what are you reading?

[---]

i've only ever abandoned books after a few pages. if i read at least 10 pages i finish it

although i have been reading dostoy's demons for over a year now... i'm like 40% done lol. have probably started and finished 30 other books in the interim

[rischka]

it took me close to a year to read demons. it's worth it

i'm still savoring maqroll the gaviero

[wba]

Le Hussard sur le Toit (Giono) - got about 30% through, realized there were 300+ more pages of intricate countryside descriptions, decided to move on.

that's actually my favorite book. I absolutely adored all of the intricate countryside descriptions from page 1 onward, and Giono could have easily continued another 1000 pages writing about the countryside, in my opinion.
But I'm generally a sucker for countryside descriptions.

[Roscoe]

I tend to only read one book at a time, only moving to the next upon completion or abandonment of the current book. An exception was my first trip through THE TRIAL, when I had to take the occasional hit off Dorothy L. Sayers as a bracer. Alternating between Josef K. and Lord Peter Wimsey was fun.

[kanafani]

Le Hussard sur le Toit (Giono) - got about 30% through, realized there were 300+ more pages of intricate countryside descriptions, decided to move on.

that's actually my favorite book. I absolutely adored all of the intricate countryside descriptions from page 1 onward, and Giono could have easily continued another 1000 pages writing about the countryside, in my opinion.
But I'm generally a sucker for countryside descriptions.

It could have used more intricate descriptions of cholera-stricken villagers vomiting a harrowing white substance as their faces turned black. Now that was cool.

[wba]

Le Hussard sur le Toit (Giono) - got about 30% through, realized there were 300+ more pages of intricate countryside descriptions, decided to move on.

that's actually my favorite book. I absolutely adored all of the intricate countryside descriptions from page 1 onward, and Giono could have easily continued another 1000 pages writing about the countryside, in my opinion.
But I'm generally a sucker for countryside descriptions.

It could have used more intricate descriptions of cholera-stricken villagers vomiting a harrowing white substance as their faces turned black. Now that was cool.

There actually came way way way more of that in the later parts of the novel. The last 150 pages or so are all about cholera and people vomiting and dying and their dead bodies and such. But of course also still nature, cause death is nature and they often die in the countryside. It's actually one of the great novels about epidemics and mass extinction.

[charulata]

Took me months for complicated reasons that have little to do with the book itself but finally devoured the second half of Enrique Vila-Matas's Mac's Problem this weekend. The book is really funny but also it's like having your favorite most well-read uncle summarize a bunch of canon short stories you missed out on in language that could possibly be better than the stories themselves? The ending gets really melancholy but in a way that's of a piece with his other books. I need to go watch 'The Glass Eye' episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents now.

[wba]

L'innocente (1892) by Gabriele D'Annunzio. So far (100 pages in) it's dope!

Also ordered a Modern Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue for August Strindberg from 2005. That guy could paint!!! Didn't know that at all, but then (great) artists aren't allowed to excell (let alone succeed) in different artforms - at least during their lifetimes. I always wondered why that was so, but nowadays think that people want to categorize and simply won't let those thoughts enter their minds. It's too complicated. A great singer cannot also be a great actor, or a great actor a great director, or a great writer a great dancer, or a great poet a great painter. People seemingly just can't stomach that.

[Roscoe]

SANCTUARY -- Faulkner's grim little potboiler. Read it decades ago. Digging on it again.

[brian d]

i'd vote that one of his two or three best (along with light in august and intruder in the dust).

[charulata]

Took me months for complicated reasons that have little to do with the book itself but finally devoured the second half of Enrique Vila-Matas's Mac's Problem this weekend. The book is really funny but also it's like having your favorite most well-read uncle summarize a bunch of canon short stories you missed out on in language that could possibly be better than the stories themselves? The ending gets really melancholy but in a way that's of a piece with his other books. I need to go watch 'The Glass Eye' episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents now.

Just for record keeping purposes, the episode was completely worth it. As creepy as I hoped it would be!

[karl]

At "work." On the machine, unfortunately - it's on Gutenberg.org:



Beside reading, a nice one-volume hardcover found in Jakarta:




I also gave up on Pickwick Papers. But did like the abovementioned Giono.

