I could write a great novel if my neighborhood weren't so upscale (book thread)

[hannah]

I strongly encourage everyone to track down a copy of Harold Bloom's take on R. Crumb.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/03/yahweh-meets-r-crumb/

edit: I posted it as a fbook note.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

The (annoyingly) annotated Shakespeare editions (that I purchased exclusively for their jacket design because I am like davy) feature the most incoherent Harold Bloom essays.

[Antero]

Good lord Bloom annoys me.

[davy]

The (annoyingly) annotated Shakespeare editions (that I purchased exclusively for their jacket design because I am like davy) feature the most incoherent Harold Bloom essays.

I'm not sure how I feel about those jacket designs. I definitely like the one for Othello.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

The (annoyingly) annotated Shakespeare editions (that I purchased exclusively for their jacket design because I am like davy) feature the most incoherent Harold Bloom essays.

I'm not sure how I feel about those jacket designs. I definitely like the one for Othello.

The one for Julius Caesar is unbelievably awful, but I really dig uniformity, and the covers of Macbeth, Othello and Midsummer Night's Dream were really attractive to me.

[Captain]

Good lord Bloom annoys me.

Maybe you're just feeling a little "anxiety of influence"???  To be honest, I've never actually read any of Harold Bloom's stuff, but he's always been heralded as such a benchmark that I figured he was aces or whatever.  But it sure sounds like he's full of shit.

[davy]

The one for Julius Caesar is unbelievably awful,

Ooh yeah, it looks like something you might find in the Christian Fiction section.

[G.C.R]

I love the Othello and Macbeth ones, but the Midsummer Night's Dream one is as silly as the play! So, appropriate.

[davy]

I just finished the last quarter of Julian Cope's Repossessed in a marathon session out on the porch. Fantastic book.

And now, to bury myself in children's books for the next month solid. My last class in grad school is Materials and Services for Children, and I've got to read something like 60-75 books over the next 30 days, a mixture of professional resources, picture books, chapter books, and young adult titles. Will be hectic, but hopefully a lot of fun.

[Maaik]

Davy, what was that one young adult novel you were telling me about at the Bingham show?  This is unhelpful, as I can't remember any details about it, but you were hyping this novel and it sounded really interesting. Then I got distracted by the twangin and the sangin and forgot.

[davy]

Scrib, right? By the playwright David Ives?

[elpollodiablo]

I was in a mad dash to the train this morning and needed a new novel to start. I grabbed Motherless Brooklyn on a whim, and hey, it's not too bad.

[jm]

I really liked Motherless Brooklyn.  Not really as much as As She Climbed Across the Table, but liked it nonetheless.

[elpollodiablo]

Lethem's become kind of a parody of himself in my mind, but he did know his way around a turn of phrase, once upon a time. There are some pretty gnarly cliches even in the first 25 pages of this novel, though.

[Ignatius]

I felt like he had earned and then abused my confidence by the time I finished that book.

[Ah_Pook]

i just finished the girl with the dragon tattoo, in time to go see the movie this evening with some friends. it was pretty fun. i think my love for genre workouts has finally brought me around to mysteries. i guess all those charlie huston books took their toll.

[elpollodiablo]

I'm thinking of giving the Larson books a try, just because they're absolutely ubiquitous on the subway and I'm curious. I also don't read much popular fiction, so it'd be a nice change of pace.

[donblood]

Motherless Brooklyn is kind of intentionally cliched, since it's an homage to Marlowe/Chandler/etc...  It's a fun book - I described it recently as a beach book for literate people.

[elpollodiablo]

I don't mean genre cliches, I mean like cliched bits of prose. Even the opening line--"Context is everything"--struck me as too well-chewed and on the nose. I actually dig the generic elements a lot.

[G.C.R]

I just had to read Foe for school and man I thought it was fucking great
Oakley Hall's Warlock still sitting there, testing me with how good those first five pages were and making forlorn puppy eyes when i tell it I just don't have the time to pay it proper attention yet.

[RavingLunatic]

Just finished Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. Somebody here recommended it to me awhile back. I found a copy for $4 at a used book store, and picked it up a few months ago. I liked it pretty well. I love the fiery rhetoric of some of the old working-class declaimers. It's a bit ironic that Wilentz documents how what were probably the two most powerful working-class movements of the period he covers--the 1829 Working Men's party and the 1850 union movement--were both destroyed by infiltration, co-optation, and compromising alliances with one of the major political parties, yet in 2008, here is Wilentz, campaigning for the unabashedly corporate-flunky Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton!

I've also just started in on the Norton Anthology of English Literature vol. 2, the Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century, which I picked up for just a couple dollars on bargain a while back. I'm not familiar with hardly any of this stuff. It's almost 3000 pages long, so I'll be doing some liberal skipping.

[davy]

Oh shit.

Bestselling author Mieville returns to his roots in this exciting, no-holds-barred fantasy set in modern-day London. Crowds throng to the British Museum to see the dead Kraken, a giant squid. When it goes missing, a breathless search for the monster leads to strange, magical criminals, and mythical cults.

 

[davy]

Oh shit again!



By the author of Candyfreak! It's already been out for a month and-a-half! Why don't I have people to tell me these things?!

I'm just gonna have to toss out my previous summer reading list.

[Bernard]

Anybody give a shit that David Markson died? I am hearing about stuff later and later. Markson was days ago, Lhasa de Sela (musician) was months ago.

All kinds of bummed. At least Markson got to have a full career.

[Bernard]

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.