What are you currently reading?

[AnotherSpin]

That is one of the contrasts the book draws out - the "cosmic" exterior with the "brutalist" interior. All the buildings in that book are fascinating.

Perhaps this book includes sections dedicated to Kharkiv, one of Ukraine's major cities. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kharkiv was one of the main industrial centers of the USSR, and the city center still retains some fascinating examples of Constructivism. However, Kharkiv, located not far from the border with Russia, has been in a frontline zone for over three years and regularly suffers from barbaric shelling. Much has been damaged.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

The Samurai, Shusaku Endo.

[JBS]

Promises a little more than it delivers. The thesis is that Austen was more radical than most critics present her, and goes into various topics (women's health, slavery, enclosure, etc) in which Austen's references would be much more obvious to her contemporaries than they are to us. But she puts a heavier load on details than they can really bear. She dislikes most of the heroes--only Darcy gets a positive presentation, and Wentworth a non-negative one (she doesn't really talk much about him). She suggests Knightley marries Emma at least in part to get control of Hartfield (the other part being sexually attracted to her since he was 28 and she was 13), that Edward Ferrars might have a sexual kink (that's one of the ideas of which the details don't bear the load) and that both he and Edmund Bertram are time-serving amoral bores who won't make the heroines live happily ever after (stronger reasoning there).

Overall interesting read, but probably not one to be read more than once.

[T. D.]

Selection of newspaper columns. Overall not as good as his fiction, and for some of the columns "you had to have been there", but plenty of amusing moments.

[SimonNZ]

[hopefullytrusting]

The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings

[ultralinear]

Selection of newspaper columns. Overall not as good as his fiction, and for some of the columns "you had to have been there", but plenty of amusing moments.

Oh that's a great favourite.  I say that even though my copy is in a box of books still unopened after my last house move.

Like you say, a lot of it has dated - written 80-odd years ago, the Ireland that he was writing about (and for) no longer exists.  But some things are just genius - like the WAAMA Ventriloquist Escort Service, for people who want to appear cultured when out at the theatre but are too dumb to make intelligent conversation (spoiler alert: it doesn't work out well.)  Or the various products developed by the Myles na gCopaleen Research Bureau, such as the alcoholic ice-cream - mostly a success, apart from two minor snags: (1) it tastes like the sludge from a tractor's sump; and (2) it gives off a vapour that destroys the optic nerve.

Great stuff.  Maybe a bit of an acquired taste though.

[Florestan]

This looks like a prostrating robot, which is all too fit for the USSR.

[Brian]

Promises a little more than it delivers. The thesis is that Austen was more radical than most critics present her, and goes into various topics (women's health, slavery, enclosure, etc) in which Austen's references would be much more obvious to her contemporaries than they are to us. But she puts a heavier load on details than they can really bear. She dislikes most of the heroes--only Darcy gets a positive presentation, and Wentworth a non-negative one (she doesn't really talk much about him). She suggests Knightley marries Emma at least in part to get control of Hartfield (the other part being sexually attracted to her since he was 28 and she was 13), that Edward Ferrars might have a sexual kink (that's one of the ideas of which the details don't bear the load) and that both he and Edmund Bertram are time-serving amoral bores who won't make the heroines live happily ever after (stronger reasoning there).

Overall interesting read, but probably not one to be read more than once.

I've mentioned this before - maybe you put it on a reading list based on my post even - but this book did send me back to Mansfield Park, armed with the new context about its slave plantation themes, and helped me to see the viciousness of the descriptions of characters even more clearly than before. It did change how I see Austen, but on the other hand, I don't at all remember the stuff about kinks or Knightley.

[Florestan]

Re-reading Hugo's Les miserables after almost 40 years (man, does time flies and one gets old without even noticing...)

Prima facie, this is one of the worst books I ever read: unbelievably saccharine, infuriatingly lachrymose, insufferably preachy, hyperbole and exaggeration on every other page, turgid, digressive to the point of digressing from digressions, in short a literary monstrosity --- which is nevertheless redeemed by the palpable feeling that behind all that stands a great and noble soul, his heart burning with an inextinguishable love of liberty and justice. A strong contender for the greatest bad novel / the worst great novel. 

[T. D.]

Oh that's a great favourite.  I say that even though my copy is in a box of books still unopened after my last house move.

Like you say, a lot of it has dated - written 80-odd years ago, the Ireland that he was writing about (and for) no longer exists.  But some things are just genius - like the WAAMA Ventriloquist Escort Service, for people who want to appear cultured when out at the theatre but are too dumb to make intelligent conversation (spoiler alert: it doesn't work out well.)  Or the various products developed by the Myles na gCopaleen Research Bureau, such as the alcoholic ice-cream - mostly a success, apart from two minor snags: (1) it tastes like the sludge from a tractor's sump; and (2) it gives off a vapour that destroys the optic nerve.

Great stuff.  Maybe a bit of an acquired taste though.

This is fantastic. Uneven, flawed in various ways but also brilliant and hilarious (de Selby!  This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said 'the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest'.).
Going to revisit it (I've also read the Anthony Cronin biography) immediately upon finishing the above columns book.

