Challenged Reading 2015 Editon

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Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

I too will take up the booklord-challenge. I'm currently re-reading Purdy's House of the Solitary Maggot and finished today A Third of a Nation, a weird depression-era play about how poo poo hosuing in New York is, and how the government should pay up to fix things up.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 19:04

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 18:22

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Corrode posted:

Someone wildcard me. Make it good!

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 14:29

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Pretty much any Tennessee Williams play is great fun to read too. Maybe better than seeing a production because you do'nt have to sit through awful accents.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 22:47

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

CestMoi posted:

Don't u usually read all those sorts of books anyway? Doesn't seem like much of a challenge IMO.........

I crave structure.

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)

4/60

Anyone want to suggest a wildcard for me?

# ¿ Jan 30, 2015 15:32

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)

5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.

14/60
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

I am doing poo poo for reading so far this year. And I should really get back onto Goodreads as it helps keeping my books straight. Currently reading Libra by Delillo and he's basically a thriller writer with ideals above his station, right? You should hear some of the dialogue he comes up with, jeepers.

e: I forgot Pnin!

Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Mar 25, 2015

# ¿ Mar 25, 2015 23:41

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

I'm afraid you've missed the deadline. SOrry, but we can't just reopen the application process now, it's not fair to the other competitors.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2015 19:03

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.

16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.

21/60
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Apr 29, 2015

# ¿ Apr 28, 2015 19:56

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

ToxicFrog posted:

If this is the English translation, it's by Michael Kandel, who deserves some kind of goddamn medal for his handling of Lem's work, especially The Cyberiad.

He's done a bunch of other Lem translations, including Mortal Engines (more stories in a similar vein to The Cyberiad), The Star Diaries (short stories not at all like The Cyberiad), and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (I'm not even sure how to describe this).

It was the English. Well, shame on my copy for not naming him, closest they come was a copyright for Seabury press.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2015 16:21

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Nope, nothing even close.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2015 21:32

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.
16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.

22 Just One More Thing by Peter Falk. Another old birthday present. I like Columbo, and seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire pushed me into reading this. Less of a book more of a collection of talk-show anecdotes written down. I'm putting it down as a biography anyway. 18
23 Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier as translated by John Sturrock (I think). Picked this up because it was ex libris from a guy with pretty ok taste, at least a lot of 70s english pomo. I liked his descriptions of children at play, but didn't particularly care about the protagonist or his moral journey. Also I'm bigoted against novels not set in the author's lifetime. Are Cuban's nonwhite (for the booklord)? I'll wait.
24 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski as translated by Barbabra Vedder. A selection from the short-writings of the Polish communist focusing on his experience in Auschwitz. I sort of want to read the other stuff. 21
25 Local Anasthetic by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Saw this in a second hand shop just after he died so I decided to go for it as my entrypoint for Grass. There's a copy of The Tin Drum boxing around here somewhere but I've not laid my hands on it. Dental work as a metaphor for political radicalism versus old-age-related indolence. Very good.
26 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LLosa as translated by Helen R. Lane. Romance between an 18 year old and his uncle's ex-wife in interrupted every other chapter by plots of radio serials. As the author of these serials is in the book, Vargas has great fun introducing us to quirks of his character and then having them play out in the following chapter. Good fun.
27 A Month of Sundays by John Updike. One of those fictional reverends who is sex-crazed, bitter, agnostic and pun-mad gets sent to write away his sins. It's a good thing he can write sex because that's the lion's share of this book.

27/60
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Another poo poo month for reading, and I should really get my eye on the booklord challenge.

# ¿ May 31, 2015 20:33

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.
16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.
22 Just One More Thing by Peter Falk. Another old birthday present. I like Columbo, and seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire pushed me into reading this. Less of a book more of a collection of talk-show anecdotes written down. I'm putting it down as a biography anyway. 18
23 Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier as translated by John Sturrock (I think). Picked this up because it was ex libris from a guy with pretty ok taste, at least a lot of 70s english pomo. I liked his descriptions of children at play, but didn't particularly care about the protagonist or his moral journey. Also I'm bigoted against novels not set in the author's lifetime. Are Cuban's nonwhite (for the booklord)? I'll wait.
24 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski as translated by Barbabra Vedder. A selection from the short-writings of the Polish communist focusing on his experience in Auschwitz. I sort of want to read the other stuff. 21
25 Local Anasthetic by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Saw this in a second hand shop just after he died so I decided to go for it as my entrypoint for Grass. There's a copy of The Tin Drum boxing around here somewhere but I've not laid my hands on it. Dental work as a metaphor for political radicalism versus old-age-related indolence. Very good.
26 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LLosa as translated by Helen R. Lane. Romance between an 18 year old and his uncle's ex-wife in interrupted every other chapter by plots of radio serials. As the author of these serials is in the book, Vargas has great fun introducing us to quirks of his character and then having them play out in the following chapter. Good fun.
27 A Month of Sundays by John Updike. One of those fictional reverends who is sex-crazed, bitter, agnostic and pun-mad gets sent to write away his sins. It's a good thing he can write sex because that's the lion's share of this book.

28 The Day of the Locust by Nathanial West. I reread this for the first time after reading his complete works like, a decade ago. Still pretty fun.
29 Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It's basically disgrace but half the length and with a vague fantasy-setting so, uh, a categorical improvement.
30 Cat and Mouse by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Another later Grass as I continue to look for The Tin Drum. Beginning to suspect that Grass' political position is down entirely to his hosed-up teeth.
31 Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. The more I read this the more I like it.
32 Strong as Death by Guy de Maupassant as translated by someone or other. It's an old Knopf copy, might be Ernest Augustus Boyd? The first Maupassant I've read where it doesn't ever dive headlong into filth. I mean, she burns some letters and feels as if she's burning herself, but it's no priest stomping on a bitch birthing puppies. Good despite that though.
33 At Swim Two Birds by Flan O'Brien. Now this was a lot of fun. Any one strand of this book is great, and switching between them can be a bit of a jerk as you're sorry to leave, but I guess if that's what he had to do. 8
34 Carpenter's Gothic by WIlliam Gaddis. I've got bookmarks in both JR and Frolic but I've got a bit bogged down in them. This one's still good though. Funny to read this both with the annotations AND having read Dispatches.
35 Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Gilbraith. Very readable, not good. The only thing in this book that rings true is the utter disdain for the British press.
36 The Silkworm by Robert Gilbraith. Far too long, and they keep stacking more and more ludicrous poo poo onto the detectives (one of them's a professional-grade stunt driver, apparently?). Repeats a simile likening strong tea to turpentine like it's something clever, and not what all our grans said.
37 The Silent World of Nicholas Quin by Colin Dexter. So this is what good detective fiction looks like. Better writing, much shorter, subtle clues and a clever solution. Filled with that very creepy donnish humour, and ends with Morse and Lewis jointly masturbating to a porno. 22
38 Let Us Now Honour Famous Men by James Agee. An impassioned communist/marxist attempts to hammer into your brains the physical existence of the poor. He mostly tries to do so by making a catalog of their possessions, with actual stories of their lives smuggled in through his run-on sentences. He then includes a letter he wrote to some poor magazine hack telling them to gently caress right off, for reasons unclear to me. The man's a lunatic. 14
39 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Kinda... boring? But very short.
40 Vathek by William Beckford. The same gothic silliness as Otranto, but at least Beckford had a sense of humour in his prose style. Very strong opening paragraph and it continues throughout. That kind of excess is what I really like in fiction. 13

