Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?

Successor to Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

Aka Tolstoy-Tolstoy Him Sad

Finally finished Nixonland at the start of the month, and new job has given me a chance to read B.S. Johnson's See the Old Lady Decently, so that.

Was thinking I might be approaching my fill of fiction (for a while), when Ashbery died and some surprisingly (given prev. lazy skimming/stoned staring of yore) engaging, refeshing JA poems appeared on Twitter---which of his books should I get? (Maybe not Three Poems for now, that's the one I was staring at back in the 70s.)

― dow, Saturday, September 23, 2017 2:33 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Start with Houseboat Days.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:09 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, Houseboat Days, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Rivers and Mountains, and The Double Dream of Spring are probably the most compelling books to start with.

― one way street, Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:27 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Will get, thanks! Now I'm wondering about Frank O'Hara.

― dow, Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:39 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Start with Lunch Poems!

― one way street, Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:51 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A Wave too. He repeats himself something fierce, though, so his collections tend to bore me after a while -- as I learned this week when I checked Can You Hear, Bird? out of the library. You can start anywhere!

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, September 23, 2017 4:18 PM

Thanks again! Suspected as much; he always seemed a bit self-delighted, but understandably so. I'll at least try Lunch Poems, A Wave, and maybe the one Don Draper enjoyed, Meditations In An Emergency.

Sante on Ashbery, with his friends and colleagues:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/12/john-ashbery-1927-2017/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Dunkirk%20the%20Iliad%20John%20Ashbery&utm_content=NYR%20Dunkirk%20the%20Iliad%20John%20Ashbery+CID_eca46ddfb844fef709f70d7083254ac6&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=John%20Ashbery%2019272017

He studied Wallace Stevens with F.O. Matthiessen and Proust with Harry Levin, began making collages, and, six weeks before graduating, met Frank O’Hara. Each felt to the other like a long-lost twin.

"The Sea Change" Elizabeth Jane Howard. This started off so well that for the first 80 or so pages I thought I'd stumbled across something wonderful, but it tailed off badly. Not one of her better ones.

"Concluding" Henry Green. My third novel by Green and the one I've enjoyed most, but still not enough to turn me into a wholehearted fan tbh.

"A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years" Carolyn Abbate, Roger Parker. I've been dipping into this and have read about 3/4 of it. The best book I've read about opera: authoritative but not stuffy, insightful, opinionated at times but not hobby-horsey and with none of the de haut en bas tone you often get in books about opera.

Allende. La biografía - Mario Amorós.

Just started on Light in August, which will be my first Faulkner.

Human Voices. Beautiful - just as great as The Bookshop.

Simak's "City", which becomes more amazing the further into it I get
Lavie Tidhar's "Central Station" which is also turning out to be better than I expected at the outset

Ford Madox Ford - Parade's End.

i have a copy of Light in August i was supposed to read in lolcollege

I'm also starting City!

I read Nathan Englander's new one (Dinner at the Center of the Earth) and really enjoyed it, even if some of the spy schemes are totally ridiculous. I was hoping it would make me want to do some research into Israeli/Palestinian history and was not disappointed.

Also read Orhan Pamuk's new one and it really lost me after the initial childhood section, got very repetitive and heavy-handed with the themes.

finished reading bely's the silver dove & have now started on mr weston's good wine by tf powys

Artful, Ali Smith

finished OLD GORIOT and nicola barker's DARKMANS: i shd write a note abt both of them (actually i shd reread DARKMANS)

still not quite through the very short ballad of peckham rye: i suspect reading a few pages it last thing at night every night is a bit contra-indicated -- it's deceptive and requires closer concentration than i'm giving it (this may seem nuts to those familiar with it): anyway i think i've grasped the basic plot motor and my plan is to finish and immediately re-read how this is handled while keeping track of the various characters and how muriel is subtly sketching them (which i haven't quite managed this time through)

(lol pynchon NO PROBLEM; half a dozen 50s peckhamites and i am LOOOOST)

meanwhile i started AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, which i never yet read (bafflingly given my love of flann o'brien) and marlon james's OF SEVEN KILLINGS

reading "there are little kingdoms" by kevin barry - i just started a creative writing ma and it's on the syllabus. i prob should have read him before, i've read many of his peers. like a lot of this generation of irish writers there's some stories i absolutely love, and a few i don't, plus the slight sense of irritation at times, certain uses of language that feel like performative irishness. i've noticed a lot of the young irish writers, presumably copying each other, deploy the adjective in unconventional places and it's kind of twee and irritating to me. like in one story of barry's "his costume daily was..." - as a one-off it's fine but then i started to notice it over and over, something about it bothers me deeply - it's like the literary form of listening to irish radio and suddenly a host who grew up in a satellite of dublin like kildare is pronouncing "sunday roast" as "sunday roasht".

also with young irish writers, indie, just a general sense of indie views and viewpoints. bad characterisation of types of people they are bound to dislike. i'm not claiming i can do any better or am not susceptible to the same pitfalls though and kevin barry is definitely a really great writer. i'm looking forward to us covering this in class and everyone delighting in the lyrical magic of the bogman irish and i can say "nobody actually speaks like that, you've been duped"

when i dabble with writing i do find my vernacular to be a big difficulty. it's easy to over egg the pudding, and standard english feels unnatural and stifling

I'm also starting City!

curious to hear what you make of it. there are way more left turns in the narrative than I was expecting.

Standard English feels natural to me, and I'd rather have my characters clearly communicate what they need to than have them transform into broad slapstick stereotypes. Of course, what I aim for in my writing is not what everybody else does - when vernacular is done well it's excellent to read, I just don't necessarily see it fitting in to the type of work I'm writing now.

Btw LG my bro told me you were doing a Creative Writing MA as I'm hoping to get onto one next year (like most of my plans this totally might not happen, though). How are you finding it in general?

i think when i say standard english feels unnatural and stifling it's mainly because my interior monologue is in a strong glasgwegian vernacular a la a james kelman novel and i live in north america and so spend every day of my life speaking in a forced and uncomfortable standard north american english with a softened accent and altered vowels and writing is a pleasurable hobby so i want to be able to let my freak flag fly when I'm doing it

it's not that i don't like vernacular - i actually do for sure. it's not really how i want to write, though if i am writing about a character then i'd want them to speak authentically. it's more just over-egged vernacular bothers me, i mean in finished, massively critically acclaimed books. i prob wouldn't censor yourself in any way at the beginning - p much all writing is awful forever until a 100 edits make you think "hmm i don't despise every part of this". not that i'm in a huge position of experience.

Btw LG my bro told me you were doing a Creative Writing MA as I'm hoping to get onto one next year (like most of my plans this totally might not happen, though). How are you finding it in general?

yeah he mentioned this - i just did orientation this week so not even had a lecture yet but so far i feel good about it, it already feels like being in safe hands, in a way just getting in feels good, but also having a syllabus and a general plan. feel free to mail if you want any info once i'm more up and running.

I've moved on to the third and final fat volume of Heimito von Doderer's "The Demons". I think it might be really, amazingly good but I might need to read it again to be sure and I have no idea when I'll be slowly tackling the 1300 or so pages again. If one of you could have a quick run through it and let me know that would be great.

Andre Aciman - Harvard Square
Marianne Moore - Observations

I saw a copy of "Demons" last time I was at skoob and...I just couldn't #growingUp

'Course you can.

I have a few pages left in Courtesans and Fishcakes. It has been an interesting (for me, at least) excursion, although it affects to be promoting a somewhat controversial perspective on these aspects of the culture of classical Athens while merely stating the broad conclusions any casual reader of classical literature and history would arrive at by taking the most obvious route.

Apparently Foucault has promoted some opinions contrary to those given here, and such is his prestige in academe that openly disagreeing with Foucault's theories requires taking a defensive posture. This leads the author into some tedious restatements of his own views that weaken the book simply by making it more repetitive than it needed to be.

Anyway, this book introduced me to a form of gambling popular in Athens that I hadn't encountered before: quail-tapping. It involved drawing a circle on the ground, placing a quail within the circle, tapping it on the head, and the wagers were won or lost depending on whether the quail retreated or stood its ground. I swear this is the exact description of this pastime, as given by a respectable classical scholar.

Tim - yeah probably. Just reflecting on a year in which I've read little.

Primo Levi - Ist das ein Mensch?
Apparently Levi said that his year in Auschwitz was in colour whereas the rest of his life was in black and white. His meticulous plain description of the life in the concentration camp is quite unbelievable. There is hardly any hatred in his words. I am glad I came around to reading this classic.

brilliant book.

Aye, it's extraordinary.

Reading Sarah Moss's Names for the Sea. It's about a year spent in Iceland with her family, during which she worked at the university in Reykjavik. Ach, I dunno. It's beautifully constructed and she wears her learning lightly, but it's the voice of privilege and I find myself bristling at her moaning and wanting her to actually *do* something with her time. (She's constrained by having her family with her, yes, and I've lived abroad in similar circumstances (minus the family) and understand the paralysis to a certain extent, but still.) I've been glancing at Auden's Letters from Iceland as well, and lord knows his is the voice of privilege as well, but Auden is doing, doing - it's a diary of movement; Moss's is a diary of stasis.

