what are you reading?

[patrick]

I began reading Woolf's The Waves last night, in awe at how firm a grip she has on such fleeting moments. For those who are familiar with the prose, or who have indeed read the book itself, are you able to suggest some further reading?

[josiahmorgan11]

It's reliable to pick up the other great modernists, really, like Joyce, after Woolf. But in a more roundabout sense, maybe Plath's poetry [NOT the bell jar], Nabokov's work, Dennis Cooper all have fleeting similarities. There is nobody quite like her. Henry James accomplished similar diagnoses in his greatest work.

[patrick]

Thanks, Josiah

[rischka]

i'm torn between the red & the black and middlemarch

[patrick]

the red & the black is also on my reading list

[rischka]

well it's half as long as middlemarch and i just ordered The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll so red & black it is

[---]

r&b is high on my reading list as well!! GROUP READ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????

[DT.]

Middlemarch is

[patrick]

I'd love to do something like that but I'm in the middle of a book at the moment and am an utterly unreliable and detestable person

[josiahmorgan11]

just started stephen king's salem's lot, in this year's now-underway 'read every stephen king in order' project

[DT.]

Salem's Lot is

[josiahmorgan11]

salem's lot sure is dope and Carrie was better than I remember it being too ! have another package arriving tomorrow including Thomas Moore & Steven Purtill's 'Small Talk At The Clinic' ooh yes can't wait

[rischka]

I'd love to do something like that but I'm in the middle of a book at the moment and am an utterly unreliable and detestable person

also unreliable. And tend to read slowly (often on purpose)

[rischka]

funny(?) that stendhal opens with discussion of a wall...

[liquidnature]

reading:
Why We Sleep (Walker) - you'll never want to sleep less than 8 hours in a night again if you read this, for better or worse; excellent book
The Pickwick Papers (Dickens)

finished:
Red Harvest (Hammett) - ok yeah, this guy is a master. tempted to devour everything he ever wrote now.

[liquidnature]

Pickwick is surprisingly and endlessly charming so far, with such great paragraphs as:

"There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head; smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else."

[Roscoe]

RED HARVEST -- yeah. It rules. Hammett Rules.

Reading Wilkie Collins' THE WOMAN IN WHITE and enjoying the hell out of it.

[josiahmorgan11]

big recommendation on "bosun" by new juche as published by kiddiepunk. now reading 120 days of sodom

[MatiasAlbertotti]

Reading "Los galgos, los galgos" by Sara Gallardo. I'm 5o pages in and it's great so far.

[wba2]

Reading WE (1920) by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Boy, this is great. Zamyatin must be one of the best Expressionist writers of his time. Immediately ordered 3 other books by that guy, and I wasn't even halfway through.

[nrh]

read a bunch of interesting small things to start the year - thakazhi sivasankara pillai's beloved novel of doomed seaside romance chemeen, a particularly nervy modiano called honeymoon, jean giono's weird biography/self portrait melville. also a mediocre simenon maigret (maigret's failure) and the new murakami (think this would be a mess in any form but it's really handicapped by translation and presentation issues).

now in the middle of iris murdoch's black prince.

[kanafani]

[nrh]

now in the middle of iris murdoch's black prince.

finished this just today. a strange book, a twisting first person account (in the form of a manuscript written from prison, with forward by the fiction editor and postscripts by the other characters) of literary failure, scandalous romance and murder. it's also caustically funny, in complicated ways - at some points it resembles a wodehouse farce - and unsettling at every turn. there's a scene where vomiting and romantic declarations are combined in a way that's even more perverse than fassbinder's martha, if that appeals.

[josiahmorgan11]

nrh, the presentation and translation issues you bring up about murakami always concern me.

I have ALMOST decided to only read books in their native language and seeing as I only speak English that'll mean only English books. But I still understand there are translators out there as exceptional as john e. woods and the work he did for Schmidt/Suskind. So who knows.

[josiahmorgan11]

Plans for this month:
The Shining [Stephen King] (Currently Reading)
Political Order & Political Decay [Francis Fukuyama]
Night Shift [Stephen King]
Mountainhead [New Juche]
God Jr. [Dennis Cooper]

[Roscoe]

Ovid's METAMORPHOSES -- just got tired of the fiction on my shelves, went for some epic verse. Most engaging so far.

[MatiasAlbertotti]

I'm reading Gibson's Neuromancer.
This was prompted by a chat we had with some friends about Cyberpunk and the new Blade Runner movie. Actually it's a reread, since I've first read it a long time ago when a I was in my teens. It could also be considered a first time read, since the first time I read it in Spanish and now I'm reading it in English.

[liquidnature]

read dahl's first work The Gremlins which was nothing to be desired and probably why it was never a hit, though the illustrations were terrific as to be expected given the illustrator

[josiahmorgan11]

"The Land of Open Graves" [Jason de Leon, 2015]
An incredible, incredibly work of anthropological rigor. Required reading for this semester's Anthropology course and quite a thrilling expose even stylistically on the Sonoran desert and migrant-related hybrid collectif. There is an excellent Radiolab series on this exact issue featuring de Leon himself, too.

[kanafani]