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DOPPLER

i love 'naive. super' so much. it's pretty near perfect. i remember first reading it and immediately wanting to read more by erlend loe. i remember looking him up on the internet and seeing that he had other books in a whole load of different languages, none of them english. i cursed and considered buying a french edition of DOPPLER and trying to translate it myself, even though my french is not good. not good at all.

so finally an english translation of DOPPLER is available and i don't like the cover/blurb so much but the book itself is funny and thoughtful and forceful. it isn't as good as 'naive. super'. it doesn't have as much heart. it is slightly repetitive in places.

but i think we can all learn something from doppler. something like: think more and buy less. something like: be kind and don't shoot arrows at people.

one sentence that i like: 'We believe we know so much,but in reality we don't even know what planets are, and even less who our fathers are.' (p. 39)

#doppler #erlend loe #writing #lit #naive. super

NORTHLANDERS

i was pretty excited to read this, because VIKINGS.

and the art is great and suitably violent. and i like the modern dialogue and stuff.

BUT the pacing is all over the place. and there's not much plot, or characterisation, or motivation. which is a shame, because it makes the book seem a bit light. i would probably read the second volume, but have very low expectations.

one panel that i like:

#northlanders #brian wood #davide gianfelice #writing #comics #lit #vikings

BOSSYPANTS

obviously tina fey is hilarious. i need to finish watching 30 rock.

this is a funny book. i laughed (out loud) ~4 times each chapter, and did one of those weird muted breathe-out-heavily-but-don't-quite-snort laughs probably every page.

it's not an in depth bio or anything, but it covers interesting stuff, and funny stuff. eh. i don't know what else to say other than that tina fey writes funnily and intelligently about things that are funny and interesting.

the whole chapter about her honeymoon on a cruise ship was incredible.

plus that cover photo cracks me up.

five sentences that i like: 'There are fun activities hosted by our cruise director, who calls himself "Dan Dan the Party Man." He has recently replaced the previous cruise director, "Pete Pete the Party Meat," who replaced "Guy Guy the Funtimes Person," who had recently died of autoerotic asphyxiation. No, that part's not true! That's a joke-lie. I'm not going to lie to you in this story because I want you to know that the rest of it is true.' (p. 91)

#tina fey #bossypants #writing #lit #comedy #biography

FAST MACHINE

FAST MACHINE is short stories.

i'm always impressed by the way certain writers circle around the same ideas and themes and even words/phrases. repeating character names and repeating parts of scenes and so on. i think bolano does this a lot. and elizabeth ellen does this in these short stories.

which actually makes them a little tough to read one after the other - they need to be well spaced.

ellen writes violently and honestly. sometimes whilst reading i would grimace. the stories get inside of you and grab at you.

i have a lot of favourites from FAST MACHINE, but i tended to prefer the longer pieces. so: 'halfsies', 'trucker', 'xenia, ---', 'the loyalists', 'winter haven, florida, 1984', 'the last american woman' and so on and so on. all of these stories.

one sentence that i like: 'It might be true what they say, that you catch more bees with honey than you do vinegar, but what sort of masochist wants a fistful of bees anyhow?' (p. 299)

#fast machine #elizabeth ellen #writing #lit

BIRDS OF AMERICA

was going to be 'funny' and c+p in a list of birds native to america but then i got worried that lorrie moore would google herself and find this and be offended or think that i was mocking her somehow.

this book is full of short stories and i think i prefer it as a collection to 'like life'.

every one of the stories is moving and funny. like laugh out loud funny. and you laugh out loud and that makes the story and the people in it more heartbreaking. i didn't care so much for 'real estate' because the balance between funny/feeling seemed a little off, somehow.

'charades', about a family at christmas, was so brief and so perfectly observed. also topical, because it is christmas.

