Poetry Forum

k-j wrote:

Nash wrote:House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski

Not read it and not sure whether I want to. It sounds like fun but also the kind of excessively po-mo book that just ends up eating itself.

Looking forward to your review. Did you hear about Danielewski's mammoth advance for his next project?! I can't remember whether it was a million dollars or half that but it's a pretty staggering number.

Well, I've given up on the bloody thing half way through. Shame really, there's a half-decent short story in there somewhere struggling to get out from the layers of irrelevant crap. I think that he could possibly be not too bad a writer if he didn't resort to gimmicks.

I've been reading Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' to take the taste away. An astoundingly good piece of writing.

Nash wrote:I've been reading Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' to take the taste away. An astoundingly good piece of writing.

Yes, I'll have to reread that one day. If you're enjoying Ford's style then I heartily recommend his four-part WWI epic Parade's End. It's a total immersion in the war and also the sweeping social changes that went on before and during. I think Ford frustrates a lot of readers with his looping, semi-stream-of-consciousness style where he's always inside his characters' heads, but I love it.

k-j wrote:If you're enjoying Ford's style then I heartily recommend his four-part WWI epic Parade's End. It's a total immersion in the war and also the sweeping social changes that went on before and during. I think Ford frustrates a lot of readers with his looping, semi-stream-of-consciousness style where he's always inside his characters' heads, but I love it.

Thanks k-j, I do enjoy Ford's style very much, the way he keeps complete control over the plot and characters even through the non-linear narrative is admirable. I'll give Parade's End a go.

Shockingly - well, I was shocked - I didn't get any books at all this year (apart from a Rough Guide, which I requested, to a place I'll probably never get to), so I've picked up something I was given a couple of years ago and never got around to. And it's really good.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes - highly recommended for all you sciency types. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/book ... ience.html

And this is a pretty entertaining article too: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_ ... yonc_.html

Oh, I've read that, David - it's great. It's amazing to think of people having to polish mirrors etc in their basements before they can even start looking at the stars.

Ros

And come to think of it, I didn't get any books either. Though I do still have a pile of them waiting to be read.

I'm alternating Zero History by William Gibson and Ancient Worlds by Richard Miles at the moment.

Ros

I’ve got two on the go at the moment. Prompted by the Silents Please thread in AOB, I’m revisiting a book I haven’t picked up since my student days. It’s a Keaton biography called The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down by Tom Dardis. Apart from many fascinating insights into the career and life of Buster Keaton, it also offers a glimpse into the early days of Hollywood – the movie moguls, studio system, lavish parties and scandals. It‘s a book worth dipping in and out of. I did the cover-to-cover bit last time around.

The other book is Aberystwyth Mon Amour by Malcolm Pryce, a pulp fiction pastiche set in modern day Wales. It’s got the usual muscular phrasing, deadpan humour and comic strip characters, including sinister Druids and a femme fatale called Myfanwy Montez. It’s early days, but I think I might just make it to the end of this one. I'm essentially a reference book and biography man.

Happy New Year to you all.

Currently reading the second of my two-volume (seemingly German?) edition of Tom Jones, which continues to be a pleasure, more in the way of a good fireside essayist than a proper novel.

Also the Solitudes / Las Soledades of Luis de Góngora in a parallel text edition, very well translated by Edith Grossman. I read a stanza in English, then the same stanza in Spanish, and so on. Grossman quite reasonably omits the rhyme, but the rhyme really is worth experiencing even if you can't understand the 17th century Spanish, with de Góngora's convoluted verse - he just plonks words down as if they were Latin fridge magnets, with a cosmic disregard for word order. You find the adjective trailing the noun by two or three words sometimes, or the adverb wandering hopelessly in search of the verb. Or even worse, the noun and verb separated, like a couple too righteous to get divorced, steadfastly ignoring eachother while still having dinner with each other's friends.

And finally, about half way - or a bit more - through Floating Worlds - the Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter Neumayer which my wife got me for Xmas. I'm generally averse to correspondence, and I still feel that twitch here, but Gorey is too often quintessentially Gorey to make it unworthwhile. Neumayer comes over as a bit of a fawning bore, although a well-read one and nice enough, but Gorey is exactly the kind of madcap, staunch, self-denigrating obsessive you expect from his works. And it's a beautiful hardback edition by a co. called Pomegranate Press (great name), with Gorey's ridiculously cute incidental doodles and designs all over the envelopes. And if any of you haven't read Gorey, I press you thither.

k-j wrote:Currently reading the second of my two-volume (seemingly German?) edition of Tom Jones

A German Tom Jones? That seems rather mind-boggling.

I recently finished Embassytown by China Miéville. Brilliant, I thought. Then I embarked on the Edward St. Aubyn "Melrose Novels", and I've just finished the first one. He is a very good writer indeed, and a great creator and depictor of monsters. Monsters, I tell you.

And I'm also dipping into Clive James's Cultural Amnesia. He is, as ever, annoyingly glib at times, and not as good a phrase-maker as he'd like to think he is, but still no mean shakes, and it's a very enjoyable browse.

David wrote:Embassytown by China Miéville.

Been intending to read something by Miéville for a long while now. About time I got around to it. I think I'm developing an interest in science fiction; at least, I've read three novels by Alastair Reynolds this year and am fairly smitten.

German Tom Jones, yes hilarious. Well, there is plenty of beer and britches so perhaps not so far fetched. To clarify, Tom is as English as God (or Fielding) intended, but the book is published by a German company (Könemann).

Definitely recommend Embassytown, but as far as I know that's the only real scifi he's written. His other books sounds interesting, though.

