what are you reading now?

[Mr. Tea]

open cyclonopedia...

Though to be honest, the typesetting in that book is hardly the most challenging thing about it!

Me: currently ploughing through a Poe collection. The one I'm on at the moment is about reanimated mummy, and is pretty (intentionally) funny. Some of them are quite unintentionally funny.

 

[STN]

Biography of Wyndham Lewis, so stay away from me, because it IS encouraging me to be a total bastard to everyone.

 

[Slothrop]

Inherent Vice.

Liking it a lot, although (ironically) it isn't as funny as some of his more serious stuff.

 

[you]

The Tin Drum by Grass but my edition (hard back Everyman) has got a horrible font size and when I looked at the Vintage edition in a bookshop it was equally as bad. I know it sounds pathetic but it's really off putting and I want to read it (and i have to read it as part of a book group thing). I don't suppose there are other editions out there with better fonts - oh for the days of Black Swan books.

I should also add that the first chapter is excellent.

Just finished The Hare with Amber Eyes - really fascinating book that is essentially a Sebald like discovery of family history through the movement of a collection of netsuke between family members. It's a very delicately written account that starts in Oddessa, takes in 19th C Paris in its pomp, the rise of the Nazis and eventual return of the netsuke to Japan. And it's non-fiction. First class stuff

on your recommendation I bought The Hare with amber eyes - looks wonderful so far, really nice writing, Thanks Jenks!

 

[empty mirror]

Inherent Vice.

Liking it a lot, although (ironically) it isn't as funny as some of his more serious stuff.

Just picked this up from the library to take with me to the beach (to read). That means I've bailed on reading Proust's Remembrance of Past Lost Time Regained or whatever for the second time. One day...

 

[luka]

i read that inherent vice a couple months ago. it was alright. at least i finsihed it. thats a first for pychon. not including crying lot ccos thats so short. i like how theres a playlist for the book on the wiki site.

 

[Mr. Tea]

on your recommendation I bought The Hare with amber eyes - looks wonderful so far, really nice writing, Thanks Jenks!

Inbox clearance request! (Nothing to add about the book, I'm afraid.)

Edit: is Inherent Vice Pynchon's new one? Might check it out at some point, though not for a bit, only finished V a couple of months ago and Pynchon is like very rich food, not good to consume too much of in a short period.

 

[you]

romeo dun

 

[empty mirror]

i read that inherent vice a couple months ago. it was alright. at least i finsihed it. thats a first for pychon. not including crying lot ccos thats so short. i like how theres a playlist for the book on the wiki site.

well, reading the jacket flap (so to speak), there's a lot of overlap with my own personal life and being a pynchon fan, i've got to give it a spin
only through the first chapter but i've already got a list of fifteen or so characters (only way i can get through a pynchon novel is by making a character list)
very much enjoying it so far

saw the playlist on amazon
i know most of it
i do expect the book will have me running to youtube to hear a song but it hasn't happened yet

 

[jenks]

I Curse The River Of Time - Per Pettersen, Norwegian writer, very good so far - wanted his book Out Stealing Horses which has had rave reviews but the shop only had this by him, not disappointed.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower - american short stories, read the first two so far - very much a mixture of Carver and Salinger with that immediate voice in your ear and crumbling lives of alcoholic dissapation and disappointment.

Also reading Rob Young's Electric Eden but that has its own thread.

 

[bandshell]

City - Clifford Simak

I've also borrowed Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

 

[luka]

a chinese girl at work got me a dream of red mansions for my birthday so im reading that. its one of the classic chinese novels. it is interspersed with a lot of poetry which unfortunately is poorly translated.
otherwise im enjoying it while feeling a little lost at the same time. there's more characters than in a pychnon novel and they've got chinese names rather than memorable ones like Barney Pigtrotter or whatever. its got a phantasmagoric feel and seems more 'foreign' than anything else ive ever read i think. i'd be interested to know if any of you lot have read it and if so what you made of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Just finished The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

 

[slim jenkins]

Thanks to someone's earlier post...Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas...which is excellent.
(Provides great ammunition/excuses for those who do not, cannot, or refuse to write)

 

[you]

brilliant, thats my next book!

 

[IdleRich]

Just read Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex a sci-fi novel dealing with different levels of reality which become confusing due to an experiment called The Ridpath Projection which creates an alternative (future) world. A small group of people enter the projection to attempt to learn about the future of humanity and various other (always vaguely defined) things from the computer-generated (or actually generated by the subconscious of the members of the projects) humans who live in this world unaware that they are merely simulations.
The plot reminded me a lot of Fassbinders' World On A Wire which is a sci-fi film dealing with different levels of reality which become confusing due to an experiment which creates an alternative (near future) world populated by computer-generated simulations who (in the main) do not know that they are simulations. The government (and big) business attempt to use it to learn about what will happen both economically and politically in the near future.
I wonder if Priest had seen the film when he wrote the book, I guess that it was very obscure outside Germany at that point but it's not impossible.
Now just started Xorandor by Christine Brooke-Rose which is another sci-fi thing which (so far) appears to be narrated by two bizarre kids who are computer geniuses but who speak in a peculiar mixture of computer slang and, er, non-computer slang.

 

[jenks]

brilliant, thats my next book!

How is The Hare going?

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

I was disappointed by a Dream of Wessex. The alternate, insular Wessex, supposedly Soviet, did not convince at all. It just wasn't as weird as I hoped it would be.

Have you read Fugue for a Darkening Island? Very nasty and desolate, I doubt it would be published today.

 

[you]

How is The Hare going?

it's great, his descriptions of 'things', his passion for the tactile nature of objects is enthralling.....but not in a self indulgent, wildean sense, instead it's a concise, poignant and beautiful prose.

 

[IdleRich]

"I was disappointed by a Dream of Wessex. The alternate, insular Wessex, supposedly Soviet, did not convince at all. It just wasn't as weird as I hoped it would be."

It's not a great book, the prose was certainly flat to the point of being boring and the characters and their reactions - most notably those of the main character Julia to her boyfriend - did not seem to relate to the events that were supposed to have generated them. The insular Wessex didn't work as a Soviet territory, but - being generous - you could say that, in the book it was always represented as a slightly wishy-washy place of wish-fulfillment for the creators.

"Have you read Fugue for a Darkening Island? Very nasty and desolate, I doubt it would be published today"

No, tell me more.