I'm in Love With Books and I Feel Fine! What Are You Reading in Autumn 2023?

Time to put aside the sultry pastimes of summer and say farewell to Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?. I recommend you settle down in a corner where the light is adequate for reading. You don't want to ruin your eyes, do you?

I'm partway into Persuasion, Jane Austen's final completed book -- according to the overly long Introduction that I hurriedly skipped past. Unlike its tedious Introduction, this book slaps!

i just read havana glam, attributed to wu ming 5. a series of epigraphs begins the second part of the novel, ectopistes migratorius, including one attributed to johnny rotten in a 1977 nme interview: "david bowie's cuban period represents the first serious attempt to make socialism sexy." alternate history. in 2045, president alfred albert wank is supporting a project by theoretical physicists jurgen grabowski and peter hans goldbaum to send temponauts back to 1944 to force the americans to carry out the plans they drafted to obliterate the soviet union with nuclear weapons. this is the only way to halt the vietnam war, the rise of the counterculture, leftist movements around the world, and the final war of 2022. first part: chrome-spangled americana and jazz on the radio, a tender european evocation of the golden age, occasionally channeling philip k. dick, with the first temponaut pursued by the oss as a nazi spy, then running afoul of james forrestal, and materializing among the navajo (i will stereotype: europeans love american indians, jazz, reggae, which will come in later, all of which they romanticize as noble savagery). second part, second temponaut, after the wank government learns of his failure reading the ripples of time through official archives, goes back to complete the job. there is a lengthy interlude in jamaica, with the second temponaut, having decided to continue his fight against communism within the intelligence community, taking part in jlp/pnp street fights (dueling agencies, cia and cuban intelligence), with wank's own political struggle in the background (dueling parties, reconstruction vs. tradition). third part, third temponaut, third attempt in the form of a cultural atomic bomb. the results of the instability in time are listed: this is lengthy, and includes not only the return of the passenger pigeon, ectopistes migratorius, but also david bowie's conversion to communism. this—sending bowie to havana—was part of the wank scheme, it seems, to disrupt cuban communism with individualism, hedonism, rebellious fashion, and music celebrating chemical and sexual excess. wank falls. bowie meets the first temponaut on navajo land. skip to the epilogue. good pulpy sci-fi whatever the political message if there was one.

now reading Thomas Seethaler's The Tobacconist, an affecting but somewhat ominous coming-of-age story set in Vienna in 1937

About to start Lark Ascending, by Silas House. Another book club book I had never heard of till this month's host picked it.

David Olusoga Black & British
Long history of black presence in Great Britain and some British presence elsewhere. I like Olusoga's writing and this is really good. Gives more depth to some stories I've come across elsewhere.
Don't think I'd quite come across the interwoven story of British loyalist blacks from the American colonies, Nova Scotia, the Sierra Leone settlement attempts, Equiano, what a scam the initial set up was, proximity of slaving network and on in quite this depth before.
There's probably at least one book fully dedicated to the story though. &;here it's one story out of many from 500+ years covered. Book is 500+ pages long so I shouldn't have backburnered it to the extent that I did

For The Many Not The Few
Graphic novel looking at popular uprisings in Britain over 700 odd years.
With a linking narrative of a white grandfather talking to his part Indian granddaughter and telling her about these events.

Lark Ascending is a very quick read; I started it yesterday and am halfway through it. It's a dystopian novel that owes a huge debt of gratitude to The Handmaid's Tale, both the book and the show. It's not bad. He writes well enough to make me want to know what happens next.

Have read a few things large and small since my last check-in, but am currently reading Loop, a book of poetry by John Taggart. I had never read him before, but a friend gave this to me, and I’ve taken to it— strange, insistent poems and repeated images in a wide variety of forms. Hypnotic, in a way. A new poet to investigate more!

Flaubert - Madame Bovary. The books canon is good.

I read Galveston by Nic Pizzolato, the creator of True Detective. It was riddled with cliché but he writes place beautifully and that was enough to carry the relatively thin storyline.

To stay with the TD world for a bit longer, I started a book of Thomas Ligotti short stories. The story I read last night, 'The Frolic', is a curious thing. There was a Cheever vibe in the uneasy middle-class calm of the set and setting but everything was underlit by this kind of diseased atmosphere that built as the story progressed. I fell asleep pretty much directly after I'd finished the story and had the most intense bout of sleep paralysis, where I was being consumed by a sallow, clinging fog. Which is a 100% recommend in my book.

I think my reading of this would benefit from some knowledge of Lovecraft, of which mine is cursory at best. Is there a Lovecraft text I should start with or a book of criticism I could get?

I need to reread Madame Bovary to recall the role of the pharmacist and the situation/place/setting/environment.

In Deacon King Kong, I am relishing the multi-generational and multicultural proximity, nicknames, differences in urgency (across and in spite of generational divides), but I am still reading and figuring out what the author has to say in his personal canon ... even if they are stories told and heard for pleasure ...

which translation of bovary?

i'm rereading nazi literature in the americas by roberto bolaño with some friends. haven't read it in years but it's a surprisingly durable bit. not among his best but bolaño was a formative writer for me when i was in high school and returning to his work it always feels like a reservoir i can still tap.

i just finished middlemarch. i don't care what anyone says, and this might surprise you, but it was good. there i said it.

Bruno Bettelheim Uses Of Enchantment
Mid 70s work where German psychologist looks at fairy tales as analogies of personal development. How the self matures at.
Pretty interesting I guess. I think that might just about fit with the ideaof folk tale as passer on of societal values and customs etc which is what they traditionally did. I haven't been fully convinced by bits of it like him talking about a class full of kids who were convinced that paper models of the comet Kohoutek somehow were the comet and treating them with a lot less respect after its pointed out that they're not. Seems like something missing in the retelling.
I'm finding it interesting anyway though not totally convinced.

yeah, i'm going to request it from my library.

can anyone recommend a recent, tight, 200 pages or so crime book that's not a turn down for a long plane flight?

"which translation of bovary?"

Davis.

Has anyone attempted to read different translations of the same book side by side? After reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang, I became aware of mistakes that were simple vocabulary and made me question my understanding of the original text. I could have detected those errors (I think).

I read that Han defended that translation after a lot of ppl criticised it, but that may just be professional courtesy

That's interesting, re: Vegetarian. There hasn't been an evaluation of much Korean literature in translation, mostly because it's quite a recent thing to have this much Korean Lit in English.

Whereas there is much more Japanese literature in English over decades with some commentary on past translator's efforts.

As I don't know any source languages (the language I grew up with I've forgotten through lack of use) I just look at the literary fluency of the English I am reading.

xp - Deborah Smith has gone on to translate Kang's other books too..

I'm wondering if choice of first language matters, and if the author has discretion (or influence or true freedom of agency) or whether it lies with the publisher.

Interesting discussion about the translation of The Vegetarian here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/han-kang-and-the-complexity-of-translation

can anyone recommend a recent, tight, 200 pages or so crime book that's not a turn down for a long plane flight?

We read Blacktop Wasteland for book club. It's an entertaining read, although it does have a couple of scenes that make you go, "Oh, come ON!"

I've really enjoyed the series by Caimh McDonnell, called somewhat tongue-in-cheek "the Dublin trilogy" (which is now up to something like 7 books). The first one is called A Man with One of Those Faces. I find him vastly entertaining.

i read both Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. the guy writes plots where the narrative never stops moving and most people don't escape alive, based on that pair. he's a good one, though for sure the twists and turns of the tales are frequently outlandish. i'd recommend both, they're swift reads. i intend to read his other pair.

i'm reading All God's Children by Arthur Lyons, the second in his Jacob Asch series. thus far in the story, it's another '60s L.A. counterculture gone to '70s seed private eye tale (similar to the first novel The Dead Are Discreet), with Jake hunting down a missing girl caught between a religious cult, a post-religious cult deprogrammer, a drug-dealing biker gang, and several others. thanks to ian for the recommendation on this series, it's excellent. apparently Lyons wrote a lot about cults prior to tackling this detective series, and he seems to know the inner workings of them inside-out.

the twists and turns of the tales are frequently outlandish.

(Last night I dreamt that I couldn't figure out subject verb order from glosses of ancient Greek in textbooks because I was in front of people and skimming through grammars they handed to me. It was all very frustrating and pointless, the way most dreams seem to be once you get older, and I woke up late. I need to check out that link. I am still reading Deacon King Kong and making sense of it. Both books I've read by McBride point out that black slaves in the U.S. were kept from learning how to read; it seems to have lasted or had effects long after slavery ended.)

Lud in the Most Hope Mirrlees
Fantasy novel about a town on a frontier with Fairyland that I don't know if I'd guess came from as early as it does. May just be down to pervasive influence or something.
Doesnt seem overly dated though not sure exactly what I would think a book of its time that was would be like.
Trying to read it while half asleep and fluey. Think I'm enjoying it but not as deeply enchanted as it sounded from a description of it by Neil Gaiman had me hoping.
So hope it's something I can revisit.

That book seems to get namechecked a lot.

Finished Loop by John Taggart, moving onto Mohammed Zenia’s Tel Aviv, a book of poems that is doing a lot of interesting work around colonialism’s signifiers while also being very strangely beautiful. I don’t know the poet well, but have read with him twice in somewhat strange circumstances, and have always enjoyed his work— glad I found out he had a book!

I finished Lark Ascending, it was a lovely book. I also finished The Elegant Universe, which seemed like a real accomplishment. I started in on another of Greene's books, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. I find this stuff daunting but fascinating.

I'm reading A Month of Sundays, a candidate for some of the worst sex writing I've ever read.

Just got Paul Crooks' Ancestors about him
Managing to trace his family back through Jamaican slavery. I know he eventually traced things back to Africa not sure that's covered here.
So analogous to Roots but by a working class British West Indian guy.
I've seen webinars by the author so am very interested in reading this.

Slogging through Powers’ Bewilderment. Narrative is zzz but I am thinking differently about having respect for other sentient beings

yeah it's a mistake

i wanted to respond to the wondering of youn. i will share my experience and general feeling. it is not unlikely especially when talking about a language pair like korean-english that nobody proficient in the language apart from the translator themselves ever looked at the text. even if they engage an editor that knows the language and/or has read the original, readability in english rather than fidelity is the focus. sometimes, a step earlier than this, submitting a translation to the author's own agent or when getting permission to translate, the agent or author might have quibbles over actual translation errors (these will be in a sample)(these might require overliteral translations that get reversed by an editor later) but that seems rare.

moving out of romance language to romance language, it's usually possible unless you have produced a text in english unreadably faithful to the original (this plagues asian languages in translation still, where translation is dominated not by writers but academics), to rip them apart line by line, looking for the infidelity required to produce something readable in english.

I've run out of freebies, but translator of a (linked) Korean short story discusses it here: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-yi-mun-yol
Han Kang on her own story: https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/han-kang-02-06-23
Which is also in this round-up of linked commentaries: https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/sunday-reading-lost-and-found-in-translation

Real grab bag on my bedside table at the moment:

Emmanuel Carrere - 97,196 Words: Essays
James Ellroy - Silent Terror
Polly Barton - Fifty Sounds

I'm reading a pop history book I picked up at my favorite charity bookshop, The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley. Its 'hook' is describing a large delegation of US government diplomats and legislators, more than 60 of them, including the Secretary of War Howard Taft, who sailed to Asia in 1905 in furtherance of President Teddy Roosevelt's intense desire to acquire more colonial possessions and expand a US empire across the Pacific. Its real purpose is to expose how deeply white supremacy was embedded in the highest levels of the US power structure, founded in the exact same Aryan mythology that the Nazis later made use of.

So far, it has delineated just what lying, racist pieces of shit everyone connected to the conquest and brutalization of the Philippines were -- which nastiness I had read about long ago in contemporary anti-imperialist tracts written by Mark Twain, but now with added disgusting details. It's an encouraging thought that books about the violent racism of late 19th century imperialism can become best sellers and their truths percolate into some fraction of the US consciousness. But it seems like popular national mythologies are almost impossible to dislodge once they become well-established.

I remember The Imperial Cruise being a good read.

Here We are, Graham Swift (book club choice) - Kind of a big shrug for me. The stuff about being sent off as a kid during the war was good I guess. Nothing truly bad or hack about this I don't think but just kinda pointless?

Finished The Swimming Pool Library. Will is an entirely tedious protagonist - "My vanity which was so constitutional that it had virtually ceased to be vanity", lol nice try - the sections from Charles' diaries are no consolation. There was a feeling of a gathering of energies towards the end, before the last little burp of plot. I'm aware that I complained about lack of plot in my last read, I know a book can be perfectly fine without one but I think I'm just craving a good substantial story right now.