Meant to bring up Kevin Barry myself after reading Beatlebone, imagining John Lennon's late 70s visit to his island off the west of Ireland, while on holiday - best novel I've read in ages. Intrigued to know if Deems has read it - largely set around Achill afaict. Had tried City of Bohane a few years ago but found the oirish noir-ish prose a bit overipe.

Also read Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn - surprised there hasn't been talk of it round here - a very ILxy novel, imagining Jesse Garon Presley materialising as a gonzoid rock critic at Warhol's Factory in the late 60s, and the twin towers reappearing in the South Dakota badlands sometime in the 21s century. Unfortunately even as a longstanding Erickson fan, I thought it was rubbish.

found the oirish noir-ish prose a bit overipe.

yeah this is sort of my criticism upthread. as i say tho when he's good he is amazing - lots of people influenced by him in ireland and not really as good. i might try beatlebone - tho i dunno if the subject matter would put me off - i don't like when music comes up in the short stories.

"City of Bohane" is the only book of his I read and I found the Mad Max gone culchie dialogue a bit cringey at times. I enjoyed a lot of it though the story didnt really go anywhere in the end imo. He has a good essay on living in Cork somewhere on the internet that I really liked.

I am now reading Dark Money, Jane Mayer, because even though I've known the broad outlines of the plutocratic counter-revolution since what seems like forever, I expect this book to bring the whole sordid story into sharper focus at a much higher level of detail than what I've picked up here and there over the decades. I am sure that my hatred of the Koch brothers will be stoked to a pure white flame.

"City of Bohane" is the only book of his I read and I found the Mad Max gone culchie dialogue a bit cringey at times. I enjoyed a lot of it though the story didnt really go anywhere in the end imo. He has a good essay on living in Cork somewhere on the internet that I really liked.

i guess with our own it's a mixed bag of prejudices and stuff, but i would read the short story collections. some parts annoy me but when he's good he's brilliant and it is moving the irish voice forward i guess. also sometimes it is fun to read about some mad fucker speeding out of gort in a hitachi van.

Natsume Soseki - Light and Darkness. I can turn pages on this quite easily, familiar as I am now with Soseki's deceptively light style (basically I am kinda scanning for moments where the internal anguish is revealed...I don't think he has ever written anything like Kokoro which is one of my favourite reading experiences, making it somewhat unlike the rest of his work).

Don't quite know what I thought of Artful - it's the story of the narrator dealing with the death of her partner, used to frame a series of academic lectures on literature, written by said deceased partner. Some of it is invigorating stuff, but they jump from point to point so quickly, and at some point the puns and references just start to feel like showing off?

Now on Ruy Castro's history of bossa nova. Cool to find out the majority of the big Bossa players started out in a Frank Sinatra fan club!

my book club's book was Paula McLain's Circling the Sun, which is terrible. McLain had success with rewriting Hemingway's a moveable feast as a novel, and she followed it up with this book which rewrites a memoir Hemingway liked, west with the wind by Beryl Markham, turning it into a novel. i checked markham's book out, and it's actually a fun collection of adventures, marred by some racial thinking and a "what is africa?" intro. mclain turns her into a passive protagonist just trying to eke by. also on the hunt for some man meat, including a passion for karen blixen's out of africa boyfriend. (markham's book only has a short chapter on him, on his death.)

I finally finished Jurgen Osterhammel's Transformation of the World. If a thousand-page, dense tome written at a fairly abstract level in occasionally jargony academic prose but offering a panoramic view of how the world changed during the 19th century sounds like your kind of thing, then you could do worse than this book. Probably the best thing about it is the fairly even-handed depiction of colonialism, which was a major fact of the 19th century globally speaking.

Would make an ideal Christmas gift ... er ... probably not ...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Rrsngm7hL.jpg

Perre Michon - Winter Mythologies and Abbots. Spent most of my evening in a pub reading this, and its the first book I finished in weeks. Amazing on a sentence-by-sentence level. The way he treats myth and God reminds me a little bit of Joseph Winkler - a catholic modernism.

Read it too fast and rather too excitedly so will return to all of this at some point in future.

poor old nono, say his name to me these days and i'm humming 2 Unlimited to myself for hours afterwards

My name on twitter dot com is based on one of his compositions, he is GREAT!

Graham Greene - Our Man in Havana
W.D. Snodgrass - Selected Poems

poor old nono, say his name to me these days and i'm humming 2 Unlimited to myself for hours afterwards

He did get something of a *kicking from all sides and so kept away from Darmstadt for yonks thereafter, so poor old Nono in way, tho not so poor as poor old Maderna who fell from being one of the Big Four to being regarded by many as a 'conductor who composes'. (*there is suspicion in some quarters that this was more down to Lachenmann's German translations than Nono's original words).

Friend and I did used to refer to 'a luigi' at work being something with which you immediately took exception to ('x annoying person will be coming to the pub' in the DMs would usually see a pic of luigi posted as a response).

Reading a few things:

Maurizio Lazzarato - The Making of Indebted Man. I approach people talking about debt very warily, because the philosophic or religious approach to it has been responsible for a lot of evil and bad thinking. This is not evil or bad thinking, though perhaps unsurprisingly, i do think he overdetermines on debt somewhat. An example might be where he says commodity fetishism has been completely replaced by the 'transaction of trust' that is credit - effectively trust, and a person's spirit has become the commodity here. Well, but commodity fetishism helps drive personal debt, and that's a simpler explanation? The idea metastasises beyond its useful ambit. That said, there's a lot of OTMFM in here as well. Not sure this thread is the place to explore it, but I'll try and put my thoughts down somewhere more appropriate. One note - is there really any excuse for either the original title or the translation having this 'indebted man' thing? I realise that going into the past 'man' may be said to have a more universal meaning, but i'm not sure even that is without contention, and certainly now there can't really be any excuse for not having 'person' there. That's at least partly because we may need to distinguish when a pathology is particularly suffered by men, and there's some room for ambiguity.

Jane Gleeson-White - Double Entry, a history of double-entry book-keeping. This is *excellent*, full of rich and interesting detail. I had no idea, for instance, about the abbaco schools (only really discovered to historians in the '60s apparently):

Fibonacci’s Liber abaci spawned an alternate education system to the Latin-based monastery schools of Italy: the abbaco schools, intended for the sons of merchants, who were taught Hindu–Arabic mathematics and learnt to read and write in their native tongues, an innovation that would encourage both the codification and standardisation of the vernacular languages of Europe, and the demise of Latin as the language of scholarship.

Gojko Adzic - Bridging the Communication Gap A work thing really, but there's plenty of food for thought for the faster u fuckers thread, and the style of the range of productivity, process optimisation, and self-help biz books has become sort of interesting to me. Like many of these sorts of books, it's well written enough for what it needs to do and is relaxed and thoughtful about its suggestions and dictates, and although you won't convince me there isn't an underlying sickness to it al, this one is freer of that sort of sensation than a lot of others.

Also started but haven't finished because i'm reading that sort of muck, but am looking forward to continuing:

Antonio de Benedetto - Zama
Kate Briggs - This Little Art, a small treatise on translation amongst other things. I started it and it seemed delightful, so I put it to one side when I could properly give it my proper attention.

Also read The Last Samurai again. it's still delightful.

I finished Dark Money yesterday. The overall picture it painted was familiar enough, but many of the details were gobsmacking and Mayer was able to connect various obvious trends that are not so obviously connected, such as the Citizens United decision and the growing incoherence of Republican politics.

Now I have started reading Brunelleschi's Dome, Ross King, about building the first domed space larger than what the Romans were able to achieve. It is admirably clear in its prose and brisk in its pace.

Just on the double entry bookkeeping book - Fibonacci’s 1202 treatise Liber abaci (‘ Book of Calculation‘) is a candidate for the GOAT opening line:

These are the nine figures of the Indians: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures and with this sign 0 which in Arabic is called zephirum, any number can be written, as will be demonstrated.

Earth-shattering tbh

Now reading Air Guitar, a collection of essays by Dave Hickey, many of which originally ran as columns in Art in America and other publications, primarily about popular music and/or fine art.

donald antrim - the emerald night in the air

really enjoying this. the first story, about a horny drama teacher directing a performance of a midsummer night's dream at a liberal arts college, is still my favourite. i like that his writing is so good yet feels somehow imitable (obvious this is an illusion, but it feels inspiring in some way)

also reading three body problem but only barely barely started. the extremely violent scene that it opens with is very uh, beautifully written?

I haf read A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and I thought it was top notch.

I might try 4321 next.

I fell pretty hard for Letters from Iceland. I've floundered with Auden in the past and it turns out what I needed was an anchor and this was just the job.

I'm going to wade back into my selected poems, but any other recommendations for what other Auden stuff could/should I look at?

John le Carre: A Small Town in Germany -- weird reading about a financially and diplomatically knackered UK desperate to get INTO the EU

Chinaski - Dyer's Hand is great.

