Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019/2020 reading thread

with the usual apologies to the antipodes, from whose firelands i have just returned.

Reinhardt's Garden by Mark Haber. Was really looking forward to this and I really disliked it! it's v much in the bernhard style, but that's a hell of hire wire act, and i'm not sure that bernhard isn't, like Nabokov, a dead end in terms of influence. It's largely set in South American jungle but as with Bernhard, the important environment is really the words of the narrator - the observations and misprisions of their relations with others around them - the sly mendacities, vulnerabilities and expressions of braggadocio. And it never quite works here, it's all a bit thin. Bernhard is able to work a line where the reader learns a sort of half trust in the narrator, their manners and mannerisms. The narrator is aware of some of these, and uses them duplicitously or in a self-serving fashion, and as a reader you gradually discover those and more of which the narrator is not aware. As a consequence you become aware of the authorial intelligence behind it all. In RG, the authorial presence never quite manages to detach itself from the narrator.

The frivolity reminds me of Pynchon a little, but it's not garlicky enough for Pynchon, it gives itself too much historical latitude. It's yet another unsuccessful example of literature without constraint imo.

[/i]Collected Short Stories[/i] and Border Districts - Gerald Murnane. This otoh i'm really enjoying. There's a slight element of Raymond Carver, who I'm not a huge fan of, in the plain suburbias and mundanity, but his prose is more allusive. there is an obsession with borderlands. i'm finding him extremely rewarding rn.
The Secret Commonwealth - Philip Pullman. Enjoyed this although there's always something about Pullman that makes me slightly uneasy. It's like he's an optimiser of the best of 20th century children's and adventure style. i'm not sure it matters, given what he's doing, which is writing v enjoyable stories. this isn't perhaps as unusual as the dawn treader/folk tale Belle Sauvage, but it's more generally successful and there are very notable sections, particularly in the Prague section:

The dark man who burned like a furnace stood with hands outstretched, palms upward, pleading. A row of little flames broke out from under the fingernails of his left hand, and he crushed them out in his right palm.

FUCK you shouldn't do these things when you're hungover. the '2019' part is going to be quite short lived.

Maybe we could cut and paste your OP back into the Autumn WAYR thread and wait until Jan 1 to start the winter 2020?

We could ask a mod to delete this one.

Garlicky?

I've started May Sinclair: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIETT FREAN.

Fleishman is in trouble
Boring and cliched but enjoyable

I finished Kubler-Ross's "On Death and Dying". It's a good book if you're interested in the topic. Most of it is transcripts of interviews conducted with terminally ill patients for her college seminar during the late '60s. They don't really talk that much directly about dying -- unsurprisingly even the terminally ill don't really like to think about dying -- but it's kind of interesting just reading about their experiences of being in the hospital, being sick, etc. Now, on a lighter note, I'm reading "After Claude" by Iris Owens.

Just as "youth is wasted on the young", impending death is often wasted on the dying. They have no clue how to do what they are so clearly doing anyway.

finished rereading Wolf Hall. I feel like such a chump for being so enchanted with this book, and yet

Nick White's How to Survive a Summer and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Buried, Sing. Y'all have read the latter, no?

Reading Flight by Olga Tokarczuc. Much better than Primeval and Other Times. Yeah, it's Nobel worthy so far. It's really great.

Of course, I'm also reading up on Handke, so 'nobel worthy' is a low bar right now. 'A Sorrow Beyond Dreams'. It's quite good, but it's also the exact same style of his pro-genocide books, and it's so offputting. There's something wrong here! But oh well. He wrote some good scripts, I'll give him that.

I have affection for Short Letter, Long Farewell .

The prose can try to be a bit cringily edgy at times but I'm into Nick Tosches "Dino" atm

(after a bazillion thraeds, we still can't for the life of us decide on either all caps or italics for a book title, can we?)

(Re)read THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes. Strong start, very good middle part, disappointing and rather melodramatic, schmaltzy ending. When the focus shifted from the elusive Adrian - an interesting persona - to the I, nothing could deflect from how boring and trite - and, quite frankly, daft - the main character Tony is. I enjoyed a solid 2/3 of this, but how this won the Booker Prize is completely beyond me. Idk if it's reluctance on behalf of the editor, but the final third should really have been better, especially for Barnes.

i'm about 70 pages into octavia butler - parable of the sower and totally in love with it.

i got through about 30 pages of stoner by john williams and it's beautifully written but i didn't want to get into the part about his parents disapproving of his new collegiate direction for whatever reason.

i tried borderlands for about 50 pages but it just wasn't doing much for me.

sorry, border districts by murnane

as i looked over my penultimate post i recalled fizzles' opening post and a trace of longing appeared in my thoughts as i remembered his positive response to the book, surely reminiscent of my own wish to be entranced by the author whose allusiveness i had seen described in an article, possibly in the los angeles review of books or the new york times review of books, i can't exactly recall, some months ago. as i finished that last sentence i scrolled upward on my computer screen to remind myself of fizzles' exact words describing his experience with the novel and realized i had mistitled it.

hence explaining my apology and correction.

my own asshole is a kaleidoscope

brothers karamazov

started out extremely strong, but suddenly plunged into 20 pages of debates about 19th c Russian ecclesiastical courts

WOLF HALL is terrific.

also returned for a little bit to Martin Eve: LITERATURE AGAINST CRITICISM - a book about contemporary fiction.

I finished my first Eric Ambler novel,Judgment on Deltchev, and found it adequately entertaining, with a sufficiently dizzying set of plot twists to keep one off balance in regard to the outcome.

This particular novel may not be among his best, but I have no others to compare it to, yet. I thought the storyline required too much naivety on the part of the main character and too much credulity on the part of the reader. I supplied as much credulity as I could muster, but my incredulity kept popping up inconveniently and asking questions that interrupted my suspension of disbelief. Then I'd dismiss those questions as quickly as I could and read on, because for heaven's sake it was only designed as light entertainment.

Dune, Frank Herbert

Garlicky?

what i like about ambler is his extraordinary compression. so much happens in the first two pages. it’s extraordinary.

also it’s extraordinary.

Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby is a bit of a go-to film at this time of year as it's vaguely literary and fits with stuff I teach on America in the 30s (via Steinbeck, naturally). I've grown to really quite like it but was concerned it was supplanting the text in my head so I've been re-reading it.

Things I've noticed this time around: it's in thrall to Joyce, mostly the Joyce of Dubliners; it feels modern in that it seems to reach out and encompass great swathes of stuff that have succeeded it; the child, jesus, the child - in a book of absences, this has to be the absence around which the others swirl (to stretch a metaphor, she's like Bertha, hidden away); I'd forgotten how expository big chunks are - sure, Carroway is the mariner's wedding guest, and is beholden to pass on the tale, but he sure spends a lot of time simply *telling*; Fitzgerald loves the adjective 'turbulent', which is I guess a kind of code-breaker for the text; I'm noticing more neologisms this time: unrestfully is the one that springs to mind, alongside the obvious orgastic.

I think I'm more suspicious of Fitzgerald's prose than I used to be (it slides past too often and he's a child of Emerson and Whitman in his reading of the American myth) but he still makes me catch my breath:

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard a long time ago. For a moment a phrase would tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

The March of Folly - Barbara Tuchman

This was a book where I also think she faltered badly. The concept was born straight out of an historian's desire to use her prestige to disseminate those infamous "lessons of Vietnam" and perhaps instruct the nation. The concept was too broad and too shallowly executed. The book fails in its stated objective.

"Garlicky" reminds me of Martin Amis writing about Antony Burgess's "garlicky puns": the phrase seems vividly memorable but irritatingly opaque. I was never sure if that made it a success or a failure.

Recently more Maigret, The Abbess of Crewe (very characteristic of Spark in her more idiosyncratic mode but only partially successful) The Driver's Seat (coming from the same place but much better, quite brilliant).

Now reading The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. Psychological it's wonderful but with self-indulgences that make it an occasionally stodgy read: given its length I'm not sure I'll stay with it to the end. It's a pity I didn't read it when younger when I'd have had much more tolerance for its weaknesses.

that may even have been where i picked it up actually.

Fizzles: your description of Pynchon has reminded me of my dislike of him.

Chinaski: yes - agree on the prose and everything - but where exactly do you see the DUBLINERS element? Something about things unstated or understated?

I don't think I can think of one thing in Pynchon that is funny.

I'd say stick with the Stead. It is maddeningly self-indulgent in places, but it's part of the imitative function of the prose alongside Pollit's manic, wheeling character. And there's something almost Roth-like in the way it ends.

Pinefox - the Joyce thing is a more a feeling, really. I don't think Fitzgerald has Joyce's frigid intelligence and what remains unsaid is very much more foregrounded in Gatsby. Instead, I think it's in Fitzgerald's rhythms as much as anything. Joyce's voice isn't sui generis, exactly, but there's something new in Dubliners that seems to flower in Fitzgerald, albeit with more opulence. It's not an exact opinion by any means!

'Frigid intelligence' is like Amis' 'garlicky puns' in its opaqueness but it's the best I got.

Last night I picked up The Dog of the South, Charles Portis. I've been looking for lighter entertainment to shake off the after effects of imbibing too much information about the James Madison Administration. This fits the bill.

Fizzles: your description of Pynchon has reminded me of my dislike of him.

Last night I picked up /The Dog of the South/, Charles Portis. I've been looking for lighter entertainment to shake off the after effects of imbibing too much information about the James Madison Administration. This fits the bill.

I don't think I can think of one thing in Pynchon that is funny.

_Last night I picked up /The Dog of the South/, Charles Portis. I've been looking for lighter entertainment to shake off the after effects of imbibing too much information about the James Madison Administration. This fits the bill._


karl malone put me on to portia, which was a great service. haven’t read this one, but it’s good to know there’s more there for me to read.

I’ve been wanting to read Dog of the South for a while. Curious to hear how you like it.

"Garlicky" reminds me of Martin Amis writing about Antony Burgess's "garlicky puns": the phrase seems vividly memorable but irritatingly opaque.

When JG Ballard died amis wrote an obit where he praised JB’s “creamy prose” which struck me at the time as a very rong and blaggy description

ugh that’s awful.

Ballard's prose isn't creamy at all! It's machine tooled.

right??

If it had been Kingsley Amis who wrote that about Ballard's "creamy prose" I'd just figure he was drunk and didn't give a flip. I've never paid any attention to Martin.

Now reading The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. Psychological it's wonderful but with self-indulgences that make it an occasionally stodgy read: given its length I'm not sure I'll stay with it to the end. It's a pity I didn't read it when younger when I'd have had much more tolerance for its weaknesses.

― frankiemachine, Friday, December 20, 2019 9:00 AM

Stick with it! One of the few novels about which I'll say its weaknesses improve its verisimilitude.

Chinaski: I like this about Joycean rhythms. I'd like to read that analysis at convincing length, from someone.

Fizzles: yes I think I see the humour in that. Though not in Pynchon.

I agree also that 'creamy' sounds wrong though I suppose MA was trying to get at unflappable smoothness of some kind - which would go with motorways, airports, function, in its own way?

But who really is 'creamy'? Maybe Proust? We'd need to decide what on earth the adjective really meant re: language anyway.

I finished After Claude. Kind of a strange book in that the first half and the second half, despite featuring the same narrator and following a continuous sequence of events, feel so different in tone as to almost be separate books. The first half is scabrous and funny, and although you begin to feel there's something a bit off about the narrator, she still has your trust. In the second half, the same self-destructive tendencies that were funny in the first half become alarming and ominous. Thematically, it reminded me a bit of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Now I'm reading Dreams from My Father by Obama.

I started the Nick Lowe bio and Joseph Roth's The Hundred Days.

Been thinking about buying that Nick Lowe bio for months but maybe now I’ll wait until you finish reading it tonight to see what you have to say.

Curious to hear how you like it.

The Dog of the South is not an easy book to describe, but I'll take a whack at it. All views are my own, unsupported by any authority or external evidence.

As I saw it, Portis created his characters and situations using the same techniques as a skilled caricaturist drawing a portrait, where everything typical is exaggerated and disproportioned, but the likeness is immediate, striking and unmistakable. His subjects are Americans whose lives are shaped by the paradox of marginal life in the USA, most often seen in rural areas, where there are profound constrictions and limitations in some directions, but nearly unlimited freedoms in other directions. So people may grow into crazy shapes, partly stunted and partly luxuriant.

In particular, the characters in Dog of the South have become untethered from any roots or responsibilities that might keep them stable, and all of them have drifted south through Mexico, converging on Belize. Metaphorically speaking, they are sinking toward their ultimately grotesque shapes. Their misadventures can be read as hilarious farce, but for me, their stories had too much truth hidden in them not to be taken somewhat soberly, too.

It's an odd book.

Began reading A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion. It was published in 1977 and very obviously plays off of the Patty Hearst situation for a large chunk of the plot. She employs some very sore-thumbish stylistic quirks. Mainly short sentences. Some repetition. But short, yes. These sit reasonably well within the overall compression and terseness of the exposition. Didion really pared away at this novel well past any brevity attempted by Hemingway. Outdid him.

I expect I'll finish this quickly, in spite of all the diversions and distractions that come at this time of the year. It is extremely short and moves fast. Time to post to the What did you read in 2019? thread. No way will I finish another book after this one and before New Year's Day.

I read it two weeks ago -- the only Didion novel I finished and found effective.

The Caravaners, Elizabeth Von Arnim - Very funny, though the protagonist's non-native sentence constructions make it somewhat opaque for a light entertainment. The Prussian main character a total chauvinist militarist asshole, all Brits depicted as meek, progressive proto-hippies. How times change, eh?

My Friend Maigret, Simenon - Maigret takes off to an island in the South of France, accompanied by a Brit tasked with analyzing his methods. Solid as always, tho I think I have a problem with Maigret's post-resolution endings - I'm always expecting some slice of life bow at the end, because the mundane is what keeps me coming back to these, but instead it always seems to end with an angsty reflection on the horribleness of the crime, when mostly through the books Maigret doesn't seem too bothered.

