Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?

Today the Northern Hemisphere is (sadly) about as enlightened as it ever becomes, whereas the Southern Hemisphere is maximally benighted. Surely this state of affairs cannot last! Yet, in the face of all this astronomical extremity, we, the ilxors of ILB, read on!

This thread is meant to supersede A halo of warmth in the darkness of the year: what are you reading spring 2023?

btw, my current book is The Galton Case, Ross MacDonald.

Finished Shared NOtes by Martin Hayes this morning and went back to reading Donald Bogle's Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of black Hollywood which has been backburnered for the last few weeks. But is really interesting and hopefully the first of a few of teh author's books I get to read.

Still reading Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as a bog book. Which is one reason it's taking me a while to get through.Great book on Africa which I've mean to read for ages.

Moving through Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, truly love this book and don’t know why I haven’t read more than this and Fontamara. Highly recommended.

the summer solstice is my favorite day of the year

still reading War and Peace, almost finished, it is quite a saga. I think it and Infinite Jest are the longest novels I've ever read

The Magic Mountain was only 2/3 as long as those two, but it was so dense and philosophical that it felt as long.

Still reading The Widow Queen by Elzbieta Cherezinska. As I've gone along and done some historical research on the side (the novel is a heavily fictionalized account of the life of Świętosława of Poland, her siblings, and the Scandinavian and Eastern European notables connected to them), I've found it to be more interesting than I gave it credit for at first. Still, there is something a bit plodding about the prose and the structure of the story. Some of that I attribute to the translation. At any rate, this is apparently the first book in a series. I don't see myself reading the others.

Larson, Where the Heart Beats
Bertei, Peter and the Wolves
Does, Do Not Look Away
Roberts, Lemady
Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures

it was here that Rilke developed his enthusiasm for Quaker Oats.

I finished Sean O'Casey's THE SILVER TASSIE. On the whole I was impressed - especially by the second Act, in WWI, which is the one that the most people objected to way back, including W.B. Yeats.

I'm reading 19th French literature decadence. Finished Les Diaboliques (Barbey d'Aurevilly) and I'm getting to the end of Le Roi au Masque d'Or (Schwob). I will probably get my hands on Mirbeau and return to Huysmans later in the year.

I'm waiting for six books in English. The last on the pile is Tropic of Capricorn and that might be my next read. I loved Sexus but did not return to Henry Miller since then. He will be a good fit for hot urban summer days.

I add, to Aimless: I read THE GALTON CASE last year, loved it. It's hard to choose among Ross Macdonald's novels but that must be one of the finest I've read.

Aimless, if you like it, I'd go for "The Chill" next!

I just started Diane Wynne Jones "Archer's Goon". Refreshingly, I have no idea where the story's going to go next.

thx. I'm just dipping my toe into Ross MacDonald's oeuvre for the first time. I see there'll be plenty of it to explore later on.

MacDonald is a master. Not as skilled as Chandler at the brilliant and original turn of phrase, but better at constructing an actual story to be resolved. He captured the time and place so well.

Archer is essentially a psychotherapist who has to constantly drive across state between appointments and occasionally gets socked in the head by one of his patients

Moving through Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, truly love this book and don’t know why I haven’t read more than this and Fontamara. Highly recommended.

Agree with poster Jimbeaux about Macdonald.

I'm halfway through Sean O'Casey's first staged play, THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN (1923).

If you get obsessive (which I did a wincy bit during the pandemic), the coffee table book “Ross Macdonald: It’s all the same case” is highly recommended (by me)

dow, the Harvey Ferguson II translation— picked up an old Signet classic edition

reading oval. a near-future tech vision that is also a pretty good relationship novel! which was a surprise. the writer is very perceptive when it comes to people and their motivations and i didn't expect that. the main characters live on top of a muddy mountain in this corporation-created group of zero carbon future houses that don't work properly. its a nice touch.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81Si2epi-WL._AC_UF350,350_QL50_.jpg

james purdy - malcolm

Good (weird) one.

yeah, very weird book

Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine

I saw that Signet paperback today and picked it up for $2. thx for the tip.

I am listening to Phoebe's reading of Jane Eyre. It's been probably 30 years or so since I last read this book. While the protagonist does come off as somewhat unbelievably good, it's still a very moving story with more subversive elements than are immediately apparent, and her prose is razor-sharp. I love all the Brontes, but this may be the best of the lot.

Hmm, "good" isn't the first word that comes to my mind for J. Eyre; what strikes me more is her absolutely flawless bullshit detector. Just an extraordinary level-headedness and common sense and capacity for self-preservation, and the ability - at nineteen or twenty - to project into the future and see how a given decision that's being pushed on her is likely to turn out. She's equally good at explaining why she can't go off with Rochester and why it would be a bad idea to let St. John hypnotize her into doing the missionary thing.

Oh, no doubt, her clarity of thought is remarkable. I just think she is a bit incredible as a model of virtue (and I realize that that is largely intentional and, to some degree, subversive).

I haven’t read Jane Eyre since high school— I loved it then. Should give it another read!

I'm reading Ronald Ayling (ed), O'CASEY: MODERN JUDGMENTS (1969). Quite enjoyable.

I've come to the conclusion that I can't read in June. I get infected with a kind of midsummer madness and can't settle. I've been flitting between a bunch of things: David Macey's biography of Foucault, which is good but very dense; Martin Gayford's *The Yellow House*, the story of the nine weeks Van Gogh spent together in Arles; and a few short bits and pieces: a re-read of Freud's *The Uncanny*, Stevenson's chapters on dreams, and Maupassant's *The Horla*.

I finish rereading Sean O'Casey's 2-act play THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN.

This is very early O'Casey and you could say that shows. It's very broad somehow; rather winking and mugging in its approach. Characters say things like 'Kathleen ni Houlihan, your way's a thorny way' - sarcastically perhaps, but it still comes over as ham.

The play was originally called ON THE RUN and the trace of that remains in Donal Davoren saying 3 times 'I'll soon be on the run out of this house'.

What slightly remains of interest to me is Davoren, the poet, and Minnie Powell, the new woman (?) - there is something of interest about these as social types.

I feel that the play would be too dated, in a way, to re-stage now; but then again, I can imagine it being adapted and rewritten for, say, Iraq during US and UK occupation - or any more recent equivalent.

Finished Bread and Wine, picked up Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Live Audio Essays, a collection of transcriptions of his lectures and performances around the subject of sound, noise, and war, among other topics. Great book so far, reminds me of both Antin and Toufic

Hmm, "good" isn't the first word that comes to my mind for J. Eyre; what strikes me more is her absolutely flawless bullshit detector. Just an extraordinary level-headedness and common sense and capacity for self-preservation, and the ability - at nineteen or twenty - to project into the future and see how a given decision that's being pushed on her is likely to turn out.

This is spot on. I love how she never goo-goo over Rochester: he remains "ugly" to the end.

As it happens I'm reading Adelle Hay's Anne Brontë Reimagined.

Terminal Boredom, Izumi Suzuki - Japanese boomer sci-fi author, back cover offers Le Guin as a comparison point. Three stories in, and every one of them deals with gender in some way. The one that's most explicit about this is I think also the weakest: written from the pov of a high schooler in an all female society, with male births a rarity and when they do happen the babies are instantly carted off to a detention centre. Can't expect a story from 1970's Japan to reflect our current gender views but there's quite a lot of essentialism in here and I don't know that there is much of a point, aside perhaps from such a society being so shocking to readers of the time that its mere depiction is its own purpose? Anyway, men are blamed for war but also for art, which is described as another ego trip; I don't think we're supposed to take this at face value tho, the same way we aren't supposed to accept the excuse that male babies are "filled with radiation". The female regime currently in power is authoritarian and fairly dystopian, though you could argue it's also a consequence of the patriarchy's previous regime leading to environmental collapse. Sapphic love is viewed in a very stereotypical Japanese way - schoolgirl crushes on "handsome" girls, but sex is not discussed at all and when the protagonist ends up sleeping with a runaway boy the experience is so alien to her that it seems the author assumes the society would be sexless. Also no mention of actual queerness, as opposed to a "well we need to organise society so now women couple up" rationalism.

The other two I enjoyed much more: second story is set in a world where randomly selected ppl are put into a coma, supposedly to wake up centuries later (though this is questioned); meanwhile, their conciousness can be inserted into the dreams of the person of their choosing. Protagonist allows friend whom she didn't actually like to come into her dreams, complications ensue. Now I'm on to one about a family of aliens trying to emulate human behaviour on a planet that used to be, but is no longer, populated by humans. Very funny stuff, daughter alien complaining that she never gets to go to the (non existant) discos while father alien tells her she would end up a hoodlum, and blames the (also non existant) motorbikes for the rise in juvenile delinquency.

In the second story the narrator muses that her friend's feminine behaviour makes her instinctively adopt a masculine posture, and decides in the end that she finds gender in general very frustrating. The alien family obviously has very fluid views: it is explained that for quite a few years there were two Son Aliens until they decided a Daughter Alien would make more sense and one of the "boys" just adopted this new guise. Much more to sink your teeth into with those aspects than in the first story.

The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé

Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of black Hollywood by Donald Bogle,
after putting it on a backburner for the last month or so. Which is silly cos it is a really good read.
Does have a bit of a drag with chapters being about 100 pages long but does have subsections. Anyway, finding this quite enlightening about an era I Only semi know. I think I am far more familiar with white Hollywood of the time, I just got into the 1940s.
BUt writing is good and it does make me want to read more of his work and watch the more black orientated films of the era. Seemed to be too many films set in teh old South being made in the 30s and limited opportunity for black actors outside of them at the time.
I've just been reading about Lena Horne whose work I want to know more of and how she got to Hollywood after marrying young and having children. But her fame came after that anyway after her first appearing looking heavy after recently having had her first child. So glad she did manage to make it and set new standards for sophistication etc

& just finishing Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa . Have just been reading about comparative education in what Europe regarded as its colonies which basically just made work fodder and tried to stop Africans from getting educated above that role. Not sure how my Dad succeeded so shame I didn't get to read this before he died. I think this is being really disparaging about Kenya and especially the schools teh Kikuyu had set up, might be different in Luo areas but can't have been much different.

Some light summer reading - Humble Pi by Matt Parker, "What happens when maths goes wrong in the real world" - entertaining, though mathematically entirely unchallenging.

Started a couple of books yesterday on finishing a couple of others.

Arlie Russell Hochschild The Managed Heart.
the book that gave the world teh term Emotional Labour looking at the idea of certain public facing jobs inherently including a level of work taht hadn't been recognised previously. She looks at stewardesses on a US airline and how they are forced to smile continually at the passengers as well as other forced external emotional signs. I've just started it so not got very far.
But does seem that i am recognising the text so wondering if I did actually get to read a copy when i first heard of teh book about 20 years ago. I know the University library had a copy and do remember at least handling that but for some reason didn't think I had actually read it. Anyway 20 years is quite an interval with a book so going to read or reread this over the next while. & it does seem pretty interesting.
Just seen her mentioning being married to an Adam in the preface. It seems she is the wife of the author who wrote King Leopold's Ghost. I had thought he had a famous wife but it was someone different. Oh well .Both interesting writers then.

David Graeber Bullshit Jobs
anarchist anthropologist lecturer/author's book on the then current workforce's plethora of meaningless jobs that seem to only exist to use up the worker's time without creating anything worthwhile. It is an expansion of an article he wrote for a magazine.
I haven't read Graeber before and have had thsi for a while and not sure why it has been backburnered other than losing itself into a to -read pile. I have been watching talks etc he did taht are up on youtube for the last few weeks. So thought i would start this, have a number of recent;y acquired books i meant to get into ASAP but can't do everything at the same time. I am enjoying his writing. Started this at like 2.30 this morning and nearly kept going with it then did manage to get to sleep.
So another one I am hoping to power through and the style does seem to lend itself to that.

Ted Gioia How To Listen To Jazz
American music critic talks about the process and criteria of telling good music from bad.
I have seen his name crop up in a few places and meant to read some material by him. I saw this title and thought it might be an interesting place to start. So far I've read the first chapter where he is talking about how to tell a rhythm section gels and if it swings. What speed the band is playing at for you to get a good sign of this.
Seems like an interesting book and I think it may trigger me to read a few others by him.

Fabulous Beasts Joseph Nigg
a collection of selections of work dating back to antiquity talking about the fauna populating the unmapped regions of the world. Interesting stuff, I was thinking particularly when I was reading it at the same time as Ed Yong's An Immense World which talked about the umwelt of known animals.
I'm currently on a section talking about medieval bestiaries. In these medieval writers are trying to apply the existence of animals talked about since the Greek and Roman empires in terms of how they support Christian credos. Which si quite interesting.
So book is interesting on a number of levels. The ideas of what animals are out there for a non global community and what it says about what they want to believe and why .
I think I was just walking round the library having a browse when i stumbled on this book and it has been backburnered for longer than I thought I would have it . But pretty interesting to read its contents.

I have read the first 75 pages of the new Lorrie Moore I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME and so far it has exceeded all my expectations. Thought the last novel was a car crash, and her recent reviews of Sally Rooney etc made me think she had really lost it. Still plenty of time for it to go off the rails but I am heartened by the quality of what I've read.

I have it on reserve at the library. Dwight Garner was not amused.

"new Lorrie Moore" are not words I need to see when I am in the homestretch of my dissertation, with no time for unrelated reading.

Stevo, I've only read Bogle's first book, which includes Lena Horne also, don't know about overlap otherwise, but it was really good, with very vivid, nuanced appraisals---wiki sez:

Bogle's first book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in Films, was published in 1973. In it, he identified five basic stereotypical film roles available to black actors and actresses: the servile, avuncular "tom"; the simple-minded and cowardly "coon"; the tragic, and usually female, mulatto; the fat, dark-skinned "mammy"; and the irrational, hypersexual male "buck".[2] In the second edition of the book, Bogle identified a sixth stereotype: the sidekick, who is usually asexual.

His review of the recent Sam Shepard "biography" was terrible: slinging sneers around, no indication that Shepard ever did any worthwhile writing, that there might be something more to him than cartoon anecdotes.

Last night I took a brief run at Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury. I picked it up more or less as a 'name check' exercise, having heard about it and knowing nothing else. It was an immediate fail for me. Too directly aimed at kids (mainly boys) of roughly 11 to 15. And the writing style was a romanticized to within an inch of its life.

So now I'm re-reading Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald's run from Human Voices to The Beginning of Spring is incredible.

yep

I picked it up more or less as a 'name check' exercise, having heard about it and knowing nothing else. It was an immediate fail for me. Too directly aimed at kids (mainly boys) of roughly 11 to 15. And the writing style was a romanticized to within an inch of its life.

what's wrong with aiming books at boys?

I'd say nothing but it's fair to list "I'm not the demographic" as a reason to drop a book.

I’m….not so sure about that

Well, I was reading too much into it, “age demographic” does make sense to me. Otherwise the statement gives me pause

Read a few new chaps yesterday, and then today decided that I will try to read as much of I can of Olson’s The Maximus Poems at breakfast each morning until I finish. I’ve never read more than sections of it and his other work, and frankly never understood the hype or how his own theories are played out in the poems. But I’ve read much related to his work, and Prynne and a few others I admire were friends with him, so I figure: why not?

i must admit to being slightly disappointed in SWTWC it when i finally read it. love bradbury, just not this bradbury. SWTWC read more like stephen king or koontz (both no doubt influenced by him)

I read it I think on a trip to visit my Dad so mid teens and maybe just a little olkd for it. Thought it was an interesting book and I know they made a film of it in the early 80s.
So haven't read it in like 40 years but did enjoy it when I did.

I guess its visiting a scenario that has been used elsewhere but I did think it pretty good at the time.

Looking at IMDB for year film was made I think the film poster may have been the book cover on my copy so I was doing some more adult things at the time but still in my mid teens. Possibly in Kenya rather tahn NYC as i was first thinking but did occur to me that I might have been there.

And the writing style was a romanticized to within an inch of its life.

there are two 900+ page volumes of Bradbury's short stories out and they still don't contain everything that's in the various smaller collections afaict.

favourites, so far, are The Scythe, The Emissary (the one about the boy stuck at home and the dog that fetches for him) and, obv, There Will Come Soft Rains.

currently rereading Fahrenheit 451 and, short though it is, i can't help but feel it'd make a killer short story.

Ireland At The Crossroads Theresa O'Donohoe
book by an activist organiser about a situation arising from a DP centre being announced in Lisdoornvarna the small town/village that is best known for a matchmaking festival for horny farmers. She gets involved when a friend who attended teh initial information evening needs support to allow her opinion to be heard when right wingers take over the meeting and subsequent agenda. I think this was a really informative book since the way the author responded to things seems really rational and thankfully she had some related experience in activism. She sets up a welcomi9ng group and a FB page that then get misrepresented by the far right.
I found this a really fast read , took mew about 2 1/2 hours , some of that is because a lot of pages have reprints of screenshots from social media used during this. & her writing style is pretty clear. I can now pass this back to the library and get it to the next person waiting to read it. But yeah recommended. I think methods used may be more universal for welcoming incoming groups and dealing with the right wing.
Events described happened in 2018 and I think book came out this year.

I found a cheap copy of
Kate Lister Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts while looking through a sale box in a local bookshop because I had gone into town to get the O'Donohoe book.
I read this last year and do like teh author a lot. I listen to her podcast Betwixt The Sheets when it comes out twice a week .Did really want a copy of this so now have one. Still need to read her other book A Curious History of Sex though which I hope to remedy before long.

I love Ray Bradburys stories but haven’t read any novel by him. I always lose patience.

I’m counting Martian Chronicles as stories.

Right

I read SWTWC more than once as a kid, I do recall the prose style but I guess I just accepted it. Lots of memorable scenes and images have stuck with me.

Just started Alex Haley's Roots. Hopefully I will finally get to know what Sinead O'Connor is singing about in Mandinka.

it's an amazing story of how a slave ended up as chief engineer on the Enterprise D.

The soundtrack by the Everly Brothers is pretty good.

The John Lennon soundtrack would have been good too if Morris Levy hadn't tinkered with it.

For good and ill, reading Bradbury is to be aware that he wrote, by his own admission, 'at the top of his lungs'.

Which reminds me once again of Henry Kuttner telling a young Ray Bradbury: “You give away all your steam. No wonder you never finish your stories. You talk them all out. Shut up.”

"Try taking the fucking horn out of your mouth".

Was that for the Wes Anderson thread?

what's wrong with aiming books at boys?

Alfred, please point out to me where I said there was anything wrong with aiming books at boys, because fuck me if I can see where that comment came from. What I thought I was saying was that I (as in me, this reader) couldn't find a toehold in the first several chapters capable of holding my interest, in part because I was far from the intended or ideal audience, which was children, mainly boys, entering their adolescence. We both know that any book can be a good book for the right audience.

Exploring the dark and twisted mind of Garth Marengi via his Terrortome; also started Joyce's Ulysses for some light relief.

xp accuracy of aim
power of throw
trying to quieten down the rest of the class in the aftermath
possibly parents suing?

Alfred, please point out to me where I said there was anything wrong with aiming books at boys, because fuck me if I can see where that comment came from. What I thought I was saying was that I (as in me, this reader) couldn't find a toehold in the first several chapters capable of holding my interest, in part because I was far from the intended or ideal audience, which was children, mainly boys, entering their adolescence. We both know that any book can be a good book for the right audience.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless),

I wasn't attacking you. Thanks!

Listening to the audioboook of Papillon. Even if it's largely fictionalized (or borrowed), it's immensely entertaining. Of course, I can't not think of Steve McQueen as the narrator.

The Managed Heart Arlie Russell Hochschild
The book that introduced the idea of emotional labour. The idea that if one is doing a public facing job as well as physical work one is working with management of emotions e.g. keeping a fixed smile directed outwards regardless of the way one is feeling inside.
She is looking at reasons why and how so the various schools of the humanities are coming to play philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history etc which all have heavy venn overlap anyway. I'm finding it a ery interesting read. I may have read it a couple of decades ago so glad to be rereading it. I think if I'm remembering when right it would have been the summer f 2003 when I was reading a massive stream of different books while I still had access to the University library. Anyway recommended read.

Robert Conquest The Dragons of Expectation
Found this while walking around the library and it looked interesting.
He is virulently anti communist, but I am finding it to be a somewhat interesting read. Has me wanting to read James Burnham for probably closely related reasons. It's not very long so I'm reading it pretty fast.

