2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?

A new season is upon us and unless you live in the upside down half of the earth, it is summer. I am now fully committed to reading The Siege of Krishnapur, J. G. Ballard. It manages to slip its tongue into its cheek with some regularity, which is nice for an English novel full of sahibs. Very little blood has spilled at this stage of the game, so the tone maintained so far may change shortly.

Here is a link to the previous WAYR thread for Spring 2019.

I’m reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J K Huysmans. Not what I expected so far

Yeah. It's J. G. Farrell. My brain has these two cross-indexed.

Thomas Mann - The Holy Sinner

Karen Russell's "Orange World and Other Stories" - love her worlds, where the odd sits comfortably with the normal. "Bog Girl: A Romance" reminded me of Ray Bradbury.

T.J. Stiles - Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America"

for a guy I randomly picked off the library shelf, Stiles has turned out to be one of my favorite historians/writers presently working. All his books have been exhaustively researched, cogently argued, and demonstrate a gift for teasing out compelling details and stories.

Mihail Sebastian: Women

ed dorn - by the sound

finished: red shift - garner (ilb rec) and black leopard, red wolf - james
reading: great northern - rodman, and washington black - edugyan
on deck: there there - orange, the line becomes a river: Dispatches from the Border- cantú

20 pages left of Terry Eagleton, HUMOUR.

did you make it??!

Finding it hard to settle on summer reading. 50 pages into a short horror novel called seed by Ania ahlborn, I’m struggling with it because the writing is poor - it’s a shame, it feels like it hasn’t been through much editing and it would have been a compelling enough arrangement of tropes otherwise

(I have 2 months free of this Amazon prime book thing so I’m like a filter feeder atm trying to get as much nourishment as I can from a sea of garbage)

Keep fleeing from that into Sappho and Elizabeth Bishop

did you make it??!

three-body problem
the end of the myth: from the frontier to the border wall in the mind of america

Really curious about the Eagleton book!

I'm reading a new translation of Alexandre Dumas's TWENTY YEARS AFTER - the first modern translation in over a century! It's by the guy who translated Mysteries of Paris for Penguin. For some reason he's self-published it on Amazon, and it reads a lot, lot better than the William Barrow version, but the Kindle formatting is the worst I've ever seen, and there's tons of typos. It's GREAT but also ANNOYING.

I've also started WEIRDSTONE OF B after being really impressed by Red Shift; and am halfway through THE BFG, which I'm reading for for the first time, and is okay-ish. Also want to read Brookner's LOOK AT ME and the last two Ferrantes this summer.

madame bovary

im reading madame bovary Flaubert just described a hat as “one of those pathetic objects that are deeply expressive in their dumb ugliness, like an idiot’s face”. Lol

— Sam (@fuiud) June 29, 2019

I finished Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945. Perhaps a bit dry at times, I think more could have done to bring the personalities and settings to life for the lay reader. I still found it pretty interesting though, and clearly a prodigious amount of research went into it. Now I'm reading Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt.

Let us know the summary of that one

Finished Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis, which was good and dealt in interesting arguments but in my reading opted not to outline much in the way of a truly concrete program, rather ending by turning over a lot of rocks.

finished the dorn: a rather prosaic portrayal of a pacific northwest logging town during the fifties centred on a small group surviving (just) on the occasional employment they can pick up on construction sites or odd job work for the local farmers who act as a sort of gimcrack gentry in the region

now i'm one chapter into omensetter's luck by william h gass

Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince -- biography of a gay, sometimes cross-dressing, warrior/spy/politician Ukraine-loving Habsburg prince who fought the Russians in WW1, then the Nazis, then the Soviets (and was executed by the latter)

Habsburgs at play:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-H5CCnU0AsTwpC.jpg

I finished Terry Eagleton HUMOUR last night.

In truth, not his best book - easy-going, not that rigorous or purposeful, though its chapter structure is ostensibly clear. The first few chapters are about theories of why we laugh - they're OK but recursive / repetitive. Then there is a history of 'humour' that slides far too much into 'good humour', C18 coffee houses etc - he keeps getting distracted from actually talking about the subject. The last chapter focuses on Trevor Griffiths' COMEDIANS, quite a good move, but gets rather distracted again from the earlier questions of what's funny, rather than what's emancipatory, ethical, etc.

Then he finally turns to carnival again, which is OK except is carnival actually funny? Then he says that Jesus Christ is carnivalesque so, very characteristically, gets to spend the last 3pp talking about the Bible. Probably not an obvious way to finish a book on humour.

The book contains some good jokes (mainly other people's) but TE's attempts to mimic Myles's 'Catechism of Cliché' are remarkably poor.

I also finished THE SHORT FICTION OF FLANN O'BRIEN.

Deceptively good / useful collection - in that I thought I had most of it already, but actually lots is first published here - including new translations from the Irish, and an SF story that FOB may or may not have written.

Familiar things like 'John Duffy's Brother' come across well. 'Drink & Time in Dublin' I had never read. Even his late unfinished novel SLATTERY'S SAGO SAGA has a degree of interest.

Today I started Julio Cortazar, HOPSCOTCH.

I feel like what I have heard about this novel is: it has a ludic structure, but that's a superficial afterthought, and you might as well just read it normally.

So I started on Chapter 1. Then a friend who loves the book told me he was starting again on ch73. So I read that and will go on to Ch2 and read it the HOPSCOTCH way after all.

Love Hopscotch. It’s primarily impressionistic. Read it however you want

Finished Sebalds Austerlitz. Could have kept on reading about forts and nocturamas and train stations for hundreds of pages more. The main plot was good as well.

I finished The Siege of Krishnapur last night. It remained gently satiric even as the bloodshed and extreme hardship of the siege is accurately rendered from the point of view of the English. The characters show amazing resilience and bravery, while at the same time each one is faintly ridiculous and beset by delusions so powerful they are able to sustain them in the face of continuous horrors, while equally blinding them and making fools of them. It's quite a feat of tightrope walking by the author.

Krishnapur is one of those In Every Charity Shop Ever Books, so I assumed it was bad or Under The Volcano-level unreadable. But that sounds interesting

Inner thread connection, the Karen Russell book of short stories has one from the PoV of Emma Bovary's greyhound. Favorite story was "The Gondoliers", about one of four sisters in a flooded Florida who ferry various people around using an evolved sense of echolocation.

Started on Paul Mason's CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE.

Easier and faster going than HOPSCOTCH. Maybe it's really like an extended run of PM New Statesman columns, with those short paragraphs and punchy assertions. Uncertain about the coherence. But only about 25pp in.

To get away from Britishers I am reading Ubik, Philip K. Dick.

So far it is a pure shaggy dog story with some sci-fi/fantasy embellishments. I get the strong impression that Dick wrote his novels by launching at random into them, just trying to amuse himself as he went along. If he liked the result he kept going, piling up new characters and incidents for a while until finally he had to figure out how to tie them together and move them in some semi-coherent direction. There's a certain amount of the "and SUDDENLY a WITCH came in with BIG DOG" sort of story logic often employed by six-year-olds, but it is kind of fun, too.

Ubik is one of his best. It becomes sort of tragically horrific by the end.

His vision had a very strongly absurdist element, which easily morphs into a sense of the horrific and tragic.

my memory is that it definitely starts on an absurdist note, all those ridiculous clothing descriptions, "wubfur" etc

Yeah, I think UBIK is my favourite PKD book.

And there's an especially good reason for the absurdism in that one.

reading Philip Kerr’s “Prague Fatale”, which is one of his Bernie Gunther novels and thus far maintains the high quality control of the rest of the series. I’m glad he was able to sneak out a final novel with this character before he passed away; I’m trying to work my way through the novels at a good clip since I’d like to reread them all sooner rather than later, assuming the remainder of the books are at a similar level. I have no reason to expect they’re not.

UBIK certainly canonical as far as PKD goes.

I partly share the view that his novels can seem improvised, but in this instance it would seem that a larger vision is driving it all.

Hopping around a few chapters of HOPSCOTCH: I can see the general charm of the set-up (people idling in Paris) but at the moment the more I read, the less it wins me over. The philosophical digressions seem windy, the story isn't yet going anywhere. I start to wonder if it's a self-indulgent book like GRAVITY'S RAINBOW but less organized.

Yet, at times it does seem to press through at something real, with unusual honesty and directness.

Maybe it will come together. I have a long, long way to go. I think it needs more concerted reading, less the commuter reading that I am mainly giving it.

I've only read Ubik, loved it, but haven't figured out which one to read next. Probably Flow My Policeman Tears Thingy.

Tried Martian Timeslip but wasn't feeling it.

