What Book Did You Read Last Night??? (3 Viewers)

[David Kronenbourg]

I have not, must check it out. He also played the laconic sheriff at the end of Deliverance, fun factoid.

And he got into a fistfight with John Boorman on set. A real hard drinkin hard livin yank

 

[Cornu Ammonis]

Neuromancer definitely isn't an easy read. I think that counts for a lot. Good though. I liked the razor girl.

It’s basically a Raymond Chandler plot with a pair of black sunglasses and computers. The characters are so flat that I really don’t care what happens.

 

[Lili Marlene]

My Joyce bookclub has reconvened after our convalescence having completed the Wake and we've become a Virginia Woolf bookclub. I'd only read Mrs Dalloway before so it's mostly all new to me.

First up The Voyage Out: posh Brits go on a boat to South America and then hang around a hotel and villa for a few months. I'm reliably informed it's like an Edwardian The White Lotus, not a show I have watched. Anyway, its all written in a non-snappy style that bears few resemblances to modern novels. Big, long sentences full of commas and semi-colons that'd give Hemingway a fucking heart attack.

Some unorganized thoughts:

* Not especially plot heavy but it glides along beautifully. The first 100-130 pages or so were hard going but once I got past trying to distinguish the 40 thousand characters (I had to write them out ) from each other I got into the swing of it.

* No obvious stand-ins for the author, you can never really tell which opinion her characters have that she shares, which is nice.

* I was thinking of our sadly departed Jim a bit, I remember him reading some of Woolf a year or two before he passed. I wonder how far he got?

* With only one or two especially memorable characters, and a very minor plotline it was interesting to enjoy a book purely based on sentence structure, and kinda vibes alone. Theres a lot of talk about women's place in the world and I'd say she was working stuff out as she wrote it, as opposed to having it all mapped out beforehand.

* Bitta racism in there alright but mostly it's a satire of posh English people so it's forgivable. At one point they go on a trip down the river thinking they adventurers but the local tribesmen just look at them bored and go "oh yeah, Brits usually do this about this time each year"

 

[Cornu Ammonis]

I’ve only read Orlando which I found equally impenetrable from a plot perspective.

 

[Lili Marlene]

*thinking "they are" ffs. Cancelled.

 

[chris d]

I thought BorrowBox had every book ever available to rent. But turns out it's a bit shit.

 

[Lili Marlene]

I thought BorrowBox had every book ever available to rent. But turns out it's a bit shit.

Come on man, free books are free, the failing here is with you.

WITH YOU

 

[chris d]

Come on man, free books are free, the failing here is with you.

WITH YOU

Would put you right off reading and straight on to TikTok.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

Imperial by William Vollmann. "Imperial is a 2009 study of California's Imperial Valley and Imperial County" . It took me a long time to read this it's heavy going at times and it's also phyiscally very heavy and a pain in the hole to bring anywhere. But it was great.

On the most basic level, though, Imperial is just a piece of land: a strip of desert whose landmarks include a toxic sea, a poisonous river, and roughly 80 miles of patchily enforced international border. The territory was mostly empty until, around the turn of the twentieth century, the American side suddenly bloomed (thanks to the miracle of massive irrigation projects) into a wonderland of lettuce, asparagus, cantaloupes, and cotton. The Mexican side, predictably, remained a desert wasteland, watered only by the salty dregs of America’s canals—which, just as predictably, prompted Mexican citizens to start crossing the border to do brutal farmwork up north. The result was a big, fascinating mess of hypocrisy: The border patrol cracked down even as our corporate farms came to depend on cheap illegal labor. When the region’s economic promise finally petered out after a few decades (a casualty of the unsustainable nature of large-scale irrigation), the area reverted to wasteland: a flashpoint of racism and violence and boredom and despair.


Wastelands, of course, are where Vollmann prefers to spend most of his time, and he haunted this one for ten years. The book is full of adventures and revelations. He rides an inflatable raft down the foul-smelling New River, allegedly the most polluted waterway in North America; he investigates the myth of a secret network of Chinese tunnels under the streets of Mexicali; he documents the inside of a maquiladora with a digital video receiver hidden in his underwear. He bribes cops, hires racist homeless translators, gets scammed and lied to, writes a mini-treatise defending John Steinbeck, earnestly espouses socialism, enlists Mormon genealogists to help him track the lives of long-dead pioneers, and eventually runs out of money.


Imperial inevitably raises the big question surrounding much of Vollmann’s work: Is it too long? It probably is. About halfway through, I felt my patience begin to flag. I’d been carrying the book around for a couple of weeks, wrestling it onto trains and out of bed, and my wrist and lower back had mysteriously started burning. I grew suddenly hostile toward WTV’s formerly lovable quirks: the clumsy sentences, the digressive digressions, the gratuitously creepy metaphors (“the alfalfa fields, fresh-shorn like a tropical girl’s cunt-stubble”), the never-ending sarcastic exclamation marks. I found myself wishing that he would redirect some of the massive energy he puts into legwork and note-taking and poetic haunting to the less obviously heroic, more social challenges of writing: synthesizing, pruning, polishing. But that’d be like asking Keats not to get so carried away with the music of vowels, or Dickens to stop writing about orphans. Excess, for Vollmann, is exactly the point. I can’t help but read Imperial’s epigraph, from the 1909 yearbook of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as a sly little meta-statement, a confession and a boast: “As long as a farmer has an abundance of water, he almost invariably yields to the temptation to use it freely, even though he gets no increased returns as a result.” That’s the problem of Imperial, and the problem of Imperial: to get arid land to bear fruit, you’re going to have to waste some water. “I write my heart out on everything I do,” Vollmann has written. It’s a very rare quality, and it should be subsidized, whatever waste might come along with it.