Martin Bulmer (ed) Racism
A great selection of short pieces on teh subject of Racism in various forms . Has selections from a load of writers I really want to read more by . & has a great bibliography of further work that I need to look further into.
I let this slip onto teh backburner when I should have been reading it faster. I've read a load of other stuff in the time I've had it out from the library.
BUt now I'm back on it I really want to get it read.
Or more ingest the contents in a meaningful way. Maybe get a copy for further revisiting.

finished Joe Nigg's Fabulous Creatures last week and thought it was a very interesting read I'm glad i have read since it coversa lot of historical descriptions of imaginary and semi imaginary animals that inhabited the unmapped regions of the world.
It has introduced me to a couple of animals I hadn't been aware of previously . hadn't realised a Yale was an animal before.
It has me wanting to look further into the lore about unicorns and dragons now since there is a wealth of stuff I'm not fully familiar with.
IT was also interesting to read about the adoption of more classical animals in the medieval era as symbolic of Christian teaching. Deeply syncretic.

For the last week I've been reading Sean O'Casey's AUTOBIOGRAPHIES.

This work comprises 6 columes. From the library I have a book with the last 3. I've been reading that. I've read all of volume 4: INISHFALLEN, FARE THEE WELL, and a fair amounrt of volume 5: ROSE & CROWN.

The book can be repetitive and self-indulgent. It mostly flows along. You confront the many pages thinking this would take a long time to read: then start reading and soon you're 30 pages further on. Thus it's often marvellously readable.

The volume I've read is about Ireland 1922-1926. Now I'm on England, c.late 1920s.

On the whole my respect for O'Casey has grown greatly in recent times. You can point to flows: as a writer he wasn't the most precise or beautiful; he perhaps didn't leave a large number of major literary works; he was quick to anger and self-defence, and might hold a grudge. Worst, his politics made him naive about Stalinism - arguably for longer than he should have been. And yet he was so open-hearted, generous, honest. He had a commitment to socialism and emancipation from inequality and poverty that was deeper than most writers'. He was sceptical about religious authority and dogma, while maintaining a sense of the wonder of nature and the world. An essay I've just read on his letters concludes by citing a number of letters he wrote to obscure people who'd written to him, including for instance an American housewife who was dismayed by the state of her life and the world. He took the time to reply at length, offering comfort and fellowship to these unknown people he would never meet. Few major writers have acted quite this way. O'Casey reminds me a little of Alasdair Gray: the eccentric ingenuousness, the instinctive kindness, the disarming directness.

After finishing Human Voices I'm well into another Ross MacDonald novel, The Barbarous Coast.

Self Help by Lorrie Moore
The last book I read was an endless cast of characters and made me wonder how a reader or writer keeps track of them all without being able to search the text.

Finished 'Gods Without Men' by Hari Kunzru, eh it was ok. An earlier work that's both longer and not as good as his more recent ones ('Red Pill' etc).

Also closing in on the end of 'His Master's Voice' by Stanislaw Lem, it's bone dry compared to his fun sci-fi stuff but there's always just enough of interest to keep me in. I appreciate the super realistic approach to a scientific project deciphering a potential extraterrestrial message (reminds me of the "competence porn" being discussed in one of the other tv or Star Trek threads).

Got some fun ones lined up, which I'll need for some medical treatment visits. New David Grann and Patrick DeWitt books, can't wait.

Finally getting around to The Well of Loneliness, about a third of the way through. I like it more than I thought I was going to - I figured it would be an interesting artefact of the time but not necessarily a great book. But the prose is nicely melodic in places and I'm finding it fairly compelling. The interaction between sexuality and gender in historic lesbianism is fascinating, as well.

Still reading the William James bio by Richardson, on chapter 80 of 90. Seems a pretty solid and well-researched book. Aims to be an "intellectual" bio, focusing a lot on intellectual influences on James, starting from his father, Henry Sr., an eccentric thinker and writer (nowadays perhaps would be called a crank) who was self-funded from his inheritance (his father was one of the richest men in the country at the time and though he tried to cut Henry Sr out of the will, Henry successfully challenged the will after his death) which enabled him to self-publish a voluminous output of religious-philosophical works, on the nature of evil and such, apparently influenced by writers such as Swedenborg, and take his large family (though not for the time) around Europe for a good chunk of their childhoods, often moving cities on a whim. The children's education was haphazard, but Henry Sr made a special effort with William, even to the point of sometimes changing cities because he'd heard of some school or instructor that he thought would benefit William's education. If nothing else, and despite the fact that William later expressed the view that he would have preferred staying put in America and having a more conventionally grounded childhood, William did become fluent in German and French, which served him well when, after a troubled young adulthood, he finally landed on the newly forming field of psychology and his life's work. There's plenty of interesting material in the book, although even despite its length, its treatment of certain lines of James's though can feel cursory.

Impressive study from o.nate here. (I'm not certain but have an idea that he lighted on this book after I cited a very old LRB review of it -- this makes me glad to hear of his reading.)

Yes, that's correct! That's how I heard about it.

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

I read an excellent recent bio of the James family a couple months ago.

Got confused for a second and thought this was part of the Eagles/Steely Dan discussion.

I've started on Botchan, by Natsume Soseki, published in 1908. It's much loved in Japan and I can see why. The main character, who is also the narrator, is somewhat naive, but unusually straightforward and irreverant, never mincing his words. From what I've read about traditional Japanese culture, everyone was (and still is) expected to be self-effacing and deferential, at least as their public, socially-adjusted face, so, the idea of a naive truth-speaker is delightful.

I read *A Book of Silence* by Sara Maitland. Maitland is from a noisy, large family; she is Roman Catholic; she has a family of her own, and lived in a vicarage for many years in East London. Post-children, she finds her marriage breaking down and, over several years, decides to move gradually further and further into the wilderness, in search of silence. This book tracks those years: her research into the desert fathers and occluded female eremites; her experiences in an isolated cottage on Skye; and a retreat in the Sinai desert. Finally, we're with her as she moves into a remote area of western Scotland, looking across the yawning expanse of heather to the hills beyond. I've read some other interviews with her and she's still there and is now basically described as a hermit.

I did enjoy the book, though it never quite catches fire. It's got rather too much on its mind and some of the explicatory sections - about psychoanalysis, astronomy - are a bit thin. The autobiographical sections were the richest and I admire her drive and fortitude.

william empson - seven types of ambiguity

minimum 1 laugh to be had on every single page of this wonderful book

Suddenly bothered by the question of whether Nick Carraway gets too much in the way, I re-read The Great Gatsby and ended up believing that he seals the deal, inextricably part of the total effect: insecure yet avidly curious and observant, even while being dismayed, put off by juicy Big Apple's downside ov hordes swarming Gatsby's wide-open fanstasy castle (becoming unadjusted as he sees them again through Daisy's eyes, they are more than ever "Broadway, from nothing to nothing"( provincially supercilious, from an insular, proper family (Daisy of Louisville's second cousin once removed!), revolted and picking up on waves and trickles of gossip, popular delusions and the madness of crowds, rubberneck gawker taste for fuckery----also initially cautious as hell, monitoring Gatsby---he comes all wrapped up and almost unraveled in spectacle, in the events and his fever dream of Gatsby's dream, of his life and death and still can't shake it, becomes a ghost of all that, at least in his reverie---somewhat like Proust's narrator's vision and narrative of Swann In Love, this is also something of a novel-within-a-novel, that can be read and read around the edges of, as Nick reads the room and writes it, replays it who knows how many times in his head, seeking perfection, out of his depth like everybody else in there, like everybody, he thinks, and says

'compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired'

A few short books to start the summer:

Marie Darrieussecq - Pig Tales
Jean Paul - Prefaces
Halldor Laxness - The Atom Station
Gerald Murnane - Last Letter to a Reader

Loved the Murnane - its a great idea (writer reflects back on each of his books -- including the one you are reading -- as a 'final' work). Its full of ego, in that he is very precious about what he does, but I can't help but really enjoy what he does so its not that off-putting. They are different from Prefaces, such as the ones collated in the Jean Paul book (which have some very good writing (if you like the Baroque) in it but as I haven't read any of the works its all a partial view) (Sublunary Editions are an interesting publisher and I might do a thread on them).

also reading short books:

what tech calls thinking by adrian daub. pretty accessible (normie?) theory/literary/historical perspective on silicon valley.

annihilation by jeff vandermeer. reread. not as good as i remember it.

no country for old men. interesting to see what got cut for the movie, but otherwise minor mccarthy.

three o'clock in the morning by Gianrico Carofiglio. if you like before sunrise you might like this.

foster by claire keegan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_(short_story), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/15/foster. short and very plain, so you can see why it's apparently taught in schools. but very good. even better than small things like these (which was good).

and then i read "it" by stephen king which was ridiculous and not a good use of time in hindsight.

"It was an immediate fail for me. Too directly aimed at kids (mainly boys) of roughly 11 to 15. And the writing style was a romanticized to within an inch of its life."

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, June 26, 2023

I'm an audiobooks person and started listening to Something Wicked This Way Comes, but I diverted to a John Le Carré novel because the beginning of Wicked just seemed just too delicious not to read in October

The Libertine Louis Aragon
Surrealist vignettes that frequently touch on misogyny though possibly misanthropy.
I've had this out of a library I visited in a nearby town a few months ago and have had on the backburner. Just on final unread piece.
Some of it is quite interesting.
But consciously experimental stuff is not going to be totally easy reading.
I'm now conscious that this is a translation too.
Have hit some bits where I was wondering if a cut up technique had been used. Though it also did seem to be semi coherent about as much as the rest of the text.

Withdraw Anne Llewellyn Barstow
A book on the witch trials and mistreatment of women in a wider historical context. I think it was in the bibliography of Caliban and the Witch.
Looks Good, mid 90s feminist fare.

400 Years of Fashion Nathalie Rothstein
Text tied in to a V&A museum exhibition .
Tracing history of Fashion for a few centuries and describing how garments wound up in the museum and what state they were in when they did. Also what the cleaning and repair process revealed about the garments and fabric they were made from.

Racism (ed) Martin Bulmer
Great selection of essays and extracts from a bunch of writers I want to read further.

I finished and loved Lorrie Moore's I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME. A kind of zombie screwball collaboration between Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, Stevie Smith and Edward Grey. I think of it a secret sequel to 'What You Want To Do Fine' from BIRDS... - her best story I think, and itself a riff on the roadtrip from LOLITA.

Picked up Meghan O'Gieblyn's GOD, HUMAN, ANIMAL, MACHINE - an essay about AI from a lapsed Calvinist, taking in Aibos and Hannah Arendt, which I found quite refreshing.

Have been rereading Kay Ryan's selected poems - love them more every time I read them.

Should be Edward Gorey not Grey :/

I hope "AI" is another typo there---

I finished volume 5 of O'Casey's AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: ROSE & CROWN. Most of it takes place in England; the latter part in the US. It features dialogues with Stanley Baldwin and with ageing W.B. Yeats who asks O'Casey what Communism is and what is its spiritual value.

I am now reading more strategically chapters of volume 6, SUNSET & EVENING STAR. Highlights so far: a typical score-settling attack on a newspaper profile from 15 years before the book was published (O'Casey sure held grudges and took revenge cold), and a lengthy description of the University of Cambridge where he tells a Don that Dons mean nothing to most people and they don't deserve to have Parliamentary representation.

I continue to enjoy O'Casey's anti-clericalism and constant attacks on religious customs that he thinks are dead relics. He seems somewhat like one who believes in a god but not in religion, which may be a paradox.

O'Casey, vol 6, ch 5, enters uncomfortable territory.

At his home in Totnes, Devon, he's suddenly visited by three women, one of whom wants to impress on him the evils of 'your Soviet Union', which she says has kidnapped her husband.

O'Casey is dismissive and changes his own position no whit.

True, these women turning up out of the blue to lecture him may be impertinent, but history seems to have vindicated them. It's odd that with his general openness to thought he doesn't even reflect on the possibility that she might be partly correct about the direction of Stalinism.

His next chapter is a sustained frontal attack on George Orwell! Frankly, it's mostly unjust.

Looks like I finally read more than a hundred pages of a Patrick White novel, in this case The Vivisector.

I'll bite: thoughts?

Only on pg. 136!

Reading The Wager, by David Grann. It's a bit plodding, but gives a very good sense of just how grim ordinary life at sea in the 18th century could be, let alone for sailors who got stranded in Patagonia (after nearly dying of scurvy--a fascinatingly horrible disease).

advanced scurvy is a real horror show. among other things your teeth fall out and all your old scar tissue dissolves so your old wounds open back up.

Finished Roots, hugely impressive. A fairly simple (appalling and harrowing, of course) story, fairly simply told but with a real subtlety of character, and variety of characters. Towards the end you do get the impression he's just galloping through the genealogy though. I'm not really bothered by the controversy about his research, that it's a good and believable story is enough. The plagiarism is perhaps more unfortunate, maybe one day I'll read The African.

Country music originals : the legends and the lost Tony Russell,
short biographies and career overviews of a load of early country performers of the 20s and 30s, I'm not as familiar with the genre as I'd really like to be. Have a number of titles from artists from this era but would like to know more. I think I'm a bit more familiar with the blues contemporary to this.
very interesting anyway. THis comes with suggested listening listed.

Linda Nochlin Women Artists
anthology of her writing over several decades.
I enjoyed her Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists which is included here and thsi would have probably been a better first choice for interlibrary loan request really.
She was a feminist art historian and her work is pretty readable.
Nice thick oversized book that I will try to make sure I read through.

Racism (ed) Martin Bulmer, John Solomon.
Great anthology of writing on Race by a lot of great writers I want to read more by. GOt backburnered way too much cos it is a really good selection.

Warrant for genocide : the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the elders of Zion Norman Cohn,
reprint of a 1967 work on the history of teh famous hoax document and much more of teh history of anti semitism.
I've read the introduction so far which looks pretty promising. I picked this up this afternoon after coming across it in a bibliography, I think of Dragons of Expefctation which seemed to be good for a number of books i need to look into further

Darker than blue : on the moral economies of Black Atlantic culture Paul Gilroy,
a collection of 3 texts based on speeches that Gilroy had given 10 yeas before publication.
Based on Gilroy's research into W.E.B. du Bois's thought.

The Managed Heart Arlie Russell Hochschild
her look into what she termed emotional labor . The interface a public facing worker has to have with teh public they are facing. In terms of faked smiles and other NVB. Also the consequences to the worker having to do this in terms of how faking things effects the authenticity of being able to access those emotions.
Pretty interesting read.

I've meant to read Roots since seeing both tv adaptations. I think also seeing it turn up in a few bibliographies.

I also want to read Paaul Crooks who has managed to trace his family history back from London, through teh West Indies and back through the middle passage to find out where his ancestors came from in Africa. & has written books on how other people can do it too.
I've been to a few webinars he's put on which have been interesting.

Had just been trying to remember something about Haley that was on the tip of my tongue. Thought it was something to do with the publication of Roots but I think it was probably more that it was him that edited the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

I think the original tv version was being released around the time i was in NYC for the first time visiting my dad for the summer.

I know I've had copies of the book for years but don't think I've read it still unless I did way way back at the turn of my teens in the wake of the tv show. I think the 2nd tv version is a lot more reflective of Africa having had civilisation including a visit to the University in Timbuktu. The original version has a far more minimalist take on life in Africa.

he was more than the editor of rhe autobiography of malcolm x - Wikipedia calls him the co-author and goes into more detail on his contribution.

I'd be interested to see one of the TV versions. I learned today that in the original, young kunta kinte was played by levar burton in his first TV role.

I read an excellent recent bio of the James family a couple months ago.

Sounds intriguing. The one I read sticks pretty closely to William, but since he and Henry were fairly close, despite living in separate countries for much of the time, there ended up being a fair bit about Henry in it, and the other James siblings as well. The book did inspire me to pick up a slim paperback of Henry James stories, as a gentle introduction to his work. I'm finding them enjoyable enough, especially "The Real Thing" which was fantastic, but there is something about his style (verbosity, perhaps?) that tempers my enthusiasm a bit.

> I learned today that in the original, young kunta kinte was played by levar burton

hence my hilarious joke:

> it's an amazing story of how a slave ended up as chief engineer on the Enterprise D.
> koogs, Wednesday, 28 June 2023 16:52

Americans know him from a thing called Reading Rainbow, like our Playschool i think, or Jackanory maybe, features heavily in an episode of Community

i get it now!

probably the biggest rags to riches story apart from that indian squaw ending up as president of the entire human race...

Dances with Wolves, Battlestar Galactica

Burton reappears in the 2016 version too.
I was thinking he was only in the original tv version for a short time and it was more John Amos who got to play the character as an older man. But haven't seen the series since around the time the later adaptation came out when I rewatched it.

Robert Browning - Men and Women, Vol II
Hilda Hilst - Fluxo-Floema

The Hilst is really good. She was a Brazilian writer (read a couple by her before), and fully into the modernist project (Woolf, but also De Sade, the whole shebang). This was a set of short stories written in an almost incantory way.

So! A hundred pages from the end of The Vivisector and White's losing me with his gender politics. This awful painter-egoist is fussing over his relationship with...a 13-year-old child savant.

The Horse's Mouth did this sort of thing in fewer pages.

That was a good one. But I never read the others or saw the movie for that matter.

The movie's fun!

Guinness should've played more hellions.

i read the Vivisector (muffled) years ago when i was in uni

the gender stuff i remember being very uncomfortable/ offputting but also i think i passed it off as being in context. oof. i think the parallels of my having read a lot of true crime & serial killer novels that that outlook was just acceptable or went unchallenged by me?
like his sociopathy is ok because there’s an end to it (art?)

i dunno if i could read it now

Hilda Hilst - Fluxo-Floema

The Hilst is really good. She was a Brazilian writer (read a couple by her before), and fully into the modernist project (Woolf, but also De Sade, the whole shebang). This was a set of short stories written in an almost incantory way.

Ohh, I read With My Dog Eyes and it was wild. Amazing writing, so full of bitter rage. I got The Obscene Madame D recently, it's in my to-read pile and I'm hoping to get to it reasonably soon but I've got so many unread things I don't know when that will be.

I recently finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Super intense! Love his writing. Level of detail is amazing, so much research & foreknowledge obviously went into it — it becomes a whole other thing when you then layer his specific perspective. In some ways it feels like it’s own category of historical fiction .. so much more immediate. it’s pretty incredible. And I really liked how angry his tone is, it feels quite, revolutionary. or something. maybe that’s the wrong word.

Last few chapters are wild, very disorienting (with good reason) it definitely stayed with me for a long time afterwards

Am also now halfway through The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers
Another one that has really grabbed me right away. Beautifully written, captures the immediacy of a historical time & place. It’s very tactile/sensory, you can see & feel everything so clearly, it’s like you’re astral projecting into the wild 18th century Yorkshire moors. Loving it.

I loved, loved, loved The Sympathizer. He hit just the right combination of humor, cynicism and horror.

I haven't read The Committed yet, but it's on the list.

Ohh, I read With My Dog Eyes and it was wild. Amazing writing, so full of bitter rage. I got The Obscene Madame D recently, it's in my to-read pile and I'm hoping to get to it reasonably soon but I've got so many unread things I don't know when that will be.

― emil.y, Thursday, 13 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah those are the two others from her I've read. She was a poet too. Would really like a translation of it.

Still moving through two longer books, but just finished Ed Steck’s A Place Beyond Shame, which is a meditation on horror movies, childhood sexual and physical trauma, addiction, horror movies, and the rust belt. It is harrowing and brilliant, best new book I’ve read this year.

I've skipped some of Sean O'Casey's chapters on WWII, but will finish with his AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 4-6 for now. 600+ pages of O'Casey on O'Casey are enough for a while.

I commence his play PURPLE DUST, which is engaging. It depicts an old house in Ireland being refurbished on the orders of new English owners. To a degree the scenario, so far, is "wily Irish locals outfox the naive English incomers". I'm slightly reminded of CASTLE RACKRENT and of the first chapter of Ulysses. The language is much closer to Synge than any other O'Casey I've read. Which may emphasise how relatively unlike Synge O'Casey usually is.

A friend who used to be in the Irish army just passed on to me an introductory illustrated book on IRISH HISTORY. I feel like I should read it as it's a gift. On the earlier periods I have much to learn. So far Newgrange has been built.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

this has been on my list for ages and this post was the nudge i needed. thanks!

yay :)

It's good!

I finally finished Leena Krohn's Collected Fiction, Vol. 1: The Novels. I say "finally" because it was a long and challenging read, which I picked up originally on Jeff VanDerMeer's recommendation. The collection started with the weakest of the lot, Doña Quixote, but got considerably better as it went on. The last three in particular were quite strong. Her style isn't really like anyone else's, although Borges may be an obvious comparison; Lovecraft too, in some of the more dreamlike aspects. Very much worth the read.