A Scanner Darkly or Dr. Bloodmoney would be my rec

Flow My Tears is p good and I know various people love it but it's a bit too one-dimensional/tied to a pretty basic premise imo

grab an omnibus of the short stories and plow through some of that, they usually get some bonkers idea across and don't overstay their welcome. or at least, so I recall from my teenagerhood when I did just that

Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch also a good one on a level with/similar vibe to Ubik imo

Yeah Three Stigmata is great for nonstop-rush mindfuck PKD, I lost count of the plot twists in that one. A Scanner Darkly is probably his best-written, most heartfelt book, very sad and often very funny. I didn’t quite vibe with Flow My Tears but lots of people love it.

Highly recommend the story “Faith of Our Fathers,” it has one of my favorite lines of villainous dialogue ever.

Henry Green - Doting
Agnès Poirier - Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50

I agree about PKD: I can't think of a novel of his that was altogether satisfying (but I have many many more to read), whereas the stories, in their own way, are.

As though, in a fairly basic and obvious way, he could hold things together over a short and not a longer stretch. Or as though some 'aesthetic' aspects, or maybe issues of depth, don't seem to matter in a story and do seem to in a novel.

Though that still feels over-simple now I think about it. But I do think the stories succeed more unequivocally than the novels.

SPQR

great

I partly share the view that his novels can seem improvised, but in this instance it would seem that a larger vision is driving it all.

I finished Ubik last night. While it does have a central plot 'device', probably inspired by his reading in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, most of the remaining pieces were completely heterogenous and unconnected to that central device.

To give one non-spoiler, minor detail that illustrates PKD's lack of method, the money in the book starts out as something called "poscreds", but very swiftly afterwards he has the characters doling out nickels and dimes, and later parts of the plot include paper bills. The poscreds don't go away entirely, but linger on in parallel, without any rhyme or reason how both forms of money relate to one another.

Different characters are introduced as clearly being important ones, including one prominent villain named Hollis. But by the end Hollis has been relegated to the dustbin as uninteresting and unimportant. A wholly new villain is promoted in his place at the last moment, but what that villain's new importance portends is left unresolved.

The ending is a cheap variant of "and it was all a dream, or was it?"

These items are obvious weaknesses. As with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, I think the one strength that carries the book and gratifies the reader is the wild profusion of PKD's imagination. He starts so many wild hares running that he cannot keep track of them all and most of them go uncaptured and disappear, but when each one jumps out of the brush running there is a moment of exhilaration - and that brief exhilaration is repeated frequently enough to keep you breathless. That's a rare quality and it is worth finding.

pkd short stories are the best, but although his novels can be v uneven, i like the different pace of his world/problem building.

the hares is a really nice observation!

I think by the 70s he had largely mastered his problems w structure, he became much less prolific and more focused (also generally sadder. And more theological)

Like his last five or so books dont have nearly as many “hares”, in Aimless’s terms.

Yes agreed (on both posts). I prefer the hares, unrealised or not. The massive theological stuff is compelling but gloomy.

"History," Elsa Morante

Just read Yu Hua's "Cries in the Drizzle", enjoyed it, some of it was funny, I liked the infolding of time in the narration, I liked the sustained minor key.

I feel like the objections to PKD's shagginess are valid but irrelevant to me tbh. I'm not so bothered that every book has to be seamlessly clockwork.

The shagginess and uresolved plotlines in Ubik felt very deliberate and haunting to me!

At the very least, you have to credit PKD for finding the perfect story to shape around his "weaknesses" as a writer.

I agree, to me it's a feature not a bug

Started my summer with Juan Goytisolo's Count Julian which is the usual (if you know your way around Latin American literature) tale of fragmentary exile, and then moved onto Auerbach's Dante: Poet of a Secular World which is his account of Dante's achievement in the way in which he is able to gather reality, what makes him unique for his time and for all time, too. It helps if you've read his theories in Mimesis and I love his prose anyway.

Catching up on some of the TBR pile:
László Krasznahorkai, Satantango - pretty much an equal slog to the (7 hour) film version, but what a slog. Mud, beer, despair, everything you'd want from a prize-winning Hungarian novel. Apparently he's worked with Bela Tarr on most of his films, which figures.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy - as good as I remembered it from previous reading. Scratches my epic fantasy itch wholesale, thus saving me from having to plow through some 10-volume series by GRRM or whoever.
Brian Aldiss, some short story collection - the story that inspired Kubrick/Spielberg's AI is by far the best thing here. Not really one of the better new wave SF short story writers from this evidence, and the gender politics haven't dated too well (probably like every other (male) writer from the era tbf).
China Mieville, Embassytown - his sole SF novel I think? Linguistics feature heavily, which makes a nice change from most SF dealing with alien races (Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life excepted of course). Sometimes I think he has just too many ideas though, and also his style can get a bit ranting. I read it in my head in this kind of breathless splurge, it tires me out.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy

what about the other three?

The Poem of the Cid, as translated into prose by Rita Hamilton, from extensive notes provided by Janet Perry. It's in a bi-lingual edition, with the original (archaic) Spanish on the facing page, but I am unable to read the original and can only derive a few hints about the prosody by inspecting it.

Jorma kaukonen Been So Long
Hot Tuna have just been formed after 4 lps by JA. Thought he might explain the swap from.Spencer Dryden to Joey Covington but has said very little.
Very interesting so far. Hadn't really heard much about his background before.
Dad was in diplomatic service so he'd lived abroad in his youth.
Also is in a marriage he just seems to be stuck in.
Could do with something similar from Paul Kantner or Martyn Balintore. Don't think there is anything though.

Marty Balin not sure what they corrected to. Predictive text how fun.

Paul Mason very wayward and ambitious but does at least include a lot of talk about economics. The kind of thing I rarely understand and I'm not always sure I understand it here either.

Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck. It’s not my usual cup of tea but I’m enjoying it. Agreeing w most of what he says. Actually started it w my 13 yo.

The Making of DSM III

and the gender politics haven't dated too well (probably like every other (male) writer from the era tbf).

I remember Ursula K LeGuinn had a beef with him? Or more specifically accused him of having a beef with her'

Aldiss was an insanely prolific short story writer, especially in the 1960s, so am not surprised there are many more hits than misses.

His non-SF army books - Hand Reared-Boy etc - seem to be going for the same audience as Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas, and I imagine their sexual politics are even more grotesque when read today (also, there were reasons he was pally w/ Kingsley Amis). Greybeard, on the other, has a quite tender portrait of a long-lived marriage - might be his best SF novel?

I started reading the Aeneid of Virgil last night, in the verse translation of Robert Fitzgerald. I am incapable of reading the original Latin and so cannot appreciate all the felicitous turns of Latin phrase I hear are in there. So far, 'Book I' read as a bit clunky, with Virgil playing the sedulous ape to Homer, while also planting as many kisses upon Augustus's ass as possible. I expect this sad aspect will improve as the story progresses.

Based on my high school reading (ahem), the Aeneid was the staid and often colorless cousin to Homer's epics. I was astounded by how funny and lush Virgil could be when I read a couple of the Eclogues.

I remember Ursula K LeGuinn had a beef with him? Or more specifically accused him of having a beef with her'

are you confusing LeGuin with Joanna Russ? LeGuin loved PKD. Russ took issue with one of his stories for being explicitly anti-abortion, and this is noted in his notes to the story in one of the complete short story collection volumes. (It's a dumb story)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pre-persons

PKD: In this I incurred the absolute hate of [fellow SF writer] Joanna Russ who wrote me the nastiest letter I've ever received; at one point she said she usually offered to beat up people (she didn't use the word people) who expressed opinions such as this. I admit that this story amounts to special pleading, and I am sorry to offend those who disagree with me about abortion on demand... But for the pre-person's sake I am not sorry. I stand where I stand: "Hier steh Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," as Martin Luther is supposed to have said.

"Hier steh Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," as Martin Luther is supposed to have said.

Principled stand or not, going by the plot summary you linked to it's still a very dumb story.

It is you who are confused, Οὖτις

I just looked up the Le Guin-Aldiss beef and found this letter she wrote on being asked to supply a blurb for an anthology:

Dear Mr Radziewicz,

I can imagine myself blurbing a book in which Brian Aldiss, predictably, sneers at my work, because then I could preen myself on my magnanimity. But I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.

Yours truly,
(Signed)
Ursula K. Le Guin

A book on popular delusions written by mackay

Ah sorry wins my bad

First I’m knowing about any of these beeves tbh!

