Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall of 2024?

Recently read Back, first HG that I don't quite buy yet. I want to read Under The Net.

As We Seek Moderation!!! In All Things!!!!!! What are Your Reading in Autumn of 2024?

I came home from a trip and I didn't do proper diligence before launching my own thread. I apologize for stepping on dow's thread.

I finished Pier Paolo Pasolini's Boys Alive, his fictional homoerotic take on what Rossellini did with Open City only with street kids. Also Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, reissued with a 2022 afterword in which he calls out Trump and other avatars of anti-democracy.

I've wasted too many brain cycles trying to decide which of these two threads is the correct one to post on. Please someone lock one of them or I will become paralyzed like Buridan's ass.

I'll ask a mod to lock the other thread. Meanwhile, here are the relevant posts that were made to the other one before this was straightened out:

I have just finished Black Money by Ross MacDonald. It had a very elaborate red herring of subplot that consumed the greater part of the build-up to revealing the true thread of circumstances that lead to the Required Murder(s), but I've discovered that I do not read him for the unraveling of the mystery, but for the pleasure of the characters and quotidian details in the stories he constructs.

Now I am re-reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I first read it around 1971, when it was not just recent but critically relevant to the times. I was about 16 and in high school and I found it wholly persuasive on the level of his lived experience and the evolution of his worldview. I decided it was time for a revisit.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, September 22, 2024 8:24 PM

Reading the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow. Took three or four times starting this book before I got traction.

― default damager (lukas), Sunday, September 22, 2024 8:43 PM

Oops, wasn't done ... anyway i'm slowly warming to the book's method, I'd call it an endless series of digressions but that suggests a foreground / background distinction that is questionable.

― default damager (lukas), Sunday, September 22, 2024 8:47 PM

Rereading Passing, Nella Larsen. Still rules.

― Daniel_Rf, Monday, September 23, 2024 2:16 AM

yuko tsushima, territory of light

for some reason it has taken me a week or more to read this v short bk, i guess i'm finding parts of it laborious even tho overall i give it the thumbs up

― pere uwu (doo rag), Monday, September 23, 2024 2:56 AM

I started reading Octavia E Butler this summer and am completely hooked, just finishing Parable of the Talents and looking into which one to read next.

― John Backflip (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, September 23, 2024 6:40 AM

Also, here's a courtesy link to the summer 2024 WAYR thread:

'In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne': What are You Reading in Summer 2024?

flopson, so cool you know Hamish! i hosted him for a reading here in Philly last week and he was excellent, also he is v handsome and lovely to talk with.

No prob, Aimless (hang om to that title).
Following recent ILB cheers for Nunez, I just now got The Vulnerables from library, which also has What Are You Going Through.

I've started reading "The End of Eddy" by Edouard Louis, billed as a novel, but described by the author as a true story. Stories of overcoming rotten childhoods seem to be perennially popular. We'll see if this one is better than average.

iirc End of Eddy was effective

Elfriede Jelinek - Children of the Dead

Like Platonov's Chevengur, this book also took its translator (Gita Honegger) decades to bring it to English. Both books published this year, and if the Platonov is about a world that could've been but never came to be, then Children of the Dead is the world we ended up with. This is set in an Alpine resort in Austria, which is populated by ghosts but everyone -- the main 'characters' or otherwise -- are reduced to wandering souls, where it seems that one thing is on: the TV.

And if this might sound like a tired satire against the consumerist hell we have built then its never been written like this. I see that Jelinek has: 1) Translated Gravity's Rainbow into German and 2) was a blogger, writing her polemics on her website, and weirdly enough this dense, barely plotted 'novel' is like an amalgamation of the two things. Just someone writing crazy pages on rotting flesh (flesh in decay forever and ever) to the TV which is turned onto, well, German TV? Detergent Commericals, Sports, whatever, the thing is always on, providing the juice for another polemic against Austria...oh and did I say there were Nazis here?

I wouldn't recommend it, but idk I'll never read anything like it (and I'll definitely need to read it more than once). When she won the Nobel this book hadn't been translated. The novels were pretty good, but I never felt like reading them again. Haneke's film of The Piano Teacher was better than the book (which was her best till this), but with Children of the Dead you can see that for once the Nobel committee have some ballsy taste lol. You can see why one of the judges resigned over the decision, anyhow..

I have started rereading Don Quixote, one chapter at a time, in the original. Love those black Catedra editions.

And I am also rereading Hyperion, this time just my old pocket book in French.

Jean Renoir - La Grande Illusion

(Read the script for the film)

"private citizens", tony tulathimutte. couldn't decide for a while whether i thought it was (a) crap or (b) good depiction of a bunch of people who are crap, but as i approach the p100 mark am tending towards (b).

reckon next novel i read has to be from the 1950s at the latest tho, as an old geezer i am just naturally hostile to these fucking zeitgeisty internet-age type novels.

btw it's spring here not autumn

Good point. Maybe we should q1-4 for these threads going forward.