Cheers xyzzzz. It's at my uni library so will go grab it.

Natahn Hill-The Nix.
Intelligent entertainment. Not many novels deserve that title imo.

Reading Leave it To Psmith, as recommended by various here or on ILE. It's great! My favourite Blandings so far.

I am on vacation for few days and have begun an appropriately fluffy book, The Lost Continent Bill Bryson (1989). The first chapter is relentlessly jokey, with such gems as the opening paragraph:

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

Nevertheless, this roughly my speed at the moment. I wanted to get away from seriousness for a bit and this younger, less-curmudgeonly version Bill Bryson seems hellbent to amuse me. I intend to permit him.

poor mh

Been buying books faster than I can read them recently. In theory that should mean they form a queue. In practice some get forgotten or left behind for much later, while newer arrivals get taken up immediately. One of those newer arrivals is Richard Olney's Simple French Food. It's very good. Although he explains why he decided he couldn't write about 'improvised cooking', the way he approaches ingredients and recipes does as much as any cookbook i have read to inform and encourage the reader to assemble their own dishes around some fundamental principles of food and cooking:

My consciousness is cluttered with memories of memories and half-memories of endless pilaff garnished with a variety of sautéed vegetables and scrapings from roast chicken or game carcasses – or combined with [i]ragôuts concocted from leftover roasts or firm-fleshed fish stews, heightened perhaps with butter-stewed onion, saffron, mushrooms, dried or fresh, one or several of the garden's native and denizen herbs; of cromesquis, crêpes, raviolis, or cannellonis stuffed with refrigerator remainders become soufflé mixtures, mixtures cheese-bound or béchamel-bound, held together with mushroom purée, stiff soubise, egg and breadcrumbs or rice (a recent and happy memory in this vein is that of cannelloni stuffed with a mixture of braised sweetbreads and braised fennel, each drained, coarsely chopped, mixed with chopped fines herbes and bound with fresh sheep's milk cheese, egg and Parmesan, the cannelloni moistened with the braising liquids, sprinkled with Parmesan, and gratinéed); salads and soups; myriad vegetables sweated in butter, herbs, and their own vapours, vegetable grains, puddings, hashes, stews, and daubes.

Certain of these terms suggest "extemporaneous" or "makeshift." Daube, for instance, means (approximately) "a mess," the origin of the word being presumably the same as that of "daub" in English.[/i]

tagging dammit!

oh and Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks from Bloodaxe. It's striking me right in the heart this weekend. deep autumnal colours and landscapes of love.

Continuing my theme of reading classics I had never got round to before, I'm now reading Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son. I also felt like it was a good match to read after Faulkner - while I thought Faulkner's prose was amazing and the world beautifully and horribly drawn, I was acutely aware that I was reading a white man's perspective on deep south race relations, and that perspective is not enough, not nearly enough.

Finished the Dave Hickey, and started reading Troubles by J.G. Farrell. It kind of effortlessly draws you into a world that becomes stranger and more real the more you learn about it. Wickedly funny as well.

Imre Kertesz: Detective Story

Troubles is so good

I finished with Bill Bryson. In 1989 he had fully perfected his formula, so that The Lost Continent felt almost indistinguishable from any of his other subsequent travel/humor books I've read. I don't begrudge him his success with this formula. It is a hard row to become a marketable author who makes his living from books alone.

Now, as a sort of follow-on to the book about Brunelleschi, I have picked up the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. I last read this 40 years ago in college. He is an incorrigible braggart, but he is also a talented storyteller, whose stories capture the intricate and unfamiliar world of the renaissance in Italy and France. They're good yarns, so it's cool with me that he is the unconquerable hero at the center of every tale he tells.

SPQR by mary beard

Finished Light and Darkness by Soseki. Up until the last third the plot the 'plot' was something like man has operation and the four other people in his life argue with and around him, at various levels of consequence. The shape of the story finally materialised in the last section as the main character checks himself out of the hospital and visits the woman who walked out on him.

Soseki died before finishing, so he might have written another 500 pages of those two sorting each other out. I felt it really took off in those last 100 pages (his earlier novel The Gate has a similar set-up where the main character goes to a monastery to find something...that going away was similarly done)

Postscript: what makes Cellini's endless self-worship palatable and somewhat engaging is that he doesn't stint his praise of others. He obviously saw the whole world as a heroic and highly colorful place, filled with brave, skillful and handsome men, beautiful and gracious women and amazingly spirited horses. Set against these are the evil, scheming scoundrels and craven cowards who act as the sworn enemies of the brave and honest men. It's a thoroughly boyish worldview, but kind of sweet.

I love the Soseki I've read, need to get more

Aimless, have you read Vasari? I want to, also interested in those two new Da Vinci bios.

I read various bits and pieces of Vasari long ago and I presently own a Penguin Classics paperback that abridges Vasari to ~465 pp. that I can refer to at need. iirc, Vasari is about on a level with Diogenes Laertius, collecting mostly entertaining anecdotes with some dull stretches interspersed.

Saw recent v. favorable mention of C. De Vere translation of Vasari, unabridged Everyman's Library ed.

I love the Soseki I've read, need to get more

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, 27 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I suspect he achieved something strange and unique for his time with his last few works - in one sense there is v little there in some of these intrigues, but they do amount...I would say almost all of his last few books are worth a read (NYRB did an edition of The Gate). Light and Darkness is out of print here and you come across in this old picador edition, almost all have a broken spine.

Ron Chernow - Grant
A collection of James tales called A London Life.

Stendhal - The Red and The Black. 20 pp in and I have said this before and I'll say it again: the canon is often excellent in lit.

i was spoilered for the red and the black by reading the stupid introduction and hence have never finished it

(also it was a v ancient pb and entirely fell apart as i read)

Well mark I have read the first few chapters...and the last few sentences in the last chapter so know what happens. Its ok though :-)

I finished Cellini's Autobiography. The traits I mentioned upthread remained consistent to the end of the book. Everything is vivid, larger than life and he is at the center of it all, deserving of mountains of credit for his genius when things turn out well and never to blame when things go wrong. I was interested to note that Vasari was one of the many artists he roundly disparaged and considered and enemy.

My next book is A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Darcy O'Brien. It's a NYRB reprint, somewhat humorous, but so far it seems more sardonic than comical. It's about growing up among Hollywood splendors, born as the child of famous and wealthy actor-parents, whose careers perish, then whose lives fall apart in rather histrionic fashion. Most of the book takes place After The Fall.

I've only just begun it, so I have as yet little to say about it.

Loved that book. Guy is a Joyce and Flann O’Brien scholar. Made the mistake of reading his true crime books. Which were really well written, but that actually made them harder to take.

He lulls you with a false sense of security with the well-turned phrases and then -wham!-the bottom drops out

reading a big biog on joseph losey, and joyce carol oates short stories 'heat' & my brilliant friend ~

What's the Losey biog like?

detailed - its the one subtitled a revenge on life by david caute

Great title - will be on the lookout.

I'm not a fan of Amis/McEwan/Barnes, but my university library was giving away free copies of "Sense of an Ending" - I read it over a day and it was... okay? Compelling plot but wincing useless dialogue and no sense of place. It's kind of a mini-me Atonement. Both of them do that really annoying thing of being genre books that end with a deliberate anticlimax to prove how very "above the genre" they are.

Both of them do that really annoying thing of being genre books that end with a deliberate anticlimax to prove how very "above the genre" they are.

I can't really think of Sense Of An Ending as a genre novel, unless we're doing the "literary realist fiction is a genre" thing. Sure there's a mystery in it, but it's not a crime novel/detective kind of mystery.

I will agree with you the ending's rubbish, though - felt very melodramatic and ridiculous to me, like something straight out of a 19th century novel.

No, you're right, it's not a genre novel. But the trope of using mystery and suspense in the service of a deliberate anticlimax - "because that's how life really is" - is (and has always been) a tiresome cliche, imho - in both literary and genre fiction. I think Tana French gets it right, though.

(The ending of Broken Harbour, for example. It's a quotidian ending, but it's not like it retroactively judges you for enjoying the "thriller" elements.)

george meredith - the egoist

I finished A Way of Life, Like Any Other. It's an interesting book that I'd have to study a while to get at. The story is plain enough. Everything that happens it described clearly enough to understand. What lingers is the author's voice and tone, which kind of hovers in an indeterminate space, touching irony, sadness, farce and a hint of anger, while rarely touching any one of these notes exclusively, but more often striking several at once, as if playing minor chords. The effect never raised me out of my seat in amazement, but it did affect me. Worth a read. Plus, it's short.

I haven't hit on my next book. I keep toying with the idea of plowing into a monstrously long book, like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but so far I'm too timorous to take the plunge. Maybe further into winter. I'll probably make a brief excursion into Greene's Ministry of Fear, instead.

I had a go at Very Merry by Zsigmond Moriscz, Hungarian Minot Gentry hi-Hils, got bored and drifted off about halfway through.

