What are you reading now?

[Globaltruth]

Just finished reading Erewhon by Samuel Butler. Written in 1872 much of his commentary and thoughts on the topics of (vapour) machines and vegetarianism (not labelled as that then) are simply astonishing, must have been outrageous at the tine. I really recommend this book for stimulating thinking, expected to struggle with the language but it was fine.
Next: an Elmore Leonard.

[Petekelly55]

Just finished reading David Foster Wallace's short stories '12 Interviews with Hideous Men'. Disturbing and truthful. I am also reading his mammoth novel 'Infinite Jest'. My son assures me I will grow to love it. I am 200 pages in and struggling.

[marthe]

Bax of delights and umslopogaas,

I read "Moby-Dick" in high school when it was required reading for sophomore year. I found it heavy going when I was 15 but would give it another go now. You might be interested to know that the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Mass. has a reading of "Moby-Dick" every year during the winter. Here's their website: <http://www.whalingmuseum.org> Nathaniel Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship 'Essex' " tells the story on which Melville based "Moby-Dick."

marthe

[umslopogaas]

Bax of delights and marthe

Thanks for those interesting comments on 'Moby-Dick'. I agree, the very short chapters do break down a very long tale into digestible chunks. Another help is Melville's clear and simple plot: he does indeed divert and philosophise in every direction, but always returns, as straight as harpoon, to the chase. Bax of delights, dont give up and when you approach the end, give yourself plenty of time, because it becomes increasingly difficult to stop; as I said, I was up half the night to reach the final pages.

Marthe, I can see that for an american high school student, this would be rather a forbidding challenge, because its very much a national treasure, like, I imagine, Goethe for germans or Shakespeare for the brits. I dont recall anyone mentioning Melville in my school days, though I remember completely overreaching myself by attempting 'The Brothers Karamazov'. I failed totally, I think I quietly returned it to the school library after I'd toiled through the first fifty pages, and hoped no-one would notice. As far as I can recall, my first successful foray into 'real' books was about a year later, when I read Conrad's 'Victory'. I still have very fond memories of that tale, but I've never dared approach Karamazov again.

I'm not sure the british school curriculum in the 1960s was very helpful in stimulating an interest in literature. I had to take O levels in both English Language and English Literature and for the latter, we had to study Chaucer's 'Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales, in the original old english, and Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar'. I quite enjoyed the Shakespeare, but I think none the less being forced to study it must have deterred me, I've never been back to Shakespeare since. The Chaucer was most off putting, both because of the difficulty of the spelling and because the Prologue is pretty uninteresting, being really just a character list. I only discovered too late that there was a rather racy modern english translation by Coghill, which made some of the actual tales rather saucy. But even Coghill couldnt do much with the Prologue.

[Don Basilio]

the Canterbury Tales, in the original old english,

Eek. Middle English. Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood are Old English.

the Prologue is pretty uninteresting, being really just a character list.

Don't you like gossip, then? The Prologue is a fascinating portrait of a society, with as much variety of character as Dickens.

[umslopogaas]

Don Basilio, I'm sure you are right, there must be more to Chaucer's Prologue than I can remember, which after forty five years isnt very much!

It may indeed be in Middle English rather than Old English, but even Middle looks pretty old when you're a teenager and have never seen it before. I was heading for a science career and didnt take english studies further than O level, so I never encountered Beowulf, and I have no idea what The Dream of the Rood is: what is it?

[Don Basilio]

Middle English is recognisably the same language as ours, but it takes practice, and you need to look at a crib. Old English, or Anglo Saxon, bears no immediate relationship.

Beowulf is a bore to my mind, only famous because it is the only long Anglo Saxon poem surviving. The Dream of the Rood is a very beautiful religious poem, much admired by a convinced Marxist friend.

If you like smut, Anglo Saxon poetry is not for you. The mead horn was always half empty.

(I did English A level about the same time: we had a number of modernist masterpieces - Portrait of an Artist, To the Lighthouse, Hopkins - and those failed to excit me. The Rape of the Lock is the work that I really liked. I also discovered The Idiot, and was fascinated. A world in which sex and religion were taken for granted. What a contrast to provincial life I knew.)

[Bax-of-Delights]

umslopogaas:

I sense we are of a similar vintage as the set texts sound similar. We did "Othello" which was a much more engaging story than JC and didn't really put me off Shakespeare although it took me another 35 years before I became truly engaged with our national scribe and then it was Stephen Greenblatt who finally made the connection for me.

Ha! Karamazov!! I read it at age 16 and DID persevere to the very end (both volumes) and do you know - I can't remember a single thing about it. Occasionally I see it on a bookshelf and shudder.

[Gordon]

Just finished Maria Edgeworth's Helen and Ennui. Having assumed - or led to believe - that Jane austen was the queen of the genre I find that Edgeworth is more than a match. Must find some more. Anyone read The Absentee?

As light relief from that, Roger Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind" about science and artificial intelligence and the role of physics in the brain. Riveting. Coming up, from Amazon, more of same.