Read a decent amount of things on vacation. Highlight was probably Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris, which I mostly read while in Trieste, kind of corny I know but it was very enjoyable. Reflects on the strange history of the city and its pull upon her and a number of other writers despite its comparative lack of great sights and cultural/economic/historical importance. Found it tremendously moving towards the end, it was Morris's last book and it concludes with her musing on her own feelings about aging and irrelevance and how much that plays into her own perception of the city.

The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati - real bummer! But pretty incredible, the sort of novel that you can sum up in a brief sentence but is filled with odd, otherworldly detail and atmosphere that makes it hypnotic to read.

On The Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Junger - very odd semi-supernatural allegory that may or may not have been a swipe at the Nazis, didn't really get this tbh but it was pleasant enough to read.

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle - I really should have read the Lovecraft story it's riffing on but I thought it was a really compelling and surprising little horror novel.

still in the middle of The Garden of Seven Twilights, by Miquel de Palol - recently published by Dalkey Archive, long novel of stories within stories within stories, which I'm always kind of a sucker for. Most of the stories are pretty fun though there are some jarring shifts in tone and not a ton in the way of characters.

Travellers and The Settled Community: A Share Future John Heneghan, Mary(Warde) Moriarty , Michael O hAodha
book onIrish travellers . I wanted to get hold of some reading matter on the subject in teh wake of the Misleor festival last week. I think this has been on the shelves in teh local library for a while so I should have got to it faster. Came out in 2012.
Various essays on various factors on traveller life and interaction with settled community. I read the first couple of sections last night and it looks good.

Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan
book based on several conversations between the two from the early days of the pandemic lockdown in 2020. Gives some insight into Cave's headspace. Glad I read it, would still like a memoir from him though

Finished The Swimming Pool Library. Will is an entirely tedious protagonist - "My vanity which was so constitutional that it had virtually ceased to be vanity", lol nice try - the sections from Charles' diaries are no consolation. There was a feeling of a gathering of energies towards the end, before the last little burp of plot. I'm aware that I complained about lack of plot in my last read, I know a book can be perfectly fine without one but I think I'm just craving a good substantial story right now.

― behold the thump (ledge),

I read it after The Folding Star, The Spell, and especially The Line of Beauty, hence its slightness, its insularity.

Good to know I picked the duffer (impulse charity shop purchase).

Might get round to those others (and reread TLoB) one day.

Having just recently learned of the existence of the Two Month Review podcast, I am rereading 2666 as I listen to their episodes discussing it.

To stay with the TD world for a bit longer, I started a book of Thomas Ligotti short stories. The story I read last night, 'The Frolic', is a curious thing. There was a Cheever vibe in the uneasy middle-class calm of the set and setting but everything was underlit by this kind of diseased atmosphere that built as the story progressed. I fell asleep pretty much directly after I'd finished the story and had the most intense bout of sleep paralysis, where I was being consumed by a sallow, clinging fog. Which is a 100% recommend in my book.

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, September 26, 2023 11:12 AM (one week ago)

this was my september, all contemporary japanese authors, all cheap on amazon the month before, and all quite short and light.

Before The Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Last Children of Tokyo - Yoko Tawada
The Nakano Thrift Shop - Hiromi Kawakami
Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata
Tales From The Cafe - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

a coffee shop with a side order of time travel, japanese Children of Men, and two about female shop assistants.

there's a cheap lovecraft omnibus in the amazon uk's monthly deals btw, someone was asking (actually, the delphi omnibus is always cheap). and there are plenty of lists of top 10 lovecraft stories (i can never remember which names go with which stories so i'm kinda useless. The Cats Of Ulthar had cats in it fwiw)

I read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for the first time; to observe as Rilke gently repeats advice to his much less talented acolyte brought on a few giggles. I picked up Mario Vargas Llosa's entry Letters to a Young Novelist too.

I always preferred Lovecraft's dream stories to the Cthulhu mythos.

Thanks for the Lovecraft advice. I've not read a single thing but have read so much stuff that references him (however obliquely) it feels like I'm missing something.

I've never made it through Letters to a Young Poet. It's short but I still found it a slog.

It's a very 19/20 year old sort of book.

I despise Rilke lmfao

It's a very 19/20 year old sort of book.

― xyzzzz__,

I'd say fin-de-siècle or at least early 20th century.

After a dip into ILB archives confirming Mario Vargas Llosa's rec, I'm gonna start Juan Carlos Onetti's A Brief Life.

Love Onetti, though I've not read that one.

Rilke's novel was really good imo; a lot of his letters are fantastic and have all sorts of things in them, like his letters to Clara has some really nice art criticism.

After a few days of flitting around in some various books, I’ve settled on the recent gift of TJ Clark’s Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. I loved his book on Poussin, which I read in August, and this seems equally fascinating and “up my alley” so to speak.

The Sight of Death I loved that book. His Picasso book is fantastic too.

Uh, meant to put a question mark after that title

yes, The Sight of Death is the “Poussin” book. Of course, Poussin is in Heaven on Earth, too, but we also have Brueghel the Elder, Giotto, Veronese, and a few others.

I am reading Paul Morley's book "A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)". I am struggling with it. This guy really needs an editor. Its so overwritten and unfocused, digressing all over the place and yet I dont think he really gets under the skin of classical music. There's plenty of lists and facts alright but fails to engage really except for some funny anecdotes about him attending the Classical FM awards. His central thesis is that streaming is changing the way we look at classical music - it's all there and its not as hide bound to the past anymore. Streaming has made classical music more democratic. Argues that it's even looking to the future more than current pop music which seems even more quaint and showbiz now. Not an argument, I'm totally interested in but whatevz. I'm not entirely sure that I buy it.

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 - Max Hastings. Not being British, it's hard for me to gauge how much and how rightly this guy is detested around here, but I'm finding this to be a very readable overview of 30 years' worth of folly.

Up in the Old Hotel - Joseph Mitchell. Collected New Yorker articles. Highly recommended to anyone who loves reading about antiquated eccentric characters of the 20th century.

I'm reading Remain In Love by Chris Frantz on a post-Stop Making Sense Talking Heads kick. Late getting to it because I thought it seemed mostly inessential give or take a few pull quotes. About halfway through and I'd say I was only half right. I'm having a lot of fun, it's balm for a tired mind. The voice is so clear. In the world according to Frantz, parents are great, girls are beautiful, Tina's a knockout, food is delicious, art is cool, celebs are friendly, bands rock well, David Byrne is an asshole. Every sentence is one clause. There's just enough wry humour and self awareness here and there to keep you going but mostly it's just immersive dining, boning, rocking and gossiping from somebody who's been very fortunate in life and is happy to embrace it. I guessed he was a Taurus about 30 pages in.

Slightly interested to see how sour it might get when times get hard, but so far, I am knocking this back like a packet of Skittles.

I started reading Mary L. Trump's 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough about everyone's least favorite fails-upward-son. First impression is that it has enough substance to have made a good in-depth magazine article, but was padded out to 200 pages in order to wring a book out of it. It has some explanatory power for the origins and development of Donald's warped personality, but the time for explanations has long passed and the time for long overdue consequences may finally be in sight.

Honore de Balzac - The Quest of the Absolute

After Bovary it's an inescapable impression that 19th century French writers were utterly obsessed with mapping out the contours of boredom.

Having just recently learned of the existence of the Two Month Review podcast, I am rereading 2666 as I listen to their episodes discussing it.

― The king of the demo (bernard snowy)

Doing an ilx search on "2666" turns up page after page of interesting commentary. It prompted a lot of engagement and conversation from at least a couple dozen ilxors.

I don't do podcasts, but that is tempting. 2666 is one of my favorite books I've ever read. I never reread books these days, but I will be rereading it again at some point.

Rereading Kokoro, Natsume Soseki. Think it's been less than a decade since I read it but my memory of it is mostly "wtf this guy gets so obsessed with this random old dude and is such a dick to his parents"; I was perhaps still too close to student age myself, if only psychologically, and at this stage of my life I can see the guy's callousness from more of a distance - yeah he takes his parents for granted, that's what ppl in their late teens/early 20's are like. Quite gripped by the mystery of what lead sensei down his road of misanthropy - I have no memory at all of what it turns out to be!

I've been forcing myself to do a reread every ten books I finish - by nature I never do this, just move from book to book with that stupid checklist, pokemon collecting mentality. But forcing myself to do it reminds me of an uncomfortable truth: often enough, even with books I loved, I will remember very little from them and given enough time it's like I've never read them at all.

Good discipline, I should try it. I'm painfully reminded of the very recent episode where I finished a book and on adding it to goodreads discovered that I'd read it eleven years before. It did not stir a single shadow of a memory.

I recently read Either/Or by Elif Batuman, the sequel to her debut novel, The Idiot, which I read a couple of years ago. It seems that her skills have improved. The novel feels sharper and more focused. It still has that somewhat aimless quality of reading a real-life diary. Things happen one after the other, sometimes with no discernible connection. But that feeling fits well with the coming-of-age theme, as questions of agency and purpose are central. Selin often wonders why other people seem some definite and well-defined but to herself she seems so vague and numinous. It's a lovely and funny book, and I'm looking forward to the next in the series.

Sergio Pitol - Mephisto's Waltz (Selected Short Stories)

Pitol is one of the very best dozen or so writers I have discovered over the last few years through translation and his take on the short story is really interesting because they are at times like sketches of what a writer could do with a story.

Also very few writers integrate their reading into their fiction. The last story starts with a commentary on Thomas Mann. A couple finish with a commentary on the story just told.

This could be a bit like Borges but in between you have the story of fictional people doing fictional things. He integrates a lot of his life in them, so they take place while in a place he was put in through his real life as part of Mexico's diplomatic service.

I went through most of it yesterday and in the morning these are the impressions.

I finished Mary Trump's book. It was OK-ish, but didn't tell much about Donald that wasn't already obvious in 2020 to anyone who had been paying even a modest amount of attention and whose head wasn't buried in the personality cult. My conclusion: overhyped and underdone.

I started Evelyn McDonnell's The World According to Joan Didion and finished Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout.

Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson (which is about finding the right words)

I'm between book club novels, am on pause in my obsession with John Le Carré and Dennis Lehane, and am listening to an audiobook of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I'm assuming you are all more acquainted with this novel than me.

I love the story. A fantasy horror novel written in purple prose about two 13-year old boys trying to overcome evil in a small town, and a father trying to help them. It is a good book for Halloween

Henry Green - Caught. Besides the goings on between two firefighters it has some great writing on The Blitz.

The Man Eater Of Malgudi, R.K. Narayan -Protagonist works as aprinter whose front office doubles as sort of hang out space for the denizens of the (fictional) Indian village he lives in. One day a burly taxidermist (!) muscles his way in and unilaterally decides to become his tenant, all the while bullying his friends at every opportunity. This has the sort of cozy, gently satirical bent that makes you feel like you've known the characters for agees. There's a bunch of books in the series it seems. This one's dedicated to Graham Greene "for many years of friendship".

read Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo, which is the 4th? Kosuke Kindaichi mystery (the 3rd released in english) and it was less good than the previous two. 70+ more to go...

On a brief vacation I read The Moving Target, one of Ross MacDonald's earliest Lew Archer novels (the first one?). Now reading Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene, which so far as I've read merits the descriptor: droll.

Our Man in Havana is one of those books I read as a kid that embedded itself in my brain and pops up at odd moments.

xp I loved The Moving Target, and the rest of the Lew Archer novels that I've read. They are like a travelogue of the underbelly of 1940s - 1950s Los Angeles.

Finished The Buddenbrooks, which was a bit of a morbid slog. Each character briefly flickers, chokes, and stays around for another 250 pages to watch another character do the same thing as the cycle repeats. Each character is ultimately quite internal, the only meaningful interactions happen within the family, one or two secondary characters excepted. Everything remains at the domestic level of alliances and marriages and buying houses, with the political developments (1840 to 1880 or so) treated very discretely. I have loved family novels where nothing happens inside / the agitated outside is blocked out (The Leopard), so maybe I just need to accept some dislike of young and old Thomas Mann (he wrote The Buddenbrooks in his twenties, and he was old at the time of Dr Faustus) while considering The Magic Mountain one of the greatest masterpieces.

The next book to come with me in my bag is Mysteries (Knut Hamsun) if that's what's it's called for you guys too.

Finished Mouthful of Blood by Toni Morrison where a lot of her shorter non fiction work is compiled.
Enjoyed it, but it took me a couple of years to get around to. Picked it up during first year of pandemic.
Pretty good anyway. Now need to read her fiction work that I've picked up over last few years.

Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Have had this for a while too and again should have read it long since. But have had it lying around and thought I really should read this and another couple of titles on palestine and the Israeli state structure. I am surrounded by books, quite literally and do want to read most of them.
So hoping I can eventually do so.
I was going to get around to Angela Saini's Patriarchs next but now think that will wait .

Alfred Metraux Voodoo In Haiti
late 50s ethnological look into the syncretic religion in one of the places it most prevailed in.
Quite interesting .

August Meier & Elliott Rudwick From Plantation to Ghetto
70s book on black history in what became the United States.
INteresting to read this when I'm used ti much more recent books on the history which have come out after years of decolonisation and anti racist thought being more prevalent.
Pretty good and i do think I am coming across some details that I don't remember from elsewhere. Not sure to what extent this is a go to source for later books. I came across it in a bibliography from something anyway.
Both writers seem to have written quite widely in similar areas black history and human rights and things.

The Power of Language Viorica Marian
recently published book on the effects of multilingualism on the individual and the society they are part of.
Looks at linguistic relativity and things. & associations created by the resemblance between different words and even momentary triggers of initial letters etc.
So somewhat interesting.I think I was looking for more on something I read about how language speaking breaks down within families . Where if the family is multilingual it can come down to communication between different individuals within that family being primarily in different languages between specific individuals. So father talks to daughter in language a , to son in language band mother to daughter and sibling to sibling may be primarily in a different language than one to another member of teh family. Which is something I came across in a Guardian or Observer review of a book a few years ago. NOt really seen that in here so far. But what's here is interesting.

Oh yeah, scored a copy of Richard Morton Jack's book on Nick Drake from a different library a few days ago too. Bit not really started it yet.

& just read a book on the history of Motown called Dancing in the street : Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit by Suzanne Smith

and David Olusoga's Black & British which was pretty good but he seems to have left out details I read in his other books that I would have included in this . SS Verdala the troopship carrying the BWIR troops from the West Indies to Europe detouring into a storm in waters way further North than the troops were provisioned for and causing death and a great deal of damage thanks to frostbite etc to about 600 of them. Would have thought it was important enough to repeat. It's in his The World's War whichis earlier,
Think I did notice a few others but otherwise pretty good history that covers a lot of areas I wasn't as familiar with. I like the author and am reading through a lot of his work.

The Narayan was a delight! Laughed out loud a few times, and it's just such a cozy delightful environment - will def pick up more of his novels when I see them.

Now on to Junichiro Tanizaki, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi. Currently our lord is still in puberty and having a sexual awakening seeing women wash the decapitated heads of enemies brought back from battle. So there's that.

Susie Boyt's Loved and Missed (New York Review Books) is described by an American reviewer as "a disarmingly droll tragicomedy about imperfect motherhood and fractured families," without getting too cuet about it, apparently (also: New York Review Books). Mentions that this is the only Boyt book published in the States so far, other than My Judy Garland Life, which looks like my kinda memoir. International correspondents! Are her novels good??

I'm about to finish Hugh Eakin's Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America, have cracked open Hua Hsu's Stay True, but am uh hesitating before opening The Netanyahus.

The Power of Language Viorica MarianThe Power of Language Viorica Marian
finished this may have to come back and reread in future. Author is running a Lab dealing with multilingual behaviour studying it etc.
It did touch on some interesting stuff .
Ideas of effect on cognition of having more than one language etc.
Just out I think or at least library system just got hold of it and i got 2nd loan on this copy

Hua Hsu's Stay True

My sister gave me this for my birthday. Will probably get to it next year.

My 2666 reread has reached the part about the crimes. I'm not sure I want to keep going.

Up in the Old Hotel - Joseph Mitchell. Collected New Yorker articles. Highly recommended to anyone who loves reading about antiquated eccentric characters of the 20th century.

― Chris L, Thursday, October 5, 2023 5:20 PM (one week ago)

Commitment by Mona Simpson (in progress)
before that Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood (improbable but endearing)

The two novels make me aware that writing is a skill that perhaps up to a point can be taught. Not to disparage the latter, which I recommend for the anguish of motherhood (the soft unformed back -- from another novel by Mary Gaitskill; the trust (and what to do with it); the rejection later).

i am finally reading some of the various collected writings of myles na gcopaleen. no doubt i'm missing a lot of important context, but nevertheless excellent stuff.

Reading the Netanyahu’s atm Alfred… if ever there was a time

Morning reading of Clark’s Heaven on Earth continues. I’m on the Poussin chapter at the moment, and it is as extraordinary as Clark’s whole book on Poussin.

During snatches of the day and at night, I have been switching back and forth between Stephen Van Dyck’s People I Met from the Internet and Emily Martin’s Making a Salt Ridge.

The former is essentially a long annotated list of people that the author met from the internet as he was discovering his sexuality, grieving his mother, moving to LA, etc. It’s engaging and is giving me some more ideas about a piece I am working on around queer millennial aesthetics.

The latter is a book of poems from one of my favorite poets working today— strange looping pieces that are invested in melding the personal and emotional with more material and abstract elements of language. That it goes between many forms helps keep engagement up.

I wanted to read something spooky so I picked The Cipher by Kathe Koja, it won some awards 30 years ago. Started off well, very edgy / grungey, and an unusual take on eldritch horror. But it was far too long, didn't go anywhere interesting after the first few chapters, more characters kept coming each more awful than the last.

i got about 1/4 of the way through "thinking fast and slow" which is supposedly one of the few things worth keeping from the TED talk/unreplicable psych experiment era. it was not.

that's been on my long list for a while, what's up with it?

'death egg' by nathan duggan. juvenile, vaguely edgy, post-alt-lit-adjacent poetry. bought bc i follow the guy on twitter. enjoyed maybe 1 out of every 5 poems, which is a good ratio i think

2666 update: I just reached the part (in the Part About the Crimes) where the seer appears and tells her life story and recites poetry about the moon. Her appearance is so necessary and so timely; and it feels so much like life, to read page after page and feel nothing but despair, and then to encounter this wonderfully hopeful and curious and worldly voice that insists upon speaking in the midst of so much bloodshed and nonsense.

I felt the same as caek about Thinking Fast and Slow. It was touted as a revolutionary leap forward in understanding cognitive processes, but it struck me as achieving a set of blindingly obvious conclusions by pursuing novel, but rather poorly designed, experiments.

yep.

at the very least it's extremely long for the amount of stuff it has to say, which is typical for the genre.

apparently some of it (like a lot of psych) doesn't replicate either. 400 pages of just so stories.

i heard the same "better than you'd expect for the genre" things about the taleb books. wondering whether to bother with those now.

am finally reading some of the various collected writings of myles na gcopaleen. no doubt i'm missing a lot of important context, but nevertheless excellent stuff.

― no lime tangier

Have read some backstory/essays, so think I may have gotten about as much as I can w/o having actually read himself.

xps there's a kind of manic scattershot energy to black swan that makes it an entertaining read regardless of its credibility.

I finished Our Man in Havana. Highly entertaining satire, full of typically Graham-Greene-ish touches.

Now I'm reading The Knox Brothers, a family biography written by Penelope Fitzgerald mainly about her father and his three brothers, all of whom rose to prominence in British society early in the 20th century. They all have moderately eccentric personalities. I am thankful she takes pains to avoid a reverential tone and frequently leans on amusing family anecdotes, eschewing most of the formal biographic conventions. But this is a labor of love, so her love and respect for her subjects is always apparent.

i heard the same "better than you'd expect for the genre" things about the taleb books. wondering whether to bother with those now.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 20 October 2023 11:19 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

taleb is a totally different beast, he’s an apoplectic megalomaniac and it reads like he snorted a massive line of coke between each paragraph and footnote. i have fond memories of reading it as an undergrad and it was m/l my first exposure to ideas in probability theory but i can’t recommend it at all. for recent pop stats stuff i’ve liked ‘book of why’ by judea pearl (also a megalomaniac in his own way, tho more aloof than taleb) and ‘random acts of medicine’ by jena and worsham. both abt causal inference

I remember Taleb really liked the word "flaneur" and bragged that he had never run after a train.

xxxpost, Aimless, you might also dig Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, which tells more about the Knox family, also James Wood got very upset in his New Yorker review of it because stiff-upper-lip Penelope and her erratic husband were raising their kids on a funky houseboat while PF's father was sitting up there in his manse.

Despite its depressing extended depiction of poverty, foster care, and childhood addiction in the rural far west part of the state of Viginia (where the state intersects with Kentucky and Tennessee), I thought Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead was a great recreation of David Copperfield.

The NYT criticized if for not showcasing Demon's potential final success but I thought it ended on a perfect note, the moment that he realized he was going to be fine.

thanks flopson. i could not face reading judea pearl. i'm familiarity with causal inference etc. in a professional capacity so it would be a busman's holiday to an extent, but also i don't think i could read a book by him in particular.

xxxxpost oh and the Fitzgerald bio also explores how she wrote novels; the author was allowed generous access to the papers, as well as doing research elsewhere.

i reread A Town Like Alice for the first time in 30 years - i remember loving it as a teenager but i cannot for the life of me now fathom why

the ww2 stuf is maybe only 1/4 of the book, and is still the most enjoyable imo. but the whole rest of it is so stultifyingly dull!
the device of the boring narrator is stupid & forces the romance to be held at such a weird remove & adds the useless layer of a love triangle that is absolutely daft

and could i please read more about how to make goddamn alligator skin shoes for seven chapters ffs

the casual racism almost forced me to ditch it altogether; let alone the cherry on top of the facepalmingly awful approximation of australian language as told by a limey gtfoh lol

anyway yep some thing are best mot revisited :/

been reading jarett kobek but the 2nd & 3rd books i read by him weren't as good as the 1st 1. the one about how he hates the internet, but that's maybe the best book i read all year so not being as good as that is still ok. also rachel kushner's "flamethrowers" - 2nd best book i read all year maybe.

Yeah, so where should I start?

novel-wise? at-swim-two-birds (and then all the rest!) my favourites: the third policeman & an béal bocht aka the poor mouth.

the myles na gcopaleen collections i just read were the best of myles (early stuff) then further cuttings. best of has maybe higher highs, but further cuttings more digestible.

thanks flopson. i could not face reading judea pearl. i'm familiarity with causal inference etc. in a professional capacity so it would be a busman's holiday to an extent, but also i don't think i could read a book by him in particular.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, October 20, 2023 10:12 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lol i completely understand

I was going to suggest the Best of Myles which I think is a lot of his newspaper work though I haven't read it through, think I do have a couple of copies lying around though. The Third Policeman, At Swim Two Birds and The Poor Mouth are all good & I have a few more things by him lying around The Hard Life and a few others. I think I do tend to pick up his books when I see them. Did love the surrealism of Third Policeman especially policemen becoming part bike etc.

you can get the 3 novels in one omnibus edition which is all worth reading Policemen, Birds and Poor Mouth.

Archipelago Books, the great publisher of International books in translation to English, is have a fall sale through next Friday— 50% off with code “fallsale.”

Truly an incredible press, includes authors that have been discussed often on ILB.

https://archipelagobooks.org/

It's a good press. I think the postage for the UK sadly invalidates the 50% otherwise there are a couple of things I would go for.

Gottfried Benn - Primal Vision

A collection of Benn's prose with about 50 pages of poems. There are some brilliant prose pieces (only poets can write such prose), a pile on of abstracted viewpoints that could be used to cloak fairly repugnant views (he was favourable toward Nazism, even if his head wasn't as turned by it as it was for Celine), but nevertheless are an amazing read.

It's an often brilliant book, by a piece of shit human being.

agree with that totally^

from memory, some of the prose is extracts from longer pieces? don't think there's been any lengthier translations since as far as I'm aware.

Yeah extracts from longer pieces, more novella/novel length. Then there are a couple of things that seem to be extract from plays (or pieces that are play like I'm construction) and they aren't as good.

There is some more straight prose, such as the study of older artists, which didn't make too much of an impression.

Terry Jones Medieval Lives
Annual sized book tie in to the tv series from the early 00ies. Somehow got shipped to the children's section when sent in from another library. Think that's just a glitch.
Have read a few of his books and thought they were great. Stumbled on his one on Chaucers Knight and thought it really good.
Saw the tv series at the time of release I think. Enjoyed.
This turned up in local 2nd hand bookshop a few weeks ago and reminded me of its existence. So now borrowed a copy.

Paul Crooks Ancestors
The novel based on his research into his family history features a character renamed August after having been kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in Jamaica. It's ok as a novel, don't think it's what I expected. Think I may go on to read something on his research methods or how to do it yourself. His webinars have been good.

