Hey bleach!

I read Mother Night the other day. No idea why I didn't sooner, I thought it was relatively fantastic.

I'm about to finish Steinbeck's The Moon is Down. I liked it for the first chapter or two, but once they were debating executing the miner I thought it grew surprisingly heavy handed. I like Steinbeck, and find plenty to like in this one, but several conversations have read pretty absurdly to me.

Whomever's read it, what did you think?

this week so far:



this had an interesting concept, but was ultimately mediocre to the core. inferior to his debut novel, which was doubly disappointing.



read this yesterday and was also underwhelmed. narrative style was impressive considering how old it is. was still too episodic to care about. i breezed through it, probably won't give it another thought.

and today i started this:



tore through the first fifty pages on my lunch break and this one definitely connects. the writing is exceedingly witty so far, and as long as the philosophical ideology doesn't weigh the novel down, this one is going to be a keeper. i'd definitely recommend this to anyone who likes words.

'Episodic' was the order of the day with those early novels.

Started "Confederacy of Dunces" finally this week. Been on my to do list forever so I'm going in with high expectations. I love the writing so far, but hate most of the characters. Suppose that's the charm of it. Only a little way's in though so maybe the bratty little sloth will win me over eventually. Either way, I'm enjoying it already.

One of my faves - it'll make you want to push a hot dog cart around & bang Russian chicks. And get fat.

WTF?

Stunningly dumb.

Fantastic, fantastic stories.

she's great. and if you enjoy her stuff, you might want to check out kelly link. similar vein, though different stylistically. i'd highly recommend magic for beginners.

I was thinking of significant writers who had conservative views...

Henry Adams
Jean Anouilh
Honoré de Balzac
Hilaire Belloc
John Betjeman
Jorge Luis Borges
Basil Bunting
Anthony Burgess
Roy Campbell
Thomas Carlyle
Lewis Carroll
Willa Cather
Louis-Ferninand Céline
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand
G.K. Chesterton
Joseph Conrad
John Clare
Paul Claudel
Jean Cocteau
James Fenimore Cooper
Gabriele D'Annunzio
Guy Davenport
Thomas De Quincey
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
T.S. Eliot
William Faulkner
Robert Frost
Stefan George
Jean Giraudoux
George Gissing
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nikolai Gogol
Ivan Goncharov
Knut Hamsun
Geoffrey Hill
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Zora Neale Hurston
Robinson Jeffers
Rudyard Kipling
Henry James
Philip Larkin
D.H. Lawrence
Wyndham Lewis
F.T. Marinetti
Francois Mauriac
Cormac McCarthy
Yukio Mishima
Marianne Moore
Eduard Mörike
Vladimir Nabokov
V.S. Naipaul
Novalis
Flann O'Brien
Flannery O'Connor
Walker Percy
Luigi Pirandello
Ezra Pound
Anthony Powell
John Crowe Ransom
Sir Walter Scott
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Gertrude Stein
Wallace Stevens
Robert Louis Stevenson
Tom Stoppard
Allen Tate
Anthony Trollope
Miguel de Unamuno
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Paul Valéry
Evelyn Waugh
Edith Wharton
P.G. Wodehouse
Tom Wolfe
William Butler Yeats

The following shifted to the right after an early dalliance with left-wing politics:

Kingsley Amis
Saul Bellow
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
E.E. Cummings
John Dos Passos
Eugene Ionesco
Mario Vargas Llosa
David Mamet
Aleksandr Pushkin
William Wordsworth

If we extend the left/right distinction to the pre-French Revolution era when it's somewhat anachronistic, then many of the great 17th and 18th century writers could also be called conservative:

Samuel Butler
Thomas Carew
John Dryden
Oliver Goldsmith
Robert Herrick
Samuel Johnson
Ben Jonson
Alexander Pope
Richard Sherridan
Jonathan Swift

haha, I feel like we have very similar tastes in literature, but tend to differ with music. I find that interesting. I flew through Bender's book yesterday, great stuff. The story "Marzipan" was amazing, as was the one about the boyfriend devolving.

Starting this one today:

So, Ogawa and I were talking about Pynchon's latest, Inherent Vice and, surprise surprise, I was finding it slow going at first. But then, I found this:



on p. 99, and now I take it all back. It doesn't matter if the plot's goofy and probably pointless. I'll endure anything to read sentences like that.

haha, indeed. I'm pretty excited about Pynchon right now. Finished Mason & Dixon about a week ago and it was absolutely amazing. Probably one of the five best books I've read and I just want to start back again on page 1. I don't know how he does it. There's so much strangeness and confusion and brilliant freeform nonsense in his books and after long stretches it seems like you're completely lost and then it all starts to cohere and condense and make sense and there's this almost ecstatic joy-of-writing and genius clarity in sentences like those and you realize, jesus christ, this man knows what he's doing. I might have to read Vice next. Not sure I'm ready to dive into V or Against The Day just yet.

against the day is alright, but inherent vice is definitely better. and not to spoil anything, but the ending is something special. you could quote the last couple pages at length, m_rots, and it would be totally justified.

i still need to fill in my pynchon gaps, though. i need breaks between his books. long breaks.