Now reading: The Doomed City by the Strugatsky Bros - More magic realism or maybe weird fiction than sci-fi. There's an Experiment, involving a City, and the protagonist, an idealist from Stalin era Russia, has been brought to said City, where he interacts with ppl from all around the world and different periods of 20th century history. No one knows what the Experiment actually is, some believe it's controlled by aliens, some think it's already been a failure. Obviously a handy metaphor for the Soviet Union itself, but a lot of fun also comes from seeing ppl with different political orientations trying to make sense of it; our protagonist just assumes it's a continuation of the road to communism. Also people are asked to change jobs at random, so far he's been a garbage collector, police inspector and journalist. Tiyl Kafka, China Mieville.

I have read 2 or 3 Didion novels, including that one, and sadly never been convinced by any!

I finished THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIETT FREAN, by May Sinclair. A study of self-denial, isolation, frustration. Chilling in a way. As a depiction of childhood, quite interestingly comparable to Joyce's PORTRAIT.

I then read a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories: A Scandal in Bohemia, The Copper Beeches, The Red-Headed League, a couple more. I started to realise that they were a bit more formulaic than I'd hoped. Slightly relevant to a recent discussion of detective fiction with Fizzles and Tim of ILB fame.

I have finally started a book I have meant to read for months: Jane Austen, NORTHANGER ABBEY.

Sadly, this Didion novel is turning out to be deeply flawed to the point where I am only finishing it out of a misplaced sense of duty. Also, I am 3/4 of the way through it already and the sunk cost fallacy is in play.

Inexplicably, I spent the hour between 5 am and 6 am this morning trying to summarize in my mind what I found lacking in A Book of Common Prayer, so I could pass it along in I Love Books. It's not like it is that important to anyone.

My central thought was about her first person narrator, who starts out very strong, but after when the scene of the book moves location the narrator rather abruptly becomes omniscient(!), while all the time maintaining the exact same writing style as before, then just as abruptly switching back to a limited first person perspective. Moreover, Didion makes the narrator's character be an anthropologist-turned-microbiologist, but she clearly knew nothing at all about microbiology and drops in some details that are not just ignorant, but weren't even necessary.

The upshot of all this is to make it more than usually plain that there is really only one voice and one character in the book and it is Joan Didion. The image that kept recurring to me is a girl having an imaginary tea party with a dozen stuffed animals and pretending to talk for all of them.

So, then the question comes down to whether Joan Didion has anything interesting to say about life, using this story as her vehicle. For me the answer is, god, no.

I could go on and critique the plot and her style and how these give only a superficial and highly artificial impression, suggesting a meaning or depth they do not possess, but I've already driven this post into the tl:dr weeds. Let's just say I didn't like the book, ok?

I liked the random observations and, yeah, I realized by pg. 50 it's a Didion-esque narrator telling the story, and that's fine. She never wrote a great novel.

i finished parable of the sower over the holiday and i'm just blown away. i can't stop thinking about it. of course i'll be picking up the second in the series and everything else butler wrote, but if anyone has any other suggestions in this vein i'd really appreciate them: prescient books that deal with the disaster of now, that understand social reality outside protected bubbles and point ways forward, from queer povs a bonus.

i'm about 2/3s through stoner by john williams and finding it increasingly repulsive. it's going in my goodwill pile.

i read more over the last week than i have all year. i'd really like to keep it up but it feels like a challenge to find promising material. at least i have the rest of butler i can dig into.

xp ah joan didion - speaking of protected bubbles...

re: reading more in a week than a year - I've been like that with films in the last week!

That post about Didion's bad novel being like an imaginary tea party is hilarious !!

I read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising for the first time. I liked it - the landscape writing in particular and the way it totally nails the delirium and eldritch whack of the Christmas period - but I do wish I'd read it when I was in my early teens. Credulity, innit.

Speaking of landscape writing, I've been re-reading Blood Meridian. It's a hoary old tale and beyond parody in lots of ways but jesus christ, some parts of the midsection are extraordinary in their world-building and brutality.

for landscape writing D.H. Lawrence can't be beat; his travel writing has a lightness that his novels often lack. I've owned and treasured Sea and Sardinia for years; now NYRBC published this delectable collection.

Frederic Jameson came up with a word to describe Barthes' writing - scriptible - because it makes one want to write further sentences in that style. McCarthy is like this. I find myself narrating, say, a trip to buy shoes and making it into a comma-less hellscape with a sagacious cobbler thrown in for good measure.

Totally agree on Sea and Sardinia - what a beautiful book. That edition looks amazing.

Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish with hoar-frost, to the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in the cold distance. After two southern winters, with roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad on this lonely naked road, I don't know what to do with myself. I walk down in the shallow grassy ditches under the loose stone walls, I walk on the little ridge of glass, the little bank on which the wall is built, I cross the road across the frozen cow-droppings; and it is all so familiar to my feet, my very feet in contact, that I am wild as if I have made a discovery.

available in the uk/commonwealth in this form:
https://cdn2.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9780241344606.jpg

His writing on New Mexico is some of my favourite Lawrence.

If I was going to choose one book for landscape writing perfection, I think I'd go for Dorothy Carrington's book about Corsica, Granite Island.

have a copy of that sitting around which i've yet to start on^

at the moment i'm reading alfred doblin's massive panoramic trilogy NOVEMBER 1918. have finished the first part which switched between demobbed/invalided soldiers, deserters & racketeers, sdp vs sparticists, worker/soldier/sailor councils and a duplicitous military command playing the different groups against each other. all this is set to the menacing beat of the remnants of the defeated army marching back from the various fronts to a berlin experiencing food shortages and mass unemployment. the second part sees their return... and somewhat annoyingly it looks like the third & final part doesn't seem to have ever been translated into english!

Chinaski, surely it was Barthes himself who introduced that term? At the start of S/Z, as far as I know. But I know that Jameson essay you mean, if it's 'Pleasure: A Political Issue'. And I'm not sure how well I've ever understood this aspect of Barthes.

I have taken another copy of NORTHANGER ABBEY out of the library and it is growing on me. Beautiful Bath; very deliberate comic irony; metafictional reflections about novels, heroines, etc -- a lot to enjoy.

I didn't know ANY of that Doblin had been Englished!

neither did i till i came face to face with it... mid-eighties translation published as a people betrayed; november 1918: a german revolution. doesn't have the concentrated power of berlin alexanderplatz but still worth a read. also a reminder to myself that i need to get the nyrb collection of stories.

Last night I started reading Iceland's Bell, Haldor Laxness. Everyone is starving, except the gentry.

eric hobsbawm, "the age of extremes"

Which used to be called AGE OF EXTREMES !

age of exxxtremes

i am actually about to jump into 'the age of capital', having both started and ended 2019 finishing 'the age of revolution'

You're right, pinefox. I didn't have the Jameson or Barthes to hand and was too lazy to search for them! (And I kind of assumed I'd get away with it. Story of my life.)

In between alternately recoiling and laughing at Cormac, I've been reading Robert Richardson's biography of William James. The things I love about this (and the same with the Emerson bio) are pretty simple: being embedded in the ideas and events of the time: the Civil War, the impact of Darwin, the rise of positivism. Interesting to note that when James went to Harvard it was actually at its lowest ebb as an institution: poorly run, lacking in vision, a tiny student body. James didn't last long and returned to being self-taught.

JUst got heavily into Viv Albertine's To Throw Away Unopened after not touching it when I was in London. Her mother's been dying so far and she's just been called away from a launch of presumably her first book to go to the death bed. & she's having her siter acting weird.
Also finding it very difficult to find a dating partner taht isn't an ossified adolescent
THink this is about as good a read as that first book with the repetitive title.
THough far less about music and the punk subculture.

THis after having finished Defying Gravity Jordan's Story by Jordan Mooney.
The memoir of the one time Westwood/McClaren shop assistant and later Adam and the Ants manager.
Which was very good on the punk subculture too.
Very interesting book, not sure how much of this is down to cowriter Cathi Unsworth or at least in asmuch as wanting to hear more of this voice. Would be interested in reading more if there was more taht read like this though.

Tristan Gooley The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs
book I was recommended by a speaker doing a talk on how to read weather during a workshop in the last Tulca festival.
Enjoying it a lot so gave a copy to my mother for Xmas.
& you can get copies in the 3 for £5 offer in FOPP. Alongside 2 of his others . So grabbed How To Read Water from there and had already started teh copy of Wild Signs and Star Paths I'd bought for her before realising that the writing style of The Walker's Guide was probably a better cold introduction to him. & more likely therefore to get her to read the thing through instead of just shelving it.

Masters of Deception: Escher, Dali, and the Artists of Optical Illusion
by Al Seckel,
which si more about the visuals but does give biographies of the artists involved.
Also gives a list of other artists whose work wouldn't have worked as well on the printed page in book form which is worth exploring too.
I looked at theis in a bookshop at a launch for another book and was impressed, back a couple of months ago.
It has some interesting stuff in including a japanese artist having made 3D sculptures of some of Escher's impossible architecture

Chinaski: I don't usually think of the James family in relation to the Civil War!

Younger brothers Wilkie and Robertson served in the war, and Harry couldn't because of an injury (the so-called "obscure hurt").

Aye, William and Henry were drafted but not held for service. Wilky fought as an officer, in a regiment composed mostly of black soldiers, including Frederick Douglass's two sons.

Winter:

Sadegh Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Petrarch in English
Pierre Michon - Small Lives

Into the cold with the intensities of Hedayat's novel. Maybe I shouldn't be impressed as I've read an awful lot of alienated fiction like this, but I am not going to sit here and pretend The Blind Owl isn't damn good for being published in 1937 because it is. The collection of English translations of Petrarch are best with its first ones (Wyatt and Henry Howard) and the later ones (Musa). Lots of so-so in between but an interesting project to mull over, i.e. how does a literary culture engage with x throughout the centuries. The problem is the Canzionere has always been good in bits and you need to be in synch with the curator's choices as well. Michon's Lives was his first published work and for the most part you wouldn't know as his style and what interested him arrived ready. I say most because one of the stories is a lot more biographical, there are half a dozen histories here that are told like few can. Its all tell, little on the tale, and how rare is it that you can say this?

i must read that Michon. Winter Mythologies and Abbots is one of the best things i’ve read in last few years.

Speaking of William James, Harvard, and the Civil War, that reminds me of Louis Menand's book The Metaphysical Club.

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Club-Story-Ideas-America/dp/0374199639

It's been a while since I read it but it talks about the beginnings of pragmatism in American philosophy in Cambridge, MA, against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

It's one of the better books based on the New Yorker ethos, and it's pungent about their beliefs in phrenology, eugenics, etc.

Yes, I remember it being a book of many interesting tangents, and interesting to see how respectable academic theories of the 19th century have often aged poorly.

So Henry James almost fought in the Civil War? I probably should have known this but what an extraordinary literary fact. He died in the middle of WWI, after all.

I don't have the book to hand but as I recall something like 350,000 were (initially) drafted but only 70,000 were held for service. Henry and William were drafted but not held. There's an interesting list of East Coast luminaries and whose children were drafted and who not; from memory, Oliver Wendell Holmes' son was but Emerson and Hawthorne's weren't.

Hello bookfriends <3

I started Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea...and then angrily put it aside after 200 pages. It drove me crazy - endless descriptions of rooms, clothes, food and barely a plot to speak of, plus a “mysterious” interlude every other chapter that are full of even more endless descriptions of things
I loved the Night Circus but this new one reads like a McSweeney’s parody version of her writing. The worst.

So as a palate cleanser i decided to finally attempt George Eliot’s Middlemarch - third of the way in and loving it! Get kinda bored with the town politics etc but everything else i love. I was surprised by how much of an immersive pageturner it is.

my wife had the same reaction to the morgenstern and middlemarch is her favorite book so u are on the right path probably

:D

Mary Shelley -Frankenstein - not what i was expecting, way more florid and overwrought and too many coincidences (presumably this was purposeful) still enjoyed it well enough.

Steph Cha - Your House Will Pay based on the real life killing of Latasha Harlins, has it's moments but i was generally unconvinced.

Georges Simenon - Maigret and the Murderer- liked it,
and am about 100 pages into his The Man Who Watched Trains Go By , rattling along nicely.

I read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising for the first time. I liked it - the landscape writing in particular and the way it totally nails the delirium and eldritch whack of the Christmas period - but I do wish I'd read it when I was in my early teens.

I still read it every December, if you were raised non-Christian there's simply nothing else out there that captures the magic of Christmas better.

^

Cynan Jones - Stillicide A future England has water on ration. There exist only paper flowers (because giving water to actual flowers is too expensive), and a plan is formed to tow in an iceberg. The iceberg will be docked, and for the dock to be built, hundreds of houses and local communities have been bulldozered. Rebels attack the water train that brings fresh water to the city with explosives, so it's highly secured by snipers. This is the 'plot', though it's mostly about a handful of individuals whose lives cross paths and are connected through this new reality. A sniper unable to perform because he knows his wife will die, an elderly couple on the coast that refuse to relocate for the towing trail, a nurse toying with the idea of infidelity, and an entomologist who discovers a dragon fly, something that could stop the whole iceberg plan in its tracks.

I've been vocal on this board with my praise for him, have yet to see anyone else here read him. His latest is a story collection that was originally conceived as a radio series, broadcast last summer by Radio4. Not heard is, but the book is, again, rather brilliant. His prose is so sparse, with so much space on the pages, every word carefully chosen (it seems), it makes for reading poetry in a way. Like slowly sipping away a fine cognac.

"He soon learns he is one of the Old Ones, a guardian and warrior for the Light. He learns that he must help find the four Things of Power for the Light in order to battle the forces of the Dark. The first of these Things of Power is the Circle of Six Signs. This book is the key book for the main character, Will Stanton. It is in this book that he collects the six signs which become the Circle of Signs, one of the Things of Power, by finding the additional five mandalas (he has been given one earlier) and uses the completed Circle to ward off the forces of the Dark."

The magic of Christmas?

[I would use a puzzled emojo there if I could]

I read The Testaments for a book club, was disappointed. It didn't add anything to The Handmaid's Tale, read more like a thriller (and a rather lazily plotted one), the villains were more cartoonish - conversely Aunt Lydia was somewhat humanised from a True Believer into a pragmatic and ruthless survivor.