I put away that horror book for the time being and started BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller (I don’t normally do the yelling titles thing but this title seemed to call for it). I didn’t even know he’d written any novels, this is his last, lost apparently; it starts with a baby shooting its father and goes from there.

I was a big Aldiss fan until I read this stuff

I finished A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan last night, which was mostly pretty enjoyable but sort of lost me in the end when it suddenly indulged in some near-future speculative fiction stuff. I realized that my least favorite genre is precisely that: near-future speculation by literary fiction writers who are maybe not entirely aware of the present, especially when written a few years in the past. It's grating and rings false. Anyway, helps with bingo.

goon squad's ending is awful. turned me against the whole book

well i also hate the "rapist journalist with aggressive footnotes" chapter

The future bits are insanely bad, I’d really liked the book up until then but those last chapters are embarrassing and sort of highlighted some earlier embarrassingness that I’d been overlooking

Her book look at me had the same problem, it would occasionally lapse into bad speculative fiction, mainly at the end, and whenever it did it seemed really off the ball

I was delighted when I reached the unanticipated powerpoint section because it meant I was much closer to the end of the book than I had thought

Thanks, everybody. Makes me feel a bit better that I stopped reading much earlier on.

Yeah, the SF stuff is awful, really thin and un-thought-through

I'm a quarter of the way through the Aeneid and I think I can see its main problem: Aeneas has no character flaws to build a story around. He exhibits endless piety and prompt devotion to each and every kind of duty. But underneath that brave and handsome boy scout exterior there beats a heart of pure piety and devotion to duty. Yup. It's pious and dutiful turtles all the way down.

Speaking of "turtles all the way down", that Bertrand Russell anecdote shows up midway through Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, which I just finished. It's a pretty interesting book if you have a tolerance for philosophy. It reminds me of the book The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, which tried a similar trick of popularizing philosophical arguments for a non-specialist audience. Holt is good at clearly explaining the various arguments with a minimum of jargon, even if you may not always agree with his judgments on which is the more persuasive. For some reason, the book ends with a couple of chapters on the problem of consciousness, perhaps because it's another philosophical question of broad interest. Sometimes I feel like the philosophical mode of reasoning is trying to apply tools borrowed from math and logic to materials that are too shapeless to stand up to such precision, so by the end of the book I felt most sympathetic to the position taken by John Updike (in an interview given shortly before his death) that after considering all the arguments perhaps making a personal statement of faith is not a bad way to settle it.

Still a very long way to go in Mason's CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE, but I note something:

His narrative is, perhaps characteristically, flamboyant and exaggerated. He claims that neoliberalism totally remade the self; turned us all into homo economicus; then crashed in 2008 and left an utterly different world. The West now, he suggests, is like the USSR c.1991 -- a system has collapsed, people have seen through an ideology, the world is totally new.

This doesn't ring very true for me. To me, that financial crash was a big economic event, but it's not evident that it has fundamentally transformed the system in which I live. Most things are quite similar to before. Some specific bad things happened - like one that stays in my own mind, the end of Woolworths, or B&S some years later. (Both of those surely also belong to 'crisis of the high street' which is a different story again.) Some of the things that are different are because of other factors (like technological acceleration). Many things seem just to be getting 'even more neoliberal than before' - soccer, for instance, or universities, or aspects of transport. The more I think about it, the more Mason's account (asserting that neoliberalism has crashed) feels like wishful hot air.

I think a simple reason for the difference between my view and his is that he, I'll assume, understands the 2008 financial crash, and, even after reading him, I don't. My non-understanding encourages me to think it's not that important, or rather, it doesn't allow me to see how important it is.

imo, the 2008 crash affected the outlook and habits of a lot of individuals and households, but the structures of the financial system were carefully preserved and nourished back to strength by the central banks of the western governments and quite a few mega corporations were bailed out, so that most of the severe financial dislocations were felt almost entirely at the grassroots level, not among the power elites. Apart from the anger and cynicism this bred, which people like Trump have capitalized on, the people running the system seem to be wholly unchanged by the experience.

Aimless, that seems to me an excellent analysis and I agree!

Rather than *BHS*, in my post I symptomatically managed to invent the closure of B&S, and not even M&S.

Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World, Mark Kurlansky.

Chapter Four: Whence Came the Breading

Elizabeth Jolley's Vera Wright trilogy

Eight books of the Aeneid down and four to go. Virgil still has his lips firmly planted on Augustus' ass. I'm setting it aside for a week while I go camping. While camping I shall bring other reading material to amuse me.

Adolf Loos: Ornament and Crime -- very entertaining writing on aesthetics from a dead paedophile

I’m relieved that everyone else hates the ending of goon squad too

Loved Manhattan Beach though.

Knocked off The Sisters Brothers, also via library ebook, which both had a good ending and lived up to the hype implicit in its permanent position in the “northwest authors” display in the local bookstore.

I just finished A Separate Peace by John Knowles. My wife and the guy working at the bookstore both expressed surprise that I hadn't read it in high school. I was intrigued by the opening paragraphs and back jacket summary, and I figured that any book that's been in print for 70+ years must be ok at least. It was actually pretty good (surprise, surprise). Maybe the first half was better and the ending seemed a bit extreme (don't want to give any spoilers) but I guess it fits with the wartime atmosphere. Now I'm reading The Unforeseen by Dorothy Macardle, which someone on here recommended.

Whilst camping last week I read a bit more than half of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman.

I agree with the most basic premises of the book, for example that the vast majority of the activity we experience as 'mind' takes place in the pre-conscious, and the characteristic operation of most components of 'mind' is heuristic, rather than strictly logical, mathematical, or rational, or that people find statistical thinking difficult and alien and far prefer applying rapid heuristics over making calculations of Bayesian probabilities.

I do have a lot of trouble with his rhetoric. Sure, he is a psychologist by training, not a writer, but a surprisingly large percentage of his experiments are based on carefully crafted, brief scenarios that his subjects are then asked to evaluate, so that his apparent insensitivity to the finer points of rhetoric and how they affect the responses he gets is very annoying.

For someone whose major conclusions wholly accept, I'm finding him extremely irritating. He's always leaving out crucial information and offering conclusions only weakly supported by the evidence he chooses to present. It's meant to be a 'popularizing' book for the lay reader, but he was probably the wrong author for the project, attempting too much and not able to condense without creating lacunae.

Hours of travel time reading HOPSCOTCH.

I still don't like it.

Knocked off The Sisters Brothers, also via library ebook, which both had a good ending and lived up to the hype implicit in its permanent position in the “northwest authors” display in the local bookstore.

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), 17. juli 2019 04:20 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

The film is actually really, really good, and I usually dislike Audiard.

I've been reading some Danish authors, Harald Voetmann, Lone Aburas, Pernille Abd-el Dayem, Christina Hesselholdt (an absolutely brilliant book about Vivian Meyer, apparently the first in a trilogy, great stuff), and now I'm reading more Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Bought in East Anglia, no less, feels very appropriate. It's not quite as good as Austerlitz, though.

Really enjoying that Cod book. Learned that the Basque got to Canada before the French and British, but didn't say anything and just started fishing there on the quiet. Early New England settler culture really shows you where Lovecraft came from, people putting codfish on family crests and doing weird rituals with them and stuff. And of course like all global commerce it intersects with the slave trade in all sorts of ways.

I do have some reservations though; the scope of the book is so large that it's questionable how deeply the author could go into all the different countries he's tackling. A lot of the stuff on Portugal is not factually incorrect but very weirdly put - someone is described as "the tyrant of the Azores" (which would be under Portuguese rule, so ultimate tyrant surely still the king?) and Portugal "merging" with Spain when what actually happened was Portugal lost a war and got conquered.

I think I've enjoyed all the Kurlansky books I've read so far. Salt was very interesting as was the Basque History of The World.
& he's now more recently branched into doing books on music or at least where music features largely.

The only Kurlansky book I've read is The Basque History of the World, and I thought it was excellent. What I've heard from my Basque friends is that, for someone not-Basque, he did as best a job as he possibly could at getting at what makes Basques 'tick' etc. I vastly prefer it to Paddy Woodworth's 'The Basque Country: A Cultural History', which contains grave generalizations and taking wild swings at the Basques, missing the target by miles. He doesn't 'get' them nearly as good as Kurlansky does.

I still have 'Cod' lying around, will pack it in my summer book bag.

Kurlansky's fiction collection, 'The White Man in the Tree', is very enjoyable.

I must be 2/3 through HOPSCOTCH, in terms of actual pages. They are taking over a mental asylum for some reason. No great logic apparent to this. All somewhat reminiscent of Pynchon.