I've been reading early novels and stories of Forster and Henry Green. What Firbank should I try, if any? Library loan has Five Novels, Valmouth and Other Stories, Complete Plays, but I might could track down some others.

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. I know it's not a novel but loads of the reviews call it a novel - so far it doesn't read at all like one, her dad sounds like a real piece of work and i'm not tickled by any of her hilarious family anecdotes. But I'll stick with it.

Is this your first experience? She was my big 2021 discovery (thanks, NYRB!).

Yeah - I was torn between this one and an actual novel.

re Firbank, there aren't many novels - I think that FIVE NOVELS will have the lot. THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT is one to try I'd say.

I finished reading Sean O'Casey's PURPLE DUST. It becomes rather a farce as the old house crashes down around the ignorant English interlopers. The Anglo / Irish clash of the plot is probably too crude, ie: the English are too readily sterotyped as fools; oddly, as O'Casey in his non-fiction makes plain his admiration for lots of aspects of England, where he lived for many years. The Syngean language actually increases near the end, followed by a great storm that reminded me of MOONRISE KINGDOM.

I then read O'Casey's play HALL OF HEALING, a one-act play in a Dublin doctor's waiting room. Mostly farce again, but with classic O'Casey tragedy at the end as well. A lot going on, many characters, and somewhat interesting on medicine and our ideas of what it can do. But not a major or deeply impressive work.

I've now read about 1400 pages of O'Casey in 2 or 3 months so will take a break from him.

I commence reading Beverly Cleary's FIFTEEN, a teen romance / angst novel from 1956. It's very mild; I don't think that the worst that can happen here is going to be very bad. I'd thought it might be 1970s or 1960s; the 1956 date intrigues me and makes me feel that this novel was written amid the 'birth of the teenager', was an early literary witness to this now storied era.

xposts: think it was the five novels collection that i read which included all his "bigger" works.

recently been reading a number of late fifties/early sixties era green penguin thrillers by people i'd never heard of. last one was john welcome's run for cover: sort of buchan meets bond with a bit of ambler. one scene with the hero held prisoner in an enemy lair features a dialogue comparing pre-war fiction (proust, waugh, the above mentioned green) to the contemporary angry young man brigade of amis & wain, the latter of whom i'd coincidentally been planning on reading next in the form of hurry on down.

reading THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST, re: climate change, and while it’s interesting and scary, the author is just not a good writer of sentences. i can’t remember the last non-fiction book in which i found the writing so off-putting (and the guy is a journalist, not a scientist)

"one scene with the hero held prisoner in an enemy lair features a dialogue comparing pre-war fiction (proust, waugh, the above mentioned green) to the contemporary angry young man brigade"

Love this kind of thing!

Isn't there a discussion of T.S. Eliot and Hemingway in FAREWELL, MY LOVELY?

HURRY ON DOWN is very rewarding, hope you enjoy.

I commence reading Beverly Cleary's FIFTEEN, a teen romance / angst novel from 1956.

I'm most glad to know that anyone would have an opinion on the top ten writers I wouldn't read.

(I've read one King story but not more - I don't like horror in general, unfortunately. But I can see his ingenuity and productivity, from a respectful distance.)

I share your experience with the Ramona books - read them at around the same time in my life. And I think I shared your sense of an American world disclosed by those books.

Pinefox, I say this in utmost sincerity: I would like nothing better in my life than to hear your opinions of the Ramona books

I mentioned King btw cos my other half and his brother are both incredibly well read, and both of them constantly gang up on me for liking King.

At a distance of decades, I can only say that I loved them, and they were possibly my favourite books at that time - say, the age of 7?

I recall RAMONA THE BRAVE, BEEZUS AND RAMONA, RAMONA AND HER FATHER, at least. I probably read each one more than once.

I would think that the things I liked most about them were a) their American quality, speaking of a particular culture; b) the peculiar truth to life that I found in many of the situations and phrases, which were also c) very memorable and repeatable.

I believe I still own them, hidden on a shelf. Maybe this should be encouragement to reread them. It's been a very long time.

Please!!!

I had Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and Ramona Forever. I read a couple of the others from the library but I knew those two best cos I owned them and reread a lot. I’m actually going home today, seriously tempted to do a bit of digging and see if I can’t find them.

The detail that sticks with me most from the books is her learning to write her name in cursive - wtf is cursive, we did not learn that shit in Ireland - and her describing the starting Q of her surname as resembling a big loopy number 2.

Oh and I should say - her family had a lot of money problems and her parents were often stressed and overworked and she spent a lot of time at the neighbours and with her aunt. That definitely struck a chord with me, both because some of it resembled my own life (it felt like you’d never read many kids books where the characters would spend time with extended family) and just because it was unusual to see full stop. There’s a scene on one of the books where they go out for burgers and Ramona is looking at her parents anxiously, like, “Can we afford this?” And the parents are like, “yes come on let’s enjoy this,” and it just felt very real in terms of how kids pick up and worry about their parents problems.

This Perfect Day - Ira Levin

What a load of shit? Honestly. The only reason I finished this was because I was on a flight that was delayed an hour.

I really like the Ira Levin I’ve read previously. I’ve read The Stepford Wives with its creeping horror and subtle but inescapable darkness about fifty times. I read Rosemary’s Baby and loved the similar themes and how visceral Rosemary’s horror feels. All good stuff.

Saw this on Kindle store for £1 and thought, incredible, let’s go. How wrong I was.

In This Perfect Day everyone lives in a utopia where there’s no war, no hate, everyone looks basically the same. Children are planned via licenses. Everyone is subjected to “treatments” which keep them medically healthy and emotionally calm and satisfied. All people have names with numbers after the four founding fathers of the system that rules the world, Uni: Marx, Christ, Wood and Wei. The latter two are fictional, I think Wood was meant to be a rough Kant analogy, but honestly? I didn’t give a fuck about looking this up.

Our hero is named Li Abigstringofnumbers (this is not an exaggeration). However, his eccentric grandfather calls him “Chip” in defiance of the naming order where everyone has one of the four approved names. Chip is special because unlike everyone else who has light brown skin, dark brown eyes and dark hair, one of his eyes is green. Yeah, this is how careful the system is about uniformity. Also? Secondary sexual characteristics don’t exist. Yeah.

Anyway at this point I started thinking of Chip as my favourite heterochromiac, Max Scherzer, so I’m going to refer to him as Max from here in out, because I cannot take an adult man named Chip seriously.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zdiPb7q92DPCpCA6SmHMAYvGl3A=/0x117:2615x1860/1400x1400/filters:focal(0x117:2615x1860):format(jpeg)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/14768285/20130219_jla_sv7_240.0.jpg

Anyway our boy Max has to say goodbye to his granddad soon after granddad shows him the true path to Uni on the tour of the building, because granddad happens to have reached 62 years old which is the prescribed age for life to end.

Anyway he’s not really that bothered by it considering. He goes off to adult life, I don’t remember much about this part except they get allotted partners for sex which is ten minutes of prescribed pleasure every Saturday.

At some point he gets recruited into a group who see his potential for difference (he does have heterochromia after all) and he gets inducted into a secret group of like minded souls. The most important of these is his girlfriend Lilac, who is repeatedly described as very attractive to him, like so:

He could smell her – it wasn’t his imagination; she actually smelled of flowers – and he could look at her dark cheek and neck and the chest of her coveralls pushed taut by two mobile round protrusions. They were breasts. They were definitely breasts.

Epic review.

wow

I started writing this on a bus leaving Dublin airport. At time of posting this message I am still in Dublin, I bet they don’t have traffic in Yankee Stadium but I still wouldn’t want to live there. 😎

This Cleary novel is charming in that the stakes are so low and so little goes wrong.

Almost the worst thing so far was when the new bf came to drive the protagonist to their date in a truck from work, rather than a car.

It's refreshing to read a story where problems are tiny.

The prose is clear, ingenuous. It all seems less cunning and cheeky than the Cleary I remember in the Ramona books.

Started A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White yesterday. Primarily reading it for dissertation background, but I'm surprised I'd never gotten to this one before.

It's um stiff in places.

I finish Cleary's TEENAGER. It's quite conservative at the end, literally concluding 'She was Stan's girl. That was all that mattered'. I had an idea that Cleary was more liberal and sceptical than that (from my reading of RAMONA et al? - very long ago). Stan gives Jane his 'identification bracelet' as a major token of 'going steady', a new concept to me. I had never heard of such bracelets.

In terms of life lessons the book is not bad, though. It implicitly tells you to be patient, not to wait for the telephone to ring but to get on with your life, not to overreact to incidents, and above all to be yourself - then people will like and respect you.

The novel reads like a pastiche of 1950s or early 1960s teen life - 'Mom, can I go to the dance with Stan on Friday?' 'I don't know, Jane, I'd rather you just went to the malt shop' - etc - which is all familiar, from GREASE, BACK TO THE FUTURE and beyond. The crazy thing is, this book is from 1956 so all that stuff is ... real. It's not a pastiche, it's actually how someone wrote about teenagers in the 1950s. Unless Cleary was already, in some way, pasticheing an emergent understanding of such life?

I commence reading Sally Rooney's CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS (2017).

I've given up on Family Lexicon. After 100 pages there's zero narrative drive, there's scarcely anything even rising to the level of anecdote and certainly nothing amusing or moving. This feels a bit harsh, like a review of her life and her family rather than just a book, but I'm just not interested in these people at all.

It's kind of what I like about that book, it's cool and off about family and event.

Anagrams by Lorrie Moore - each generation responds in a way that is characteristic (through a range of forms and cultural and critical trends) and pays tribute to an ongoing struggle to make sense of being alive (which may take the form of jazz pianists in hotel bars for business travelers)

Family Lexicon is on my checkout list. You can't give up!

I won't give up on her - I'll try a novel at some point.

She wrote a lot of good novels. Try another one!

I had heard one or two negative reports on Sally Rooney's writing. In that context, I find her book slightly better than I'd hoped.

I have heard that the writing is plain and undistinguished. Yes, in a way. But this is a first-person novel. So the voice is that of a character. What matters is not whether it's elaborate or plain, but whether it coheres as this character's narrating voice - as with any other first-person narrative. I'd like to think that this voice is one that Rooney has fashioned, as such, rather than it just being what she has written because she can't write any other way.

I don't mind plainness. Slackness is worse. The voice has some of that. It rises very occasionally to higher formulations and figurative language. More notably, it holds shrewdness in enumerating and describing feelings:

'I could heard that Bobbi said this with an ironic smile, because she was aware that she was showing off. I was jealous, but I also felt that because I had seen the play I was party to something Bobbi didn't know about. She still saw Nick as a background figure, with no significance other than as Melissa's husband. If I told her that I had just sent him an email thanking him for the tickets, she wouldn't understand that I was showing off too, because to her Nick was just a function of Melissa's unhappiness, and uninteresting in his own right' (32).

The awareness about feelings and the readiness to elaborate them reminds me slightly of Éric Rohmer's characters, who do this to an absurd extent. I sense that the greatest distinction of this novel may turn out to be the detail with which it describes and explains such tesselations and shifts of feeling. I quite like the way that, so far, it isn't boringly saying 'I didn't know how I felt' or 'I wasn't sure of anything', but rather is content to name feelings and their causes exactly.

The funniest line in the book thus far is: 'I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed' (28-9).

For a while I didn't think this line was going well. I thought it was going to overreach and say something pretentious that would put me off. But it does the opposite. The admission of not having read Baudrillard is one thing. The ready statement that the perception was probably unrelated to his thought is something else. It makes the whole proposition marvellously collapse.

A point that I distrust about Rooney is that she posits some characters (the narrator here and the fellow in NORMAL PEOPLE) as 'very talented writers'. I am not convinced that they are. Or, I think Rooney believes that they are, but I don't think I would agree with her assessment, if we could actually assess them. I think this is one respect in which she may be naive. I note that the narrator here mostly does not narrate the novel in a stylistic impressive way (see above). This is OK (see above), but doesn't help with the proposition that she is a great writer. Not does this sentence:

'I sat in bed in the morning writing poetry, hitting the return key whenever I wanted' (11).

200pp through the 321 of CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS. It feels as though the book may be too long; longer than what Rooney had to say.

The protagonist has an on-off affair. The novel drifts through much inconsequential banality. The stakes seem quite trivial. The dialogue is banal. Characters don't offer interesting ideas or insights.

All the characters decamp to France. You might think that intelligent or sensitive people would then respond to this environment and have thoughts and perceptions about France. The characters don't. It's as if they haven't gone anywhere.

The novel does contain some other elements that surface occasionally, such as an interest in physical pain and a family back story that indicates another social world from the main story. I don't yet know how far these will be integrated into that story.

Most of the characters are supposed to have artistic talents and strong political views. They don't talk about these issues much. These things do appear sketchily, as part of a conversation that will go on for a few lines then stop. But the 'conversations with friends' may have had the potential to be much more diverse and substantial than the inconsequential conversations that actually dominate the novel.

Thought this piece tackled the often opaque politics of Rooney works pretty well

Political flimsiness is not, for one, unique to Rooney’s sharp millennial protagonists. Frances’s mother is “a kind of social democrat.” Connell’s is vague about who she’ll vote for, but is “interested in Cuba and the cause of Palestinian liberation.” Nick doesn’t really talk politics but at one point concedes he is “‘basically’ a Marxist.” The Republic of Ireland is almost unique as a Western European country in that it has a small and fractured organized left that has never held major power. In the last decade, the Republic has seen a sea-change of social progress, from episodic referendums on abortion rights and equal marriage, to issue-based movements around water charges and housing and a surge in votes for Sinn Féin, a left-wing party whose central project is opposing the border which splits Ireland into two.

But it remains a place in which left-wing sentiments do not find easy institutional expression. It’s a place where, as Rooney put it in 2017, “the deterioration of the power of the Catholic Church was replaced pretty much wholesale with the power of the free market,” a chronology leaving scant space for the development of strong left-wing institutions. These characters aren’t (only) sanctimonious millennials: they are people of all ages searching for political answers, trying to place their progressive values in an historically conservative country. Simon’s half-formed answer is to work as a parliamentary adviser for a small leftist grouping in the Dáil, perhaps as much an article of faith as his deep Catholicism.

In Anagrams, I don't think I completely understood what was fabrication but think I got the gist or sense of each story, but possibly not.

I read the first page or so of Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein. Sometimes, with newer books, I read the Acknowledgments and the first page to get to know the author's writing style. It was nice when Acknowledgments did not exist (and I did not cheat in this way); they only seem to now for English language publishers or authors.

The book tour and personality seem to have started with the influence of other media types and have intensified with streaming and the pandemic. Salinger, Rooney, Mandel, ... (Television, basketball, and pop music in Crooklyn ...)

I returned the Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard yesterday, and The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth MacKenzie. I thought those were worth noting if not previously acknowledged by anyone (for the unique space of Australia and New Zealand in cultures shared by people where English is the primary language and the particular anxiety related to parents or mothers).

Transit of Venus is a strange book: lush but spare?

I finished a few books:
- Split, by Jeremy Boyd: sent by the author to me as a trade, this appears to be a masters thesis manuscript. In that regard, it’s quite good, and I can see Boyd’s poems going somewhere eventually. Like many younger writers, tho, there is a lack of discipline or consistency in the daring elements of the work, so that their concepts seem slightly flimsy. A decent book overall.

- The Maximus Poems, by Charles Olson: I had never read this weighty tome, only a few poems from it, before diving in. Upon completion, I found myself feeling much more “educated” on the modernist project and its inheritors, as well as quite taken aback by the breadth of Olson’s poetic capabilities. The poems range from historical accounts and lists to elegiac lyrics about seafaring to damning visual poems about contemporary capitalism and so on. There’s so much in the 634 pages that it is impossible to encapsulate the book’s subjects in a way that does them justice. Glad I made the effort!

I'm on holiday reading some dialogues by Giacomo Leopardi. Elegant and depressing. Better not to have been born etc, great beach reading.

^recently read a short leopardi extract in an anthology which got me interested in reading more. had only been aware of him before that from the title of an early birtwistle piece.

finished john wain's hurry on down. went in more or less expecting some kind of kitchen sink realism, but turned out to be pretty much a picaresque in episodic form (with a lot of very non-realistic coincidences driving the narrative) following the idealistically callow protagonist down and eventually back up the social ladder to a plateau of resigned acceptance (i think). favourite section and probably the most comedic was his withdrawl into country house chauffeurdom. one of those novels i'd half been meaning to read since my teens, so happy to have finally done so!

then read stan barstow's ask me tomorrow. this was most definitely kitchen sink realism. centred on an aspiring writer moving from his small coalmining village to a nearby provincial centre as part of his plan to ultimately conquer literary london, holed up in a boarding house writing his first novel and navigating his changing relationships with his family, landlady and co-boarders all with pasts that are coming home to roost, so to speak.

now reading some edna o'brien and liking it.

No Lime Tangier, my experience with Wain is similar. Not that I expected realism in quite that way, but I also did not realise how picaresque, episodic, even allegorical it would be. I found the book very stimulating, comic, enjoyable. I, like you, had meant to read the book for many years, and needed to make myself get round to it.

Only Barstow I have read is A KIND OF LOVING, which I found quite shrewd about (the protagonist's) emotions.

re hurry on down, should also have mentioned his time living with his writer acquaintance & girlfriend during his window cleaning career as a highlight of the novel for me. whole thing is a strange mix of grimness and comedy.

it's been so long since i read a kind of loving (or saw the film) that i now only remember the general outline. what i didn't know was that he wrote a couple of sequels to it, one of which features a cameo from the main character from ask me tomorrow.

I finish CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS. Ultimately it's not for me. Yet oddly I quite like the ending.

I've been camping and doing much strenuous hiking for the past couple of weeks. Easy reading was the best I could manage at the end of those tiring days. To wit:

Maigret Bides His Time, Georges Simenon. A thoroughly typical Maigret novel.

The Comforters, Muriel Spark. A somewhat atypical Spark novel, but quite nicely done and entertaining.

Rose Gold, Walter Mosley. A late entry into his series of detective novels featuring Easy Rawlins. Mosley seems at his best and most comfortable with the cast of characters he's assembled in this series. Again, a typical effort, which also means a good story well told.

Finished a strange book of poems by Thomas Delahaye, and then made my thrice-weekly bike ride a rare trip to the university where i sometimes teach to pick up a copy of TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death. It is excellent.

Finished The Wager. It's a workmanlike effort. Oddly, my estimation of it went down just a little when I saw the author interviewed on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday.

I finally started The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin, which has been in my library for years. My dad and I watched a PBS adaptation way back in the late 70s-early 80s. Prophetically, she imagines a future impacted by climate change. I admire her vision and her economy of language.

Yeah, I saw some of that, def incl. the sweet ending, when it ran back then, and parts of it on YouTube, which may have the whole thing now or sometimes. She said it was homage to Philip K. Dick, her "invisible classmate" (as quoted in an openculture.com post:
https://www.openculture.com/2016/12/when-ursula-k-le-guin-philip-k-dick-went-to-high-school-together.html

*Bartleby & Co* by Enrique Vila-Matas. Really, this is another book about writer's block and does the world need another book about that topic? When it's this funny and deftly constructed the answer is a defiant yes.

I commence reading Alasdair Gray's MCGROTTY & LUDMILLA (1990), a slim political satire. It seems one of Gray's least serious books.

It's curious how many books Gray published, when everyone just cites a few lan[dm]arks and short stories.

Territory Of Light, Yuko Tsushima - Short novel, originally published as a newspaper column in the late 70's, about a young woman dealing with divorce and raising a young daughter in a new apartment. The very down to earth everyday passages are punctuated by highly lyrical dream sequences. Its origins means there's some redundancy from chapter to chapter but not much. Main character is very likeable and relatable, not at all a martyr or a supermom. It feels like this might be autobiographical or as we now call it autofiction, but there's no big intro; the author blurb does mention her father, also a famous author, killed himself when she was one, and that is the case for the protagonist too. Strikes me how autofiction is only really a useful term for writers, as something to espouse or rail against; for me as a reader it really makes no difference if that is what this is or not.

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner - A slightly bizarre case I feel, Garner having neither changed his writing to graduate from children's fiction to adult fiction nor made an effort to update his style for today's kids. So this reads exactly like a 70's children's novel, the more difficult aspects of it for me at least mostly down to old fashioned vocabulary. Anyway it delivers the goods as far as the folk horror vibes everyone loves. The UK comic Knockout plays a major role, must track an anthology down.

