Currently Reading: Chapter II

[Wombatz]

Vacation reading:



I don't care much for Baker, so I'd enjoy a little bashing, but what an awful book this is. Especially the shrinkery: the guy's a lifelong junkie but every needle still has to do with an overbearing mother, an innate disability to love another person beside his trumpet, and repressed homosexuality which conveniently leads to the book's climax hijacking the glory of that Baker portrait movie by a Nazi underwear fashion shootist. When it comes to music, the author has neither ears no words. The only thing I took away from this was the European touring during the 70s and 80s, and recordings on small labels here which were standing around in my local record store when I was a kid, and it all seemed so connected to the big world and glorious past (though why was Steve Lacy gigging in that small basement discoteque for 5 people), when it really was about scraping by, daily.

[surfer]

Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangarembga

I'm a few pages from finishing this book, and it is an incredible work. In the canon of African coming-of-age novels, its right up there with better known books like African Child, Ambiguous Adventure, and Purple Hibiscus. Highly recommended.


"The condition of natives is a nervous condition" - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

[Jesse]

i have that on hold at the library-there must be some buzz, i've been waiting a few weeks.

[surfer]

i have that on hold at the library-there must be some buzz, i've been waiting a few weeks.

The Dangarembga? Really? She wrote a sequel to it "The Book of Not" back in 2006, which was not as critically received. Maybe its assigned reading for a class?

[Jesse]

well, i'm "3 of 5", but still. honestly, i am generally surprised when anyone is reading substantive literature these days. the twin cities have the rep of being "bookish", and once received high marks by the metric of indy bookstores, but all those stores are gone now.

[surfer]

Its got to be people reading this for some class. The book was published in 1988, and its not being made into a movie, and its her only novel (other than the sequel) so I cant imagine there's much buzz around a long forgotten bildungsroman written by an Zimbabwean woman. That said, I hope you like it, I think its so well written.

Great first line: "I was not sorry when my brother died."

Very interesting blog post on the book here: http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.com/2012/0 ... ns-by.html

[aditi]

Just finished reading her memoirs on travel/recording in Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, briefly Morocco and various places in Europe throughout the 1940s-80s. She goes into great detail on recording the indigenous peoples of Mexico's folk songs, as well as the popular songs and social customs of other parts of Mexico. Also of interest is the description of hauling over 200 pounds of recording equipment by foot, boat, train and small plane.

[Jesse]

Also of interest is the description of hauling over 200 pounds of recording equipment by foot, boat, train and small plane.

She's the Werner Herzog of location recordings.

[MRS]

"Honorine made stuffed peppers like no one else could. Romanian style, she called it. She'd fill the peppers with a stuffing of rice, sausage meat and a little beef, well salted and peppered, then place them in an earthenware casserole and cover them with water, add tomato coulis, thyme, bay and saw-wort, and let them cook on a very low flame, without covering. They tasted wonderful, especially if you poured a spoonful of crème fraîche over them at the last moment. I watched them playing rummy as I ate. To 51. When you have 51 points in your game, a tierce, a fifty, a hundred, or four aces, you put them on the table."

[surfer]

Alberto Moravia - Bought and Sold

[Adrian]

That's a beautiful cover!

[Dohol]

re-reading:





I cannot read his novels...never ever..

but I've always been able to read and enjoy these.

Jim Harrison said "The Nick Adams stories are a young man's stories written by a young man and enjoyed mostly by other young men" (needless to say Harrison still loves them and is therefore still young..)

[faster]

Read Remainder the other day. Not half bad, if, in the end, slightly glib (?).

[Gaendaal]

The Medieval Machine, The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages - Jean Gimpel

Hugely interesting and told with a nice wit.

[Dohol]

The Medieval Machine, The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages - Jean Gimpel

Hugely interesting and told with a nice wit.

oooo...


That looks good..

[labrat]

Read Remainder the other day. Not half bad, if, in the end, slightly glib (?).

[faster]

Read Black Swan Green last week because people kept telling me to read David Mitchell. Good writing, slightish book. Probably for far younger people than this guy.

Now reading Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology, which, despite its dumb title already seems to be a terrific--even masterful--critique of the state of evolutionary psychology and "adaptationist" teleological thinking in the sciences. Written slightly academically, by an academic. The first chapter (well worth a read) is available at the link, gratis.

[jon abbey]

the best David Mitchell is number9dream, in which he does Murakami as well as all but the best one or two Murakami books (Mitchell was living in Tokyo then). those recent ones like Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas are very overrated.

I read Dorothy B. Hughes-In A Lonely Place this week, which I thought was superb, essential noir that I'm a bit shocked eluded me for this long. then we started watching the famous Bogart/Nicholas Ray film that was based on the book and weren't into it at all, stopped well before the end.

next up is the new Chabon, out today, Telegraph Avenue.

[Adrian]

Murakami - 1Q84 - finally a cheap one volume edition. Will start on it this weekend.

[grisha]

Three by Perec

re-read the first one ("Which moped...", i read it in hebrew), couldn't make it through the second ("The Exeter Text"), now at third ("A Gallery Portrait"), so far really engrossing.