And Paul Mason for light relief. It is somewhat bizarre how this book swings between specific accounts of US business people and politics, and the nature of knowledge and metaphysics over the past few millennia.

He may have bitten off a bit more souvlaki than he could chew.

it's not hard to see why it's his most well-known book, but it's not my favorite or his best imo.

tbc, I do like it, I just like other stuff of his more

I tried reading Hopscotch in college but I was too depressed & lazy to get very far. On the other hand, the very short story "The Continuity of Parks" is stellar.

anyway reading Mammother by Zachary Schomburg, the first novel by my fav contemporary poet. Surreal but not nonsensical, very moody and sad.

Cortazar works that are better than Hopscotch:

- Axolotl (short story, my favorite piece of his)
- Cronopios and Famas (this is his best imo)
- The Continuity of Parks (short story)
- Save Twilight (poetry collection)
- House Taken Over (short story)
- Around the Day in 80 Worlds (collection of short pieces)

i tried Anciallary Mercy after liking Justice and disliking Sword and... i couldn't get into it. after the 20th use of 'impassive' i just checked out.

i tried Black Leopard, Red Wolf and i couldn't really get into that either. something about the gratuity, idk.

i'm now giving Traitor Baru Cormorant a shot and it's ok but half hear it as someone giving me an elaborate narration of their last catan game or something. so i'm not doing well with well-reviewed sci-fantasy recently.

somewhere in there i read The Uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Wells) and A Sport and a Pastime (Salter) which were both amazing and terrifying in different ways. i mean, we're fucked, is how i break it down to an extent.

Fuzzy THinking Bart kosko
I've wanted to read something along these lines for a while. Came across a number of the people the author talks about in George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things some years ago. Got this from a charity shop a few weeks ago.
Pretty interesting anyway.

Cronopios and Famos is brilliant, I agree. Wasn't as enamored of what I've otherwise have read by him. I have Hopscotch on the shelf, should dive into it.

White house lawn, how unpredictable really.
Couldn't he just die , in extreme pain or something.

I have heard that 'Continuity of Parks' was good!

(Then again I have also heard that HOPSCOTCH is good)

It's reassuring to hear one or two people not think that HOPSCOTCH is great.

- Axolotl (short story, my favorite piece of his)

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, July 24, 2019 12:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^^^^^

Like that one a lot. Think he reads better in Spanish, tbh, but don’t have the stamina to read a doorstop like Rayuela/Hopscotch in the original and long ago became disillusioned with the well-known translator of it into English.

Well-known? Not known to me. But fwiw I have actually felt that the translation was good - it does convey wordplay, fiddling with letters and sounds, and sometimes lyricism.

I feel that the problem, such as it is, lies beyond the translator.

Gregory Rabassa is well-known, yeah, although it’s all relative: you wouldn’t call him a household name but he did the English translations of a load of el boom stuff & Latin American lit mavens will know him. I’m reading one by him at the moment, the lizard’s tail by Luisa Valenzuela - I think it’s good but haven’t read the original obv. Curious about this disillusionment.

1) Liked Cortázar better when I read him in Spanish, and maybe some others as well, can’t remember
2) Read Rabassa’s (very slight) memoir
3)Saw him give a talk in my neighborhood in which he seemed to mostly repeat some lame jokes from 2)

I realize the above may not be an airtight case but...

I'm back reading the Aeneid. It has become drenched in gore, but the feats of arms Virgil vividly describes seem more mechanical than heroic. Not surprisingly, his lips have still not disengaged from Augustus's posterior.

I don't think I've heard anyone say anything nice about the Aeneid

i remember it being a bit like the Avengers

During the medieval period the Aeneid was the epitome of Homeric epic for an educated class that had no knowledge of or access to Homer's epics. They thought it was amazing stuff and couldn't praise it enough. I can see why, but knowing the originals rather spoils the flavor of the ersatz.

Starting to prep for my South Korea trip by reading The Story Of Hong Gildong

I know nothing about THE AENEID but didn't Seamus Heaney very late on produce a version of part of it, that people like?

I like the Aeneid, even the very hilarious part in Hades where it goes full Augusts propaganda. I've never read either Homeric epic in a verse version, though.

x-post. Yeah, Heaney did book 6, it was very good.

I've never really gotten into cortázar. have read rayuela and final del juego. think i like the short stories better but not enamored altogether

just remembering that there is a manic pixie dream girl in rayuela

Think Cortázar’s significant other -Carol? - was not an MPDG herself but he was aware of his predilection for such.

Chapter 133 of HOPSCOTCH, where character Traveler reads a bizarre encyclopedia or future plan for society, seems to me quite well done, imaginative, executed with dedication. It feels a lot like Borges's famous 'Chinese encyclopedia' but developed at great length. The translation conveys Cortazar's interest in specific wordings.

Hong Gildong was fun, kind of a Robin Hood tale where Robin also has wicked awesome magic powers. Could've done without the last third that just describes dude's life after he's become the ruler of an island realm, though.

Now it's on to At Dusk, Hwang Sok-yong.

Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies, his late sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. His powers aren't fully up to the task any more; it's mostly scenes of interrogation, and the end of the book comes too abruptly; but it's short, moves swiftly enough considering its elderly cast, and rounds out the earlier stories with portraits of Smiley and company before and after the events of those novels. His usual tone of disgruntled melancholy feels well-earned here.

I checked out a copy of Basque History of the World from the library and started to give it a whirl two nights ago. I will bring it with me on the weeklong camping trip I'll soon be leaving for, but I am not certain my interest in the plucky Basques drives down quite that deep. I'll bring several other fallback choices, too.

I read The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom. It's a novelistic companion piece to his Staring at the Sun book about his therapeutic explorations of how we deal with death and how best to live our lives. Yalom basically asks the question 'what if I could have Schopenhauer in one of my therapy groups?' and goes from there. It's clunky and Yalom isn't really a novelist but it's affecting and finds new ways of thinking about grumpy old Arthur.

Now reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I loved the wildness of Housekeeping very much; this is much more measured but it's got its hooks into me and is a good companion to the Yalom.

I hadn't recalled the MPDG element in HOPSCOTCH but rereading chapter 1, it's true - like an ur-text of the idea.

I finished the novel at midnight. As far as I can tell, the last two chapters are left bouncing back and forth infinitely. I didn't like the ending. I didn't really like the beginning or the middle either. But the earlier parts held more life and promise.

Meanwhile Paul Mason attacks Object Oriented Ontology, Bruno Latour, Rawlsian ethics, Utilitarianism, Althusser, Bergson and post-humanism, while saying he'd like to march under a banner with a randomly generated snowflake.

One of the most bonkers, scattergun books I've ever read - curiously similar in certain ways to Wyndham Lewis's hilarious epic polemic TIME & WESTERN MAN, which makes a very similar anti-vitalist, pro-stability case; something that PM doesn't seem to have considered, as that book (being by Lewis) is generally associated with the political Right.

Yet for all its theoretical daftness, I probably agree with most of PM's ultimate political conclusions.

I seem to be making a habit of reading recent booker winners. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) was everything the reviews said - daring, inventive, weird, compassionate, human - but also strangely slight; despite being 200+ pages it read like a short story. Milkman (2018) was more fulfilling.

Milkman was a thrill, deeply touching and hopeful

Olsson, The Weil Conjectures

The author's life as seen through the prism of the famous Weil siblings. Subjectivity index: 700 millianaïses.

Who will stand up for 62: A Model Kit?

Is The Weil Conjectures good? Can't tell from your description.

curiously similar in certain ways to Wyndham Lewis's hilarious epic polemic TIME & WESTERN MAN, which makes a very similar anti-vitalist, pro-stability case; something that PM doesn't seem to have considered, as that book (being by Lewis) is generally associated with the political Right.

but i should add v entertaining and enjoyable. and stimulating.

Is The Weil Conjectures good? Can't tell from your description.

The author had a brief fascination with mathematics in college before becoming a fiction writer and mother. She also had a certain fascination with Simone Weil as the representative of an ideal, as some young women used to. The book is partly a reflection on her past self and partly an impressionistic collection of biographical anecdotes about the Weils (in the present tense, with no quotation marks, as separated chunks of text). Simone was an iconic figure of the postwar era, now less well known (in the author's judgment). Andre was a giant of 20th century mathematics and unknown outside it. The author's consciousness is not enough of a binding agent to hold the book together, but she is able to consider the two Weils proportionately, which other writers do not. The book is short and vindicated more by its plain historical matter than by its thick subjectivity.