The magic of Christmas? [I would use a puzzled emojo there if I could]

The book begins just before the Winter solstice and ends on Twelfth Night, and as the main character awakens as an Old One and is given a quest to complete, his happy rural childhood Christmas serves as the quotidian contrast to an epic pagan drama. Him struggling to navigate two different midwinters simultaneously resonated with me, as a kid from an areligious family that still celebrated Christmas. It still does... as a kid it was the difference between the communal Christian holiday my family was not part of and my own private magical season, now it's the struggle between the howling commercial gauntlet of modern Christmas and simply keeping a candle lit through it, getting a moment of peace with my remaining family. This book really captures that, and on top of that it's probably the most gentle epic I've ever read.

The book does gently contextualise the Christian elements of Christmas and place them in deep(er) time but it still has an implicit religiosity about it, I think. Which isn't a criticism at all.

The series overall is more explicitly pagan, but as you say, Cooper reads much more like two-way syncretism than, say, Phillip Pullman or C.S. Lewis. Midwinter is fixed and eternal and belongs to everyone, and Christmas has been hung off of it. But if the rector says God is what is fixed and eternal, the Old Ones won't press the issue (although they will wipe your memory of the conversation).

Seconding the STILLICIDE love, really well done

Finished The Doomed City. Five stars, god tier, would buy from this seller again. I don't often say this kind of stuff, because I think in 2020 genre entertainment complaining about not being taken seriously is not a good look, but this truly is a book whose standing I think would be much higher if it wasn't seen as a science fiction novel.

Now rereading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold for a book club.

I just finished “The Plotters,” by Un-Su Kim. It’s a contemporary thriller set in Seoul, and follows an assassin-for-hire, as he discovers he has a conscience. Reviews described it as darkly hilarious, but it wasn’t especially. Just prone to occasional wry asides? One of the blurbs on the back cover describe it as “Tarantino meets Camus,” which isn’t totally inapt. I think that maybe I don’t like contemporary thrillers

Finished /The Doomed City/. Five stars, god tier, would buy from this seller again. I don't often say this kind of stuff, because I think in 2020 genre entertainment complaining about not being taken seriously is not a good look, but this truly is a book whose standing I think would be much higher if it wasn't seen as a science fiction novel.

just read TS Eliot’s review of Monstre Gai and was amused by the parenthesis here:

As for his own philosophy (and theology - for i can’t accept his affirmation of the stupidity of Angels) he does make me think.

I'm reading the cheerful, romping The Painted Bird for the first in anticipation of the film.

the doomed city is so strange and powerful. it has correspondences with monstre gai by wyndham lewis i think - and the magnetic city of which the characters are denizens. but it’s also substantially different and rich in different ways - the social observations, the work that takes place in the city, the uncertainty of its metaphysical or indeed political status. i’m not sure i fully appreciated it at the time but it’s a book that’s really stayed with me and i’m going to return to it i think.

Will have to check out that Wyndham Lewis! It made me think of Kafka, Bulgakov and (in more genre fic terms) China Mieville. Was also reminded of Alfred Kubin's sole novel, which is very similar in that it is about an artificially constructed city that ppl volunteer to join and then all sorts of chaos breaks loose, but Kubin's vision feels shallow in comparison, flippantly nihilistic and only really interested in seeing people suffer. The Strugatskys put their characters through terrible stuff too but they clearly care about why humans are the way they are and how, perhaps, they could become better.

One thing the additional material in my edition of the book clarified for me is that while for much of the novel I had taken the protagonist to be a scathing portrait of what they hated about the country they were living in - the stalinist fanatic who becomes corrupt, bourgeois and elitist as he moves up the ranks - he is also a portrait of the authors themselves as they grew slowly disenchanted with the Great Experiment. So while it's easy to hate Andrei the narrative in many ways is him slowly shedding the certainties of youth, and the ending allows for the possibility that once those are gone he could possibly start over and do better.

First two books of 2020:
Magda Szabo - The Door (1987)
Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall (2018)

After a month of emotionless depression it's nice to know that I can still cry, as these both made me do. "The Door" highly recommended.

Lydia Davis' Essays One. I've never read any of her stories before, but I loved this. Plenty of exceptional essays about writers and writing, delving into the detail about what makes certain writing effective. The only ones that left me a little cold were the ones about visual artists, but that is probably more to do with my own lack of knowledge and interest in that particular area. One of those essay collections that has made me want to read everything from her, every writer she writes about, and also gave me more confidence in writing myself.

Also just finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which immediately goes on to my list of all-time favourites. I'd previously read Housekeeping which I thought was just OK, and an essay collection of hers which I liked but don't have a particularly strong memory of, besides her Calvinism. I'm a sucker for novels that are bold enough to spend their entire length basically just exploring what it is to live a good life and be a good person, and how one might handle the trials that life will throw your way. There was also something profoundly hopeful in this novel that I needed in my life right now, as I feel increasing anxiety about the way the world is going. Its constant recognition of the small beauties in every day life, the value it places on a small but dignified life, the constant wonder at the fact that we even exist at all, the inevitability of all things passing...it's easy to wallow in dread, but this pulled me out of it, at least for a little while.

I own three Robinson essay collections, and she struck me as ideal airport reading: I remember little about her essays except a carapace of erudition. Two exceptions: her Moses piece and one about Calvin, whom she thinks we've mistakenly dismissed as a, well, Calvinist.

This may well have been written already but a study of, say, Updike and Robinson and how different writers explore/wear their Calvinism would be interesting. As someone who pretty aggressively renounced Calvinism, Robert Louis Stevenson would be an interesting counterpoint.

Or Anne Brontë,

YOU may rejoice to think yourselves secure;
You may be grateful for the gift divine–
That grace unsought, which made your black hearts pure,
And fits your earth-born souls in Heaven to shine.

But, is it sweet to look around, and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness
Which they deserved, at least, as much as you,–
Their faults not greater, nor their virtues less?

...

That even the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies;
And, when their dreadful doom is past,
To life and light arise.

Robinson tried saving Calvinism from the dustbin, actually.

I don't know if it's been anthologized yet, but Robinson's piece last year about the Puritans was quite interesting to me:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/which-way-city-hill/

I recently finished Barack Obama's book Dreams from my Father, which I enjoyed. I'd heard it was actually a "good book" and not just in the "good book for a politician" sort of way. It was actually written well before he first ran for office. Of course it's more interesting to read it now, knowing what happened later, but I do think I would have enjoyed it even if it was written by someone less famous. It deals with a lot of potentially controversial topics about race and identity in a way that manages to be both frank and disarming. To oversimplify a bit, a major theme is how does a young man learn to be a black man in America, who has grown up attending a predominantly white, upper-middle-class school in Hawaii, without a black role model at home. Other themes deal with what it's like growing up with an absent father, a young man's education in political organizing, and some intriguing though brief glimpses of Indonesia and Kenya.

Now I'm reading The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen.

i never got around to dreams from my father -- it did sound interesting. i've actually held off on reading any of the obama bios that have come out because i wanted to get to that one first.

first book of the year for me is jill by philip larkin. it's a nice read so far -- his prose reminds me a lot of his poetry, brisk and filled with rather melancholy observations.

abanana - that's an intense start to 2020! I really liked both of those - I've seen criticism that Ghost Wall wimps out at the end, but I'm sort of glad it does. The Door resonated weirdly with an experience I had years ago in an old job, and really hit me hard.

I am bogged down in NORTHANGER ABBEY - need to crack on for a few hours and get it over with.

I've started the year with a bunch of poetry collections:

Christopher Marlowe - The Complete Poems and Translations
Omar Khayyam - The Rubayat
Alexander Pope - Selected
Osip Mandelstam - Selected
Anne Carson - If not, Winter
Fernando Pessoa - Poems in English

The Carson is its own thing, I think, a terrific collection of fragments - surely one of the great achievements in translation in the last 20 years. There is an alchemy at work here. Pope's Selected and Marlowe really bring it, especially with translations (of Homer and Lucan respectively, although I also loved Pope's own poetry which has quite a range from his Eloise to Abelard to Essay on Criticism, lots of learning on display). Mandelstam is my thing, always, no matter who translates it - and David McDuff's selection from his career is good curation. The whole thing has a flow, he makes Mandelstam over again and again, you just drink it in. Khayyam's poetry/games/philosophy is funny and, must be said, one for the wine drinker. Pessoa's poems originally written in English aren't that good (how does he order words holds its own fascination) however I like seeing how everything that he has ever written about comes out in this weird form.

Moving along in Bros K in very short fits so far, an odd and intimidating and disorienting book.

One of the few grad school papers I can still read was a study of jingoism and country houses framed by Pope's Essay to Dr. Arbuthnot

first book of the year for me is jill by philip larkin. it's a nice read so far -- his prose reminds me a lot of his poetry, brisk and filled with rather melancholy observations.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

Larkin is such a sharp novelist! Seek A Girl in Winter.

Essay = Epistle

I am bogged down in NORTHANGER ABBEY

I just read it over the weekend! Did you make it to book two yet? I get sidetracked so much reading Austen because I look up a lot of words and then spin off into linguistic reveries. I was so happy to see her refer to someone's address as a "direction" in Northanger Abbey, for example.

Cognate to the Spanish “dirección” = address!

that's why I was delighted! the Spanish always seemed like such an exotic word to me, but... no!

THe Mike Heron memoir You Know What You Could Be: Tuning into the 1960s
which was part of the 2 for £5 deal in FOPP.
He's just got as far as meeting Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson who were playing the folk club he's appearing at. He started off asa rock'n'roller but there was no platform for anybody doing original material in that area at the time.
INteresting so far so looking forward to reading the rest of this.

The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs Tristan Gooley
just coming to the end of this, not sure how much of it I'll retain next time I walk through nature.
BUt some interesting observations that it would be good to learn.

Keith Morris My Damage
turned up in the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop so I grabbed it.
Got as far as him getting bored with Black Flag, leaving forming the Circle jerks and releasing Group Sex.
Also being housemate with jeffrey lee pierce and him leaving cos he's in love with Texacala.
Enjoying this too, knew little about him beyond him being in Black Flag and teh Circle Jerks whose material I don't know very well. Then being in a few bands later on that I know the names of but am not sure I've heard.

One of the many good things about Northanger Abbey is Isabella's overuse of 'amazingly', which I'm tempted to appropriate now and then.

"I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly"

finished The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By enjoyed it a lot mostly because it was so funny which was not what i was expecting given that the blurb was about how this was Simenon's attempt at a big serious novel instead of another Maigret, but i found Kees Popinga hilarious.

started Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad which i had avoided up until now 'cos i hated the title, but i really like it so far.

Finished NORTHANGER ABBEY yesterday.

As a text it has historical interest - lots of variant spellings; 'surprise' is usually (or always?) spelled 'surprize'; it uses words in ways we wouldn't, as has been noticed above. A very odd feature to modern eyes: it uses quotation marks around 3rd-person descriptions of speech, rather than just around the words characters say. You can, I would think, see fictional technique still being improvised here.

At times I found the story tiresome, too fixated on trivia (is it respectable for a man and a woman to ride in the same carriage? :O). On the other hand the obsession with money, legacies, dowries etc becomes really hard-headed by the end, sort of superseding the claims of romance.

I like the Bath material because I like Bath. And I think there is some really sharp social observation, comedy and satire. Isabella the greatest creation here - her 'amazingly', cited above, is prescient, as she seems to me a very modern, current figure, one who enthuses to X about how much she loves them, then neglects them; the kind of person who would now comment on every friend's social media post 'OMG love you you are AMAZING'. Austen really gets at something here. I thought Isabella might be redeemed by the end, but no.

Then there is the Gothic element, and the metafictional element, together. This is very strong - a novel partially predicated on a commentary on an extant genre and examples of it, playing off the protagonist's reading of these texts and how they affect her expectations (such preposterous scenes in the abbey where she keeps thinking that spooky things are happening!), and also often addressing the reader with talk of what we expect of a heroine. This whole aspect is cranked up really heavily in the last chapter or so, where the narrator refers to herself in the 1st person a lot. It's almost as metafictional a novel as I've read outside AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, and perhaps confirms the suspicion that C20 sorts of fictional self-consciousness are in a tradition with this earlier form of it.

Lots of interest, but I think it's a book to read quite fast, not get stuck on as I did.

I wanted to move on to Jennifer Egan's THE KEEP because I hear it's also a Gothic parody. But I don't have it so I've started on another Egan: LOOK AT ME (2001). I'm impressed so far.

A very odd feature to modern eyes: it uses quotation marks around 3rd-person descriptions of speech

If you go back another couple of hundred years you begin to see all kinds of bespoke approaches to handling dialog in text - reading contemporary transcripts of witch trials from the 17th century (which is going about as far back from Austen's time as Austen is to us) they would enclose speech in quotes but also switch all the pronouns to third person, which really throws you until you get used to it (not to mention the free-form spelling, where people aren't even troubled to spell a word the same way consistently within a single text).

Austen uses uncontracted forms of tag questions in a way modern English speakers don't ("this attic is amazingly gloomy, is not it?" vs "isn't it?" or "is it not?"). But what I wonder is if Austen is employing them in a marked way or not... was that just the usual form tag questions took in conversation during her time, or was she employing those uncontracted forms as an affect for the purposes of characterization (the way we might have a character today say "it's hot out today, is it not?" vs "isn't it?")?

I finished Iceland's Bell last night, making it the first book I've read in 2020. At this pace I'll read (quickly calculates on fingers) about half as many books as I read in 2019. Part of the difficulty I had getting through this one was not the book's fault. I've been disinterested in reading most evenings and diverting myself with crosswords often as not. But some of the problem was with the book.

It lacked fully developed characters or any true center to the plot, but instead was a historical novel that relied for much of its interest from a desultory overview of the history of Iceland, circa 1680 - 1710 AD. No doubt this period and place in history holds more fascination for Icelanders than for non-Icelanders like me. Laxness did the best he could; he was a very talented author. I just wasn't his ideal audience.

i've tried to read 'independent people' several times and never gotten very far

My reading pace has been slow this year so far, on account of having a miserable cold and mostly being too tired or miserable to read.

I've finally gotten around to Chronicles, having had it for the best part of 15 years. I like it, broadly, but I'm a little underwhelmed overall. He's great company and the early stages are magical but there's something about his aphoristic style that starts to wear thin in the Oh Mercy section. I'll stick with it.

I also thought the "Oh Mercy" section was the weakest. I still liked it overall.

Great points F. Hazel about how diverse the conventions of English writing were, the further you go back.

