sandboox: anybody reading anything?

me too

Are we including history and biographies too? I'd be down for ILXers doing it.

Yah, I'm in for a best books of 2011 balloting. (Mine might be YA heavy, but then's the breaks).

a number of us seem to have the same reading list...and I did see that nytimes 10 best list as well.

I enjoyed art of fielding, but couldn't get through more than 20 pages of swamplandia. I have ten thousand saints on reserve at the library (it's actually 'e-reserve' -- apparently they only have 7 e-copies of it -- which seems absurd in the e-era).

copyright

bro

A new biography of acclaimed American author Kurt Vonnegut, beloved by fans worldwide for his work's warm humour and homespun Midwestern wisdom, has shocked many with a portrayal of a bitter, angry man prone to depression and fits of temper.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/03/kurt-vonnegut-biography?cat=books&type=article

Have these many who have been shocked ever read any Vonnegut.

started Stephenson's Reamde and enjoying it more than I expected to. If you are a gamer or every have been, you will be amused.

just finished Reamde - totally will make a great Hollywood movie, which was annoying in the final pages (to an NS fan) but afterwards I realize is an excellent development.

haven't read yet stack:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7149/6452963715_597be5981a.jpg

haha reamde is in the pile of stuff i want to get to eventually... it just seemed so daunting atm

Lamp idk if ur interested at all in that kind thing but I'd love to read a list of yr top books of the year

id have to think abt but i love making lists of things

started pictures @ a revolution yesterday which i think i recall lord soto & maybe others recommending -- it is really great@!

This History of Histories by John Burrow really is excellent. His summing-up of the main features of classical history, at the end of having dealt with the main classical historians in turn, is superb.

He really starts enjoying himself with the dark ages/early medieval chroniclers, becomes quite relaxed in fact, too relaxed even? But no, it's discursive, but not too discursive, and fun to read. Sometimes it feels more descriptive of what's in the histories than the introduction led me to think, but I don't particular mind this - as well as being historiography, it's a very handy prism with which to view specific case studies in history as well.

just finished A Visit From the Goon Squad (loved) and started on Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave. before that Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (didn't like it much)

**

that was an accident.

**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**
i found the scene where aomame meets The Leader in the hotel room to be supremely crepey. when he said "You could stick a needle in me and I wouldn't even feel it", i got freaked out and my heart started beating faster. probably one of the more visceral reactions i've had to literature
**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**

since there's no rolling new yorker magazine thread i'll post here that i just read Cesar Aira's fiction in last weeks issue and really liked it. if anyone who's familiar with him could recommend some of his stuff i'd appreciate it.

My Life as a Nun is super

**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**
i found the scene where aomame meets The Leader in the hotel room to be supremely crepey. when he said "You could stick a needle in me and I wouldn't even feel it", i got freaked out and my heart started beating faster. probably one of the more visceral reactions i've had to literature

i thought a lot of the stuff w/ the little people was suspensful and kinda scary, like when they appear out of the girl's mouth for the first time.
**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**

Raoul Vaneigem "The Revolution Of Everyday Life" - fascinating Situationist call to action (or not).

reread PKD's androids/dream - excellently well written in comparison to that steaming pile of excrement that was the last murakami (& dick was pretty hacky) - it's all about mercer & isodore, couldn't give a monkey's about the robots, albeit that mercer's star turn is a ghost of Xmas past / obi wan cheesefest. also "martian time slip" which came over as a marital infidelity drama set in 1950's Australia.
currently halfway through stanley crawford's "log of the s.s the mrs unguentine" which is flipin marvelous.

enjoying ten thousand saints but it feels very familiar so far. waiting for the story to go somewhere new. seems very concerned with trying to evoke the east village through landmarks and music references, zzz

that was one of my big problems with The Fortress of Solitude :/

seems very concerned with trying to evoke the east village through landmarks and music references, zzz

tending to the graveyard of unloved books (those I'm not optimistic enough about concentrating on to justify moving out) at my folks' place, I dipped into KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS by Luc Sante, which came out a few years ago. enjoying his period New Yorkisms.

I'd like to read Ten Thousand Saints, I read Hate: a Romance when it came out maybe looking for that kinda thing.

maybe I'm wrong; maybe that's not what I hated about it, maybe I just hated the popcultural cataloguing though that was def a big part of my adolescence as well...?