So is that a measured thumbs up, alimosina? Because that book seems sort of in my wheelhouse, although I am somewhat skeptical of some of the positive reviews I may have just read.

being sceptical of positive reviews is such a great pleasure and a useful heuristic. *this person likes it but in a way that suggests i will not*

I didn't regret reading the book. The author's efforts to understand her younger self were not arresting, but her distillation of both of the intransigent Weils' lives into a series of luminous details was worth the time.

Thanks. I was thinking if you really liked it a lot you would have posted about it on the other thread.

Am I the only one who really likes that poem about Simone Weil by Thai Sweet Chilli SensationsRowan Williams?

Thanks, alimosina. i might give it a go. Interested in both the Weils (and know bugger-all about Andre Weil)

Also there's Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up!

You do?

Ha, thanks. I sat in on a course with Karen Uhlenbeck for a little bit once. Did we discuss recent Freeman Dyson book on the other thread already?

Never mind, found your comments here: Redshifted In Memphis: Thread for a discussion of books about science or its history aimed at a general audience but not playing to the crowd

Finishing At Dusk. It strikes me that the protagonists - the millenial with vague artistic aspirations working herself to death in dead-end jobs and the boomer architect pining for the sense of community he felt during his youth in the slums, slowly realising how complicit he's been in gentrifying away that community - could be from pretty much anywhere in the "developed" world. It's strong, heartbreaking stuff, very much recommended. Kenzaburo Oe is a fan.

I got this selection of New Voices Korea texts that I saw an ad for in the LRB. Slim little volumes. Hopefully some of them will be less devastating than this Hwang Sok-yong, but I'm not holding my breath.

I also am reading MILKMAN (though still haven't finished CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE).

Summer has been mostly bad not good - just not enough time to read shit.

I finished the first part (of four) of Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries and right now its tone is kinda unlike much I've seen in German Literature (or anywhere else). There are snatches of warmth for people and life -- despite what it brings -- which I am still grappling in this story (each chapter is a day in 1968) of what is at heart a conversation between mother and young daughter, where the former recounts her young years in Nazi Germany to the latter, growing up in New York in the shadow of the ongoing war in Vietnam. I have a lukewarm liking for it, and I want to spend all my time wrestling with it except I am busy till the end of the month. So in the meantime I am finishing Abdellatif Laabi's Bottom of the Jar, an account of a childhood in Morocco with a few poetic turns that aren't quite landing and also aren't enough for you to turn away from either. Finally Wolfgang Hilbig's novella The Tidings of the Trees which is of course great, the guy's sentences are great. When you like you like.

I finished Dorothy MacArdle's The Unforeseen, which I had purchased in the Forgotten Books reprint edition, which is basically just a facsimile of the original first edition in a generic green paperback cover. A good print job and nice quality trade paperback binding though. It was an interesting and slightly odd book, because it deals with spooky occurrences (mainly prevision) as a realistic possibility. I don't know if Macardle herself took them seriously as a possibility, but the book does. It reminded me of Gustav Meyrink's The Golem in that way, though that's an even weirder book. Apart from that, the book is a well-written Gothic thriller/romance set mainly in the hills of Ireland just outside Dublin between the World Wars, and the main characters are educated upper-middle class people, though some of the interesting parts of the book also deal with itinerant tinkers who camp out on their property for a time, in a practice which seems unique to Ireland (not sure if it still occurs).

Now I'm reading Svetlana Alexievich's Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of WWII. It was written in Russian in 1985 but apparently has just been translated into English. It's quite powerful stuff, hard to read at times, mostly stories of atrocities witnessed by children at first hand, but with judicious editing that makes them flow almost like fairy tales, I guess like the old bloody fairy tales of pre-modern times, with the German soldiers taking the role of the evil trolls or goblins. I was reminded a bit of The Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel. Hard to put down.

Milkman just freaked me out by mentioning Playboy of the Western World, when Synge was an answer in the Times crossword today. So I guess I’m reading that next.

Reading the Playboy next? It'll only take you a couple of hours.

I don't think I have yet reached the MILKMAN reference to it. Something to look forward to.

I finished CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE around midnight. I didn't even expect it to end - I turned the page and I was on the last page. Paul Mason winds up talking about writing on Bondi Beach, somewhat losing his thread, not for the first time.

A curious book - is it really a whole book at all? A compendium of articles and talks posing as a unitary book? His last section offers a series of 'reflexes' for radicals today. One is 'never give in', but the substance is mainly about secessionist movements and why they scare neoliberalism. The next is called 'Live the anti-fascist life', but his main example of doing this is a soldier friend of George Orwell's who literally went out and shot lots of people. Fascinating and moving account, but not an obvious practical model for people today.

It's something of a mess, a scrapbook, a spontaneous farrago. Yet (I will say one last time) when it comes down to it, I agree almost entirely with every basic political message and conclusion it has to offer.

moving on to Jenny O'Dell's "How to Do Nothing" and "Black Elk Speaks", plus this Kate Wilhelm short story collections that has one of the most atrocious 80s covers ever
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fbooks%2F1287017096i%2F890465._UY630_SR1200%2C630_.jpg&f=1

Some of it is great some of it is trite, but it's always well-written, she is a great prose stylist. Never thought I would be praising short fiction originally published in Redbook but here we are.

I spent last week camping and hiking, but also managed to read several short books.

The first was The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, a strange little novella by Thomas Mann. It was not apparent from the edition I read how much of this "legend" was invented or reworked by Mann, but it was pretty clearly based on a pre-existing story. To give a hint at its strangeness, it revolves around two friends who decapitate themselves, and with the aid of a goddess are revitalized, but with their bodies attached to one another's heads.

Next, I read Not to Disturb, Muriel Spark, another novella, from the early 1970s. It felt like the treatment for a film script, very compact in its descriptions and dialogue and very dramatic in its premise, but ultimately it felt insufficiently human, in ways that her earlier books never do, and its satire was a bit too forced to seem realistic, but neither was it quite farcical enough to float blissfully free of reality. Still, not a bad book, just far from her best.

Lastly, I read Maigret Has Scruples, Georges Simenon. As with many of the Maigret novels, the real excellence of it is not in the imaginary crime or its solution, but in the creation of a wholly comfortable and fully inhabited world with apparently minimal effort on the part of author or reader.

I shall now return to The Basque History of the World and finish it.

Finished MILKMAN. In the end I felt it was about as good as people say. Something of a black comic masterpiece.

Just read "When You Reach Me", a Newberry-winning kids book from 2009, after Jia Tolentino mentioned in the NYT By The Book section. It's terrific, easy to read in <3hrs, and would def recommend if you liked "Holes"

Also just finished "The Beginning of Spring" on my Penelope Fitzgerald sprint which is amazing as usual, without being anything like one of her other books, as usual.

That’s the Russian one?

with the poor bear :(

The bear scene is amazing

I'm reading another British miniaturist: Elizabeth Taylor. I finished A View of the Harbour, have started A Wreath of Roses.

Taylor is fabulous. I think A View of the Harbour is the best of those I've read but can recommend Angel, too. Miniaturist is a good way to describe her, albeit the inner landscapes of the lives she portrays are vast. I have A Wreath of Roses somewhere.

I read John Higgs's Watling Street. It's a bit of a mess to be honest. It wants to be a Bryson-esque travelogue, with some more immersive almost Iain Sinclair like meditations on place (another interview with Alan Moore, about Northampton!) but doesn't commit to either. It's full of historical and cultural generalisations that made my teeth itch and it's got a Brexit framing narrative that hasn't been properly considered and consequently feels tacked on.

And I'm getting old and tetchy but what happened to editors? At a macro-level, this could have done with some architectural work and at a micro-level, there are some weird decisions with bits of text that read like placeholders that someone simply forgot to take out.

My wife just recently read When You Reach Me to our son, and she said that I would probably like it.

It’s excellent – minituarism for kids, even! And a pretty good all-ages read

I would strongly recommend reading as little as possible about it first, though

I would like to read it at some point. I think they took it back to the library. I finished Alexievich's Last Witnesses and am now reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk.

I'm reading another British miniaturist: Elizabeth Taylor. I finished /A View of the Harbour/, have started /A Wreath of Roses/.

I just finished it -- doesn't come together, or at least the ending doesn't play.

I just finished it -- doesn't come together, or at least the ending doesn't play.

no, agreed. been a while since i read it but istr it’s overall one of her weaker ones and that though I enjoyed weaving of emotions throughout the book the resolution wasn’t satisfactory (in fact i remember being disappointed - that it had squandered the emotional density that had been built up which promised a bit more).

I read Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, P.G. Wodehouse. It lacked some of the snap and wit of the best Wodehouse and always kept well within the customary well-worn tropes. But then it was roughly his 70th (and final) novel and he was over 90 years old, so perhaps a bit of fatigue is understandable in this case.