It all makes me wonder when it was that things finally became more codified - I suspect around the late 19th century - which ironically is also the same time that we tend to think of a new wave of literary rule-breaking starting. In other words maybe 'modernism' only appears iconoclastic because language had finally just been settled.

Reading Five Children and It, which from the get-go left A Wrinkle In Time far behind, with Nesbit's super-concentrated, occasionally feverish, empathetic, yet firm, young-auntie voice vs. L'Engle's slobbery Granny Jesus kisses (although I'm told that some of hers, incl. in this same series, are a lot better).
Looking toward my first Sebald---ILB seems to favor Austerlitz over Saturn's Rings, amIright? Those are the ones at hand.

ILB seems to favor Austerlitz over Saturn's Rings, amIright?

Poll it? (NB: I've read neither - thought I own one of them - and would not be able to vote in such a poll.)

Great points F. Hazel about how diverse the conventions of English writing were, the further you go back.

It all makes me wonder when it was that things finally became more codified - I suspect around the late 19th century - which ironically is also the same time that we tend to think of a new wave of literary rule-breaking starting. In other words maybe 'modernism' only appears iconoclastic because language had finally just been settled.

Looking toward my first Sebald---ILB seems to favor Austerlitz over Saturn's Rings, amIright? Those are the ones at hand.

― dow, Monday, January 20, 2020 2:20 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't know if ILB really does? In any case, while pure and uniquely Sebaldian, they wildly differ. Austerlitz is an all-encompassing single story: all the deviations, everything covered, is what makes up the story arch and the history we learn. 'The Rings of Saturn' is much more meandering and takes you into even more unexpected terrain, the leads not necessarily all connected to each other (I mean of course it's all connected Sebald-style, but).

I couldn't choose between the two, really (and I'm - right now - reading 'The Immigrants' for the first time, which was his debut and seems like the best introduction to him as a writer, too). 'Austerlitz' is immensely impressive - well they all are - but perhaps start with 'The Rings of Saturn', which isn't as top heavy as Austerlitz is? But then idk, Austerlitz is a masterpiece, too.

I think Austerlitz is much better. Rings of Saturn is very good, but also feels a bit like a bunch of small essays loosely connected. In Austerlitz, it all takes one shape, and is immensely emotionally powerful.

VERTIGO precedes THE IMMIGRANTS.

THE RINGS OF SATURN is always the one for me. Tremendous exhibition about it at Norwich Castle last year.

Lots of his pictures for AUSTERLITZ were also on display at UEA.

I've started reading Maria Edgeworth's CASTLE RACKRENT.

I had better not read too many books at once.

VERTIGO precedes THE IMMIGRANTS.

You are right, of course.

Except for some reason I wrote THE IMMIGRANTS instead of the correct title: THE EMIGRANTS.

In descending order:

Austerlitz
The Emigrants
The Rings of Saturn
Vertigo

They're all good, though.`

I echo Alfred's list. Austerlitz is extraordinary but, given the emotional weight of it, I don't know that I could read it again.

I'm in that delicious/enervating phase of being between books and not knowing what the hell to read.

In anticipation of a trip to the southwestern US next May I've started reading the sensationally named Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, Hampton Sides.

So far, it is a competent narrative history aimed at a popular audience. The style is workmanlike and just readable enough not to be irritating. Although it is copyright 2006 and the author attempts to embrace some of the Native American side of the story, he has already managed to use the word "squaw" several times, which tends to cast some shade on his credentials in that regard.

xpost Thanks yall---I'll probably start with Austerlitz, although I certainly sympathize with any book or author tagged, fairly or not, as meandering.
I read a book first publised in 2019, by an actual youngperson! Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror---Reflections on Self Delusion. At thirty, she looks back to her Canadian-Filipina origins, with prodigious parents who got religion in Toronto, and vaulted to a megachurch lifestyle complex, which the author and her friends referred to as "The Repentagon," somewhere in the "fathomless sprawl" of Houston--which had no zoning laws, so it was near a teen club dedicated to the music and memory of DJ Screw---and as a young and restless, yet well-schooled teen, she found the szzyrup experience compatible with her ideal of eternity---later sought in the desert, while doing psychotrophics---which might have something to do with her attraction to the writings of Simone Weil, the Christian mystic who escaped to WWII London yet starved herself to death in solidarity with the victims of Hitler (since this book came out, JT's New Yorker archive has incl. illuminating, disturbing examination of what had seemed to me something of a mystery trend: millenials posting "just kill me now, blow me away," in ecstatic context).
Back to life: her storytelling essays may have been strengthened by actual journalism, which she first practiced while going back to her alma mater, the University of Virginia, in the wake of the Rolling Stone debacle. She immediately recognizes and sharpens her view of shady nuances, while meeting people close and closer to the center of the recent furor.
Also rides the rapids through tunnel of mirrors, "The 'I' in Internet," seeking to make sense of some involvements, to get perspective on others that make all too much sense, or seem to (Russian nested doll tendencies of some psychedelic and even weed experiences, splitting difference between self-awareness and self-consciousness, may also apply). And she works hard to make the money required for the good food and exercise (esp. a mostly female-inhabited hivetivity known as the barre, which might have come from an unholy collaboration of Ballard and Atwood) required to make the money for
Oh well, she's got a good acerbic sense of humor about all this. Also a lot of good stuff about her favorite children's books, and discussions of seemingly familiar voices---Weil, Plath, Ferrante, several others--while pointing out things I hadn't thought of and didn't know.
The only section I have doubts about is "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams," mainly because Trump upstages everybody.

Suddenly came to the end of teh Mike Heron memoir part of You Know What You Could Be.
Just getting heavily into it when it abruptly ended. So hope there might be some hope that he writes a longer memoir at some point.
Has Robin Williamson written a memoir?
Heron gets as far as Robin and Licorice getting back from Morocco which means the psychedelic era of th eband is just about to get underway.

Hertoic Failure by Fintan O'Toole
the book on Brexit which came out last year and i started before Xmas and thought I was going to get read over Xmas.
INteresting stuff, he's exploring the meaning of the title subject. He's just been talking about the Terror being found in 2016 and the mission it was on to find the NOrthwest passage. Followed by a load of people going off to try to find the lost ship and not being thought to be really doing it if they came back without finding the ship, including somebody who found the entrance to teh Northwest passage which i thought was mythical. INteresting book, may need to read some more of him once I get through this. Wish I'd gotten myself together to get a ticket to watch him talking at the local university when he was here last year or the year before.

Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'roll: The Science of Hedonism Zoe Cormier
Popular science book on the pleasure principle and evolution and stuff.
Bought this is n a charity shop a while back and its been sitting in a pile waiting to be read.

I finished The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen, slowed a bit by my suffering from a miserable cold, which turned out to be strep. It's not a super-easy book to read, bearing as it does a number of modernist hallmarks - acute attention to psychological states, unusual formal structure, lack of omniscient perspective. On the other hand, it does tell a coherent, emotionally-resonant tale, the shape of which becomes clear at around the 3/4 point, and is resolutely realist, keeping flights of lyrical fancy to a minimum. When the shape of the plot first becomes apparent, it may seem perhaps a tad old-fashioned, Gothic even, but by the end, its necessity to the careful and intricate structure becomes plain. Dealing as it does with gradations of social respectability and expected behavior which have now been nearly erased by the march of 20th-century progress towards the fully-liberated consumer, and limning as it does a particularly genteel level of that society, at the rare slow moment, one may catch a whiff of the dusty and fusty. Nonetheless the acuteness of the portraits, especially of the children, and the current of mordant humor running just below the surface, together with the overall craftsmanship and frequently glittering sentences, make it hard to assign any grade other than "masterpiece".

I've now started the enjoyably diverting (and undemanding) Life is Meals by James and Kay Salter.

I discovered Bowen in December '18. "Gothic" is a good descriptor. If you liked what you read, try The Death of the Heart.

I'd like to read that one at some point.

Also try doorstop Collected Stories, from the very early 20s (and maybe before?) to late 60s.

a person of interest, susan choi

ive been reading mickelsons ghosts by john gardner ~ p good, reads vaguely like a less depraved sabbath's theater to me

The Lark Ascending, Richard King. Enjoyed Original Rockers quite a lot so looking forward.

Just now coming to this thread -- I read Reinhardt's Garden last year and loved it! I'm a few months removed so my impressions are no longer the freshest; but I read it around the same time I tried to read a Bernhard I'd never read before (Old Masters), and I thought Haber was doing something quite different and, in a way, much more straightforwardly enjoyable, once you get past the intimidating look of the unbroken word-column, and the basic conceit of the delirious monologue. I thought the transitions between the narrative present and recollected events were managed very well, and kept me interested in a way that Bernhard sometimes fails to do. (Not that he doesn't hold my interest [Well, Old Masters didn't; apart from that, though...], but with TB I tend to feel I'm being asked to focus more on the language itself, and less on the story.)

Yeah, I really liked Reinhardt's Garden.

I've started reading Maria Edgeworth's CASTLE RACKRENT.

How can one read James Joyce — or Beckett for that matter — without a sound appreciation of Castle Rackrent?"

-- Brian Aldiss, "Diagrams for Three Enigmatic Stories"

Castle Rackrent is a perfect little black comedy.

i finished parable of the sower over the holiday and i'm just blown away. i can't stop thinking about it. of course i'll be picking up the second in the series and everything else butler wrote, but if anyone has any other suggestions in this vein i'd really appreciate them: prescient books that deal with the disaster of now, that understand social reality outside protected bubbles and point ways forward, from queer povs a bonus.

As someone who also read Parable for the first time recently, I'd be curious to hear whether you found anything that fits the bill.

I'm tempted to recommend Omar Al-Akkad's American War, which gave me similar feelings, but was less well-written (What isn't less well-written than Octavia Butler, though?!), to the point where it stopped holding my interest around the halfway mark. Been meaning to pick it back up though!

Deep into that Barr book on Ealing - curious how even as far back as the 70's, someone mounting a defense of the studio had to put the spotlight on its "rebels" (Hamer, McKendrick) and push back against its archetypal image - "x isn't just what you thought it was" admitidley being a well-worn approach to talking about anything.

I like Brian Aldiss, and like people to read old books, but I don't really understand his question above.

I don't see very much relation between this and Joyce, or Beckett. I do see a bit of a relation with Myles na gCopaleen - the parodic Editor and footnotes anticipating AN BEAL BOCHT / THE POOR MOUTH.

Though my understanding of most things is very limited indeed, I suspect that I actually know Joyce, at least ULYSSES, better than Aldiss did.

Just reading some batches of short novels:

Linda Bostrom Knausgard - The Helios Disaster
Thomas Benhard - On the Mountain
Peter Handke - The Afternoon of a Writer
Franz Kafka - Letter to his Father
Anna Kavan - Sleep has his House
Natalia Ginzburg - Happiness, as Such

finished THE REVISIONARIES by a.r. moxon, which . . . not even sure what to say. enormous, rambling, meta. i quite liked it, and it easily kept me going through 600 pages, but i don't think i'd dare *recommend* it

it shares that distinction, among other things, with infinite jest

Finished part 1 of Bros K. The story so far: everyone is screaming.

Thanks to this thread, I checked out Thomas Benhard's Old Masters.

Finished CASTLE RACKRENT, plus Preface, Glossary, Notes, Appendix, Introduction, Note on the Text.

The Glossary is probably the highlight of all these: classic Irish fun, though the 1995 Introduction fancifully describes it as a patriarchal strategy of containment written by Edgeworth's father. The Introduction goes too wildly off-beam in those directions but does make a fair case for understanding the importance of the novel as a kind of allegory of the fate of the Anglo-Irish.

Started reading the copy of Crime and Punishment I bought a couple of years ago thinking I'd try something ther than constance garnet.
Enjoying it so far but have a few other things i want to read.

Castle Rackrent is a wild ride though I remember it now more for its form and innovations than the weight of its ideas.

What are the innovations?

That quotation is from a short story by Aldiss. Earth is being colonized by friendly aliens who are obsessed with minor 19th century writers. These aliens have psychic powers, and use them to force their literary tastes onto the culture and retroactively bring into existence more 19th century works, just as minor.

Sounds remarkable! So I suppose we weren't to take the quotation literally after all; perhaps the opposite.

I've put my Egan novel on the back burner and started on a novel I bought years ago: Zadie Smith's NW.

I've never got to it but every time I've flicked through it the text has looked impressive and innovative.

First two pages and it feels like the real deal.

I finished Blood and Thunder. It was well-researched in the way that is possible through books and manuscripts. Some attempt was made to reflect the perspective of the various tribes of Native Americans involved, but since that perspective is very meagerly represented in the written record, it was meagerly represented in this book, too. I missed it.

The thing this book did best was to give a sense of Carson as a highly unusual product of his age and experiences. To give one example of what I mean, he was a 'mountain man' and trapper in his youth, but a sober one. In an age obsessed by "Christian duty" he was apparently motivated far more by his sense of fairness, loyalty and justice than any conception of duty, Christian or otherwise.

I came to like him. Apparently, everyone who knew him did, too.

As someone who also read Parable for the first time recently, I'd be curious to hear whether you found anything that fits the bill.

I'm tempted to recommend Omar Al-Akkad's American War, which gave me similar feelings, but was less well-written (What isn't less well-written than Octavia Butler, though?!), to the point where it stopped holding my interest around the halfway mark. Been meaning to pick it back up though!

― handsome boy modelling software (bernard snowy), Friday, January 24, 2020 1:55 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

well, i picked up more butler and it's doing the trick! parable of the talents and bloodchild.

barnes and noble of all places had nice hardcovers of the two parables

I just read Bloodchild, been wanting to read the Parable books but Butler books just don't turn up at used bookstores around here (I got Bloodchild at B&N, actually)... "Amnesty" and "Speech Sounds" are amaaaaazing.

xxposts - i have Blood & Thunder in my stack of “to-reads” bc it looked interesting- will def check it out based on your review, Aimless!

About 2/3 of the way through Mrs Palfrey and - aside from Taylor's mastery of the subtle detail and the light she throws on the tiny hollows of misery that colour our days - the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers (which I suppose amounts to the same thing). Ludo is pretty rancid, Beth from A View of the Harbour is in perpetual torment thanks to her writing and Angel. Well, Angel.

