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

"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

I endured a violent Spark addiction two Christmases ago -- I read four of her novels at one go. She's great.

the marriage plot does not seem like a book that should have been written by a grown-ass man

heh. are you reading it now?

just finished ursula k leguin's lathe of heaven. strongly reminded of PKD as I read -- thought the dispossessed & left hand of darkness were fantastic -- this one, not so much.

Currently reading Disturbing the Peace by Vaclav Havel.

Man, I'm disappointed that Underworld, despite three or four splendid passages, is a waste of time.

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

haven't yet read it, but do have it. so i'd vote for this for a book-club!

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?