Then I read “Mothering Sunday” by Graham Swift, on a lens from my mum, it was alright, I liked the way it seemed abstracted from a huge Barbara Taylor Bradford potboiler but it left me largely unmoved.

I read the 33 1/3 about The Raincoats, as covered elsewhere.

I read a book of sharp little short stories by Lara Williams, called “Treats”.

Now I’m a chapter in to “Let The Blood of Man Not Flow” by Mikhailo Stelmakh, Ukrainian Soviet mythmaking by the looks.

aimless, i forget, do you have a kindle at all? burton is surprisingly lighter-feeling when you don't have to lug around that brick of an nyrb edition.

I own a Kindle, but I rarely make much use of it. I own an older edition of Robert Burton in hardback, copyright 1927, Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, editors, Farrar & Rinehart publishers, ~1000 pages total including front matter. All the hundreds of Latin tags are translated into English, which is nice.

I'm already partway into Ministry of Fear with a Georges Simenon novel on deck. As I said, the prospects for my tackling an ultra-long book will improve as winter deepens. Last winter it was The Man Without Qualities, Musil. The previous winter it was Shelby Foote's civil war history.

After a few books i could not get into, due to failures sometimes on their part, sometimes on mine, I'm reading B. A Shapiro's 'The Art Forger', a crime novel which is not exactly brilliant, but is very interesting on the details of creating a fake Great Master painting

Yesterday I finished Moby-Dick, and it took me til the very end to realize that everything Ahab says is mock-Shakespeare.

Had Kazou Ishiruo's The Buried Giant lying around for over a year now, guess the recent Nobelification is as good a reason as any to tackle it.

Be interested to hear what you think - I keep on feeling I should read it (great reviews, including some people I trust, nobel prize etc), but can't summon up the enthusiasm. also reading the mysterious affair at styles atm, so enthusiasm for evenly moderately heavy lifting is at a bit of an ebb at the moment.

Aw, Fizzles, read some shiny bauble or other and give yourself a lull. I have a soft spot for the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian when I need some light entertainment that isn't poorly written. Afterwards Ishiguro may not seem like such a slog.

Ishiguro Ishiruo

^ brain fart

No, you were right, it was Daniel's brain that dealt it

I'm an ishiguro fan but I cannot fathom the good reviews for the buried giant.

Ursula K. LeGuinn came out against it, was irked by something Ishiguro said about it being a gamble for readers to accept fantasy tropes - LeGuinn rules obv and has fought this good fight for a long time, but in a world where GoT is the biggest show on tv, ehhhh. And at the same time, Ishiguro wasn't wrong to assume much of his audience would be somewhat resistant.

Dan it's Ishiuro

Oh shit, sorry.

...wait, no it isn't! :O

Dan it's Le Guin

https://i.imgur.com/6VjoC0J.png

Dan sonned in a fake news beef?

Another lyricist wins the Nobel---where will it end??

I've read everything of Ishi(g)uro - even the short stories - except the Buried Giant. Just doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy at all. But he's the only one of that generation of Booker-type writers - Amis, McEwan, Barnes, Rushdie et al - that I really have any time for.

The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. I'm only at the gushing, you're-so-wonderful, stage in the correspondence - and John really thinks PB is wonderful - it might sour later. PB's écolier anglais is so cute though.

Quite a way into The Buried Giant by REDACTED. LeGuin's criticisms make more sense to me now - I didn't expect this to be quite as straight a fantasy novel! In the interviews I'd read with REDACTED he talked about putting himself into the mindset of a person from that age, and that a belief in say ogres was common, but I expected this to manifest in dialogue and not actual characters. Anyway, I'm enjoying it as these things go, there's not a Chosen One or anything rote like that. Reminds me a lot of T.H. White, also I'm playing the new Zelda and that works well as a companion piece too.

Zelda---an album, a game? Please describe.

I finished Ministry of Fear. It's a more literate than average British thriller that could as easily been the script treatment for a Hitchcock movie from the same era (early 1940s).

It is, as the author directly states on the fly leaf, an entertainment. At one point Greene tips the reader a broad wink, stating that his main character felt 'like a man whose life is being controlled by a larger force with a knack for the surreal'.

It does hint at larger themes than the garden variety spy intrigues at the center of the plot, but doesn't really embrace them. For instance, Greene keeps circling around the role of pity in human life, but his presumed insights are never very clear and verge on self-contradiction. He even includes a dream narrative, with a mother figure speaking from the grave, but however portentous it appears at the time, nothing is made of it. It all amounts to pseudo-meaningful window dressing, designed to lift it above the ordinary pot-boiler, but the quality of the prose would have been sufficient. otoh, it does give a vivid sense of the air bombardment of London.

I finished Farrell's Troubles. Hard to praise it enough without sounding dumb. I want to say something like: it reminded me of what novels can do. Highly recommended.

Nothing Holds Back the Darkness by Delphine de Vigan, a memoir of sorts about her mother's messed up family, mental health problems, and death; also about goes into her doubts, motivations, and problems in writing such a memoir. I thought it was great, far more engaging than My Struggle. Then I read the follow-up, Based on a True Story, also supposedly an account of real events, what happened after the memoir was published - but it becomes more and more like a hollywood thriller, less and less plausible as non fiction. The characters discuss the appeal & validity of fiction vs non fiction, and at one point the narrator says something like "you want me to say [the previous memoir about her mother] was made up? Ok, I made it all up!". Confusing. There's a memorable section where a character reads uninterrupted a list of titles from a bookshelf; it goes on, hypnotically, for almost a whole page, and because it's translated from the french and so I presume most of the titles are french novels, I have no idea whether they are real or invented.

Now reading Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, Georges Simenon.

Joan Didion - The White Album. The style is something you can just eat up, though there is very little I am learning about anything. The kind of thing I might have really loved at 19/20, not sure now.

i felt the same way when i read her at 20. her disses are so cutting and the writing so good you want her to like you, but ultimately that elliptical style, always circling outwards, felt supercilious

Yeah, I think she later admitted some of the early slick magazine Highbrow writing got shticky, but try for instance The Year of Magical Thinking.

Joanna Walsh: Vertigo -- as good as everyone said it was a couple of years ago when everyone was reading it

J.D. Vance - Hillbilly Elegy - This was an (unasked-for) gift from last year that I hadn't gotten around to reading yet. Mostly a fairly sanitized memoir of a hard-luck childhood (with a happy ending), it also dips into amateur sociology, with uplifting bromides masquerading as political hardheadedness. Not sure why someone would write a book like this in their early 30s unless they're thinking about running for office someday. Having said that, it's well-paced and hits some emotional notes that feel authentic.

weird to read a measured review of that book, which I only know from everyone on twitter making a big deal out of hating

i think the ppl i follow hated it because the wrong people liked it, or something

didion's deep topic is anxiety -- that's what she marks in herself and hence registers always very acutely in others

her political coverage, which didn't really begin till the late 70s, was as astute as anyone's: you'd think (all things considered) that she'd be quite bad at new york race politics in the 80s, for example, but (rereading recently w/hindsight, thru lens of ta-nehisi etc) this isn't so

my sister and i both read year of magical thinking after my mum's death and got a lot out of it -- i've reread it several times - but i lent it to a close friend after her dad died and she more or less threw it across the room

(a book it unexpectedly reminds me of: paul morley's ±nothing, in which mannerism -- albeit not a very similar mannerism, all those lists -- is a manifestation of the underpinning feelings* PM can't or daren't talk about)

*this word is too weak: i mean anxieties about overwhelming emotions, like grief or anger, and the ways you set controls on those)

Didion managed that change from delineating anxiety instigated by vague correspondences to delineating how vague correspondences among political elites can instigate anxiety. It's a neat trick. Miami and Political Fictions are among my favorite boks.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Valiant.

this is the kind of page-turning non-fiction thing that i like to read but so rarely do

I finished Simenon's Three Bedrooms in Manhattan. Apparently it was based on his meeting his second wife, whom he met less than a year before writing this novel.

The story really only contains two characters, the man and the woman, who meet and fall deeply in love. What struck me most about the book was the degree to which the narrator, who writes in the third person with a kind of omniscience, spends all of his effort examining the internal thoughts, feelings and reactions of the man. The woman's character is described solely through externalities. So, in a way, it is a book with just one character.

The second thing that struck me was that in spite of the narrator's obvious affinity with and sympathy for the man, the man came off as very egoistic, almost a narcissist, and hence very unlikable. The woman was neither likeable nor unlikeable, in that she never fully came alive to me; she only existed as a catalyst for the man's feelings and her declarations of her own feelings were never given an independent basis upon which to stand.

As a a result of the above-mentioned problems, the book lacked the one element I most enjoyed in the previous Simenon's I've read, a discerning and accurate portrayal of the psychology of the main characters. The numerous, rather hectic attempts by the narrator to explain the man's motives are merely confused rather than penetrating. For me, the book was an unexpected failure, interesting mainly as an artifact, not as art.

Anna Kavan: Ice -- mad as a cut snake, but enjoyable. Can see why Ballard loved it.

About to start a book with the best title ever, Alexander Kluge's 'Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome'.