You read Mason & Dixon, ste?

started it when i was a precocious middle-schooler. never made it more than one hundred pages in. i have yet to finish that, or gravity's rainbow (though i've made more headway into that, but keep getting derailed before reaching the end, so i inevitably have to restart each time), nor started v or vineland. so i'm far from an expert in all things pynchon, but i feel like i have a decent grasp on his oeuvre. by the time i'm an old man i'll have read his complete works. for now, there's other stuff to read.

like voodoo histories, which is what i'm nearly done with now. it's a history (of sorts) of conspiracy theories, involved mostly with the way that conspiracy theories affect our cultural understanding in mostly negative ways. lots of invocations of occam's razor, but also written wittily enough to be a joy to read. it's pretty lightweight and minor, but at points feels far more relevant than it does at first impression. especially when it comes to 9/11 conspiracy theories and its echoes of anti-semitic theories of the past, as well as its debunking of the hypocrisy of the fringe left, the book is quite remarkable. the fact that the author (david aaronovitch) is a hard left jew, makes for a deep personal connection to the material. there's no reactionary-ism present in the book, and little political bias, at least against the left. it seems that he is upset because there are so many legitimate grievances to hold, politically, yet people get lost in these paranoid reveries. either way, if anyone here likes popular non-fiction, this is a pretty great choice with which to pass the time.

edit: some of what i wrote is not quite accurate. just did some googling on aaronovitch, and he's a former leftie, turned something of a neo-con apologist. doesn't change the fact that this book is a great read, and it seems to confirm tony's conversation with himself, but yeah, his support for the iraq war detracts greatly from his credibility. but what do i know, i'm young and foolish? maybe when i get old, i too can sacrifice my ideals publicly.

That books is wonderful. I saw it on my uncle's bookshelf on Thanksgiving and, rather than play obnoxious board games with my family, I knocked out like 80 pages on a rocking chair. Couldn't put it down. A bunch of reviews compare it to The Big Lebowski, but other than the stoner voice, I didn't see the similarities and thought it was very original and fresh. Great book. It aching to be made into a movie.

The Gunslinger.
by Stephen King.

This is a book with sentences like, "My father had by then taken control of his ka-tet, you must ken--the Tet of the Gun--and was on the verge of becoming Dinh of Gilead, if not all In-World." Which is fine. I can dig fantasy of this sort, but so much of the book just comes off kind of awkward, with lots of forced metaphors and similes and attempts to infuse each sentence with import, like King is trying to be Cormac McCarthy or H.P. Lovecraft. One gets the feeling this sort of writing doesn't come naturally to King.

However, I more or less dig the world he's created here and I'd imagine the other books in the series are better. Don't know when I'll feel like reading them, though.

Also, sperm isn't just sperm, it's "mansperm." For whatever reason.

Yeah, the later books are better, definitely. The closer King hews to the prose of Firestarter and The Stand, where he balances conversational banality with what often looks alarmingly like literature, the better. As the series goes on, he figures out how to reduce the self conscious awkwardness of "mansperm, which is just bad writing, even if he means better.

The funny thing is, King loves this book, and the series it became, because of the prose. He discusses it at length somewhere, I think maybe On Writing.

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

King thinks this is the best first sentence he's ever written. He says it tells you everything you'll ever need to know about the story, and it's just good writing. I think he's right: No matter how long and bizarre and often bloated, the entirety of it is contained in those words. That's always what The Dark Tower series is about. And as writing it's stark and spare, a whole narrative in 12 words. As beautiful as anything Hemingway or Fitzgerald ever penned.

Unfortunately, King doesn't wander back to writing that clear and concise again for a long time. Seven or eight volumes. For me, it was all worthwhile, but I'm a fan so I forgive a lot. I can't imagine why a casual King reader would commit to such an undertaking, even if it's all enjoyable.

I just finished this.



Jesus.

Just finished "The Shack", by W. Paul Young, and I'll just say what you've probably already heard. It's probably one of the best books about religion and sprituality out there, because it never gets too "Christy" or too preachy. Nice read, and a very interesting hypothetical about hanging out with God, and asking the hard questions. The very end was kinda weak, though. you can tell that one of the co-writers slapped that on for the screenplay. No doubt someone is working very hard to produce "The Shack" into a major motion picture. I think I just about got the whole thing cast in my mind already. I just hope that Morgan Freeman will get paid the "God" bucks that he deserves if they roll him out for this one too.

I want to be an astronomer...

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey.

Getting near the end of this. A bit weird to read after watching the film so many times. The film really nails the book, though, and does it one better by toning down the metaphor and allegory. The book really overdoes it at times, and makes it almost impossible for you to miss the point it's making, with the narrator going on and on about the fog this and the fog that, and McMurphy's lifting us out of the fog, etc, etc. It gets a little annoying at times and almost chokes the narrative. Still, I'm digging it quite a bit overall.

Incredible stuff. I'm a little over half the way through. I've never read anything else with such a skilled and resonant way of wrapping heartfelt melancholy in wry humor and apathy.



To find the book image, first I googled "the dream songs," before realizing I needed to change it to "the dream songs berryman"
v.