[Roscoe]

SANCTUARY is kind of Faulkner's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

[arkheia]

Just read Peter Heller's The River. It's a fairly straight forward survival scenario, two male friends on a camping trip must get an incapacitated person downstream while outrunning a forest fire (among other things, which I won't spoil). The novel is structured on gradually revealing the personalities of these two friends as they react to various obstacles, although I ultimately wished they were fleshed out a bit more (the overriding difference in their outlooks becoming simplified to a clear optimist/pessimist dichotomy). Heller sort of toes the line between a page-turner and something more grounded and reflective, which may turn off readers expecting one or the other but I found it interesting how the writing negotiates between the two modes. Not quite a full recommendation but if anyone has read it, I'd be curious what they thought of it.

"Jack cocked his ears as if he were receiving some alien broadcast. “The big ones,” he said, “they talk. That’s what my cousin said, the hotshot firefighter in Idaho.” “Talk?” “The biggest fires. They talk, just like this. Listen.”

They listened. Who knew how far off. Not close enough yet to crown the wall of woods with light. There were other sounds: turbines and the sudden shear of a strafing plane, a thousand thumping hooves in cavalcade, the clamor and thud of shields clashing, the swelling applause of multitudes drowned out as if by gusts of rain. Rain. Downpours. Washing through a valley and funneling over a pass. Crackling through woods and sodding over the tundra. Wynn closed his eyes and could swear he heard the sweep of a coming rainstorm. As if the fire in its fury could speak in tongues, could speak the language of every enemy. And sing, too. Over the rush, very faint, was a high-pitched thrum, a humming of air that rose and fell almost in melody.

Wynn walked to the water. He peered into the dark. Between the tall trees on either bank was a swath of stars, a river of constellations that flowed heedless and unperturbed. Between the brightest, needling the arm of Orion and the head of the Bull, were distances of fainter stars that formed, as Wynn stared, a deep current, uninterrupted, as infused with bubbles of light as the aerated water of a rapid. Except that he could see into it and through it and it held fathomless dimensions that were as void of emotion as they were infinite. And if that river flowed that firmament, it flowed with a majestic stillness. Nothing had ever been so still. Could spirit live there? In such a cold and silent purity of distance? Maybe it wasn’t silent at all. Maybe in the fires that consumed those stars were decibeled cyclones and trumpets and applause.

As in our own. Our very own voluble fire.

He looked straight across at the wall of trees: dark. A solid reassuring darkness. Not that reassuring. The rolling pops of trucks dumping gravel, the cracks of artillery, they were unnerving. How could they not see it? How could the sound travel and not the light?” What they didn’t realize is that it had. It had traveled. The entire sky was so suffused with firelight that the billion stars were as faint as they would have been under the dominion of the fullest moon.”

[arkheia]

Also just finished Maria Gainza's Optic Nerve (english translation). From what I understand, the book is a work of autofiction involving stories of the narrator's family, friends, and personal life. These passages dovetail into analyses of famous paintings and artists, as both the narrator and Gainza are art critics. There is a question at the margins of how the curatorial role of an art critic/historian applies to Gainza’s own playful semi-autobiographical stories - it's not a direct correlation but the connection can be found in certain instances. Another highlight is how the often unpredictable flow of thoughts segue between subjects, which proved to be both demanding and engaging in equal measure.

[Roscoe]

Bailed on SANCTUARY (my fault, not Faulkner's) and moved on to Le Fanu's UNCLE SILAS, which is sizing up to be good fun.

[nrh]

3 to kill, jean-patrick manchette - had actually read the brilliant comics adaptation of this that manchette worked on with jacques tardi, so the plot, with all of its increasingly nasty surprises, was not exactly a surprise. but manchette's voice is the revelation.

[wba]

reading some more Ogai Mori, who really rocks, it seems. I'm currently halfway into Fumizukai "The Courier" (1891).
I just wish Mori had written a few dozen more stories that were set in Germany during the 1880s.

[wba]

3 to kill, jean-patrick manchette - had actually read the brilliant comics adaptation of this that manchette worked on with jacques tardi, so the plot, with all of its increasingly nasty surprises, was not exactly a surprise. but manchette's voice is the revelation.

Just read "Laissez bronzer les Cadavres / Corpses in the Sun" two months ago, his first novel he co-wrote with Jean-Pierre Bastid. You know that one? If so, how does "3 to Kill" compare to it, or generally with other stuff by Manchette?
I enjoyed the debut, but am not sure if I wanna read more of his stuff, as - all in all - it was still pretty generic and the writing wasn't anything special. More like a fresh, juvenile exercise that combines everything in a somewhat "newish" way, but doesn't rise above pastiche and remains firmly rooted in generic clichés.