40/60
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 17:03

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

It's the colour red that has me worried (that Stavinsky will track me down and beat me up for failing the challenge)

# ¿ Jul 29, 2015 18:51

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.
16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.
22 Just One More Thing by Peter Falk. Another old birthday present. I like Columbo, and seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire pushed me into reading this. Less of a book more of a collection of talk-show anecdotes written down. I'm putting it down as a biography anyway. 18
23 Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier as translated by John Sturrock (I think). Picked this up because it was ex libris from a guy with pretty ok taste, at least a lot of 70s english pomo. I liked his descriptions of children at play, but didn't particularly care about the protagonist or his moral journey. Also I'm bigoted against novels not set in the author's lifetime. Are Cuban's nonwhite (for the booklord)? I'll wait.
24 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski as translated by Barbabra Vedder. A selection from the short-writings of the Polish communist focusing on his experience in Auschwitz. I sort of want to read the other stuff. 21
25 Local Anasthetic by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Saw this in a second hand shop just after he died so I decided to go for it as my entrypoint for Grass. There's a copy of The Tin Drum boxing around here somewhere but I've not laid my hands on it. Dental work as a metaphor for political radicalism versus old-age-related indolence. Very good.
26 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LLosa as translated by Helen R. Lane. Romance between an 18 year old and his uncle's ex-wife in interrupted every other chapter by plots of radio serials. As the author of these serials is in the book, Vargas has great fun introducing us to quirks of his character and then having them play out in the following chapter. Good fun.
27 A Month of Sundays by John Updike. One of those fictional reverends who is sex-crazed, bitter, agnostic and pun-mad gets sent to write away his sins. It's a good thing he can write sex because that's the lion's share of this book.
28 The Day of the Locust by Nathanial West. I reread this for the first time after reading his complete works like, a decade ago. Still pretty fun.
29 Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It's basically disgrace but half the length and with a vague fantasy-setting so, uh, a categorical improvement.
30 Cat and Mouse by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Another later Grass as I continue to look for The Tin Drum. Beginning to suspect that Grass' political position is down entirely to his hosed-up teeth.
31 Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. The more I read this the more I like it.
32 Strong as Death by Guy de Maupassant as translated by someone or other. It's an old Knopf copy, might be Ernest Augustus Boyd? The first Maupassant I've read where it doesn't ever dive headlong into filth. I mean, she burns some letters and feels as if she's burning herself, but it's no priest stomping on a bitch birthing puppies. Good despite that though.
33 At Swim Two Birds by Flan O'Brien. Now this was a lot of fun. Any one strand of this book is great, and switching between them can be a bit of a jerk as you're sorry to leave, but I guess if that's what he had to do. 8
34 Carpenter's Gothic by WIlliam Gaddis. I've got bookmarks in both JR and Frolic but I've got a bit bogged down in them. This one's still good though. Funny to read this both with the annotations AND having read Dispatches.
35 Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Gilbraith. Very readable, not good. The only thing in this book that rings true is the utter disdain for the British press.
36 The Silkworm by Robert Gilbraith. Far too long, and they keep stacking more and more ludicrous poo poo onto the detectives (one of them's a professional-grade stunt driver, apparently?). Repeats a simile likening strong tea to turpentine like it's something clever, and not what all our grans said.
37 The Silent World of Nicholas Quin by Colin Dexter. So this is what good detective fiction looks like. Better writing, much shorter, subtle clues and a clever solution. Filled with that very creepy donnish humour, and ends with Morse and Lewis jointly masturbating to a porno. 22
38 Let Us Now Honour Famous Men by James Agee. An impassioned communist/marxist attempts to hammer into your brains the physical existence of the poor. He mostly tries to do so by making a catalog of their possessions, with actual stories of their lives smuggled in through his run-on sentences. He then includes a letter he wrote to some poor magazine hack telling them to gently caress right off, for reasons unclear to me. The man's a lunatic. 14
39 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Kinda... boring? But very short.
40 Vathek by William Beckford. The same gothic silliness as Otranto, but at least Beckford had a sense of humour in his prose style. Very strong opening paragraph and it continues throughout. That kind of excess is what I really like in fiction. 13

41 The Coup by John Updike. I thought it would be interesting to see Updike struggle with both race and politics. The standard egomaniac monologist is this time the dictator of an African dictator, as he tracks across his country in mufti, when he's not been spirited by a black Mercedes to his palace to talk to one of his wives. It's pretty bizzarre. Besides more expected Updikeisms (it's not ten pages before he suggests that the many women the previous ruler murdered were asking for it) he lets his imagination go wild in a way he never does in his American books. The KGB retrofit a severed head to act as an animatronic dispensing propaganda. Pretty fun.
42 Boss by Mike Royko. A philippic against Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and, to hear Royko tell it, a monomaniacal monster with a naked love of power that he excises by innumerable opaque wheezes. It starts out strange how much Royko hates Chicago politics but when it gets to the race riots his rage became more comprehensible to me.
43 A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene. A depressed architecht accidentally acts exactly like a saint, despite being so bored of this whole morality thing. A better depiction of a saint than The End of the Affair where it's truly unbelievable, but maybe not the most interesting thing to read?
44 The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges as translated by Andre Hurley. It's Borges, lots of tiby stories about labyrynths, alternate dimensions and cowboys stabbing each other. To be honest by the 50th 2-page story they all sort of blend into one. Has The Wait in it, where a chap opts to snooze through an assassination attempt, which was pointed out as one of the best by something I read ages ago. Since I've been meaning to read this for like a decade I'll say this was 16
45 Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I decideed to take this back down off the shelf. It's kind of embarassing how much he idolized organized crime, but it's all in good fun. 20

Pretty bad month for reading but I suppose it can't be helped.