I read a big anthology of Didion called Live And Learn last year and - challop alert - found The White Album to be kind of the weakest link in it: Slouching Towards Bethlehem has that great piece on John Wayne, "Goodbey To All That" and a long thing on Haight-Ashbury that kinda puts the lie to to the narrative of the 60's that a lot of ppl paint (with The White Album as a canonical text!) where things were nice and groovy and then suddenly Manson and Altamont threw everyone into a spiral of paranoia - Didion herself seemed to view the whole scene as pretty paranoid and fucked up even at its flower power height. Of the later stuff, the piece on the Central Park jogger case (which I assume mark is refering to) is essential reading.

Finished The Buried Giant - it's a nice enough fantasy novel. Found the relationship at the centre of it quite touching. Now I'm reading John Buchan's Greenmantle, which is one of those books that signals what you're in for from the very first paragraph:

"I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant's telegram. It was at Furling, the big country house in Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade. I flung him the flimsy with the blue strip pasted down on it, and he whistled."

currently reading

Captain Cook: Master of the Seas by Frank McLynn, re-reading Game of Death by PKD, and am about to start Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson. The Cook bio is p fascinating but sad lolz @ me for being lost when all the nautical terminology gets brought in.

Finishing The White Album. I think the essay on Feminism is something quite sharp -- as someone who observes this stuff from afar -- Didion is certainly mapping out some of the issues that are very much live and being worked out.

I think w/the title-essay and first section I found myself thinking that the music has pretty much covered this. So I huffed a bit on my one-liner above.

My favourite piece (as I finish) is called In Bed, a 3/4 pager on migraines that is just a marvel, Walser-like Feuilleton piece that is strenghtened by the factual matter she brings in crossed with that anxiety too.

I will definitely read more from her next year.

view the whole scene as pretty paranoid and fucked up even at its flower power height

the flower power moment was a reaction to and an attempt to break out of the horrors of the time, by rejecting it in total and inventing a new society ab ovo. of course, it failed miserably because the horrors of the time were far too powerful and entrenched and the counterculture was too rudderless and full of nonsense.

the greatest successes of the sixties and seventies came out of politically organizing around stark and simple ideas, like equality under the law, that were within the purview of politics. that included civil rights, feminism and gay rights.

oh, and things were so bad under the existing U.S. anti-communist and apartheid regime, that paranoia is not the right term. the pervasive dread was justified.

the flower power moment was a reaction to and an attempt to break out of the horrors of the time

Well yeah, no shit :) What I'm saying is Didion (as an outsider to the scene) saw new horrors there, far earlier than what it looks like in common mythology.

common mythology as media cliches--before that, even to us young and restless, it seemed fairly likely that the problems of known bohemian culture would take some crazy turns via sudden massification (not that aome of my classmates didn't hitchhike across country to the teen-tourist-runaway-exploiter-swamped and rainy Haight during the Summer of Love, bur they enjoyed the travel more than the destination).

Nothing against Didion or her readers, then or now. She could be pretty sharp about all that, also see Ellen Willis's early "Lessons of Chicago," about the '68 Democratic Convention and debacle.

Anna Kavan: Ice -- mad as a cut snake, but enjoyable. Can see why Ballard loved it.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, November 15, 2017 10:41 PM (yesterday)

I love the books I've read by Kavan but iirc Ice is not one of them. Wholeheartedly recommend her in general, though.

Finished David Toop's Ocean of Sound. And a couple Neruda collections, The Heights of Machu Pichu and 20 Love Poems. I definitely need to reread those, though.

weird to read a measured review of that book, which I only know from everyone on twitter making a big deal out of hating

I guess I missed the backlash. It seemed to get mildly positive notices. I can see people developing a strong aversion to the author's persona or maybe the book wasn't what they were expecting. I guess it does express a point of view which is timely in light of the election results of last year, in terms of helping coastal liberals to understand why poor hillbillies tend to vote conservative. I thought it was just okay.

in terms of helping coastal liberals to understand why poor hillbillies tend to vote conservative.

This is the reason it got such a strong backlash I think. A lot of liberals and ppl on the left were not up for hearing any justifications for voting Trump, or just frustrated with the cottage industry of pieces following Trump voters in this othering, anthropological manner.

J.D. Vance - Hillbilly Elegy

o.nate is on the money bout this one. I wasn't planning to read it until seeing it in the library. Interested me in part because I grew up in southern Ohio, my dad worked in Hamilton where Vance lived for awhile. I went to elementary school w/many people of Appalachian descent. But for me Hillbilly Elegy was far more effective as memoir than political tract. Better at psychology than sociology. Vance might have made the book solely about surviving his family disfunction and come up with something like The Glass Key. Even before he extends his (fuzzy) analysis to the white working class/Trump voters he runs aground IMHO by suggesting his relatives' specific insanities are traits shared by all hillbillies. While he's observant and sharp about hillbilly culture he glosses over or even leaves out one aspect that always stuck me as a kid: hillbillies tend to be virulent racists. Still first half or so is brisk and readable. Like many bestselling nonfiction books from M Gladwell on down, however, it gets repetitious in the second half. Wonder how many people who buy this skim the post-Ohio chapters. Still it reveals some important and uncomfortable truths.

Started this week on Isaac Deutscher's "The Prophet", only another 1500 pages to go.

danielle mclaughlin - dinosaurs on other planets (p good classic literary short fiction, mostly set in ireland)
elizabeth taylor - collected stories

i'm doing a masters right now and my college reading has included a bunch of short fiction i've read already (johnson, kevin barry, colin barrett, lorrie moore, zz packer, amy hempel etc) but some stuff i haven't like john updike, alice munro, wells tower etc. it's interesting finding out how specific my taste is, i didn't think i had a taste but there's definitely been some stuff i really disliked, and a pattern to that.

What is the pattern, to the extent that you feel like laying it out? (Since it's also part of your workaday routines.)

i think i'm just more traditionalist than i knew, with short stories. i get p annoyed when the plot goes missing. i mean all the stuff i like is literary i suppose but it bothers me when there are too many characters or whatever. some of my favourite novels are experimental enough i think, or difficult going, but the great short stories seem to make the reader feel in safe hands. it's not a question of "easy to read" though great short stories imo usually are, it's more like the writer effortlessly puts you in the place they want you to be.

with some stuff like maybe the updike, a little, and v much the alice munro, i could tell it was great writing but it was also unevenly written, had big chunks of exposition, forced you to work extremely hard to care at certain points, just like, not what i expect from a short story.

also a lot of more modern american short stories by your classic "i live in brooklyn" writer have these passive main characters - no action, somebody checking instagram while their housemate has a breakdown or whatever - i realise there's a duty to talk about modern life but things can still happen.

(and i feel weird criticising stuff with "nothing happens" given that usually when people say this about music, or movies, or novels, it's piqued my interest. my opinion could be changing because i'm writing my own stuff every day also.)

Vance might have made the book solely about surviving his family disfunction and come up with something like The Glass Key.

meant to say The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. apparently The Glass Key is a novel by Dashiell Hammett that I've never read

it's the miller's crossing book, v good

This interview gives a flavor of Vance’s political views including his views on Trump:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/

I wrote above about Delphine de Vigan's Based on a True Story, also supposedly an account of real events, what happened after the memoir was published - but it becomes more and more like a hollywood thriller - I've just discovered it is now a film directed by Polanski. Luckily behind all the thriller flim-flam it is a novel largely about novels, novelists, and readers, so my curiosity needle only registered a slight flicker.

My current book is by an author named Laurence Bergreen, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu.

It is easy to read and fairly well-researched. It's organized and written in bite-sized chunks to the point where I could almost recreate the author's pile of index cards from which he wrote. I don't mind this, because I have a bad head cold right now and am incapable of absorbing anything more elaborate than this - including the original Travels of Marco Polo, which I also own, but haven't the energy for. Fortunately, Bergreen has only a few annoying ticks, which I am mentally tired enough to overlook. It passes the time and that makes it worthwhile.

Kate Briggs - This Little Art. Really good, book length essay on translation, the in-and-outs, using her own experience (translations of a series of lecture given by Roland Barthes) as a jumping off point.

I like how it doesn't mention Benjamin's essay on it, for one thing.

That sounds like my thing

It is.

Melville - Bartleby.

Simone De Beauvoir - Force of Circumstance. All that French ppl are good for is memoirs and that is that #ironLaw

On this day I am thankful that you guys have never really given me too much grief for the terrible thread titles I have foisted on you over the years.

SPOILERS! Marco Polo died at the end of the book. Now I am reading Leave It to Psmith, Wodehouse. Grade A+ so far.

If Aimless failed to like you Leave It to Psmith, I think my world would have crashed down

Don’t know where that “you” came from

Thanks for posting that Psmith book whoever did upthread. So many Woodehouse books it's hard to choose which one comes next. That one was definitely almost up there with my other favourite, Joy in the Morning

Also try Uncle Fred in Springtime. The gallant Uncle Fred is the Jeeves of the Wooster class---socially, that is; he's got more brains than Bertie in his well-appointed antic attic.