[marthe]

umslopogaas,

'The Brothers K." was very brave indeed for a high school student! Senior year (age 17) we did 'Crime and Punishment' along with Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'. This was meant to be a "compare and contrast" essay. Needless to say, in the spring of 1968, there were too many world-shaking events going on and I left my reading to the last minute. C and P got rather short shrift. At university we did Bros. K. 'Moby-Dick' was part of a sequence in American Lit. that started with Puritan sermons and ended with 'The Great Gatsby'! The following year we did British lit. starting with 'Beowulf' and 'Canterburty Tales' in translation. My grandmother, who was Belgian and spoke English, French, Flemish, and German, could read Chaucer in the original without any difficulty because it was so much like Flemish.

marthe

[umslopogaas]

Bax of Delights and marthe

Looks as if we share a certain aversion to 'the Russians'! Like BoD I have the Bros. Karamazov gathering dust on the bookshelves and judging by the spinal damage to those venerable black Penguins, I must have read it, but also like BoD I cant remember a word.

I went to see what else I had in the way of Russian literature, with the dawning realisation that I had once struggled through quite a lot of it and then hadnt thought about it for an instant in the last forty-odd years. Very well thumbed copies of The Idiot, The Devils and Crime And Punishment. Also Gogol's Dead Souls and Tolstoy's Resurrection, but not War And Peace or Anna Karenina: I think I decided I'd save them until I broke a leg, but mercifully I never have.

All my reading has been unguided, I studied science at university and literature was confined to evenings when I was too broke to nip over to the pub. I found most of my fellow science students uninterested in 'heavy' reading, to put it mildly, but was delighted to make one friend who shared my enthusiasms and we sort of urged each other on. His dad was a university librarian and they actually lived in a flat over a library, so he had a certain advantage.

Being rather fond of student life and not too concerned about never having any money, I decided I would stay on and do a higher degree if my exam results turned out well enough. And they did. Oh boy, if you think winter is cold now, I can remember winters in the early seventies when my annual income was a research council grant of seven hundred pounds a year. But I survived, despite once nearly asphyxiating myself with a paraffin heater (I think they must give out carbon monoxide as well as heat, I nearly passed out before I realised what was happening) and landed a job in the lowland tropics of the far East. Whoopee, warm at last! And shortly after I arrived my old mate sent me the first part of Swanns Way, with the inscription "This could be the start of something big." It was, I've been meandering through Proust ever since. Wonderful, the final peroration near the end of Time Regained is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I know, even in translation: it must be magical to be able to read the original french.

No-one seems to have responded to my earlier post enthusing about Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, but I'm still hopeful: surely all you musical people must have read it? I will happily post more if any one is interested, I think it is a masterpiece

[DracoM]

Just finishing Zusak's 'The Book Thief'.

Am just about to start re-reading all Cormac McCarthy's novels. They made an enomormous impact on me first time round.

I suppose as he is an American, the chances of him winning the Nobel Prize are limited / non-existent?

[DracoM]

Sorry - missed the bits about Dr F, but honestly, I did try, I really did, but......couldn't get past page 124.

Finished about a month ago 'Ruth' by Mrs Gaskell. Remarkable! Unmarried working class mother in mid-19th cent rural surroundings who toughs it out, ewarns a living, refuses to marry to give respectability, faces down impregnator, and also the virulent hostility of the parish and is supported by the local Dissenting pastor - amazingly. An awful lot of tears and a lot of God, BUT the central theme is very sharply observed and written. Must have been a bit of a cause scandale when first published.

[DoNothing]

I'm reading The New Believers: Sects, 'Cults' and Alternative Religions, by David V. Barrett. It was an impulse buy by my OH that I've nicked and am now devouring. Very interesting. The cult/alt. relig. that I'm the most relieved not to have been raised in is, thus far, the Exclusive Brethren. Phew, I hadn't appreciated not being born into a cult before. Though the author doesn't like the word 'cult'. The book is religious sociology, which is a new perspective on the topic for me. I'm not sure I agree with Barrett on everything, but it's definitely making me think about things in new and interesting ways.

Also reading The Mill on the Floss and listening to the audiobook of Trollope's The Small House at Allington. It's brilliantly read/performed by Timothy West; I highly recommend his Trollope audiobooks. Whilst I'm at it, his wife, Prunella Scales' Emma audiobook is fantastic too; practically perfect, imo.

Lots of interesting books mentioned in this thread. I want to get reading Moby Dick, some Wm Boyd (haven't read any), Terry Pratchet (ditto), Cold Comfort Farm... Treats aplenty.

verismissimo: I gave up with Blink, I wasn't impressed. Have you tried the implicit racist test that Gladwell mentions: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/ ? I tried it a few years ago after reading Blink, and was very excited to discover I was less racist than average, yippee! Having read the book, I'd convinced myself that I was probably a secret, screaming racist. Phew, again.

The new forum looks great, a lot better than the old message board format. Many thanks to those responsible.

[verismissimo]

Ploughing on with Blink, but, like you, not impressed, DoN. Not taken the test. Better ignorant.

Invested in a second hand copy of Doctor Faustus on your recommendation, um. Will report.