August Meier and Elliott Runwick From Plantation To Ghetto.
Early 70s book on US black history.quite in depth and I think I'm coming across details I'm not remembering from later work on the subject.
Not sure to what extent this is a recognised source for later work. I found out about it from a bibliography but not sure to what degree it's picked up on elsewhere.
I think it's good and does have me wanting to read other things by the authors.
Don't think there's a Doug Sahm connection. & only just clicking on writing about the book that one of the authors' first names happens to be the same as a character in the other black history work I read this week.

Ancestral Imprints: Histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance
Thérèse Smith
just got this out of the library too. Maybe should have waited since I have a few things coming soon. But did look really i8nteresting. Looking into the early days of recording traditional Irish music both annotation and early days of actual audio recording..
Do want to know more about this stuff ever since hearing Farewell To Ireland the Proper box set of the early New England recordings of bands from the Police Force and Fire service. Probably before too I think, think me getting the set reflected an earlier interest.
I picked up on a lot of roots stuff after getting into things like Dylan who had prompted a writer to look into his influences in a book I read in the early mid 80s and also artists like Nick cave and the Gun Club who were investigating root sinfluences from a non purist perspective. Which all may reflect an earlier taste I hadn't fleshed out much before.
That Tony Russell book on early country ties in too. So basically fleshing out things i have a vague interest in.

I recently read The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia. This is the 2nd of his books that I've read, and I didn't like it as much as the other one (To Each His Own). That one was more psychological, filtered through the perspective of one main character. This one takes a more omniscient perspective and purposely keeps the characters somewhat anonymous - even to the point of having chapters which are just dialog of unidentified voices. Its a more journalistic approach to describing a sociopolitical situation. It's admirably compressed and ingenious in rendering the reality of the "mafia" in Sicily in the mid-20th century, but it just didn't have the same emotional heft for me.

There's a good Damiano Damiani film version of that. Lee J. Cobb as the don!

Next up for the book club: Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn. A first novel by a Hawaiian author that won the PEN/Faulkner in 2020 for best debut novel. Looks like a good read.

Commitment is remarkable so far for its flatness, which seems deliberate and do not remember from her other novels. So there is a choice and one could change.

You can get the 3 novels in one omnibus edition which is all worth reading Policemen, Birds and Poor Mouth.

― Stevo

I am reading my second Hanne Ørstavik book and she's quite incredible but very hard going thematically. stylistically she's very exact and very easy to read, a real pleasure, but thematically she's just unstinting -- the other one I read was about her partner's cancer, this one's about a pastor reckoning with suicide of both friends and parishioners. remarkable, remarkable writer, really honestly breathtaking, but I may give myself a little space before I try the third of her books that's been translated into English

Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Israeli historian without a Zionist agenda looks back at the setting up of the state. Maybe that's more with an anti Zionist stance.
So is exposing the extent to which anti Arab feeling was there from the start.like it's not a bug it's a feature.
Quite good so far and I should have got to this sooner. Picked it up from a charity shop a couple of years ago. Picked up a few things on Palestine and Zionism that have sat around waiting to be read. So really is about time.

The Evolution of Human Rights Paul Gordon Lauren
History of the idea of Human Rights. Goes back to before Magna Carta. I was struck by people apparently viewing rights as tangible in themselves instead of hopefully as a mutual understanding in a societal network or practically as leverage in a legal setting. So thought I'd better learn more about how they were understood widely.

i thought the start of this book seemed familiar, but perhaps he's trying to point out that finding bodies in a ditch is quite common in the 87th precinct. got another 40 pages in and found an ocr error highlighted. checked records and i'd read in before... in february. wtf.

was only 120 pages so i finished it anyway, started saturday evening, finished monday morning, so the damage to my stats wasn't that great.

Anyone read Elsa Morante's Lies and Sorcery? It just got the NYRB treatment and it looked great at the bookstore yesterday.

Really looking forward to reading it in a few months. Only one of her novels I haven't read

William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet

Think Julius Caesar is the only of the major tragedies left.

good writer

shame about the bayesian priors

I started The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, something I heard about through ILB. Off to a nice start!

Finished Emily Martin’s book of poems as well as Steven Van Dyck’s novel, now onto nightly enjoyment of Laura Riding’s Close Chaplet and Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead. Riding is wonderful as always, and this is my second Hjorth novel since her Will & Testament was such a hypnotic and intense psychosexual family drama.

https://i.imgur.com/m1zUnN9.jpg

Continuing apace with Hjorth, started Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, a book inherited from my grandmother after she passed. Dense, informative, and horrible in every way one
might imagine.

Carr, Fire in the Belly
Neale, Closing the Gap
O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube
Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins
Phillips, Terrors and Experts

This book is about psychoanalysis but looked interesting. The patient comes to the analyst for expert guidance through the dark wood, the way Virgil guided Dante. It would be worth reading about how that works out in practice (and quotations abound: Kafka, Stevens, Woolf, Johnny Rotten). The book turned out to be about everything but that.

Descartes' cogito famously started by doubting the existence of everything, but found certainty in the existence of the doubt, and hence the mind (D. thought he could recover the entire world). Phillips does something similar, but for him, the only certainty is Freudian theory (but most of that is now optional too). We know that there is a unconscious, and that there are fears from infancy (e.g. of castration), and that dreams have hidden meanings, because Freud said so. But that is all we know. So the reader gets unanswerable questions like:

So instead of asking, Is there an unconscious?, we might ask, In what sense are our lives better if we live as though there is one?

If there was no such thing as repetition, what would we be using fear to explain? If there was no repetition -- if we stopped believing in such a thing -- what self would we have knowledge of?

the question, who are we dreaming for? is bound up with the question, What kind of object is the dream for us? What do we want to use dreams to do for us?

Spoiler: there are no experts. Phillips describes a world in which the analyst and the patient float in a void, neither knowing what they are doing, while orbiting the fixed reference point of Freud's vocabulary. The unasked question is whether it is of any help to anyone except the analyst who is getting paid for it. The reader must have a total commitment to the ritual of psychoanalysis, while renouncing any justification for it. I don't have any such commitment, and this short book was a very long slog.

I've launched into Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk. It's a first person narrative and unfortunately I'm not really enjoying the voice of the character who is delivering every sentence and every thought in the book -- although it feels like the author intended readers to rather like and admire the narrator. To me the narrator seems too much like an ersatz 'wise person' whose philosophy is eccentric, but still intended to be insightful and admirable, but comes across to me as just a bunch of random apothegms that don't add up to anything much. I'm about 90 pages into it. I'll read some more tonight, but may just set it aside if I continue not 'feeling it'.

Vashti Bunyan Wayward: Just Another Life To Live
Quite charming book , really enjoying it. Read the first third or something similar in one sitting. So now she's on the walk to Skye.
She;s just had boyfriend Robert dump even more of her stuff to show she doesn'ty need it. Without prior warning
So sounds like she's going through traumatic events but is more reflective of it than anything. Talking about the process of losing naivete etc.
I think I need to hear teh Immediate recordings a bit more thoroughly and give the Diamond Day a few more spins.

I’ve also started morning reading Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum , a pretty dense if interesting book chronicling the formation of the US poetry canon between 1940 and 1990, with especial bile saved for the advent of the “program era” and the myth of the stable subject’s “voice” as an emblem of American greatness. It’s equal parts information and polemic, like other Rasula books. The man has read a lot of utter shit to reach his conclusions— I applaud his fortitude.

Samuel Beckett - Three Novellas
L.F. Celine - Fable for Another Time

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

i just finished Cortázar's Blow Up and Other Stories. Absolutely loved this collection. For me, he has a lot of the formal invention of Borges with way more emotional punch.

What do people think of The Pursuer, the longest story about a Charlie Parker jazz figure? There is a bit of hep cat to the writing but I really loved this story - the writing seemed to try to capture a bebop fervor without resorting to Beat poetry tricks. I guess I'm going to read Hopscotch at some point.

I started Mike Davis' City of Quartz last night. Any initial trepidation about dryness was immediately blasted away - this reads like a Caro book written by an angry guy with a sandwich board - every word is chosen to inflame.

I went ahead and finished Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I just had to accept that, for me, the character of the narrator as a kind of silly far-fetched caricature of the 'wise old crone', even if caricature was not exactly the author's intention.

I finished The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. Nominally science fiction, for most of its length it reads more like an idiosyncratic form of nature writing. The book it most reminds me of is Edward Abbey's memoir of living as a park ranger alone in a cabin in a desolate desert in Utah, Desert Solitaire. Like Abbey, Haushofer's narrator also evinces a strong preference for the company of animals over that of her own species. The most lyrical passages involve her love for her adopted dog, Lynx. The book is also often repetitive, but I guess that the life of a subsistence farmer would be fairly repetitive.

What do we think of Ian Kershaw? I'm thumbing through The Global Age: 1950-2017 at the library and it looks fine for a airplane trip this week.

Algiers Third World Capital Elaine Mokhtefi
memoir of writer who moved to Paris in the early 50s then Algeria in the early 60s after falling in love with an activist from there.
I've just read about her knowing Frantz Fanon around the time he died. I hadn't realised he wasa war hero.
Pretty good so far, I think I got turned onto this from looking up Stokely Carmichael in the library systen after finding a book by him in a bibliography of something I read recently. I think he appears later on in this but not got that far so far. I know he wound up there when he was on the run as did Timothy Leary I think.

disastrous period of reading to the point where I wondered why the hell anybody reads fiction at all, fully nauseated by what passes for higher literary forms and modes. i may cover the contributing factors and partial recovery from same at some point (finally picking up the percival everett books lying around helped in part - thanks Tim).

anyway, just picked up a PD James, Mind to Murder, who was always a favourite of my mum's and many others of that generation ofc. her books are always extremely well *put together*, efficient establishing of scene, relationships, motivations etc, impressively so, but for all that I find them a bit colourless. these days the quality of their descriptions and construction makes them very good as period documents, evoking what has to be considered I suppose a different age (ie one in which I grew up, or immediately preceding that period), but one that no longer maintains. Or if does maintain at all it's in remnants and recollections in certain mental, social, cultural or geographical enclaves (daily telegraph, home counties, reruns on britbox etc).

This is set in a mental or psychiatric clinic and I'm v much enjoying that slightly colourless mood tbh.

Joe Sacco Palestine
Collection of the mid 90s comic by American comics writer. Pretty scathing story of his trip to Palestine, what he saw, what he was told by residents. Possibly a good entry point to the situation there. It is about 30 years old but still seems very very topical.

Nick Soulsby Thurston Moore : we sing a new language
Oral history of Sonic Youth member's solo catalogue. very interesting overlook. I enjoyed teh author's biographyof the Swans a few years ago too.

Michael'Ó hAodha Insubordinate Irish' : Travellers in the text
Limerick academic's book on representation of travelers in other media. Very interesting look at representation itsel and how travellers have been villified over the centuries. Some looking at how they are shown in myth and lore and the effect it has in real world treatment of the people. Enjoying this so may be looking for more by the author.

Black Panther / Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby ; foreword by Nnedi Okorafor ; introduction by Qiana J. Whitted.
collection of early stories of African superhero .Does leave me wodnering when Wakanda became a modern metropolis though. & keep seeing levels of uncomfortable racism.

Algiers, Third World capital : Black Panthers, freedom fighters, revolutionaries Elaine Mokhtefi,
pretty good memoir by ex pat American activist. Really enjoyed this.

Re: PD James, there is just such a volume of description and dialogue, and so much scene-setting biography of peripheral characters, I immediately feel the need to skim, and the details and characters are never engaging enough to be immersive and indulgent in a comforting way. Which is to say, I don't like her books.

I confused PD James with Ruth Rendell when I was looking up an adaptation of a work I enjoyed (La Ceremonie)

easily confused! (in my personal experience anyway,
just the names, the period, the adaptations, i think they’re fairly different writers, right?).

and chuck yes - i always struggled with pd james, i think even dislike might be too strong. i just found them v dull.

seeing fiction (to pick an admittedly narrow lens out of the various options), as applying a set of organising principles to the world/cosmos, she comes out rather better. and the operations of a professional and successful fiction writer aren’t uninteresting. “highly competent” is a dull evaluation but also pleasing in a way.

in comparison, for example, to a lanchester, who makes such hash of organising the world, or eg solenoid which, although it has some points of interest, seems frankly lazy, idly edited, requiring high levels of indulgence on the part of the reader. pd james is *assiduous* and for some reason today (tho not before and who knows possibly not after) it’s appealing to me.

I have now renewed The Hidden Reality twice. It's a great read, it's just something I need to take in small increments (which is very unusual for me).

I am tentatively reading a history of the 16th century conflicts between the Holy Roman Empire and the vigorously expansionist Ottoman Empire. It's titled Defenders of the Faith and the author is James Reston, Jr. and it was published in 2009.