[JBS]

I've mentioned this before - maybe you put it on a reading list based on my post even - but this book did send me back to Mansfield Park, armed with the new context about its slave plantation themes, and helped me to see the viciousness of the descriptions of characters even more clearly than before. It did change how I see Austen, but on the other hand, I don't at all remember the stuff about kinks or Knightley.

I happened to see it on the public library shelf. I plain forgot that you had posted about it.

Kinky Ferrars is forgettable: the "evidence" is one mangled scissors sheath and Edward being privately educated unlike his brother. But the Knightley bit is a bit more persuasive: she presents him as trying to enclose as much of Donwell and Highbury parishes as he can; Hartfield is the largest bit of property in either parish that he doesn't own, and will be co-inherited by Emma and her sister, who happens to be married to his brother, and thus will eventually be controlled by his brother and whoever Emma marries; he needs to either own Hartfield or get the consent of its owner to fully implemente enclosure. A Hapsburg would have closed the deal long ago.

[Brian]

I happened to see it on the public library shelf. I plain forgot that you had posted about it.

Thanks for the recaps/reminders. If you had liked the book more I would try to take more credit   

[SimonNZ]

Huh. That Highsmith Ripley book ends as though there's two or three chapters missing. I can only assume to suggest that even if he gets through this last bit of cover up we'll see that there really is no "last" and he's stuck in an endless cycle of dissembling and looking over his shoulder, never able to relax. Perhaps, but it still seemed abrupt and unsatisfying.


started:

[AnotherSpin]

Huh. That Highsmith Ripley book ends as though there's two or three chapters missing. I can only assume to suggest that even if he gets through this last bit of cover up we'll see that there really is no "last" and he's stuck in an endless cycle of dissembling and looking over his shoulder, never able to relax. Perhaps, but it still seemed abrupt and unsatisfying.

Maybe because it's the second book in a series of five?

[ultralinear]

This is fantastic. Uneven, flawed in various ways but also brilliant and hilarious (de Selby!  This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said 'the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest'.).
Going to revisit it (I've also read the Anthony Cronin biography) immediately upon finishing the above columns book.

I didn't realise Everyman had issued his collected novels - my copies are all dog-eared paperbacks from 40 years ago which at the moment I can't lay my hands on, and it's probably time I updated them - so thanks for posting that image.

Yes the character of de Selby is a wonderful creation - a confident authority on metaphysics who combines a beguiling fluency with a monumental stupidity - like his claim that darkness at night is caused by a daily accumulation of particles in the atmosphere, which he attempted to clear from above his house with an array of water jets directed upwards.

The Poor Mouth is a wickedly accurate satire on the poverty memoirs from the likes of Peig Sayers and Tomas O'Crohan which at one time used to fill the shelves of Irish bookshops and provide a kind of sentimental underpinning for the whole Gaelic Revival movement, hence the more devastating for being written originally in Gaelic.  It's a particular favourite of my partner, who through a cultural initiative of the period was required as a child to spend some time living in those conditions with a Gaelic-speaking family on the Aran islands, and still recalls it with a shudder.

[T. D.]

I've read Tomás O'Crohan's The Islandman. In English of course, though I spent a lot of time on the Dingle Peninsula on a couple of vacations.
I recall an old Wall St. Journal ad (1985, I had to look the date up) offering the Great Blasket Island (O'Crohan's home) for sale.

[San Antone]

Latest in my most recent traversal of Cormac McCarthy's novels:

Suttree



Finished Child of God about a week ago, maybe longer - but Suttree is getting into his prime stuff, IMO, culminating with Blood Meridian before his trilogy of coming of age novels.

[T. D.]

Switching between this and the Flann O'Brien newspaper columns.

[Ganondorf]

Well, I finally did it. I read today the last page of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Based on the translation that i read, can this be counted as among the greatest masterpieces of world literature? Hardly. In a few passages (mostly located in the first two parts) the prose is gorgeous but in most cases reading this was an extremely banal experience. I heavily dislike the Narrator (in fact I think he is one of the most infuriating main characters I've ever encountered). Dickens's constantly interrupting omniscient narrator is not even halfway as annoying as Marcel here. For someone whom I've often heard described as a writer relatively progressive in his views I have hard time seeing Proust as anything else but a Class-A sexist pervert. Every even slightest form of a positive comment towards women is usually followed instantly by a new sting. It's rather impressive, actually. While male homosexuals are treated rather fairly for the time, that doesn't apply to lesbians as the narrator apparently has some very serious issues with them, to the point that his homophobia goes to such lengths that he basically keeps Albertine a prisoner in order to prevent her from having sex with other women. If that's not a case of pathological narcissism then nothing is. Even if intentionally a case of unreliable narrator, the effect of reading the book is not pleasant and quite exhausting. I think I can definitely say that Proust is one of those famous writers that I don't like. I realize that I should read the original French but I have hard time committing myself to learning an entire new language in order to re-read a long-ass book which I may hate even then. Reading this was mostly for bragging rights. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the longest book I'm ever going to read. On the plus side, now that I'm not gonna touch this particular book again you can be spared my constant complaining about this.

I have moved on to another (very long) book, this time a re-read. And I seem to love it just as much as I did then. I'm talking about Mann's Joseph tetralogy.