45/60
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

# ¿ Aug 2, 2015 11:31

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.
16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.
22 Just One More Thing by Peter Falk. Another old birthday present. I like Columbo, and seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire pushed me into reading this. Less of a book more of a collection of talk-show anecdotes written down. I'm putting it down as a biography anyway. 18
23 Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier as translated by John Sturrock (I think). Picked this up because it was ex libris from a guy with pretty ok taste, at least a lot of 70s english pomo. I liked his descriptions of children at play, but didn't particularly care about the protagonist or his moral journey. Also I'm bigoted against novels not set in the author's lifetime. Are Cuban's nonwhite (for the booklord)? I'll wait.
24 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski as translated by Barbabra Vedder. A selection from the short-writings of the Polish communist focusing on his experience in Auschwitz. I sort of want to read the other stuff. 21
25 Local Anasthetic by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Saw this in a second hand shop just after he died so I decided to go for it as my entrypoint for Grass. There's a copy of The Tin Drum boxing around here somewhere but I've not laid my hands on it. Dental work as a metaphor for political radicalism versus old-age-related indolence. Very good.
26 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LLosa as translated by Helen R. Lane. Romance between an 18 year old and his uncle's ex-wife in interrupted every other chapter by plots of radio serials. As the author of these serials is in the book, Vargas has great fun introducing us to quirks of his character and then having them play out in the following chapter. Good fun.
27 A Month of Sundays by John Updike. One of those fictional reverends who is sex-crazed, bitter, agnostic and pun-mad gets sent to write away his sins. It's a good thing he can write sex because that's the lion's share of this book.
28 The Day of the Locust by Nathanial West. I reread this for the first time after reading his complete works like, a decade ago. Still pretty fun.
29 Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It's basically disgrace but half the length and with a vague fantasy-setting so, uh, a categorical improvement.
30 Cat and Mouse by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Another later Grass as I continue to look for The Tin Drum. Beginning to suspect that Grass' political position is down entirely to his hosed-up teeth.
31 Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. The more I read this the more I like it.
32 Strong as Death by Guy de Maupassant as translated by someone or other. It's an old Knopf copy, might be Ernest Augustus Boyd? The first Maupassant I've read where it doesn't ever dive headlong into filth. I mean, she burns some letters and feels as if she's burning herself, but it's no priest stomping on a bitch birthing puppies. Good despite that though.
33 At Swim Two Birds by Flan O'Brien. Now this was a lot of fun. Any one strand of this book is great, and switching between them can be a bit of a jerk as you're sorry to leave, but I guess if that's what he had to do. 8
34 Carpenter's Gothic by WIlliam Gaddis. I've got bookmarks in both JR and Frolic but I've got a bit bogged down in them. This one's still good though. Funny to read this both with the annotations AND having read Dispatches.
35 Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Gilbraith. Very readable, not good. The only thing in this book that rings true is the utter disdain for the British press.
36 The Silkworm by Robert Gilbraith. Far too long, and they keep stacking more and more ludicrous poo poo onto the detectives (one of them's a professional-grade stunt driver, apparently?). Repeats a simile likening strong tea to turpentine like it's something clever, and not what all our grans said.
37 The Silent World of Nicholas Quin by Colin Dexter. So this is what good detective fiction looks like. Better writing, much shorter, subtle clues and a clever solution. Filled with that very creepy donnish humour, and ends with Morse and Lewis jointly masturbating to a porno. 22
38 Let Us Now Honour Famous Men by James Agee. An impassioned communist/marxist attempts to hammer into your brains the physical existence of the poor. He mostly tries to do so by making a catalog of their possessions, with actual stories of their lives smuggled in through his run-on sentences. He then includes a letter he wrote to some poor magazine hack telling them to gently caress right off, for reasons unclear to me. The man's a lunatic. 14
39 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Kinda... boring? But very short.
40 Vathek by William Beckford. The same gothic silliness as Otranto, but at least Beckford had a sense of humour in his prose style. Very strong opening paragraph and it continues throughout. That kind of excess is what I really like in fiction. 13
41 The Coup by John Updike. I thought it would be interesting to see Updike struggle with both race and politics. The standard egomaniac monologist is this time the dictator of an African dictator, as he tracks across his country in mufti, when he's not been spirited by a black Mercedes to his palace to talk to one of his wives. It's pretty bizzarre. Besides more expected Updikeisms (it's not ten pages before he suggests that the many women the previous ruler murdered were asking for it) he lets his imagination go wild in a way he never does in his American books. The KGB retrofit a severed head to act as an animatronic dispensing propaganda. Pretty fun.
42 Boss by Mike Royko. A philippic against Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and, to hear Royko tell it, a monomaniacal monster with a naked love of power that he excises by innumerable opaque wheezes. It starts out strange how much Royko hates Chicago politics but when it gets to the race riots his rage became more comprehensible to me.
43 A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene. A depressed architecht accidentally acts exactly like a saint, despite being so bored of this whole morality thing. A better depiction of a saint than The End of the Affair where it's truly unbelievable, but maybe not the most interesting thing to read?
44 The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges as translated by Andre Hurley. It's Borges, lots of tiby stories about labyrynths, alternate dimensions and cowboys stabbing each other. To be honest by the 50th 2-page story they all sort of blend into one. Has The Wait in it, where a chap opts to snooze through an assassination attempt, which was pointed out as one of the best by something I read ages ago. Since I've been meaning to read this for like a decade I'll say this was 16
45 Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I decideed to take this back down off the shelf. It's kind of embarassing how much he idolized organized crime, but it's all in good fun. 20

46 Erewhon by Samuel Butler. The good stuff. I still don't entirely see how the machine chapter is a dig at evolution but I did get what he was doing with the musical banks, which I managed to totally miss first time round.
47 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene. Pamphlet of a novel that... I guess counts as magical realist? A terrible Swiss oligarch has terrible parties where he tortures his terrible Swiss cronies, which the non-terrible, decent, depressed Greene protagonist gets invited to as his son-in-law. Broad-strokes on a postage stamp, basically.
48 Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. I read the start of an intro to this by some Hardy biographer which made two points: Conrad's the real depresso of fin de siecle English lit not Hardy like everyone says, and this book doesn't have an ending. Which is right, it really doesn't! I still like it though.
49 Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr. Big biography of Tennessee Williams, the first after the death of the insane woman who somehow became the caretaker of his literary estate who'd previously scotched previous projects. Lahr structures this book chronologically following the plays, but takes the lead from the play's contents to expand on aspects of WIlliams' life. Suddenly Last Summer, for instance, leads to a whole chapter on Rose Williams' entire life. It also betrays its super-long gestation by the density of quotations . The two main revelations for me are that I didn't know he wrote so many plays, or how utterly awful he was. Also he once shared JFK's speed-dealer.
50 The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster. What an awful book, really makes you long for WW1.
51 The Conformist by Alberto Moravia as translated by Angus Davidson. Picked this up because I really liked the Bertolucci film and had no idea it was adapted. This was a delight to read, I really need to track down more Moravia, or possibly more Davidson.

