What are you reading now?

[Conchis]

No idea whether Richard Nixon said it, but he was anticipated by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, in 1753 ('Le style c'est l'homme même', Discours sur le style), and perhaps in thought by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy in 1651 ('Stylus virum arguit).

Yep, you must be right. I first came across the quote in book review which attributed it to Nixon, which is how mistakes are perpetuated through the ages.

[Conchis]

Looks like you have the basis for a new kind of literary criticism.

The idea that a nation other than France could have produced an 'equivalent Proust' is a perfect example of lazy literary criticism. A La Recherche....could only have been written by an upper middle-class French homosexual with Jewish blood but it is entirely a product of French culture and French sensibilities. Just like you couldn't have a 'French Ibsen'.

[Rjw]

The Rotter's Club. jonathan Coe

Re reading, as his new book Middle England is out soon!

This is so funny, i e it makes you smile, to someone of my age. 66¡

Is there a van der graaf generator thread?

[Conchis]

The Rotter's Club. jonathan Coe

Re reading, as his new book Middle England is out soon!

This is so funny, i e it makes you smile, to someone of my age. 66¡

Is there a van der graaf generator thread?

I began reading Rotter's Club in the summer and enjoyed what I read but then another book diverted me. I will return to it at some point.

I think you DO need to have a knowledge of the period and the music of that period to get maximum value from it.

Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson ('Like A Fiery Elephant') is highly recommended by me!

[muzzer]

Karl Ole Knausgard - The End

This is (guess what?) the final volume in the My Struggle series and I am finding it as baffling to assess as the other volumes. It's very readable and the author has some arresting insights into the business of daily life but one can't help thinking literally anyone with an average command of their own language (and the available time) could have turned out this massive series of books. To call him the 'Norwegian Proust' as some critics (who almost certainly have never actually read Proust) have is deeply insulting to the French original. Proust's novel (and it IS a novel) is about the only book you'll ever read that will change your life (and for the better). Knausgaard has basically constructed a shopping list of his thoughts and feelings - there is a lack of art to his work's construction and you can't stifle the feeling that he's basically just shoving down the first thing that comes into his head. And it's NOT a novel, as Knausgard has not even bothered to disguise the personalities he is writing about - the upshot of his fun and games being his uncle threatening to sue him for defaming the family name and his second wife leaving him because he's so horribly self-absorbed (though the latter detail isn't covered in the book).

My Struggle is basically a guilty pleasure - a junk read for the beach, which your John Grisham-reading neighbour in the next lounger might mistake as 'highbrow'. Artistically, it's a pile of fetid crap.

I picked up one of the earlier volumes and swiftly put it back after a few sentences. I can only envy the author his sheer chutzpah. I’m not sure a culture that gives credence to this sort of stuff is in good health at all.

[muzzer]

Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson ('Like A Fiery Elephant') is highly recommended by me!

Seconded. BSJ a very interesting figure.

[Beef Oven!]

The Rotter's Club. jonathan Coe

Re reading, as his new book Middle England is out soon!

This is so funny, i e it makes you smile, to someone of my age. 66¡

Is there a van der graaf generator thread?

A great book on what it was like being a teenager in the 1970s. I'm a contemporary of Cole, not much older than him, so it really resonates with me.

There is no VDG thread - you could always start one up!

[eighthobstruction]

I picked up one of the earlier volumes and swiftly put it back after a few sentences. I can only envy the author his sheer chutzpah. I’m not sure a culture that gives credence to this sort of stuff is in good health at all.

....had enough 2 thirds through first volume....guessed [right] that it would not get any better....no matter if anything 'interesting' happened....

....readers may also be glad to hear that I have given up on Thus Spoke Zarathrusta after 6 months of occasional attempting....

[Richard Tarleton]

....readers may also be glad to hear that I have given up on Thus Spoke Zarathrusta after 6 months of occasional attempting....

"...he spent a short lifetime writing incredibly unsuccessful books that nobody wanted to read, before going mad and dying..." [Hugo Rifkind in The Times yesterday, reviewing a new biog of Nietzsche, which I don't think I'll read. I do recommend Bryan Magee's summary in "Wagner and Philosophy"]

[eighthobstruction]

....a lovely little book that I absolutely loved and wished that it was llonger was Patrick Kavanagh : Tarry Flynn.

