Latest book received

[PeteMurray]

There isn't any German version, this book has not been translated to German, it's US one I've ordered and showed, just another edition.
Chabon is a milestone for me, after reading his books, especially "The mysteries of Pittsburgh" I've started reading much more of American modern literature.

Interesting. Probably the publisher was told their original cover sucked and needed to be redone.

Chabon is kind of unique in the American literature scene. He's writing sort of highbrow pulp. I can't really get fired up about much of the blockbuster stuff of late, mostly because it either seems to be fraudulent "biographies" about people living horrified and depraved childhoods, cookie-cutter women's mysteries, or Chuck Pahuliak's testosterone-scented shock schlock.

[Aaron]

I recently picked up the first two Inspector Montalbano books (The Shape of Water and the Terra-Cotta Dog) by Andrea Camilleri and I'm firmly hooked. Camilleri is sort of a cross between Sciascia and Chandler. Montalbano is an honest cop, but one who can bend the rules when necessary. No gratuitous sex, but there is some "salty" language. A nice bonus for me is that Montalbano is a bit of a foodie, so I get to read about and fondly remember some great Sicilian cuisine.

I have Urban's Fusilier on the way, but I'm not sure I'm ready to leave sunny Sicily for the battlefields of the AWI yet...

[Vanvlak]

I recently picked up the first two Inspector Montalbano books (The Shape of Water and the Terra-Cotta Dog) by Andrea Camilleri and I'm firmly hooked. Camilleri is sort of a cross between Sciascia and Chandler. Montalbano is an honest cop, but one who can bend the rules when necessary. No gratuitous sex, but there is some "salty" language. A nice bonus for me is that Montalbano is a bit of a foodie, so I get to read about and fondly remember some great Sicilian cuisine.

I have Urban's Fusilier on the way, but I'm not sure I'm ready to leave sunny Sicily for the battlefields of the AWI yet...

Really? They'd shown an Italian TV series based on the books, and that looked good although I didn't follow it. I suppose he likes 'arancini' in the books as well?
Incidentally, Sicilian food is too good to merely remember. Best in the world, and it's all just North of us.....

By the way - book thread, model thread, film thread - how about food you're eating thread? With place for a good wine too...

[Aaron]

He hasn't eaten any arancini yet. Just thinking about them makes my mouth water though. He lives in a fictional town on the southwest coast, so he eats a lot of seafood. Sadly I live too far inland to enjoy fresh octopus year round.

My wife's family are all from Italy and many of the men were chefs, but they are all from the north (Lucca / Montecattini). They are all great cooks (my mother-in-laws bracciole is good enough to kill for!) , but they don't do much with seafood or eggplant (melanzane?)  and when we were in Sicily my wife had never heard of most of the food on offer. It didn't stop me from eating anything put in front of me though!

[Vanvlak]

He hasn't eaten any arancini yet. Just thinking about them makes my mouth water though. He lives in a fictional town on the southwest coast, so he eats a lot of seafood. Sadly I live too far inland to enjoy fresh octopus year round.

My wife's family are all from Italy and many of the men were chefs, but they are all from the north (Lucca / Montecattini). They are all great cooks (my mother-in-laws bracciole is good enough to kill for!) , but they don't do much with seafood or eggplant (melanzane?)  and when we were in Sicily my wife had never heard of most of the food on offer. It didn't stop me from eating anything put in front of me though!

Melanzane is correct. Sicily has grand food - but their sweets are best I think - biscotti di mandorla and granita al limone and the chocolate of Modica.... mmmh!
When in Modica last January we saw someone selling 'Arancini del Commissario Montalbano' - didn't try them though.
I've never been to Lucca, but I guess I will eventualy - I have a soft spot for Italy.

[Aaron]

As do I. My wife's uncle and his family are in Montecattini. When we visited in 2001 they treated us to quite a feast.

Speaking as someone with a horrible weakness for sweets I have to agree with you again on Sicily. It is probably a good think I don't live there or I would have diabetes by now.

My real passion is fresh figs. Sadly they were not in season on my two trips. My mother-in-law has a beautiful white fig tree lovingly brought over from Italy decades ago. With care we nurse it through our winters and are usually handsomely rewarded with a lovely crop (and occasionally two in a good year). I have three cuttings I will plant outside this year. If they do well I should be able to make myself truly sick for years to come  :: .

[Vanvlak]

Sounds good Aaron - we get figs every summer here, and I like them too - although I prefer prickly pears - mmm!
Er - back on topic - am reading Umberto Eco's 'Mouse or Rat? Translation as negotiation.
Nothing to do with modelling, a lot to do with communication, which is essential to gaming! Grand book.

[Prof.Witchheimer]

Chabon is kind of unique in the American literature scene. He's writing sort of highbrow pulp. I can't really get fired up about much of the blockbuster stuff of late, mostly because it either seems to be fraudulent "biographies" about people living horrified and depraved childhoods, cookie-cutter women's mysteries, or Chuck Pahuliak's testosterone-scented shock schlock.