The writer in Angel is so damn exuberant though. I can't dislike her.

Ach, I dunno. Exuberance is good but without an ounce of insight?

i’m not sure ludo is entirely rancid is he? iirc kingsley amis said it was an unusual portrait of a writer in fiction who is actually seen to do the work of writing. certainly he finds Mrs Palfrey picturesque or interesting subject matter.

agree with Alfred on Angel, she’s incredibly present and vivid - bursts off the page in her awkwardness and will.

both remarkable books. might have to revisit mrs palfrey.

I'm probably being a bit unfair to Ludo (I've not finished - he might turn out to save her from a rampaging bear). I get his loneliness lends him a kind of searchlight quality, sweeping for any sort of contact, but it's his relation to Mrs Palfrey, which is kind of vampiric: she becomes purely about material or sustenance for his habit. And his writerly eye is beautifully rendered (that thirst for detail) but it's still grubby as hell.

yes i think that’s fair. the whole novel is pretty unsparing of people and of time.

the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers

I mean, she WAS friends with Kingsley Amis, so fair enough.

Haha - very true!

Well, I was totally wrong about Ludo. There is quite literally no end to the shit I don't know.

I finished the book in the waiting room of a health centre; I was totally overwhelmed and had to hide my face. What a writer.

I reread parts of Lorrie Moore, A GATE AT THE STAIRS.

And continued with Morris Dickstein's 'The Critic & Society: 1900-1950', on Edmund Wilson et al.

I'm currently reading a recently released NYRB book: Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks. It's an odd duck. Kind of a cross between popular science, popular philosophy, a memoir, and an extended personal essay on the subject of human consciousness. I have yet to decide if he has anything new to say on this subject that is cogent or worthwhile, but his authorial voice is engaging enough to make him companionable, and that is worth much right there, so I read on.

What are the innovations?

― the pinefox, Monday, 27 January 2020 11:18 (four days ago)

As an early historical novel, and the perspective of the narrator

I just started reading Mike McCormack's odd sci-fi novella "Notes from a coma". John McGahern meets PKD!

John Douglas and Olshaker - Mindhunter (1995). First book fail of my year. Douglas is one of the links in the chain that created the "genius serial killer" character in the 90s. In this book he doesn't recount any dialog from the interviews, and doesn't seem to have a sturdy methodology. The Anna Torv character in the TV show exists to point out the most obvious problems about his work.

Ginzburg - The Cheese and the Worms (1976). A deep dive into the life and times of a 15th century peasant who was burned at the stake for heresy. His hypothesis that the title metaphor came from an "oral tradition" is weak, and he admits it in one of the intros. Still quite interesting. I want to read his earlier book on the cult who battled witches while sleeping.

currently reading Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) for a book club. He can set up a story well enough to be interesting, but his characters are paper thin. I suspect it's just misery lit tourism -- an "American Dirt" for Afghanistan. (He left there when he was 11.)

I think Life is Meals is turning out to be more suitable for snacking than as a main course, so along with the occasional nibble I’ve embarked on The Odyssey in the Fagles translation. I enjoyed his Iliad last year.

in this thread we stan Emily Wilson's Odyssey

I'm reading the first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography - To the Is-Land. I have a complicated relationship with NZ in that I went there for six weeks some 20 years ago and - this sounds trite as fuck but it's true - had a kind of epiphany - something like growing my eyes again. I've always thought if I go back, it'll be for good. Also, My sister has recently moved to NZ so this feels like one way of re-learning the lie of the land or something.

Anyway, irrelevant autobiographical sketch aside, I'm enjoying this. I'm always vaguely suspicious of richly detailed early memories, if only because my own recollections of my early years are basically non-existent, but this is told with such close-to detail and vigour it's hard not to be beguiled. She grew up in a railway family, so had a largely itinerant childhood, moving with the work around the South Island of the 1920s and 30s. There's no real hint as yet of the melancholy that would consume her but it's at the edge of things.

All of this is qualified by the frontispiece, really:

From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.

Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks

I really enjoyed this, while not being convinced that Riccardo Manzotti's theories make much sense or are even very meaningful.

That Mike McCormack PKD-esque volume does sound unusual and interesting.

I continue with NW.

in this thread we stan Emily Wilson's Odyssey

That one looks interesting. If I ever read it again I might try it. Fagles’ language seems to have a bit more grandeur which suits the heroic mood.

Needed an easy read so I picked up Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which turns out to be absolutely terrific, with a Wodehousian density of (good) jokes. Roxane Gay on Goodreads complains about its thinness and over-jokiness, which seems like a classic Goodreads point-missing

Social media indicates Roxane Gay seems like a classic misser of points.

I finished Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness a couple of nights ago. I most enjoyed it when he was pointing out how inadequate and incoherent existing theories of consciousness are. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I came away less than impressed with his highly unspecific explanations of his own preferred theory, as devised by his Italian acquaintance.

My own conclusion is that for millennia humans have been accumulating vast amounts of well-observed data about how human consciousness behaves when it manifests itself in human activity, and how it appears internally as self-reported by acute self-observers. Very few novel discoveries are still being added to this body of knowledge. It's not 'sexy' like neuroscience.

Attempting to describe human behavior from the bottom up and from the inside out by correlating each thought or action with brain activity at the molecular level seems to me to be a fool's errand, if only because consciousness only accounts for a small fraction of brain activity. Most brain activity doesn't correlate to anything that can be described in terms other than neurons undergoing changes in their chemical states. The activity happens. One may presume it has consequences, but it happens in a black box and it seldom manifests as consciousness.

But the above post is just a playful dab at the subject. ILX made a bigger collective stab at it in this thread.

If you’re looking to read more on the subject, The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers is worth spending time with.

More than halfway into the new William Gibson, and I'm enjoying it more than the Peripheral... it has the advantage of not having throw you in the deep end like the Peripheral does, since it revisits the same concepts and many characters. Seems to make the narrative more enjoyable, although I'm not sure I'd say there's a lot more going on. Just more coherent.

Unfortunately most of what's important in the new Gibson happens offscreen, so the characters basically run around for a while and then go home again. It's enjoyable enough, but a bit underwhelming.

finished larkin's "jill" last week. really enjoyed this one -- larkin is such a great, observant, funny writer even in prose. it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).

almost done with charles bowden's "blue desert" (arizona writer, sort of poetic/hard-boiled -- finding it a little less good than i'd hoped but it's short at least), then thinking of tackling jonathan schell's "the fate of the earth," which i picked up at an antique store. also rereading lee-ditko spider-man right before bed, for the first time in many years.

everyone has me killfiled, don't they?

not me. bro

On a William Carlos Williams kick after reading Reed Whittemore's bio.

xxp not only do i not have you killfiled, i'm trying to keep up with your damn twitter thread

As mentioned at FAP yesterday, I finished Richard King's The Lark Ascending. Sort of a primer for the UK's changing relationship towards the countryside through the 20th century - ramblers, kinder scouts, eco-fascists, hippies, new age travellers, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp - through the lens of music, so Vaughn Williams, Ralph McTell, Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, but also less obvious selections, Eno, Ultramarine, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Stan Tracey. King is quite a lyrical writer. There's a concert to accompany the book at the Barbican in March.

Now onto Sally Rooney's Normal People

it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).

Cool! Let me know if you do.

Been a while, but time to delurk after my brief show at the fap last night -

Aurora Leigh - always dragged my feet on reading this. Never took to her shorter poems much, and I bridle a bit at verse novels, novels in verse, w/e/ But it's bringing me more pleasure than anything in a while. Just bursting with stuff - knotty super-particular images, elliptical shifts of focus and digressions that just feel pleasantly 'f it, I'm going to think about this for a while'.

Some Trick, Helen DeWitt. Also enjoying this, almost inevitably. Not that far in, but completely up for her hymns to statistical software.

Also reading and working from Make: Electronics. Stopped drinking so I'm just having a period of faddishly deciding to be interested in new things (also - baking bread, meditation). Want to know how stuff works, learn a bit, play around, build some tiny things, fix stuff, burn off a fingerprint in a soldering accident etc etc.

And dipping in and out of a couple of academic oddball classics - Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and John M Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

I found King's book a bit flat. I wonder if I was in the wrong frame of mind when I read as it ticks a lot of boxes for me.

I'm taking a break from Janet Frame and am reading Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing. She's a poet by trade (and a creative writing teacher) and she's a great proponent of Gilbert White's entreaty to 'watch narrowly'. Her gaze here is very much about the vagaries of climate change. Not in a didactic way but the whole text is suffused with the evidence of change be it on an Alaskan dig to uncover hunter-gatherer artefacts or on the shores of Westray, where erosion has revealed evidence of neolithic occupation. She has always been able to weave in aspects of her own experience and is often quite candid about her family life (her best essay is about mother's cancer diagnosis ) but, as yet, this is largely absent from the text.

I've been re-reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, LeCarre. It's OK, but LeCarre wrote better stuff later on and I suspect the movie of this (which I haven't seen for a couple of decades now) is better than the book. Anyway, I needed something undemanding and this fits.

Aurora Leigh - always dragged my feet on reading this. Never took to her shorter poems much, and I bridle a bit at verse novels, novels in verse, w/e/ But it's bringing me more pleasure than anything in a while. Just bursting with stuff - knotty super-particular images, elliptical shifts of focus and digressions that just feel pleasantly 'f it,

lol I read half of it on of all places a plane headed to Seattle, years after my professor of a grad Victorian lit course raved about it. Yeah, it's got wooden passages, but it brims with possibilities, and, actually, Browning's use of blank verse to enjamb the gnarls of her thinking impressed me. If you read Wordsworth's The Prelude it serves as an answer poemm.

having read three novels by alan burns over the last week: babel seems to be entirely composed of cut-ups sourced from a plethora of found material circa the mid/late sixties which to be honest i found a bit of a slog to get through, if occasionally diverting; europe after the rain on the other hand actually has a discernible (if exceedingly fractured) narrative about a quest through war-torn europe... some notable parallels between this and anna kavan's ice which was published a few years later; dreamerika! again with the cut-ups (& additional pictorial collage) depicting/satirising the travails of the kennedy dynasty. kind of curious to check out his first novel buster which from what i can gather is more in the angry young man mode.

but for now: ann quin's the unmapped country!

Still reading essays in THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM: on Trilling, Richards et al.

It's enjoyable enough, but a bit underwhelming.

sadly a very accurate summary.

Decided to take the plunge with Ducks, Newburyport last night, 50p in & having fun so far. Rather than being an obstacle, the crazy stream of consciousness format seems like it might actually make it pretty easy to dip in & out of.

Wow, 50 pages is more than I can do, I mostly manage ten to twenty pages, and when I hit another puma episode, I take a break :)

I've returned to another book that just flows, am reading Proust again. Book 10 in the Danish 13 book version. Second part of The Prisoner. I have 10 and 11, and will make it through that little novel inside a novel. Then I should probably go back, I don't think I've read parts 7 and 8.

Also, slowly working my way through The Black Jacobins by CLR James, which is incredible, if a bit dated. And slowly making my way through The Radetzky March, one chapter at a time, for work-related reasons.

I remember really liking the Black Jacobins when I read it.

I'm now on to The Wicked Pavilion, Dawn Powell. It reminds me of a line in a Katherine Hepburn movie: "She did worse than insult you; she described you." So far, Powell seems intent on relentlessly describing her characters. This may shift, as I'm only 50 pages into it.

Sick On You Andrew Matheson
memoir of the Hollywood Brats lead singer detailing the so far pretty lows of living in poverty while getting his protopunk band together.
I think I'm still in 1972, & he's just met Cliff Richard thanks to a would be manager. Not sure if this is going to be positive.
Oh well, quite enjoyable read if you like this kind of thing.
Now to finally get their recordings.

Man, I wish I had to read Joseph Roth for work

Me too. Wish me luck with this book pitch.

the wicked pavilion is so good

isn't it?

Powell's A Time to Be Born is even better -- one of the period's essential American novels.

reading the Milk Bowl of Feathers, an anthology of surrealist writing and... a lot of it is not very good. might abandon it for the complete stories of leonora carrington

Been reading some stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber for a book club I plan to attend tonight. Quite a variety of tones in this collection! I think "The Lady of the House of Love" made the deepest impression of the ones I've read so far, though "Puss-in-Boots" was the most simply enjoyable. Will be interesting to hear what others have to say.

Really like what I’ve read in that, but haven’t read the whole thing.

I heart the Bloody Chamber!

Last night I finished The Wicked Pavilion, Dawn Powell. It walks a line between brutal satire and full-throated cynicism. No one in it could be called happy. Of the ten or a dozen prominent characters, all but one is to some extent a hustler who's always on the make, including those who are wealthy enough they have no lack of means. Even the nicest character displays no real kindness, but rather a sort of forlorn, pathetic hope the world will treat her well, without expecting it actually will.

I found the characters to be convincingly drawn. Their motives are selfish, but they are not intentionally cruel to one another. Their selfishness is so unconscious, such a given, that it emerges as a social standard they are simply conforming to, for it is how 'everyone' acts and is expected to act. So, as indicated in the title, it is a very wicked book. Funny, if you assume an Olympian detachment, but a bit depressing if you feel you live in the world she describes.

Phineas Finn, which like all long Trollope feels rather peristaltic: sometimes nothing happens for a little while, and then the plot lurches into motion for a dozen pages, and then everything relaxes for another fifty. Not sure I am on board for another four books of this.

recently, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was not as bad as I expected it to be in some ways, but bad in a few ways I didn't expect

Long time no see, thomp. Your peristaltic experience is close to mine re some (not all) volumes of In Search of Lost Time, but I stayed with it and the last volume was sufficient reward.
Have you read The Way We Live Now? Enough momentum to pull me right through that doorstop, with no slow-downs---no speed-reading either, but the pace schooled me.

Reading it at the beginning of the Trump Administration may have helped.

I think of going back to Elizabeth Bishop. All over again? Well, quite apart from the poetry, there's so much prose to read, that I've never touched.

Elijah Wald Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

book on Dyaln up to Newport '65 and the other folk artists around at the time. Running through Dylan's stylistic evolution of the early 60s so far.
Want to read a few more of Wald's books did really enjoy his book on the delta blues, Escaping The Delta when I read it a while back.
Very interesting.