Just finished "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" by Karen Russell, last of hers I hadn't read, and my favorite. She comes up with great odd short story ideas, and populates them with little details that make them easily believable. Now reading "Where the Crawdads Sing", per sis' suggestion.

For that last one, see the Literary Clusterfucks thread

Vampires In The Lemon Grove is great, integrates genre tropes into literary fiction in a non-cringy way.

Making my way through those New Korean Writers chapbooks:

Demons, Kang Hwagil - Weird Fiction depicting the life of an elementary school teacher who's moved to the backwoods. Lots of stuff about rural pettiness and ppl not believing women. Strong feminist subtext. I'm sure there's some myths and traditions that tie into the supernatural aspect of the story that went over my head. Really enjoyed this.
Divorce, Kim Soom - Rather less metaphorical in its feminism. A poet about to get divorced ponders on how that procedure has affected women in her and her parent's generations. Pretty harsh stuff.
Milena, Milena, Ecstastic, Bae Suah- Sorta deadpan, Kafkaesque story. There's some potential in the protagonist's fastidious habits and the weird film he's working on, but mostly this was a bit too cutesy for me.
Old Wrestler, Jeon Sungtae - A former celebrity goes back to his old village for a ceremony honoring him; the protagonist is also losing his memory to a degenerative disease. A really affecting part is when he smells the smell of onions and it takes him back to his childhood, only to be told that the region only started planting them after he left. Quite heartbreaking.
Left's Right, Right's Left, Han Yujoo - Self conciously experimental story of someone's thought process as they are being choked to death. Lots of repitition. Quite good.

Bought Macdonald’s Fantastes and Lilith in a charity shop today - has anyone read any of his stuff? It was a mostly random pick from the Scottish Lit section...

I finished Mammother by Zachary Schomburg over the weekend and last night I started Crudo by Olivia Laing, which so far seems to be right in my wheelhouse

Revisiting some old scribbles on pastoral, still love this quotation from sixth century cleric Gildas' The Ruin of Britain:

I shall not enumerate the devilish monstrosities of my land, numerous almost as those that plagued Egypt, some of which we can see today, stark as ever, inside or outside deserted city walls: outlines still ugly, faces still grim. I shall not name the mountains and hills and rivers, once so pernicious, now useful for human needs, on which, in those days, a blind people heaped divine honours.

Gildas - The Ruin of Britain and Other Documents ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom not that Michael Winterbottom.

starting David Lindsay's "Voyage to Arcturus"

..and, this isn't really the place for it, but reading about that mighty ash Yggdrassil, reminds me that my woodcutter friend who I saw at the weekend pointed out several ash to me, and said soon they will all be dead, and there will be no more ash in the UK, from ash dieback. Obviously there are many worse things to worry about, but the native ash is a distinctive and lovely tree and its complete disappearance i find obscurely sad.

and on a separate note again, looking at the ash my friend pointed out reminded me of the penetrating reported quote of Jonathan Swift: "I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top".

Never fails to stop me in my tracks whenever I remember it.

Ruth Ware’s thrillers. Breezy beach reads, recommended

Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor; thoroughly enjoyed it, perfect holiday read for me. It's like he's set himself the task of writing a Richard Ford-style thing where nothing really seems to happen over the course of a weekend for 260 pages.

I mentioned upthread that I read Francisco Cantu's 'Line Becomes a River,' which is an extended memoir-essay-primer on Mexican/US border policy written by a former CBP agent. I'm still thinking about it a week after finishing, and I've bought copies for two friends. It's a marvelous piece of writing, cleaving deeply to the human impact of the Obama-era border enforcement situation. (An afterward deals w/ Trump policies). Best thing I've read in a while.

I just finished Murakami's Killing Commendatore. It's bad, I think? Maybe? Lots of ideas that never coalesce and a handwavy 'oh, it's metaphors' cop-out made embarrassingly literal at the ending. (Seriously, the protagonist journeys to the land of metaphors). Next, onto the second book in the N.K. Jemisen broken earth trilogy.

10 IF $Murakami=fiction THEN bad
20 GOTO 10

I still like Murakami about 50% of the time.

I really enjoyed Milkman - though I’m not sure why the Fates wanted me to read the Synge, which was pretty meh.

Finished Man in the High Castle, which I'd been warned isn't one of Dick's best despite its reputation, and... I agree. The only other one I've read is Ubik, and it's no Ubik.

There are couple killer moments, like the gun battle in the office, and I'm definitely glad I picked it up, but I was mostly bored and had to force myself to get it finished. In a way I actually admired its perverse dedication to un-excitingness, but boy are the characters flat. I wish there'd been more about its most provocative conceit (that the Japanese won the war and were, it turns out, pretty good to live under) and less of the, er, Dickian-reality-collapsing-stuff, but... guess I'll check out Electric Sheep or Policeman instead next time.

For that last one, see the Literary Clusterfucks thread

Thanks for that. The Slate link was an interesting article. Just under half of the book read, so appreciated the spoilers to alleviate the "feels like a ---- is imminent" anxiety. Has a "To Kill a Mockingbird"-lite vibe that isn't unpleasant.

Ouch on Killing Commendatore. Been saving that and the last Carlos Ruiz Zafon for a while. That ending sounds like the Alan Wake video game, which killed a great atmosphere.

While out trekking last week I read The Garden Party, a short story collection by Katherine Mansfield. They were interesting enough, but not quite the sort of writing I most enjoy. She excelled at setting a tone and creating an atmosphere, but my overall impression was that they leaned heavily on descriptions and used dialogue very sparingly, so that they did much more telling than showing. The prose had a tendency to get 'poetic', but thankfully stopped short of 'annoyingly poetic'.

Now I am halfway through Girl in a Landscape, Jonathan Lethem. He writes clean fluent prose and can describe action clearly, which are weak points for many writers. He's also strong on imagination, but mediocre on character development, relying more on emphasizing a character's quirks than giving on them human depth.

Girl in Landscape is one of his best, ends strongly iirc

I've 50 pages before finding Angel, the funniest and most vivacious Elizabeth Taylor novel I've read.

After reading a good blurb in the Sunday Seattle Times for "The Shakespeare Requirement" by Julie Schumacher, first reading her prequel, "Dear Committee Members". Quick read, no LOLs yet, but grinning a lot: English prof writing recommendation letters, some of hyperbole, most carrying out the chore with witty, honest assessment of academic ability. Mixing in "The Rook" by Daniel O'Malley after that, to see if it's better than the Starz series.

Hi! I just wanted to say that I met the pinefox Saturday evening and he was divine! The only bad thing is that we got to hang for only an hour or so. But he was friendly and funny and we talked about The Wake (quivers), Middlemarch, the pound, and what I should read next. Lorrie Moore: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital it is!

I'm currently reading Marguerite Young: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), 1198 pages of Joycean tumble. It's a chore but an intermittently ecstatic one.

it really is.

I've 50 pages before finding /Angel/, the funniest and most vivacious Elizabeth Taylor novel I've read.

Kevin B's post is practically the best review I've ever had on ILX. How are we supposed to start an ILX feud with that kind of talk?

It was slightly entertaining to find that some highly educated Americans think that the UK is in the Eurozone and abandoned sterling years ago.

FROG HOSPITAL apart from being consistently brilliant is short - it's hard to think of a reason not to read it.

Our discussion did also lead me to consider that the coloured-pencil drafts of FINNEGANS WAKE look like the the NYC subway map, which Kevin said was a lot more difficult to interpret.

I finished up Nocilla Dream last night which I'd been reading in spurts. I sort of see what he was going for but I spread my reading out way too much to have the gestalt effect of it really hit me. The Nocilla Trilogy in the US is a boxed set from FSG so I have and presumably someday will read the other two.

I seem to be making a habit of reading recent booker winners. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) was everything the reviews said - daring, inventive, weird, compassionate, human

i'm only about 80 pages in, but i am loving it. it's amazing how he is able to conjure genuinely horrific images (ie, a girl being integrated semi-permanently into a cemetery gate, which is also a glowing furnace) while being lol funny a page later. the bardo is a wonderful setting because it makes sense for these emotions and worlds to collide there.

I finished John Updike's RABBIT, RUN today. Brilliantly written; surprisingly dark in the end.

I have a stack of ponderous times that have been weighing on me for a while now. It's practically put me off of reading altogether. So I decided to track down some fantasy novels that might actually be FUN to read. Here's what's in my current lineup, I'm very excited!

