Recently Begun Books

[Sif]

I'm finally getting to Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić. I got it a few months ago, it's just taken this long to get through the books ahead of it on my 'to read' pile.

[Daniel del Real]

Last weekend I started Se?as de Identidad (Marks of Identity) by Juan Goytisolo. It's my third attempt to read Goytisolo and it was the first succesful after trying twice to read Reivindicaci?n del Conde Don Juli?n (Count Julian).
About 80 pages into the book I see a lot of similarities between Goytisolo and Mars?: both have a cryptic way of writing, changing the narrator from first, to third and even to second person in different paragraphs. They write about Barcelona as natives from this city, although they both write originally in Spanish. They're almost the same age (Goytisolo 79, Mars? 78) and that's maybe a part of why their perspective of Franco?s Barcelona is similar.

[Heteronym]

I'm finally getting to Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić. I got it a few months ago, it's just taken this long to get through the books ahead of it on my 'to read' pile.

Oh, you'll have to write a full review when you finish it.

I've started today a modest selection of poems by Alexander Pope. I've been on a poetry binge for the past days.

[Refus de Sejour]

Studs Terkel - Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.


Nothin' like a nice straightforward title .

[Eric]

In this heatwave a thread for recently begun books is a safer bet than recently finished ones.

I've recently begun Merc? Rodoreda's novel "Aloma" and am liking it so far.

[mesnalty]

I just started Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, which is shaping up to be a five-star book.

[JTolle]

Just started the philosopher and sociologist Gillian Rose's memoir, Love's Work: A Reckoning With Life. She was mentioned in one of Geoffrey Hill's poems, so I took a look and this seemed her most inviting work, which is saying something when she hits me with a paragraph like

"Now, of course, I believe that it was Edna whom I went back to New York to meet. Edna was Jim's parting gift to me. She is an annunciation, a message, very old and very new. Edna is, as she insists, my "home from home." Whereas the idea of the original home would arouse an agon of bitter ambivalence in me, the redoubled home has no colour or cathexis of pain inseparable from its welcome."

7 pages in.

Last weekend I started Se?as de Identidad (Marks of Identity) by Juan Goytisolo.

This and Juan the Landless are sitting on my shelf, and once I clear my plate a little and gird myself for it, I'm going to pick up the former not the latter.

[waxwing]

Witz by Joshua Cohen 150 pages in..... it's been a struggle

[Loki]

I'm almost 300 pages into Clarissa, by Richardson, which would be something like 600 if the font was the usual size.
Well, reading Clarissa it's much more difficult than Pamela , which I read last year: Pamela was probably easier because Richardson was trying to reproduce the style of a fifteen-year-old servant girl, which couldn't have been complex. With Clarissa, instead, he is reproducing the style of high-class family (Lovelace's style, in particular, is complex, or rather, high).

Clarissa's behaviour is sometimes even more annoying and irritating than Pamela's, which would be a good reason for those who hate Pamela for not reading Clarissa. Her behaviour is annoying for different reasons, but it's not less frustrating.

Apart from that, I really like this huge epistolary novel: it's like spying on these people, namely Clarissa, Anna and Lovelace in primis. Nothing much happens, which could be a drawback, but the emotions that are shown through their letters make up for the lack of action.

As far as I have read, nothing more than an eighteen-year-old girl refusing to comply to the family's will and than her struggling with admitting to her love for the man her family hates has happened (I'm not sure whether this last sentence is completely intelligible: if not I guess this this is due to my reading Clarissa's letters).

[Daniel del Real]

Le Journal intime de Sally Mara by Raymond Queneau. As I know one of his lesser known works but I'm sure it can give me a good hint on what is like reading such a peculiar author.

[Heteronym]

I'm fifty pages into Poor Folk; what a pleasure to return to Dostoyevsky!

[lenz]

I'm almost 300 pages into Clarissa, by Richardson, which would be something like 600 if the font was the usual size.
Well, reading Clarissa it's much more difficult than Pamela , which I read last year: Pamela was probably easier because Richardson was trying to reproduce the style of a fifteen-year-old servant girl, which couldn't have been complex. With Clarissa, instead, he is reproducing the style of high-class family (Lovelace's style, in particular, is complex, or rather, high).