[nrh]

Just read "Laissez bronzer les Cadavres / Corpses in the Sun" two months ago, his first novel he co-wrote with Jean-Pierre Bastid. You know that one? If so, how does "3 to Kill" compare to it, or generally with other stuff by Manchette?

i'm probably the wrong person to answer this question, since until this novel my relationship manchette has mostly been through the comics he collaborated on with jacques tardi, which share plots with the novels but of course substitute tardi's drawings for manchette's direct voice.

it's the voice that drew me into 3 to kill - a little distant, often openly disdainful, willing to circle away from the action at hand to comment or contextualize (but still very direct and unsparing with regard to the action itself). the method of contextualizing genre plot within leftist political frame work is probably much less novel in regards to european crime fiction than it once was but i found it interesting, especially as someone far more familiar with american crime fiction of the period.

so far let the corpses tan/corpses in the sun hasn't been tranlated into english, so i don't know how it would fair with the (english speaking) manchette fans i know...

[wba]

Just read "Laissez bronzer les Cadavres / Corpses in the Sun" two months ago, his first novel he co-wrote with Jean-Pierre Bastid. You know that one? If so, how does "3 to Kill" compare to it, or generally with other stuff by Manchette?

i'm probably the wrong person to answer this question, since until this novel my relationship manchette has mostly been through the comics he collaborated on with jacques tardi, which share plots with the novels but of course substitute tardi's drawings for manchette's direct voice.

it's the voice that drew me into 3 to kill - a little distant, often openly disdainful, willing to circle away from the action at hand to comment or contextualize (but still very direct and unsparing with regard to the action itself). the method of contextualizing genre plot within leftist political frame work is probably much less novel in regards to european crime fiction than it once was but i found it interesting, especially as someone far more familiar with american crime fiction of the period.

so far let the corpses tan/corpses in the sun hasn't been tranlated into english, so i don't know how it would fair with the (english speaking) manchette fans i know...

Yes, indeed, I didn't consider this. A leftist political framework used to be pretty common in some european crime fiction of the time, but to someone used to american pulp sensibilities this might come as a surprise.

I'm (far more) amazed that the complete (and quite slim) oevre of Manchette hasn't been translated into English!! - but then again, what's pretty common for many european countries (crime stories from europe and especially france being regularly translated into several european languages), might be less important for the english speaking market. And it could be that some European crime sensibilities could feel (or could have felt in the past) completely alien to someone schooled on the "classics" of the US or the UK.

[wba]

Just began reading the 14th (and final) volume in the "Wheel of TIme" series/saga started by Robert Jordan in the late 80s and completed after Jordan's death by Brandon Sanderson in 2013. I'm going on a family holiday for a week, and need something that can be quickly put down and is easy to get back into for a few minutes a couple dozen times a day. I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish the 1000+ pages in that time, but I've already read 40 pages today before work, so fingers crossed.
And it's actually almost 20 years since I picked up the first volume, so "finishing" this after two decades feels a bit special.

[wba]

I'm currently into "The Black Lizard" (1934) by Edogawa Ranpo, and it's great fun! Unfortunately the English translation of this is terrible. It seems like the guy who translated this hasn't mastered the English language...
Want to read some more Ranpo in the future, but hopefully in better translations.

[liquidnature]

Updike's Rabbit, Run, loving it thus far. Hoping to finish sometime between this week and the year 2025.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Hoping to finish sometime between this week and the year 2025.

lol!!!! My pace of reading relates.

[Roscoe]

Read A HEART AT FIRE'S CENTER, the biography of Bernard Herrmann that was informative if not much more. Then MACBETH, and now Laclos' DANGEROUS LIAISONS, which is most entertaining. I'm not used to epistolary novels.

[DT.]

Finally finished War and Peace. I could've gone without the repetitive philosophy of the last 30 pages, but otherwise, it really is a towering work.

[wba]

Just finished Quintett 1928 (1928) by Friedrich Eisenlohr today.
Now I want to read some other novels by Eisenlohr!
Can't decide if I should buy Sommerkomödie (1935) or Hunger nach Glück (1932) next...

[kanafani]

30267604._SX318_.jpg (60.96 KiB) Viewed 3325 times

[Roscoe]

Finished off DANGEROUS LIAISONS -- familiarity with the story via the film didn't prevent a few good solid punches to the gut. Before long, I started hearing Glenn Close's voice reading the Marquise de Merteuil's letters. Overall I dug it.

Next up, I dunno. OLIVER TWIST for my winter trip to Dickensland?