I have several misgivings going into this one, mainly because in the years immediately preceding the book's publication this historical period was being actively used by neo-cons to serve their "clash of civilizations" propaganda that accompanied the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That narrative added plenty of fuel to the anti-Islamic surge after 9/11. Among the book's blurbs was one from the Washington Times newspaper that echoed that narrative slant. Further, I remember James Reston, Sr. as a staunch apologist for the Vietnam War. So, I'm exceedingly wary of how this history is being presented.

So far, the book seems uninterested in reinforcing that neo-con slant. The biggest flaw I've noticed is a tendency to use 'punchy' but simplistic prose to keep the narrative pace as swift as possible, and focusing heavily on anecdote and colorful characterizations, while glossing over motives and political complexities.

Started Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs for my "huge books to read before getting up" slot. Very interesting to see a foreign, fanciful look at the UK - at one point he talks about a character "never leaving Britain" but later mentions he "wanders all over, without ever leaving England and Scotland". Is the character anti-Welsh or did Hugo just forget? I'll have to keep reading.

I'm usually an apologist for Hugo's bloglike digressions but have to admit that the description of a character's cottage having a piece of writing affixed to it that details the proper forms of address for different members of the nobility which goes on for like seven pages...I skipped that.

I started Mike Davis' City of Quartz last night. Any initial trepidation about dryness was immediately blasted away - this reads like a Caro book written by an angry guy with a sandwich board - every word is chosen to inflame.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Friday, November 3, 2023 10:25 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

An update: I absolutely love this book and look forward to diving in every night. It's much less rant-y than the 2006 intro had me believe. Still in the first chapter, but he's quickly drawing all these connections across the history of LA and across different fields and eras, architecture, art, Ornette Coleman, Pynchon, pre- and post-war academia - really impressive stuff. I'm reading this in the run up to a visit to LA and CA in early December - all my poor beliefs in the CA myth getting shattered :(

Davis is a GOAT, most of his books are worth reading. Late Victorian Holocausts is one of the most relentlessly bleak yet eye opening books I have ever read.

I've been enjoying Donald Fagen's book Eminent Hipsters. The first half is sort of a musical autobiography via short essays on various artists who influenced him especially during his youth. The second half is a lovably dyspeptic tour diary of a tour he did with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs (not with the Dan).

PBKR, this might be too much right on top of City of Quartz, but at some point you might also enjoy Joan Didion's Where I Was From---dig past tense, re lifelong struggle with her Golden State pioneer legacy of myth, early Cold War schoolbook histories and much else before and after: it's acerbic, empathetic,confessional, searching, finding, without getting preachy, in some curveball timelines that always fit the experience(of what it's like to live and groove and age in this lovely artificial paradise of religious and financial and techno-revelations, of righteously freedom-principled govt.-tapping water projects, aircraft factory-centered burbtopias etc.) like when the scales fall from her eyes again, and/or relate to more disorientation/re-orientation---and yeah, lifelong---

I've never read any Didion. Davis mentions her a couple of times already in the first chapter. Thanks for helping put her on my radar.

She started getting better in the 80s, when, as Alfred says, "Reagan broke her," and she became more aware of what, in this late book, she considers to be her own maudlin assumptions, in the context of Cali spectacles and traditions.

I'm reading *Red Harvest* by Dashiel Hammett. I'm enjoying it immensely, but, never being particularly capable of coping with a huge range of characters, I'm kind of just clinging on for the ride.

mark s (or indeed anyone else, but i feel Mark Will Know), I'm still on my PD James jag. I don't think I've seen this usage of 'up' to indicate traffic problems before. Does it have a specific meaning other that which can be inferred from the context?

One of the characters has to make a trip out of London into the country to inspect a hospital:

‘There’s that, of course,’ conceded her friend. ‘And the John Carpendar’s in a very pleasant part of the world. I like that country on the Hampshire border. It’s a pity you’re not visiting it in the summer. Still, it’s not as if she’s matron of a major teaching hospital. With her ability she easily could be: she might have become one of the Great Matrons.’ In their student days she and Miss Beale had suffered at the hands of one of the Great Matrons but they never ceased to lament the passing of that terrifying breed.

‘By the way, you’d better start in good time. The road’s up just before you strike the Guildford by-pass.’

Miss Beale did not inquire how she knew that the road was up. It was the sort of thing Miss Burrows invariably did know.

otherwise, the novel contains a really exceptional description of a murder by oesophageal tube...

And then it happened. There was a squeal, high-pitched, horribly inhuman, and Nurse Pearce precipitated herself from the bed as if propelled by an irresistible force. One second she was lying, immobile, propped against her mound of pillows, the next she was out of bed, teetering forward on arched feet in a parody of a ballet dancer, and clutching ineffectually at the air as if in frantic search of the tubing. And all the time she screamed, perpetually screamed, like a stuck whistle.

that's just the specific moment, there's a long really tense lead-up as well. really very good.

otherwise recent reading includes:

The Evolution of Agency by Michael Tomasello, which I might cover elsewhere

Journals – RF Langley (again - a favourite book)

A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer's Row – Eugene R Robinson (memoir, and a lot of fun as you might imagine)

The Trees, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier – Perceval Everett. Books lying on a pile for ages, for some reason I had a block on reading any of them. The Trees was extremely enjoyable, but it felt *really* loose to the point of carelessness, but then I read an interview where he said he realised he wasn't being fair to southern whites (it's immediately obvious and disconcerting how nasty he's being), and then he went 'well, fuck it'. and yeah, that works. Both Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier made me laugh out loud once or twice, which is no mean feat. Again, he'll take risks and not worry too much about how well he achieves what he was going for. The meat of his books is in the interaction the artificial set-up provides. The section in Erasure on his mothers decline while on holiday is exceptional writing imo. Tense, managing the different levels he's set up for himself very well.

Robinson - Muriel Spark. The book that got me out of my slump of reading supposed literature composed of indifferent thinking and imagination expressed in indifferent words. As soon as you pick up Spark every sentence crackles with its intent to deliver something sharp about the people, events and situation of the book. There's a sort of mildly irritating facetiousness surrounding one of the characters, a Dutchman iirc, but the whole experience was extremely invigorating and stimulating.

Specimens of Families – Yu Miri, prompted by posts here (really good essay/fiction vignettes of family relations esp wrt the Korean/Japanese Zainichi experience)

Politics on the Edge - Rory Stewart. A comic novel.

Material World: A Substantial Story of our Past and Future - Ed Conway. V good as far as these things go. The journalistic manner... well, i feel bad carping, because one thing about my reading this year, is realising just how much good feature writing there is out there (The New Yorker, the FT Weekend to pick two, have an exceptionally high hit rate for their commissions). One of my favourite books is The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William E Blundell. It's a skill. But extended to book length, the methods and manner are tedious and unenlightening i think. Go figure. Still, the book summarises useful and important information about the anthropocene/anthropogenic world.

How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our Shared Systems for a Changing World – Deb Chachra. easy to read, pleasant and informative company, but i've got 2/3rds of the way through and I'm not actuall sure i've learned much? I've been interested in the infra substrate of our digital world for a while, so maybe i've just picked up most of the info elsewhere, but it feels oddly fluffy. not sure what the problem is actually. it walks and talks like a good book.

there's others, but can't remember for the moment what they are, which is probably just as well.

I would take it to mean "the road has been dug up / taken up".

ah! ledge, thank you. that is indeed obvious now you state it.

i mean it's a little opaque. but yes, i think that must be it.

I dimly thought it might mean "filled up with traffic."

btw I haven't read it, but think ilx consensus finds her novel Children of Men inferior to screen version, and gen. obnoxious/narrow-minded as well.

Good movie, anyway.

i'd like to shout out The Doll Who Ate His Mother by Ramsey Campbell, a delightful satanic cannibal story set in 1970s liverpool, with special praise for the heroine's blind obliviousness to the fact that the hippie she has a crush on is the same maniac she's been trying to track down and who stole her dead brother's arm so he could eat it, and how she doesn't realize this until he is literally coming at her brandishing her dead brother's arm

https://media.tenor.com/i_atQEwIDwsAAAAd/chef-kiss-sam-de-leve.gif

Oh yeah, Stephen King held the spotlight on The Doll... in the Ramsey Campbell section of Danse Macabre. He said he thought The Parasite was "better," but---also good comments by Campbell in reply to King's letter (also memorable responses of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, James Herbert, and Harlan Ellison. Shirley Jackson was already gone, but King brings cogent quotes re writing of The Haunting of Hill House from her "Experience and Fiction.")

Re-read Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, a book which I lost in the move from west to east coast and which I found myself wanting to take a look at this fall. Since her passing last year, it has become enormously expensive, but I bought a copy as a birthday gift to myself.

Really an astonishing book, so full of radical enjambments and fervid utopic thinking that it really feels sui generis, truly one of a kind.

Ilan Pappe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Horror story of the destruction of Arabic Palestine with tolerance of multiple faiths to make way for the state of Israel. Told by expat Israeli academic.
I wasn't very familiar with the story of the Nakba prior to this. Am now a bit more so but want to read more.

Elizabeth Badinter The Myth of Motherhood.
French feminist looks at history of attitude to what constituted motherhood in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Pretty scathing. Glad that Rousseau cropped up at the right time if this is to be believed.
Thinks well written and translated.
Think it dates from around 1980.

Richard Morton Jack Nick Drake
Great in depth history of the introvert singer. I've got as far as the summer before him going to Cambridge.
He's spent time in Southern France and got notably good on guitar

Myth Of Motherhood is v good but be aware Badinter took a sharp islamophobic turn later on.

nice try, sly dow, but you can't tempt me to read any more stephen king, not after i've already read howevermany dozen of his books and

jfc his tics

gotten wise to his

seriously this is so obnoxious

writerly affectations (tho he does generally seem to be a solid dude, and the responses by the other authors do sound intriguing... dagnabbit fine maybe i will finally check out danse macabre)

yeah but anyway for reasons obscure to me i'm now on The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein even though i think i hate it

in particular there's a bit where a mennonite-ish guy thinks lustily of his wife "naked as old mother Eve" and i fear it may be some time before i can wipe that blotch from the carpet of my mind palace

I finished that book about the Holy Roman Empire and Ottoman Empire in the early part of the sixteenth century. Because the author limited himself for the most part to relating facts it didn't at all support the idea of some grand wrestling match between Christianity and Islam. One galling detail was that in his afterword the author confidently writes as if the book I had just read actually did support the 'clash of civilization" bromides. Nope.

Basically it told an old story of a bunch of autocratic rulers seeking incremental gains of power, cleverly lying to each other, waging stupid little wars that kept trading the same territories back and forth, or grandiose wars of conquest that failed to conquer much. On the fringes of all this idiocy was Martin Luther, a shameless egoist, stirring up trouble to no good end. Whatever religious faith or civilization mean, they don't mean the hot mess that this book described.

xxxpost yeah cat, as said on Rolling Speculative, I had to get used to King's writing all over again, especially his big frisky Cujo-breath romps of enthusiasm, but he does know his genre, with digressions and joekyness to minimum in the section about works ov Campbell et al, and authors' comments are noteworthy, esp. Bradbury's.

I'm reading The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon. I wouldn't say it's required reading, she spends at least as much time going over territory I'm already familiar with from other neuroscience books, as she does in deconstructing gender myths. The main message seems to be that studies that show gender differences in the brain are often low quality, highly selective, or unreplicated; studies that confirm the null hypothesis (no differences) are, as usual, less likely to be published; any genuine differences are population level, often with 90% or more overlap between populations; and finally and most importantly the brain is highly plastic and it's impossible to disentangle the influence of our highly gendered/sexist society.

Cordelia Fine's Delusions Of Gender does something similar with regards to the idea of "biological" early childhood differences

good title!

I attempted to give The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen a go, but had to ditch it at the 1/4 point. Tbh I was wrestling with the urge to give up on it practically since the first pages. Ostensibly a comic novel, I just didn't find it very funny. And minus humor there wasn't much other reason to keep reading about basically uninteresting characters doing uninteresting things.

Next up is Henderson The Rain King, a Bellow which I haven't read before. Not to beat a dead horse, but I've had more genuine laughs in the first 10 pages than in the 160 pages of The Corrections.

Fascinating. I found Henderson as funny as a truck, but this might be my problem with late Bellow.

1959 is late Bellow? But yes, maybe my least favourite of his and probably reads as a p racist text now (I slogged my way through it 30 plus years ago, so can't actually remember much about it now, other than that it was a chore rather than a pleasure).

No noticeable racism as of yet, except when the narrator remarks that a hotel he stayed at was so fancy that it didn't admit Jews, although clearly this is meant ironically.

I'm currently reading another Ross MacDonald, The Far Side of the Dollar. It moves swiftly.