51/60
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

# ¿ Sep 2, 2015 12:04

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.
16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.
22 Just One More Thing by Peter Falk. Another old birthday present. I like Columbo, and seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire pushed me into reading this. Less of a book more of a collection of talk-show anecdotes written down. I'm putting it down as a biography anyway. 18
23 Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier as translated by John Sturrock (I think). Picked this up because it was ex libris from a guy with pretty ok taste, at least a lot of 70s english pomo. I liked his descriptions of children at play, but didn't particularly care about the protagonist or his moral journey. Also I'm bigoted against novels not set in the author's lifetime. Are Cuban's nonwhite (for the booklord)? I'll wait.
24 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski as translated by Barbabra Vedder. A selection from the short-writings of the Polish communist focusing on his experience in Auschwitz. I sort of want to read the other stuff. 21
25 Local Anasthetic by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Saw this in a second hand shop just after he died so I decided to go for it as my entrypoint for Grass. There's a copy of The Tin Drum boxing around here somewhere but I've not laid my hands on it. Dental work as a metaphor for political radicalism versus old-age-related indolence. Very good.
26 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LLosa as translated by Helen R. Lane. Romance between an 18 year old and his uncle's ex-wife in interrupted every other chapter by plots of radio serials. As the author of these serials is in the book, Vargas has great fun introducing us to quirks of his character and then having them play out in the following chapter. Good fun.
27 A Month of Sundays by John Updike. One of those fictional reverends who is sex-crazed, bitter, agnostic and pun-mad gets sent to write away his sins. It's a good thing he can write sex because that's the lion's share of this book.
28 The Day of the Locust by Nathanial West. I reread this for the first time after reading his complete works like, a decade ago. Still pretty fun.
29 Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It's basically disgrace but half the length and with a vague fantasy-setting so, uh, a categorical improvement.
30 Cat and Mouse by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Another later Grass as I continue to look for The Tin Drum. Beginning to suspect that Grass' political position is down entirely to his hosed-up teeth.
31 Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. The more I read this the more I like it.
32 Strong as Death by Guy de Maupassant as translated by someone or other. It's an old Knopf copy, might be Ernest Augustus Boyd? The first Maupassant I've read where it doesn't ever dive headlong into filth. I mean, she burns some letters and feels as if she's burning herself, but it's no priest stomping on a bitch birthing puppies. Good despite that though.
33 At Swim Two Birds by Flan O'Brien. Now this was a lot of fun. Any one strand of this book is great, and switching between them can be a bit of a jerk as you're sorry to leave, but I guess if that's what he had to do. 8
34 Carpenter's Gothic by WIlliam Gaddis. I've got bookmarks in both JR and Frolic but I've got a bit bogged down in them. This one's still good though. Funny to read this both with the annotations AND having read Dispatches.
35 Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Gilbraith. Very readable, not good. The only thing in this book that rings true is the utter disdain for the British press.
36 The Silkworm by Robert Gilbraith. Far too long, and they keep stacking more and more ludicrous poo poo onto the detectives (one of them's a professional-grade stunt driver, apparently?). Repeats a simile likening strong tea to turpentine like it's something clever, and not what all our grans said.
37 The Silent World of Nicholas Quin by Colin Dexter. So this is what good detective fiction looks like. Better writing, much shorter, subtle clues and a clever solution. Filled with that very creepy donnish humour, and ends with Morse and Lewis jointly masturbating to a porno. 22
38 Let Us Now Honour Famous Men by James Agee. An impassioned communist/marxist attempts to hammer into your brains the physical existence of the poor. He mostly tries to do so by making a catalog of their possessions, with actual stories of their lives smuggled in through his run-on sentences. He then includes a letter he wrote to some poor magazine hack telling them to gently caress right off, for reasons unclear to me. The man's a lunatic. 14
39 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Kinda... boring? But very short.
40 Vathek by William Beckford. The same gothic silliness as Otranto, but at least Beckford had a sense of humour in his prose style. Very strong opening paragraph and it continues throughout. That kind of excess is what I really like in fiction. 13
41 The Coup by John Updike. I thought it would be interesting to see Updike struggle with both race and politics. The standard egomaniac monologist is this time the dictator of an African dictator, as he tracks across his country in mufti, when he's not been spirited by a black Mercedes to his palace to talk to one of his wives. It's pretty bizzarre. Besides more expected Updikeisms (it's not ten pages before he suggests that the many women the previous ruler murdered were asking for it) he lets his imagination go wild in a way he never does in his American books. The KGB retrofit a severed head to act as an animatronic dispensing propaganda. Pretty fun.
42 Boss by Mike Royko. A philippic against Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and, to hear Royko tell it, a monomaniacal monster with a naked love of power that he excises by innumerable opaque wheezes. It starts out strange how much Royko hates Chicago politics but when it gets to the race riots his rage became more comprehensible to me.
43 A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene. A depressed architecht accidentally acts exactly like a saint, despite being so bored of this whole morality thing. A better depiction of a saint than The End of the Affair where it's truly unbelievable, but maybe not the most interesting thing to read?
44 The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges as translated by Andre Hurley. It's Borges, lots of tiby stories about labyrynths, alternate dimensions and cowboys stabbing each other. To be honest by the 50th 2-page story they all sort of blend into one. Has The Wait in it, where a chap opts to snooze through an assassination attempt, which was pointed out as one of the best by something I read ages ago. Since I've been meaning to read this for like a decade I'll say this was 16
45 Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I decideed to take this back down off the shelf. It's kind of embarassing how much he idolized organized crime, but it's all in good fun. 20
46 Erewhon by Samuel Butler. The good stuff. I still don't entirely see how the machine chapter is a dig at evolution but I did get what he was doing with the musical banks, which I managed to totally miss first time round.
47 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene. Pamphlet of a novel that... I guess counts as magical realist? A terrible Swiss oligarch has terrible parties where he tortures his terrible Swiss cronies, which the non-terrible, decent, depressed Greene protagonist gets invited to as his son-in-law. Broad-strokes on a postage stamp, basically.
48 Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. I read the start of an intro to this by some Hardy biographer which made two points: Conrad's the real depresso of fin de siecle English lit not Hardy like everyone says, and this book doesn't have an ending. Which is right, it really doesn't! I still like it though.
49 Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr. Big biography of Tennessee Williams, the first after the death of the insane woman who somehow became the caretaker of his literary estate who'd previously scotched previous projects. Lahr structures this book chronologically following the plays, but takes the lead from the play's contents to expand on aspects of WIlliams' life. Suddenly Last Summer, for instance, leads to a whole chapter on Rose Williams' entire life. It also betrays its super-long gestation by the density of quotations . The two main revelations for me are that I didn't know he wrote so many plays, or how utterly awful he was. Also he once shared JFK's speed-dealer.
50 The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster. What an awful book, really makes you long for WW1.
51 The Conformist by Alberto Moravia as translated by Angus Davidson. Picked this up because I really liked the Bertolucci film and had no idea it was adapted. This was a delight to read, I really need to track down more Moravia, or possibly more Davidson.