 

[magicbastarder]

i'm reading eoghan daltun's 'an irish atlantic rainforest' and i've been reading it for months. wading through it, really, it should have been two thirds the length it is.

 

[rettucs]

Juno Loves Legs.

Almost finished it. Its a quick enough read. Very good at times, but something a bit off about a male author writing a book about a female teenager.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates. Amazing.

 

[chris d]

The Satsuma Complex - Bob Mortimer. This was totally fine, a decent take on noir fiction with a English Midlands slant.

 

[rettucs]

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.

About 50 pages in and its a great read, if a bit heavy going in terms of the subject matter. There's a lot of reading in it so its gonna take a while to get through.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Blood Meridian re-read. Still mind boggling.

 

[Cornu Ammonis]

Blood Meridian re-read. Still mind boggling.

I’m reading The Passenger and I really want to go back to blood meridian again.

 

[pete]

Los Angeles Review of Books

McCarthy imagined a vast border region where colonial empires clashed, tribes went to war, and bounty hunters roamed....

lareviewofbooks.org

 

[snakybus]

More musings on recent reads.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
I’m still digesting this and thinking about it. It’s a really great book. At least, I think it is. It’s such a strange book that goes down so many narrative alleys, it’s really hard to say, other than that I enjoyed it very much. What blew me away is how readable it was. Often, weird equals frustration for me but not this time – it was never not engrossing, which is saying something as it’s a 600-page doorstop. I guess it helped that I’ve read a few by him now and am not surprised when he gets into odd, dreamlike territory. Strange diversions popped up; a modern-day story about a couple who lose their cat, the experiences of Japanese soldiers occupying Manchuria in the 1930s/40s, a weird service for middle-aged women provided by an ex-fashion star, and lots more. The connections between these were never quite resolved, but that all seemed okay. Yeah, I liked this book a lot.

Logicomix – An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou
Excellent graphic novel centred around the philosophy of mathematics and logic, as told through the life of Bertrand Russell, his explorations and those of his fellows. There was lots of breaking of the fourth wall too, as the authors themselves feature quite a bit.

Septology parts III-V I Is Another by Jon Fosse
This is a collection of the next three books of seven by Jon Fosse. It’s Bekettian, I guess. He does mention Beckett at one point. He really dives into memory and the meaning of art in this one. I particularly liked the idea of what you might refer to as abstract art that he explores. One of the characters says that art shouldn’t make sense because life, frustratingly, doesn’t make sense. Other than that, I found it a little slower-moving than books I-II but still pretty good.

A book I was beta-reading for a friend
I can’t talk about this, but all good.

The Ballad of Halo Jones by Ian Moore and Ian Gibson
This was a reread of the classic 2000AD graphic novel collection after ten-ish years. This time around it really struck me how good this is. You can forgive some of its unevenness on the basis that it came out month to month, and also the fact that it more or less goes nowhere – I guess you could call it picaresque. The wealth and depth of ideas is just fantastic, and the touches of humour are great too. Not sure how feminist it would be considered nowadays though, in comparison to its reputation at the time. Not at all, I expect.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
This was my first foray into Raymond Chandler and it was more or less …like the film, really. And like with the film I got a bit lost in the plot and found it a bit dated. I also found the nonstop smart-arsery of Marlowe and everyone else to be a bit, well, like a hundred 40s movies I’ve seen. It’s unfair, of course, because it was this was the one that spawned all the others. And of course it has been highly influential on modern literature in general, as well as specifically on Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy etc as well as modern films. I guess, despite its clear tawt writing, humour and intricate plotting there was no level of engagement beyond that for me, no emotion until the final couple of paragraphs, which were admittedly great. I’m not sure why I was expecting there tobe, but there you go. I’ll read more of his writing as it’s diverting stuff regardless.

The Green Road by Anne Enright
Excellent, insightful book about a somewhat unloved family in the west of Ireland growing up in the late ‘70s and ‘80s and their relationship with their slightly selfish mother as adults when they come home for one last Christmas before she sells the old home. I guess it’s a thing I’d identify with so of course I was going to be engrossed but I think even if I wasn’t from the time and place I still would have liked it just for the great storytelling. The writing is unfancy and beautifully balanced, the characters wonderfully realised – or at least certain of them. By no means a perfect book, I still loved this.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Just finished Blood Meridian, which is the best book I've ever read, very white male of me, I know, but it's like spellbinding.

Now reading The Vorrh, which I'm getting into after a bit of a false start last time. I like the premise is about ancient sentient forest older than mankind which contains the garden of eden, cannibal spawn of Adam and other cool shit

 

[snakybus]

Just finished Blood Meridian, which is the best book I've ever read, very white male of me, I know, but it's like spellbinding.

Just started this today! (A re-read. Because it has to be done.)