'dance in america' is also one of my favourites, and i listened to lorrie moore reading it via the new yorker podcast thing and it was wonderful.

the best story: 'people like that are the only people here: canonical babbling in peed onk'

one sentence that i like: 'Usually, no one in Therese's family expresses much genuine feeling anyway; everyone aims instead - though gamely! - for enactments.' (p. 96)

#lorrie moore #birds of america #writing #lit

THE WINTER GHOSTS

in a kind of half-hearted attempt to do something topical with the book group at the library, i selected this as the next read. because it's winter. because the book has 'winter' in the title.

it's a ghost story, obv, and it's pretty good. freddie watson, whose brother died in ww1, travels through france w/ his grief and then spends the night speaking with a lovely, slightly insubstantial girl in a small french village with a troubled past (everyone has a troubled past).

it's short, but is still too long and probably could be a short story. there are endless descriptions of the scenery and of freddie's emotional turmoil etc. and it's well written but there's too much of it.

i found the history the story is based on interesting, and maybe could have done with a little more info in the story/author's note, but at least it sent me in the direction of other books/wikipedia. that's always good.

three sentences that i like: 'Plain, clean, anonymous. The sheets were cold to the touch. We suited one another, the room and I.' (p. 18)

#kate mosse #the winter ghosts #writing #lit

ALONE IN BERLIN

goodness this is bleak.

it is about german people trying to live their lives under nazi rule. their thought processes and reactions to the nazis seem horrifically real/well-observed.

the two central characters, the quangels, are tragic and honourable and resist by writing postcards denouncing hitler and the nazis and then drop these postcards all over the city. at times their actions seem terribly pathetic, but they always resist.

the detective who tries to track down the postcard writers, escherich, is also very well written.

the closing court scene, and the quangels in prison and actually pretty much the whole book is heartbreaking.

the translation is good, but it leads to occasionally bizarre sentence structures/turns of phrase. but that is probably a good thing.

four sentences that i like: 'Anna Quangel had no time to awaken from the dream of her reunion with Otto. She is already reunited with him. She is where he is. Wherever that may be.' (p. 563)

#hans fallada #alone in berlin #writing #lit #translation #german resistance

OFFICE GIRL

i read some comments on the internet the other day and it seems opinion on 'the great perhaps' (which is on my bookshelf waiting to be read) are pretty divided. some people really like it, some people really hate it. which i suppose is the absolute best kind of response you would want for a book.

anyway so OFFICE GIRL is indie-film fiction or something, whatever that is. it's about odile and jack, two young arty twenty-whatevers who meet make art and like each other and that's it.

it's nice. it's a relationship story, a young-people story. i guess i identified with some stuff because i am young and i guess the target market for this kind of book.

the style is quick and witty and i wish i could write as smartly. i like and use myself the short chapters/sections w/ headings/subheadings/all-caps sentences that lead into the main text.

maybe a more even balance between jack and odile (it starts out with an odile-centric few chapters, but then the rest of the book is pretty jack-centric) would have been nice.

one sentence that i like: 'They kiss everywhere, again and again over the next few hours, so much so that it scares the cat.' (p. 216)

#joe meno #lit #office girl #writing

THE HISTORY OF LOVE

nicole krauss has a lovely writing style, all sharp and snappy where it needs to be and poetic and hot-of-heart in the right places.

THE HISTORY OF LOVE is about a writer, leo gursky, and the book he wrote that his friend took and how the book made its way into the hands of others and also about his son who doesn't know he exists. it's all quite sad and then also uplifting.

the best sections are from the pov of alma, a young girl who is trying to find out about leo's book. her sections are full of great stuff: like how to tell if something is edible or poisonous and not die. also her brother bird thinks he is maybe the messiah, i don't remember what he refers to himself as, but in the yiddish policemen's union it's referred to as a tzaddik ha'dor (i think) and it mean potential messiah.

