What's Everyone Reading At The Moment?

i have started house of meetings by martin amis. so far so good

so far so great. its 1956 and they just made mention of russias secret speech by stalin and made a reference to the nazis connection to the tome the will to power by nitzche which is a book/journal that i love. good stuff and a great book so far. takes place in a forced labor camp. seems like no one is familiar with amis here though
 
about to finish house of meetings and start the pregnant widow next both by amis. i also bought his book money today which is apparently a penguin classic which i didnt know before buying it. one of there ink cover lines or something. nice to see he did have some recognition at some point
 
Currently reading:

Some poems by Paul Klee
Isolato by Larissa Szporluk
The Collected Poems of Tennessee Wiliams
Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
The Late Parade by Adam Fitzgerald
Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale
some prose by Edgar A. Poe about poetry. what a surprise.


Recently finished:
Crush by Richard Siken (again)
The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind by Szporluk
White Buildings by Hart Crane (again)
Selected Poems by Dylan Thomas (again)
 
Currently reading:

Some poems by Paul Klee
Isolato by Larissa Szporluk
The Collected Poems of Tennessee Wiliams
Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
The Late Parade by Adam Fitzgerald
Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale
some prose by Edgar A. Poe about poetry. what a surprise.


Recently finished:
Crush by Richard Siken (again)
The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind by Szporluk
White Buildings by Hart Crane (again)
Selected Poems by Dylan Thomas (again)

whats dylan thomas like. im guessing by again that you like him. hes always someone i hear about as great but know little about. i dont know much about poetry at all really and when i try beyond some of the obvious ones i just run into a lot of what seems to me to be tedious overwrought line after line. the opposite is almost as bad.
 
I'd say, in a less than sufficient nutshell, that Dylan Thomas is more about the sound of his words than the traditional sense of them. By that I mean that a) it's really helpful to hear him read his poems aloud (see YouTube); b) how he sounds his words helps lend them meaning and those uncommon meanings / combinations eventually result in entire poems. If you're reading d. Thomas as you would the newspaper or an essay, you won't get much out of him. Read him aloud yourself and see.

D. Thomas can run to excess. But then I like excess. It's interesting and helpful to ask why his poems can be over-wrought, as you put it, or at least highly ornamental... Hope this helps.

S.
 
I'm reading these. Not all at the same time but before they're due in three weeks.

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I'd say, in a less than sufficient nutshell, that Dylan Thomas is more about the sound of his words than the traditional sense of them. By that I mean that a) it's really helpful to hear him read his poems aloud (see YouTube); b) how he sounds his words helps lend them meaning and those uncommon meanings / combinations eventually result in entire poems. If you're reading d. Thomas as you would the newspaper or an essay, you won't get much out of him. Read him aloud yourself and see.

D. Thomas can run to excess. But then I like excess. It's interesting and helpful to ask why his poems can be over-wrought, as you put it, or at least highly ornamental... Hope this helps.

S.

ill give it a try. no ones ever told me to try reading poetry aloud before
 
Just started re-reading The Prodigy ( a.k.a Underneath the Wheel ) by Herman Hesse.



Just finished reading The Ghost With Trembling Wings by Scott Weidensaul. Really fascinating work about the hunt for near extinct/extinct species.
Happily, it's rigourously scientific and only mentions cryptozoology in order to debunk the majority of that field ... i.e. phantom big cats in the UK,etc.
 
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Just started re-reading The Prodigy ( a.k.a Underneath the Wheel ) by Herman Hesse.



Just finished reading The Ghost With Trembling Wings by Scott Weidensaul. Really fascinating work about the hunt for near extinct/extinct species.
Happily, it's rigourously scientific and only mentions cryptozoology in order to debunk the majority of that field ... i.e. phantom big cats in the UK,etc.

i love hesse, hes one of my favs. i think my fav work by him is gertrude or perhaps journey to the east though i love all his stuff. finally finished house of meetings which was really good but i feel i would have gotten more out of it had i been russian in russia from 1930 to 1980 but his style is still all over the book. i should also mention that i hate russian literature. he made a funny comment about it in the book when he said now i know ive just introduced a new character and this should be traditionally followed by a chapter of this new characters family history but were not gonna do that. hes also very joyce in his perspective and rhythm at times. had a bunch of crappy stuff happen in the past couple of weeks, pets are great but for every one you get there will someday be a goodbye and weve got a lot of good byes comming, so it took me a min to finish but now ive started dead babies today and im already like a third of the way through it and i guess ill read the pregnant widow next after that. i do love that amis always has me going for the dictionary. every book of his i read i have to do this. maybe ill recommend the ghost... to rachel as she has several biology degrees and is very interested in this kinda stuff (silent spring etc). nice to see that people are reading something though
 
Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast Of Champions



Not as good as Slaughter-House Five but that's hardly any fault of his. I enjoyed the same atmosphere of bewilderment as occurred in the former ... life is a difficult business, indeed !
 
martin amis. success. fantastic. sad.

god i didnt expect this to be so utterly sad. the last line broke me

I've read quote a lot of Amis but not Success. I love Money and London Fields but have struggled with some of his other works, having said that I'm just about to start Zone of Interest. Maybe I'll give Success a go next.

