Currently Reading

[kandu]

Finished today Hermann Hesse's 'Siddharta' and it didn't impress me much. So I decided to start Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' and I really like that twenty or forty-legged vermin.

[nicenick]

i've got about 100 pages left (it's a long one), but i'd have to say it's been pretty fantastic. released on a vanity press, too.

m

hey, thanks for the recommendation -- really enjoyed the excerpt online & ordered a copy. looking forward, i'm in the midst of considering law school so this looks like fairly relevant reading material!

now reading:



i loved recognitions but i'm not sure what to make of this so far (60 pages in) -- dialog is great but the scene transitions seem overly "writerly" to me & unnecessarily confusing. maybe i just need to get into the swing of it.

[grisha]

[aditi]

just finished reading:



will soon start on:

[diederich]

Not a book, but a respectable 166 pages of content. Anyone else had a chance to check As Loud As Possible out? So far I'm happy with it, some quibbles here and there, but it's refreshing to read writing on noise that isn't so bemused/confused. It's sound like this will be once a year for the foreseeable future, but if that's what it takes to get this much material together I'm happy.

[kangaroo?]

re: As Loud As Possible

it's been sitting on the lampdesk and staring at me for a week now. Certainly formidable, but i'm not sure what all these endless interviews will amount to (i like my revelations to come little by little). Still, i expect to be pleasantly surprised, certainly the serious look into Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Broken Flag, The Haters, etc are worth the price alone

and a huge WOW!!! regarding the amount of work these guys have put into it, the two editors alone are responsible for more than 2/3 of the articles

[sevenarts]

Just finished Franzen's Freedom, which I started out loving, then started getting more and more annoyed with, then was won back over by the end. Great writer, great observer of people and scenes, but the miserablism gets really tiring in the middle stretches.

Now I'm reading the middle novella of Balzac's History of the Thirteen.

[billygomberg]

tore into this on recent travel. pretty fantastic so far.

[cheerios]

Been reading this one literary zine called "Open City". All the stories in it were really good, and well written. Some of them way better than anything that any mainstream short story writer has written before I bet and it's a relatively small press I believe, though not the smallest of the bunch.

Now Readng: Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Simple to read, it goes into some detail about his life, I think it's a memoir. On chapter 2 right now.

[billygomberg]

enjoying this a lot.

[aditi]

Will be slowly reading through "The Gamelan Music of Javi and Bali. An artistic Anamoly complementary to Primary Tonal Theoretical Systems" by Donald A Lentz. This will take a few weeks to process... The theory looks pretty solid, but the commentaries on Indonesian music leave something to be desired.

[surfer]

finished this:



started this:

[Herb Levy]

As long as I'm nosing around IHB for the first time in a while, Let me point out that the January 13th edition of the New York Review of Books has an interesting review article about Cesar Aira, which includes news that New Directions plans to publish at least eight more of his novels (& that he's written something like 70 books since 1975).

In keeping with the actual topic of this thread: I've just started two very different books: Jaimie Gordon's Lord of Misrule & SC Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon, both of which start out really well.

[Dohol]

I'm re-reading this for the first time in 25 years..

[leroysghost]

one of those rare cases where the film adaptation is better than the book.

[faster]

Burgess, though, is great. His Earthly Powers and The Long Day Wanes knocked me out.

[Jesse]

I have recommended the Maylayan trilogy to a few over the years, great work about Empire. In the 80s a pal who spent 4 Peace Corps years in Togo turned me on to modern novels about dislocation and Empire-the Burgess trilogy, At Play In The Fields of the Lord, Graham Greene, et al.

[yonhosago]

The only Graham Greene I red, The power and glory, I did twice. The description of the infernal Mexico and the miserable character were almost painful.

[cheerios]

Graham Greene is ok, "The Quiet American" was a great book and the movie featured Brendan Frasier.

Now Reading: Cancer Ward by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
A Russian novel about a bunch of men confined to a single space in a communist country? I think I'm in heaven.

[faster]

I have recommended the Maylayan trilogy to a few over the years, great work about Empire. In the 80s a pal who spent 4 Peace Corps years in Togo turned me on to modern novels about dislocation and Empire-the Burgess trilogy, At Play In The Fields of the Lord, Graham Greene, et al.

Another "Empire" book is Joseph Conrad's Nostromo