....reread The Slave: Isaac Bashevis Singer....as very good as I remembered it....

....and about 20 other books from various rec's that were pretty dire....disappointing year of reading....

[Richard Barrett]

I do recommend Bryan Magee's summary in "Wagner and Philosophy"

So do I. It's one of the best books on Wagner I know, and one of the best books on philosophy that I know.

Current reading: Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist, but concerned not only to present it in a way that's accessible to a layperson but to emphasise its potential poetic aspects. Sometimes I despair at some "popular science" authors' reticence (no doubt heavily encouraged by their editors) to go anywhere near the actual mathematics that they're doing in their research because I really want to get more to grips with that stuff without being at the level required to get through a university textbook on the subject, but I'm inclined to forgive Rovelli because he expects readers to engage with it in a deeper philosophical way.

[Conchis]

I picked up one of the earlier volumes and swiftly put it back after a few sentences. I can only envy the author his sheer chutzpah. I’m not sure a culture that gives credence to this sort of stuff is in good health at all.

I would agree. I'm fairly cynical about the way he has achieved prominence. Norway is a small country with a commensurately small literary marketplace: its 'big' writers are venerated (although its greatest novelist, the Nobel prize-winner Knut Hamsun is still under something of a cloud due to his collusion with the Nazis and his unrepentant support for Hitler) but the best-seller lists are dominated by British and American authors. Reportedly, all you have to do to win some sort of literary prize in Norway is to get published. Knausgard's early novels won prizes but didn't have much in the way of outreach.

He is very readable, in a facile way but that's one of the issues I have with him. Proust makes big demands on the reader from the start, and his scrutiny not just of 'Marcel' but of all the other characters is penetrating and comprehensive. Knausgard can only look into himself and what he finds there is sheer banality. No insights: no discoveries. You and your twenty best friends could have written My Struggle, but only Proust could have written A La Recherche.....

[Conchis]

....had enough 2 thirds through first volume....guessed [right] that it would not get any better....no matter if anything 'interesting' happened....

....readers may also be glad to hear that I have given up on Thus Spoke Zarathrusta after 6 months of occasional attempting....

It's his most famous book but, amongst Nietzsche scholars, it's not highly rated.

Read Birth Of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals (and, maybe, Ecce Homo) first - they're short books but they take a while to read.

[waldo]

It's his most famous book but, amongst Nietzsche scholars, it's not highly rated.

Read Birth Of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals (and, maybe, Ecce Homo) first - they're short books but they take a while to read.

Agreed. I certainly wouldn't recommend Zarathustra as a way into Nietzsche - I don't think it is typical Nietzsche, at all. The Genealogy of Morals is probably the most celebrated among current philosophers, so that would be a better starting point. Personally, I would recommend Human, All Too Human - it offers a pretty good survey of the territory he would later go on to stake out and is composed of numbered paragraphs (some very short, some a bit longer). You don't have to understand it all to get something from it; you don't even have to read it in order.

About Nietzsche more generally.........Much of what he wrote was a reaction to the work of previous philosophers. His "attack" on these is conducted by means of witty aphorisms, ironic quips, muttered asides and so forth. He does not spell out his arguments and often doesn't even specify just who he is responding to. Sometimes, he gives his philosophical "enemies" offensive nicknames........Unless you have actually studied these other philosophers or are at least passingly familiar with the history of Western philosophy, you are inevitably going to be in the dark for much of the time. When I was at university (I studied philosophy and later taught it for a while), we were more or less discouraged from reading him on the ground that there wouldn't really be much point until we had first covered everyone else! That isn't to say that you can't get something valuable from him; only that you must adjust your expectations accordingly. Some areas will require specialist knowledge; others won't (such as his attack on Christianity or his views on Women).

He is, by the way, a very very funny writer and, for my money, the greatest non-fiction prose-writer of all time.

[muzzer]

I’m halfway through Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein. It’s exemplary and very helpful in tracing how he changed his mind, as well of course as conveying a real sense of quite how overwrought he was in general.