There in the dusty light from the one small window on shelves of roughsawed pine stood a collection of fruitjars and bottles with ground glass stoppers and old apothecary jars all bearing antique octagon labels edged in red upon which in Echols' neat script were listed contents and dates. In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood. The jars stood webbed in dust and the light among them made of the little room with its chemic glass a strange basilica dedicated to a practice as soon to be extinct among the trades of men as the beast to whom it owed its being.

The Crossing, pg 17.

Finishing up the Cormac I've yet to read. Just this and Cities of the Plain left and then I'll be rereading this dude for the rest of my life. Hopefully he'll kick out a few more great ones before shuffling off this mortal coil. This writing ruins me for almost everything else. Just amazing.

well now I have to pick that one up too. This thread and goodreads notifications are ruining any chance of a life outside work and the library.

Reading about his childhood has been fascinating. I had no idea he was a poet and a bank robber, for starters.



That's exactly it. Well put.

first book since coming back to fiction after a brief respite and this is certainly hitting a sweet spot. acerbic, mean and, for the most part, spot on in its indictment of upper middle class entitlement. book's ostensibly about a sexually frustrated former artist now working as a fundraiser for a mediocre nyc arts college, but lipsyte uses the loose plot, which involves a new media mogul and his illegitimate iraq war vet son, to turn his sights against all manner of social disgraces. definitely a white person novel, and charming only in the grodiest, angriest sense, but frequently lol-worthy, and like i said, very often otm.

"poor kid was a wild child, a homophobe. he might as well have been illiterate, guessing at supermarket signage. for all my adolescent rage, i had never included the marginalized or oppressed in my dream carnage. i had never said gypped, or indian giver, or paddy wagon, or accused anyone of welshing on a bet. if there ever evolved a tradition of locutions such as "she tried to tranny me on that real estate deal," you would not hear them out of my mouth. i never even called myself a yid with that tribal swagger i envied in others, though i had a right, or half a right, from my mother's side."

satire-wise, lipsyte falls somewhere between delillo and pahliniuk, in terms of subtlety and craft, though i'd argue he's marking the east coast cultural pulse far better than either does, these days.

Yeah, I said it was fascinating. I didn't say he was a great man. This book focuses on his childhood and the early years before all that. The stuff most people don't already know.

For school. Doing my head in.

Two requests, from someone who does not read fiction nearly enough:

Looking for a novel that is beautifully sad. Like, makes you cry at the pervasive beauty of the world sad.

Also, looking for a novel that is similar in narrative structure to The Wire, with multiple character threads tied together to create powerful thematic consistency.

If there is a book that fits both criteria, that'd be brilliant. Otherwise, y'know, recommend stuff.

Anything by Cormac McCarthy, really, though Suttree might be your best bet.

So many books lined up for the summer:

^^^ well you'd better get some more lined up because those Lemony Snicket ones will only take you about two hours each, if that.

Oh yeah, I knocked out the first two in about an hour and a half each. I have plenty more books lined up, and the Border Trilogy will take a while, but this is just the beginning.

started this yesterday:



surprised at how riveting this is. i'm not much of a financially minded individual, so i was expecting something a little more wonky. i like lewis's politics here, he states his feelings clearly, but steps aside to tell the story. sometimes it reads too smoothly for its own good, but overall, very pleased with this. hope to have it finished by the end of the day.

I'm currently trudging through The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner, and taking the occasional break to read A Collection of Essays by Orwell.

From the Dept. of Whythehellnot?:

I scooped up all but Volume 8 of Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events for a buck apiece at Half Price. Good way to kill some summertime hours (minutes).

Those Great Ideas books are gorgeous.

yeah, and the writing inside of them is usually pretty good too.

win/win

I recently finished Evelyn Waugh's 'A Handful of Dust'. The greatest British novel of the 1930s by the greatest British writer of his generation? Still reads as quite modern and the ending is still a shocker.

Finally starting this:



Got it for christmas '03, have read the first 50 pgs - which are excellent - but now I'm dedicating myself to finishing this beast for real by the end of the year.

good luck. volkmann is a great writer, but tough as anything to get through. thinking of which, i should return to imperial at some point this summer.

Picked this up from the library based on your recommendations. Excellent, fun read--he's so great at fleshing out characters in just a few pages. I'm nearing the end of "Down Through the Valley." You really wish each story were a full novel, but then again, maybe not.

Finished Christopher Moore's vampire spoof, Bloodsucking Fiends, yesterday. I tried The Gospel According to Biff a few years ago - found it repellently glib and put it down. Bloodsucking Fiends is better, a canny piss-take of Anne Rice, among others. Still, I prefer the humor of a Carl Hiassen, who never loses his sense of moral outrage, to Moore, who doesn't seem to care about anything apart from number of yucks per page.

It's not without flaws but still a remarkable piece of work by a prodigy who was 22 when it was finished.

Picked up at Lit Fest:

Firmin: adventures of a metropolitan lowlife by Sam Shepherd
Historic Bars of Chicago by Sean Parnell
From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame by Mark Monmonier
Chicago TV Horror Movie Shows: From Shock Theatre to Svengoolie by Ted Okuda