THE HISTORY OF LOVE was good, although it seems like a couple of the plot elements it uses crop up in almost every contemporary novel i read.

two sentences that i like: 'To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realise that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.' (p. 45)

#nicole krauss #the history of love #writing #lit #books

FREEDOM

i started reading this because my mother said she had started reading it and it briefly seemed like a nice idea to be in a kind of unofficial book club with my mother. hahaha.

from the very first section franzen creates this whole real world thing with words. there are a lot of details and a lot of backstory and everything is fully-formed and great. the characters seem real, i guess. or they seem to be what i expect characters in a contemporary realist novel should be.

despite patty berglund being the character that franzen is most trying to reveal to us, i feel like she comes across a bit... disparate? idk. she has this huge section of autobiography, which is good, but then she behaves really oddly in other sections.

also lalitha seems a bit hard done by in terms of narrative focus. seems a bit one-note. also i accidentally read ahead and saw that she died, which was annoying and also the death seemed a bit of a trick to get the narrative whee franzen wanted it to go. which, you know, as the author he's pretty entitled to do, but it seemed a bit blatant. i like in realist novels where the author tries to hide themselves as much as possible.

there's a few pretty hilarious sections where franzen writes about youth culture and stuff and also about bright eyes.

^reading that it seems like i didn't like it, but i did, i did. probably more than the corrections.

one sentence that i like: 'At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they'll break my heart.' (p. 564)

#jonathan franzen #freedom #writing #lit #books #realism

MCSWEENEY'S 16

this issue is good because it came with a comb and i haven’t had a comb or combed my hair in a good long while.

robert coover’s ‘heart suit’, where the main body of the story can be shuffled and read in any order, is interesting in theory but not so much in practice. i wasn’t super sure what point he was making. seems like this idea is better used by others. see: b s johnson.

‘mr. nobody at all’ by ann beattie was actually great and had funny parts and sad parts and parts about the impossibility of the existence of a person. i think.

and the main issue was great, even though i’d read a fair few of the stories before. kevin moffett’s story is SO good and i used to try and copy the style in my own stories a lot. also adam levin’s story is awesome awesome awesome.

one sentence that i like: ‘As a kid I played all the made-up games with my sister, Sally, games I can’t recall now though I recall learning the rules, which varied from game to game, and now just to think about them, the rules, causes me, like it never used to, a certain quickness.’ (p. 86 (from kevin moffett’s ‘the medicine man’))

#mcsweeney's #writing #lit #comb #kevin moffett

WHO COULD THAT BE AT THIS HOUR?

being part the first of the series 'all the wrong questions'.

for some reason i never read 'a series of unfortunate events', but when we got this in at the library, the cover was so enticing and the art (by seth) so beguiling, that i couldn't help but take it home.

and it turns out that i made a wise decision, because WHO COULD THAT BE AT THIS HOUR? is wonderful. it's mysterious and populated with lovely nourish characters and settings. and i dearly love snicket's writing style; the defining of particular words; the irreverence; the occasional weighty sadness; etc.

the vfd, from what i've read, seems like a very good idea indeed.

one sentence that i like: 'The food at the Hemlock is too awful to eat, particularly the eggs, which are probably the worst eggs in the entire city, including those on exhibit at the Museum of Bad Breakfast, where visitors can learn just how badly eggs can be prepared.' (p. 2)

#who could that be at this hour?#all the wrong questions #lemony snicket #writing #lit

HHhH

by laurent binet, translated from the french by sam taylor.

it outlines operation anthropoid, the mission to kill reinhard(t) heydrich, the hangman of prague. but the book takes in whole swathes of the second world war, and i suppose all of history, as well as binet's qualms about fictionalising the events he is writing about.

i don't think i've read a book that deals with history quite like this. it seems to me to be the exact right way of writing historical fiction, and there is probably a manifesto to be drawn up based on this book.

two sentences that i like: 'If only I could have been inside his head at this precise instant, I am absolutely convinced I would have enough material to fill hundreds of pages. But I wasn't, and I don't have the faintest idea what he felt.' (chapter 218)

#HHhH #laurent binet #sam taylor #wriitng #lit #heydrich

THE THIRD REICH

as expected, this bolano novel is atmospheric and poetic and like being stood at the bottom of a deep pit, or perhaps like being under the shadow of something very large that you cannot see.

it follows udo berger, a champion board game player, as he holidays in spain. resorts and hotels and the sea and campgrounds are all recurring bolano tropes. and the whole thing feels like a detective novel with no crime to solve.