52 Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Read this for the first time since back at school. Lots of fun stuff hidden just beneath the surface, tactful allusions of incest, homosexuality and rape. And a job lot of misogyny, my lord.
53 A Frolic of his Own by William Gaddis. Continuing the slow reread of Gaddis. Much as I hate him, Franzen might be right in calling this boring in parts. I even missed the bit where he looks at the lake and thinks about Native American gods.
54 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon by Sei Shōnagon as translated by Ivan Morris. I guess a lot of the virtues in Japanese literature are pretty untranslatable, there are a lot of lists. Who was she, Feudal Japan's John Ashbery? C'mon. Anyway, lots of fun stories of a barking madaristocracy. Very very extensively annotated, most of which I ignored.
55 The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. This was fun, horror stories of terrible hotels and terrible people. I felt a fool for not clocking that the John Malkovich film i watched half of was adapted from this.
56 The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Boy, this was junk. And absolutely, totally, plot-free. From the intro where the author chides our ever-corsening world 4 times in 2 pages, to a characterization which reads likes a dating profile posted by a truly despicable ponce.
57 The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler. Vaguely communistical travel-writing around 1930s Europe, where you needed letters of introduction everywhere, even to the local brothel. Guy could spin a yarn, I'll say.

I ran 2 months together to try and make it look better, but boy. No production at all. In my defence I'm 400 pages into Mill on the Floss, but jeez. Also, I'll need to get cracking on the book lord challenge!
57/60
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# ¿ Nov 2, 2015 18:57

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Change all the challenges apart from reading A Blind Owl.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2015 13:05

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.
16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.
22 Just One More Thing by Peter Falk. Another old birthday present. I like Columbo, and seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire pushed me into reading this. Less of a book more of a collection of talk-show anecdotes written down. I'm putting it down as a biography anyway. 18
23 Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier as translated by John Sturrock (I think). Picked this up because it was ex libris from a guy with pretty ok taste, at least a lot of 70s english pomo. I liked his descriptions of children at play, but didn't particularly care about the protagonist or his moral journey. Also I'm bigoted against novels not set in the author's lifetime. Are Cuban's nonwhite (for the booklord)? I'll wait.
24 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski as translated by Barbabra Vedder. A selection from the short-writings of the Polish communist focusing on his experience in Auschwitz. I sort of want to read the other stuff. 21
25 Local Anasthetic by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Saw this in a second hand shop just after he died so I decided to go for it as my entrypoint for Grass. There's a copy of The Tin Drum boxing around here somewhere but I've not laid my hands on it. Dental work as a metaphor for political radicalism versus old-age-related indolence. Very good.
26 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LLosa as translated by Helen R. Lane. Romance between an 18 year old and his uncle's ex-wife in interrupted every other chapter by plots of radio serials. As the author of these serials is in the book, Vargas has great fun introducing us to quirks of his character and then having them play out in the following chapter. Good fun.
27 A Month of Sundays by John Updike. One of those fictional reverends who is sex-crazed, bitter, agnostic and pun-mad gets sent to write away his sins. It's a good thing he can write sex because that's the lion's share of this book.
28 The Day of the Locust by Nathanial West. I reread this for the first time after reading his complete works like, a decade ago. Still pretty fun.
29 Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It's basically disgrace but half the length and with a vague fantasy-setting so, uh, a categorical improvement.
30 Cat and Mouse by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Another later Grass as I continue to look for The Tin Drum. Beginning to suspect that Grass' political position is down entirely to his hosed-up teeth.
31 Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. The more I read this the more I like it.
32 Strong as Death by Guy de Maupassant as translated by someone or other. It's an old Knopf copy, might be Ernest Augustus Boyd? The first Maupassant I've read where it doesn't ever dive headlong into filth. I mean, she burns some letters and feels as if she's burning herself, but it's no priest stomping on a bitch birthing puppies. Good despite that though.
33 At Swim Two Birds by Flan O'Brien. Now this was a lot of fun. Any one strand of this book is great, and switching between them can be a bit of a jerk as you're sorry to leave, but I guess if that's what he had to do. 8
34 Carpenter's Gothic by WIlliam Gaddis. I've got bookmarks in both JR and Frolic but I've got a bit bogged down in them. This one's still good though. Funny to read this both with the annotations AND having read Dispatches.
35 Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Gilbraith. Very readable, not good. The only thing in this book that rings true is the utter disdain for the British press.
36 The Silkworm by Robert Gilbraith. Far too long, and they keep stacking more and more ludicrous poo poo onto the detectives (one of them's a professional-grade stunt driver, apparently?). Repeats a simile likening strong tea to turpentine like it's something clever, and not what all our grans said.
37 The Silent World of Nicholas Quin by Colin Dexter. So this is what good detective fiction looks like. Better writing, much shorter, subtle clues and a clever solution. Filled with that very creepy donnish humour, and ends with Morse and Lewis jointly masturbating to a porno. 22
38 Let Us Now Honour Famous Men by James Agee. An impassioned communist/marxist attempts to hammer into your brains the physical existence of the poor. He mostly tries to do so by making a catalog of their possessions, with actual stories of their lives smuggled in through his run-on sentences. He then includes a letter he wrote to some poor magazine hack telling them to gently caress right off, for reasons unclear to me. The man's a lunatic. 14
39 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Kinda... boring? But very short.
40 Vathek by William Beckford. The same gothic silliness as Otranto, but at least Beckford had a sense of humour in his prose style. Very strong opening paragraph and it continues throughout. That kind of excess is what I really like in fiction. 13
41 The Coup by John Updike. I thought it would be interesting to see Updike struggle with both race and politics. The standard egomaniac monologist is this time the dictator of an African dictator, as he tracks across his country in mufti, when he's not been spirited by a black Mercedes to his palace to talk to one of his wives. It's pretty bizzarre. Besides more expected Updikeisms (it's not ten pages before he suggests that the many women the previous ruler murdered were asking for it) he lets his imagination go wild in a way he never does in his American books. The KGB retrofit a severed head to act as an animatronic dispensing propaganda. Pretty fun.
42 Boss by Mike Royko. A philippic against Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and, to hear Royko tell it, a monomaniacal monster with a naked love of power that he excises by innumerable opaque wheezes. It starts out strange how much Royko hates Chicago politics but when it gets to the race riots his rage became more comprehensible to me.
43 A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene. A depressed architecht accidentally acts exactly like a saint, despite being so bored of this whole morality thing. A better depiction of a saint than The End of the Affair where it's truly unbelievable, but maybe not the most interesting thing to read?
44 The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges as translated by Andre Hurley. It's Borges, lots of tiby stories about labyrynths, alternate dimensions and cowboys stabbing each other. To be honest by the 50th 2-page story they all sort of blend into one. Has The Wait in it, where a chap opts to snooze through an assassination attempt, which was pointed out as one of the best by something I read ages ago. Since I've been meaning to read this for like a decade I'll say this was 16
45 Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I decideed to take this back down off the shelf. It's kind of embarassing how much he idolized organized crime, but it's all in good fun. 20
46 Erewhon by Samuel Butler. The good stuff. I still don't entirely see how the machine chapter is a dig at evolution but I did get what he was doing with the musical banks, which I managed to totally miss first time round.
47 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene. Pamphlet of a novel that... I guess counts as magical realist? A terrible Swiss oligarch has terrible parties where he tortures his terrible Swiss cronies, which the non-terrible, decent, depressed Greene protagonist gets invited to as his son-in-law. Broad-strokes on a postage stamp, basically.
48 Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. I read the start of an intro to this by some Hardy biographer which made two points: Conrad's the real depresso of fin de siecle English lit not Hardy like everyone says, and this book doesn't have an ending. Which is right, it really doesn't! I still like it though.
49 Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr. Big biography of Tennessee Williams, the first after the death of the insane woman who somehow became the caretaker of his literary estate who'd previously scotched previous projects. Lahr structures this book chronologically following the plays, but takes the lead from the play's contents to expand on aspects of WIlliams' life. Suddenly Last Summer, for instance, leads to a whole chapter on Rose Williams' entire life. It also betrays its super-long gestation by the density of quotations . The two main revelations for me are that I didn't know he wrote so many plays, or how utterly awful he was. Also he once shared JFK's speed-dealer.
50 The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster. What an awful book, really makes you long for WW1.
51 The Conformist by Alberto Moravia as translated by Angus Davidson. Picked this up because I really liked the Bertolucci film and had no idea it was adapted. This was a delight to read, I really need to track down more Moravia, or possibly more Davidson.
52 Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Read this for the first time since back at school. Lots of fun stuff hidden just beneath the surface, tactful allusions of incest, homosexuality and rape. And a job lot of misogyny, my lord.
53 A Frolic of his Own by William Gaddis. Continuing the slow reread of Gaddis. Much as I hate him, Franzen might be right in calling this boring in parts. I even missed the bit where he looks at the lake and thinks about Native American gods.
54 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon by Sei Shōnagon as translated by Ivan Morris. I guess a lot of the virtues in Japanese literature are pretty untranslatable, there are a lot of lists. Who was she, Feudal Japan's John Ashbery? C'mon. Anyway, lots of fun stories of a barking madaristocracy. Very very extensively annotated, most of which I ignored.
55 The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. This was fun, horror stories of terrible hotels and terrible people. I felt a fool for not clocking that the John Malkovich film i watched half of was adapted from this.
56 The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Boy, this was junk. And absolutely, totally, plot-free. From the intro where the author chides our ever-corsening world 4 times in 2 pages, to a characterization which reads likes a dating profile posted by a truly despicable ponce.
57 The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler. Vaguely communistical travel-writing around 1930s Europe, where you needed letters of introduction everywhere, even to the local brothel. Guy could spin a yarn, I'll say.