Clarissa's behaviour is sometimes even more annoying and irritating than Pamela's, which would be a good reason for those who hate Pamela for not reading Clarissa. Her behaviour is annoying for different reasons, but it's not less frustrating.

Apart from that, I really like this huge epistolary novel: it's like spying on these people, namely Clarissa, Anna and Lovelace in primis. Nothing much happens, which could be a drawback, but the emotions that are shown through their letters make up for the lack of action.

As far as I have read, nothing more than an eighteen-year-old girl refusing to comply to the family's will and than her struggling with admitting to her love for the man her family hates has happened (I'm not sure whether this last sentence is completely intelligible: if not I guess this this is due to my reading Clarissa's letters).

I've recently been reading (in whole or parts) some minor 18th c. followers of the hugely popular Clarissa and Pamela and they are even more over-the -top melodramatic about saintly girls being kidnapped by nasty (or seemingly nasty but really just confused) aristocratic gents. It's hard to believe anyone took them seriously at the time and yet there is some truth in the dangers faced by girls and women in the marriage market.

[Daniel del Real]

I The Divine by Rabih Alameddine. Interesing so far in two things:
The life of a child born from a Libanese Muslim father and a mother from the United States. The mix of cultures in an ideology.
Finally the way the novel is structured in first chapters is peculiar and engaging.

[Loki]

It's hard to believe anyone took them seriously at the time and yet there is some truth in the dangers faced by girls and women in the marriage market.

It's hard indeed! I can't share her views and opinions at all most of the times.
I can't even imagine what are these works you mention like, if I think of Clarissa!

[Patrick Murtha]

Some books in progress:

Fiction:

Bram Stoker, Dracula
Henry James, The Europeans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Cao Xuequin, The Story of the Stone (Volume 1 of 5-volume Penguin edition)

Poetry:

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Middle English edition)
Simon Armitage (trans.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Non-Fiction:

Brand Whitlock, Belgium (2 volumes)
William Cobbett, Rural Rides (2 volumes)
Peter Biddlecombe, Travels with my Briefcase
Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell in Burma
Richard D. Altick, The Scholar Adventurers
Alastair Fowler, A History of English Literature
Neal Thompson, Driving with the Devil
Edward Achorn, Fifty-nine in '84
Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies
Douglas Woodruff, The Tichborne Claimant

[jackdawdle]

henry james' wings of the dove.

i hate the idea of having bought a book and letting it gather dust.

[Mirabell]

henry james' wings of the dove.

i hate the idea of having bought a book and letting it gather dust.

It's a fantastic book. One of my favorite novels ever.

[jackdawdle]

It's a fantastic book. One of my favorite novels ever.

i do like the englishness of it.

i'm about 50 pages in and the story as far i could tell is about money, where it's been tucked away and who and how it'll be in the hands of.

[Daniel del Real]

Continuing with my recent entushiasm for reading Spanish writers from the seconf half of the XX century I recently picked up Las Ratas by Miguel Delibes and Pabell?n de Reposo by Camilo Jos? Cela. Still in the first pages of each one but they are familiar writers to me with a proved quality and excelent flowing prose.

[Bottle Rocket]

I recently (finally) started on Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate.

I've read a bit over 200 pages so far, and like it very much. The "central point" of the book is Stalingrad in mid-battle, but it traipses all over WW2 Russia as it tells the stories of many, many characters.

It's a full-rigged, old-fashioned Russian novel on the grand scale; although written in the late '40s and early '50s, it summons War and Peace far more than, say, anything I've read by Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn.

Some of it (dealing with the Final Solution and the generalized brutality of the Ostfront) is not easy to read because it's so unflinching, but on the whole it is really wonderful in that serious Russian way. And Grossman doesn't spare the Communist apparat any more than the Nazis; as a result, the book was suppressed until 1980, when Sakharov smuggled it out to Switzerland; it wasn't published in Russia until 1988.

Highly recommended (so far, anyway)


BR