Halfway through Saints and it's getting better. Going some unexpected places and keeps me turning the pages. It's a relief of sorts to kind of stop looking for some grand statement in the book, realizing it's not that kind of novel, and just enjoying the story.

brain went over christmas, read a couple of extended article type books.

in search of the perfect pub, a christmas gift. It was ok. Was dreading a jokey travelogue or nostalgic localism but it's more thoughtful than that. Too bitty, though, lacks focus.

Also and then there's this: how stories live and die in viral culture by Bill Wasik, which was fine-to-good, pleasantly anecdotal & smart first-hand amble through that stuff.

Sort of read The Compleat Angler. Fabulous prose, but skimmed when it got too fishy.

Headlong Hall. I think I've finally acknowledged to myself that I don't like Peacock.

i quite liked peacock, or at least i tried to make myself. i don't know. only read nightmare abbey.

finished the marriage plot. ending rather insipid.

been trying to make myself go back to bleak house, instead soothing a chest cold and sleep-deprivation fatigue by reading 'the complete masks of nyarlathotep: the classic call of cthulhu adventure, complete for the first time, with the lost australian chapter and four new episodes'

Fuck, now you mention it, it was nightmare abbey not headlong hall

I've had a longstanding notion that I should like him - he's spot-on for me in theory - but I always glaze over when reading him. (see also Firbank).

i was thinking about reading firbank. i found an anthology at work and put it aside. and then realised i'd put aside a near-identical anthology about fifteen months before. so i've been thinking about reading firbank for a while, i suppose.

imo they're such short books it's worth reading 1 or 2 to find out if he's your kind of fun.

firbank is p silly

Always struggled with Firbank too. Well, struggled through about half of about three or four novella-length works. People who like him admire the various refinements of his humour, a sort of fin-de-siecle plus, (or minus if that equates an ironic refinement), but I always feel as if I'm handling a recalcitrant hoover when I'm reading.

Daniel Deronda and some way into Either/Or over Christmas. It was that sort of Christmas, internally anyway, the festivities were perfectly convivial.

Daniel Deronda is a very strange book, isn't it? Eliot is an extraordinary writer, such a control over the psychological motivations of her characters, and the bleakest most material ideas you can imagine all managed with great intellectual brilliance. You would fear her sympathy as being very little different in quality to her criticism. There are vast swaths of Victorian sentiment swaddling some her characters - there's so much work that goes on around some characters to indicate their goodness, and in general her sense of irony is too fine for this continual application of sentimental make-up to be at all convincing. If you attempt to clear off this sentimental mummy that surrounds some of the characters you find that there's hardly a single appealing character in the whole work. I've never read a novel where it's quite so clear that all the author is interested in is ideas. Eliot has absolutely no interest in the quotidian whatsoever - fashion is flippantly dismissed in a single short paragraph, and NO ONE EATS EVER. She mentions food once, and that dismissively (it's a pet theory I have that realist writers aren't interested in food, only genre and fantastic writers are - Eliot has given that rather wobbly idea a shot of amphetamines). Power and resistance, power and resistance, a vicious heath-robinson moral manufactory of a novel, with Deronda the most powerful of all - it takes a whole religion to take him down. And all so brilliantly done, too.

And then on top of this you've got these vast tracts of hectoring Old Testament blood and thunder + Romantic Nationalism, which cure Daniel Deronda of being a sanctimonious prick at which point he buggers off into the desert sunset.

Thoroughly enjoyable, but rather nasty as well.

Enjoying Either/Or... again, well I think again. I had a copy that had Fear and Trembling as well, but I think that must have been edited highlights, because this full version is two volumes. Especially enjoying it after the rather top-down controlling of Eliot in DD. To feel the existential struggles of a Romantic individual as, by all sorts of fragmentary means, it tries to find some sort of meaning or understanding of itself in the world is exactly what I need. Maybe I shall contract a brain fever.

there was a point this term where everyone at my college was going around reading 'either/or'; that was kind of weird.

eliot is someone i feel like i would like to read more of; these things sound like the sort of things i would be glad to find of her.

i am back on beckett, for the evening

yeah D Deronda sounds great

c.j. lines' "cold mirrors" like the 666th Pan book of horror stories edited by herbert van thal except written ever so well in a slightly will selfy style ( tho less verbose ) only thing that lets it down is that in place of self's unpleasant witty denouements we get rather "garth merenghi" endings to the stories. genre bound but showing promise.
reading sherlock holmeses, now, holmes.