luka

Well-known member
which is the third? is it the romanticism? i own all of them but that's the one ive looked at least. i got barabaric vast and wild the other day which is the most recent one. i also have rothenbergs jewish anthology and the america anthology and i think they're all great.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Had a plane flight so I did end up reading Near to the Wild Heart and A Stream of Life. The great thing about planes is that you really can't enjoy much else but books and sounds in there.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Started reading a biography of Montaigne. This will help me put off reading his actual essays.

Also reading No Country for Old Men, which I really need to polish off ASAP.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
2016 so far:

  • Scott A Wilson (ed) - Music At The Extremes: Essays on Sounds Outside the Mainstream
  • Dawn Foster - Lean Out
  • Albert Meltzer - The Anarchists In London 1935-55
  • Simon Morris - Consumer Guide
  • David Keenan - Furfur: Sideways Into England's Hidden Reverse
  • Pete Coward - Vessel Without A Soul
  • Selma James - Sex, Race and Class - the Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952–2011
  • David Keenan - England's Hidden Reverse
  • Karl Marx - Capital volume 2
  • Susie Daniel, Pete McGuire and various skinheads - The Paint House: Words From an East End Gang
  • Toby Broom - Englishman: Adventures in Music
  • Phil Mailer - Portugal, The Impossible Revolution?
  • George F - Total Shambles

Currently reading Asher Senator's book "Smiley and Me" about him and Smiley Culture.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Do people own reading chairs? I feel like my reading would go up a gear if I had a reading chair.

Or maybe I'd just sit in it smoking weed and watching Marvel Universe movies.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Read a review of a new biography of Proust in the LRB which made me think I should read 'Swann's Way', at least, before I die. Anyone read it? Dare I?
 

jenks

thread death
I read the Benjamin Taylor biog that was reviewed in the LRB and enjoyed it very much but not as much as the Edmund White book on Proust which is worth reading even if you never read Proust himself. I'd definitely encourage anyone to read Proust but maybe hang fire on judgement for the first thirty pages - it takes a while to get going. Swann's Way (or whatever your preferred translation of that section - a Love of Swann's etc etc) is really gripping and is some of the best writing in the six volumes. Saying all that he isn't a quick read and there a re moments where i wished he'd just get on with it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I've read Swann's Way (alone from the series although I have picked up the second one which stares grudgingly at me from the shelf) - some funny bits at the start and it's interesting but there are bits where you wish that the narrator was't such a wimp or that Swann would just fucking forget about Odette. It hasn't made me desperate to get stuck into the second one just yet...
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I guess it would be perverse of me, on some level, to read Proust in translation before I've even read Ulysses.

At the moment I'm dithering a little but I've taken up 'Pride and Prejudice' again after getitng a third of the way through a few years ago. I stopped not because I was bored, but for no particular reason.

In the day I'm dithering between Peter Ackroyd's history of England and a guide to writing fiction.
 

droid

Well-known member
Just finished resolution way, am reading the new Mieville now

It's 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer - and occult disciple - Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.

It's 1950. A lone surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts - and by the forces of hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Flicked through a collection of Emily Dickinson poems today and espied:

'XCV

COULD mortal lip divine
The undeveloped freight
Of a delivered syllable,
’T would crumble with the weight.'
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Right, well I finally finished Infinite Jest the other day, and have picked up a couple of new things since then.

A mate gave me a copy of this the other day:

lopcoversmall.jpg
, from http://www.lifeofpies.co.uk/

A guy goes around the UK in search of the perfect pie. Each vendor is marked out of 10 on seven criteria, giving - rather unconventionally - a final score out of 70. The prose is often witty and charming and the whole thing is delightfully amateurish in the best possible sense of someone who really loves something. My main criticism is that his marking system is crazily moderated, so that a really bad pie will get a score only slightly below 50/70, while just a handful of real winners score above 60.

Also, Foucault's Pendulum.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Flicked through a collection of Emily Dickinson poems today and espied:

'XCV

COULD mortal lip divine
The undeveloped freight
Of a delivered syllable,
’T would crumble with the weight.'

ED is great - I linked to an interesting article about her last week on the 'Poetry' thread, in case you hadn't seen it. The lines you've quoted match the subject matter of the article very well
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading about authors from yesteryear I am always struck by how extraordinarily well read they all were. Even if they hadn't read all the canonical stuff, they'd read an absolute shedload of stuff. I think I was like that as a child, but nowadays I struggle to finish one book a month. There's just so many other things with which you can occupy your time - TV, the internet, streaming music/films, etc. I wonder if there are many 'well-read' people growing up in the West anymore, given the strength of competition available to kids?

How much do others here read, generally speaking? Last year I managed to sustain two months of reading a book a week (most of the books were relatively short: 200-300 pages), and it became a lot easier to do it as I went along. I tend to feel reading books is more rewarding, mentally, than watching films, e.g., precisely because it's harder.
 

droid

Well-known member
The target this year is 150 books. At 91 so far, but at least 20 of those are graphic novels. Will probably hit about 110 'proper' books, though most of those are genre trash.
 

luka

Well-known member
I read about 10 books a year. Not much genre trash though. Craner is still trying to read the western canon in it's entirety and still hasn't got pat the Greeks lol. I'm supposedly doing a masters so should try and read more. I read a chapter of Being and Time today. 10 pages. Feeling quite pleased with myself.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I read about 10 books a year. Not much genre trash though. Craner is still trying to read the western canon in it's entirety and still hasn't got pat the Greeks lol. I'm supposedly doing a masters so should try and read more. I read a chapter of Being and Time today. 10 pages. Feeling quite pleased with myself.

I wonder if the canon would be more fun to read backwards?

You're doing a masters?
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah. I don't have an undergrad. I skipped that bit. It's a vocational thing, not academic. I want a job.
 

luka

Well-known member
I have to do a presentation on it, just those ten pages. Everyone on the course is thick as fuck though so I can say anything and get away with it.
 
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