I wish I'd read *Red Harvest* in one or two sittings because, in the end, I lost my way with the plot (sort of the point, I guess) and just held on for the ride. The body count in the book is kind of astonishing, almost approaching farce.

The emptiness of the subjectivity in the novel is interesting to me. Right there at the birth of a genre the sense of a character who is pure action, pure verb, driven by an urge to finish the job, to *solve* (to loosen), and whose motivation remains forever clouded - it's right there, fully (un)formed. I'm sure there are hundreds of PhDs about it but I'd love to read more about its genesis.

This of course doesn't nearly explain what he did with the material, but as wiki points out:

The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (fictionalized as the Continental Detective Agency).[2] The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.[3]

...One Man, Two Guvnors (a play featuring James Corden) is an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 1745 comedy Servant of Two Masters (orig: Arlecchino servitore di due padrone, or Harlequin Servant of Two Masters), relocated to 1960s Brighton.
When Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars was a smash in Italy in the fall of 1964, Leone’s work came to the attention of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Leone had used Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai movie Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) as the entire basis for his plot, with some (very) minor differences. Leone received a letter from Kurosawa, pointing out that ‘I have just seen your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film’. Kurosawa claimed copyright infringement and demanded payment. Leone, clutching at straws, discovered that both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars bore a passing resemblance to Goldoni’s play. After some negotiation, Kurosawa and co. were allowed exclusive distribution rights to A Fistful of Dollars in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, plus 15% of the worldwide box office. It’s now been established that both Yojimbo and Fistful were influenced by numerous sources, including Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (titled Piombo e sangue, or ‘Lead and blood’ in Italy) and the western-set Corkscrew.

Judge for yourself who borrowed what from where:

A Fistful of Dollars

Yojimbo

Servant of Two Masters

Red Harvest

Corkscrew

: Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns and Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult published by I.B. Tauris

Oscar and Lucinda again, finally. I first thought about rereading about a year ago. So much prose from this lives in my mind but none more so than this:

“Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet–it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too…we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed…I cannot see,” he said, “that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence…It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.”

…”That such a God,” said Oscar, “knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager…That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing the line first, unless…unless–and no one has ever suggested such a thing to me–it might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine.”

And this, too, about Oscar’s father, a fierce Plymouth Brethren minister who is also a naturalist:

Wardley-Fish had an impression of a killjoy, love-nothing, a man you could not send a birthday present to in case he smelt the racetrack on it, a man who would snatch a little Christmas pudding from a young boy's mouth. But where he might have expected to find a stern and lifedenying spirit, he found such a trembling and tender appreciation of hedgerow, moss, robin, and the tiniest of sea creatures that even Wardley-Fish (it was he who thought the "even") was impressed and moved.

Leaning against the counter at Martindale's with all the heavy physical awkwardness of a fellow waiting for his wife at the milliner's, he read this passage: "the pretty green Ploycera ocellata was numerous; but the most abundant, and at the same time most lovely species was the exquisite Eolis coronata, with tentacles surrounded by membranous coronets, and with crowded clusters of papillae, of crimson and blue that reflect the most gemlike radiance."

Now Wardley-Fish thought himself a man's man, steeped in brandy and good cigars, and if expediently-he had renounced the racecourse, he had no intention of abandoning the hunt, which he still rode to at Amersham whenever it was possible. Further, he imagined himself stupid. He had been told so long enough, and had this not been his father's opinion also, he would never have been pushed into a life as a clergyman. His early wish had been to study law, but he was told he had not the brain for it. He had not questioned this assessment and had therefore decided, whilst still at Oriel, that he could only hope to advance himself through connections, the most effective of which would be made through marriage.

He claimed to have no ear for poetry or music and yet he was moved-it nearly winded him-by the elder Hopkins's prose. Where he had expected hellfire and mustard poultice, he found maidenhair and a ribbon of spawn. "I found the young were perfectly formed, each enclosed by a globular egg, perfectly transparent and colourless."

To be able to feel these things, to celebrate God's work in such a lovely hymn, Wardley-Fish would have given everything and anything. He felt, in these simple, naturalist’s descriptions, what he had never felt—what he should have felt—in the psalm beginning “I will extol thee, my God, O King; and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever.”

Thanks for giving me the necessary nudge.

I'm reading The Jokers, by Albert Cossery, who was born in Cairo in 1913 to a Greek Orthodox family and wrote his novels in French. This one is set in an unnamed middle eastern city by the Mediterranean. It's short, cynical and dances on the edge of nihilism. My copy is an NYRB edition, translated by Anna Moschovakis. This one is not in my wheelhouse, as the saying goes, but It's good to get out my wheelhouse from time to time.

Gotta keep your shoulder to the wheel.

finishing up Chateaubriand's memoirs after having read "the adventures of sherlock holmes" last month for the first time

unsure what i'll read in december but have a list a mile long as usual

Oh I did read xxxxxpost At Swim-Two-Birds, thanks yall for the rec (re place to start w Flann/Myles). The only parts that properly amazed me, given this book's acclaim, were the mad lost king Sweeney's succinct laments, checking in to sing updates on his suffering, having spent last night perched on a high branch in the deep woods, for instance. The way he balances imagery on meter, resigned and yet not---or he wouldn't keep showing up: he's sad, not depressed---seems classical in the best sense. Not knowing a better Irish reference, I think of it as Yeatsian, in the best sense, though seems to draw on whatever Yeats drew on.
And there's some echo of this in the suffering of the author of the book within the book (etc.), whose characters have risen against the oppression of his shit writing: not because he expresses it like Sweeney, but because he's not learning the error of his ways, because the violence against him seems (and is) futile.

Also, got a chuckle about cowboy hack characters getting hassled by rustlers from another book---all in Ireland, of course---otherwise, as the narrator's pal replies whenever the narrator goes on in an un-Sweeney-like way, the rest of these crowded, very talky halls-within-walls are "all my bum."

But I wouldn't mind reading some more if I come across it, and may make The Third Policeman my next library system loan request.

Definitely read The Third Policeman. I need to reread that too.

A pint of plain is your only man.

Yu Miri - The End of August. A 700 page book around the Korean experience in Japan/parts of East Asia, roughy from the '20s through to World War, touching onto the present day. Centers around the author's family, and her marathon-running grandfather, who pretty much ran through life though the peak of the book is a train journey in the last third of the book, undertaken by one of the women in it. Lots of striking writing around food, and the way prayer is incorporated in the language of the book.

And the many deaths, as well as many births!

I'm reading Zadie Smith's The Fraud at my wife's request, she was finding it quite oblique and wanted my opinion. Well, here's how we find out - with so far very little other supporting evidence or confirmation - that the lead character and her cousin's wife have become lovers (the two things referred to at the start are, as far as i can make out, 'a home of women and girls at ease with one another' and the husband's continued absence):

One thing permitted and made possible the other, even if the logic was too shrouded, too mysterious to penetrate. Like a finger. Like two penetrating fingers. Like two fingers penetrating a flower. In complete, candleless darkness. As if the fingers and the flower were not separate but one, and so incapable of meaning the one against the other. Two fingers entering a bloom not unlike the wild ones in the hedgerow – layered like those, with the same overlapping folds – yet miraculously warm and wet, pulsing, made of flesh. Like a tongue. Like the bud of a mouth. Like another bud, apparently made for a tongue, lower down.

Doesn’t seem that oblique to me

Goodbye Columbus

Always meant to read this! So enjoyable. Roth writing in his early 20s - the voice is already so developed and confident - frightening.

That's just Zadie trying to avoid the normal pitfalls around writing a sex scene and instead getting more of a faux Victorian orientalism mashup.

Thomas Bernhard - Gargoyles. Not one to start with, though it's really interesting to see the great man developing his technique as this book culminates in a thirty page paragraph of bile.

William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

hi gyac, your presentation of Oscar and Lucinda (which I think local library still has, will check tomorrow) has me wondering if you've read Marilynne Robison's Gilead? If you like that, check the follow-ups---Alfred didn't approve the last/latest, Jack, but is sadly rong.

Marilynne *Robinson*, that is.

Racing through Bernhard's Woodcutters - every other attempt I've made at Bernhard (Extinction, The Loser, Old Masters) has fallen by the wayside about 20 pages in, but Woodcutters is really doing it for me.

Footnotes in Gaza Joe Sacco
Collection of comics from early 00ieswhere American cartoonist depicts his trip to Palestine. This time he's an accredited journalist and he's looking for information for a story on a massacre in 1956.

Fair Future Wolfgang Sachs
Book on resources distribution and ethics.
Gets a little technical but only a little.& isn't overly dry.
Based on information gathered in Germany so that's where the statistics come from.
Decent translation.

Nick Drake Richard Morton Jack.
Very good detailed biography of introvert acoustic artist. I've got as far as him getting to University in Cambridge.
I should be concentrating on it more but am reading a stack of things at the same time.
Well will get through rest of it over couple of weeks after I get back to Galway.

I am almost straight in the middle of Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum, and I wish the pinefox were here so that we could talk about this passage regarding Robert Lowell:


“Lowell's work is compulsively fascinating precisely because it takes on the waxwork character of the freak show, the exhibit of a human life assuming monstrous pro-portions. What is "monstrous," I should clarify, comes from the root monstrum and monere, portent and warning: Lowell warns us, by self-exhibition, of the pitfalls of life lived on a pedestal, in the show-case; life as continual self-dramatization; poetry as public monument. His celebrated jawbreaker lines have an integrity that detaches them from the very poems they inhabit, bringing to mind Albert Speer's penchant for designing Third Reich buildings for the elegance of the rubble that would eventually be left of them.”

Rasula, via other critics as well as his own incisive wit, gets down what I dislike so much about Lowell’s poems— they often feel as if brokered between an image of what a poem should be and what the poem actually is, flattened and unyielding in their flatness.

In any case, any who are interested in post-war poetic culture and politics in the US should read this book— it is fascinating and quite funny at moments, too.

He had me until the Speer comparison.

Lowell inspired so many better poets that I gotta wonder how they didn't peck out letters to each other with "Cal sucks, doesn't he lol" at the top.

They did!

I'm intrigued -- who and what else is covered in American Poetry Wax Museum?

Alfred-

“Oscillating between documentary and polemic, The American Poetry Wax Museum is a study of the canonizing assumptions and obsessions that animate postwar American poetry. Highly public literary controversies, such as the Pound affair of 1949, or the anthology wars of the early 1960s, are chronicled in a precise, detailed, and theoretically inflected account redefines the project of literary history. Rasula's analysis moves from the of New Criticism, through the ascendancy of Robert Lowell and confessional poetics, into the current period of multiculturalism and the avant-garde provocations of the language poets. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources—ranging from the history of museum display to the institutional and cultural processes by which American poets have been canonized—Rasula combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and social history in an analysis that works to disrupt prevailing myths about poets and poetry in the public sphere and in the academy. This innovative and irreverent book…will be an important resource not only for scholars of the period but for writers and teachers of poetry as well.
It stands as an invitation for all of us to consider what it means to assemble and police a national canon of poetry.”

A friend recommended it because we were talking about poets no one reads anymore and the false economy of “visibility “— he brought up Peter Viereck, whom no one except a very few have ever heard of, but who won the Pulitzer in 1949 and a Guggenheim a while after that. Rasula’s book helps explain who and what has been canonized and why… and some of the details are pretty damning.

Sold! My uni library doesn't carry it, alas.

I think of people like Muriel Rukeyser and Karl Shapiro.

Shapiro is especially prominent

I finally finished The Jokers, Albert Cossery, but it was (for me) rather a dud, which is unusual for an NYRB edition; they're normally pretty reliable for me. This novel felt didactic in intent and sadly sophomoric, displaying the laziness in thought and execution that often springs from overconfidence in one's innate brilliance. Too bad. It did have the virtue of a setting in a culture that is underrepresented in English translation.

Now I'm reading A Gambler's Anatomy, a Jonathan Lethem novel from 2016.

^, ^^ Have you read any of the "bake-off" books of Robert Peters?

(xxxxpost--re: Lowell and other waxed p.s)
When I finally got the nerve to show Gert my poetry, she stood up, clapped me on the shoulders, and said, "Pablo, go home and paint!" So I did, and boy was I glad. See, that was constructive criticism, guys.

The Fraud was not that good. Full of research, you could go down all sorts of rabbit holes if you wanted - the once popular and now forgotten William Ainsworth Harrison (I thought at first he was a fictional version of a typical 19th century author) plus Dickens, Thackeray, Cruickshank and others; slavery, the abolition movement and slave revolts; the Tichborne claimant; the corn laws, the Cato Street Conspiracy, land reform, the rights of women... but it was all very slight and unengaging. At least it was a quick read, most chapters were only 3-4 pages so you couldn't get bogged down.