I'm pretty sure I read Leave It to Psmith during my initial Wodehouse splurge about a dozen years ago, maybe more, but Wodehouse can safely be revisited after a dozen years and all the good parts spring back up as fresh and funny as during the first reading, since I've forgotten every last detail of them by now.

I think Uncle Fred was written as a covertly aged-up Psmith, no?

Muriel Spark - The Comforters

Never read a Psmith, but reminds me: anybody read Thorne Smith? I've just come across a couple anthologized stories, which seemed imaginative but sad or depressive, sideswipe-y @ women.

Did like the movie and 50s or early 60s TV series of Topper (Mr and Mrs. Ghost as Space Age swingers, flustering veddy proper Topper).

About 200 pages into John Buchan's Greenmantle and I'm baffled as to what lead Jess Nevins (in the loeg: black dossier annotations) to define Buchan's Hannay as "less bigoted and jingoistic" than Bulldog Drummond and other espionage heroes of that era. The dreaded boche bears the brunt of Buchan's wrath in Greenmantle (there was a war on, after all), but there's also time to deride the Dutch, the Turkish, the South Africans, "savages" of various non-European countries and, of course, the Jew, who is "at the back of most German enterprises" according to Hannay. Meanwhile, the British are of course faultless, especially adept at blending into very culture while avoiding detection (!) and let down only by those unmanly peacemongers in Parliament. The closest the book's come to what Nevins calls a "humanistic and even compassionate streak" is when Hannay has to hide in a poor woman's house in Bavaria; seeing her misery (which is sharply contrasted with the superior conditions of working class women in Britain - because only a fool would deny 1910's Britain was a proletarian paradise, I guess), our hero decides that perhaps it would be best if the British army refrained from burning down the houses of the German populace and laughtering its children, as this would make them just as bad as the boches.

I'm well aware it's ridiculous to get this worked up about a novel that's over a century old now, but it does pick at you little by little. Finishing it, because the boy's own adventure stuff is very readable and besides I always finish books.

Last night on Book TV, author Lynne Olson said that Churchill's writing on World Wars downplayed the importance of Continental resistance movements etc.: it was all about plucky little Britain, the superior stock. Also that even some British intelligence officals were influenced by pandering spyfi, Buchan and lesser talents.

I'm about halfway through Thomas Berger's Little Big Man. Through an improbable series of picaresque adventures, our hero finds himself living half the time with a Cheyenne Indian tribe and half the time with white settlers, in the 1860s American West. Berger knows how to spin a yarn, and there's plenty of action and comedy. The main theme seems to be a clash of civilizations, though I'm not well-read enough to know how much of Berger's portrayal of the Indian way of life is realistic. In any case, it serves as an interesting foil to the foibles of white man's society. Also notable for being written in a form of ungrammatical dialect that is fun to read and doesn't get in the way (another which comes to mind would be Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang).

Huge fan of that book, never came across anything pointing out any glaring inaccuracies or discovered many myself in my dabbling into the subject

https://truewestmagazine.com/the-little-big-man-hoax/

Reading the very good but spectacularly unapealingingly named 'Old Rendering Plant' by Wolfgang Hilbig

]Don't remember the novel Little Big Man, which I read in high school or shortly thereafter, but do remember getting into the movie, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman: picaresque, yes, but I cried at the end, and yes it was a very very long time ago.
Mention of Greenmantle as thriller richly evocative/pungent re time place worldview, reminds me of this, from ILE's Crime Fiction S,D:
Thank yall for getting me to read Richard Price, finally! Lush Life is tremendous, the way he expertly steers us through the multi-dimensional convergence of class, race, age, gender, other, in Lower East Side Post-9/11 Giuliani York* (the Quality Of Life Squad greets us at the kick-off and reappears like a reverse ice cream truck: you better have what they want, cause they got quotas). The author dispenses a lot more acerbic compassion, a lot more justice, than his people are likely to find anywhere else.
(*Wiki:"The experiences of Bratton and New York Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Maple were used as the inspiration of the television series The District." Never saw that, but this isn't a cop show thread; we got one of those?)

― dow, Sunday, November 12, 2017 10:49 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, it's whatever justice can be dispensed via said convergence, rather than sermonizing or gratuitous manipulation.

― dow, Sunday, November 12, 2017 10:53 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The cop show thread is just called "police procedurals what are your faves" iirc

I loved clockers, want to read more price at some point

― The Suite Life of Jack and Wendy (wins)

I dashed through "Extravagant Stranger" by Daniel Roy Connolly (it's a memoir in the form of a series of short prose pieces) - some of the pieces I thought were outrageously brilliant, others less so, but my liking for any given piece seems to have more to do with how tired / able to concentrate I was when reading it. I'm looking forward to giving it another go sometime.

Now I'm reading "Span of the Year" by Vera Panova, more Soviet business, this time from around the middle of the twentieth century. I picked it up to look at the attractive Lynton Lamb cover, and it seems good so far.

I finished "Span of the Year" and enjoyed it enormously. It's a kind of Soviet version of the kind of "domestic literature" (a highly gendered term obv) currently popular with the likes of the Backlisted podcast, but instead of the setting being middle class London or wherever it's a smallish Soviet town, and the issues at stake centre around what it means to be a good citizen.

Now I'm reading "Pilgrim At Sea" by Par Lagerkvist and finding it as glorious and disorientating as I usually find his work, these odd small parables in which the meaning (almost) never quite clarifies.

I picked up The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt, and started it last night. It has several unusual qualities that pique my interest, but I haven't made up my mind if I trust her to deliver the goods. I can't yet divine if her narrative methods will finally enhance or detract from my reading experience and whether the story she wants to tell me seems worth the candle. atm I am willing to keep reading to find out. I know many ILBers liked it and that adds incentive.

took me a full month, but finally made it through george meredith's the egoist. kind of a proto-huxleyean country house comedy of manners/satire of victorian social mores & power/gender relations. his prose was a lot more mannered than i'd been expecting.

now starting on the novels of thomas love peacock (caricatured in the above as an oblivious scholar with a devotion to port and stuffy libraries)

read a julio cortazar short story as part of my ma this week - axolotl. what a brilliant story! one of my assignments this semester is to write about a story which changed my perspective on writing or something along those lines - i was worried a bit because a lot of the stuff i enjoyed was stuff i'd already read, cheever, johnson, kevin barry etc.

looking forward to reading some more. does it matter which collection i start with?

Blow Up and Other Stories is a good introduction

I have vanquished Greenmantle. Moving on to Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, which I imagine will be coming from a less hateful pov.

I have vanquished /Greenmantle/. Moving on to Carrie Brownstein's /Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl/, which I imagine will be coming from a less hateful pov.

*really feel its lack when you haven’t had it

hmm. ykwim but “...when you haven’t read any recently” for those at the back.

people have been telling stories for about as long as they've had language. it seems to me our brains use stories as their main organizing principle for integrating complex information into a whole. fiction is all about feeding that urge.

yes, there’s a beer isn’t there? i compare it to when you’ve been eating too many takeaways, you get a funny head. unnourished. lack of attentiveness to yourself.

attempted to address one aspect of the thing here:

http://diasyrmus.org/first-step/

one perhaps paradoxical takeaway being that fiction and poetry do not involve deceit.

loool autocorrect. “there’s a *need* isn’t there* is what it shd have said.

i’m in the pub so there’s also a beer.

Does anyone know of interesting end-of-year fiction lists? I'm not seeing much that looks appealing among the most frequently recommended novels (Exit West, etc).

I'm on a break from Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah and reading The House of Mirth, as well as a beautiful exhibition book on JMW Turner and Venice.

ronan read Blow-Up

Creative Review rep for Cortazar's Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires, which I find quite hard to find other than in the realm of books still made of paper.

but it is only 87 pages long and doesn't justify £12+ pricetag.

It's entertaining and quite odd. Probably not in ebook as it has comics pages mixed in, maybe?

currently popular with the likes of the Backlisted podcast

This is a really good podcast btw, don't remember how I found it but it's ace.

Under A hoodoo Moon the Dr john memoir. So far got to his early teens where he's already learning guitar and just trying smack.

The Lester Bangs blondie book which is pretty good on various things but very weird as a promotional tool for a mainstream band. maybe it would have been better if this had become more of the archetype for later coffee table books?

Storm Thorgerson's Classic Album covers of teh 60s . maybe more looking through the psychedelic sleeves but interested to read what the Hipgnosis designer has to say on development of general style.

I have settled in with The Last Samurai and am a little over halfway. Despite making a show of tinkering with narrative flow early on, it tells a very direct, compact and simple story so far. I am tempted to call it a Young Adult novel for TAG program teenagers, except most ILXors would presume that was meant as a zing, where I do not intend it as such. It's actually a fun, rather witty book, that knows what it wants to do and does it with flair.