58 The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg as translated by John and Ann Tedeschi. Short work of, I guess, pophi about a medieval miller prosecuted for heresy because he believed that God and the Angels emerged from the chaos of unformed world like worms emerge from cheese. Ginzburg is tilting against concepts of high and low culture by tracing how scholarly works found their way into the hands of this labourer. But mostly I read it because he manages to resurrect a likable weirdo. I'm classing this as history as time's running out. 5
59 Victory by Joseph Conrad. The interactions between Lena and Axel really stood out for me this read round.
60 The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Chapter 11 was really painful to read. 1
61 Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad. For people who think Conrad's really verbose and slow moving, this is the collection for you! because it'd 100% confirm your notions. The intricacies are good if you've got the time to take them in.
62 The Egoist by George Meredith. Really weird book, like a beefy Thomas Love Peacock, I guess. Feels sort of out of its time as well.

57/60
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# ¿ Dec 2, 2015 11:09

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 18:22

Mr. Squishy: Mar 22, 2010; A country where you can always get richer.

Fedelm posted:

6. An essay. The Depressed Person / David Foster Wallace.

That's a short story isn't it? Unless DFW wrote two things titled The Depressed Person which doesn't seem utterly impossible. And now to necro the thread

Mr. Squishy posted:

1 One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent and others. A play exploring the dire housing situation in depression-era New York. Agit-prop long past its sell by date but still fascinating, mostly for being in such a foreign style. (17)
2 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. Picked this up again and it's a really interesting read. Managed to get a few references that I missed last time, like I somehow didn't clock that he was talking about Nietzche, somehow. Still need to read it with a Steven Moore guide to get them all though.
3 Agap� Agape by William Gaddis. I had a long journey and it's 100 pages. Read through this time paying attention to the main character, how he's buffetted by bouts of intense pain and delerium.
4 The House of the Solitary Maggot by James Purdy. Another re-read, the bits in the cinema are as good as I remember them, but I was sure there was a crucifixion in this. Maybe it's in another one of his. It's written in a weirdly conversational style where characters and locations are introduced and then introduce their history with the family which we surely would have heard of before. It's a shoe-in for challenge eleven as every single one of the 5 characters both loves and hates each other. (11)
5 The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson. It's nice to see his continue hysterical attack over social niceties and the possibilities of violence infused with some surprisingly keyed-in social commentary. I mainly felt cut off from the time, this book realy conveys the panic of an age bouncing from WW2 into ann uncertain future of nuclear destruction and political irrelevance. I would say I enjoyed this book more than any of his other novels I've read.
6 Faust, part one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as translated by Phillip Wayne. I'm not sure how they've diveded up the play, part 2 seems a great deal thicker. Nice to see the black poodle circling Faust in little fiery steps. I probably need to reread this, I wasn't treating this fair.
7 The Double by Jos� Saramago as translated by Margarat Jull Costa. After ignoring the trailers for Enemy for weeks I saw this in a bookshop and decided why not. I really enjoyed reading the book making GBS threads on this lovely dude and his slight ethical failiures. I honestly skipped over the chapter where anything happened because I couldn't be hosed reading about uh, blackmailing people into pimping out their partners. Sorry Jos�.
8 The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat as translated by Iraj Bashiri. Dug this thing. I liked it when he killed her 10
8 Fight Club by Chuck Palahuink. Boy, this wasn't good. I mean, the writing was OK but the underlying politics is just impossibly irritating.
9 Cathleen ni Hoolain by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. Watta lotta Irish plays forthcoming. Included because otherwise I'd have read 4 books in two months. This one's a short blighter about the attraction of war. Also casts the Nationalist cause as a shapeshifting vampire, which is nice I guess.
10 Translations by Brian Friel. Clever play about language. Also included a dippy English soldier getting ganked by the IRA. RIP to him.
11 By the Bog of Cats by Mariana Carr. A Tennessee WIlliams-esque thing about capitalistic bastards trying to drive a traveller from her actual bog, which she stomps around while feeling emotions about her vanished mother. Gotta like that dumb sort of violence, I guess. 2
12 The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin MacDonagh. It's the In Brughes guy. It's like an O. Henry story with some gruesome abuse in the middle and a slick bit of violence throughout. Or well, like that one O. Henry story that everyone knows.
13 A Skull in Connemara by Martin MacDonagh. This has a lot more of that bloody violence. Features a kid who cooked a hamster and keeps going from there. Entertaining, you know.
14 Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. Now this is a play. Family bickering going over the endlessly repeated retelling of history,like Krapp's last tape.
15 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Fun but boy it shows that this was a series of stories rather than a novel. Characters are introduced and then dropped as the introduction was the only fun bit to write. I'm glad he didn't break the bowl at the end.
16 Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. Brisk tale of snobbery and cosyness in the world of British publishing 50 years ago. An awful literary wife has appointed an awful hack to drum up an awful biography for her now-dead husband (who was mostly awful, but wrote a few good books), all overseen by the smug narrator who knows that the true merit lies beyond all this, in the bosoms of the sexually giving working classes and America. Maugham's satire of his colleagues is good but I don't think he has anything to say about what he admires. Bit hypocritical for the book takes a swing at Henry James for walking away from America and attempting to write about duchesses. I used to know the name of the chap this book was an insult to. Apparently Maugham befriended him, for material.
17 The Stain by Rikki Ducornet. Never heard of her, picked this up because I saw an uncorrected proof going for 50p and the first few lines seemed engagingly mental. The rest of the book followed through. It's like one of those wedding feasts Flaubert turns up his nose at except everybody's down with the party. Basically a 200 page orgy with religious-theming.