Newcomer, Keigo Higashino - Murder mystery set in a traditional Tokyo neighbourhood. Interesting structure: each chapter follows a suspect. At some point this starts to feel a bit diminishing returns, as obviously none of these will turn out to be the killer or they'd be the last chapter, and there's also a repetitive nature to the petty family secrets the investigator uncovers instead. But as the network of characters expands and overlaps things get more interesting, and gradually emotional stakes get higher as well. Higashino is a very kind hearted writer, firm in his belief that most people are trying their best ("Japan's Stieg Larsson" says one of the blurbs on the cover, and I've rarely seen a comparison more misleading); the inspector as invested in helping people find closure and healing rifts as he is in the murder per se. Lovely stuff.

I just finished Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade. I liked this very much. He creates an engrossing interpersonal and cultural setting of 1940s Mexico City. The end is weirdly abrupt and a little unsatisfying, as if he didn't know how to end it, which I just learned is because this is the first of a trilogy. The others haven't been translated yet, but definitely would read them when they are.

Just started Van Halen Rising.

The next vol of that trilogy will be released later this year.

Excellent.

I loved how the narrator always seemed to be circling the mystery, making very little progress, which was why the last few pages was so strange to me. Now I realize they were setting up the next book.

THe Commissar Vanishesthe falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia
David King,
Late 90s coffee table sized book documenting Soviet photo retouching. I think the process is pretty well known where individuals are airbrushed out of history and disappear from photos they had been in. This gives some very good examples.

Great kingdoms of Africa / edited by John Parker
new book published a couple of months ago on the historic Kingdoms of Africa. Need to get this read over the next 10 days since it has a number of people behind me in the interlibrary loan queue.

The view from the cheap seats : selected nonfiction Neil Gaiman,
I think I found this when looking for books by Samuel Delany and it has an essay/intro to the Einstein INtersection in it . as well as a load of other short pieces on things. Finding it pretty interesting anyway.

I've been reading Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, a non-fic by Cynthia Barnett. It's belongs to that genre which has proliferated in the past couple of decades where an author selects a very broad topic like 'clothing' or 'horses', does a shit ton of research and gathers a mountain of index cards with various facts they think will capture people's interest, then weave them all into something that resembles a cross between a set of encyclopedia articles and a book of bathroom trivia.

I don't mind reading these books from time to time. They're a nice break from the novels, history or better-focused popular science type things I generally read. In the midst of reading one I feel like I'm learning all kinds of interesting things, but they are such a jumble that a week later I'm lucky to remember more than three of the facts I read. That's OK. But I don't kid myself that they are anything but middlebrow entertainment.

As for Rain specifically, it's a fine example, better written than most, but still a hash concocted of tidbits of knowledge and entertaining trivia.

I recently finished "Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow. I'd always been curious about it, mainly because I've seen it compared to Pynchon, but I'd never gotten around to reading it until recently, when I found a cheap used copy. I guess there are some similarities. Both writers get the "pomo" label thrown at them, but if I ever knew what that term meant in terms of literature, I must've forgotten. To me it seemed more similar to something like "100 Years of Solitude" (so I guess "magic realism"?). Although famously set in turn-of-the-century America, the themes of race relations and urban violence also link it to other 1970s New York novels like "Mr. Sammler's Planet" and "Speedboat".

Malicroix by Henri Bosco (recent NYRB translation) -- very reassuring to have a fire, honey, bread, basin, bitter soap, pitcher of water, rain, whitewashed walls, solid roof -- nature threatens but does not seem threatening -- death is near but one has ancestors

Finished the Le Guin, highly recommended. It's so succinct, and profound.

Started something completely different (and yet somehow not), The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Written in 1999 by a theoretical physicist, it's an accessible introduction to string theory. It's been in my library for probably 15 years. Probably a little out of date, but I'm excited to read it. I guess that's a good outcome of seeing Oppenheimer this week: it made me more interested to understand, at least at some level, the science involved.

i was into Greene in the early 00’s and remember liking Elegant Universe a lot!
made me feel like i actually ~got~ it
but of course it all immediately fell out of my head & i went back to being dumb as a post lol

LOL

I will never be able to retain the names, let alone the weights and charges, of the various particles.

travelling people by bs johnson

here we are with the travelling people
don't ask why, B.S. says go

I finished MCGROTTY & LUDMILLA, which I was reminded is a novelisation of a TV / radio / stage play. I don't care for the "sexual politics" of the novel, but in other kinds of politics it's perceptive, especially on the idea of Con / Lab sustaining a two-party status quo that serves both. I didn't use to see politics that way (as Gray seemingly did decades ago) but I do now in the KS era.

I then read Alasdair Gray's THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS: short stories, and one report on the anti-Iraq War march. The book is easy to read and mostly agreeable.

I read some of Edwin Morgan's poems and am impressed. His concrete poems are unusually witty and intelligent.

I began J. Meade Falkner's MOONFLEET (1898), am a quarter in. It's a historical novel set in the 1850s, so though writing in 1898 already looks old to us, I think that the writing and speech in this novel deliberately sounds even older. It's a thrilling tale of smugglers in a tiny coastal village. One thing that strikes me about the life described is the lack of entertainment or things to do. No film, TV, internet, radio, records. But also no theatre, no novels, hardly any books. The narrator does read THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. That's his only entertainment media. So he is driven to spend time gazing out to sea, or walking around the country. And in a Robert MacFarlane way, he has knowledge and words (that we no longer have) - of nature, land, sea, crafts, ships.

I think PKD was right about the heat and the threat that it poses given that the problem is caused by an industry that is not easily regulated and that involves changes that are more interwoven in everyday life. Other threats seem to have been more specific and readily controlled (but this may be appearance and popular understanding only).

I've been reading Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, a non-fic by Cynthia Barnett. It's belongs to that genre which has proliferated in the past couple of decades where an author selects a very broad topic like 'clothing' or 'horses', does a shit ton of research and gathers a mountain of index cards with various facts they think will capture people's interest, then weave them all into something that resembles a cross between a set of encyclopedia articles and a book of bathroom trivia.

RAIN: THE BIOGRAPHY

we had a copy of moonfleet on the shelf at home when i was a kid. can't say i ever read it though.

Incidentally, I was thinking of acid rain in the eighties as an example and wondering if for marketing purposes the targeting should be more specific (e.g., methane leaks, meat eating).

But the targeting may be incorrect hence the usefulness of accurate informative popular scientific writing.

I have read Moonfleet twice and still have no memory of it.

There's another Falkner book I remember slightly better where there's a church or cathedral or something that's been added onto over the centuries until the arch that supports it can no longer hold all its weight, and every time the main character walks past it he has this refrain running through his head of "The arch never sleeps...They have bound on us a weight too heavy to be borne; we are shifting it. The arch never sleeps." That stuck in my head, though I can't actually remember the name of the book.

gutenburg lists only The Lost Stradivarius and The Nebuly Coat

Must be The Nebuly Coat.

Taking a hint from ilxor the table is the table, I am reading Bread and Wine, Ignazio Silone.

I admire the ability of MOONFLEET to generate a pastiche of the literary - or even ordinary - language of 150 years before.

Narrative in MOONFLEET is often perverse. A certain scene will be described in great detail, viz. the boy hiding in the vault behind a coffin or trying to escape it. Then other important scenes will be passed over in brief retrospect, the likes of "By that time, indeed, I had come to know and help the contraband man, and on many a moonlit night I assisted them to haul kegs ashore" - ie: you've started working with the smugglers but you didn't think it worth narrating this as an incident in the main present of the novel??

A worse offender is when he declares that his crush on local girl Grace has been requited, they've been on walks through the woods and pledged their troth to each other - AND he has told her all the facts about the secret smuggling ring. This is DRAMATIC material, it ought to have a chapter of its own - "And so that day I walked out to see Grace, knowing that I must tell her the truths of my heart" and on. But it's thrown off in a paragraph looking back, viz. "Indeed Grace and I had come to like each other well, and I had told her about the contrabandiers" - and this material like much else he cuts short with the phrase "But I shall speak no more of this". A very odd repeated formulation (for a novel) that I can only think conveys something of a writer with a quill pen, who can't erase or cut and paste text and who may find the prospect of writing certain things too exhausting to bother with.

The novel is good on landscape, as when the narrator is carried into a landscape of walled fields, scrubby grass, crops, stone quarries. Again, this is an era when such characters knew the land intimately, as they didn't have much else to distract them.

i read moonfleet as a kid and there's one specific scene i remember very vividly indeed (or likely somewhat misremember) -- though the rest of it is quite gone

but I shall speak no more of this

(ie no spoilers)

:D

Good decision and hilarious expression of it !

I conclude MOONFLEET.

Unsure which scene Mark S remembered but there are quite a few.

The most notable thing about the novel might be its skilful pastiche of language 150 years old. Like writing a George Eliot novel now. Which I suppose people do, in quite popular Waterstones type novels, though I'm not sure they do it as well as Falkner did.

Ted Gioia How To Listen to Jazz
overview of the genre(s) and breakdown of the forms. So pretty interesting. I was seeing the author's name turn up in a number of bibliographies of books i had read so wanted to read something by him and this was the first. May read a few others now.

Great Kingdoms Of Africa ed John Parker
interesting overview of some of the great Kingdoms of pre colonial Africa a subject that needs more recognition. I'm not sure why there is no section on Great Zimbabwe which I would have thought pretty essential.
Does have notes with citations of a great number of books that I want to look into reading. So several more for my never ending to-read list.
A quick read and I may get back to it when there isn't a large queue in the interlibrary loan system since it only came out a few months ago. May wind up getting a copy for myself too.

American Whitelash: the resurgence of racial violence in our time Wesley Lowery
Black American journalist looks into recent racist attacks and systematic racism in the wake of Obama's tenure as teh first Black President and the subsequent rise of a racist to the role.
It's a quick read but may be enlightening. Juwst had me watch Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station after it was mentioned in the text.

A band with built-in hate : The Who from pop art to punk Peter Stanfield
Biography of the British rock band by an author I heard interviewed on the Ugly Things podcast. Seems pretty good so far
This was the one title by him i the Irish Library system I think I may be looking for others once i get through this.

David Graeber Bullshit Jobs
My first book by the anarchist anthropologist. Not going to be the last.
Some of what is being talked about is fleshing out thoughts I'm having about things immediate.y topical to me. Like this boxticker thing he talks about and how things are shaped to accommodate that perspective.

I commence reading Jan Mark, THE HILLINGDON FOX (1991).

I enjoy the present tense of the Pinefox's posts. I am reading Hello Beautful by Ann Napolitano and wondering if my brother and mother shared time together when my sister and I were in college and if they know each other differently. I am also wondering about the Catholic Church and its influence on Italians and Irish who immigrated to and settled in the United States and founded their own communities.

Before that I read some short stories by Tom Rachman that made me wonder about what is short-lived but has anachronistic appeal or does not.

I finished THE HILLINGDON FOX. It's a short teenage novel in alternating chapters, each set of chapters representing a diary. One diary is written in 1982 by a lad called Gerald as the Falklands War takes place. This diary is to be placed in a time capsule. The second diary is written by his younger brother Hugh in August 1990, as the Gulf crisis takes place. Hugh is asked by Gerald to rescue the time capsule, presumably to avoid someone finding incriminating evidence if it is opened. What is it that Gerald doesn't want found? Oddly it only really seems to come down to his suspicions of their father's affair - unhappy, but not really life & death stuff.

The conceit of the two diaries is ingenious, formalist in a sense. They are written in different voices: Gerald quite pompous and proper, Hugh informal and in a rather Adrian Mole sort of vein. I find Hugh's style irritating, just as I find it in David Mitchell's BLACK SWAN GREEN (2006), but I think this must reflect the quite realistic rendition of something that really is irritating. Now I think of it, BLACK SWAN GREEN is quite close to the Hugh diary here, which makes me think that BSG might almost have been a novel for teens. The diary voice also reminds me slightly of Jonathan Coe.

The biggest themes being explored in this very readable little book are war and the experience of living through history.

I start Angus Wilson's book of stories THE WRONG SET (1949). I'm only reading this because it's another book I've owned for too long, unread, an old orange Penguin. So far the writing seems mannered and tends to start with lavish description of things like flowers which can be hard to envision. Wilson shows some small stylistic eccentricities - for instance, sometimes continuing an exchange of dialogue between two people within a single paragraph. The general manner makes me think that perhaps at this point he is influenced by Ronald Firbank, who is even mentioned once. Reflecting that Wilson was gay at a time that it was illegal, I wonder if this aspect of life will in any way be signalled in the stories.

I've been greatly enjoying Bread and Wine, Ignazio Silone. The fact that it was published in 1936 while Mussolini and fascism were still riding high in Italy and Stalin's purges were roiling the international socialist movement adds considerable interest as a historical document. It also helps that in places it is very funny (see: Chapter 13!).

I just read that a few months ago, Aimless— have you read others in the trilogy?

Not yet. They sound interesting, but may be a bit harder for me to locate locally.

I am starting Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg translated by D.M. Low. In lieu of Acknowledgments, I read the Introduction by the Translator and the Author's Preface and then the first chapter. It's off to a good start.

Not yet. They sound interesting, but may be a bit harder for me to locate locally.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

I'm hoping they're closer to Flattery than, say, Sally Rooney (not that I hate Rooney).

As well as Wilson I commence reading Jonathan Coe's last novel BOURNVILLE (2022).

Thus far it's very characteristic. Leisurely narrative with a sensitive character passing through different places and thinking earnest thoughts, while recognisable social events take place - here, the start of the pandemic.

Then back to 1945 for the history of Bournville, a village formed around Cadbury's chocolate factory.

One speech by a European character asks how such a witty people as the British could vote for Brexit and BJ. The speech is bad. It's unpromising that it's reprinted on the back of the book. Whether Coe will offer a serious consideration of why people vote as they do, including eg media ownership and those owners' hostility to socialism, I am unsure.

Finished The Country Girls which was highly readable, and because I'd given up on something else and I was camping with no wifi and it was on the e-reader, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk-Kidd, which was extremely of its genre (families and moderate but not unendurable child abuse and very much *feelings*). Next up, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss.

BOURNVILLE continues engaging. I like Coe's rendition of the now quaint activities and ways of talking of early 1950s youth. Certain slow undercurrents are perceptible about characters' political attitudes. Coe is easy and enjoyable to read.

In THE WRONG SET:

'Fresh Air Fiend' is a puzzling story about an alcoholic woman married to a Professor, and a young woman who wants to rescue the Prof. It's hard to make anything of it but Wilson perhaps enjoys the flamboyant put-downs by the alcoholic.

'Union Reunion' depicts a family reunion in South Africa in 1924. They end up quarrelling. Formally it has the interest of devolving into free indirect speech or interior monologue, drifting into characters' thoughts. The human relations are inconclusive, and in a work of this length it's hard to get committed to the characters, but the story has some political interest. These white characters believe in their privilege and talk of the need to keep black people in line. Possibly Wilson's deepest motives in this story were political.

'Saturnalia' depicts a dance at a London hotel where the classes are supposed to mix. The character sketches can be quite vivid. Again the story doesn't amount to that much, but it tends to confirm the impression that Wilson's prime theme in this particular book is social class.

over the last month have read the first ten inspector montalbano novels in reverse order. quite glad I started at #10 and worked back because #1 was my least favourite. I thought I was prepared by the TV series for quite a bit of stuff about food but there was even more than I was expecting.

now onto LIGHTHOUSE by tony parker an oral history of lighthouse keepers in the UK.

How do race, ethnicity, and class intersect in the UK? I am still enjoying Family Sayings (alpine walks, yoghurt cultures under the mother's scarf that must settle properly) but also anticipating Almost British by Charlotte Mendelson and Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson and remembering scenes from Michael Apted's first film in his series. The present progressive is much less satistfactory than the simple present.

Almost English, rather

Finished Keith Waldrop’s Light While There is Light, a “fictional memoir” about a family closely resembling his own, caught in a web of religious wingnuttery, poverty, and working scams. Excellent book, elegiac and rather beautiful.

Also finished TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death, a truly incredible book consisting of journal entries regarding two large paintings by Poussin. It is, at its heart, a book about how we see what we see, the process of absorbing or not absorbing visual art, and the intricacies of how ideology and aesthetics play into things. Highly recommended.

Midway through Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy. I thought it was pretty bad when her mum died and her dad hit her and her best friend bullied her and got her expelled from school and she fell under the spell of an auld lech(*). But as a 21 year old getting kidnapped back home for the crime of seeing a married (separated) man - jesus what an ignorant bigoted suffocating morality. 'Divorce is worse than murder'! What a vile religion.

(*) it's maybe a somewhat less bleak read overall than those selected lowlights suggest.

^need to read the first two in the series, but just recently read girls in their married bliss which i enjoyed, though found the stylistic whiplash of the alternating chapters took some getting used to.

started and finished rayner heppenstall's two moons: parallel narratives on opposing pages with reports on contemporary events (mostly involving death & destruction) offset by a semi-fictional account of his son's accident and the extended family's coming to terms with their new reality. the structure makes it an occasionally frustrating read, but does occasion some presumably intentional resonances, eg mention in passing of ann quin's last swim/reports on cross channel swimming record attempts earlier in the novel (bs johnson & family also make a cameo appearance). there are a few points where he lets his emotions peak through the distanced style... also a few moments where it's obvious this is a product of his later reactionary old man period.

now onto moorcock's byzantium endures.

I finished Van Halen Rising. A quick read for me. Decently written and full of fun stories. Everyone always hated DLR.

Started Cortazar's Blow Up and Other Stories.

Speaking of the Irish: I've read about half of John McGahern's short fiction after reading Amongst Women years ago and am entranced.

By coincidence, after Bread and Wine I read Cause for Alarm, a zippy little thriller by Eric Ambler, also set in Italy under Mussolini and published two years later in 1938. The two books both portray the brutality of the fascists, but could hardly have been more different in their tone.

Silone's book was intended to reach a pan-european, socialist-leaning, intellectual and politically sophisticated audience. Ambler's audience was British, middle-class, much more insular, reflexively suspicious of socialism and foreigners in general. Putting them side-by-side they say a hell of a lot about the vast differences between prewar England/Britain and the rest of Europe.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

About to start collected short stories, will report. Also intrigued by mentions of the novel.

Start with the last story, "The Country Funeral."

Eh? The last story in Show Them A Good Time is "Not The End Yet."

I finish Angus Wilson, THE WRONG SET (1949).

Here are further stories that appear in it.

'Realpolitik' is a brief highlight. It depicts a meeting at an old museum which has been taken over by a new executive who wants things to be businesslike, streamlined and popular. It feels like a 1980s scenario, it even feels very relevant now. But this was written in the 1940s! The way the executive beats everyone else in the conversation is deftly written by Wilson.

'A Story of Historical Interest' is about a woman whose old philandering father becomes very ill and eventually dies. Moving back and forth in time, it shows her talking to his nurse (who is Irish and whom she distrusts*) and travelling with him in an ambulance. She has turbulent feelings about him which go back and forth. At the end he is set to die and she says, no, she doesn't need to go and see him, she has her life to get on with. I am reminded of the old widow at the end of THE CORRECTIONS who is happy to restart her life.

* a few Irish people appear in the book and they are treated as having a charming brogue which is unconvincingly rendered. I'm surprised that Wilson couldn't do better than this.

In 'The Wrong Set', a young lad called Norman has moved to London as a student. His aunt, nightclub piano player Vi, goes to visit him. We see the seedy nightclub world: here lesbians are glimpsed and Jewish people are also talked about, with a predictable undertow of anti-semitism. When she finds Norman's place, he has gone out to a rally with Communists. The landlady remarks that they're rallying 'to make trouble for the Government they put into power' - Attlee's. This is one of the book's interesting elements, the occasional remarks about the Attlee government, usually not especially positive. When Norman returns, Vi complains that he is 'mixing up with a lot of Reds and Jews'. The snti-semitism becomes explicit and Vi regrets this. But she complains to Norman's mother that he is in 'the wrong set'.

This title phrase does correspond to something about the book. Much of it is about class, cliques, manners, people's distaste for others. It's an accurate sort of title but not one that indicates anything pleasant or encouraging.

'Crazy Crowd' shows young couple Peter and Jennie going to visit Jennie's family in the Cambridgeshire countryside. The family is very eccentric (including reactionary brother Hamish), in a way that is difficult for Peter to handle. The reader sympathises. Eventually he snaps and Jennie makes an effort to stop him leaving. The eccentricity is quite vividly drawn; it's one of the most effective stories.

In 'A Visit in Bad Taste', a couple is visited by the wife's brother, who has just been released from prison after a charge of 'offences against children'. The couple tell him that he must move on; the wife even says that perhaps he should commit suicide. Nothing else happens; basically it's a tale of distaste and distanciation.

