What are you reading?

[Lucky Strike]

James Ellroy - American Tabloid

Actually, Ive read it already but it was long time ago and its so bloody good! =)

[todestrieb]

This is such an amazingly fun, witty and surreal piece of literature. Like a twisted "grown-up" children's book filled with arcane secrets and fantasy. The publisher's description is on point: "Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland". Wicked stuff. Lewis Carroll would approve.

[Faust]

Finally got started on Bellow with Humboldt's Gift...20 pages in and I'm hooked. This book is reading my head.

EXACTLY!!! Couldn't have put it better myself. I should be receiving it this week in the mail.

[Faust]

Selected essays from On Literature by Umberto Eco. Ranging from mildly interesting to utterly forgettable to downright stupid. Of course the natural question is why I would try reading something like that in the first place. I don't think I have an answer to that.

Well, at least Humboldt's Gift arrived yesterday. Can't wait to start.

[Alesha]

Joris-Karl Huysmans "Against Nature"

[viv1984viv]

^^I've actually got his:The Double...on my shelf but never read it.
...good for beginners or?

The double is GREAT for beginners, one of his under-rated books in my opinion....

Bros K is awesome - its too much, just so so so much in it. Someone - I cant remember who - said everything of life is in Bros K.. so true.

Haven't read C&P - cant comment.

AKA*NYC - The room is his best book - its just raw raw raw..... yeah, that one affected me greatly...

Ive recently started a blog, trying to post a bit more but - yknow... Its called "notes from the vomitorium" mainly book reviews, take a look if you like, would be good to open up some dialogue, some guys with literary taste round here - anyone else post book reviews?

[deius]

Selected essays from On Literature by Umberto Eco. Ranging from mildly interesting to utterly forgettable to downright stupid. Of course the natural question is why I would try reading something like that in the first place. I don't think I have an answer to that.

Well, at least Humboldt's Gift arrived yesterday. Can't wait to start.

Actually I saw that at a book market yesterday but passed over it. Eco can be so infuriating considering how incredibly intelligent he is. At times his essays are too facetious and ironic when they should be definite. As for his novels, since Foucault's Pendulum he seems to have gotten worse.

250 pages of Monte Cristo left. The length is not necessarily a disadvantage. In some ways it makes the sequence of events more life-like in their inconsistent pace.

[Faust]

I've only read The Name of the Rose, and I liked it for what it is - intelligent entertainment. But this collection of pseudo-criticism was pretty bad.

Has anyone red New Art City by Jed Perl? Thinking to pick that up.

[Mail-Moth]

Kristin Ekman's The Forest of hours. A very good surprise. The centuries long travel of a wild spirit discovering mankind and thus language, thought, symbols, lies, hope... The first part, during which the protagonist is still a creature of the forest, something like an half dormant, half conscient form of life, is full of splendid - almost tactile - evocations of the forest.

Since I'm reading it in french I won't be able to quote some of those passages, but this is something that people here who like moths and mosses may look for.

[todestrieb]

^ That particular Ekman is quite a wonderful read. Rather like a modern -not in setting but perspective- rendition of a folkloric tale imbued with literal and allegorical allusions to disavowed baleful fringes of the human condition. The very disavowed fringes that cannot but make up that condition's essence, its unconcious, as it were - the stuff that we forget or repress. Not far from bygone literary grounds once explored by Rabelais or Gogol with additional nods to Norse mythology and a pagan-esque romanticisation of Scandinavian forests.

i love this book so much! i always think of her as the positive, humorous inverse of unica zurn..
i have just started reading a bit of claude cahun for the first time and she definitely fits into this triangulation somewhere too..

Buñuel said it rightly: "Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days".

Glad you brought up Zürn and Cahun. Their respective written works certainly deserve far more attention and interest than have been received so far. Throw in Joyce Mansour -whose work is in my mind emphatically the purest appraisal of l'amour fou in its most sensuous guise- into the mix for a curious quadrangulation and the world would cease to be the same. Never again.

[laughed]

I love Crime and Punishment. It was my first russian experience and it was mind blowing. I also love Tolstoy, Anna Karenina is great for newbies. Kafka etc.

[Fade to Black]

Has anyone red New Art City by Jed Perl? Thinking to pick that up.

the title sounds familiar...think it was mentioned in one essay included in Updike's Due Considerations anthology. I remember having a good laugh at the way he took apart the pretentiousness of the art criticisms, going to pull that book out again.

[todestrieb]

rené guénon : introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues

How do you find it? I used to be dismissive of him when I was younger partly because Bataille was somewhat derogatory towards him, and I loved Bataille back then -still do but in a different way-, and partly because most of his work struck me as a bunch of religious mystical bullshit. I know better now. His old-world naivety, for want of a better expression, is rather endearing particularly situated within the context of the intellectual landscape of his time. Quite a rarity even by today's standards.

[Mail-Moth]

René Guénon. I used to read him a lot in my early twenties, along with even less respectable figures of occultism like Evola.

I forgot almost everything about it. I only remember that, from an esoteric point of view, his writings about symbolism were a good read. La Crise du monde moderne was a rather naïve approach of history, I suppose, but I'm still surprised to see how prophetic I may find it even today, in my moments of delusion.

For the rest, yes, there are some amusing statements in his prose.

[Fade to Black]

thanks to merz posting that O R'lyeh image i was inspired to finally go check out some Lovecraft...read "The Call of Cthulhu" , Stephen King was right, the guy can't write dialogue but has an inexorable hold on "luxurious and Byzantine" prose.