I SUPPOSE i could say something about the ineffectual individual VS the heavy hand of history, about the seething violence of everyday life, about war and how it is always waiting to come to the surface. etc. etc.

THE THIRD REICH is not perhaps quite as hazy or dream-like as some of the other short bolano novels. it is good. it is claustrophobic.

i thought about rewriting the whole novel and changing the references to 'the third reich' (a military board game) to 'settlers of catan', and retitling the book 'catan'. seems like that would be time well spent.

one sentence that i like: 'The I opened my eyes, trembling, and I saw the cloud, giant and dark, looming over the town and lumbering like an aircraft carrier toward the hills.' (p. 192)

#the third reich #roberto bolano #writing #lit

TREASURE ISLAND!!!

HAHAHA. this book is so funny and made me not quite laugh out loud, but do this strange thing where i expel air out of my nose pretty fast, and with great force. not quite a snort though. and believe me, i was expelling air through my nose A LOT, all the way through TREASURE ISLAND!!!.

OH by the way it's obviously by sara levine, not robert louis stevenson.

the unnamed narrator starts trying to sort her life out (i identified with the narrator because she, like me, is 25 and works in a library (albeit a pet library, rather than a book library), and feels like she has to SORT THINGS OUT, and also because she is acerbic and no-nonsense (i say no-nonsense but actually there's a whole lot of nonsense in the book, which is good, because it's the good kind of nonsense).

SO: unnamed narrator decides to live her life a little more in line with the values embodied by jim hawkins in treasure island (no exclamation marks), which are: BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, HORN-BLOWING. words to live your life by, for sure.

the only bit i didn't like was when she feeds little richard the overdose of painkillers in the lasagna and then suffocated him. seemed too far.

i'm not usually hugely into 'funny' books, i.e. books that have humour as their main aim, because i feel like everything else suffers for the funnies (see: the two sam lipsyte stories i read the other day, which made me laugh a little, but by the end i was just wrinkling my face in bemusement). BUT TREASURE ISLAND!!! didn't suffer from this, no not at all. HOORAY. *SOUND OF HORNS*

three sentences that i like: 'At first it seemed like a laugh. Then the laugh sort of fell down the stairs and became a wail. That intractable bird, that bird in whom I could barely wedge a useful phrase, had been studying my misery when I'd thought he was asleep.' (p. 116)

#treasure island!!!#sara levine #writing #lit #humour #HORN-BLOWING

JAILBIRD

JAILBIRD is kind of all over the place, like it was maybe written over a weekend and vonnegut didn’t look back at what he’d written even once. it’s funny and occasionally has something important to say, but it’s not really up to the standard of his other stuff. ohhhh well. onwards.

one sentence that i like: ‘We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.’ (p. 232)

#jailbird #kurt vonnegut #writing #lit

THE THOUGHTS AND HAPPENINGS OF WILFRED PRICE PURVEYOR OF SUPERIOR FUNERALS

this is absolutely not my usual kind of book. i had to read it for the book group at the library. i don't want to be mean about it, but it's kind of a struggle to find good things to say about it.

the plot is pretty basic and slow moving and actually the inciting event is just really hard to believe. wilfred accidentally asks grace to marry him. ACCIDENTALLY. how does that happen? that doesn't happen, does it? eh. so i didn't believe that, at all. and then turns out grace is pregnant, but not by wilfred, and grace's dad kinda forces them into marriage and wilfred says NOTHING about not even having had sex with grace, just shrugs his way into a marriage. crazy.

plus i wasn't really a huge fan of the way grace is treated as a character. the way she's just an inconvenience for wilfred, an obstacle between him and flora. who he apparently loves deeply, despite exchanging only around a page of dialogue with. rrrr.

THAT SAID there are some nice descriptions of the sea/beach/old forest thing.

one sentence that i'm not sure even means anything: 'He had met Flora Myffanwy and he had become, to his own mind, through recent experiences and something newly forged within him, something he couldn't articulate but that he could best describe as 'a purveyor of superior funerals'.' (p. 220)

#the thoughts and happenings of wilfred price purveyor of superior funerals #wendy jones #lit #writing #book group

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