Current reading material?

[boganlux]

Calicelos

Googling this returns nothing.

[plainenglish]

Andrew, if you haven't read James, you should, m'man. The fellow sure knows how to massage the ostensible sense out of any sentence, and then leave ya hungerin' for more. Commas like whoa and similes like what. Still picking up the scattered pieces of my mind, which was thoroughly destroyed in June: I blame The Wings of the Dove, and maybe just the first sentence thereof:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.

Actually, just the first four words:

She waited, Kate Croy,

I don't know why, but -- it just gets me.

Ooh!  The parentheticality of it all!  I think you may have drug me in.  I was an English major and so of course skimmed my share of James, wrote the prerequisite paper on the unreliable narrator in The Turn of the Screw, but never really got into the whole James aesthetic.  What would you recommend as a starting point?

[Good Intentions]

Calicelos

Googling this returns nothing.

Heavens knows I can't remember how to spell that thing. He's a bit trotsky blowhard over in Britain, intellectual vanguard and all that.

Edit: Professor Alex Callinicos

[hannah]

I was an English major and so of course skimmed my share of James, wrote the prerequisite paper on the unreliable narrator in The Turn of the Screw, but never really got into the whole James aesthetic.  What would you recommend as a starting point?

I vote for What Maisie Knew. Relatively short (~230 pages), utterly heartbreaking.

[plainenglish]

I was an English major and so of course skimmed my share of James, wrote the prerequisite paper on the unreliable narrator in The Turn of the Screw, but never really got into the whole James aesthetic.  What would you recommend as a starting point?

I vote for What Maisie Knew. Relatively short (~230 pages), utterly heartbreaking.

Excellent, thanks -- I'll check it out.

I'm currently reading Absalom, Absalom! -- somehow never hit that one. Oh how I love Wm Faulkner!

[alistarr*]

I was an English major

to the band names/double meanings/fitting epithets for our tired generation thread!

[Greg Nog]

When silentsigh came to visit, she brought me the new "Pirates!" book as a gift!  I hadn't even known about it, so it was quite the lovely surprise.



I also just bought "The Third Policeman", by Flann O' Brian, on the suggestion of the eyepatch guy.

[alex]

I also just bought "The Third Policeman", by Flann O' Brian, on the suggestion of the eyepatch guy.

I keep being amazed by the impeccable taste of the eyepatch guy. Great book, that.

[Lindsay With An A]

I was an English major and so of course skimmed my share of James, wrote the prerequisite paper on the unreliable narrator in The Turn of the Screw, but never really got into the whole James aesthetic.  What would you recommend as a starting point?

I vote for What Maisie Knew. Relatively short (~230 pages), utterly heartbreaking.

Excellent, thanks -- I'll check it out.

I'm currently reading Absalom, Absalom! -- somehow never hit that one. Oh how I love Wm Faulkner!

That's what I'm reading right now too! It's the last novel we're reading in my Woolf/Faulkner class (which I know I've mentioned before as being basically the sweetest class I've ever taken). So good! Did you get to the part where Judith says that life is like a bunch of people trying to weave their own patterns into the same loom at the same time (only that the sentence goes on for about a page and a half, of course)? Because I think that's basically my favorite sentence in all of literature right there.

[nonotyet]

I finished this over the weekend. It's incredible. It's a YA novel about a girl growing up in Nazi Germany in a foster family and it is narrated by Death. Am I ashamed that all I seem to be reading right now is YA novels?  Yes and not at all. Except I kept slipping into reading this one in Adam Carolla's voice in my head because of that one Family Guy episode. So like, don't do that.

[Andrew_TSKS]

i'm currently reading "long bomb: how the xfl became tv's biggest fiasco" by brett forrest. the guy has a good writing voice and the story is pretty fascinating. overall, i'm enjoying it quite a lot.

also, only 1/4 of the way through it, i'm already seeing a shitload of mistakes on the part of the behind the scenes management (aka vince mcmahon).

[milly balgeary]

I finished this over the weekend. It's incredible. It's a YA novel about a girl growing up in Nazi Germany in a foster family and it is narrated by Death. Am I ashamed that all I seem to be reading right now is YA novels?  Yes and not at all. Except I kept slipping into reading this one in Adam Carolla's voice in my head because of that one Family Guy episode. So like, don't do that.

It has been a while since I accused you of copying me. I'm not going to say it so you don't get all embarressed, and then join some freako gang. Anyway, I'm through my YA phase now. May I recommend The Thief? By Megan Whalen Turner, as well as the Queen and the King books, which are the sequels. Best YA books ever, without a doubt.