18 Libra by Don DeLillo. I don't like DeLillo but I quite liked this one, I guess because I've got more interest in the JFK assassination than a dumb baseball match or road movies. It's still shocking that an author of his standing can't write dialogue though. But hey, he can come up with some nice metaphors, though occasionally he lets himself get carried away.
19 Herzog by Saul Bellow. I really enjoyed this one. Old jewish man feels hard-done-by yet self-loathing as he constantly thinks about his awful ex-wife, etc.
20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Michael Kandel. Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable.
21 Dead Babies by Martin Amis. A birthday present I was given... 8 years ago? Anyway, a whole vicarage full of awful druggy people but once you skim past the first 30 pages (which are a bit smug), it gets rather funny. Like Waugh or, I suppose, Kingsly Amis, these awful stereotypes tear themselves apart. Worst of all of are the Americans, of course, who take a rather Nietzchy view of things (the dead babies of the title are things like, uh, morals to be left by the wayside). It ends rather explosively but I had not been reading NEARLY CLOSELY enough to either understand or care.
22 Just One More Thing by Peter Falk. Another old birthday present. I like Columbo, and seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire pushed me into reading this. Less of a book more of a collection of talk-show anecdotes written down. I'm putting it down as a biography anyway. 18
23 Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier as translated by John Sturrock (I think). Picked this up because it was ex libris from a guy with pretty ok taste, at least a lot of 70s english pomo. I liked his descriptions of children at play, but didn't particularly care about the protagonist or his moral journey. Also I'm bigoted against novels not set in the author's lifetime. Are Cuban's nonwhite (for the booklord)? I'll wait.
24 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski as translated by Barbabra Vedder. A selection from the short-writings of the Polish communist focusing on his experience in Auschwitz. I sort of want to read the other stuff. 21
25 Local Anasthetic by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Saw this in a second hand shop just after he died so I decided to go for it as my entrypoint for Grass. There's a copy of The Tin Drum boxing around here somewhere but I've not laid my hands on it. Dental work as a metaphor for political radicalism versus old-age-related indolence. Very good.
26 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LLosa as translated by Helen R. Lane. Romance between an 18 year old and his uncle's ex-wife in interrupted every other chapter by plots of radio serials. As the author of these serials is in the book, Vargas has great fun introducing us to quirks of his character and then having them play out in the following chapter. Good fun.
27 A Month of Sundays by John Updike. One of those fictional reverends who is sex-crazed, bitter, agnostic and pun-mad gets sent to write away his sins. It's a good thing he can write sex because that's the lion's share of this book.
28 The Day of the Locust by Nathanial West. I reread this for the first time after reading his complete works like, a decade ago. Still pretty fun.
29 Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It's basically disgrace but half the length and with a vague fantasy-setting so, uh, a categorical improvement.
30 Cat and Mouse by G�nter Grass as translated by Ralph Manheim. Another later Grass as I continue to look for The Tin Drum. Beginning to suspect that Grass' political position is down entirely to his hosed-up teeth.
31 Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. The more I read this the more I like it.
32 Strong as Death by Guy de Maupassant as translated by someone or other. It's an old Knopf copy, might be Ernest Augustus Boyd? The first Maupassant I've read where it doesn't ever dive headlong into filth. I mean, she burns some letters and feels as if she's burning herself, but it's no priest stomping on a bitch birthing puppies. Good despite that though.
33 At Swim Two Birds by Flan O'Brien. Now this was a lot of fun. Any one strand of this book is great, and switching between them can be a bit of a jerk as you're sorry to leave, but I guess if that's what he had to do. 8
34 Carpenter's Gothic by WIlliam Gaddis. I've got bookmarks in both JR and Frolic but I've got a bit bogged down in them. This one's still good though. Funny to read this both with the annotations AND having read Dispatches.
35 Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Gilbraith. Very readable, not good. The only thing in this book that rings true is the utter disdain for the British press.
36 The Silkworm by Robert Gilbraith. Far too long, and they keep stacking more and more ludicrous poo poo onto the detectives (one of them's a professional-grade stunt driver, apparently?). Repeats a simile likening strong tea to turpentine like it's something clever, and not what all our grans said.
37 The Silent World of Nicholas Quin by Colin Dexter. So this is what good detective fiction looks like. Better writing, much shorter, subtle clues and a clever solution. Filled with that very creepy donnish humour, and ends with Morse and Lewis jointly masturbating to a porno. 22
38 Let Us Now Honour Famous Men by James Agee. An impassioned communist/marxist attempts to hammer into your brains the physical existence of the poor. He mostly tries to do so by making a catalog of their possessions, with actual stories of their lives smuggled in through his run-on sentences. He then includes a letter he wrote to some poor magazine hack telling them to gently caress right off, for reasons unclear to me. The man's a lunatic. 14
39 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Kinda... boring? But very short.
40 Vathek by William Beckford. The same gothic silliness as Otranto, but at least Beckford had a sense of humour in his prose style. Very strong opening paragraph and it continues throughout. That kind of excess is what I really like in fiction. 13
41 The Coup by John Updike. I thought it would be interesting to see Updike struggle with both race and politics. The standard egomaniac monologist is this time the dictator of an African dictator, as he tracks across his country in mufti, when he's not been spirited by a black Mercedes to his palace to talk to one of his wives. It's pretty bizzarre. Besides more expected Updikeisms (it's not ten pages before he suggests that the many women the previous ruler murdered were asking for it) he lets his imagination go wild in a way he never does in his American books. The KGB retrofit a severed head to act as an animatronic dispensing propaganda. Pretty fun.
42 Boss by Mike Royko. A philippic against Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and, to hear Royko tell it, a monomaniacal monster with a naked love of power that he excises by innumerable opaque wheezes. It starts out strange how much Royko hates Chicago politics but when it gets to the race riots his rage became more comprehensible to me.
43 A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene. A depressed architecht accidentally acts exactly like a saint, despite being so bored of this whole morality thing. A better depiction of a saint than The End of the Affair where it's truly unbelievable, but maybe not the most interesting thing to read?