Andrew Holleran - The Kingdom of Sand

If I ask for it to be changed to 4th Quarter, what's Winter of 2024-25 going to be? Just wondering (time is not my forte).

Once that's straightened out, we might need a poll--although whoever chooses a title could always change quarter to season or vice versa.

Having really enjoyed her first three novels, I cashed in some Waterstones vouchers on the new Sally Rooney, purchased on the day of publication. It came with free branded stickers and cupcakes, which my five year old enjoyed.

I’m sure I’ll read it before the end of the year, but the size (it’s about 150 pages longer than her previous novel) and Rooney’s new. Clipped. Short sentences. Style. Has put me off a little, so I’m reading Prince Caspian instead. I’ve never read the Narnia books before so thought I’d try to get them all done before Christmas. (I’ve finished a pitiful amount of books this year due to studies, so I’m goosing my numbers with what I assume are easy reads.)

Trumpkin the Dwarf should've made an appearance in a Rooney novel.

Dear Little Friend seems like more of a ferrante title

What are you reading in the Year of the Whopper?

If I ask for it to be changed to 4th Quarter, what's Winter of 2024-25 going to be? Just wondering (time is not my forte).

― dow, Thursday, 26 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

There would be no season just quarters.

So winter would come in for some of Q4 and some of Q1.

(I was joking about all this BTW)

Or maybe we could put an asterisk on the season:

Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall* of 2024? (*Spring in the Southern Hemisphere)

(*Autumn)

We could settle this democratically. At the turn of each season we could start a thread to nominate titles for the following season, e.g on April 1 for the thread title at the next solstice. Then we could poll the titles, e.g. in early June, with the winner attached to the upcoming WAYR thread, starting the nomination process at once for the next WAYR thread, etc. In this way we could dilute the vote of northern hemisphere ILBers to the point where the southern hemispherians might slip in a reference to their notorious seasonal eccentricity every 5 or 6 years.

I propose that the representatives of the Southern Hemisphere get to pick the thread title 32% of the time, based on their landmass.

anyway...

George Eliot, The Lifted Veil. A curiosity, nothing more, despite the best efforts of the afterword to paint it as a clear exemplar of her moral philosophy.

Now on to The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk.

Olga was talked about on front row last week or so, but i'll be damned if i can remember what they said.

oh, actually, i remember thinking that it would be something you'd like

found the episode, i'll listen after i've read the book.

Domenico Starnone - The House on via Gemito

Apparently Starnone is Ferrante's partner and their fiction is pretty similar. Naples, working class life from the 50s onwards as the son grows up to be something else entirely, yet carrying the weight and violences he grew up with. This is written from a more male perspective as opposed to Ferrante.

Its a really good, rich read. Like Ferrante I just couldn't put it down.

so this was september

Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides, trans. Buckley)
The Iliad (Homer, trans. Wilson)
Iphigenia in Tauris (Euripides, trans. Buckley)

there's a big gap in the story between the last two, which is basically filled by Aeschylus' Oresteia and maybe Euripides' Orestes which i'll get around to. The Odyssey and the Aeneid in there as well somewhere, plus another dozen Euripides plays. i'll get to all those eventually.

does anything cover the first 9 years of the trojan war?

(the above mostly prompted by the references to Iphigenia in the trollope i read in august. in fact she came up twice within a couple of days the way these things do)

I just finished The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Having earlier this year read the second volume of Taylor Branch's history of MLK, Jr. and the civil rights movement, which also pulled in Malcolm X's part in the struggle, there was a tremendous amount to unpack in the autobiography and a multitude of contrasts, conflicts, and complements between their two approaches. Any conclusions I can draw immediately will by necessity be offhand and a bit scattered.

What strikes me first is that both men were powerful speakers and organizers, but while MLK, Jr. was raised and educated to take the mantle of leadership, Malcolm only rose through the sheer power of his drive and intelligence. I put this book down amazed at what an absolute force Malcolm made himself into just out of his raw experience and his will. Both men knew they would die a violent death for accepting their position of visible black leadership.

Both the Nation of Islam and the SCLC/SNCC were centered in their devotion to discipline as essential to escaping the prison that racism had built around black Americans. But the discipline of the nonviolent movement relied on the community to shape and support it while the Nation of Islam was top-down, rules-based and more coercive.

In the end the Nation of Islam, which Malcolm had elevated into a huge force in the black community through his relentless articulation of the justice behind black anger, collapsed when Malcolm was assassinated back into its original dimensions as a minor cult, because Elijah Muhammad was too small a man to carry the Nation of Islam forward and too jealous to allow Malcolm to carry it for him.

"Apparently Starnone is Ferrante's partner and their fiction is pretty similar."

His novel Trick is so great!