Another one from the bottom of the library stack: Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Classs, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Recommended by the same deceased relative who recommended The Elegant Universe. Maybe a little out of date now, but I think still worth reading, as an examination of how, starting in the 70s, the U.S. political system was turned so completely to the service of the very wealthiest.

November is female month, when i look back and realise I've just read men for the first 10 months and try and make amends... (it's not that bad this year)

Anne Tyler - celestial navigation
Issy Sutie - jane is trying
Ali Smith - companion piece
Shirley Jackson - haunting of hill house

Ali Smith was an extension to her Seasons quadrology and is fun and insightful and angry

Hill House is a reread and I'm 25% through and it's a classic, obv.

the first two were a bit light tbh.

(dug out my copy of Danse Macabre as well so reading the relevant bits of that alongside the Jackson)

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives
J.L. Carr - A Mouth in the Country
Robert Glück - About Ed
Robert C. Rosbottom - When Paris went dark : the City of Light under German occupation, 1940-1944

journeys end in lovers meeting. the thing that always pops into my head in railway stations etc, it's from Hill House, which I'd forgotten.

(originally from twelfth night)

forgot one - Ariadne by Jennifer Saint. another Greek myth retold

What did you make of the Carr, Alfred? I am going to dig into Bob’s new one when the semester ends, too

let's fucking go you miserable bastards

https://i.imgur.com/9CwsYmO.jpg

What Iris Murdoch should I start with??

What did you make of the Carr, Alfred? I am going to dig into Bob’s new one when the semester ends, too

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

The Carr? Mildly dull. I liked most of About Ed.

Oh man. Love A Month in the Country, sorry you found it dull!

A Month in the Country is perfect!

I read Héctor Tobar's *Deep Down Dark* about the Chilean mining disaster. I've started Richard Holmes' monster biography of Shelley but not sure I have the stamina.

v belated answer to fizzles (long after he needs it; long after others have decoded it accurately) re "the road is up"

i: yes, i have encountered this now and then -- very possibly in early 20th century crime fiction (wimsey etc)
ii: i had half-reasoned (i.e. w/o applying much genuine thought and no research) that somehow it derived from the era of e.g. plank roads and such, where the surface would be something you could lift up and lean at the side when digging holes was necessary? (not that plank roads were ever much of a phenomenon in the uk as far as i know)
iii: … at the unreasoning edge of my mind i also had the notion that a safety barrier in front of a roadworks was somehow like the drawbridge being up
iv: "it's been dug up" makes much more sense but i don't think i ever got that far

Oh man. Love A Month in the Country, sorry you found it dull!

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, December 1, 2023 9:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

A Month in the Country is perfect!

I usually love mid-century UK/Irish fiction (Pym, Bowen, Taylor, etc.) or the same fiction set in the early to mid-century.

I’m almost done with Henderson the Rain King. I would rate it as lesser Bellow. This may be a terrible thing to say but I think Bellow is more fun to read in his cranky, misanthropic mode. I’m not really sure what he was trying to accomplish with this sort of Joseph Campbell slash The Golden Bough type of exploration of myth, ritual and archetype; lots of it is less compelling to me than he seems to find it. And after Henderson arrives in Africa, the laughs get fewer and further between as Henderson becomes less of a satirical antihero and more of a straightforward hero.

I finished A Gambler's Anatomy, Lethem. I can't say I loved it, but it was weirdly compelling because he writes so vividly, creates an unfamiliar but convincingly detailed world, and he kept driving the story and characters ahead at a hard pace in unpredictable directions. Those were its virtues.

My eventual difficulties with it were fairly central. Lethem seemed to know exactly what he wanted to write about but his main interest in the book wasn't the story or the characters. Those existed as throwaways, just contrivances that allowed him to write about his real interest, which was stitching together two extremely specialized worlds: high stakes backroom gambling on backgammon and a particularly exotic branch of neurosurgery. Once he'd accomplished this virtuoso feat in the first half of the book, he just sort of winged it for the remainder and let the characters collide rather aimlessly until they reached a dead end.

Front Lines, Juliet Jacques - Compilation of her journalism. Was expecting it to be much more of a chronicling of the UK's descent into terf island, but it doesn't really get too granular on that, good for my blood pressure. The early pieces really drive home how much has changed, both in terms of vocabulary but also of things that now seem obvious still needing so much explaining at the time. It also gets a bit repetitive - Jacques herself in the foreword makes a joke about there being a potential drinking game here where you take a swig every time Sandy Stone's "The 'Empire' Strikes Back" gets namedropped. I really enjoyed an essay on being stuck in a train with some fellow footie supporters and having to negotiate all the conflicting impulses - did they clock she's trans, will it code too male if she gets deep into the trivia, will she be reinforcing sexism if she pretends she just knows a few names. Also, lots of good stuff about queer groups in Eastern Europe and sundry trans and queer artists.

Mystery Of The Yellow Room, Gaston Leroux - Book club pick. Fine as far as this kind of thing goes - gotta admit that if you start including maps of the building in order to further detail your mystery you've lost me, I just don't care enough about the whodunnit - but fascinating to me due to an unfortunate purchase: local bookstore said it was only available in hardcover, and when I went to pick it up...it turned out to be one of those shoddy jobs ILX's own James Morrison sometimes details, with the cover clearly a GIS result for yellow + room. Anyway as someone who's used to a Criterion/NYRB/Fantagraphics mode of cultural consumption I actually found it quite novel to read something where the original text has NOT been lovingly treated. Turned out to not be too bad, though the translation was clearly done by someone better at French than English - thus the detective asking that nothing in the room "be deranged", for example. Aside from that, only one other note of the bizarre - an observation that was clearly supposed to be a translator's note just showing up in the middle of the text, letting the reader that "in the original translation" the word was translated into killed but you can safely use murdered. Ok!

I have a nice hardcover reprint of Mystery of the Yellow Room, part of a facsimile series from 'the Collins Crime Club'. Appears to be the original 1909 (uncredited) English language translation. An introduction notes that Hercule Poirot enthuses about Yellow Room in the 1963 mystery The Clocks, so I'm guessing it was a formative favourite of Christie's too. Talking of whom, I'm also a sucker for secondhand copies of those Christie first edition hardcover facsimiles that Collins issued in the last decade or so - some great covers, Christie p much always had good covers on her bks, h/c and s/c - an underestimated part of her appeal imho.

Maps are p much as fundamental to the whodunnit as they are to the fantasy epic.

I finally finished Dostoyevsky's The Idiot which took me a long time to read. I was enthralled at times and completely lost at others. The ending was great though.

I've now picked up Little Dorrit again after putting it down for a year and I've started War & Peace. I'm hoping to make good progress over Winter.

I've also read a bunch of Simenon's Maigrets recently - quite fun!

I’ve started reading book 5 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Jon Fosse, of recent Nobel fame, makes an early appearance as one of his writing instructors.

I've bought Jon Fosse's The Other Name: Septology I-II as an audiobook but haven't listened to it yet.

As part of my book club (now in its 29th year!) I read Tan Twang Eng's Book of Doors, a fictional account of W. Somerset Maugham's year in Penang on the Malay Peninsula in 1920-1921.

It was fine. My 10 book club compatriots overall voted it as the third best of the 8 books we read together and discussed in 2023 (following Tom Crewe's The New Life and Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds. My favorite was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

I'm currently splitting my reading each evening. First I read some of the recent new translation of Homer's Iliad from Emily Watson. After which I read some poems from Wsilawa Szymborska's Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 for some lighter fare before trying to sleep.

Emily Wilson! serves me right for relying on my memory

And while you are it, make sure you also fix in your mind that her father is A.N. Wilson and not, say, Angus Wilson.

Though I did take a months-long break because it was depressing me too much, I finally finished a re-read of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Here is one of the final pieces in the book, which is particularly pertinent given the current world situation.

Come off it. – The critique of the tendencies of contemporary society is automatically countered, before it is fully expressed, by saying that things have ever been so. The excitement thereby so promptly abjured, testifies merely to the lack of insight into the invariance of history – to an unreason, which proudly diagnoses everyone as hysterical. Moreover, the critic’s attacks are said to be merely hamming it up for the gallery, a means of claiming special privileges, while whatever they are nonetheless upset about is well known and trivial, so that no-one can be expected to waste their attention on such. The evidence of the calamity comes to benefit its apologists: because everyone knows everything, no-one is supposed to say anything, and it may then continue unchallenged, hidden by silence. What is affirmed is what philosophies of all political stripes have trumpeted into the heads of human beings: that whatever has the persistent gravity of existence on its side, is thereby right. One need only be dissatisfied to be already suspected of being a global dreamer (Weltverbesserer). The consensus employs the trick of ascribing to opponents a reactionary thesis of decay, which is untenable – for is not horror in fact perennial? – by discrediting the concrete insight into the negative through its alleged failure of thought, and those who rise up against the shadow, are maligned as agents of the shadow. But even if things were ever so, although nonetheless neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the British colonial administration of India deliberately burst the lungs of millions of human beings with poison gas, then the eternity of horror is revealed by the fact that each of its new forms outbids the older ones. What endures is no invariant quantum of suffering, but of its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the talk about the growth of antagonisms. Any other kind would be innocuous and would pass over into mediating phrases, the renunciation of the qualitative leap. Those who register the death-camps as a minor accident in the victory procession of civilization, the martyrdom of the Jews as world-historically insignificant, do not merely fall behind the dialectical insight, but invert the meaning of one’s own politics: of stopping the extremity. Quantity recoils into quality, not only in the development of the productive forces, but also in the increase of the pressure of domination. If the Jews are exterminated as a group, while the society continues to reproduce the life of workers, then the comment that these former are bourgeois and their destiny unimportant to the larger dynamic, turns into economic spleen, even insofar as mass murder is in fact explicable by the decline of the profit-rate. The horror consists of the fact that it always remains the same – the continuation of “prehistory” – but unremittingly realizes itself as something different, something unforeseen, overwhelming all expectations, the faithful shadow of the developing productive forces. The same duality applies to violence, which the critique of political economy pointed out in material production: “There are determinations common to all stages of production, which are generally fixed by thought, but the so-called universal conditions of all production are nothing but... abstract moments, by which no real stage of production can be understood.” (Marx, Grundrisse, page 88) In other words, to abstract out what is historically unchanged is not neutral towards the matter , by virtue of its scientific objectivity, but serves, even where it is on target, as a fog in which what is tangible and assailable disappear. This latter is precisely what the apologists do not wish to concede. On the one hand they are obsessed by the dernière nouveauté (French: latest novelty) and on the other hand they deny the infernal machine, which is history. One cannot bring Auschwitz into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states in terms of a mere gradual increase of horror, regarding which one preserves one’s peace of mind. Certainly, the martyrdom and degradation suffered by those in the cattle-cars, completely without precedent, casts a harsh, deathly light on the most distant past, in whose obtuse and unplanned violence the scientifically organized kind was already teleologically at work. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what has not yet been, which denounces what has been. The statement that it’s always been the same, is untrue in its immediacy, true only through the dynamic of the totality. Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end

I didn't find out until I'd finished reading Other Voices, Other Rooms that the character Anabel was based on Capote's friend Harper Lee, which certainly made sense: Capote-figure Joel's relationship with tomboy A. is increasingly complex and fraught, while other characters just hit their marks when it's time for generally tedious dialogue. Social conditioning has made them this way, spells out the author, via 13-year-old Joel. It's messed up the isolated misfit Anabel too, but she's pushing back,pushing and pulling Joel as well.
Unfortunately their adventures lead to b-/c-movie scenes (were even crappy carnivals of late 30s not prepared for rain?) and then to re-visions of recombinant imagery from Joel's earlier inner space whirligigs: more vivid constructs, now Extra Special Effects crusting Southern Gothic into subgenre sureties---although before and even sometimes during this, Capote, like young Ray Bradbury. sometimes effectively draws on Poe, another driven technician (whom Capote mentions in his intro as a "blurred" influence in his childhood writing: down deep yes, but in an unquiet grave).
(Anabel seems at first as stereotypical as the others,straight and gay, black and white, male and female, but for the familiar surface leads elsewhere).
Also true of Joel, although after all the detail work, "certain intuitions" about himself zip toward the historic ending, while Anabel does all the gender-bending heavy lifting---but along the way, Joel has developed a case of the shrewds, becoming Capote, so it works out plausibly enough after all.
Have I told too much? Devil's still in the many unmentioned details, and lively. Hilton Als has commented v. favorably on some of the short stories, so that's where I'll go next.