Phineas Finn, which like all long Trollope feels rather peristaltic: sometimes nothing happens for a little while, and then the plot lurches into motion for a dozen pages, and then everything relaxes for another fifty. Not sure I am on board for another four books of this.

PF was my first Trollope too! Not the best intro. I next read The Way We Live Now, after which I was hooked.

Have finished Rachel Cusk's Kudos and now I want to read the trilogy again (and her other works for the first time) - just spellbinding. This one maybe slightly less compelling than the first two, but only slightly, it leans harder into the literary circuit critique and seems almost dreamlike in places - a journalist interviews the narrator, speaks non stop for four pages without the narrator saying a word, then finishes the interview saying "well I think I've got enough!"

Also Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, somewhat more blackly comic than the title suggests, I love the narrator's theory of "testosterone autism" where old men's capacity for social intelligence declines, they develop an interest in "various tools and machinery" and "the second world war and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains". Full of great lines like "It's strange how the Night erases all colours, as if it didn't give a damn about such worldly extravagance."

I am now reading a narrowly focused history called Money Mountain: The Story of Cripple Creek Gold, Marshall Sprague. It details the more lurid parts of the history of the Cripple Creek, Colorado mining district from the earliest cattle ranching homestead in the area, up through the boom years in the early 1890s and on into the 1930s. Like any confined place that generates masses of wealth, a lot happened, more than enough to fill 300 pages.

I'm considering reading Trollope's The Way We Live Now as an apt follow-on to this one.

Yeah, go for it. Don't let its size intimidate you. What Trollope lacks in Eliot and James' psychologizing he compensates with momentum and portraiture.

The Trollope I've read so far has been centered on ecclesiastic politics, which against all probability, he managed to make entertaining, so I expect he'll do just fine with much juicier material.

I finished the two books I was reading: The Odyssey (tr. Fagles) and Life is Meals by James and Kay Salter. LIM was a unique mish mash of anecdotes, food-related facts, historical trivia and the odd recipe, all united by the themes of cookery and entertaining. It's a bit breezy, but it makes a cumulative case for a particular theory of the good life (and gains some emotional punch from coming near the end of what was by all appearances a long and happy relationship). In that sense, it could almost be read as a companion to Salter's All That Is. I'm guessing everyone's read The Odyssey. I found it quite enjoyable. More fun and less grim than The Iliad, but in its own way just as bloodthirsty. The gory climax should appeal to anyone who's ever had house guests overstay their welcome.

Odyssey is a deep fave. Has all the cool high fantasy stuff you want in a good mythological epic + yes gore climax

Iliad always felt more normcore. Still cool and all but needs moar giants & lotuseaters

hi dow, alfred

PF was my first Trollope too

no this is my ... tenth? trollope; i'm just wondering if it's time to get off the bus. i don't know, once the shape of it (victorian fuckboy discovers personal integrity in Parliament, of all things) revealed itself to me i was more on board. to mix transit metaphors.

i will read the way we live now if i ever get to the end of the pallisers. i did see both the eustace diamonds and phineas redux in an oxfam store yesterday but i couldn't quite bring myself to pull the trigger.

i gave phineas finn to my sister-in-law; she'd said her father described it as 'something you absolutely MUST' read. and, i mean, really? okay, i guess. if that's your thing.

"notes from a coma" was excellent, the ultimate celtic tiger novel in many ways. so more mike mccormack its is, im onto his latest one "solar bones" right now

Nanni Balestrini - The Unseen
Agatha Christie - The Secret Adversary

This pair were lent to me by two ilb-ers, and I liked reading them side-by-side. In their different ways you see the fear of the red wave (one written from a v pro-, one from a v anti-). The Balestrini is almost a carbon-copy of the style in which Joyce set the last chapter of Ulysses in an attempt to capture the energy of anarcho-libertarian politics and its moment in Italian society (Autonomy). The other is just a very bog-standard potboiler that centers on the hunt for the man who is behind The 'Bolshovits', and its like we need to go back to the Balestrini again to even begin to scare the shit out -- if not kill -- the people in the 2nd book. Mad world.

Oh yeah now I remember the good Solar Lottey talk on a prev WAYR! Notes From a Coma v appealing title, will also check. Ditto The Unseen (not because of the title but description).

Think intro to edition of The Way mentioned that some of Trollope's old fans found this one way dark, which it is, though with pre-Wodehouse sense of ridic x also implicit (pre-Dawn Powell?) humor (some juxtaposed descriptions of non-twit characters, for inst), and those who start silly but become deeper and/or more sympathetic, also sillys and sympathetics becoming darker or at least more volatile, problematic, in plausible ways.

just about done with Muir's "My First Summer in the Sierra" (and other selected writings)
current bus reading is Kelly Link's latest "Get in Trouble", which is on par with her earlier work. Embarrassed to be reading something with a Neil Gaiman blurb on the cover, esp when it seems to me like she does everything Gaiman wishes he was doing, except with actual depth and inventiveness.

also idly reading Arendt's "The Human Condition" which is a bit of a slog, occasionally obscure and outdated, but then intermittently insightful too.

yeah it's her most tedious book

bit of a letdown after Eichmann in Jerusalem re-piqued my interest about her last year

read On Revolution, still her sharpest

had that on my list too, but the Human Condition was the one that arrived first :(

I have begun The Way We Live Now. After 50 pages Trollope is still sorting out introducing the characters to the reader, including the all-important disclosures of their titles, property in land, incomes, debts, and general liquidity. This far outweighs in importance their occupations, since these are the gentry; if, by great misfortune, they must earn money, they must do their best to disguise it as a hobby rather than a necessity.

I finished Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing. It was good, if not up to the standard of Findings and Sightlines. She's always had a spareness to her style but here it's almost as if she's scared to touch the page in places; it means a tentativeness which is engaging enough but left me gasping a bit by the end of it.

Also read William Styron's Darkness Visible this morning. It's definitely 'gone home' as it were; I can see I'll be revisiting it a lot over the next few days and beyond.

Currently reading Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three by Mara Leveritt

Nearing the end of NW. Largely excellent.

Romanticism: A German Affair, Rudiger Safranski. Highlights so far: Kant complaining Herder's too difficult to read (take a look in the mirror sometime, Immanuel), the craze of literature reaching Germany as 20% of the population becomes literate (amazing excerpt from some noblewoman talking about a visit to some other aristo where they spent the entire day reading, either alone or to each other - it's described like a coke binge or something); Goethe being staunchly anti-revolutionary but still getting his son a toy guillotine and the genre of conspiracy stories taking off, which includes the depressingly accurate statement "then as today, conspiracy theories are the current of philosophy of history that most easily penetrates the masses".

Raymond Williams - Orwell
PG Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters

Jeeves' 'sir' oddly reminded me of Thomas Bernhard's habit of inventing a repetitive word to punctuate his tirades and in the same way a subordinate who solves the day (and in this case also beats the fascist), is smarter but does not think to use it to get out of his situation...well I should read a few more than talk like this. Then moved on to further ruminations on England and class via Williams' short study of Orwell. I would quite like to read Homage to Catalonia sometime; Williams absolutely captures what is so abhorent about the late novel. A sympathetic reading, though, and so nice to read something like that when everything seems like a part of a culture war (even if we have always had culture wars really -- as Williams alludes to in the way Orwell became a fucking symbol -- his pleas at the end falling on deaf ears are so much of where a lot of this country is at.

Jeeves likes being a valet and is also the celibate life partner of Wooster

Had not thought of it that way, or at all, but of course you're right.
I've read most of Orwell, and have to say Homage is one of the essentials; he's at his peak.

Maybe too bad he didn't just show up in more combat zones now and then, like Graham Greene.

Zadie Smith's NW: contains some terrific writing; interestingly, deliberately structured; internally diverse; thoughtful and sensitive in rendering consciousness, attitudes, city life.

The mystery is just how far it refuses to cohere at the end. Maybe it's a very deliberate experiment in not tying up strands, and leaving the reader with so much unresolved. If only because novels usually do tie things up, you implicitly assume that these things will properly come together - and they don't.

Gave up on Arendt's "Human Condition", the kind of academic text that is just a seemingly endless definition of terms with lots of historical and textual references that are just like.... why, why is this book being written? How is this sort of semantic hair-splitting valuable or useful or even interesting? A bummer.

as a replacement, got M. John Harrison's latest short fiction collection "You Should Come With Me Now" out of the library. much better.

25 or so pages from finishing "A Fraction of the Whole", Steve Toltz, a 2008 Man Booker Prize shortlist book. Cover blurb comparison to "A Confederacy of Dunces" is apt, as the writing in both is enjoyable, but the characters are all fairly detestable. Reading perked up once Jasper's mother's character was introduced, as she reminded me of an ex.

Just finished Two Serious Ladies. I assume it's well-read by people on this board, but it's pretty much a perfect book and I highly recommend it if you haven't. It's right at the intersection of "completely original" and "blisteringly easy to read".

Speaking of M John Harrison, I was planning to have a second (or third) stab at Light next.

I love Light and Nova Swing (Empty Space a little less so)

Yeah, me too. I never got around to finishing the third one for some reason.

Gregg Hurwitz - Into the Fire. latest in the orphan x series. formulaic as hell but I enjoy them

Ann Napolitano - Dear Edward. fine.

Sam Lloyd - The Memory Wood. kidnapped child thriller. didn't really work for me.


Brent Weeks - The Black Prism. liked enough to start the second in the series.

currently reading Brent Weeks 'The Blinding Knife' and Olga Tokarczuk ' Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead'

Much as I'd like to enjoy The Way We Live Now, it's glacial pace is killing my interest. The characters gather in various combinations and talk or worry or are gratified or hopeful or scornful or thoughtless, about the exact same things as 150 pages ago.

No character has yet altered in any way; they all maintain the same static approach to their situations. This is somewhat realistic. Adults change character very little and change slowly. But with such static characters one must turn to the plot for movement and change, as events overtake the characters. This may happen in future chapters, but after 200 pages the plot is moving at the pace of a sleeping snail.

This book has quite literally put me to sleep many times now. It is time to cut my losses and put it aside. Sorry, Alfred, but even in the face of your much-trusted reassurances about this book's excellence, the idea of another 550 pages of this oppresses me.

I've gone back to SERIAL ENCOUNTERS, the book on Ulysses & the Little Review --

but also having another crack at William Empson, SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL. I'm afraid this isn't quite as fun or accessible as I'd have hoped. It moves along at times (ch1) in a baffling conversational way - often one sentence is almost unrelated to the previous one. Ch1 is a bizarre alternative to an Introduction, which doesn't introduce the theme at all. I really still don't know what Pastoral is, for Empson! Nor what the Sonnets or Henry IV have to do with it. Also, some of the book is about stuff that's just too obscure to me - 'Milton and Bentley', but I don't know who Bentley is.

I think I'll read properly the chapter on 'Marvell's Garden', The Beggar's Opera and Alice, and leave it at that.

But one remarkable passage in Ch1, on images of workers as 'myths' - literally anticipates Roland Barthes by over 20 years.

This book has quite literally put me to sleep many times now. It is time to cut my losses and put it aside. Sorry, Alfred, but even in the face of your much-trusted reassurances about this book's excellence, the idea of another 550 pages of this oppresses me.

Hm. Pace is one of the things for which I admire Trollope.

I have been reading a very enjoyable short story collection by Chavisa Woods, Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country; as well as a not-totally-unrelated work of nonfiction by Phil Neel, Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict.

bounced hard off of drive your plow over the bones of the dead (too-quirky narrator) and this is memorial device (trainspotting with post punk name drops, i'm good), rereading wolf hall in prep for new tome, super psyched. hilary mantel can really fuckin write

Last night I switched over to The Luck of the Bodkins, P. G. Wodehouse. In violent contrast to the Trollope, events overtake the characters and abolish their plans at the clip of about once each three pages. Verily, it gallops along!

I finished Devil's Knot, which contains a lot of solid reporting about the still-unsolved '90s West Memphis triple murder case, and particularly about the investigation and trial. It seems unbelievable that three convictions could have been obtained on the basis of evidence presented at trial. I guess juries are often inclined to give police and prosecutors the benefit of the doubt. Now I'm reading Normal People by Sally Rooney.

Andrei Makine: The Archipelago of Another Life -- Russian conscript soldiers doing atomic war prep in the 1950s, written in a slightly odd but not unpleasant C19th style

Finished climate-anxiety interior monologue Weather by Jenny Offill. Unlike some other stuff I’ve got going on bookwise it was both short and quick so I’m both satisfied to have finished a book and grumpy to have finished a new hardback so promptly but I guess that’s life.

Really liked that book while having it underline waaaaaaay to many of my own anxieties.

W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants: I liked the first two stories a lot. Short and mysterious. The third was a bit flabby. The fourth was too much, dealing the most directly with the Holocaust and being the most generic because of it.

Mike Reiss's Springfield Confidential: It's clear that he wasn't one of the geniuses behind the series. So many stabs at humor fail in this book.

John Bellairs's The House with a Clock in its Walls: OK children's lit. I liked the odd details that aren't followed up on -- the best being the Fusebox Dwarf who says Dreeb! who is only in a single paragraph.

Currently on Rafael Bob-Waksberg's short story collection, which the onion avclub put on their list of 2019's best books. The first story, comparing dating to a snake in a can prank, is perfect. The next few aren't as good.

Empson was proving so frustrating that I went back to ... Michael Wood on Empson. Bedtime / comfort reading.

I just finished reading Jean Stafford's 'The Mountain Lion.' I'd never read anything by her before. In fact, I don't think I knew she existed until last week. It's both highly judgmental and critical of judgment. Unsure how I feel overall – there's a lot going against it: exaggerated racism, deeply-ingrained sexism, uncritical (?) mid-century classism, exaltation in self-harm, a cynical narrator. However, it's totally unlike anything else I've read. It's about a sickly, strange, and ugly brother and sister from Covina, California, who spend summers at an uncle's ranch in Colorado. The sickliness, strangeness and ugliness of the children is integral of the book, and the brother's burgeoning masculinity begins to subsume it, while it becomes a critical flaw in the sister's development of a feminine self. It's told over the course of fiveish years in odd intervals - a summer here, an evening there, a few years in a sentence - and it ends in a stagey act of violence.

Has anybody else read it?

I haven’t but have wanted to and have seen it praised in the archives.