Just finished The Luminaries. It is long and a bit earnest in some parts and very well written in others.
 
I've read quote a lot of Amis but not Success. I love Money and London Fields but have struggled with some of his other works, having said that I'm just about to start Zone of Interest. Maybe I'll give Success a go next.

Just finished The Luminaries. It is long and a bit earnest in some parts and very well written in others.

his style on success is elegantly convoluted and dense but funny. its really the only books that have made me laugh out loud with his line "she touches me so i close my eyes and pray for paitience made me laugh. everyone always say ellis's stuff is funny but i just cant see that. the rules of attraction was not funny in the least. success is also short as its only just over two hundred pages. heres the thing about success though, its where he learned to sucker punch you with perspective. about two thirds of the way through the book you realize one of the narrators cant be trusted and then he throws the punch that changes how you feel about everyone and everything that came before it. the end will devastate you. im saving money and london fields, just bought the twentieth anniversary edition of london fields, for last as theyre his most well known work but i started with lionel asbo which was written in 2012 and it was fantastic as was the pregnant widow which came just before it and those are much less dense in prose but retain all the substance and style hes known for. i let my wife read the opening section to lionel asbo and she wouldnt give it back until she was finished. right now hes one of my fav authors and im gonna finish dead babies this morning which should be good. nice to see someone knows him though and thanks for mentioning him to me. im really in love with his work at the moment.
 
I've read quote a lot of Amis but not Success. I love Money and London Fields but have struggled with some of his other works, having said that I'm just about to start Zone of Interest. Maybe I'll give Success a go next.

Just finished The Luminaries. It is long and a bit earnest in some parts and very well written in others.

so what amis novels have your read besides those two? so far ive done lionel asbo, dead babies, success and the house of meetings and am currently reading the pregnant widow. watched the rachel papers for fun not long ago but i think we misreead the sterotype of the main character. we didnt think he was supposed to have any game.
 
so what amis novels have your read besides those two? so far ive done lionel asbo, dead babies, success and the house of meetings and am currently reading the pregnant widow. watched the rachel papers for fun not long ago but i think we misreead the sterotype of the main character. we didnt think he was supposed to have any game.

I've read The Rachel Papers, Money, London Fields, Night Train, Lionel Asbo, The Pregnant Widow and Yellow Dog. I must say if you enjoyed Lionel Asbo, which was very ho-hum for me, you'll absolutely love Money and London Fields which are vastly superior novels drawing on similar themes.

I've also got a selection of short stories called 'Heavy Water and Other Stories' which contains one classic, Let Me Count the Times. Worth the price of admission alone.
 
I've read The Rachel Papers, Money, London Fields, Night Train, Lionel Asbo, The Pregnant Widow and Yellow Dog. I must say if you enjoyed Lionel Asbo, which was very ho-hum for me, you'll absolutely love Money and London Fields which are vastly superior novels drawing on similar themes.

I've also got a selection of short stories called 'Heavy Water and Other Stories' which contains one classic, Let Me Count the Times. Worth the price of admission alone.

let me ask about lionel asbo, what did you think of him working the quote who let the dogs in, which appears before the first chapter (which i thought was gonna be a trite comment on who let the trash into the upper class by quoting a very trashy song) and then finding it worked into the dialog of the last chapter totally relevant to the plot? that was technically brilliant to me. uncle li, who let the dogs in? who, who let the dogs in. (i really thought the baby was dead). i also loved the symmetry of the first and last chapter mimicking each others syntax and prose. he mentions a symmetrical poem in house of meetings and then he kinda writes it in lionel asbo. i also loved the loaded name of lion-el, the way he pronounces it (bringing to mind a lion and his pride), and all the pride he had in him which he was always denying existed at all. like when he actually calls the warden sir when he learns hes won a lot of money. the first sign that money, even the possibility of money, will indeed change him despite his claim to an unchanging nature represented by his name (anti social behavior disorder). the split nature of des's race with all the good, intelligence, height and strength coming from the black father he had and not the other white relatives which is what everyone wants to think (dawns fathers brain size comments come to mind). grace aging and dying anything but gracefully. i could keep going but a lot of this technicality in his writing was amazing to me. i also loved the love dread that des had for lionel, i know that feeling first hand and very up close (the fear and dependency). it felt very accurate to me and the line about there being inconceivable voids in des's knowledge also rung home for me. as an aside the topless models are no more and have just been done away with.

the rachel papers is the book im kinda fearing to read as i think i wont connect to its subject matter whatsoever. it feels like its gonna be very generational with no connection to my lifes experience at all. sex is kinda taken for granted in todays times so i dont understand the conscious pursuit of it as a motivation for a character in as novel. anyway still reading the pregnant widow which is good in style so far but im wondering if ill connect to the plot at all. i liked his comments on times passing and its effect on peoples psyches but his comments on womens measurements seems kinda lame to me so far. who does that. no one ive ever known
 
Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast Of Champions



Not as good as Slaughter-House Five but that's hardly any fault of his. I enjoyed the same atmosphere of bewilderment as occurred in the former ... life is a difficult business, indeed !

You should read my polemic on Kurt Vonnegut. :p
 
bhops come back. youre the only other person i know whos read this book. whatd you think of the points about lionel asbo
 
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