A Darker Shade of Magic - Schwab
The Night Circus - Morgenstern
The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Swanick

I finished Girl in Landscape. No comments beyond what I've already said. Then I picked up The Mueller Report by the Office of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller regarding Russian interference with the 2016 US presidential campaign and related matters.

It is surprisingly well-written with a minimum of legalese and usually employs very exact wording to convey the least possible ambiguity. So far the many blocks of textual redactions in Part 1 make the pages fly by, since they may contain only a few dozen unredacted words. Because I kept up on the news reports during the investigation and after the release of the report, there has not yet been much new to me, but the report makes absolutely clear that Putin and the GRU materially assisted Trump and opposed Clinton, and the operation was quite large and successful.

Unusually I happen to have read GIRL IN LANDSCAPE 2 or 3 times. I think the first time its drifting nature frustrated me somewhat. The narrative is curiously slow and recursive. Yet when I looked at it very closely, I found the language richer than it appeared.

Specific details like the Archbuilders' speech and the John Wayne pastiche are also very good and enjoyable.

Re: Milkman: would love a book about the wee sisters.

Gosh yeah

Alexander MacLeod, Lagomorph

I liked that.

Finished the chapbook collection I was going through and moved on to Richard E Kim's The Martyred, the only modern Korean book that's a Penguin classic afaict. Was somewhat wary of it, as it's a Christian writer depicting the Korean War, but thirty pages in I feel I'm in safe hands: it deals with a military investigation into the execution of twelve priests by communist forces and the two mysterious survivors from that incident. It's quickly made apparent that there's more to the incident than the official narrative and a lot of resentments amongst survivors and church authorities. Kind of a mystery novel with lots of existential anguish thrown in. Dedicated to Albert Camus.

Perhaps I should not be surprised, but having read most of the Mueller Report there was little information in it that had not already become public over the past two and a half years through other means, such as various trials, public indictments, plea statements, investigative journalism, and legal analyses of those publically available facts.

The key piece of the eventual report would have to be the decision by Mueller and his team not to make a prosecutorial finding of obstruction of justice, despite there being overwhelming evidence of repeated acts of obstruction, often substantiated by Trump himself, openly, during interviews, tweets and impromptu answers to reporters' shouted questions. His many acts of witness tampering alone ought to brand him as a hopelessly corrupt actor.

If any of you failed to keep up on the many strands of this shameful story, it's all there in clear, consecutive narrative and analysis. But if you did grab onto all the public revelations as they swept past, you can skip reading this. You know it all, except for a few, minor piquant details, such as the email quoted on p. 149.

There, according to the special counsel's office, at the moment that news reports arrived that Clinton had conceded to Trump, an unnamed person (whose identity is redacted) emailed Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, who was personally tasked by Putin to make high-level contacts with Trump's transition team ASAP.

The email read: "Putin has won."

I return to Seamus Heaney, ELECTRIC LIGHT. Different discipline and intensity of reading poetry, a good thing to get back to.

Though late Heaney isn't always so intense, and is usually too ready to blather about some old family friend that none of us have ever heard of. That's when he's not translating bits of the classics, a practice that has rarely meant anything to me, though it seems intensely interesting to him.

Nonetheless I take satisfaction from moving through the lines and looking closely for the points of interest. I wouldn't mind going back and reading / rereading the whole of Heaney.

All of this is prompted I suppose by the magnificent exhibition about him in Dublin.

The craft of a Heaney poem delights me so much that I almost always forgive the lack of inspiration in late Heaney.

I like the idea that there is craft in these poems.

But I don't think I can always see it.

And I don't think that's just a matter of craft being so good it's invisible.

Perhaps there is a Heaney thread where someone could show this in a real detailed example.

Seamus Heaney-Classic or Dud (RIP)

I've been doing the Women in Translation Month thing: what I read starts here:

#witmonth #womenintranslation book 1: HUMAN ACTS by HAN KANG (translated by DEBORAH SMITH): Excellent and incredibly grim novel about innocence vs the state. The section from the POV of a hastily cremated corpse is far from the bleakest bit. pic.twitter.com/lZAkPCMT8Q

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) August 1, 2019

Pasternak/Rilke/Tsvetaeva - Letters: Summer 1926. Some of the letters here are pretty great. Tsvetaeva especially who is has these strange, blunt rhythms to her prose. Rilke is dying and it sorta shows (in comparison to the correspondence to ohter people in his younger days) as time goes on and enthusiasm dims - and Pasternak I've never been especially convinced by, he is finding himself in the world. Its a valuable snapshot if you are interested in any of these people, and also how lonely people try to find each other - but also how sometimes that doesn't work. We all die off in the end.

Yukio Tsushima - Territory of Light.

I've been nearly a week w/o opening a book. I guess I needed a break. Looking to try on That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, Carlo Emilio Gadda. In his introduction Calvino likens it to Italy's equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses, in part due to the many Italian dialects Gadda very artfully employs. Then the translator's intro warns that the translation can't really capture any of that.

I've been on a nonfiction kick this summer. Also, these are all audiobooks.

Tenold - Everything You Love Will Burn
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism. The historical details about how fascism began were my first encounter with them, and too brief, so I bought a copy of Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich which I hope to get to soon.
Mike Myers - Canada. structured like a stand-up routine, with many of the canada facts at the beginning being set-up for later jokes in the personal segments.
Alexievich - The Unwomanly Face of War. not as good as the Chernobyl book, with many accounts that say almost identical things. interesting that one of the first accounts is of a horror story also included in the MASH finale, followed by accounts that dismantle the pieces of it.
also Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451. not what I expected. more about instant gratification in culture rather than censorship.

currently listening to David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest
halfway through reading Ted Chiang's Exhalation collection

W.G. Sebald - 'The Rings of Saturn'. Simply exquisite, of course. And speaking of: After tiptoeing around it for a long time, Sebald sealed the deal for me, I want to read Chateaubriand's 'Memoirs' next. Does anyone know what the best English translation/edition is? Is Anthony Kline's free translation as good as the NYRB version (the first 12 books irc?).

Gérard de Nerval - Aurélia ou le rêve et la vie. (re-read)

AM Homes - Days of Awe. The first short stories collection of hers that I found mediocre and, at times, even tedious, while on the whole being a fan of her work. I feel like she's reached a point where she's starting to repeat herself - both thematically and structurally - in a way that feels lacklustre, on auto-pilot. The stories just aren't as good.

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. Solid collection that's nice to cherry-pick through with many work by authors previously unknown to me.

"Does anyone know what the best English translation/edition is? Is Anthony Kline's free translation as good as the NYRB version (the first 12 books irc?)."

Read the NYRB last year and its a selection from each of the books which I liked enough but I actually wanted to read the complete first few, with all its reflections of his younger years iirc.

I finally finished Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Would it be too corny to call it Byzantine? It's po-mo in a way that seems very late '90s. This and Infinite Jest were clearly cut from a similar cloth: the fascination with formal complexity for its own sake, meta-textuality, calling attention to its own artifice, lots of authorial wink wink nudge nudge. There is an emotional core to the book but it's buried under so many layers it struggles to breathe at times. I imagine a knowledge of Turkish political history would probably help a lot too. It's clearly an accomplished work, but I felt exhausted before I reached the end.

Now I'm reading Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla.

Thanks xyz! I'm the same in that I'd rather read the complete works, especially on his youth/young manhood.

Richard Ellmann -- Yeats: The Man and the Mask
James M. McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom

Rooney - Normal People. believe the hype!

i didn’t like Conversations with Friends but wifely like i have to give Normal People a chance

I found the two protagonists pretty insufferable.

LOL @ my phone autocorrecting ‘wifely’ in there xp

Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World by Mark Miodownik
author runs through a lot of the construction of objects in the every day world. Quite interesting.
Looks at things like the atomic bond in the construction of concrete and steel.

Patternalia Jude Stewart
Light book of musings on the history of various patterns. Worked its way to the top of my book pile so I've been dipping into it.

Pedagogy of Hope Palo Freire
follow up book revisiting the work he published in pedagogy of the oppressed a few decades later. Read the earlier book on a train the trainer course I took around this time last year. Seemed very sound and was apparently central to the philosophy of Brazilian education , unfortunately Bolsonaro has come in and overturned that. Regressive dickhead.
Found the book in the library yesterday, thought I'd had to get a library loan to get the earlier work. Must have been focused on getting the oppressed volume cos I missed this at the time.

Augusto Boal Theatre of the Oppressed
brazilian theatre writer whose ideas were behind Theatre for Change

Pere Ubu The Scrpbook
short book with a short history of the band up to 1982 in. Been dipping into this too.