'Raspberry Jam' is about a boy who is taken up by two very eccentric sisters, who eventually get drunk and kill a bird. The boy won't go to see them again. As I write down the content of these stories I notice how minimal it is. It would be good to say that this is compensated by fine writing and thought, but it isn't really. Once again a clear recurring pattern can be seen of distaste and separation.

'Significant Experience' tells of one Jeremy, remembering how in 1936 he had an affair in France with an English (and partially Irish - leading to the same slack idea of Irishness) woman 13 years his senior, and how this was perhaps a romantic education for him. The woman is unpleasant, they quarrel, the relationship isn't nice to read about. The odd thing is that the story is prefaced by a brief scene among firewatchers - thus presumably early 1940s - but then ended with a scene among young men at an Oxbridge college. This doesn't seem a good piece of composition. It doesn't work to interesting effect.

'Mother's Sense of Fun' shows one Donald experiencing the oppressiveness of his mother's personality, until, or even after, she dies. The sense is of a negative feeling about family.

'Et Dona Ferentes' shows a family in the countryside who have a vistor, an 18-year-old Swede called Sven who is proud of his good looks and wants to seduce someone - possibly the father, Edwin. (Sven's thoughts and speech are again treated quite crudely, a poor pastiche of foreignness.) The mother, Monica, thinks with panic of Edwin's past of gay liaisons. These are only alluded to without quite naming them, in a way that must have been period-specific. But the panic about gay desire is plain. It's the one place in the book of this gay author where the theme becomes central. In the end Sven is sent away and Edwin and Monica try to restart their marriage as if nothing has happened.

The story's title is in some other language - I don't know what it means. Google Translate says it means 'and bearing gifts'. Titles like this usually remind me of my view that (while knowing as many languages as possible is excellent in lots of ways, good for the mind and for thought) writing in one language shouldn't and needn't borrow phrases from others, in this particular way - it's evasive and pretentious. I think Orwell said this long ago and I tend to agree. If the title means 'and bearing gifts', then why not say that? It would be unimpressive? So why does it look better in another language? I think this kind of thing is a case of the fake prestige of the unfamiliar because you can't make up something that works better in your own language.

I can see thematic coherence across THE WRONG SET, but not in a way that's appealing. The coherent themes are class, division, distaste, disdain or even disgust, detachment, separation. The people are mostly bitter, unkind, snobbish, occasionally bigoted. The book presents quite an unpleasant view of the world. It doesn't really redeem this with great writing. I can't very much see why this first book should have been acclaimed. However, I think there is more to Wilson than this and maybe his later books are better.

That title is part of a famous Latin expression, originally from the Aeneid; it has been Englished as “beware Greeks bearing gifts” but I don’t think the title “bearing gifts” would point the reader as directly to the particular expression. It’s really the opposite of evasive though it does expect you to know a thing

there's an element with this type of move (which orwell in fact may have been getting at) of establishing (bcz also limiting) the readership wilson felt he wanted, who will also be a "set" (i guess the "right set") among whom the this exploration of wrong-setness is taking place. middle-class education in the first half of the 20th century included some years of latin, and imperial myth-making included the aeneid: the voyages and settling of aeneas are a foundation tale for the roman empire and the british empire was openly and loudly following the roman model -- shared knowledge of latin, as well as marking out people who were likely good with languages (handy in the colonial civil service), functioned as a kind of intellectual (or better say memetic) ligature for that class and that world. this particular motto was easy for clubbable types to recall bcz it contained a little pellet of bigotry-as-advice.

(adding: as wins says it's from the aeneid but it was also no longer i think quite "of" the aeneid: ppl could roll it out as an easyread shared joke w/o necessarily recalling where it came from… )

i haven't read these stories and my memory of reading angus wilson in the past is "why i am doing this again?", but i think i recall enough about his being seen as a sardonic commentator to believe that the concept-reveal is that the "right set" is also pretty awful (you the reader, perspicacious and in on the joke, naturally excepted)

Good analysis, Mark S. Thanks.

I'd say I'd like to see your take on the actual story / stories but then I've already indicated that they're not great, and you've already said you didn't get much out of Wilson, so not much rationale for inflicting that on you.

I have a friend who’s always pushing the old man (men?) at the zoo so I’ll probably get around to that one at least

Peter Stanfield A band with built-in hate : The Who from pop art to punk
pretty decent Who biography that takes them up to the late 70s.
Think I'll be reading some more of him if I can get hold of some. This was his only title in the Irish library system .
I had came accross him being interviewed on Ugly THings podcast.

The hidden treasures of Timbuktu : historic city of Islamic Africa John O. Hunwick,
coffee table sized photobook talking about the manuscripts etc held at the ancient University town.
Quite gorgeous.

19th-century fashion in detail Lucy Johnson
garment porn. Book on details in garment items in the Victoria and Albert museum in London.
a book I'd love a copy of. Another one from Irish library system.

Witchcraze Anne Llewellyn Barstow,
Book on the craze of Witchunting in the 16th & 17t6h centuries. Particularly fixated on the perseccution of women.
I noticed the author is writing as though whatever wicthcraft the witches were accused of has a factual basis which I wasn't sure how to take. I was thinking more that I would say allegedly or something similar since I would be thinking this was pretty exaggerated at the very least. & a ruse for persecution.
I'm just reading a chapter on how women were pushed out of the workforce in teh 16th century after having been more closely involved traditionally. Oh well up the patriarchy burn the witch like.
I think this is a decent book but I am having some problems with that , since I would think a lot of what women were accused of were male projections. & the lore and methodology of what was thought of as witchcraft were outside of the experience of thsoe doing the accusing. Certainly all the satanic orgies sound pretty fictive.
Oh well, bibliography has turned me onto some titles I'm looking forward to reading.

Darker than blue : on the moral economies of Black Atlantic culture Paul Gilroy
transcripts of 3 lectures done for W.E.b. du Bois conference.
one on car culture, one on Bob Marley and other musical artists and one on citizenship and consumption. Prett interesting.
Bibliography has pointed me at some books on the history and practise of Human Rights that I will have comingto me next week I think.

I ordered a number of books through the interlibrary loan system thinking that in the past they have taken an age to come through and now it seems 8 titles have already been sent out to my library. Seems the efficiency of teh system has improved also, I think, how long it takes for a book to reach me once sent out. So just about to be inundated with decent reading on top of the stack of decent reading I already have out. Hope I am going to get through everything.

I conclude Jonathan Coe, BOURNVILLE (2022).

The novel is a family saga that tells a version of the story of England 1945-2020 through several key historical moments. The moments are VE Day, the Coronation, the World Cup Final, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, his 1981 wedding, Diana's funeral. The frame, either end of the novel, is 2020, the first 3 months or so of the pandemic.

To a degree Coe renders these historical events. But he extensively does so by quoting radio and TV commentary on them, presumably from actual recordings and transcripts. So the voice of Dimbleby et al is intercut with characters commenting on what they see on screen. In a way this is lazy, an easy writing job for Coe. In a way maybe it's an authentic way of writing about how people experience big events. The most intellectually interesting thing about the novel might involve media, and the fact that history is experienced as media events, though still by specific people in their own places and groups.

Coe's writing is mostly plain, orderly; you could say flat or bland. He is not a Nabokovian writer. Except, in a way, when he writes pastiches of other styles and genres - that is when he can come to life as a writer. He has most verve when he is copying someone or something else. He doesn't do that so much in this novel, except in a pastiche of a report of an EU committee. The EU is presented, by this very anti-Brexit writer, as well-meaning, broadly a good thing, but bureaucratic, slow and obstructive.

The novel features characters who have appeared in other novels, including THE ROTTERS' CLUB / THE CLOSED CIRCLE / MIDDLE ENGLAND. But Coe's final note states that it belongs to a different sequence, called 'Unrest', which includes EXPO '58, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS, MR WILDER AND ME, and he hopes to write a 5th. So a trilogy and a quintet are linked. Whether WHAT A CARVE UP! and NUMBER 11 are also linked to these, I don't quite recall.

The novel seeks to espouse progressive values and open-mindedness. One white character Geoffrey Lamb, is viewed as a closed-minded racist. A black character, Bridget, condemns him after his death, and states that others are also guilty for not standing up to him. Coe seeks to write the issue of 'race' in a particular way by not openly signalling it, and not highlighting the ethnicity of non-white characters. (As I recall, his novel NUMBER 11 partially centred on black characters.) Non-white characters, eg from India and Iran, gradually appear during the novel and the implied sense is of England changing for the better as it becomes more open. Meanwhile, a character very predictably turns out to be gay - this point is telegraphed from early on.

Perhaps some of the characters are not very vividly drawn. In fact Coe doesn't really provide much visual description of characters. It's as if he just wants us to go by personality. But the personalities are sketchy too. I think this is somewhat deliberate; we're meant to have an impression of character traits, without a direct lengthy account of them. The character Bridget is meant to be from Glasgow, but this aspect of her (eg in her voice) is surprisingly little demonstrated. The novel is somewhat more interested in Wales, where certain scenes are set (as they were in the ROTTERS' CLUB trilogy).

In a way the novel is ambitious. And in developing characters over a long period of time and 350pp, it builds some poignancy, especially around mother Mary Lamb who turns out to be, ultimately, the central figure. On the other hand, you could feel that Coe is coasting here. At least, it often feels as though the novel wasn't very hard to write.

I think in Family Sayings what may require patience is the idea of getting to know a family by what it says. The sayings acquire force and weight through repetition; everything outside of what is said is not completely known but only gradually sketched in, and it takes time to figure out what is said means what it does.

(That is where I am hoping the book will take me. Right now it seems like the echo chamber of a loud family.)

lol the ep of morse i just watched is called "greeks bearing gifts" (in english not latin) and morse ponderously morseplains virgil and the reference to the ever-patient lewis at the end

I haven't had much time for Coe outside of What A Carve Up and The House of Sleep. The earlier stuff is juvenile. The later stuff (pretty much from The Rotters Club onwards) seems to be, like you say, coasting. I think at some point Coe decided his metier was The Great English Politics Novel, but I don't think that's his strength - his dialogue is too cornily on-the-nose, and his politics are as middle of the road as mine are, and therefore not particularly interesting to me.

Where he Ceo excel, IMO, is in writing excessively byzantine and sellf-referential thriller plots (as in the House of Sleep). But it seems like he exhausted himself early on and stoped writing those sort of books, which is a shame.

A PS on Coe:

c.2001, when he was becoming quite famous or notorious, James Wood reviewed THE CORRECTIONS and complained that Franzen's critique was "telling the culture what it already knows" (or similar phrase).

I have never been totally convinced by that critique of that particular novel. But it is much more evidently true of this Coe novel.

When Coe writes about the death of Diana, he literally writes a passage like "The public wondered where the Queen was. The national mood of grief was turning restive". When he writes about Covid-19, he writes things like "With lockdown, people were trapped in their houses. They could only communicate on screens. It was as though human connection was cruelly taken away".

In other words, he repeats things that were immediately said about these events in the most mainstream media; ideas about the events that almost literally everyone heard as soon as they happened. This doesn't seem a great vocation for an imaginative fiction.

Maybe Coe could say that what he's doing is creating an archive of living history, in fiction, for posterity. Maybe one day his novels will be useful in this way as Victorian novels might be now. His record of eg lockdown *is* quite accurate.

But even if this is useful for posterity, it's not very enlightening to read now.

So I do think that his novel falls heavily under Wood's old stricture. He tells us things we already know all too well.

I commence Jonathan Lethem, BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL (2023).

I also start on Cordwainer Smith, THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF MANKIND, ed. Frederik Pohl (1979), stories 1958-1963.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

I like Dolan. Haven’t read Megan Nolan’s prose. Did you like Flattery?
― ydkb (gyac), Friday, 11 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

About to start collected short stories, will report. Also intrigued by mentions of the novel.

― dow, Saturday, 12 August 2023 bookmarkflaglin

Been reading a bit about this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/08/a-smorgasbord-of-unlikability-the-authors-helping-sad-girl-lit-grow-up

William J. Mann - Katie: The Woman Who Was Hepburn
John le Carré - The Mission Song
Charles Olson - Collected Poems

finished Eric Sneathen’s Don’t Leave Me This Way, a book of cut-up poems about Gaëtan Dugas, the AIDS crisis, and the voices of those lost. References to The Odyssey abound. Great book.

also read a bunch of William Bronk poems, as well as new shorter collection of poems by Ed Roberson about his time working in an aquarium.

The only Coe I've read is the Rotters Club trilogy.

Absolutely love The Rotters Club, think it fits this odd template I often fall for - ridiculously ambitious completely failed comedy. The comic sections are awful and should have been left out entirely, especially the "hilariously" naff 70s dinner party, unfortunately the shit TV version leaned heavily on this aspect. News events do not at this point seem shoehorned in, but are important to the plot. The wonder and delusion of being a precocious arty sixth former, framed within this unmanageable series of plot devices, shifting perspectives and styles, with that closing internal monologue (I guess inspired by Joyce), that's where the gold is here, and I can forgive all of the flaws, including the larger framing device which also should have been left out.

The Closed Circle was less good. It has interesting(ish) new characters and some strong sections, but the overall effect is essentially wheel-spinning, until we get to the shock twist. The political satire of New Labour seemed to be dull and ineffective. Not a bad book, just a very average one.

Middle England was quite a different book, but in the end would rate it about the same as The Closed Circle. The story follows the same characters across the coalition / Brexit years and unfortunately resorts to increasingly simplistic characterisation with the new characters introduced. There's one - a rich teenage girl who becomes a Corbynite and is implied heavily to be antisemitic - who nearly ruined the whole thing for me, though she doesn't feature much. Overall it seemed like a failed experiment, if he wanted news impacting real lives then austerity would have been a much better place to go. The novel ends quite well, but think I'm done with the series at this point.

Camaraderie: I found THE CLOSED CIRCLE disappointing. I found MIDDLE ENGLAND much more effective overall. Aspects of it remain memorable for me.

It's entirely true that he introduces the one socialist character and implies that she's bigoted, and I was naturally troubled by this also, but fortunately it's only one line in about 400pp. But it's also symptomatic that he can't take the socialist revival of these years seriously, says nothing at all about, for instance, the 2017 election result.

He does write extensively about austerity in another novel, NUMBER ELEVEN.

Another problem I had with Middle England's politics was the nice moderate Tory MP girlfriend, of course there is no such thing IRL, she would have voted for every benefit cut, and not even acknowledging that seemed like a huge error.

I'd forgotten her! and still don't remember her clearly, whose gf she was, or anything.

I think you're right to imply that this looks like 'centrism', and it's slightly puzzling that Coe got here after having once been politically sharper.

Coe is my age and my cohort: just over a year younger than me and was actually for a while in the late 80s a fellow reviewer at the wire, stopping at the time I became editor lol (tho not by my command). A thing I have glumly and grimly noticed a lot of is a *lot* of ppl from the same cohort swerving from a sharper 80s politics to a crappy 00s centrism. I suppose we could just handwave it as "getting older, kids and mortgages blah blah", but it seems to manifest in quite a particular way. So instead I'm going to blame the abolition of the GLC and the vanishing of the alt-terrain of e.g. City Limits.

it may be the cosy champagne-socialist hummus-eating latte-drinking guardian-reader cultural elite to blame. or else he just hasn't encountered any young working class people outside of a service setting in the last few decades. or those might just be the same thing.

in 1984 he played keyboards for a "short-lived feminist cabaret group, wanda and the willy warmers"

orwell was right

I think it's been pointed out before that one group of bad 'centrists' is middle-aged UK rock critics.

Another is UK stand-up / TV comedians. The odd thing here is that in NUMBER ELEVEN, Coe specifically attacks / satirises that particular group.

Now I want to read this Number Eleven.

What I want from Coe (or somebody else) is a UK 20th/21st century Les Rougon-Macquart (which if anything gets more radical as it progresses, Germinal is book 13 or 16 depending on how you count and ends with a demand for Communist revolution) but I'm never going to get it.

Antonio Lobo Antunes - Fado Alexandrino.

- Modernist novel pub. in 1983, trying to draw up a picture of Portugal's Carnation revolution in the 70s. Five soldiers tell their stories in a bar to the 'Captain' (who is there to only listen). All have fought in the colonial wars in Mozambique. They look back and talk about the years after, during one night.

(The wiki on the novel has a good summary of the structure.)

- The long, coiling sentences have a long tradition by the time Antunes got going. They come from the likes of Proust and the last chapter of Ulysses, with further refinements by many authors down the decades (anything from Hermann Broch's Death of Virgil, Bernhard, Faulkner, late Woolf, to obscure writers such as Juan Benet when talking about the Spanish civil war etc.) This kind of writing often has a flattening effect on character (though you learn enough to distinguish their stories), it can obscure much as the ocean of thought-flights pile on. This is often exhilarating to me, as an experience.

- I like that it can amplify the painful history but also take these events down a peg or two. For these soldiers, it was a period in their lives. But they live on...

- Another key reference is Celine (the back of the book mentions Dos Passos but that didn't feel right to me). As the subject implies the content is grim, it can also be grotesque to look from outside in. It's specifically remarkable when dealing with their various relationships the soldiers have with the women in their lives. The heat of what they've been through weighing heavily on these relationships and yet a sense that war and Portugal's politics didn't have a say in the ups and downs (mostly down) they experience. These are lives that are shaped by events, but they also make choices.

Mothers keep up a constant, initially one-sided, conversation with their young children and then later seem to repeat stories, deliberately or having forgotten, to fill the silence when their children come to visit.

Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries (also, like Fado Alexandrino, finished in 1983) has some unusually two sided conversations between mother and daughter..

I am halfway through The Elegant Universe, and we are on superstring theory. He really does try to keep things understandable, but I am struggling. This stuff is so far outside the realm of my experience, I have a hard time visualizing it, even with the helpful diagrams.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

re: nolan, i liked acts of desperation but have not read the new one.

Counselor Ayres' Memorial, Machado de Assis - His last work, written as a diary by a character who is also advanced in age. He meets this young widow and makes a bet with his sister that she will remarry. It seems pretty clear from the beginning he's attracted to her, and there is a line of unreliable narration running through the novel as he consistently underplays this, but it doesn't end up going anywhere extreme...a more age-appropriate romance blooms between the widow and a young man instead. Felt kind of trivial in the end. The abolition of slavery happens during the novel but characters take it mostly as an almost neutral event, some have to go back to their farms and take care of the paperwork of employing the former slaves as workers but that's pretty much it. That being said the ending I found pretty affecting. Def still more in the romantic than realist school. Also a book where the narrator says stuff "I heard much news, none of which I will write down right now", as per the pinefox's experiences with Moonfleet - the diary conceit used to mask this somewhat.

Good Pop, Bad Pop, Jarvis Cocker - The pitch for this being Jarvis sorting out his attic and deciding what to keep, I thought this would basically amount to music criticism, some sort of guide through his record collection doubling as a manifesto for his aesthetics. It is not that. There are few records in the attic, and he uses this conceit more as something to hang an autobio on and to provide some advice to ppl looking to become artists. What he has to say about music is mostly quite boring and basic - Beatles, Velvets, Punk. It was interesting to see him talk about Barry White as a vocal influence tho, which in retrospect makes tons of sense. The autobio stuff is mostly very charming, unless you hate the guy I guess - his grandad making him a makeshift dalek, young Jarvis going to a Stranglers show and naively wondering at the area next to the stage being near empty only to be caught in a mosh pit when the concert started, an early song based on having sold a bunch of rancid crabs at his day job.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Voung - Book club pick. Both a second generation immigrant and queer coming of age novel. Voung writes poetry, and you can really tell this is a poet's novel, to effects both good (loved the violent, lyrical ode to Hartford) and less good (a lot of highly abstract, very assertive sentences about life, love, nationality that I think would work in poems but in prose make me go "hmmm IS that right tho?"). Overall very strong, dark, heartbreaking stuff.

Vuong’s poetry is awful, fwiw.

Warrant for genocide : the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the elders of Zion
Norman Cohn,
traces the history of a famous hoax that had a great deal of consequence in its wake. Arguments by an imagined Machiavelli copied from a satire on the despotism of Napoleon III. IN th eoriginal it had the liberalism of Montesquieu argued against the cynicismn and manipulation of Machiavelli. The plagiarist simply copied out whole chunks of the dialogue from Machiavelli and attributed it to a jewish leader. They even kept most of the original structure except they dropped one chapter from the original.
& it took until the wake of the first world war for the book to become popular. Apparently one book containing it was among the books taht the Tsaritsa took with her into her pre assassination captivity.
So, interesting book, thought I'd read it after it appeared in the bibliography of something else I read recently. Now I'm having to rush through it because i have a pile of books arriving thanks to the library system suddenly becoming efficient.

