What are you reading while ilx is stuck in a quicksand?

started IQ84 and it's fine so far but (somebody said this on another thread) there is a LOT of attention paid to breasts and it is kind of uncomfortable-making and distracting.

Got time for one or two more 2011 book before I have to make my best of the year ballot. Do I read Morgenstern's Night Circus or something else? Suggestions for best of fiction 2011 contenders?

American Pastoral

'Middlemarch'...loving it so far

it occurred to me earlier that there is a logic to the boob fixation in iq84

i suspect jay rubin may have missed some key to it tho and just gone "huh cool there are lots of words about boobs in this book"

i don't know, though, that's mainly because in my head for some reason jay rubin is the comic book guy

i started "pulphead" last night and the first piece in there, about attending a christian rock festival, is so great. hope the rest of book lives up to it: http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200401/rock-music-jesus.

ty for the link, there, i am hearing so much good press about that book but somehow none that makes me want to actually pick it up, i figured i would have to read a thing first

ty for link too, that was a great read. a book like that wouldn't normally be on my radar but it's under serious consideration now.

The Enigma of Capital by David Harvey. It's very engaging, but I've just got that slight uncertainty that comes when reading about something you know little or 0 about, from a perspective you're predisposed to agree with.

capitalist agriculture and the origins of the european world-economy in the sixteenth century

I am reading "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester - I picture Samuel L. Jackson as the main cop. Before that I read "Waystation" by Clifford D. Simak, it was very good.

I've had some difficulty getting into it (because of the voice and dialect of the narrator/protagonist), but The Book Of The Night Women is really gripping.

It's kind of fun to listen to Janáček while reading IQ84; Sinfonetta is totally at odds with the tone of the book - at least as of the halfway point - and it's a really weird counterpoint to the narrative.

alice munro: which is the best collection to introduce people to her?

i want to read her for the next work book club, but i'm not sure which to recommend. no one's read her. aside from open secrets (b/c I've read it already), do folks here have any recommendations for what to choose?

i started with 'hateship, friendship ...' but i have never finished it

r n i am reading the stephen king novel with the american date in the title, it is kind of fun

also 'malone dies'

I just finished 'The Marriage Plot'

Sigh, my book club has selected Augustus by John Williams. Not that the writing isn't great, it's just painfully self-serious and the whole thing is epistolary (i.e. all the prose is in letter form), and it's the sort of thing that's a bit of a chore to read after a job that involves reading a lot of complicated stuff.

i just finished malone dies--didn't dig it as much as Molloy but still pretty great.

how was the marriage plot m white?

I'm starting Underworld for the third time and will start Candice Millard's account of the Garfield assassination.

i think m. dies affects me more consistently than does molloy, tho' this is in large part because of the streamlining of the anti-narrative aspects. molloy might be funnier, though. ("the turdy madonna? he said, as if he knew turdy like the back of his hand, and there was no madonna in the length and breadth of it" - this line has been making me laugh about twice a week for the past month)

probably going to finish malone dies today. where i currently am is as far as i've ever got with the trilogy hurrah. (though i kind of wonder when the characterization of them as 'the trilogy' set in. and whether it works, to be honest.)

i am not m. white but i read the marriage plot - wasn't crazy about the idea of the novel (kids graduate from college, learn about life) and the main female character was a lot less interesting than the two dudes but i was surprisingly emotionally affected by it.

just finished marriage plot too, and i didn't like it that much overall--there is some compelling stuff mixed in w/a lot of not compelling stuff--but for some reason, once my book club started bashing it, i started to feel a bit defensive toward it. still, overall don't think the compelling stuff made the rest of the book worth it, tho.

haven't read any other eugenidies but consensus seemed to be that it wasn't as good as his other stuff

def. wasn't as good as middlesex.

a lot of it felt v miscalculated, to me; maybe it is just me but i feel like a contemporary audience doesn't need inventive metaphors for what depression ~feels like~ & they somehow made it into this otherly almost fantastical state. i also liked some of it. it was funny reading somewhere, poss here, that the blowjob scene was like ~lauded~, popularly, because reading it it obv stands out as like a poignant section of the novel, although i had problems with that bit too.

what else did your book club think, rayuela?

how was the marriage plot m white?