I have read Ellmann's WBY biography.

I finished Heaney's ELECTRIC LIGHT - read the whole thing with audio of Heaney reading it. I now feel doubtful that I can or should read poetry any other way.

Started Muldoon's MAGGOT.

Still reading fantasy novel THE TROLLTOOTH WARS.

Ducks, Newburyport out in the USA and I've read the first 6 pages. Otherwise, Sheila Heti, Motherhood, which contains the line (in the context of a family tree viciously pruned by the Holocaust) "Family is scarce in our family" which was affecting enough that I had to put it down for the day.

how is the ellmann yeats book? i've owned the wilde book for about 10 years but somehow have never read it.

It's good if dated. It actually doesn't dwell on the poetry. I can see him holding his nose as Yeats spends thirty years plowing through Madame Blavatsky, seances, Noh, Lady Gregory, Irish peasant drama, and masks; he sorts out these phases with admirable clarity, though.

I accept Yeats' greatness as a poet, for it is brilliantly evident in his poetry, but viewed simply as a person, he always looked to me like a godawful mess of fatuous immaturity and intellectual bad judgment.

if only Twitter had kept him honest

Hey, I began Ducks, Newburyport today as well. Really looking forward to seeing what crazy adventure that puma gets into, though at the moment it's been interrupted by some kind of rant.

The reason I began a new book is because I finished rereading Pynchon's Against the Day. I must have read the first part of it five-six times, but only the second time I made it all through. I took a break after part three, and only went back to it earlier this summer, reading parts four and five. I was surprised at how coherent it seemed, there's a good three-hundred page stretch where it's basically only Kit and Dally and Reef and Yashmeen and Cyprian. Almost like a little novel inside the novel. Then Frank returns, and the last part of it is as ever-shifting as at the beginning.

I finished Steve Jackson, THE TROLLTOOTH WARS.

I enjoyed this, even or especially with its rather ludicrous replication of material from the first 3 actual FFGs - I mean, whole scenes from THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN!

But it ends with a deux ex machina scene which is possibly also an allegory of role-playing, ie: the gods are like players, the books' characters are like PCs.

I start Henry James, THE ASPERN PAPERS, but it will probably take me a long time.

I'm about 85% through That Awful Mess in the Vis Merulana. It does exhibit the sort of comprehensive mastery of language, rising to an occasional full pipe-organ fugue and mixed with low buffoonery, somewhat reminiscent of James Joyce.

The other salient feature that jumps out at me is the author's apparent view of women as being objects both of great frightfulness and aching desirability, which conflicting emotions color the entire narrative so far, both overtly and latently. I conclude Gadda was not entirely a well man when it came to his relationship with women. It makes me hesitate to recommend the book without reservation.

I finished Ants Among Elephants. It was a fascinating look at life in some of the poorer and more oppressed corners of Indian society, from independence up until more recent times, told through the stories of a few generations of one untouchable family. The two main characters are an uncle of the author who was a radical Communist political organizer and the author's mother, who struggled against caste-ist and sexist oppression to complete her education and obtain a permanent position as a teacher. But intertwined with their stories are stories of many other relatives, acquaintances, and lots of interesting background material. The book has a Balzacian sweep, zooming in on intimate personal stories and then zooming out to sketch the political situation at large, all in a very engaged, clear style that is never pedantic or dry. Highly recommended.

Now I'm starting on Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth, which someone was giving away on their stoop. So far I've considered bailing out since I find Roth's sex writing to be neither sexy, funny nor all that interesting, but the book has such rave reviews I'll probably soldier on a bit to see if it improves.

Reading Hilaire Belloc’s book on Robespierre.

(Spoilers: He’s not as keen on him as I am)

Willem Elsschot: Soft-Soap -- a masterpiece of cynicism in an old 2nd-hand copy that unfortunately stinks of mould

J.P. Nettl - abridged version of his (originally two volume) biography of Rosa Luxemburg

i am starting on my first thomas bernhard by reading his last novel: extinction

previous to that i read david markson's wittgenstein's mistress

I am now reading The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald.

Finished Daniel O'Malley's "The Rook". Liked it better than the Starz series, which dilutes and changes the novel's world, characters and plot.

Now reading "Major Dudes / A Steely Dan Companion". A chronological selection of reviews and interviews. Learning some stuff, and surprised with how easily the deep cuts come to mind. Now on the solo years, before they got back together. Got me to pull out China Crisis' "Flaunt the Imperfection" for today's commute.

Next two in the stack are follow-ons to these. "Stiletto", sequel to "The Rook", and "Reelin' in the Years", a Steely Dan biography.

Henry James: Search and Destroy

I'm on the third book (Death's End) of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. Really enjoying the series, even if there are some parts that urge me to reach for the salt and take a large pinch

I gave up on that after book 1 as the aliens, when revealed, turned out to be really dull. Do they get more interesting?

I dunno, they haven't arrived yet

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXpost Hi Aimless, if you come across the Katherine Mansfield collection unhelpfully titled Stories, with a not particularly helpful intro by KM biographer Jeffrey Meyers----it's a Vintage Classic, and a good demonstation of how her writing developed over the years, incl. acquiring and repurposing and sometimes discarding manners and influences, but always with a drive that seemed to come from experience, as a girl and young woman and less young woman in New Zealand and Europe. Not always at her best here, but plenty of momentum.
Good quote from omg Elizabeth Bowen:
We to her the prosperity of the 'free' story: she untrammeled it from conventions and, still more, gained for it a prestige till then unthought of. How much ground Katherine Mansfield broke for her successors may not be realized. Her imagination kindled unlikely matter; she was to alter for good and all our idea of what goes to make a story.

We owe to her, that should have been. As a prodigious teenager, Bowen was checking in while Mansfield was checking out, and the inspiration to her personally might have been particularly strong.

I spent last December plowing through three Bowen novels, The Death of the Heart the best among them.

Cool. Need to do that, I've only read the dynamic doorstop Collected Stories.

Please Look After Mother, Shin Kyung-sook. The titular mother disappears on a trip to Seoul; novel follows the various family members as they process their guilt over having neglected her. Written almost entirely in the second person. It's got that good family guilt a la Tokyo Story, and a certain sparseness that I encounter a lot in....South East Asian? (struggling to find a non-offensive word for something I've found in Chinese, Korean and Japanese fiction...post-confucian?) writing. I'm probably making it seem like a bit of a chore but actually it's quite the page-turner!

That sounds good, I'm gonna check it out.

reading two books I found on the street:
I Claudius (Graves)
Annihilation (Vandermeer)

I read a bunch of stuff over the summer - a list that makes me look well parochial. Ho hum.

Alan Moore - V for Vendetta. The concept is enough to make it a classic but it's stretched out pretty thin by the end.

Robin Ince - I'm A Joke and So Are You. I find Ince kind of annoying but this is gently wise and funny enough to mitigate the worst of his excesses.

Caryl Lewis - Martha, Jack & Shanco. I went to Anglesey so wanted to read some Welsh-language literature. This aims for a Steinbeckian universalism but doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions. The nature writing was beautiful.

Richard King - The Lark Ascending. This should have been my *thing* - activism, music and landscape - but it never quite, well, took flight.

Robert Macfarlane - Landmarks. I fell out with Macfarlane around the time of The Old Ways but, compared to the above, the existential nature of Macfarlane's commitment mattered again. Beautiful.

Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker. As a reading experience, I found it tough but my brain has been like a huge resonating chamber since I put it down.

Keiron Pym - Jumpin' Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock and Roll Underworld. This was the *one*. During an obsessive pursuit (to use Richard Holmes' phrase) of his quarry across the world and down the toilet of London's 60s underworld, Pym ravels and unravels the riddle of Litvinoff and with it the history of the Jewish East End, the Krays, the Chelsea set, Performance. Litvinoff comes across as manic, inventive, borrowed from death.

I finished The Beginning of Spring last night. It was a very fine novel and a pleasure to read. More so than any of the authors I read, Fitzgerald achieves her effects so subtly and organically that it is impossible for me to put my finger on the artifice that supports her art. She is economical of details, but there is no sense of sparsity or strain. She frequently chooses the precise word needed to carry an exact meaning, but her prose is never fussy. Her characters emerge clearly and well-formed, and do not seem overdone or underdone. I stand in awe of her excellence and cannot explain it.

btw, the autumnal equinox is almost upon us. A new thread of books, mists and mellow fruitfulness shall soon be in order.

I'm now reading another novel by Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia. This one is To Each His Own.

The next 'What Are You Reading' thread here:

2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

Check out ILB's exciting all-new lineup for Fall!