David King The Commissar Vanishes
author's book detailing the research into the photo manipulation of the early soviet years in Russia.
Coffee table sized book that details a lot of the images both in doctored and undoctored forms.
Interesting to see how this was done after having heard about it for years. I think I probably read reviews of this book being released at the time it was and related Guardian/Observer magazine articles.

Handbook of English costume in the nineteenth century C. Willett Cunnington,
NIce book of images of clothing from teh era. I think I need to get a copy of this and a couple of other centuries as standing reference style guides for future garment construction/design. I think he goes back a few more centuries back to medieval times at least.
Bloomin love the clothing of this era, even if it was a bit restricting.

Women artists : the Linda Nochlin reader
a set of essays by feminist art historian. It includes her Why have there been no great women artists? as well as a number of others.

The philosophy of modern song Bob Dylan,
short pieces by the great lyricist/dj on a number of songs he feels significant.
Quite interesting. I grabbed this on seeing it was in the local library despite knowing I had a pile of books about to appear. But t does seem to be a pretty quick read. I just need to get through it.
Also saw that the local library has Ted Gioia's History of Jazz in but managed to restrain myself from grabbing that too.

Dancing in the street : Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit Suzanne E. Smith,
have read the introduction so far but this does look very interesting.

The evolution of international human rights : visions seen Paul Gordon Lauren,
One of a couple of books I ordered to try to learn the history of Human Rights. How they developed what they really mean.
Felt it a bit weird that somebody was trying to present them as tangible things when I think they are more a question of leverage.
Not wanting to seem overly cynical or right wing or something and wanting to see them as in some way significant and recognised but it seems a little unrealistic to think that one can bash somebody around the head with the existence of a right. THough free speech does require some level of responsibility not to intentionally misrepresent and so on.

haha table, I did think of you as the ILXor most likely to have an opinion on this guy

still unsure on how I feel about his novel, in the end. the nods to Barthes and Simone Weil feel a bit out of nowhere. I will say the book club I'm in tends a bit mor and unlikely to feature anything with as much explicit passages about gay sex as this had, so it's interesting it got chosen.

I like a lot of different types of poetry— my favorite poets include Hopkins, Dambudzo Marechera, Jean Day, Prynne, Niedecker, etc— but one thing that I loathe in poems is when they engage in what has been called the ‘dilatory epiphanic,’ closed to anything except a certain interpretation and affect that the poet intends. It makes for boring work, and Vuong engages in it across much of his work.

Finished The Country Girls trilogy a few days ago, wonderful stuff but tough going, especially the third one. Would love to read more by her but maybe something featuring someone with a bit more grit - not to victim shame or blame! But Cait's helplessness and Baba's millstone grinding cynicism were hard to stick with for 600 pages.

Try her short fiction.

Will do! Forgot to mention how mad I am at Baba for fucking up Cait's life by getting her expelled.

I've been reading some Tove Jansson short stories from the selection that NYRB published as The Woman Who Borrowed Memories.

Charles Rosen - The Frontier of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music
Marguerite Duras - L'Amour

The Rosen is fantastic. NYRB should 110% collate his literary criticism, it's as good as Hardwick's. This volume are a bunch of 'informal' lectures. I suppose that could imply a conversational, chatty tone...and while they can have that dimension there is no mistaking that these pieces have as much argument as a classical piece articulates argument.

The Duras is just wonderful. She is one of the 20th century's greatest artists and you'd point to books like this when asked for evidence. Her later books are like scripts for experimental pieces of cinema (they are like her films, which are kinda unclassifiable). The fusion of cinema and literature are like nothing you'll ever read.

I recently read "Fleshmarket Close" by Ian Rankin. This is apparently one of a long-running series about a detective based in Edinburgh, Scotland. I had never read any of them - this one falls somewhere in the middle of the series, I believe, but it seems that the books are written so that no prior knowledge of the series is required. It was interesting to me to see the contrast between how the main recurring characters are handled vs everyone else. The minor characters are generally involved in some way in the crimes being investigated, ie. they are experiencing major life events and personal crises. The major characters on the other hand, the detectives, are just doing their jobs, perhaps daydreaming about retirement. Very little of consequence happens to them. Readers know and presumably like them, and their job is basically just to be themselves, to demonstrate the stable aspects of their personalities: a certain blunt irascibility, perhaps too much fondness for drink, etc.. The book ambles along at a fairly moderate pace, until near the end, when the plot strands begin to come together quickly, which gives the book some momentum into the finish. Now I'm reading "Those Who Walk Away" by Patricia Highsmith, but more on that later.

xp it's funny, I was looking for what to read next coming off the stack of detective/crime stuff I've been reading, and I have some super cool 70s hardback editions of Duras stuff I found in the Hudson Valley last year, and I reached for one and then thought...no my dude it's still summer try to keep it light, not stuff you're gonna have to get into a whole analytical mode of reading to follow. but then I grabbed an Egyptian 70s feminist novella lol

Was it Woman at Point Zero?

no, same author though -- The Circling Song

Good post o.nate.

I have had the impression that THOSE WHO WALK AWAY might be one of Highsmith's best.

I am finding Cordwainer Smith hard to focus on so back to new Lethem in the insomniac watches of the night.

Slavoj Zizek has mentioned "Those Who Walk Away" as one of his favorites, which is how I was led to it.

for the central female minds working overtime(often, but not always, those of unnamed first-person narrators)in xpost Natalie Flattery's Show Them A Good Time, Hell isn't other people, it's (often, but not always) closer to the self, rattling hot and cold like erratic plumbing in there, is she gonna blowy Other people are greatly needed, as as objects of concern, defiance, reassurance, desire, love, seeming indifference, impression, hopefully favorable---for sure, for all of these central characters, an audience is required, but they (from one to unspecified several) can be a tough crowd---dangerous, even (some of the ones, exes), but even these last are necessary focal points, seized on, closely observed, graphically recalled in the hairline fractured innerverse, which can implode, at least temporarily?
Well, these gals are never "crushed, like matchboxes" (maybe like other things), not like one of them's friends (there are often groups of female friends), sadcore girls who "dress like widows" and who are on a certain occasion supposedly displeased with the narrator, for "not being tragic enough" and thus "detracting from their beauty" by showing up with a bunch of men, including older ones (who themselves are not properly appreciative of "my death jokes, my single girl jokes," and of her laughing at the rong time during sexual encounters)
What the hell: stability is always found, at least for a while: flags are planted. Someone recalls being almost 14 and in love with a rando who might also be the or a local serial killer, out in the bare boondocks. As per rountine, He comes to pick her up from the regular babysitting gig, as he's agreed with her father, his semi-employer to do, and asks, "Are you scared?" She's prevailed on him to watch The Exorcist with her, and (with a conviction that you shouldn't lie to the one you love), she answers indirectly, instructing him that the hellpuke all over the screen is really pea soup, that she's no dummy.

This is one of the first stories---in the last, "Not Yet The End," a grown-ass woman travels purposefully in her hoadery car(which she scored from the divorce!), that she knows people assume she lives in, but she doesn't she's also got a crappy house, by cracky, and a cool-looking cat companion named Screechy, whom she rescued from the schoolyard, when her principal threatened to eat him, feeling liberated by the end of the world---date announced, although (see title). She tells her latest unsatisfactory date (it's date night! As maybe every night is now) that she will not put up with this. He's another good audience/responder, in his crappy way, and he and we see she's got principles, dammit.

In the middle, another older woman disappoints her friends by no longer presenting her life "as a production," but going off to Paris with her long-time boyfriend-to-new-husband and his son, both of them damaged by his first wife, who has finally succeeded in self-destruction (though not before the narrator, too much the student of family documents, including photographs, is sure they've once been in silent proximity while windowshopping). She's trying to do right by the man and the boy.

There are some partially unsatisfying endings (and other bits, where Writing can make for distracting billboards or potholes, in passing), but the only one that's really a problem is actually a good one that further drains the life-as-afterlife of a successful writer and her source-material sister: in context, the ending seems to me like a set piece, gimmick maybe, climax-as anticlimax at least: which is maybe part of the point, along with, maybe, no such thing as a lowest point? Dunno, will read some more, but literature shouldn't be too easy to judge---and if I've made any of this look on-the-nose, be assured it can make for uneasy reading and re-reading, or at least not breezy.

is she gonna blow?, I meant, not "blowy" jeez sorry

What's the best critical edition of Tristram Shandy? Is Norton good? Seems to be most commonly available in library loan, but I'm willing to dig further.

and Nicole Flattery, not Natalie.

FLATTERY My feeling when I reread the stories recently was a lot of sympathy for my younger self, like, “Oh, it’s not so bad.” I feel like with your first book, you’re very conscious that you have to be impressive. I’m not as interested in impressing anyone, which I think just comes with age.

i read an old penguin english library edition of shandy which has copious (& very handy) notes and intro. also have one by some american univeristy imprint which was much less comprehensive in that regard. no idea how the norton compares.

currently reading new worlds 3. some good stories, also some not so good stories.

not sure about dilatory epiphanic (which i just googled in quotes and the only result was this thread) but i'm also an ocean vuong hater

Dow I liked your review! I think we have some overlap though for obvious reasons I felt more kinship with the characters.

Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I should read some of these again. That’s the beauty of short stories.

Thanks! o hell yes check this yall:

Show Them A Good Time - Nicole Flattery

These stories - eight in all, dark and complex, were easy to read but not so easy to grasp. Is that a compliment? Maybe. I liked this collection very much though. Like me, Flattery is from the Irish midlands and the landscapes she draws on in some of the stories - flat land, dead light, still suffocating air - are familiar to me, as is the mood of depression saturating everything. There’s a lot of dark humour in this collection, almost always unsettling, like hearing someone laugh behind you on a dark path. Her prose is precise in execution, with short sharp sentences, but the stories themselves are almost the opposite. They are woven in almost dreamlike ways. The title story, Show Them A Good Time, is about an almost-revealed service station that seems like purgatory and the atmosphere is very much like that of a nightmare you experience on the edge of waking up. I read it once but I want to read it again.

The main characters in these stories are all women - varying ages and backgrounds. Sometimes they are brutal, sometimes they are adrift, but they are always strangely compelling. Track, I thought, was very interesting, about a directionless woman in a relationship with a famous comedian. There are nightmarish details sprinkled casually throughout the stories, the horror of modern life is mundane and fades with time except to those who experience it directly. “The missing women of the midlands,” the 13 year old’s miscarriage, the slipping ladder - these are all details that haunted the corners of their various stories and hooked into me. She has a very strong sense of who she is and where she’s from and it’s a real pleasure to read that in a young woman’s work.

I would need to read this again, I think, but overall I enjoyed it. It’s not for everyone, but then most things aren’t.

― mardheamac (gyac), Sunday, March 27, 2022 2:54 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Looks like it is for me, thanks!

― dow, Sunday, March 27, 2022 3:23 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

You don’t live over here, do you? I’d lend it to you if you came to an ILB FAP.

― mardheamac (gyac), Sunday, March 27, 2022 3:24 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'll look around over here, thanks for offer.

― dow, Sunday, March 27, 2022

FLATTERY My life throughout the period of writing this novel was a lot more stable than it was in my 20s, when I was writing the stories, which just felt chaotic. The move for me was just being like: I have to do this every single day. It felt way more like a job to me than the stories did.

Recently read:

Pat Long - The History of the NME (Pretty basic biography of the magazine, not really anything particularly illuminating in here)
John Rogers - This Other London (Sinclair-lite written by a guy who does really enjoyable YT videos about...walking around London. Think ley-lines only get mentioned once or twice which is impressive for A Book About Walking London)
Susannah Dickey - Common Decency (Fairly enjoyable novel about two neighbours in a Belfast block of flats - one gets obsessed with the other)
Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These (Loved this novella about an Irish coal seller's Christmas in the mid-80s, would love to read more Keegan now).

Currently rotating between:

Michael McGee - Close to Home
Megan Nolan - Ordinary Human Failings
Gerald Murnane - Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

I finished Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide and had realised it had been around all my life since it was first published the year I was born.
It's an interesting pretty quick read. Odd to see how much damage a pretty obvious hoax can do. But it needed to find a receptive audience which it did in the wake of the First World War. It was already having books refuting it and pointing the flaws in argument etc being printed in the 1920s. But it does seem that some people do still believe in the Protocols. There have even been supposedly supporting arguments using tnh idea that Maurice Joly who wrote Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, ou la Politique au XIXe siècle par un contemporain, was Jewish and therefore intended his work to further the conspiracy which is just absurd.

Geza Csath - Opium and Other Stories

Don't read many short stories but this is a keeper. Early 20th century Hungarian fiction has a particular vibe, a fluidity in storytelling with incredible concision, all of its own. The story of the orchestra goes through so much disappointment and a screaming sadness tinged with humour in less than 10 pages.

Elsewhere there is something akin to Poe; some very nasty, macabre tales, and as the title implies a hallucinatory quality.

The Tale Of The Fat Woodworker, Antonio Manetti - A novelized account of a supposedly true story, in which a group of friends (including Donatello and leader of the pack Brunelleschi) get angry that the titular woodworker failed to show up to one of their dinners and, as punishment, decide to gaslight him into believing that he's been Freaky Fridayed into some other bloke. This is achieved with the collaboration of many a member of Venice's upper class, including a judge who sentences him to prison for debts accrued by the other guy. Real Bullingdon Club stuff, a big part of the animus clearly being that the lowly woodworker failed to show up at a dinner featuring so many of his social Betters. The poor guy ends up moving to Hungary in shame once he finds out the truth. Manetti was a biographer of Brunelleschi; the translator's introduction suggests this was Brunelleschi's attempt to show himself a master of perspective in human as well as artistic terms and also points out the similarities to Kafka.

There's a strong sense of cruelty in a lot of Italian comedy, I've seen enough spaghetti westerns to know this, but here it's really difficult to laugh along with the poshos torturing this poor dude. Still, an interesting experience to read a 15th century Italian text that often feels like a 90's magic realist comedy (Groundhog's Day, Liar Liar, etc.)

William Shakespeare - Macbeth
Marguerite Duras - Hiroshima Mon Amour (the script for this was published as a book)

Good Lord Bird by James McBride (looking forward to the other novels based on this one)
before that, Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser (rich, promising start but enough -- contrast -- The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith)

The Writing In The Stone Irving Finkel
Story about an Assyrian official looking for a treasure source in Ancient Mesopotamia.an attempt by a historian of the era to portray how people of the time viewed their world. A touch of the Jim Thompson in the narrator or protagonist's viewpoint on the disposabili6y of other people's human life possibly.
& trying to think if the depth of field of the narrative is similar to that in The Graduate the original novel cos it reminds me of that. Found that book to have a distinctive one like scenes seen in a snowglobe or something.
Quite a nice read I guess and a fast one.
I was a little thrown off by The complete absence of page numbers so unable to tell how far into the book I was.
I was trying to think what had directed me to this and was surprised to find out it was only a few years old cos I had thought it was from earlier before I started reading it.

Neil Gaiman View From The Cheap Seats
A set of shorter previously published pieces by the fantasy author. Several reviews and introductions to other people's works and things.
Very readable and makes me want to check out the material referenced.

Frederick Douglass is not a hero. Is changing number of verbs indiscriminately to indicate the South vs. the North rather than black vs. white a tactic or a tic? Or is it West vs. East? Or are there no vs. but just a family (un)happy in its own way?

I don’t understand your post, youn.

I finished a re-read of Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire. Astonishing how prescient and present its analysis remains.

As told in The Good Lord Bird, the Civil War and the abolitionist movement were complicated ... North vs. South (culture), East vs. West (property), Black vs. White (slavery, history, ethnicity). The novel is a fictional account of John Brown's rebellion at Harper's Ferry.

All the verb numbers are switched, and I don't know if that is an accurate representation of how people spoke much less the pattern for different dialects.

Frederick Douglass has big hair and does not come off too well.

oh i see— yeah that’s strange about the verb conjugations!

The family (un)happy in its own way was my attempt to characterize the unique legacy of slavery in the United States; it seems to have a powerful grip even for those who want to claim a fresh start and to forget.

A couple of Hatha yoga texts:

Anon - The Shiva Samhita, tr. by James Mallinson
Shandor Remete - Shadow Yoga

i don't know if this is a relevant point abt verb numbers but someone (lol i forget who)* argued that the civil war is when "the united states are ___" became "the united states is ___"

*(i think i encountered it in garry wills's book on the gettysburg address but i don't think he came up with it and anyway it's currently in a box so i can't check)

And if slavery and racism (which I hesitate to name on account of lack of verifiability of human races as fundamentally different but is real otherwise) have carried over on a global scale exacerbated by finance and climate disasters, then is the American Dream as an extension of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation untenable?

Think you're unlikely to get any defenses of the viability of the American dream in this particular forum (thankfully).

But what I meant was trying to give up a certain notion of progress. I am not certain everyone on ILX would be willing to do so unless prepared to offer or to accept or to have confidence in a cogent alternative.

I'm reading The Bachelors, Muriel Spark. It's one of her early novels. It has many of the elements that characterize her complete body of work, such as main characters engaged in fraudulent or criminal behavior, excellent pacing and deft use of dialogue, but it doesn't quite feel like she'd hit her full stride, yet. She's still assembling her materials. Which isn't to say it's not a good novel. I don't think she was capable of writing a bad novel.

Isn’t that her very first novel? I never bothered with it since I heard she wasn’t fully formed yet as you said.

But now I am intrigued

I love reading embryonic fiction and poetry.

I finished John MacGahern's The Barracks and am about to begin Kate Masur's Until Justice Be Done.

According to Wikipedia, The Bachelors was published in 1960 as her fourth novel. As for where it stands in order of when it was originally written or at least existed in an advanced draft, I can't say. Order of publishing isn't always accurate in that way.

Oh sorry I was getting confused with The Comforters. She had already written a few good books before that one so maybe I should (re)read it. Don’t you mean her fifth novel?

Right. Fifth novel.

xxxxxxxpost youn, I would not like to give up on the ideal or idea of progress re better vaccines, for instance. Also if it means better anti-fascism, whatever that might consist of.

"better" better mean "keeping up with the bad stuff."

Finally reading Left Hand of Darkness, which, not news, is very good.

dow - Thank you for taking the time to read my incoherent hopelessly generalizing (throwing in the kitchen sink) posts. I agree with your point and hope that science and human belief in progress will be humbler and more aware of its limitations and open to a wider range of possibility while not as eager to draw conclusions and profit.

correction: belief in human progress

I finished Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away. I was wondering about the title. Apparently it's a reference to those who walk away from a crime in progress rather than getting involved or trying to help. I guess it could also have a secondary meaning as those who walk away from a fight (as opposed to those who have to be carried away). It made me want to visit Venice. Her control is superb. The prose is unassuming. You never get the sense that she is showing off or trying to sound "literary", but you often stop to marvel at how economically and precisely she describes something rather subtle. Her recurring subject is human psychology under highly stressful circumstances, within a social milieu of midcentury American wealth, a wealth that insulates them from lots of unpleasant things, but which fails to protect them from their most critical vulnerabilities. Her characters often seem to be caught in a trap which is at least partially of their own devising, and which ratchets tighter and tighter around them.

correction: a wider range of possibilities

yes indeed.

Diana Wynne Jones Dogsbody
Nell Gaiman wrote a foreword to an edition of this which is included in the anthology of his shorter pieces which I just finished. I think he has a more general piece on her too. I hadn't realised she also wrote a series that included Howl's Moving Castle which I know from the Studio Gibli animation.
So this is a children's or YA book on a star system being sentenced to a lifetime as a terrestrial dog during which he also needs to find an element of the reason he was sentenced.
Seems quite good so far. Mid 70s book for children that mentions the troubles in Ireland as a backstory for one of the supporting characters. Interesting detail that must have been a semi controversial personal choice at the time. This character us seen to be good I think when Irish were vilified in UK media at the time and still being discriminated against when it came to housing/accommodation.
Well have it part read so going to get through the rest of it.

Neil Gaiman Welcome To The Cheap Seats
Collection of short pieces including reviews, forewords, speeches etc.
I'm going back through to copy the worksvhe mentions for future reference.
Thought it quite interesting. Think it has turned me onto some new work.
Diana Wynne Jones most immediately.
I picked it up because of a piece on Samuel Delaney who I'd just read about in Graham Lock or Paul Gilroy or somewhere.

I have been reading THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ELIZABETH BOWEN. Mostly I have read her first volume, ENCOUNTERS (1923), contained in it. These stories are very short. They are often very Jamesian, especially in dialogue. But they also carry a strong charge of eccentricity, perversity, mischief. I can see the youthful talent here, but most of the stories aren't substantial enough to be so satisfactory.