Alfred and I are for it: I read it as building empathy or at least sympathy and concern for an obnoxious protagonist, without excuses, just something the size and shaping of justice. Also I liked Boston Adventure, and he may like The Collected Stories, which he's mentioned reading (I've barely started, but seems fine).

You're prob right about the ending. Overall kind of reminds me of a secular Flannery O'Connor.

Def. in your face, I mean.

donald barthelme 60 stories. extremely my shit

Yes, I did like The Mountain Lion. She got the Library of America treatment, which she deserves. I haven't read her third novel and my local and uni library systems don't carry it.

Does it feature a mountain lion?

finished 'drive your plow....' liked it a lot bar the boring horoscope stuff. really funny and I particularly enjoyed Czech republic as utopia.

Flann O'Brien: The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman
The temptation to skip ahead to see the war-crime-level pun that each of these stories is reverse-engineered from is incredibly strong.

Finished The Stand and it runs out of steam towards the end but it’s still pretty great!

Now reading Oryx and Crake. Crake unnerves me and I really like her prose as usual, and if I ever find a non-linear story I dislike it’ll be a shock. Brutal details all over the place, it’s easy to read because of the prose and being intriguing but it’s not something I’d choose to read again in a hurry, if you get me.

I've read a lot of Atwood but I've never tried any of her sci-fi/speculative fiction books yet

I feel so bourgeois, but I'm diving into the nominees for last years International Booker prize. The winner, Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharti, is pretty good, a chronicle of three generations of mostly women in Oman, really good at capturing a sort of rupture in their lives (they talk about having slaves, while also discussing getting educated in London at the same time, and the next generation seems caught between worlds). Have also begun The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, which is so much my jam. A long meandering book about the writer himself delving into the murder of Colombian politician Jorge Gaitan in 1948, it's almost Sebald'ian in it's mixture of history and personal observations. Absolutely love it.

I've read a lot of Atwood but I've never tried any of her sci-fi/speculative fiction books yet

Atwood is awful. Prefer LeGuin for didactic sociopolitical sf.

Normal People was good. Rooney is a talent to watch. One of the two central characters is described as carrying a worn copy of a James Salter novel on a trans-Europe backpacking trip, and there is something Salteresque about this winding tale of an on-again/off-again, friends-with-benefits relationship - partly in the way that the central relationship preserves a core of inscrutability. We're never quite sure why it is star-crossed, though there are some plausible hints. Rooney's prose has a pleasing suppleness and lyrical quality. Now I'm reading Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky, a quirky Weimar-era German novel.

Remember the name! Sally Rooney!

I've read the two Rooney novels in the last month. Conversations with Friends seemed the more original novel but she's on to something limning relationships that novelists often overlook.

Cesar Aira - The Seamstress and the Wind

This is an author I wanted to read for a while. Aira has the kind of rhythm of someone who can let his imagination zig-zag all over the place and yet remain sorta contained. He has written 60+ books and its a bit like a thrashy Borges*, it doesn't look like there is a lot of re-working (which could imply a lack of care but I would need to read more to see what the deal is here). Its a short, fast read with little to no intensity. I could either read a dozen of these over a week, really gorge in it but to what benefit (beyond a little pleasure from turning over pages fast) I do not know. Not that I read for any kind of benefit, but that question came up while reading this.

* I hate saying this because there is very little like Borges. I could not back it rn.

Yeah, he doesn't rewrite or edit or reread what he's written, for better or worse.

The idea of a trashy Borges is very appealing, and he claimed that's what he was going for in "The Rose-Colored Corner "( as I think D Gi translated it). maybe others too, I haven't read 'em all (though obv. he reveled in some ripping tales of ripe imagery)

he central relationship preserves a core of inscrutability. We're never quite sure why it is star-crossed, though there are some plausible hints.

she's on to something limning relationships that novelists often overlook. Yeah, been there, but not in books, will have to check that out.

Does it feature a mountain lion? No, but it's got a Catherine Wheel. Don't remember much about reading it in the 80s (after James Wolcott's revelatory profile in Harper's----much later, he said that piece had gotten more of a sustained positive response than any other). Don't recall what he said about The Catherine Wheel (her last novel), but seems to be considered not as strong the first two. I'll bet it's worth a read after all her other stuff, at least (still need to get A Mother In History, her McCall's Magazine interviews with Marguerite Oswald, later published as an apparently rip-and-read paperback, judging by excerpts. It's out there).

found a copy of Maryse Condé's Windward Heights, a Caribbean re-framing of Wuthering Heights, so I went ahead and picked up the Bronte novel and I'm gonna read them bang bang

Then you have to read A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura. Absolutely wonderful Japanese take on WH.

"The idea of a trashy Borges is very appealing"

Sounds a lot like the start of a Michael Wood sentence.

Finished Clare Hutton, SERIAL ENCOUNTERS: ULYSSES & THE LITTLE REVIEW.

Not as exciting as Ulysses and the cyclops

A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura

thanks for the recommendation! this looks very good.

has anyone in here read Richard Powers' The Overstory? I've never read anything of his but I've been seeing it mentioned all over the place lately.

I bought it because I quite like Richard Powers and liked that he got the Pulitzer, but I've only read the first part, then I borrowed it to my then-girlfriend who likes reading about trees. The first part was great and I really want to delve back into it.

my wife and one of our best friends both super-loved it and advised me not to read it since I don't need any more climate-change-anxiety

richard powers is really bad at characters and plot but he's kinda good at ideas and vibe. the opening "story" of the overstory has the most overblown dumbass chekovs gun thing i've seen in forever.

galatea 2.2 and plowing the dark were both interesting but again he writes human beings on an isaac asimov level

I'm reading Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt. He writes well and covers a lot of territory. Much of it I was already familiar with through my interest in the classics, but he adds details and presents a very lively picture of the people and history involved, so it remains interesting even while on familiar ground.

Postscript: His thesis that the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura was the decisive event in the creation of modern secular science is rather silly, but it gives him an excuse to write the book, and for readers to read it, so I forgive him.

he writes human beings on an isaac asimov level

I've only read one Richard Powers book, "The Echo Maker", but I concur with this assessment.

I finished "Castle Gripsholm". It's an interesting period piece, a fable of louche sexuality doing battle against the forces of control and repression, which seems apropos for a Weimar era novel. I guess it was also the first book which Michael Hofmann translated, way back in 1985. Dude must be older than I thought. The translation was perfectly serviceable but not particularly distinctive.

Yeah, I was always disappointed by any Richard Powers I tried to read.

My favourite Tucholsky stuff is the poetry, which is often very funny and also very angry about the forces that lead to WWI. Written in Berlin dialect tho so it's difficult for me to imagine a translation ever capturing it.

I've finished rereading most of Michael Wood's ON EMPSON and started rereading Colm Toibin's ON ELIZABETH BISHOP. I suspect that this is one of CT's best books.

I also have a book of Tucholsky’s satirical writings called “Germany? Germany!” which I haven’t read yet.

trip to the bookstore yesterday, ended up getting 3 of 4 staff picks by an employee whom i don't recall working there before.

spinal catastrophism: a secret history by thomas moynihan

this one realy put out for me at the store but now that i have it i'm a little worried it's going to be one of those works by cross-disciplinary" academics that's a little too in love with its cross-disciplinariness, sort of rambling and not as profound as it thinks it is. unreadable preface by one iain hamilton grant. some edgelord vibes. i'm going to push on and hopefully learn some things about spines and evolution i guess.

the gift of death and literature in secret by jacques derrida

derrida is basically a religious writer i think? for some reason it doesn't put me off. mysteries of being type shit. beautiful and deep prose.

thomas the obscure by maurice blanchot

never heard of this, no real idea of what to expect although samples at the bookstore left me fairly entranced.

thomas the obscure is dizzying, may induce dissociative disorder

Great book

Thomas the Obscure is an all-time favorite of mine, just a completely unique reading experience ('dizzying' otm).

Is there a new edition, or is it the old Station Hill one with plain white title on plain black cover? I need to replace mine, it slid between the gap in my car seat cushions and ended up under the spare tire in the trunk(?), where it became saturated with moisture during a heavy snowfall(???)

I know there is something actively insidious about my own Station Hill edition because my marginalia appears now to refer to another, different book, or books

Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story
Stephen King, Different Seasons
Frederick W. Farrrar, Eric or, Little By Little

The Swerve was pleasantly diverting most of the time. It spent very little time focused on Lucretius and De Rerum Natura, and most of its time focused on papal politics of the fifteenth century, and that was fine with me.

I plan on starting Amnesia Moon, Jon Letham, this afternoon or evening.

I predict you wont like it

(Mostly cuz i love it lol)

sp: Jonathan Lethem

Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship. It's a hugely propulsive narrative and it struck me that Toibin barely uses any figurative language - everything is driven by action and character dialogue. Even when he does have recourse to description, he'll be perfunctory (the day is 'mild and sunny' a light switch is 'firm and hard'). My knowledge of Ireland and Irish life feels scanty and cliched, but is it fair to say that Toibin is both sentimental and excoriating about Ireland? There is a huge amount of (undoubtedly righteous) anger in the book - mainly at the silences and secrets in family and wider social life, particularly with regards to homosexuality.

I also saw the film of Brooklyn recently (sentimental, excoriating). Lord, but I couldn't take my eyes off Saoirse Ronan.

Been reading Ernie's War the compiled WWII articles/columns by Ernie Pyle a US war correspondent.
I think I've seen him played in a film by Henry Fonda.
THink I saw a similar anthology on the shelves of the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop and then bought this through amazon marketplace.
It i spretty good now taht i'm getting into it.

Started Outlaw the book on the Country stars Kris Kristofferson , Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.

Also started the Soul of an Octopus which has been travelling around in my bag for the last few weeks but I've been listening to podcasts too much to read on buses etc.

I started reading The Waning of the Middle Ages by J. Huizinga, which had been on my shelf for ages, and I'm also dipping into stories from the George Saunders collection Civilwarland in Bad Decline.

During the move from a beach vacation to coming home, rushing to a hospital and coming home again in a few hours, I can't locate my copy of Amnesia Moon anywhere. My major impression of it when I was only half-finished with it was that it seemed like Lethem was recycling a lot of short story ideas into a novel. But the device holding them together was adequate to keep it feeling like one story and his narrative ability was strong enough to keep the ball rolling.

Now I have no idea when, or if, I will be able to finish it properly. :-(

Stevolende - I read some of Pyle's pieces when I was going through the Modern Library's book of WWII reporting. I don't know how I'd do with a whole book of his writing, but it was interesting to see his very unpolished and rather corny, but still effective style contrasted with the more writerly pieces.

Just finished Luis Sagasti's Fireflies, a short book where each chapter is just the author drawing some connections between disparate historical events, writing, art, concepts, etc. Most of it works, though there are occasional jarring moments where he clearly gets something wrong, and I'm not sure if it's intentional or not. Endorsed by Enrique Vila-Matas on the cover, definitely reminded me stylistically of Bartleby & Co.

Also just finished England's Hidden Reverse. Pretty fun, even though I've barely scratched the surface of any of the groups being written about. The story of John Balance getting in trouble at age 12 for astral projection sounded like it came out of a Daniel Pinkwater novel.

Chinaski: I think you're right about Toibin's writing style. I don't think that BROOKLYN the film manages to be very excoriating. My recollection is that compared to the book it rather sentimentally fudges the ending.

Aimless: You're quite correct about AMNESIA MOON - JL has stated that it did originate that way. It's a relatively wild collage of ideas, perhaps to the point of lacking coherence, but I think it does hold together and keep propulsion and purpose.

I finally finished Empson's chapter on ALICE and have put SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL aside. Such an odd book - barely coherent as a 'book' at all, it seems to me. I admit that my problem as a reader is not knowing the primary material well enough, but then that didn't stop me getting through the even denser SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. A difference is that that debut does at least announce what it's about, whereas SOME VERSIONS has no Introduction, let alone any Conclusion, and never gives a readily understandable idea of what it means by Pastoral or why that word would be a good one to unify what it's talking about.

I moved on to read, at last, James Wood's essay on Keith Moon in THE FUN STUFF.

last part of latest enewsletter from The Crime Lady (AKA Sarah Weinman, good writer and editor, for inst. of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, the stand-alone anth, and Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, the Library of America boxed set, incl. novels mentioned on prev WAYRs):

So many authors are seeing their book tours canceled, years of dreams supplanted. Amy Klein, who has a book coming up in April, on https://electricliterature.com/what-its-like-to-try-to-promote-a-book-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/ and alternative ways of doing so.

Which is also why I want to stump for my favorite books of 2020 so far, some that aren’t yet published yet:

The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg (I reviewed it here: https://airmail.news/issues/2020-1-25/chasing-rainbows)

Weather by Jenny Offill — a timely novel that’s only going to get more classic over time.

Pretty As A Picture by Elizabeth Little — the voice! The insight into moviemaking! The scathing commentary about sexual politics and true crime! The teens! We did an event at Chevalier’s Books last month and I’ve never wanted an event to go on for many more hours. That’s what the book is like.

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong — a brilliant collection as a whole, but I was particularly taken with her piece on the life and murder of Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, an artist I’ve long wanted to write about (Dictee is one of my favorite books of all time) but now I don’t have to.

Lurking by Joanne McNeil — for the Internet old-timers, for those who want to know when the Internet was good, why it went bad, how it can foster community, it’s just a wonderful, thoughtful book.

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson — for pure confection, post-modern mystery escapism.

Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar — my favorite debut crime novel of 2020 (out in April), just spot on about transforming life into art and who gets sacrificed — particularly women — as a result.

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker — Lost Girls was a stone masterpiece and so is this book, out in April.

Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins (it’s out in May, and it singed my soul for how good it is)

My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman — chances are you’ve read some of the essays already published in venues like Longreads and Glamour, but trust me, the entire collection — also out in May — is dynamite. I’ll be thinking about the final piece for a long, long, time.

These Women by Ivy Pochoda (also out in May, and it reverse-engineers the serial killer narrative from the vantage point of all the women — victims, loved ones, those on the margins — who don’t end up in his orbit, but supersede his orbit.)

Life Events by Karolina Waclawiak (also out in May!) — I loved how it mined a woman’s drifting ambivalence through life, marriage, travel, and there are no easy answers, nor should there be.