44 The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges as translated by Andre Hurley. It's Borges, lots of tiby stories about labyrynths, alternate dimensions and cowboys stabbing each other. To be honest by the 50th 2-page story they all sort of blend into one. Has The Wait in it, where a chap opts to snooze through an assassination attempt, which was pointed out as one of the best by something I read ages ago. Since I've been meaning to read this for like a decade I'll say this was 16
45 Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I decideed to take this back down off the shelf. It's kind of embarassing how much he idolized organized crime, but it's all in good fun. 20
46 Erewhon by Samuel Butler. The good stuff. I still don't entirely see how the machine chapter is a dig at evolution but I did get what he was doing with the musical banks, which I managed to totally miss first time round.
47 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene. Pamphlet of a novel that... I guess counts as magical realist? A terrible Swiss oligarch has terrible parties where he tortures his terrible Swiss cronies, which the non-terrible, decent, depressed Greene protagonist gets invited to as his son-in-law. Broad-strokes on a postage stamp, basically.
48 Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. I read the start of an intro to this by some Hardy biographer which made two points: Conrad's the real depresso of fin de siecle English lit not Hardy like everyone says, and this book doesn't have an ending. Which is right, it really doesn't! I still like it though.
49 Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr. Big biography of Tennessee Williams, the first after the death of the insane woman who somehow became the caretaker of his literary estate who'd previously scotched previous projects. Lahr structures this book chronologically following the plays, but takes the lead from the play's contents to expand on aspects of WIlliams' life. Suddenly Last Summer, for instance, leads to a whole chapter on Rose Williams' entire life. It also betrays its super-long gestation by the density of quotations . The two main revelations for me are that I didn't know he wrote so many plays, or how utterly awful he was. Also he once shared JFK's speed-dealer.
50 The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster. What an awful book, really makes you long for WW1.
51 The Conformist by Alberto Moravia as translated by Angus Davidson. Picked this up because I really liked the Bertolucci film and had no idea it was adapted. This was a delight to read, I really need to track down more Moravia, or possibly more Davidson.
52 Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Read this for the first time since back at school. Lots of fun stuff hidden just beneath the surface, tactful allusions of incest, homosexuality and rape. And a job lot of misogyny, my lord.
53 A Frolic of his Own by William Gaddis. Continuing the slow reread of Gaddis. Much as I hate him, Franzen might be right in calling this boring in parts. I even missed the bit where he looks at the lake and thinks about Native American gods.
54 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon by Sei Shōnagon as translated by Ivan Morris. I guess a lot of the virtues in Japanese literature are pretty untranslatable, there are a lot of lists. Who was she, Feudal Japan's John Ashbery? C'mon. Anyway, lots of fun stories of a barking madaristocracy. Very very extensively annotated, most of which I ignored.
55 The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. This was fun, horror stories of terrible hotels and terrible people. I felt a fool for not clocking that the John Malkovich film i watched half of was adapted from this.
56 The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Boy, this was junk. And absolutely, totally, plot-free. From the intro where the author chides our ever-corsening world 4 times in 2 pages, to a characterization which reads likes a dating profile posted by a truly despicable ponce.
57 The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler. Vaguely communistical travel-writing around 1930s Europe, where you needed letters of introduction everywhere, even to the local brothel. Guy could spin a yarn, I'll say.
58 The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg as translated by John and Ann Tedeschi. Short work of, I guess, pophi about a medieval miller prosecuted for heresy because he believed that God and the Angels emerged from the chaos of unformed world like worms emerge from cheese. Ginzburg is tilting against concepts of high and low culture by tracing how scholarly works found their way into the hands of this labourer. But mostly I read it because he manages to resurrect a likable weirdo. I'm classing this as history as time's running out. 5
59 Victory by Joseph Conrad. The interactions between Lena and Axel really stood out for me this read round.
60 The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Chapter 11 was really painful to read. 1
61 Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad. For people who think Conrad's really verbose and slow moving, this is the collection for you! because it'd 100% confirm your notions. The intricacies are good if you've got the time to take them in.
62 The Egoist by George Meredith. Really weird book, like a beefy Thomas Love Peacock, I guess. Feels sort of out of its time as well.

63 Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow. One of the most fun Bellow books I've read, including a lot of criticism about some poet I've never heard of.
64 The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James. I really like James' short stories, the ending seems... unconvincing as a masterstroke but what do I know?
65 The Fight by Norman Mailer. Boy, Mailer thought a lot about boxers. I think this is the first Mailer I've read after turning from American Dream, Guess what buddy, I'm saying this is an essay. 6
66 The War with the Newts by Karel Čapek as translated by Edward Osers. Now this is some high grade stuff, really enjoyable. Turns from a literary satire of Conrad to, say, one of Fitzgerald's early magazine stories into all sorts; minutes of boardroom discussions, society pages, scientific reports. This really is a great book. And it's all about landuse so guess what, space.
67 The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. Basically a highbrow version of The Day of the Jackal. I went through this earlier in the year, but I've got my calipers out and decided that Llosa's a non-white 3
68 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I 100% read this because it was poetry, and short. Cheers TS. 7

Having looked up the definition, I'm calling one of the Gaddises I've read this year Absurdist. I could probably continue to gimmick the challenges but I don't see how I'd get around the "published recently" thing so I failed the challenge. Nevermind.

68/60
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Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jan 15, 2016

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 16:39

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Challenged Reading 2015 Editon