Did you read "The Final Solution"? Set in 1944 and around an 89-year-old detective (he's actually the famous Sherlock Holmes).. Really great fun! The only CHabon-disappointment for me was his Sommerland, a sort of Baseball-Fairytale. Sorry to all our American friends, but baseball isnt' my cup of tea at all, generelly i don't like any sort of sport-based novels.
I'm not in the American literary blockbuster scene and have no idea what's going on there but you guys have lots of phantastic writers there like Paul Auster, Jonathan Frantzen, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides (though he lives in Berlin, me thinks?) and lots more; apart from that you have all that Creative Writing schools, I wonder why you all don't write books

[PeteMurray]

Did you read "The Final Solution"? Set in 1944 and around an 89-year-old detective (he's actually the famous Sherlock Holmes).. Really great fun! The only CHabon-disappointment for me was his Sommerland, a sort of Baseball-Fairytale. Sorry to all our American friends, but baseball isnt' my cup of tea at all, generelly i don't like any sort of sport-based novels.
I'm not in the American literary blockbuster scene and have no idea what's going on there but you guys have lots of phantastic writers there like Paul Auster, Jonathan Frantzen, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides (though he lives in Berlin, me thinks?) and lots more; apart from that you have all that Creative Writing schools, I wonder why you all don't write books

Don't go into the literary blockbuster scene. It's horrible. McSweeny's magazine is among the best fresh stuff of late, and it's all short pieces, edited by the inestimable Dave Eggers (author of the excellent A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) Although Eggers deserves a small measure of blame for the glut of Overcoming My Childhood memoirs on the market, his is both fresher and more sincere and optimistic than most of the later stuff.

My two favorite Americans, though, are E. B. White and James Thurber. I'll agree with the rest of your list, possibly with the exception of Franzen who rubs me the wrong way. If you'll let me substitute Tom Wolfe instead, I think I would agree wholeheartedly. I also think Hunter S. Thompson and H. L. Mencken are repulsive people who happen to have written some of the most brilliant and incisive material on America that will ever be done. Plus both of them can turn sentences that are polished jewels of language.

Our Creative Writing schools are not very good at turning out readable writers. They are good at turning out people who can create highly referential and stylized work, usually about topics and characters that have no relation to life as I live it. But what do I know? I don't jet off to Prague to meet Belorussian runaway heroin addicts, nor have I secretly been fascinated and repulsed by some of the more deranged sexual practices of the human species.

I think the best American writers have come out of journalism, and with the decline of the newspapers we've lost a great and fertile ground for essayists and short-story writers. Oddly, I think that is why McSweeny's magazine works - the people writing it are of the web generation and know how to get straight to the point at hand.

Edit: I just caught your mention of Pynchon. If you are reading Pynchon, I take off my hat to you. I find reading Pynchon to be like swimming with a dolphin: Both of you are swimming; the dolphin is doing it better and for longer and with a deeper understanding and effortless execution than you will ever be able to do.

And I'm reading him in English! I can't even imagine what it's like to have to translate him into German or Russian, or whichever language you prefer to think in.

Reading Umberto Eco is like swimming with a sperm whale. All of the above is true, except the whale is HUGE and VERY DANGEROUS and ancient, and will probably turn and dive into inky blackness you can't even comprehend, to do battle with unseen krakens.

[Le matou rouge]

I realy like like your swimming parallels, but I have to disagree with you about Frantzen. I know he's famous because of "The Corrections", but I had only read "The Twenty-Seventh City". It is his first novel, wrote in 1988, ant it is a very, very impressive book about our depressive way of life in modern cities, the democracy dead end and a twist of anticipation about the importance of terrorism today.

About name dropping, one of my last american "coup-de-coeur" is Rick Bass : his short stories are better than his (last) big novels, and his first book "Oil Notes" is incredible about obsession.

meow,
Matt

[Prof.Witchheimer]

Pete, I have to admit there are some childhood memoire or memoire-like books I really like, most of them the Mary Karr’s “The Liars' Club” and the sequel “Cherry”, though the sequel is only just a sequel. Granted, Mary Karr hadnt a really happy childhood, but who would write a book about a cheerfull childhood? You know the Tolstoj’s “Anna Karenina” famous beginning: “All happy families are happy in the same way, but no two unhappy families are alike” . That’s what I mean. Nobody likes to know something about another happy child but everybody would like to know what sort of hell the writer had to go through. Of course, I exaggerate a bit but there’s a grain of truth in it, isn’t it?

I don’t know E. B. White, James Thurber, Hunter S. Thompson and H. L. Menckenand and to be honest never heard of them, to my shame. But I will give them a try soon. Any recommendations on them?

J.Franzen…I have two of his books, “The twenty-seventh city” and “The Corrections”. I didn’t like “The 27th city” and I loved “The Corrections”, a gigantic work of language power. I couldn’t resist putting in the beginning of “The Corrections” here. One day I stood in my bookstore, opened a brand-new “The Corrections” and read the first two paragraphs. After that I thought, that’s one of the best beginnings of a book I ever read:

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat
Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in that great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table listening in vain for Enid.

