Currently Reading: Chapter II

[billygomberg]

Read Inherent Vice last week. Kinda lame, honestly.

thank you.

okay good bc I've been avoiding this pretty seriously.

[surfer]

Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene

[surfer]

Julio Cortazar - The Winners

[Dohol]

re-reading (for the ten millionth time..)

[Gerardo A]

Julio Cortazar - The Winners

This was the first Cortazar novel I read, back in high school, I should read it again.

[surfer]

Its good so far. 100 page prologue, woof.

[grant]

[Lao Tsu Ben]

guess who this is on the cover.

[Dohol]

[lokimotive]

The Obscene Bird of Night is one of my favorite novels ever. Very playful, very dark, very fun. To me, it's one of those books that keeps bubbling up in your mind years after you've read it.

I really like Cortazar's The Winners. It definitely has elements of the "feel" (whatever that means) of his later works, but they seem more subdued in that book and come off somewhat more interesting. Final Exam is also good for that.

I'm currently taking a break from reading Kristin Lavransdatter (the Tiina Nunnally translation) to focus my attention on Satantango. I ordered Satantango through Interlibrary Loan and it took freaking forever to get down here, plus I only have it for two weeks.

I fell in love with Undset's attention to natural detail and incredible world building in Kristin Lavransdatter, but now that the plot's taken over I don't really care as much.

Satantango, on the other hand, is great so far. I can't imagine translating Krasznahorkai's sentences (I mean... even if I knew Hungarian), because they're so long and ridiculously complex. Lots of fun though.

[grisha]

The Road to San Giovanni by Italo Calvino.

only started, probably less than 10 sentences in (one of them goes on for some two and a half pages, though)

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Is there a thread for this kind of thing ? I very much like reading this blog anyway (I've just discovered it).

[surfer]

Joe McGinniss - The Miracle of Castel di Sangro


Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - In Praise of Shadows


Ben Lerner - The Lichtenberg Figures

[faster]

[jon abbey]

I've been reading up a storm the last month or so, let's try a recap:

after trying a bunch of short and easy books and not making it too far on any of them, I decided to go the opposite way to break my recent book-reading slump, and tackle the 1200 page The Power Broker that's been sitting unread on my shelf since 2002 (thank you, Amazon, for keeping track of when I bought it):



Caro is an incredibly thorough journalist, as has been chronicled in minute detail recently in the wake of the publication of volume 4 of his in-the-works-for-38-years-and-counting LBJ bio. when your book gets reviewed on the front page of the NY Times Book Review by a former President (Clinton), you know you're doing something right.

so, The Power Broker. as good as its reputation, and an essential read for anyone living in or around NYC, as a lot of Moses' unilateral decisions still affect the way people live in NYC, for better and for worse. he built the West Side Highway (good), but he hated public transportation and kept essential funding from it, which is why it's still not so easy to get between the three airports and Manhattan (bad) and why they're still building the 2nd Avenue Subway 50 years after it was initially proposed (bad). it's an incredible story, though, how someone never elected to public office was the most powerful person in NYC (and NY State) government for three or four decades, through Mayor after Mayor, Governor after Governor, and President after President.

next up, in the wake of the death of Harry Crews, I realized I wasn't sure exactly which of his books I'd read, and I knew it had been a while since I'd read any, so I decided to make my way through as many as I could. I started with his superb "A Childhood", a supposedly non-fiction reminiscence, and then I read this (I think for the first time?):



typical Crews, his world/s are extreme and riveting if you can handle the extremity of them. this was perfect for my mood post-Moses, and I knocked it off in a night. next up:



in keeping with the title, this was the only relative dud of the bunch, written in 1958, and with some ridiculous testimonials on the cover, from people like Groucho Marx and Ernest Hemingway (!!!). I think this was in part because Dundy was at the time married to the very influential theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and this might be why the book is kind of overhyped to this day, or maybe I just didn't connect with it. anyway, to use a way overused phrase, I didn't think there was much there there.

so back to ol' reliable Crews:



again, a quick read and totally satisfying, but one thing that I found completely fascinating: part 2 of this book begins literally the exact same way as the beginning of All We Need Of Hell. the same character doing the same exact thing, and I believe the exact same few paragraphs (although I haven't checked specifically, just from memory). from there, the path the character takes quickly diverges, and here he fits in with what's already going on in the first part of the book, but I love that kind of overlapping universe, and I thought it was kind of a bold and unusual way to do that, with the exact same entry point. so, yeah, another thumbs up, and I have another few Crews-es in the queue. next:



kind of cheesy cover design, but I loved Adiga's first novel The White Tiger (which won the Booker), so I bought this when it came out last year, but it sat unread until now. I very much enjoyed it, Adiga has insight into a wide, wide range of people from all classes and walks of life in India, and he pushes them together and apart in fascinating and entertaining ways. I hope his third novel isn't too far away, I'm a definite fan.

then tonight I started, upon recommendation of Matt Revert:



which I'm really enjoying so far about 1/4 of the way through.

[Adrian]

Just finished the newly typeset corrected version of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce - I don't see why I used to like it so much in the past. Have my tastes changed that much? I guess so...

[surfer]

kind of cheesy cover design, but I loved Adiga's first novel The White Tiger (which won the Booker), so I bought this when it came out last year, but it sat unread until now. I very much enjoyed it, Adiga has insight into a wide, wide range of people from all classes and walks of life in India, and he pushes them together and apart in fascinating and entertaining ways. I hope his third novel isn't too far away, I'm a definite fan.

A nod to Vertigo?



The White Tiger sounds interesting

[jon abbey]

I think that's a coincidence, no plot relation/connection, and The White Tiger has a similar design style.

I finished 'Remainder', which I don't think I especially liked in the end, but it was well written at least.

and last night I knocked off Haruki Murakami's first book, Hear The Wind Sing, which is shockingly thin and pointless, there's a reason only Kodansha has ever published it in English. for completists only, Yuko says 'Pinball 1973' (his second book and the other one not well known in the English-speaking world) is a bit better, but also far from essential.

[surfer]

About 50 pages in:

[Antoine]

I think that's a coincidence, no plot relation/connection, and The White Tiger has a similar design style.

Maybe a bit paradoxal as I don't have any specific examples in mind, but I have the feeling that there's been many book covers inspired by Saul Bass in the recent years... but could be just an impression (and some of them could just have been fictional covers / tributes things I saw in the past).