Mother Daughter Widow Wife by Robin Wasserman (out June 23) — this novel had me questioning all of my life choices, and it wrung me dry. I felt changed reading this.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Duchess Goldblatt (out in July) — it stole my heart and is a damn good memoir about creating a new identity to save yourself.

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby (out in July) — my other favorite debut crime novel of 2020.

The Devil’s Harvest by Jessica Garrison (out August 4) — I blurbed this because it’s a propulsive and incisive look at a hired killer who targeted those on the margins — often poor, undocumented immigrants living in the Central Valley — told with necessary compassion.

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman (out September 29) — another book I blurbed because it made me understand the complex, hard-to-pin-down man that was Marvel Comics’ id and superego, and the archival research is amazing.

There will be more added to this list, of course. Let’s keep reading, let’s keep supporting authors, in this time and at all times.

Still can't locate my copy of Amnesia Moon. Now reading The Highland Clearances, John Prebble. Who needs stinkin' dystopian fiction when there's history to read?

Who needs stinkin' dystopian fiction when there's history newspapers

Was gonna say

A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura

I bought this but it's now stranded in our workplace mailroom :(

At last I've started Joseph Conrad's NOSTROMO.

I've been doing well with short books so far this year, reading 15 so far. I was thinking of starting The Decameron as more of a challenge. Is it a book to occasionally read a story from, or is it worth reading all the way through over a few months?

I was also considering that, and I’m sure we aren’t the only ones! I got a Lydia Davis collection out the library that I now won’t have to return until doomsday; and I keep thinking with all this spare time I should go back to cancer ward but it’s not too appealing to read about life in a shabby hospital for some reason

i plucked off my shelf calvin tompkins bio of robert rauschenberg 'off the wall' ~ really enjoying it, hope tompkins is presently ok

barely posted in this thread recently, so thought it was worth updating gradually with a few of things i've been reading, in no particular order:

Plastic Emotions - Shiromi Pinto, a novel freely interpreting the life of 20th C architect Minette de Silva, and a relationship with Le Corbusier. I am not enjoying this book and don't think I will finish it. Lots of short sentences starting pronoun verb.

She scans the parking lot... She wonders at her audacity... She sighs... She will not offer...

Endless paras of the stuff, and it's not at all clear a lot of the time why you are being told this stuff.

It's a voice that reminds me of 'what i did in the holidays' school essays, and a proxy some writers use to convey a privileged sensuous immediacy with the world - I assume because the voice is somewhat childlike. I tried to resist this immediate reaction – my learned critical instincts were forged largely around white male western writers. I'm super wary of dismissing a woman writer, with Sri Lankan background, because of voice. I wrote a bit here about how we may need to reconfigure or work a bit harder at what our conception of 'good' is if we are to allow other types of writers into literary spaces.

However, wherever on the scale of personal irritation or critical annoyance this is, I'm struggling. I was drawn to the book because i quite liked the idea of a romance framed through architecture, which is what the title and brief description suggested. I continued despite immediately recognising that I was going to struggle, because I happened to pick up at the same time Seeing Like a State by James C Scott, which is part covers Chandigarh, which as designed by Le Corbusier also features in Pinto's book. and the coincidence piqued me to think that approaching the same subject from two radically different angles wd be interesting.

The imaginary letters to Le Corbusier are painfully bad, as they are part filled with exposition and narrative, for the benefit of the reader. It's hard to read them as letters.

I will persist for a bit longer. Maybe skim a bit.

Came across this brief, fervent thread: Obit: Larry Brown What should I read by him? Also by Harry Crews?

I've been trundling through Wolf Hall again, struggling again, ahead of reading The Mirror and the Light, but in the knowledge that I never finished Bring Up the Bodies. I wish I knew why I struggled. I'm clear from the quality of the writing it only reflects badly upon me. it may just be that i've got lazy. In fact I have an inkling, but i'll leave that for the moment, because this paragraph is utterly wonderful, the very best writing and almost a poem in itself:

There was a moment when Anne gave him all her attention: her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look; blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it; then he doesn’t. He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight blackbuds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

a paragraph of pairs - anne and henry, now and just then, now and beyond. it starts with a single quite powerful observation - how do two people you know who are intimate look at each other? he sees it momentarily, instinctively, which note is then sounded at the end again. in between those two notes, the paragraph breaks out through the flocking starlings, into the future, into prescience and the beyond, before returning to that single contemplate note, but not in the same place where you started – reflecting the meaning of the paragraph.

the paragraphs Plastic Emotions regularly seem to be about nothing - this paragraph is about many things, it bursts open then closes neatly again, but moved on. in the well-captured moment when something very lucid slips from your mind immediately, it contains one of the great strengths of the book and of Cromwell as a character – the very close perception of psychology, allowed because its so well materialised, like the historical context around it and conveying it.

it reminded me of a paragraph i've read a number of times - i'll quote it in the excellent translation's english, but it's really in the french that it comes alive, so i'll quote that after, and I'll also give it the context of the para before:

I

It is to some secondhand chronicles, to the General Statistics of the Vendée published in Fontenay-le-Comte in 1844, and to a belated happenstance in my own life that I owe the tale I am about to relate.

It is the year 976. Ancient Gaul is a hotchpotch of names bolted to lands, which are themselves names: Normandy belongs to Guillaume, Guillaume Long-Sword; Poitou belongs to Guillaume, Guillaume Towhead; France belongs to Eudes, duke of France; the crown, that trinket, belongs to Lothaire, the king, which is to say squire of Beauvais and Laon. For Anjou and the Marches it's Robert the Calf and Hugues the Abbot. Alain of the Twisted Beard controls Brittany. And the diocese of Limoges is in the hands and under the miter of Èble, brother of Guillaume, not the Long-Sword, but the fair-haired, frizzled Towhead. The towhead has two characteristics: it is too fair and too full; it blazes up in an instant. Guillaume is too fair and his anger gallops like fire. Èble has his brother's towhead but without the tow's two qualities: beneath the miter of the one and the helmet of the other you can see the same hirsute swirl of frosted locks, the same frothing fuzz, the same crushed straw with short curls, but on Èbles head the tow does not catch fire at the least impediment; on Guillaume's head it does.

Whether Èble's towhead might blaze for other reasons, this tale will tell.

I think it's the pace at which it moves from the dry context and that brief 'It is the year 976' and then it just explodes through a family tree that circles and repeats until it catches ablaze through its fantastical names and images. look how Michon gets from 'It is the year 976' to 'Whether Èble's towhead might blaze for other reasons, this tale will tell', and look at the manner in which he gets there - an exuberant chronicle, completely showing off.

The reason it's worth quoting the French is that what is added to the mix is a beautiful poetic economy and rhythm, almost lyrical. I also struggle with the word 'towhead' and while it's quite clear that's pretty much the only translation, its absence in the original is welcome. I should add before I quote that my french is execrable, and i had to pore over this with a dictionary in hand *and* the translation above to get anywhere. it is written in the literary historical tense, which is not spoken, which i imagine gives it a certain flavour all to itself. I have not got to the bottom of 'Je tiens', with which every one of the stories in Abées starts - I am holding, yes, but is this rather in the meaning we might (at a push) say 'It is held that...' etc? Not sure. For those of you whose French is even worse than mine, I think you get a perfectly decent impression of the poetic lyricism and concision by seeing the rhythm of the punctuation and the comparatively few words between the punctuation and the names, the balance of the clauses:

Je tiens de chroniques de seconde main, de la Statistique générale de la Vendée imprimée à Fontenay-le-Comte en 1844, et d'un hasard tardif de ma propre vie, le récit que je m'apprête à raconter.

L'an 976. Le vieille Gaule est un fatras de noms enclavés à des terres, qui sont elles-mêmes des noms: La Normandie est à Guillaume, Guillaume Longue-épée; le Poitou est à Guillaume, Guillaume Tête d'étoupe; la France est à Eudes, duc de France; la couronne, le colifichet, est à Lothaire, roi, c'est-à-dire sieur de Beauvais et da Laon. Sur L'Anjou, sur la Marche, c'est Robert le Veau et Hugues l'Abbé. Alain à la Barbe torte tient la Bretagne. Et l'évêché de Limoges est entre les main et sous la mitre d'Èble, frère de Guillaume, non pas la Longue-épée, mais le frisé, le blond, la Tête d'étoupe. L'étoupe a deux qualités: elle est trop blonde et volumineuse, elle flambe d'un seul coup. Guillaume est trop blond et sa colère galope comme le feu. De son frère, Èble a bien la tete d'étoupe: sous la mitre de l'un comme sous le casque de l'autre on voit le meme tourbillon hirsute de poils gelés, la mousse crêpelée, la paille concassée à boucles brèves; mais sur la tête d'Èble l'étoupe ne prend pas feu à la moindre contrariété; sur celle de Guillaume, si.

Que l'étoupe d'Èble s'enflamme peut-être pour d'autres causes, le récit le dira.

Three examples - I think all in a sense to do with positioning and balance:

'Sur L'Anjou, sur la Marche' - the gliding, rather full 'L'Anjou' followed by the strict iambic taps and heavy final word of 'sur la Marche' - it creates real momentum for the next roll of names, it's a delight to say, to read.

Same trick, extended, here, after a rather prosaic section starting 'Et l'évêché de Limoges'...

'frère de Guillaume, non pas la Longue-épée, mais le frisé, le blond, la Tête d'étoupe' <- after the 'frère', a long-ish clause, then the sharp short clauses, then the final rat-tat-tat emphasising the key image of 'la Tête d'étoupe', and look at the almost palindromic sounds in that phrase.

and immediately after the analytic, forensic: 'L'étoupe a deus qualities' - needs to be said I think with that lovely and slightly airy precision 'kali'tay' (sorry for the barbarous phonetics).

So, yes, add to the wonder present in the english translation, the cadences of the original french.

anyway both paras seem to fill you up and then deposit you back down, ready to continue, but with very much more than you had before. both are fantastic pieces of writing.

Quality post, Fizzles. I usually avoid this thread because I've developed a bit of a phobia of literature over the past couple of years as a consequence of having studied it in too much depth, with no professional prospects to show for, but you should grace us with your presence on 'Je déteste tout'.

thanks! and thanks for the gracious invitation to hop over to je déteste tout, but really my french is too dire to speak of, let alone speak (or write) with, and my reading is just about tolerable. even allowing for that as i say, i *pored* over that paragraph for some time with a biro and pad on one side, and a french-english dictionary on the other.

Are you familiar with Pascal Quignard? I think it's fair to say that he's one of the finest living French writers, with a proclivity for historical and linguistic leaps, from fragment to fragment, especially in his ongoing Last Kingdom series. He's very fond of collating and methodically, poetically glossing 'secondhand chronicles' such as the one you quoted.

i am not - thanks for the recommendation. sounds v much up my street.

it reminded me of a paragraph i've read a number of times - i'll quote it in the excellent translation's english What is this from?

It's from Pierre Michon's Abbés / Abbots.

I'm not feeling up to any truly adventurous reading these days. I will probably read less and pull out some old favorites as "comfort" reading for a while.

rereading a couple of things this weekend: wodehouse's joy in the morning and vidal's 1876. both are bringing me some much-needed cheer.

Love Joy in the Morning

I have never heard of JE DETESTE TOUT.

Tbf il ne veut pas être trouvé; il vous trouvera.

Great post up here Fizzles! And thank you Pom for recommending Quignard. I need to get on that.

Joy in the Morning is my favourite Wodehouse, which, I guess, makes it one of my favourite things ever. Very glad there’s a copy in the house right now.

I’m just reading Psmith Journalist, which is terrific and features very un-Wodehousian things like the acknowledgment of working-class poverty, a vivid sense of place, and actual dramatic stakes. The jokes are the weakest part, but it’s up there with his best IMO.

For some reason I’m also reading Franzen’s Strong Motion, which started well then puttered off drastically, but I’m halfway through now and resigned to finishing.

50 pages into NOSTROMO. Not especially easy going. A long way to go - about 400 pages in fact.

I'd probably be doing better with Thomas Hardy.

Conrad pumps away at his obscurities like an organist in a cathedral. Nostromo's worth the trouble, though. When finished, pinefox, find Edward Said's work on that novel and Conrad generally.

Last night I started in reading Parting the Waters, the history of the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch covering the years 1954-63. It is well-written and engaging so far, but just holding this behemoth of a book will challenge my wrists. (And yes, I am aware of e-readers. Don't @ me.)

nearing the end of Marcus Grey's Clash bio "Last Gang in Town" (he is not a good writer) and Joanna Russ's short fiction collection "The Zanzibar Cat" (she is an incredible writer).

unfortunately after that I'm fresh out of new things to read, being almost entirely dependent on the local library, which is now closed. Bookstores aren't really filling orders (though I have placed several), so looks like I'm going to have to resort to re-reading things in my personal library. The collected works of Naguib Mahfouz? Or Italo Calvino? Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

All of them!

That Clash bio is interminable. I tried twice to get through it and failed.

Came across this brief, fervent thread: Obit: Larry Brown What should I read by him? Also by Harry Crews? Still hoping for some help!

trying to finish 'bring up the bodies' so i am only bringing 'the mirror and the light' on the plane

Harry Crews' A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is his best book. Of his novels, I'd start with A Feast of Snakes.

feast of snakes seconded

i have a soft spot for body

Are we ready for a Spring thread...?

Yes. Tradition must be served.

Done and done!

"And sport no more seen / On the darkening green" -- What are you reading SPRING 2020?

Started reading William Golding's Adventures in the Screen Tradea fter having it sitting on my shelf way too long.
Very interesting. Not sure what I've read by him outsid eof this, did read princess bride a couple of years back and Lord fo the Flies way back but not sure what else.
Oh he gave lovelock the name Gaia.
But this is a great look into various aspects of the film making scene

The Philosopher's Stone:A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy by Peter Marshall
Picked this up in a sale an age ago have started reading it a couple of times then moved over onto something else. I think its an interesting subject so hopefully going to stick with it this time.
He's currently talking about early Chinese Alchemy at the moment around 10th century and especially the significance of sex. Tantric like rites and things.

All-new, exciting 'Springtime Collection' thread is linked right above your post. Try it on for size!

Adventures in the screen trade, princess bride = William Goldman

Lord of the flies = William Golding