Most of these characters have been connected, sometimes by the author, to people he knew, but Lee seems to have been the closest, judging by her effect on the writing.

Having finished the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska before finishing The Iliad I was in need of another 'lighter' book to intersperse with the traumatic tale of bloodshed, so I picked Sure, I'll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford. I shall probably need yet a third or fourth candidate before I'm done with the Homer.

Balfour's Shadow David Cronin
History of British meddling with the area formerly known as Palestine. Helping Zionist Jews move into the area before WWII and moreso after. following through to 2017 showing a history of arms sales through the 50s, the truth about the supposed neutrality of the Thatcher years and on. Including Reagan, Blair, Brown and others.
Good book and seemed to be a quick read. Came recommended in a pro Palestine group I'm in.

Shlomo Sand The Invention Of The Jewish People
Tel Aviv based academic looks at the history of the "Jewish People" and questions the idea of unity. He sees that a core belief spread among a disparate group of peoples.
I'm reading a section where he's looking at archaeological investigation into what had been Palestine. During which several former mosques were simply destroyed instead of being surveyed or had digs assigned to them. He talks about the lack of evidence before a certain time which would be when the supposed kingdom had existed. Also talks about the Bible having been looked at as a unified historical source which had been dismissed in the work of Thomas L Thompson. one of whose books I chanced on in a charity shop at the time I had just been reading about him.
Interesting book. Think I may read his Inventionof the State of Israel.

I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp Richard Hell
Memoir by punk bassist. I've got to where he's just moved to New York.

I haven't read The Iliad since my freshman year of college in 1984. I need to reread it. IIRC, we read the Lattimore translation, which came out in 1951.

I'm counting this time through The Iliad as technically not a re-read, because it's a different translation than the Robert Fitzgerald one I read 40-odd years ago. This Wilson translation is eminently clear and forceful, while retaining enough metric interest that I think an audiobook version would be very attractive.

I have a T.E.Lawrence translation floating around somewhere that I still need to read.

I read Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey, it was revelatory.

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, which is actually working nicely as a sequel to Musil's Man Without Qualities, finally finished that a couple of months ago. The next thing I read after MWQ was Penman's Fassbinder book, which had an important quote from ... Robert Musil. Anyway, in the Bernhard, Musil's magnificent philosophical openness, and semi-smirking delight in the follies of the Austrian upper classes, has curdled into a disdain and loathing of everything and everyone, author included - the narrator of Woodcutters keeps admitting, he's as bad as everyone else. Bernhard's use of repetition is exceptional and definitely musical, in keeping with the book's milieu of elite musicians/composers, and at times I've been reminded of the third great Austrian writer I know, Elfriede Jelinek, although Bernhard is more passionate and less ironic than Jelinek, although both write with teeth, or blades.

Great stuff, Ward. Did you like Musil in the end?

I did! Obviously there are frustrations - the constant abandoning of any narrative momentum in favour of another philosophical diversion really felt like a deliberate strategy to shake off the uncommitted reader - but with these monster book there is definitely a kind of snowball effect as you get used to the style, and get more familiar with the characters and their world. By the end, I almost felt that Musil could have wrapped things up in another 100 pages or so - or could have carried on forever. And as when I finished In Search of Lost Time, for days afterwards I was haunted by a feeling of loss, that I no longer had this unique, challenging voice in my ear.

Reading short storied by Mavis Gallant, who really is the greatest version of that New Yorker read-between-the-lines school of short fiction imo. Also impressed by her breadth: in the first three stories, we get a British expat couple running a hotel in Switzerland, an Italian peasant girl and a French Canadian teenager - all psychologically convincing.

Also reading very different short stories by Lafcadio Hearn; born in Greece to a local mother and Irish father, worked in the US and the Caribbean as a journalist, then moved to Japan and assimilated fully, getting a Japanese name and everything. He proceeded to get deeply into Japanese folklore, and his collections of ghost stories, while published in English, have become canonical texts in Japan and inspired films like Kwaidan. A lot of the stories in this collection are a little too blank for me, but I like when he goes really weird, like the one where SPOILER a dude falls asleep and his soul gets kidnapped by ants.

Yeah I was impressed by the Mavis Gallant short story I read too (The Four Seasons). Need to read more. It was Jett Heer’s strong recommendation on Twitter that had me check her out.

I read Gallant's Paris Notebooks last month: she records the gyrations of les soixante-huitard with sympathy, their parents with disdain. A few summers ago I spent time with her massive short story collection.

"- but with these monster book there is definitely a kind of snowball effect as you get used to the style, and get more familiar with the characters and their world."

Yes. Half of the time with a lot of great books is spent in almost relearning to read again...

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase: not enough Wolves.

Pet Shop vs America: Just the right amount of both.

i read A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett and loved it. it was a nailbiter. will she get married or will she become a doctor!?! what a kickass feminist epic. from 1884. and semi-autobiographical. Sarah Orne wanted to be a doctor like her dad when she was young and would go on rounds with him but she had poor health. thus, the writing life.
i read Dawn in Lyonesse by Mary Ellen Chase. a short novel. it was cool. like an Alice Munro novella from 1935. i don't know how people from Cornwall felt about Mary Ellen's Cornwall dialect in the book. Mary Ellen was from Maine like Sarah Orne and she actually met Sarah Orne when she was 10 years old and Sarah Orne encouraged her to be a writer. And she totally became a writer!
reading - in fits and starts - No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and my only fear is that all young American novelists will begin to talk like this. But that's not Patricia's fault if they do. and besides people were already starting to talk like this after reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill way back in 2014. maybe that's even why Patricia talks like this now. anyhoo, its a funny book and zeitgeist-y and she is totally a writer to be jealous of and for some reason i can only read a chapter at a time and then i get weary.
reading No One Writes to the Colonel and other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez because i felt bad that i had never read him and i know myself so instead of a big novel i would take baby steps and read some short stories and i think i picked a winner. the stories are very charming and entertaining. and not even magical!. i really liked the one about the guy who steals the balls from the local one-table pool hall. kind of an O.Henry vibe. so, who knows if i will read the novels but i will definitely read more short stories.
i am also reading The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen little by little. its actually very easy to put down and pick up again at a later date. it is about the history of island biogeography and it is very interesting. love the story of this guy Wallace! he would go anywhere. he got so many fevers and bug bites. imagine getting so many bug bites on your feet that you can't walk for six months and have to sit in a hut on an island with no television. imagine all the butterflies you aren't catching! and Darwin may or may not have stolen all his ideas. or maybe just some of them.

But that's not Patricia's fault if they do. and besides people were already starting to talk like this after reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill way back in 2014.

I liked Dept. of Speculation, just not as much as James Wood. How do people talk after reading it?

they write like it. in short bursts.

post-google lit.

sebald had to walk ten miles a day in the snow for his fun facts.

"talking" = their writing voice.

Mostly through the Maria Bamford book now. For those who might be curious it mainly surveys her lifelong struggles with mental illness, an astonishing variety of twelve-step programs, various mental 'breaks', voluntary hospitalizations, and the like.

The tone is more than slightly manic, which serves her as a form of comedic deflection and also seems to be her most natural and accustomed way of addressing what her life feels like to her because she has a bipolar personality. The book, however, is not really comedy so much as a sort of cross between self-help and confessional. I haven't been a consumer of her comedy in the past, but it's pretty obvious that this book more or less encapsulates the essential Maria Bamford Experience. You are aghast at her and like her in about equal measure.

Lucio Cardoso - Chronicle of a Murdered House. A Brazilian novel from the early 60s, released on Open Letter.

It's a Faulkner-esque design. Multiple viewpoints on a house's scandalous goings on, leading to a decline in fortunes. All centered around a beautiful woman.

It's the first time I've read an account of an incestuous affair in a realistic-ish setting. Really well done, and very Latin.

I'm reading The Fire Within, reissued by NYR Books. I like novels whose narrative approach vacillates from free indirect to directly addressing the reader.

just finished Hardy's Trumpet Major, just started Hardy's A Group Of Noble Dames

The only "minor" Hardy novels I've read are Under the Greenwood Tree and Two on a Tower.

robert gluck - about ed

i'm about to run out of hardys to read, just a couple of the minor novels to go... but then there's always the poetry i guess.

currently reading the english (by way of czechoslovakia) novelist edith templeton's the island of desire, starts out as a comedy of haut-bourgeois manners which then turns into a satire/critique of english social mores in the second half.

that'll leave me with two hardy's to read, bott of which would probably be Pointless answers

Desperate Remedies: A Novel (1871)
The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters (1876)
and 100000000 poems

i also have the recent biography by the same woman who did the the dickens biography and i think it might be even longer

(hardy's, hardys?)

wikipedia says there are probably 50 short stories that i should go through and check - i've read a bunch in various collections. penguin has various anthologies of them, probably the same things in a different order.

Distinguishing a mediocre from a good or great Hardy poem is hard -- and part of the fun.

Got my bundle from the Sublunary editions sale.

Osvaldo Lamborghini - Two Stories
Horacio Quiroga - Beyond

Really good to go much much deeper into Latin American writing with these two short translations.

I finished American Poetry Wax Museum, which truly is the most important book to understanding the US poetry canon. (Returning to discussions of yesteryear, it also does a handy job of explaining why a mediocre poet like Robert Lowell continues to be so ‘popular’). Highly recommended for those interested in that kind of thing.

Have since plowed through:
- Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In: a fine if a little too neat book of poems by young psychoanalytic theorist and queer scholar. Honestly was a little bored reading it.

- Zan de Parry, Put It In See What It Does: de Parry is one of my favorite living poets, and the way this large chap absolutely nails the cadences and verbiage of middle America in an earnest and not-mocking way is incredible. Can’t wait for this guy’s first larger-press book this year.

- Oswell Blakeston, The Cobra King: A collection of pithy queer erotic poems from this legend of the 20th century. Excellent small book.

Like others, I am currently reading About Ed. Per usual, Bob’s prose is incredible, though I expect things to get more messy as I am only two sections in.

It will -- in the best sense.

I read Lawrence Block's *Sins of the Fathers*. I loved how stripped back it was (even for a noir) but the central theme was kind of on the nose.

Now reading Barbara Pym's *Quartet in Autumn* (my first Pym). It's essentially a comedic miniature about the 'grey lives, thinly led' of four characters approaching retirement but there is something savage about it, almost existential. The comedy comes from how straight Pym plays it: there is no attempt to ennoble the characters, no vast secret visionary interiority (take your pick: Ford, Updike, Salter etc); equally there is no accumulative undertow, no sense of something being 'held back', like *Remains of the Day* or whatever. There's lots of Larkin here, some Patrick Hamilton. The author she most reminds me of is Elizabeth Taylor, although there is a sense that at least love can save us in Taylor's books. Maybe it's just the shitty December weather but dang, it's hitting quite hard.

I love the Scudder books but haven't read that one - my local charity shop has a copy so might pick it up. Yes, Block's recognisable stamp (for me) is that strange combination of subtlety and sudden over-on-the-noseness (as well as his meticulous but nigh-invisble mystery plotting).

I like reading old kids books at Christmas and this year its "The Dark is Rising", which I didn't read as a child because there's no anthropomorphic animals as main characters. It's very good on atmosphere in a way that I appreciate as an adult but probably would've bored me as a child. Incredible sound design.

The early Scudder books (Sins of the Fathers is the first) are thinner, more straightforward mystery novels. There's a three-year publication gap between the third (Time to Murder and Create (1977)) and fourth (A Stab in the Dark (1981)) books, and you could almost say the series doesn't really start until then.

I really enjoyed "Eight Million Ways to Die" but "Ginmill" (four years later) is a whole other, spectacular thing

The book version of 'it gets good in S9'!

It will -- in the best sense.

Osvaldo Lamborghini - Two Stories

Please let me know what you make of this one. I'm a big big fan of Sublunary, and I have pretty decent exposure to experimental writing, but I thought this was genuinely complete nonsense, a chaotic surface with nothing underneath.

Didn't think much of the first story, but the second held some interest with it's exploration of different relationships and sexualities in that period of oppression in Argentina's history. It reminded me a little of Hilda Hilst's writing though yeah a lot more chaotic (or modernist lol)

Would probably get hold of another book of his, were it to be translated, which I am not sure it will.

Osvaldo Lamborghini sounds like a mysterious author from a Bolano novel.

There is a quote by him in the PR for the book:

"It scares me."

I am guessing we should begin a new thread for winter, yes? I will do so later today.

Glück’s About Ed seems to find me weeping over my oatmeal every morning, an image just bathetic enough that I have to question why I am crying— is it for Bob? For Ed? For all of my dead friends? Past loves? Who knows. It’s an incredible book.

A new WAYR thread has been hatched:

Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023?