Maybe that’s just me but I find it’s really Literature.

Tom Wolfe. Errr….What shall I say…Of course, I’ve read his “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and surely it’s a great book. This sort of great books that everybody knows and reads and there is a Hollywood movie on it with a Hollywood star (Tom Hanks?). So one day I said to myself, Alex, this book is already a classic one, everybody speaks of it, you have to read it, no matter whether you like all the society satires or not. I was going to read it and now I’m not able to say if I liked it. Actually I had to persuade myself to read it to the end. Maybe because it is just this sort of a society satire. Btw, satire, 27th city of Franzen is also coming from that direction. Just not my cup of tea.


Pynchon…I’ve read it in German and I feel it the same way you do. I’ve understand his short stories to some extent, the reading of his books like “V” (one of “easy” or maybe the “easiest” one) was a bit like walking in the fog, you know it’s something here and you can smell and touch it but you can’t understand it at all. I cherish the hope that one day I’ll be able to “swim like a dolphin” Btw, a similar feeling I had during reading Nabokov’s “Ada”.

I’ve read most of these American writers in German, my English was just too poor. Actually it’s still really poor. But since approximately one year I’ve started reading of the English-language books and in the meantime I’m able to enjoy it and don’t need to reach for a dictionary every 30 seconds…

Reading the Russians and in Russian is a special enjoyment. I’m really happy I’m able to do it.  In the Brautigan’s “”A Confederate General from Big Sur”, the protagonist Lee Mellon says “A man needs the proper atmosphere to read the Russians”. Exactly my thought, it’s nothing you should read before sleeping.

[Le matou rouge]

Alright ! First page then :

In the fall of 1985, my twenty seventh year, I read in a work by the poet-novelist Jim Harrison a quote from Kafka about “freeing the frozen sea within us.”
I know how to find oil, but I’m a horrible speaker: I couldn’t sell men’s magazines on a troopship. And I don’t know if I can even write well enough to explain why oil is found in some places and not in others. I get frustrated. It seems sometimes that the best way to communicate the presence of oil – or perhaps of anything – is to revert to guttural ughs and growls, and just go out and, by damn, sink a hole in the ground, shove the pipe down there deep enough, until oil begins to flow up out of it, with its rich smell of hiddenness and with the energy of discovery. And then to point to it: to say, There it is. Always, I want to do that. I want biceps to sheen, I want tractor-trailers to groan, bringing materials in and taking oil out, and drilling breaks to squeal. (You’re drilling through a hard formation, bearing down, then the drill bit pierces a softer formation, one that is more capable of storing oil. The pipe shifts, sinking down into this softer formation, going faster, and it make a barking, torquing, squealing sound. It sounds exactly like beagles…)
I want to stamp on the ground hard enough to make that oil come out. I want to skip legalities, permits, red tape, and other obstacles.
Sometimes I feel almost out of control, and that what is down there is between the oil and me. I want to go immediately and straight to what matters: getting that oil.
My father calls me Animal. I was a fence post in the third-grade play. I bump into things often, and frequently run over others. But I know where oil is, and I want to try to explain to you what it feels like, how it is, to know this.
I just do not know how to do it –show you- because it is three dimensional, or even beyond. It is future, undrilled, and I am present, knowing. I don’t know yet, without drilling, how to bridge that gap.
It is the frozen sea within me.
___________
I know how to find oil.


And nothing compare to "The Dolphins"  :love:  :



meow,
Matt

[PeteMurray]

For White or Thurber just pick up any book of essays - you should be able to get some inexpensive ones and they'll give you a taste for whether you like them or not. I like them both for different reasons. Thurber writes well about people, White writes well about places and moods.

Mencken has passed into public domain and so quite a bit of his stuff is available online. You might want to Google him and see what comes up. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is his most famous work, but I prefer "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," which I think is his more pithy satire.

Wolfe's Magnum Opus is "The Right Stuff," and I actually think you could read it in English without reaching for your dictionary too much. The language is colloquial but not horribly so. Maybe I should give Franzen another chance.

I envy your ability to read Russian authors in Russian! Tolstoy and Dosdoyevsky are beautiful enough in English translation. But they're hard work, not for casual reading.

[Westfalia Chris]

Was given this nice piece as an Easter present by my parents:



It´s a reprint of a 19th century book on the Prussian Army. There´s a text part that recounts the history of said army from the early 17th to the late 19th century, focussing on the exploits in the wars of 1866 and 1871, including quite a number of very nice period colour plates.

Hmmm, gaming the franco-prussian war, possibly with a VSF slant, is getting more and more attractive...  

[Malamute]

Hmmm, gaming the franco-prussian war, possibly with a VSF slant, is getting more and more attractive...  :p

Welcome to the club of VSF Britain invaded 1881 by those dastardly Prussians. :wink:  ::