When she gets on to a couple of slightly longer stories just a couple of years later - 'The Parrot', 'The Visitor' - a change emerges. The stories have more resonance. 'The Parrot', describing a young woman trying to retrieve a lost parrot, is striking. 'The Visitor' is poignant.

In theory I would like to read this whole book but it' nearly 800pp long and I have over 650pp to go. So likely I'll put it back on the shelf till another time.

Having finished The Bachelors I will modify one part of my earlier appraisal. The pacing suffers in the second half as she tries to manage a large cast of characters with a multifarious web of connections and the pace loses momentum. Not quite up to the usual Spark standard, but still very readable.

xp ha I enjoy kid Bowen's mischief etc., but yeah her POV gets wider and deeper as she goes along through the century (b. 1899-d. 1972). Seems to get a bit depressed sometimes during the Depression, but WWII homefires get her going again, and---can you be "on a roll" if it pretty much lasts 30 years? (thinks of Willie Nelson's catalog) Yes.
So I hope you'll come back to this collection now and then. Where should I start with her novels?

I confuse the Elizabeths' short fiction. Taylor's are wryer, piquant.

The Death of the Heart. xpost

Dow: Bowen's early novel THE LAST SEPTEMBER is outstandingly interesting.

I return to a book of which I've read parts more than once and parts never: R.F. Foster's MODERN IRELAND (1988). Ireland in 1600, where he begins. is something I've never known about before.

Tony Russell's Country music originals : the legends and the lost
I think I need to get myself a personal copy of this and work through it dilligently. Descriptions sound really enticing.
& I could do with a better knowledge of teh area. Same wioth prewar blues I guess, I know some artists who I've come acros over the years but there is a lot more I could know and some variety ion styles etc.
THis comes with suggested listening and a decent bibliography for further research. THink there may be other music from similar era that I could do with a similarly in depth resource on.

The hidden treasures of Timbuktu : historic city of Islamic Africa John Hunwick,
coffee table sized book looking into the history of Timbuktu and what is there. It is a town that was established in 1100 that was for years used in tropes about faraway unknown places but was a source of learning for most of teh time it has existed
HUnwick looked into the papers taht are stored there and found things apparently lost prior to him doing so. So I need to avoid simply seeing things from a white saviourism perspective. What's here looks good and nice to have access to books on this and related subjects, would just prefer more indigenous perspectives I guess.

Michael Ingantieff Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
Essays and responses from talks given in 2000 at a conference in Princeton in the wake of the 50th anniversary of teh Declaration of Human Rights. Quite interesting and a reasonably quick read.

Not So Black and White Kenan Malik
a look into the history of the idea of white supremacy.
Quite interesting, covers a lot of ground I have read about elsewhere.
Picked this up off teh new books shelf in the local library. So glad to see they are buying things like this in.
Nice long bibliography to turn me onto new things i haven't read yet.

What I read this summer:

Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show
Enrique Vila-Matas - Bartleby and Co.
Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr. Ripley
Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
Herman Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener

Hell of a run. Sinking into term-time senescence with a Reacher novel.

R.F. Foster's MODERN IRELAND (1988).

I read this about 20 years ago. It took me . . . well, it felt like forever. I probably should have read some other works on the period first; he assumes a fair amount of background knowledge, if memory serves.

Yes. The oddity of the book is that it looks like an introduction that will tell you the facts on each period, but its actual method tends to be eg "contrary to much that has been written since, Catholicism did not at the time imply disloyalty to the Crown" or "Accounts of the famine have tended to overemphasise national factors" - leaving you wonder: who has written that, when and why? And what is the basic statement here, outside of controversies? The whole book is more Meta than it looks.

On the other hand, he's a fabulously well informed historian and an unusually fine writer.

Diana Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle
pretty well written children's book . I'm realising that I'm picturing Spirited Away when I was thinking of teh Studio Ghibli animated version. Though I think I must have seen this.
I don't remember having read tyhe author before Dogsbody last week. Some of her work was around when I was the target age but I don't remember coming across her. She can write really well and subtly introduce themes that are somewhat leftist. Characters in this talking about being exploited etc. Think I may read some more in future but definitely wanted to read the source of the animation's story even if it isn't the thing I was thinking of. Think I've seen a bunch of the Studio Ghibli films so now going to look up the source for Spirited Away

Augusto Boal Legislative theatre
Brazilian radical theatre theorist writes an experimental beta version book about the chance happening that had him in elected power and applying his theatre techniques to governing.
I want to read through all of teh author's work to see what he actually stood for since I think the group that semi introduced me to him whitewashed him heavily. Wound up with a really reactionary take on his work and I think a deep weakening of what he stood for. Very very white liberal BS group who I wish could be kept away from teh subject of race since tehy seem to be absolutely tone deaf on it.
Boal and Freire seem to be writers I think have a great deal of value. Freire has complained about his process having become popular and tehn having its application watered down heavily in teh process which I think is also true of Boal's work.

I’ve read Charmed Life and Archer’s Goon recently, both by Wynne Jones, both excellent, especially Archer, which has very lefty 1980s children’s TV vibes. I love how predictable her stories are - you realise, reading them, how much other adventure fiction leans on tired Hero’s Journey/Save the Cat templates.

Whoops I mean UNpredictable

I finished Poems of the Late T'ang, A.C. Graham. The introductory essay and notes on the translations I found very helpful in understanding how much is, by necessity, lost when translating these poems into English. The translations themselves were better as poetry than some of the attempts I've read, but seldom invoked that sense of excitement one gets from good poems.

Now I've started on The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, Joshua Cohen. The distinct personality of the narrator's voice is strongly established from the first and it carried me forward swiftly and easily into the story. It remains to be seen if the features that make it so distinct eventually wear on me, which is a danger when so much depends on that voice. I hope not.

I am reading Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson and again wondering about class in the UK and the meaning of provincialism and ties to land (and what will replace it). As an outlook, provincialism has come to mean familiarity: one could imagine a lifetime resident of NYC being presumptive about knowledge of that city but as restricted in movement as a person from a one stop gas station apple pie diner passing through rest stop exurban locale: sophistication has been tied to place but will it continue to represent barriers to experience (tied to wealth)?

So looking forward to this thread title receding into the distance
</jerk>

Hi. If that was meant for me (or about what I just posted), I am curious about what provoked it.

Sorry no it’s just a knock at the thread title, every time it pops up on SNA I suppress a flare of irritation. Hence the jerk tag.

I have remembered to return to the book I was reading, BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL.

(What I meant to ask is how can willful ignorance or lack of curiosity other than of one place be labeled provincial in one context and sophisticated in another if as a result what one knows is equally narrow however deep?)

I found the Charlotte Mendelson book I had to read for book club (The Exhibitionist) to be loaded with some pretty heavy class snobbery, amongst many other faults.

xpost youn, I just finished reading Henry Green's memoir Pack My Bag, where he looks back at different group dynamics and shared attitudes on the home estate (among different classes and ages. also eventually the manor becomes a hospital for Great War officers, getting patched up to go back to the battlefield" they are very kind to him, hard for other adults to manage), in primary and middle-to-secondary (the latter being Eton, though he doesn't name either), and Oxford (compared in some flash-forwards to London), and finally to fellow workers, total professionals and lifers, in his father's foundry---whom he finds liberating to work and socialize with, though is amazed and amused at some of the attitudes they share with his upper-class fellows, "for different reasons," he says, leaving us to do our own homework---he does provide some striking examples, though.

So, although he doesn't use the term, "provincial" is something he keeps coming back to, incl. tracking his own attitudes, conflicts in different social contexts.

"hard for other adults to manage" means adults other than the officers themselves; Henry is a child at this point.

Also the influence on group and self (behavior, image), while going through schools, of The War (they died for you---also a kiddie riot on the day Armistice is announced), of the Russian Revolution (ooo you're a rich boy), and the General Strike, which Henry tries to flee, hiring a car in Oxford as soon as it's announced---

He who once scanned every schoolmate's face for signs of disgust-justifying blue blood ("while being closely related to a lord myself").

t some of the attitudes they share with his upper-class fellows, "for different reasons," he says, leaving us to do our own homework

the unforeseen

There's a cost involved "You look awful" (something of a complaint/accusation, it seems) "I received a message, my parents are dying." (Other boy shuts down, moves away

Of course the rich kids and the workers can be seen as trying to nullify fear, so "for different reasons" only goes so far, though so do their life situations, and their lives.

In Almost English, the protagonist is a girl with a Hungarian grandmother and great aunts who attends a boarding school called Combe Abbey after attending a school in Ealing where she leaves her (former) best friend Ursula. She lives in Westminster Court. I think the class differences are presented drastically (and perhaps not with the intention of reinforcing class snobbery). The protagonist appears awkward (and is outright clumsy and dreamy the way girls can be), but the reader is sympathetic because she is so young and inexperienced and the sister of the boy who wants to and does bring her home for the weekend is so deliberately cruel. I don't know what will happen with the fathers yet (but be wary on their turf).

dow - I think part of the adventure of being an anthropologist (or Henry Green) would be to experience the intensity of social and cultural ties and ways of being, which become even more salient when you can cover much over limited ground. It is interesting how estates in Great Britain and France were taken over as hospitals and schools in WWII. (Two great wartime innovations worthy of fantastical treatment as probably has been done -- Morse code, the Underground Railroad ...)

Westminster Court is in Bayswater (which may mean something to London/UK residents).

I recently finished Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, a rather funny and poignant comedy of manners set among a group of elderly widows and widowers who are year-round residents at a shabby-genteel London hotel that functions as a retirement home. It seems that all residents come from a similar class stratum, though there is much policing of small gradations of propriety and manners between the residents, and much backbiting and tallying of minor slips. The main character, Mrs Palfrey, holds herself to a higher standard than the rest, at least in her own mind. After that, I read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. All three of the Cathers I've read have been solid entertainment.

Taylor and Cather are the right combination.

Digression alert! To pass an idle half hour I did some archaeology into the origins of ILB and thought I'd pass along that the first ever WAYR thread was initiated on ILB's inaugural day: Dec. 17, 2003. It was appropriately titled "What are you reading?" It accrued 83 posts in 64 days, ending on Feb 18, 2004. A duplicate thread titled "What are you reading?" was started on Feb 5, 2004. It accrued 146 posts before ending on March 16.

(I know I was both reading books and posting to ILB back then, but for some reason I didn't post to either WAYR thread.)

On that (also partly prompted by o.nate's post* and because I've thought about it before): it's a shame there isn't an easy way to search the whole 'what are you reading?' thread or database or whatever. I like reading what y'all think about books and searching within posts is a pain the arse.

*Mrs Palfrey is such a gently wise book. I think about it from time to time.

Reminds me of Updike's description of Stead's The Little Hotel. He thinks it's uneven, but as usual, goes an aptly detailed sense of narrative incl. well-paced and placed quotes, that his readers has a good chance to guess whether they might like (dislike, or only appreciate) the book, whatever his verdict. Which is sometimes a matter of tone; I think he just appreciates this one (but I'll check it out at some point) He ends with this:

Miss Stead, an outspoken left winger, enriches her perceptions of emotional dependence with a tactile sense of money as a pervasive, disagreeable glue that holds her heroines fast, in their little hotels of circumstance.

"though dying and penniless, is nonetheless consummately demanding and arrogant; and the Admiral, another decrepit Englishwoman, whoe insufferable manners induce persecution from the hotel servants. These servants, Italian and Swiss peasants in the main, and the touring artistes who perform at the neighboring night club....a Magic Mountain[like microcosm of Europe appears intended, though on a less Alpine scale

Sorry for the typos! Going by Updike's review, This book seems like it could be closer to Cather at her most acerbic, though maybe not as good, than anything "gently wise," though there is also some love in Christina's little hotel! Bad love, but still.

it's one of her slighter works (in every sense) but still worth a read. it was worked up & expanded from an earlier story that appears in her collected shorter fiction ocean of stories which i very much recommend.

Thanks! The original story might well be better, considering some other writers' work-ups.

But what I came back here to say before being reminded of that book, was that I've been struck by one more of Green's enviably succinct comparison of seemingly similar behavior across class lines:

Henry, now suitably trained and experienced, has moved up to management of his father's foundry, and goes with his cohorts to the annual company fete in Blackpool, the location they voted for. He asks an attractive, well-dressed young woman to dance, then is struck by "the corns of her right hand," yeah she's one of your foundry workers, Henry, duh. He hopes to have a little conversation as they dance--a few years earlier, still a teen and finally dancing because girls, he told one, trying to be distinctive, that he liked the chandelier. She: "How nice for the room."
But this one doesn't say anything, as he goes on about the band, the music, the food, the drink, the lighting, everybody having a good time. Finally the music stops, and she does speak: "No more, no more." Goes back to her chair.
Henry thinks this is really cool. After a lifetime of competitive chatter, he and his friends at Oxford (soon before he quit, or washed out), had come to the truly impressive sound of silence.
In Birmingham, and now in Blackpool, this young woman had no doubt heard quite a variety of male bullshit, with Henry's line of inane, generic patter available to young men of her own class as well, via movies and mags, with the smoov young gent, or better yet the cute clumsy wannabee, always good for another dance--until, and maybe she didn't know she'd had her fill 'til she met Henry, she has an honest gut reaction: "No more, no more."
He gets this, also in a gut way (as somebody who had also had his fill of many social expectations, or held out as long as possible, before throwing himself in)(also ended up as something of a hermit drunk).

that should have been ocean of story (singular). here's a review by the other antipodean stead from the lrb if you can get around the paywall.

Though she is rightfully acclaimed and translated into English, I doubt Dulce Maria Cardoso's second volume of essays is going to make it into the Anglosphere, so I'll just share one detail that cracked me up: when she was a teenager in 70's Lisbon, an older neighbour lent her a copy of "Rebecca", with the admonishment "read this so you don't end up marrying the first guy that comes along".

The myth of motherhood : an historical view of the maternal instinct Elizabeth Badinter,
have read teh introduction and first chapter. Looks interesting. I think it was a tiotle I was pointed to by Federici's Caliban and teh Witch.
Seems to read quite well and it is something I want to read.

Black and British : a forgotten history : fully revised and updated with a new chapter David Olusoga,
I enjoy Olusoga and this is one that I've been meaning to read for a while. Tracing the history back to where there is evidence. He has talked about presence of Black Roman Legionaries in the early CE years. Where I'm at in the book he is talking about John Blanke the Tudar court trumpeter after addressing early moves into slavery and pirating the Spanish slave trade.

Nellie Bly Around The World in 72 Days and other writings
late 19th century female stunt reporter who did a transglobal tour in the wake of Verne's Phineas Fogg at teh time the book was a new sensation and tried to beat his record. Her writings, journalistic pieces etc including her being shut up in a mental asylum to expose teh state of the institution.

The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein - I am turned off by the structural and thematic similarity to Last Resort, primarily the use of blackmail to stimulate page-turning and the preoccupation with (and supposed abnegation of the significance of) wealth in gentrified Brooklyn. The pace is frantic: I would have preferred to have arrived at choices (such as implied by the title) and action with more deliberation. Topical research seems to cover the surface and its vulnerable points.

(also ... presumption of either/or regarding the arts and sciences, and characterization as caricature based on related stereotypes ... extrovert or introvert ... and reinforcement of gender roles in marriage)

Peter Weiss - The aesthetics of Resistance (Vol.II)

Along with Nanni Balestrini's 'The Unseen' I can't think of a another novel that uses modernist writing to explore revolutionary politics. This novel was published in three vols, and completed before Weiss' death. It's set in the late 30s and this volume covers the start of WWII with the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression act, as the narrator watches and waits for a passage to safety as a refugee across Paris to Stockholm. There he meets Brecht and he become his researcher on a play about Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, a nobleman who headed a rebellion with peasants. The passages where he delves into medieval/peasant rebellion history as a read into the present day is one of the best things I have read this year (Things just don't go away, unless we all go away). Uwe Johnson, whose Anniversaries also used a more recent history to delve further back into the Nazi past, was also being published at the same time...an amazing time for German language prose that is finally making its way to English.

The 2nd part was finally translated ten years after the first. It can be read in a standalone way (I read the first part about five years ago), I reckon. Don't know when the 3rd part will be published. I hope not to wait as long.

I conclude BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL (2023).

Starting to enjoy this “I conclude” business, the P’Fox.

Today we had the final meeting of Prynne reading group (for now) because we finished the Poems. It took us a little more than a year, with some notable breaks— we didn’t meet at all this past summer, for example. All in all, a really compelling reading experience, and I am excited about our next venture— to read through as much Clark Coolidge as possible.

I should mention that I say “for now” because next year will see the release of Poems 2016-2024, a volume collecting the enormous amount of material Prynne has generated since 2016. It is 616 pages long— the current collected, which spans his career from the late 60s until 2015, is 676 pages long.

I am currently reading Ulf Stolterfoht (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) and Prynne’s Or Scissel, a delightful little book of rhyming lyrics from 2018.

I commence properly reading Luke Gibbons, JAMES JOYCE AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION (2023).

Best revelation to me so far is that Joyce was quite good friends with one Thomas W. Pugh, a socialist who had fought at Jacob's Biscuit Factory in 1916. Frankly I can't understand how I didn't know this already.

No spoilers here, but The Netanyahus: (Interminable Subtitle) certainly ends with a bang!

It's a very strange book. In an afterword the author makes it quite clear that the story was based on a presumably true anecdote, heard directly from Harold Bloom shortly before he died. He stresses that he altered many elements to fit the dictates of storytelling and to protect still-living participants, but he makes it equally plain that he stuck very closely to the original 'true' anecdote when describing the characters and actions of the Netanyahu family, whose arrival dominates the second half of the book. Even allowing for ample comic exaggeration, what he writes about them is jaw-dropping.

Behind the amazing circus-like atmosphere of the Netanyahu's antics, as described in the novel, Joshua Cohen touches frequently on the conundrums he perceives in being jewish in the post-WW2 world. It's rather like a person who has had a wisdom tooth pulled will compulsively send their tongue exploring the empty socket, even when it is sore to the touch. He arrives at no conclusions on that subject, but you can tell it is a tender spot, and ultimately that is where the real value of the novel resides, not in the clowning of the Netanyahus. Though I did enjoy their getting clowned.

I loved The Netanyahus. That description is perfect.

The Sum Of Us Heather Mcghee
I heard a load of podcasts that either had the author guesting or mentioned the book around the time this came out early in the pandemic.
It's the one that raised the point of the attempt to integrate swimming pools in the late 50s leading to white councils shutting them down rather than integrate them. It goes onto look at other instances of the zero sum game that this thought is based around.
Interesting book and I'm glad i finally got to read it. I think I just came across it in another book I copied the bibliography from recently and hoping that things it mentions are going to get read by me in the near future. Alongside the rest of my TBR list.

From the Plantation To The Ghetto August Meier & Elliot Bundwick
1970 published Black History book.
Interesting since its about 40 years plus earlier than most of the ones I've read but seems pretty well informed. I think there's been more research done since but this does seem pretty worth it.
First chapter looked back at W.E.B. du Bois and some West African culture.

Elizabeth Badinter The Myth of Motherhood.
Feminist history of the idea of the maternal instinct. First chapter looked back at the Patriarchy after introduction looked back at tradition of wet nursing in France focusing on 18th century. I heard a podcast talking about similar few weeks ago.
Anyway pretty interesting. Translation reads pretty well.

I read Helen Graham, THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION (2005).

A useful book that gave me facts and chronology that I am afraid I did not previously have.

The story can also be quite harrowingly grim to read.

The author has a somewhat culturalist approach, talking of the war as a clash of identities and cultures. She uses the term 'culture wars', a term extremely common now but not much used in the UK in 2005. I must assume that she was drawing on its use in the US in the 1990s.

A point that emerges, which may be familiar, is the culpability of Western democracies, notably the UK, in appeasing Spanish fascism both during, and well after, the war.

I finished Diane Athill's Don't Look At Me Like That, about being sexually active in midcentury England. I guess I try one of her memoirs, also re-published by NYRB.

I have that checked out! I finished Greek Lessons by Han Kang (I think she is a poet who succeeds as a novelist) and started A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. I fear that this gate will enter as a barrier for a toddler.

The recent elections in Spain made me wonder about the legacy of Franco. It was interesting when that was how identity was factored (as opposed to how it might be now).

I hope it is about more than that.

I am not sure what culturalist means (i.e., what would go into determining culture and political allegiances). I think identity and ideology were based on class in the UK and in Europe and then in the US also on social issues -- sometimes masking differences across race and ethnicity -- that in the UK and in Europe could be perceived as surrogates for their determinants.

