OT: What are you reading?
No, I had not heard. But Del Toro is a great choice. We need a good version after the disasters of The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996) and the 2002 RB version.
@JOKS
Where does that Pinocchio image come from?
My friend gave me her copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s Amrita, so I’m reading that now. I’m really enjoying it, it is winning me over with each page.
Meanwhile, I read Hitomi Kanehara’s Autofiction and have to strongly recommend people avoid it, if it comes under their radar. The Vintage paperback cover is aimed toward the Haruki Murakami crowd and the cover description makes it sound like it has a good concept (I suppose somewhere behind the hazy, horribly sensationalistic writing the concept is good), but it is one of the most outright awful books I’ve read in quite some time.
—PolarisDiB
ELVIS: not sure. just type ‘Stills from Del Toro Pinocchio’ into a search engine and you will find it ;-)
All right!
Took me a bit longer to get through Gambit that I’d imagined, but anyway, I’ll hopefully begin GDM today.
How was Knight’s Gambit? I have a copy (the same as you posted with that great cover) but I’ve only read the first story.
Your going to love Go Down, Moses. Freakin’ masterpiece!
Having only read two of his short stories previously, they seemed to be Faulkner-lite but overall I liked them quite a bit [plus a good ‘rest’ from the bleakness of Light in August,] I think Tomorrow may’ve been my favorite of the collection. Certainly appropriate to describe them as ‘mystery’ rather than ‘crime’ stories. The title story which closes the collection seemed a bit different from all the rest, as well as being significantly longer [I’d say novella length,] and I’ll definitely have to read it again at some point.
Can’t wait to get into it, been looking forward to it since I bought it a few weeks back. :)
I think I’ll pull down my copy of Go Down, Moses and read a few of the stories. It has been too long. Thanks for the capsule review of Knight’s Gambit.
No problem, hope you enjoy KG when you get to it.
Heart Of Darkness(Conrad)
St. Aubyn, “The Patrick Melrose Novels.”
thought i’d cheer myself up
^^one of Australia’s most well known authors from the past.
Coincidentally enough, there is a quote from Conrad at the back of this edition praising Lawson, which is funny considering i just finished Heart Of Darkness.
^ No cool nickname like Banjo Patterson, though.
^^hehhee. I was kind of hoping you would make a comment! Are you familiar with Lawson, or any of the ‘classic’ Australian authors?
^ I tried reading Patrick White once. Didn’t make it very far.
I’ve read a little bit of Patterson and Lawson, but not enough to say anything intelligent about them.
Reading now:
^ You’re on quite a Sallis binge, Matt. How is he?
Just the six Lew Griffin novels, Ari.
His is actually really kind of an interesting take on the whole detective novel genre, as very early on in the series he has his detective start writing detective novels that become fairly successful, and, eventually he’s actually teaching university lit classes, but gets drawn back into looking for missing persons and the like for old friends, etc. They’re ripe with literary allusions and such (Sallis, as you probably know, is a poet and has translated Raymond Queneau, as well as poems by Neruda, Lermontov,Pasternak and Pushkin, and ain’t afraid to use it). The Griffin novels are all pretty compact, too, so you can get throw one in about a day or two.
He’s a pretty good prose stylist from what I’ve read, though I’m not sure the Griffin novels are worth pursuing if you’re not into Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Himes (Sallis is a Himes aficionado, and has written a biography about him) . . . or some decedent from that lineage. But if you like that kind of thing, you shouldn’t miss these—he’s certainly loads better than most of the more popular writers of the genre today.
Oh, and I guess the other notable feature of the Griffin novels is that it’s one of the few prominent series with a white author writing about a black protagonist with some degree of credibility.
Still trying to decide if I want to try Drive after this (he has a sequel due out later this year).
The Recognitions by William Gaddis (956 pages long, read 100 pages)
The Man Wihout Qualities by Robert Musil (stuck on page 400)
The Conspiracy by Paul Nizan
The Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson by Louis Barfe
re-reading The Public Image by Muriel Spark
just finished The Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov
I’m reading among others “Ask and it is given”.
Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre!
I just finished reading Look Me in The Eyes: My life with Asperger’s. It’s an auto biography by John Elder Robinson the brother of Running with Scissors author Augusten Burroughs. Style wise it was well written and flowed quite well and some of his Aspergian traits were amusing. But he didn’t really offer a lot of insight in to Asperger’s or how to cope with it other than the standard approaches like joining support groups and getting counselling. And even then he only scratched at the surface and didn’t give a lot of details about his experiences in counselling or support groups. The thing I found the most interesting about Robinson’s story was that as an electronics wiz he worked as technician for the rock group Kiss when they were in their prime but again he only scratched at the surface and didn’t really go into much detail about what happened during his time with them. All in all he’s a led an interesting life but unfortunately he glossed over the things I wanted to hear more about and dwelled on the stuff I was less interested in.
Now that I’ve finished that I’m going to read The Departed screenplay and see if any further analysis can dig up something new.
Last one:
previously:
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Seth Grahame-Smith
currently:
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
Finished Amrita, enjoyed it a bit. I am probably going to set aside Japanese books for a little while simply because I’ve returned to my rented house and have discovered the gigantic pile of media waiting for me here, including books I own but haven’t read yet. So I’m reading Underworld by Don DeLillo right now. It is trash to White Noise’s signal dissonance.
—PolarisDiB
Joks
ELVIS: were you aware that Del Toro and G.Grimly are working on a dark stop motion version of Pinocchio? Apparently it’s going to be quite faithful to the original story. Could be interesting
While reading Pinocchio i figured this would be an ideal way to do it in today’s age. I imagined a dark, stop motion version to be reminiscent of that Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb from the mid 90’s