I found it spoke effectively to some of my anxieties as a onetime gifted child who is now, like many gifted children, a decidedly ordinary adult

I feel I was lucky in a way that I completed my public school education before the vogue for TAG programs had begun. I have a very clear memory of being 17 years old and opening the letter notifying me I was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist. It totally pissed me off, because it told me it was now my duty to use my special talents to further the glories of our great nation. I figured that was about as presumptuous and meddlesome a piece of guff I'd ever been handed by a passel of self-important adults in my life. I still think it.

All I've (nearly) finished lately is Atlantic Hotel by Joao Gilberto Noll. Its like a cross between Flow My Tears the Policeman Said and...something else. I had it last night, forgotten it now. Its better than the David Lynch comparisons, I promise!

dan chaon's "await your reply", in between bouts of "howard's end"

I am now idling about in The Kings of Nonfiction, an anthology of short nonfic edited by Ira Glass. There's some nice stuff in there.

Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia by Ginny Hill.

Really good discussion of khat culture in the first few pages

Does anyone know of interesting end-of-year fiction lists? I'm not seeing much that looks appealing among the most frequently recommended novels (Exit West, etc).

― jmm, Saturday, December 2, 2017 6:56 PM (six days ago)

Largehearted Boy is keeping a running list of all year-end lists:
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2017/11/online_best_of_75.html

I have started The Greek Alexander Romance, in the Penguin version translated and edited by Richard Stoneman. It should be a quick read. It's a fantasy, in the same way that the Arabian Nights are fantasies, but incorporating Alexander the Great and some bits and pieces of his life and history.

The textual footnotes seem mostly concerned with untangling the many corrupt texts one from another and explaining the translator's decisions for how they've been cobbled together in this version.

Is it good?

Noah Feldman -- The Three Lives of James Madison
W.S. Merwin -- Unframed Originals
Robert Forster -- Grant and I

That last is an import, I assume

I bought it quite easily on Amazon and got it in two days.

I finished Little Big Man. It's a big, rollicking, fun read, and I highly recommend it. Not sure I really love the Battle of the Little Bighorn as the bravura finish, with its perhaps too tidy symmetry with the Washita massacre portrayed earlier. Though the author wisely refrains from drawing his thematic threads together too neatly and the ultimate feeling one is left with is a chastened ambivalence, yet it would have been perhaps more satisfying to have the ending focus more on the colorful figure of Crabb himself and less on the dutifully historic cardboard Custer. In my view, Troubles is ultimately a more successful model of how to interweave a tale with historic events, without letting them usurp the novel's essential prerogative to create its own world.

An hour ago I closed the back cover on Jakob Wegelius's FABULOUS children's novel, "The Murderer's Ape." It is a long (588 pages!), slow, old-fashioned adventure story typed onto an Underwood by a non-verbal ape (Sally Jones), about a three year attempt to exonerate her best (human) friend from a false murder accusation. It takes place in Portugal and colonial India, and features a depressed fado singer, an accordion manufacturer, an anarchist plot, scheming seamen, a lovelorn maharajah, life-and-death chess games, and amateur aeronautics. It is like Joseph Conrad by way of Beatrix Potter.

I want to recommend it to... everybody. It is beautifully illustrated, translated from Swedish by Peter Graves (who translates Strindberg and Linnaeus), and deep, and introspective. I know this board as a whole is not into whimsy or children's literature, but this is a totally weird and genre-transcendent book.

Capsule review here
Sample chapter here

I bought it quite easily on Amazon and got it in two days.

Is it good?

I'm well past halfway through now and I'd say no. It is more of an artifact than art. The historically founded parts are filled with garbled nonsense. The fictional set pieces that are dropped in are of poor quality.

This "romance" may be the portal through which much of the world came to see Alexander in the period from about 300 CE to 1500 CE, but if anything it diminishes the historical figure of Alexander, even given all the resources of fiction and imagination with which to aggrandize him. Not worth seeking out, in my opinion, unless you wish to understand it as an artifact defining the ignorance of past ages.

Poo. I might get the murderer's ape then.

"Murderer's Ape" sounds fab!

Finished Brownstein's autobio a few days ago; enjoyed it a lot, despite a lack of interest in 90's alternative rock (I came for Portlandia, which the book doesn't really cover). I should stop being surprised that good lyricists are often also really great prose writers.

Now it's E.M. Delafield's Diary Of A Provincial Lady. I was expecting something satirical, perhaps somewhere akin to a female Wodehouse. And it's certainly funny, but sad too - you really feel for the protagonist, with her idiot husband, hellion children, "friends" constantly invested in rubbing her money troubles in her face. Complaints about the uppity service evoke less sympathy, but that was the age, I guess.

Diary of a Provincial Lady's sequels maintain the quality

I am now reading a book by one Sue Burrell, Waiting for Aphrodite. The subject matter is invertebrate biology, but handled gently, with a minimum of jargon and only a wee pinch of academics. She assumes the reader knows almost nothing, writes only to mend the largest holes in their ignorance, then thoughtfully provides a bibliography at the end of each chapter for those who care to run some experts to earth. It is soothing in its way. I like it.

Correction: Sue Hubbell (I was trying to read the spine across the room.)

Primo Levi: Natural Histories -- mostly darkly comedic science fiction, with occasional vertiginous glimpses of horror that remind you of the sort of things the author must have seen in Auschwitz

Yikes! Any good?

Yes! If you like Calvino's fables and tall tales, especially.

Thank goodness for xmas break, getting through a fair bit:

Wolfgang Hilbig - Old Rendering Plant
Muriel Spark - The Abbess of Crewe
Kristen Roupenian - Cat Person
Muriel Spark - The Hothouse by the East River*
Slowomir Mrozek - The Elephant
Marguerite Duras - Yann Andrea Steiner

Hilbig and Duras are the keepers here. Very different styles and aesthetics. The Duras starts as a brief account of her relationship with a much younger man. From one of their conversations it then jumps into this fictional account of love between two jews (a big age gap here too, except the woman is an adult and the man is actually a young adult, no older than 10) that provides some sort of cathartic release on the holocaust, or somesuch. Its a real high-wire act, what unites the two strands is the care of one person for another (damaged) individual - of course, its something she explores in Hiroshima Mon Amour and many of her books. The Hilbig is an extraordinary account of a boy's obsession with a coal plant. Its transformation of the landscape into this magical realm is reminiscent of Proust's walks around Combray, but even more so Tarkovsky's stalker (its the gothic). Both will pay and re-pay much re-reading.

The Muriel Spark books were sorta boring, couple of interested ideas un-followed (I didn't finish The Hothouse). Mrozek's collection of short pieces is from Penguin Central European Classics strand and there are bits of Schulz, Walser, Kafka. Its diverting enough, worth a read but I wouldn't go out of my way.

Finally Cat Person was a remarkable story in The New Yorker. Tell you all more about it later, but do read it - I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

delighted to be catching up things i hadn't got round to or in some cases finished this year. first up This Little Art by Kate Briggs, which I bought and started earlier this year, but then put down. That's because I was battling with it a bit - my own fault - I tend to want to be a bit ruthless with the evident difficulties of translation. It means that 'when you say you've read the translated book, does that *actually* mean you've read at the book do you see' stuff quite tiresome.

that really isn't what the book is like at all though, and now I've broken the back of it i'm finding it really enjoyable. the main substance of it centres around her translations of Barthes' late lectures:

...a critic, theorist and writer whose very last piece of writing, the one that was left on his desk on the day of the accident that led to his death, was titled: 'One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves.'

Or, in an alternative translation: we always fail to speak of what we love.

Or alternatively again: you (a general you that includes me, the you we use in English, sometimes, to embrace both you and me),

you always fail to speak, when you speak of what you love.

that passage hit me quite hard. (actual French title was on échoue toujours à parler de ce qu'on aime and was an essay on Stendhal apparently.

also read a shit load of poirot. five little piggies is *excellent*, really interesting and impressive, with a couple of cruxes that are done extremely well. the big four is *dire*, really spectacularly bad. it was written aiui when Christie was at a very low ebb, and it shows, she even mutilates poirot at one point, and it's making me want to understand more about what she was going through at that time.

of course one of the persistent comedies of poirot is that he speaks in english nearly all the time, apart from the most basic words any person would learn immediately. in this sense, as was pointed out to me last night when talking about this, he actually speaks very like the archetypal english person in France - ie basic words in french, anything even slightly beyond that in stilted english.

xp Yeah my twitter's been all over those (except that last one, dunno what that is)

I'm sure the fact that he killed himself this year is significantly affecting my response, but mark fisher's the weird and the eerie is a lovely little book. It could maybe be a little more rigorous at times - I remember seeing somewhere (maybe here) that the eerie is poorly defined, which I don't agree with, but I do feel like the case for certain works belonging to the eerie aren't convincingly argued - but in general it gets across what's valuable about these modes and makes me want to spend more time in them.

Just started Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford. Too soon to say anything else about it.

five little piggies is *excellent*, really interesting and impressive

That's good to know, as I'm coincidentally just about to read it!

After your post I read the Wikipedia page for The Big Four, it sounds very WTF in a tantalising way, but I'll avoid it on your advice.

