Kind of beyond The Pale King: newest book thread

[elpollodiablo]

I'm reading another Vollmann, this one called The Ice-Shirt. It's a mashup of Norse mythology, Inuit mythology, and the historiography of the Norse expansion into Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland. It's contemporized with Vollmann's own travel writing and some reflections by mountaineers and other travelers in modern-day Greenland, and there's a lot of typical (for this period) Vollmann-esque metatextual games going on: meditations on transvestite prostitutes in the Tenderloin interspersed among Inuit fables, that kind of thing. This is the first book in his Seven Dreams cycle, which is all about the colonization of North America. Given the interests of some of the metal-inclined dudes around here, I think this novel might tickle your fancy.

Also read Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others last night, which was a fairly insightful overview of 20th century representations of war & violence, but what was really great about it was that it led me to read Simone Weil's essay "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," which has more to say about pain, violence and suffering in ~30pp. than Sontag does in ~100, and does so way more powerfully. If you haven't read the Iliad, I'd still recommend it if you're at all interested in war as a human phenomenon; if you have read the Iliad, I can't recommend it enough.

[Antero]

A+ thread title.

[jm]

A+ thread title.

Sorry, I been light on the book-readin lately, but yeah.

[davy]

Nothing exciting going on here, either. Just rereading A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows in preparation for A Dance with Dragons.

And loving every minute of it!

I also read through the chapter-by-chapter summaries of A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings posted at Tower of the Hand. It's a really well-done feature -- utterly comprehensive (took me a few days to get through them), heavily footnoted, spoiler-protected, etc. You can click on characters' names and get instant explanation of who they are -- geographic regions or landmarks are mapped. Highly recommended if you're looking to brush up, and also for viewers of the show who haven't read the novels. Excellent resource.

[hannah]

Last week, I finished my third Dickens of the year (Our Mutual Friend, which was preceded by Little Dorrit and Bleak House), and am now at a loss as to what novel to read next. It has to be something I can finish in the next month—and given that I'll be busy with wrapping up the quarter and heading off to Russia, that may be a tall order. In the meantime, I am reading Ben Katchor's Cardboard Valise.

[clare]

I dunno Hh. Dickens is good though isn't it? I go through phases of reading him and loving it, and then forget for years. I read most of Little Dorrit on my phone last year, but then lost it in the restore as new phone debacle, and haven't remembered to pick it up again. I'd really just like a hard copy of it. It works better for me that way.

I've almost finished Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and I've loved it, though it's been a while since I read the first one, so there was some catching up to do between it and The Subtle Knife.

I don't get to read as much as I used to, but that is finally starting to change, and once we get our bedrrom back I'll be reading before I go to sleep (unless we're doing other things).

[jebreject]

Also read Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others last night, which was a fairly insightful overview of 20th century representations of war & violence, but what was really great about it was that it led me to read Simone Weil's essay "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," which has more to say about pain, violence and suffering in ~30pp. than Sontag does in ~100, and does so way more powerfully. If you haven't read the Iliad, I'd still recommend it if you're at all interested in war as a human phenomenon; if you have read the Iliad, I can't recommend it enough.

Thanks for this rec. I'll def have to find it.

[FreddyKnuckles]

A+ thread title.

I'll go ahead and agree that this is a nice play on the other thread title, but I do find the mimic thread titles pretty annoying when I'm trying to find something. 

[dieblucasdie]

Big ups on the Weil, pollo.  If you haven't read her main body of work, it's definitely worth exploring.  Simultaneously, "Whoa, this is a really bizarre take on Christianity" and "Why don't all Christians think this."  It's so bracing to read someone with such an outward, careful, humane sensibility, who still shows no compunction about exposing her inner life.

[davy]

Hey cool, I just found out that one of my favorite cartoonists lives in my town. The guy who wrote this:



...one of the only graphic novels I've ever purchased!

He lives here with his wife, Eleanor Davis, also a famous illustrator and cartoonist. Her most well-known book:



I learned all this when L invited me to go with her to a mural unveiling on Friday. The painter of the mural is Eleanor Davis, which sounded familiar, so I looked her up and remembered coming across her name when I was looking for more info on her husband. Anyway, I facebook-stalked them both and we have mutual friends, including my tattoo guy and a former bandmate. Neat!

[G.C.R]

My friend's brand new baby has been named Dashiell! I think this is pretty great, as author names go.

[FreddyKnuckles]

Too close to Daschle...

[clare]

only for you FK!

I used to look after a kid called Dash. He was cool.

[alex]

I was a bit saddened today when it turned out that not a single student in my class had actually enjoyed reading Huysmans' 'Against Nature'. Some of them thought it was kind of okay, just not really their thing. It's certainly a book that polarises, so I wasn't expecting them all to love it by any means, but I would have thought that at least one of them would use the word "funny" to describe it.

