Finally finished The Sound and the Fury -- exhausting, depressing, and amazing. Faulkner does stream-of-consciousness as well as Woolf (which in my book is better than Joyce who gets all the credit for it). Poking around Mt. TBR to find something lighter...
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
I re-read that a few months ago, and yeah....agree with your assessment. I tend to do "author binges," and Faulkner was a binge of min several years back. But the Snopes books remain unread, and I will get those eventually. Mount Nightstand is still quite a summit, over here....Originally Posted by Sturgeon's Lawyer
"And this is the chorus.....or perhaps it's a bridge...."
Would that it were only a nightstand...
If anyone cares to read my review of Sound, it's on my blog, where I review pretty much everything I read..
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
I'm about half-way through Island. Very quick reading. Lots of description of scantily clad castaways from a 19-year-old boy's point of view. Ginger and Mary Ann were never like this. Thanks, Jed, for the recommend and rekindling my interest. I've got a pile of Laymon books that have been sitting around for years. Time to dust them off and dive in. Wow, is he good! No long and slow build up. The mayhem starts immediately.
She-who-must-be-obeyed has never really cared for my taste in books; but, now she's on her second Laymon (The Beast House; her first was The Cellar). Before this binge, she read all the Joe Lansdale I could find for her.
Lou
Looking forward to my day in court.
Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain (Dutch translation)
Hard to read, but very interesting.
Finished "The Beast House." While I really enjoyed reading it, it wasn't nearly as good as "The Cellar." The third in the series, "Midnight in The Beast House," is coming in the mail today, so I have to decide between reading that next (probably!), or reading another Laymon (I also have "Body Rides" and "The Lake" to choose from).Just finished Richard Laymon's "Island," which was smutty (weird smutty) but a lot of fun. Now it's on to his "The Beast House." Yes, Lou, I've already read "The Cellar."
Congratulations! If she's reading those, she can no longer complain about that. If she reads Island she'll probably think "The Professor and Mr. Howell were never like this!"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...allan-conquest
Some excellent recommendations, above & below the line. Nina Allan herself is a fine writer, & I'm greatly looking forward to her new book, Conquest.
I see you say over on your blog, in slighgtly stronger terms than you said above:
I'm happy for you to say that you prefer the way Faulkner & Woolf write stream of consciousness. But I think it's wrong to say that they "handle it better" than Joyce. Differently - definitely. But I actually think they're trying to do different things.Faulkner handles stream of consciousness, in my opinion, as well as Virginia Woolf -- which is to say, rather better than James Joyce.
I think Woolf & Faulkner are both closer to free indirect style - they're depicting what, in earlier novels, a narrator would write that they were "thinking". It's not really a depiction of their consciousness as such (indeed, you show how & why this is the case in what you write about Benjy). By contrast, Joyce seeks, certainly in the earlier of the Bloom chapters, to depict more or less exactly what might be the flow of experiences - thoughts, smells, sounds, feelings [rendered lingusitically] - as they flow through Bloom's consciousness, in all their random & not-so-random richness & diffuseness & tumult.
I admire Faulkner (though I can't bear Woolf - I can't get beyond her vile snobbery) - but I think Joyce is a writing on a more or less wholly different plane. And, certainly, what he's tried to do in representing Bloom's stream of consciousness is almost incomparable with what Faulkner (& Woolf especially) are doing.
H'mmm. My favorite Joyces are the early ones (Dubliners and the Portrait) and the Wake (though I have never read that one straight through; I dip into it). I did finish Ulysses once, and, while it has some wonderful parts, I thought the whole was less than their sum. Each chapter is like a gem, but I find that their setting doesn't work for me, so to speak.
Still on my journey through Woolf. Just beginning to discover Faulkner -- I read Light in August not too long ago, and have a couple of others on Mt Tsundoku.
I think the next thing I will read is Lemony Snicket's "Unauthorized Autobiography." I suspect it will be light and joyful.
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Ah, yes, that's a fascinating take - I agree, it's not a book that easily coheres into a novelistic whole, especially not on first reading (not least, because each chapter's exercise in style disrupts continuity of, for want of a better phrase, narrative voice).
I think that, in this, the framework of The Odyssey helps a lot. Also, of course, the fact of it being a *day*.
For better or worse, I think it's a book that virtually all new readers will need some help with (the recent Cambridge centenary ediition is stunning, by the way).
That said, it's the single book I reread (parts of) most often. Which makes me realise I no longer experience it as a sort of linear progression, but more like a sort of (circular?) integral whole - as if each part can be read as metonymically representating the whole, as if from a different perspective.
Loved to read that one when it was published in 2007.
Interesting to see the movie on his life years after that: https://www.oliversacksdoc.com/
I've once seen him in an interview with Adriaan van Dis, I think.
Roger Deakin: Notes From Walnut Tree Farm
'I would advise stilts for the quagmires"
Finished this one, and quickly moved on to John Sandford's The Investigator, the first in his new Letty Davenport series. For those who read Sandford, yes, Letty is Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter.
I'll get back to the Perry Masons, but Sandford's writing is like a pair of comfortable slippers for me.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life In Music-Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards
For any who don't know:Henry Threadgill is a "Jazz"/new music saxophonist/flutist,composer,bandleader.
"please do not understand me too quickly"-andre gide
Ooooooh, I so want to read that book about Threadgill. Met him, once, here in SF, and saw Very Very Circus. Mind blowing.
"And this is the chorus.....or perhaps it's a bridge...."
To be clear, I didn't actively dislike Ulysses; I merely failed to find it as wonderful as the earlier and later books.
Yes, a guide is helpful. I bounced off Ulysses the first time I tried, and found two things very helpful: an unabridged dictionary (where I bounced that first time was at "ineluctable modality of the visible;" I knew what the individual words mean, but I just could not make them cohere into meaning together) and Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses, which blathers a bit but was written under Joyce's supervision, and contains, among other things, a helpful chart of the patterns (style or "technic," color, body part, chapter of The Odyssey, etc.) associated with each chapter.
What's "stunning" about the new(ish) Cambridge edition? Is it annotated or something?
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Oh, it's beautiful. It's vinyl lp sized, for a start! The text is a reproduction of the first edition, but slightly enlarged on the page, with lovely big margins. Text is keyed the the Gabler edition, & there is light footnoting for textual detail.What's "stunning" about the new(ish) Cambridge edition? Is it annotated or something?
There's an excellent intro, & then each chapter is preceded by an intro by a different scholar, "situating" the chapter. The emphasis is on helping the reader to make their own way, rather than explanation or scholarly debate.
Finally, these chapter intros are littered with contemporary photos - of Dublin scenes named in the novel.
The whole edition is geared towards making the novel accessibly readable, for the first time reader but also for the returning reader. It's a gorgeous object in itself, but also a genuine pleasure to read.
^^^ Sounds tasty.
>goes and looks at Amazon<
Tempting ... but I could buy a whole lot of books I haven't read before for that much money. Maybe if I find a decent used copy somewhere...
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
You need to channel your inner Jed here!!!
Or inner Jedi.
Read the first Jim Butcher's "Codex Alera" book - "Furies of Calderon" and truthfully didn't think very much of it, though the second half did get better.
Now I am rushing through the second book "Academ's Fury" and can't believe how good it is. About 50 pages to go.
Hoping the third book is this good.
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A gentleman is defined as someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't.
^^^ I love the Dresden Files books, but have yet to pull the trigger on any of Butcher's other series...
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
I could have sworn I already posted about this, but I must have dreamt it. Anyway, I decided to go for Body Rides, which is a somewhat different genre than the few of his I've now read. So far, it's really good!
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