Skronk wrote:

I'm reading Rusty String Quartet, a book of poetry by Raegan Butcher. It's very good. Over 300 short poems about women, life, work, and about how much he'd like to die. He's like Bukowski without the drinking. It only cost my broke ass 10 bucks, too.

I liked that a lot. Really great stuff.

I just read Nick Blinko's "The Primal Screamer." UNREAL.

I notice a few people finishing 'Against The Day' - what's the opinion? I've read most all the Pynchon going, but am holding off this until it's out in paperback. I am in for a good time or a giddy disappointment?

I recently read 'Quo Vadimus? or, The Case For The Bicycle' by E.B. White. It's great. The story 'Quo Vadimus?' itself has resonated somewhere deep with me; it's a frustration about modern life that is completely in tune with the way I feel these days, and have felt most of those days. White stops a harassed looking man on the streets of New York and demands of him "Quo Vadimus? Where are you going?" The guy gives a long description of the complicated errand he is running, and White asks if he isn't ashamed of himself. "All you really want is a decent meal come mealtime, isn't? [...] don't you think you are pretty far from the main issue if you're on your way to tell a Miss Cortwright to leave a note for Mr Josefson telling him to..."

It also includes the lines:

"Smirk again and I'll smack you," I said. "I always smack smirkers."

He smirked. I smacked him.

The second thing with White is that he co-edited 'The Elements of Style' and his use of American English is humbling. The third thing about this book is that my edition is from 1938 and pages 153-168 are missing. Dang.

The last two days I read 'How To Write Short Stories' by Ring Lardner. Turned out I'd read most of them before, but they're such cosy fun it doesn't matter. Lardner has the language at his tips too but it's the spoken language, which has baseball players playing in 'The World's Serious' and other assorted brilliance. The nice thing about 'How To...' is that each story has a page introducing it as a 'how-to' example:

A stirring romance of The Hundred Years' War, detailing the adventures in France and Castille of a pair of well-bred weasels. The story is an example of what can be done with a stub pen.

The story is, of course, about boxing.

I'm about to start 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson has been the name I've forgotten to write down for years. He always cropped up in other people's novels of the twenties and thirties but only now have I got hold of a couple to read (I've got 'Many Marriages' on the to-read shelf, too). I get the impression that 'Winesburg, Ohio' is a school set-text in the States, but I've never seen a Sherwood Anderson book on a British shelf yet. I had to order these from American second-hand sellers - something I prefer doing anyway as the editions tend to be a touch more exotic (the New World!) and the exchange rate makes it no touch of trouble.

daniel robert chapman wrote:I notice a few people finishing 'Against The Day' - what's the opinion? I've read most all the Pynchon going, but am holding off this until it's out in paperback. I am in for a good time or a giddy disappointment?

I enjoyed it. It wasn't the feast of technical knowledge that GR is, and a lot less cynical/dark. I can see why it got negative reviews--if it's dumped on your desk with the assignment to have a review done in, say, a week, you're going to be kind of resentful. But if you're willing to live with it for a few months, there's no problem.

I love reading Ring Lardner. It's like watching a particularly adept juggler.

Maurice - 'Gravity's Rainbow' without the technicality? Colour me there! Cheers, I'm going to look into this here question of when the paperback is out.

Ty Webb -

Ring Lardner wrote:THE FACTS - A sample story of life in the Kentucky mountains. An English girl leaves her husband, an Omaha policeman, but neglects to obtain a divorce. She later meets the man she loves, a garbage inspector from Bordeaux, and goes with him "without benefit of clergy." This story was written on top of a Fifth Avenue bus, and some of the sheets blew away, which may account for the apparent scarcity of interesting situations.

What actually happens is a guy sends his drunk mate to buy Christmas presents for his betrothed - but never mind.

kerble wrote:I actually just finished American Psycho last night at about 2:00am. Yes, it was nauseating, but I was actually impressed at how well Ellis managed to get you into this person's (pat bateman's) mind. The excessive descriptions of what everyone was wearing every single time he encounters them solidified his insanity for me.

I also felt that because Bateman was constantly mistaken for someone else (at least fifty times) it worked as some sort of comment on yuppie conformity that really sunk in and made me believe that all the other male characters were equally interchangeable.

Good read. Gross.


Faiz

I just finished this book. This is the second time I've read it. This time around I am thoroughly convinced that it is a great "American" novel, Jesus Christ, If only for the foray in Central Park with the kid, at the zoo. My head is spinning. I am wearing Mossimo jeans, with a Fruit of The Loom white T-shirt, and Flip-Flops by Fossil.

-Jeremy

P.S. Can we get this thread more regularity than all those threads about pussy-farts or whatever?

I'm doing too much academic reading at the moment to take on anything heavy for fun, and this has lead me to the horrific realisation that I quite like regular contemporary novels of the type one sees at the front of regular book shops.

'The kite runner' was pretty interesting and (at times) gripping stuff. I was expecting a twee story of rural Afghanistan, so the reality of the book surprised me. The pre-Russian/Taliban descriptions of a 'modern' Afghanistan are fascinating given the current notion of the place as stone-age.

After reading Mark Haddon's 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' and enjoying it, I've started 'A spot of bother' which also seems pretty good.

Clearly it's time to shelve any misapprehensions I might have about my literary sophistication.

Adam CR wrote:Clearly it's time to shelve any misapprehensions I might have about my literary sophistication.

There's really nowt wrong with reading pulp for pleasure. I wouldn't say 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' is a work of literary significance, but did I enjoy reading it? Sure I did.

I just finished 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson, and it sort of blew my mind. It's like 'Dubliners' with the small town sense of imprisonment and powerlessness. It was also really, really fucking bitter.

More Ring Lardner now, a collection called 'What Of It?' From his 'Bedtime Stories':

RED RIDING HOOD

Well, children, here is the story of little Red Riding Hood like I tell it to my little ones when they wake up in the morning with a headache after a tough night.

Well, one or two times they was a little gal that lived in the suburbs who they called her little Red Riding Hood because she always wore a red riding hood in the hope that sometime a fresh guy in a high power roadster would pick her up and take her riding. But the rumor had spread the neighbourhood that she was a perfectly nice gal, so she had to walk.

Not crap.

Went by the bookstore yesterday with a few beers in me and went nuts. They had to give me the superduty bag with the big handles.

Some genre stuff (Glen Cook, a nice big edition of From Hell to replace my lost one), some classics (Livy's history of early Rome, Algernon Blackwood, Kingsley Amis), Chris Nieratko's book of porn reviews that Vice is always hawking, and thanks to this thread, I picked up Gravity's Rainbow.

This should keep me busy for a while.

Recently read "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. A remarkable theory of brain function and how it may (finally!) lead to intelligent machines. Not only are the ideas powerful, but they are presented in an understandable way for a mostly non-technical audience. A must read if you are at all interested in artifical intelligence.