I liked it. I liked the end and the structure a lot and it was fun reliving the 80's.

Rayuela: I would rep for runaway as being munro's 2nd best collection

alice munro: which is the best collection to introduce people to her?

The selected stories published in the late nineties is exemplary. Hateship... boasts the greatest number of superb, memorable short stories. Among the early volumes The Moons of Jupiter is also consistent.

'live of girls and women' is a good intro to munro & might work better as a book club selection

i don't know what i'm reading. nietzsche. probably middlemarch. i'm wondering how much middlemarch i can read before spring semester starts; maybe i'll read 1q84 if i get done with the eliot before then.

About 70 pages into The Trial by Kafka and... it's good, it is just a bit of a slog. Or maybe I'm just not in the mood.

just finished

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/8/2009/11/500x_makers-novel-cover.jpg

p good if a touch overlong

has anyone read any of john jeremiah sullivan's essays? v interested after reading a james wood review.

i started "pulphead" last night and the first piece in there, about attending a christian rock festival, is so great. hope the rest of book lives up to it: http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200401/rock-music-jesus.

― n/a, Thursday, December 15, 2011 4:59 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Permalink

i'm getting near the end of it now, that first essay is still the highlight but there's other great stuff in there too - the long piece about the 19th century naturalist was esp. good. sometimes his style gets in the way a little bit but overall the book's worth reading.

awesome. thanks n/a.

schlump -- re: what my book club thought, there were complaints that it didn't map onto any sort of victorian literature and that madeline was an undignified heroine b/c she hooked up (!). anyway, i don't know much about victorian lit but thought that was a silly complaint.

thanks all for the alice munro suggestions!

I've recently read

To Engineer is Human, Henry Petroski. A collection of essays that make the same point repeatedly: engineers study engineering mistakes and catastrophes because they teach them more than the successes. Got it, Hank!

Field Notes From a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert. A book about global warming. She visits scientists and encapsulates their findings in clear language even average lay people can understand, explaining why we are thoroughly screwed.

The First Salute, Barbara Tuchman. American Revolutionary War history with a lot of side excursions to Europe and the West Indies, so as to make the global situation plainer, allowing American readers to understand that we didn't win the war, so much as the British lost to the French because of the neutrality of the Dutch.

i've tried picking up maybe 6 -- 8 books since i finished book of night women, including some supposedly great reads, but so far, they're all paling in comparison.

"The Magicians" by Lev Grossman, which is super fun so far

btw belated thx for the book club digest rayuela, i needed the vicarious inclusion, & think "what do you think of madeleine as heroine" is one of the more interesting threads to unravel re: the book (that & the ~describing depression~ one, for me)

i read a lot slower than you guys but i'm reading/still reading eileen myles' inferno & really loving it, as a bildungsroman & as something as just audible & loose as her poems, as a voice, as a memory. it is about new york in the '80s in a very textural, routine-y way, it's fun to read.

Finished: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Started: Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

finished malone dies and the stephen king, now reading murakami and smth called 'blood of elves'

i liked the witcher books quite a bit but i dont think i can partic defend them

it made me really happy that you were reading beckett just btw

no problem schlump...i did think madeline was a flatly written character, but that this had nothing to do with her sexuality. maybe this is because she was written to be so normal, and eugenidies can't write compelling, normal characters? just speculating. on the other hand, the depression parts were my favorite, though, and i thought he nicely captured the way in which people who have no experience with depression tend to view/approach depression.

alice munro has pulled ahead of gary shteyngart in the book club vote. anyone here read 'super sad true love story'?

in the middle of reading
-why we write: the politics and practice of writing for social change and
-dark matter: a century of speculative fiction from the african diaspora

iirc there were a # of ppl on real ilx that quite liked 'super sad' but i think its his worst novel, well-written but charmless.