I started a Reynolds book a while ago. Quite enjoyed it, but for some reason never finished it.

Just finishing up a re-read of East of Eden. Not as palatable as I remember.

On to American Gods next.

Select Samaritan wrote:On to American Gods next.

That's Neil Gaiman isn't it? I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. I didn't like it at all myself, I think I gave up a couple of chapters in.

I'm reading Robert Aickman's collection of short stories 'Cold Hand in Mine' at the moment.

Well I'm not finished yet, but so far the premise seems better than the execution. And that seems to be a common criticism.

What was it that you didn't like? One thing that annoys me is how Shadow so casually and unquestioningly accepts the crazy turn his life took, with all the crazy shit that goes down along the way. Gaiman has, by page 270, lightly addressed this, but I remain unconvinced.

Of course I'll reserve any real verdict until I've finished the novel.

I've just finished The Sound and the Fury. Very good. Needs to be read again, but I'm not sure I'll do that just yet.

Lately I've read/am reading:

Ubik - P.K. Dick - really enjoyed, I love Dick's analog future and the tortuous headfuckery of his plots.
Nog - Rudolf Wurlitzer - excellent short novel of the 60's, like a slightly more compassionate version of Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson. Check it out.
The Stranger - Camus - liked it more than I thought I would. Clean and crisp. Picked it up at an airport along with
A Clockwork Orange - Burgess - not bad but I prefer the movie. Book a bit heavy-handed with the moral at times.
Nightmare Alley - William Lindsay Gresham - entertaining morality tale set amid U.S. carnivals and psychic hucksters between the wars. Loads of wacky new vocabulary.
House of the Fortunate Buddhas - Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro - quasi-pornographic memoir of Brazilian libertine who's had more different kinds of sex than I've had hot dinners. Quite good but I preferred his "Sergeant Getulio". Will read more JUR.
The Investigation - Philippe Claudel - this was OK but just a massive Kafka rip-off really. Surprised how derivative it was. I love Kafka, who doesn't, but show some respect.
Life Sentences: Literary Judgements and Accounts - almost finished this superb essay collection by Willam H. Gass. The more I read of Gass's non-fiction the more I think he's a genius. Great pieces in here on Nietzche, Malcolm Lowry and Knut Hamsun among others.
Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany - just started this tome that people call "the Ulysses of SF". 50 pages in of 800 and going very well so far. Nowhere near as slow going as Ulysses! (and ultimately I'm sure not the same at all).
The Inheritors - Conrad/Ford - thought this was a really interesting premise, especially given the authors, but reading it I can sort of see why it's not among their most celebrated works. Just feels flat and the narrator is very dull.

Strangely that's the second novel called "The Inheritors" I've read in 2012, having read Golding's back in February. Didn't enjoy that either.

k-j, that's a stunning range of books you're reading at the moment. And Ubik! Astonishing book. I read it in the late 70s - early 80s, along with almost all of PKD's other books, but that's the one that really stuck in my mind then, and still does. I remember, when I finished it, that I felt as though my brain had been hit by a large mallet and was still vibrating, like a big gong. Well, that's how I felt. How would I feel now, I wonder.

David wrote:Ubik! Astonishing book. I read it in the late 70s - early 80s, along with almost all of PKD's other books, but that's the one that really stuck in my mind then, and still does. I remember, when I finished it, that I felt as though my brain had been hit by a large mallet and was still vibrating, like a big gong. Well, that's how I felt. How would I feel now, I wonder.

Ha ha, good description! Dick pulls no punches! Up next in my Dick parade (probably in a couple of months' time), VALIS.

Have you read his rarely-mentioned early non-SF novel "In Milton Lumky Territory"? Highly recommended. Story of a lost soul (though he only finds out later) who becomes a travelling salesman and has some odd mental experiences. Shows that PKD didn't need SF tropes to work his unique alchemy.

Apart from that all I've read of his is a collection of short stories, "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" and "The Man in the High Castle". I love the feeling of realising you really dig a prolific author and having all his oevre laid out in front of you to explore.

Just started E.E. Cummings' "The Enormous Room". Two chapters in, not bad. Not as affected as I'd feared.

k-j wrote:Up next in my Dick parade (probably in a couple of months' time), VALIS.

Part of the VALIS trilogy, I see, according to Wikipedia. I think I remember not much liking VALIS, but really liking The Divine Invasion.

k-j wrote:Have you read his rarely-mentioned early non-SF novel "In Milton Lumky Territory"? Highly recommended.

No! I'll try to pick that up.

k-j wrote:a collection of short stories

Not Beyond Lies the Wub, by any chance? Some great stories in there! I particularly remember one about a human who is befriended - briefly! - by a spider in a world-struggle against the insect world, and one about some very strange garbage men.

I've just finished The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney......fantastic!

Now reading Ratman's Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert.

david wrote:

k-j wrote:a collection of short stories

Not Beyond Lies the Wub, by any chance? Some great stories in there! I particularly remember one about a human who is befriended - briefly! - by a spider in a world-struggle against the insect world, and one about some very strange garbage men.

It was a recent "Selected Dick". Wub was the first one, very amusing. I also enjoyed "The King of the Elves" and "The Days of Perky Pat". I love PKD's take on the postwar suburban dream. Don't remember the the spider one though.

James Hunter's "Glencoe and the Indians", a history of a family descending from the MacDonald Chiefs of Glencoe and of the Chiefs of the Nez Pearce of Montana.
Seth

In the middle of The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis. Enjoying it muchly.

Nash, I still don't know why you didn't get through American Gods. I mean, I have a pretty good idea, having read it myself, but we might be on different planets.