[milesofsparks]

i just came across this book:



which was a very strange experience.  apparently i must have read it as a kid and i must have taken it very seriously (although i didn't remember it), because miss rumphius' three rules (go to faraway places, come home to live by the sea, and do something to make the world more beautiful) are right up there with the golden rule in my head, though i didn't remember where they came from.

makes me want to track down all the books i read as a kid, if i could.

[milly balgeary]

Before I tackle Pynchon's latest, I'm reading a book I think Elpollo brought up a while back called Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo meanwhile also reading the buddha: writings on the enlightened one, and Ghost Hunters: William James and the search for scientific proof of life after death.

High recommendation for Ghost Hunters:

From PW

In a compelling tale with resonance for today, Blum evokes a surprising sympathy for her band of tough-minded intellectuals—among them philosophers, psychologists, even two future Nobelists—who, around the turn of the 20th century, pursued the paranormal in an attempt to bridge the gap between faith and science at a time when religion was besieged by the theory of evolution and a new scientific outlook. Foremost in the Society for Psychical Research in America was the brilliant philosopher and psychologist William James, who like the others, risked his reputation in this unorthodox pursuit. Blum unearths the history of their research, their passionate friendships and debates, as well as their private doubts about the meaning of their work. Much of the society's efforts were devoted to exposing charlatans, but even the most dogged of the members, Richard Hodgson, was baffled by Boston's Leonora Piper, a reluctant medium of rare gifts. As Hodgson obsessively studies this medium, the story grows weirder and weirder, but Blum, who was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Award for Love at Goon Park, tells it straight, never overdramatizing the strange events. She achieves deep poignancy at moments that in less gifted hands could have seemed most laughable. The result is a moving portrait of a fascinating group of people and a first-rate slice of cultural history.

First rate.

[elpollodiablo]

Before I tackle Pynchon's latest, I'm reading a book I think Elpollo brought up a while back called Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo

Sweet! Let me know how that goes. I think I've only got time for two 1000 page novels this break.

[milly balgeary]

so far so good. it's interesting more than entertaining, though.

[nonotyet]

I have briefly and abruptly reversed the YA Fiction Only policy to start reading this:

and it's very good, but half the time I do not know what the fuck Simmons is talking about. And I will never know anything about sports becuse every time I watch [insert sport here] with my friends who know about sports they get annoyed because I am asking questions every thirteen seconds and also apparently I jinx games.

It is hard, being me.

[jimmyq2305]

As fiction goes, I just finished Ulysses for the first time, and probably understood about 10% of what was going on.  Re-reading Maldoror was a good deal more enjoyable (the centipede is not lacking for enemies).  For a former English Major, I have a decided aversion to fiction, which I'm trying to overcome.  What I have really enjoyed is John Lucaks' Budapest 1900.  It doesn't have the theoretical weight of Harvey's Paris, the Captial of Modernity or Schorske's Fin de Sicle Vienna, but its more poetic than either, and if not the most important book about urban modernity certainly the most enjoyable I've come across.  Discovering the work of Alain Badiou has been quite the head trip too.  The Handbook of Inasthetics is slightly over 100 pages and in that space managed to make me reconsider every opinion about art that I hold.

[austin]

I am reading Gravity's Rainbow (by Pynchon as I'm sure most of this board knows).  It's a bit of a head trip.  Very dense.  It is enjoyable some (most?) of the time; but I am not sure where the story is going.  I don't think he's going to be my new favorite author.

[elpollodiablo]

I am not sure where the story is going.

(tho not according to some)

[milly balgeary]

The best, shiniest, review of Against The Day so far is by John Clute. He calls it a pure 'Science Ficton' novel, and hazards something along the lines of it being a summing up of all of our old stories of the twentieth century. His review is kinda glorious.

[martin_van_buren]

I just finished reading Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia, the first novel I've finished in, oh, about three months- and really its more a novella. Fantastic stuff, though. Proto-symbolist/surrealist/somethingist. Going off in every direction. Really gorgeous passages about whole histories of the human race that the narrator (author?) is hallucinating complete with self-generated religions and just really nice and beautiful and batshit insane. I'm also almost done with a book of Wodehouse stories, and have another lined up. Not really sure what I'm going onto next novel-wise, but I'll try to get back in the swing of this "reading" thing. Brought home a selection from the library, so we'll see.

[elpollodiablo]

This is a small excerpt from a section involving a photographer/technophile bumming around Columbus, which I always contended was America's asshole:

As if the light of Heaven had performed a similar service for his brain, Merle understood that he must never if he could avoid it set foot within the limits of this place again. "If the U.S. was a person," he later became fond of saying, "and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would be plunged into darkness."

[milly balgeary]

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw14197.html

[old kentucky shark]

reading "lolita" and dickens's "hard times" and i want to start "ulysses" because i guess i've got all the obvious classic books in the world to catch up on basically

also awaiting the new dave eggers book at the library, although i suspect my eggers phase has more or less passed