yea super sad is not v good i read it

I am about halfway through The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, and I'm enjoying it very much. Her use of the omniscient voice is incredibly deft and artful. It gives the impression of a particularly keen-eyed and scrupulous intelligence that understands everything and thererfore has no need of opinions.

i liked SSTLS a lot personally

muriel spark is great

It's pretty bad

bummer. it looked kind of funny, maybe intentionally?

i've heard it compared to egan's a visit from the goon squad, which i liked. for those who've read both, is it an accurate comparison?

ehh, not sure. both def have some brilliant passages & maybe notably the best stuff was excerpted before both were published imo

goon squad > sstls imo, though im not the biggest goon squad fan.

im actually reading 'the keep' now. feel like its giving some of the same quibbles as good squad but ima stick w/ it

Yup, didn't really like Goon Squad either but i'd take it over SSTLS. I presume some of the comparisons are because both of them are set in the near future

typing goon 3x there, it was a certainty id fuck 1 up

i'm reading egan's emerald city right now, and liking it much more than the keep. only 2 stories in though.

"In the Beginning was the Command Line"

finished Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. more journalistic than analytic biography which translates into a quick breezy read and a handy summation of the personal computer revolution since the 70s. towards the end it does read too much like a business magazine article. Jobs is a monumental asshole, as everyone knows, though the extent and dimensions of his genius are a matter of personal perception. I won't stop buying Apple gadgets. A review in NYRB was OTM, concluding that Isaacson proved you can reveal a subject's flaws while still writing a hagiography. But the romance/glorification of Jobs isn't so obnoxious that you can't read the book. I liked it.

when I refer to Jobs as an asshole, that means I wouldn't want to have worked for him and don't think much of the way he treated his children. totally respect & admire his accomplishments. first computer I bought was a Mac II in 1986.

The Thelonious Monk biography by Robin D.G. Kelly is good, but for the first time in years, I'm more drawn to fiction, so I need to pick up something else to read, too. I started Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, but despite all the hype/praise, I'm having trouble into it.

Is Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games any good? Looks interesting, but it's also about 1k pages long, so could be a slog.

"getting" into it.

Damn this "smart" phone.

I'm most of the way through Hot Countries, Alec Waugh, a travel book published in 1930. Most interesting aspect of it is the fact that tourism was a well-established activity, but air travel was as yet unknown. As he mostly is visiting islands, it is all done via ships.

Second most interesting aspect is that European colonialism was the unchallenged rule throughout the world. Waugh includes several matter-of-fact discussions of the problem of white men posted to the tropics who were only able to find brown-skinned sex partners, and how this worked out for all the parties involved. There are many heavily racist remarks scattered through the book, but they are cloaked in such a thick covering of it's-all-for-their-own-good paternalism that I doubt the author ever noticed the disconnect between his liberalism and his racism.

Most irritating thing about the book: he splices in about 40 pages of an unfinished and unfocussed novella set in tahiti, on the pretext that it is enlightening to the reader, whereas the truth is he was just padding shamelessly.

Alec Waugh, Alec Waugh... I can't remember whether he was the brother of Evelyn or the template for Waring in What's Become of Waring by Anthony Powell, or both or neither.

Some of Evelyn's travel writing is excellent as well.

Franny and Zooey. Superb. Ok the mysticism is so-so, ending especially is somewhat damp, but for a fond, sharp, and beautifully detailed portrait of a family it is peerless.

Ok maybe not peerless. If you know of any peers toss them this way.

Alec was Evelyn's older brother. The racism has become even more explicit toward the end, where he is discussing haiti. Several times now he has called blacks "stupid" and he fully buys into the idea that mulattos are smarter, because they have less "savage blood".

Disposed of Alec Waugh. I am now starting Pale Fire. It may be too clever for me, like those little wooden puzzles where a sphere is constructed out of eight or so angular pieces you must fit together, but it's too soon to say.

just finished stone arabia, and by extension all three spiotta novels in about a month and a half.

find something that works and stick with it, right?