In this instance, it would mean something like: a historian focusing on cultural facts and factors as causes, rather than eg: economic facts, or military history, or high politics, or something else.

(I think you mean what determines everyday experience; I think this could vary over time and perhaps once favoring communism or fascism meant as much and was as everyday as being for abortion or immigration or Brexit or against. I haven't read the book and couldn't tell much from this: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-spanish-civil-war-a-very-short-introduction-9780192803771)

This month's book club selection is Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead. This is the second of his we've read (the first being The Nickel Boys). He's an extraordinarily capable writer. The protagonist of this one is the owner of a furniture store in Harlem in the late 50s/early 60. Whitehead uses this character to explore a number of dimensions of Black life while (largely) avoiding reducing the other characters to stereotypes, and there are times when the prose really sings.

I read Silverview, John LeCarre. It was his last complete novel, and might be his shortest at just over 200 pages of generously large print. It took me a couple of sittings - maybe 3½ hours - and I am not a speedy reader. As befits so good a craftsman, it was very competently put together, but in comparison with his many other novels, it was fairly slight. His distaste for recent UK governments and politics was an unstated theme.

I picked up the Sisman biography of Le Carre nicely cheap in a pretty new looking copy in a charity shop last week. NOt really looked at it so far. BUt hope to get it read.

I read Transit by Anna Seghers. I saw the movie previously and found it not particularly interesting, so I probably never would've read the novel if I hadn't been on a trip away from home with nothing else to read but my wife's Kindle which had this novel on it. I'm very glad I did, because the novel is much better than the movie. I don't know why film-makers try to make movies of novels that depend so much on a unique authorial voice. It almost never translates well. The novel on the other hand was very engaging. The narrator is a strange person and its hard to get a handle on his motivations but somehow his actions manage to seem believable, and the action manages to be somewhat Kafkaesque and dreamlike without completely tossing realism overboard. Maybe this is a hasty judgment but I would say it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with Camus's The Plague in the annals of occupation-inspired lit.

The Crazy Iris and other Tales of the Atomic Aftermath, edited by Kenzaburo Oe - Got this decades ago when I was reading a lot of Japanese authors in preparation for a trip to Nippon. Never got around to it, partially of course due to the very grim subject matter. But with Oppenheimer opening so much discourse on here and elsewhere, I felt its time had come - I think with these kinds of tragedies it's very easy to start from a point of "yes yes of course it was terrible we all agree" and then move on to the Philosopher King part of the debate on whether it was justifiable/inevitable without fully digesting exactly how it felt to the people caught up in it, and that's quite dangerous. Kinda like the information in the media that an atrocity has happened doesn't do much to public opinion but pictures do.

Anyway: most of the authors collected, though not all, were actual witnesses to the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings. What comes across above all is the immense strangeness of the event - no one living through it had the slightest notion of what had just happened, ppl unsure of where to flee to, fears of incoming bombings continuing. Small groups of local doctors and nurses totally at a loss as to how to treat the people that need their help. Taken as a whole, the stories also give a strong context for life around that time: the before (a young schoolkid on his way to the mine that the Imperial Japanese regime had ordered his class to work in) and the after (Hiroshima survivors living in basically slum housing many months after the bomb was dropped destroying their homes).

I return to Luke Gibbons, JAMES JOYCE AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION. It talks about montage and is rather a montage of ideas and quotations itself.

Finishing summer with: Miquel de Palol - The Garden of Seven Twilights. Issued on Dalkey Archive, one of a batch of new books from them since the guy who ran it died. A third of the way in. Having this as a book in translation is just about the only thing it has in common with Dalkey of the past. Basically a group of people gather gather in a complex outside a destroyed Barcelona (world shattered by war and conflict) and tell each other stories. So far, so much of an update of Boccaccio but the narrative skill and imagination is nowhere near as strong. It does lots of stories within stories but I think it sacrifices doing one of them well for doing 2 or 3 badly. Very quantity over quality. Its very snappily easy to read (Noveau Roman it isn't); Palol was a poet but concision is lacking, a lot of poets don't do prose narrative but they can do something else with prose. Not quite there at the moment.

There are 500 pages left which I could easily finish in a week or so but so what?

Lorrie Moore has outdone herself with the characterization of Sarah Brink and the Keltjin family. I can't help but love them all. Maybe this is not a good thing and not a marker of good writing, but how enjoyable it is.

xxxp, Daniel. have you read John Hersey's Hiroshima? based on interviews with survivors, it tracks their movements, in alternating third-person narratives, just before the blast and soon after, through the city built around a confluence of six rivers---well, one interviewee was swivelling around in her office chair, about to ask another worker something at the moment of the blast, was trapped in rubble for a long time--but later the German priest makes his way to the hospital, meets her, they have a conversation---I want to read the second edition, when Hersey follows up with more interviews and research.
He says in this first one that Japanese physicists deduced what had happened fairly quickly, from international professional scuttlebutt, despite Manhattan Project security (there was some awareness that Americans and others were working toward a thermonuclear weaoon, like that science fiction story that earned author Clive Cartmill a visit from the FBI), and news reports added more evidence, which the Japanese physicists contextualized clearly enough for public consumption, while the US Gov was still not doing that so much. Hersey's book made a whole issue of The New Yorker, edited very quietly.

The second edition was researched and published in the 80s, I think. The science fiction story reflected some awareness that was around, at least on mid-40s geek fringes (as well as among those with security clearances).

Kenan Malik Not So Black And White.
Quite interesting. Summarises history of race I've read elsewhere. Reasonably well written.vast bibliography to point me to further reading.

dow, I have not, sounds interesting. According to this anthology there's actually a lot of published testimonials from victims, tho who knows how many have been translated.

I read Alex Kazemi’s New Millennium Boyz, couldn’t put it down, really.

It poses some interesting challenges for readers, as it pretty aptly documents the attitudes, patois, and behaviors of suburban white teenage boys in the US around the turn of the millennium. That is to say: the book contains a lot of misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and violence.

I escaped the sort of environment that the book documents by the time it really mattered, but my middle school years were reflected back at me through the book. (Fwiw, I was basically “taken out” of the school system because I was being mercilessly bullied for a number of reasons). It does an equally good job of depicting Y2K culture, from PBS (which the kids call “Parents BullShitting”) to popular music to the rise of the internet and early online video culture.

And I think that part of its point is that mainstream handwringing over what is happening to a certain class and race of young men is largely bullshit, not because young men aren’t in crisis, but because the handwringing does little to change the culture of how young men are raised in USAmerican society. The book suggests, through its action, that the hollow center of the culture, its banality and stupidity, builds and allows for hollow and broken young men to perpetuate the social ills I mention above.

Whether it needed to utilize the moves that it does is certainly up for debate, but it gets at some things about my own experience growing up that I found illuminating.

One of them, perhaps the question that the book asks in the end, is whether the then-new hypervisibility, self-as-brand, and lack of privacy actually makes us more invisible to ourselves and those around us. Still a potent, if perennial, question.

I am about 3/4 of the way through Harlem Shuffle. It's very well-written. Some passages are just gorgeous. However, if I'm comparing it to his last novel (which, tbf, won the Pulitzer), it seems a little . . . the words that come to mind are "light" and "directionless." It's more of a caper than anything weightier. I suppose it's unfair to expect every book from a writer to be as impactful as his or her best work.

finished Mishima's "The Sound of Waves" last night, going to dig back into Chateaubriand's memoirs, which i made it about 1/3 of the way through last winter.

ton of things, especially some more recent stuff (fiction and non-fiction), that i need to get from the library soon; just a question of making the push to put it all on hold at my local branch.

this thread both inspires and overwhelms me on the reading front

I'm a few pages from finishing The Last Grain Race, Eric Newby, about his time spent as an apprentice deck hand, aged 18, on a four-masted sailing ship, circling the globe from Belfast to South Australia, picking up a load of wheat, and returning with it to England in 1938-39. It was written in the mid-1950s and is somewhat more ironic than the usual wooden-ships-and-iron-men genre (note: the ship was steel-hulled).

It shares some characteristics with Two Years Before the Mast in that Newby is a public school product interpreting life in the lower reached of the working class. Except where it diverges into long explanations about the ship's rigging and other technical details, it is readable and amusing enough. But Newby is not Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London. Even though he is clear enough about the low pay, back-breaking work, bad food, and mortal dangers of the job, he has no real interest in the class system. Basically, he is just slumming.

The Matrix by Lauren Groff. Nun lit (see also The Corner That Held Them), at the halfway point it almost dips its toe into fantasy or magical realism but it mostly seems to want to stay on the straight and narrow.

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman. Birkbeck College is mentioned as a path to advancement for a minor character, a clerk at Imperial Foods owned by Mr. Khan who is married briefly to the protagonist and comes to live in London for a new life. I've read a few novels by Rachman and in his writing think I detect the discipline (and limits) of his having previously written for a news publication, which I read somewhere while reading his first novel and so may not be entirely objective. (Separately, I am wondering how UCL fits within the system.)

It's strange to think that Lorrie Moore is a responsible adult now and writes about bands that I knew. I like getting to know obliquely the cross section of America that she writes about and her experience in it. I am gladthat the protagonist was able to hold her own when she did and I especially liked the parts about her cutting loose when she was adrift.

Rachman is appealing if you fantasize about living abroad.

King Solomon's Mines, H Rider Haggard - Quartermain probably the least read of the characters from Moore's original League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? A big game hunter in Africa immediately conjuring more troublesome things than, say, an invisible man. So yeah this is about Quartermain helping a guy out whose brother has disappeared and discovering a Lost Kingdom. The portrayals of the African characters, while mostly "benign", also tend towards the paternalistic - I was surprised though to read a paragraph where Quartermain makes a big deal out of not using the n word, which he dislikes, and states that some "natives" are gentlemen while some rich white men are not. This struck me not as particularly impressive anti-racism from Haggard but because it suggests that even in Great Britain circa 1880 the word already had a stigma amongst some white people, which I wasn't aware of.

Less serious but of course the hunting sequences are also a bummer, particularly when they're not doing it to survive: lots of talk about "poor beasts" and moments of compassion for the dying animals. Don't shoot them then, Allen!

Anyway outside of all that the novel has an amusing author's voice, Quartermain sometimes coming across as a child's idea of a hero - he remarks often on his companion's propensity towards swearing, which amounts to said companion saying "God" and "Jesus" at times. Also as Alec Guiness said about the script to Star Wars - I want to know what happens next.

KSM and She were big films and are often repeated on the lesser freeview channels. but those are the only two from the list of 40+ things he wrote that i recognise.

In The Italian Teacher, the one character who knows both the father and the son is Marsden. I am curious about what could have happened without an imagined deadline or word limit but am not certain that that character would have been right (otherwise, Natty, or less likely, Birdie or Barrows).

barbara tuchman - a distant mirror

my second tuch. this is her book about the 14th century. it’s a pretty fat tome and i’ve been reading a few pages before bed each night, at this rate it’ll take me a year to finish it. definitely slower and denser than guns of august (which i gobbled up in a few sittings) but she’s such a great writer. every paragraph is dripping with “the sauce”

My sense is that every boomer in the UK has read KSM but their kids will only have read it if there was a copy on the shelves growing up.

barbara tuchman - a distant mirror

my second tuch. this is her book about the 14th century. it’s a pretty fat tome and i’ve been reading a few pages before bed each night, at this rate it’ll take me a year to finish it. definitely slower and denser than guns of august (which i gobbled up in a few sittings) but she’s such a great writer. every paragraph is dripping with “the sauce”

― flopson,

I'm glad you mentioned her. I've wondered if she's still worth a read (and if her stuff remains accurate).

distant mirror is an incredible book.

guns of august was solid imo.

i've had her march of folly on my list for while, but it seems the most vulnerable to reappraisal on its historical merits.

Guns of August is certainly worth reading despite not being perfectly accurate. i recommend pairing it with a long book review of christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers like this one https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n23/thomas-laqueur/some-damn-foolish-thing

Oh right I have March of Folly lying around the bed waiting to be read.
So need to do that and maybe these others

distant mirror is an incredible book.

guns of august was solid imo.

i've had her march of folly on my list for while, but it seems the most vulnerable to reappraisal on its historical merits.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 19 September 2023 11:00 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

im curious about the stilwell in china one

I found March of Folly to be the weakest of her efforts, unless you compare it to Stilwell and the American Experience in China., which is essentially just her doctoral thesis, seized on by her publisher in order to capitalize on the immense popularity of The Guns of August.

I always run into this with history books, constantly debating with myself whether to read the boring but superficially more accurate new one or the old one that reaches further into the ecstatic truth of vivid, aesthetically sublime writing.

If you want relentless accuracy, fact-by-fact (you can look 'em all up!) as nail-by-nail x overview as compelling narrative, try Timothy Egan: The Big Burn is the life of a forest fire in rich timberland---that burned an area the size of Connecticut in a weekend---when the U.S. Forest Service was itself seen as a Big or Bigger Burn by righteous capitalists. The Service is not presented as perfect by any means, but the story zooms from macro to micro and back at just the right times, with the struggle of different groups and individuals fighting the fire juxtaposed with how things are going back in D.C. (not too much of this shit)

Righteous capitalist catnip for The Pioneer Spirit sets the stage for environmental and social disaster in Egan's even deeper-digging The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.

I'm starting into Persuasion, Jane Austen. Her prose is a precision instrument, just a pure pleasure in itself.

xp The Worst Hard Time has the distinction of being the most severely panned book in my book club, which has now been running for more that 10 years and has read more than 100 books.

Austen is gangsta

Finished Matrix. Some lovely writing but it felt mostly like a straight line journey from beginning to end, no major diversions or setbacks or unexpected events. In other words somewhat lacking in plot.

On to The Swimming Pool Library.

Swimming Pool Library is another, like Famished Road, that has been sat over there on the shelf for 30 years. ha, in fact, they are literally next to each other

(unread / unfinished)

I gave up on The Famished Road last year.

King Solomon's Mines does this (offensive) thing where the white explorers encountering a hidden civilization pass themselves off as wizards by using their modern weapons, familiar to me from many a children's cartoon and Carl Barks comic but I wonder if this is where the trope started.

My fav instance of it is in the (I'm sure otherwise not very good) Martin Lawrence vehicle Black Knight where Lawrence, transported to medieval times, turns on his lighter and goes "look, FIRE!" and one of the rampaging villagers just goes "well, we have fire".

David Olusoga Black & British
pretty decent history of black presence in Britain going back to Roman times.
It jumped forward to Tudor times to describe musicians at Henry VIII's court and then followed through teh start of the slave trade and hat it was easier to seize a shipment containing human cargo asa privateer than go through the whole process of buying from sourcel I've just read the cynical treatment of loyalists and black soldiers who fought for the loyalist side in the War of Independence in what was to become the States. & then gone through the scheme to move population incoming from that in Sierra Leone. Which I hadn't taken in previously was a combination of scam and wishful thinking by the guy who suggested Sierra leone. & that he had actually written an article/submission saying why the same place wasn't suitable as a penal colony shortly before suggesting it was a good place for a black colony.
Good book which I've meant to read for a long time but I've neglected since getting out of the library cos I'm in the middle of reading a stack of other things.

LUdd in the mist Helen Mirlees
fantasy novel that was a big influence on Neil Gaiman among others. & I was turned onto by reading his Welcome To The Cheap Seats recently.

Voodoo In Haiti Alfred Metraux
study from the mid 20th century looking at the syncretic religion and its effect on the population of the country it was prevalent in.
Its a bit racist, it is from 1947 so I guess that's to be expected. Probably could be a lot more so so maybe by comparative standards its like totally woke.
Pretty interesting and i think it is well known.
THink this was something I picked up from the bibliography of Federici's Caliban and the Witch . Another book I'm neglecting.

Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment
Scholarly study on the subject of fairytales that I've meant to read for decades. THink I was looking at it the summer of 20 years ago and didn't get to read it

Toni Morrison Mouthful Of Blood
an anthology of shorter pieces by the black author. My current bathroom book

> I gave up on The Famished Road last year.

it's almost as if i remembered this rather than just bringing it up at random 8)

took a bunch of books to amnesty last saturday, mainly modernish sf that i know i will never read again (utopia, altered carbon, windup girl) and things i've bought as ebooks since (american gods). maybe these should follow.

Just started Deacon King Kong by James McBride.

(I find myself making up thread titles for Aimless the way I sometimes make up baby names or others might play video games. I was trying to find a way to incorporate the moon or moonlight without much success. The moon can really light up one's path.)

Deacon King Kong, otoh, was one of the most beloved book club reads. Fantastic book.

What were your book club's objections to The Worst Hard Time?

I think it was just the sheer unremitting misery of the narrative. I actually found it engaging.

Yeah, somehow he finds momentum in misery! Digging through the Dust Bowl.
The Big Burn might have more of that, moving with the crackling, drying flash of the fire, drying the melodramatic/disaster porn potential to plain detail and perspective and scale of physical=mental-emotional (also strategic and tactical) considerations, scale of aftereffects as well.

(fwiw, wiki sez TWHT

won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction[2][3] and the 2006 Washington State Book Award in History/Biography.

I recently read the Keith Richards autobiography (with James Fox), "Life". I found it pretty enjoyable. At 550+ pages, perhaps it could've been trimmed a bit. The stories about the early days were the most interesting to me, and even though that "imperial" phase of the Stones only took up the first decade of their now 6+ decade run (5 decades at the time of writing), the book never completely lost my interest. For someone whose public image is taciturn, Richards seems rather loquacious in print. Not only that, he's a pretty decent raconteur, with a dry sense of humor and an ear for pungent turns of phrase. It seems like his two great loves in life are music, esp. blues and rock, and drugs, and he writes at length about both. The music parts were the more interesting parts for me. It would take a far more introspective writer than Richards to find something interesting to relate about the numberless drug experiences, which tend to become repetitive. But any way you slice it, he has lived an interesting life and managed to relate enough of it to carry the book, no doubt with the indispensable assistance of his co-author.

There Will Be Fire - Rory Carroll

vv compelling read, covering the IRA's plan to/failed attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher by bombing the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Not having known much about this story, it's fairly astonishing just how close they got to pulling off the unthinkable. The before mostly covers Thatcher's policies w/r/t Northern Ireland, bomber Patrick Magee's path towards this event, other bombings carried out, and the during is a fairly horrifying recreation of what actually occurred. The after is the tracking of the suspects, and the race to track down an IRA operative in Scotland who is part of a seemingly separate plot (and he is, but they're connected.) It achieves a nice balance without being "actually, both sides are etc etc..."

Like an old German I knew said of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, the devil saved her.

My third Richard powers, Bewilderment. kinda meh

Also recently finished Robinson’s the dark beyond the stars. Way too long

I am about 3/4 of the way through Harlem Shuffle. It's very well-written. Some passages are just gorgeous. However, if I'm comparing it to his last novel (which, tbf, won the Pulitzer), it seems a little . . . the words that come to mind are "light" and "directionless." It's more of a caper than anything weightier. I suppose it's unfair to expect every book from a writer to be as impactful as his or her best work.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, September 16, 2023

Haven't read Harlem Shuffle yet, but it is apparently the first part of a trilogy. The second book, Crook Manifesto, was just published this summer.

I really loved the two books I've read by him, The Underground Railroad (which won the National Book Award) and The Nickel Boys (The Pulitzer)

Going through Le Carré's books in order, I've now read or reread all of the Smiley novels - "Call for the Dead", "A Murder of Quality", "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "The Looking-Glass War", "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "The Honourable Schoolboy", and "Smiley's People".

I'm a long way away from "Legacy of Spies", the distant follow-up published in 2017

My next book is "The Little Drummer Girl" from 1983, which I remember being my favorite Le Carré at the time

I've heard that The Crook Manifesto is better than Harlem Shuffle, maybe more of a genre/lit (or at least character study) balance, like his zombie-hunting Zone One(clean-up of v.valuable Manhattan real estate, cause you know the plague is over). I really enjoyed that one.

still, the preview of Harlem Shuffle seemed promising: POV of a fence, usually a flat weasel in crime stories, here a scuffling small store owner lured into the shade.

How did you find Smiley’s People? Got it on the shelf, tempted if put off by the size. Certainly it opens well.

It's time again to wind down this summertime thread and move into our shiny new digs at I'm in Love With Books and I Feel Fine! What Are You Reading in Autumn 2023?. See y'all there!

xp I really liked Smiley's People, it seemed more coherent to me than The Honorable Schoolboy and less difficult to follow than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (the two previous books), and brought the original series to a nice conclusion