I even quoted a few sentences from this bit, in which our main character gets very agitated about recent changes in the composition of communion wafers:

And now they had gone even further: they had dared to eliminate wheat entirely, and shameless merchants were manufacturing almost all the Eucharistic hosts out of potato starch! However, God refused to manifest himself in potato starch. This was an undeniable, indisputable fact; in the second volume of his Moral Theology, his Eminence Cardinal Gousset had himself also discussed, at some length, this question of fraud, from the divine point of view; and, according to the unquestionable authority of this expert, the priest celebrating Mass could not consecrate bread made from the flour of oats, buckwheat, or barley, and although the matter was unclear in the case of rye-bread, there was no room for any discussion or debate when it came to potato starch, which, to use ecclesiastical wording, was in no sense a competent substance for the Holy Sacrament.

The main character goes on to consider that this does not help to reinforce his already wavering Christian beliefs; after all, "how can one believe in an omnipotence that is hindered by a pinch of potato starch"? And not a single one of my students was amused.

[Nick Ink]

I just raced through two Ian McEwans (Solar and Amsterdam) and a Jonathan Coe (The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Simm). Although I enjoyed them, I was actually a little disappointed by the McEwan novels, somehow not as good as I remembered from earlier, more transgressive things like The Cement Garden.

Anyway, it was all getting a bit too British, so I'm now onto this:

[davy]

I just raced through two Ian McEwans (Solar and Amsterdam) and a Jonathan Coe (The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Simm). Although I enjoyed them, I was actually a little disappointed by the McEwan novels, somehow not as good as I remembered from earlier, more transgressive things like The Cement Garden.

Did you read On Chesil Beach? It was a slim novella tucked chronologically between Amsterdam and Solar. I haven't read those two novels, but I did read On Chesil Beach and was quite impressed. I thought The Cement Garden was strong, but my favorite of his is Child in Time. I can't say I enjoyed it--because it's terrifying--but it certainly packs a wallop.

[Trousers and Pat]

Hey, I just started Solar today but relying on the library as I do all I could nab was the french translation.  Which is kind of dumb maybe but whatever.

[Nick Ink]

I just raced through two Ian McEwans (Solar and Amsterdam) and a Jonathan Coe (The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Simm). Although I enjoyed them, I was actually a little disappointed by the McEwan novels, somehow not as good as I remembered from earlier, more transgressive things like The Cement Garden.

Did you read On Chesil Beach? It was a slim novella tucked chronologically between Amsterdam and Solar. I haven't read those two novels, but I did read On Chesil Beach and was quite impressed. I thought The Cement Garden was strong, but my favorite of his is Child in Time. I can't say I enjoyed it--because it's terrifying--but it certainly packs a wallop.

Oh yeah, I loved On Chesil Beach and read it in a day. I do like him, and I'm being a bit too critical really. Parts of Solar made me laugh out loud, which isn't something I do a lot when reading, sadly. I just got the feeling reading those two back-to-back that he's mellowed out a bit too much. I could imagine the TV adaptations going out on primetime BBC you know, which I don't think you could have said for his earlier stuff. The other thing that slightly bugs me about some of his writing is that there always seem to be long, detail-packed sections where I feel that he's kind of showing off what he's researched for the book. In Solar, you get this technical physics stuff, in Amsterdam there's a couple or three pages about music composition, and I just end up glazing over a bit, and getting taken out of the story itself.

Still, I am a fan, and it sounds like I need to get hold of Child In Time some time this year, while I'm on a McEwan roll.

The Jonathan Coe was well-written and a quite cleverly-constructed tragicomedy of loneliness. It keeps echoing Eliot's Four Quarters, and though it seems simple on the face of the story, there are lots of dots to be joined. Anyone read any Coe? I have The House Of Sleep, The Rotters' Club and What A Carve Up!, all very different and good in different ways.

[davy]

As a father of delightful youngsters, The Child in Time will thoroughly break your heart while it's scaring you to death.

[Nick Ink]

Ah, is it a bereavement sort of thing - perhaps I can do without that.

[G.C.R]

The only McEwan I've read is The Daydreamer - dreamy-yet-intense children's/YA book about a kid who is so quiet and introverted his family never notice that he's transmigrating into the bodies of the Baby, or the Cat, or other beings in the house. The description of what its like being a baby was amazingly sensual,its stuck with me very strongly. I should read some more McEwan.

[davy]

Ah, is it a bereavement sort of thing - perhaps I can do without that.

It's a story about a kidnapping.

[davy]

I read it around the same time I read Kevin Brockmeier's The Truth About Celia, also about a kidnapping. Both were terribly sad books. They were also quite brilliant, and I'm glad I read them (particularly glad I read them before becoming a parent), but I've avoided those types of stories ever since (in movies, in the news, in books). Just too painful to comprehend, really.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

just finished stoner by john williams which is real good if you like books or are in some sort of academic snare or have one of those lives with disappeared successes and accumulated consumptive terrors or not

this what it looks like



recommended to me initially by miles klee who is a dude

[elpollodiablo]

****i am a dick 8===D