I tend to read 3-4 Christie books every year, usually as a clear-the-decks exercise after something more challenging. Was really impressed by Cards on the Table - although impossible to explain why without spoiling - and HP's Christmas, which is a generic "posh patriarch cops it" mansion mystery, but the solution is quite ingenious.

A few week ago there was an unsurprisingly annoying Front Row episode discussing Christie, with Giles Coren, Sophie Hannah and whoever's been adapting those fucking awful recent BBC Christmas specials. Coren kept saying the books were terrible, the BBC lady was rambling about how she hadn't read much christie but preferred the outside-the-formula books without detective characters, and Hannah kept trying to position Christie as a great social satirist, and it was like JFC how much wrong analysis can you get in a six minute segment.

Had Voltaire in Love for ages, never read it--will be interested to hear what you think

Theodor Fontane: On Tangled Paths -- really enjoying this after a somewhat wobbly start (lots of local colour peasant types getting up to shenanigans, but then the political and sexual intrigue kicked in); annoyingly I already had another copy of this, but under a different title ('Irretrievable') and from different translator

Never could get along with Christie, I have to admit. I just want to punch Poirot in his face.

I've been reading At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It was an unasked-for gift from last year. I guess I feel a little guilty for not just reading the primary sources, but that's a silly reaction to have, especially when Bakewell has done such a fine job of research. It must be difficult to write a fairly light and entertaining book about philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Also, I should be honest with myself, I was never going to read Heidegger or Husserl anyway and at least now I have some sense, however superficial, of their thought.

I'm in a reading trough and am desultorily reading:

Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild, which is beautiful and clear-eyed and wise and all the things that make Snyder 'one of our best humans' (trademark). It does feel a little dated, but I don't think that's his fault.

Anita Brookner's Look At Me, which is limpid and arch and precise and all the things that make Brookner so good but hell I find her hard work sometimes.

Brian Vaughan's Saga, which is magnificent.

Never could get along with Christie, I have to admit. I just want to punch Poirot in his face.

Read The Stone Tide by Gareth E Rees, sits somewhere in the psychogeography - autofiction - old weird England continuum without being squarely any of them, and also taking a wry look at those modes, I enjoyed it. Mostly set in Hastings, and a bit in Bexhill-on-Sea.

I read Old Men In Love by Alasdair Gray, it's the first of his I've read, and I enjoyed that too, feels like Proper Old Fashioned (but not that old fashioned) Lit Fic, takes the ruse of being The Collected Papers Of the main character, includes diaries and drafts of part-finished novels. Well done everyone. Set mostly in Glasgow.

I read Worlds From The Word's End by Joanna Walsh, tricky and rewarding "experimental" short stories, she's very good indeed. Set nowhere in particular. Eley Williams remains my short story champ this year, I love "Attrib" beyond all reason.

Now I'm reading "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie" by Jean Rhys. Would like to keep reading it forever. Set in Paris so far.

I have a fresh unopened copy of attrib. sitting waiting for me at home as I type

(along with the ya novel THUG and spufford’s golden hill. all recommended by the what page are you on podcast)

Richard Holmes - Shelley: The Pursuit
Katherine Anne Porter - "Old Mortality"

The Odyssey, tr. Emily Wilson. Spare, swift, and true.

I'm back for air after sequestering myself with Proust since late summer (am halfway through - just finished the first vol. of Sodom and Gomorrah/Cities on the Plain, to be precise - and am taking a small break, but still very much engrossed).

I've heard nothing but excellent things about the new translation of the Odyssey and am looking forward to reading it. I'm hoping to read a few other books during my holiday break before returning to Marcel.

As it's the time of year of year-end recaps, in the spirit, I thought I'd share a few highlights from 2017 which may be of interest to some (a few of which were taken from recommendations from threads earlier in the year - thanks all :))

Distant Star + Last Evenings on Earth - Roberto Bolano
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Transit - Rachel Cusk
The Malady of Death - Marguerite Duras
Youth - JM Coetzee (am meaning to read the other two in the trilogy, as well)
Torpor, I Love Dick - Chris Kraus
Lightning Rods - Helen DeWitt
The Sellout - Paul Beatty
Bartleby and Co - Enrique Vila Matas

The Economics of Global Turbulence - Robert Brenner
Detroit I Do Mind Dying - Dan Georgakas
October - China Mieville
Memoirs of a Revolutionary - Victor Serge

Also hoping to read these over the holidays (meant to include in earlier post!) and also hoping to eventually get to Henry Green after finishing In Search of Lost Time.

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10581.html
Autumn - Ali Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_(Smith_novel)

It's so weird that smith & knausgaard both have books called winter out now, that are the 2nd volumes of "season" tetralogies

Diary of a Provincial Lady's sequels maintain the quality

Turns out I had purchased an omnibus of all of these! Had a buncha flights so binged, which is perhaps not the best way to read them (some comedic tricks do repeat a lot), but overall am very very impressed. Foreword rightly points out how modern Delafield's character is in balancing home life and professional ventures; I also enjoy the frequent shout-outs to plays/books/movies the protagonist has enjoyed. Am in total agreement w/ her on René Clair's Le Million and the moment where she confesses that she would leave her husband and children in a heartbeat if propositioned by not Ivor Novello or Douglas Fairbanks but CHARLES LAUGHTON is <3 <3 <3 Also, the frequent hopes for a bolschevick revolution when she has to deal with her snotty neighbour. Very interested to check out more Delalfield.

Now reading the second volume of the Penguin Book Of The British Short Story and the early selections being of course filled with Wodehouse and Wharton I was a bit wary I'd OD on English whimsy, reading this right after Delafield, but then it gets into the WWI era and jesus. The story that's impacted me most so far is "The German Prisoner" by James Hanley, whom I'd previously not heard of. It's like an EC Comics war story but with Italian cannibal movie levels of violent gore. Can't say I enjoyed it, and am not entirely sure what I think of it (Author's Intention, although a red herring, always seems to pop up in this kind of thing, I think), though it's certainly a nice corrective to the rah-rah nonsense of Buchan and the like. Anyway, it's certainly something. Approach with caution.

I've been reading At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It was an unasked-for gift from last year. I guess I feel a little guilty for not just reading the primary sources, but that's a silly reaction to have, especially when Bakewell has done such a fine job of research. It must be difficult to write a fairly light and entertaining book about philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Also, I should be honest with myself, I was never going to read Heidegger or Husserl anyway and at least now I have some sense, however superficial, of their thought.

Really liked this. I've mentioned this a few times but there's a section she quotes from De Beauvoir's memoirs that is basically the end speech from Blade Runner.

(Wharton? I meant Waugh, duh)

Some good ones I read in the last couple of weeks:

Jennifer Egan - Manhattan Beach
Gerbrand Bakker - The Twin
Sayed Kashua - Second Person Singular
Magda Szabó - The Door (thanks, ILB!)
Sebastian Barry - Days Without End
Emmanuel Carrère - Class Trip

The best one was probably Days Without End. A really good novel about the American Civil War, told by a very modern protagonist.
The Door took a while to get going, but turned brilliant in the last 80 pages.

The story that's impacted me most so far is "The German Prisoner" by James Hanley, whom I'd previously not heard of.

Highly recommend James Hanley's novel Boy, equally grim in its way and successfully prosecuted for obscenity during the author's lifetime. Love this from the Wiki entry on it:

Novelist Hugh Walpole, in a review, described Boy as "A novel that is so unpleasant and ugly, both in narration and in incident, that I wonder the printers did not go on strike while printing it"

Yeah, I saw that mentioned in the author blurb at the back. E.M. Forster repped for it!

'Boy' is one of the most depressing things I have ever read, and I've read a lot of depressing things.

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar + her poetry from '62 till her death. I liked the novel, its very much of a piece that is comfortable (as with a few Hollywoood films at the time) in taking in psychoanalysis, mental health, certain (now controversial) treatments. What she does in the book that the films wouldn't do is slap an agreeable ending.

Bernard Sumner's memoir Chapter and Verse. Still at him being a kid, just taking his 11 plus and trying to avoid the local non-Grammar High School.

I Swear I Was There about the first 2 Sex pistols gigs in Manchester teh ones put on by Howard devoto and Pete Shelley.

FOPP has a stack of great titles in the 2 for £5 section
also got a thing on the Who in the 60s and 77 Sulphate Strip.

Might go back for a couple of the books on style, The Bag I'm in for one.

New thread: And The Snow Fell Softly On ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

In last weekend's WSJ, Daphne Merkin reviewed massive new collection of early letters from Plath, with at least one more volume to come. Her mother had her trained to report back on everything, everything, and she seems to have enjoyed it, is DM's impression, plus the "microscopic" focus, though disconcerting at first, becomes very involving, hypnotic even. But not too zone-out/in for perspective/patterns.

I've got a vol of Letters Home to come, and really looking forward to cracking on in 2018. I do like Plath's poetry but the talent of course was cut short, and from reading her I felt there was so much more to come (which I possibly don't feel about Kafka, say, but there was so much more of it, and it was miraculously something on a sentence-level.)