I read Ties, really good. Gemito (like the Neapolitan Novels) is a lot more expansive.

Last night I read The English Understand Wool, Helen DeWitt. Even granting that it was more or less a short story trying to masquerade as a novella, it was pretty thin stuff. Afterward I immediately started on So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell, another novella. It was spoken well of by multiple ilxors recently.

I seem to be reading only non-fiction lately. My last few:

Ruth Harris - Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
Stanley Cavell - The Senses of Walden
Edward G. Seidensticker - Genji Days
Lucy Sante - The Other Paris

Brad Snyder - Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment
John McGahern - The Dark

Last night I finished So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell. It dangled quite a few emotional hooks in the water, but for some reason the bait on them didn't engage me me. This was an entirely personal reaction having nothing to do with the quality of the writing or the story. I could easily see why it excited the admiration of so many ilxors, but it never quite caught me.

I finished The Empusium, I didn't love it as much as they did on Front Row. More details tbp on her own thread.

I also just finished Via Gemito and have found it very hard to put down. It has a great cumulative effect that moved me a lot at the end.

The way the narrator seems to try and fail or succeed at getting out from underneath his father's voice - I found that very formally impressive without drawing attention to itself too much.

My current book is Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. It has the vibe of an oral folk tale, but Achebe sneaks in some more novelistic elements under the radar.

I finished The End of Eddy. I would say its an impressive debut. I would read a sequel that continued on from the point where this one ends. The overall feeling is one of tightly controlled rage - but the tone is more complex than that gives it credit for. Now I'm reading "Friend of My Youth" by Amit Chaudhuri. It reminds me a bit of "The Friend" by Sigrid Nunez in its very lackadaisical approach to advancing the plot, such as there is. At least its mildly interesting so far.

That was my impression of SN'sThe Vulnerables as well, though it does incl. some spitballs re publishing, and good, actually energetic take-down of Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethelen."

Maria Gabriela Llansol - A Thousand Thoughts in Flight.

No prose like Llansol. Imagine a cross between Musil and Emily Dickinson, which is the nearest I can get to. Musil in the sense that she shares with Musil the concerns for the degraded soul (as well as a love for Nietzsche), as well as mentioning him several times (though she is into Germanic lit like Kafka and Rilke as well).

The book itself is divided into three sections, they are like diaries. One from the 70, another from entries in the 80s and the last is from the 90s. The latter is a tribute (of sorts, she could never write anything that straightforward) to fellow writer and friend Vergilio Ferreira, who had passed away at the time. Lots of interests in her reading and outlook. However, the result reads like someone trying to put something down on paper that is very internal to her and no one else, a diary barely fit for publication, in a way. The truest diary, in another. That leads to an opaqueness that is intriguing, the danger is of a collapsed music but there is just enough to keep going, she makes space by breaking up the prose into these poet like segments...

...in between these blocks of prose. She is very much a player with the forms with which writing take place and how it can look on the page.

I finished Things Fall Apart last night. A very good book, with a killer last paragraph. For me its major value was bringing to life the Ibo culture as it existed prior to European colonization, without any effort either to praise or condemn it, but simply to describe it in a human and relatable way. Recommended.

I finished "Friend of My Youth" by Amit Chaudhuri. It's a novel in which nothing much happens: all the action takes place in Bombay, where the narrator, a semi-successful, middle-aged writer who now lives in Calcutta, grew up. The first and longest section relates a visit to Bombay for a publicity interview and reading. Usually when he comes to town, he sees the titular friend of his youth, an intermittently recovering addict named Ramu, but on this visit Ramu is in rehab, so he spends the trip taking care of quotidian business and occasionally thinking about Ramu. Then the novel jumps forward a few years to another visit, after Ramu is out of rehab. Then it jumps forward a few months to a third visit, this one uncharacteristically accompanied by his wife and children. That's about it. It reminded me of Sigrid Nunez in its very understated style. There is no catharsis or big emotional moment. The writing is fairly straightforward and matter-of-fact. Yet it somehow does leave a sort of lingering, luminous sensation.

My current book is A Gun for Hire, one of Graham Greene's earlier books of the sort he called an "entertainment" instead of a novel. His writing uses a nice bag of simple tricks that make it easy for the reader to see what's going on without thinking too hard, but without getting so simplistic that it's actively irritating. It's easy to see his debt to Buchan in this one.

oops! A Gun for Hire Sale

William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!

Just finishing it now. Great, but also exhausted by it. Feels like the writing is something you've been a witness to.

It is a journey.

Colm Tóibín - Long Island

A sequel to Brooklyn. I don't know how he writes these ostensibly unremarkable sentences whose cumulative power impresses me.

I got my Daniel Woodrell books in the mail and I'm reading The Outlaw Album which is a book of stories. I can't remember the last time that I wanted to steal so much from a writer. It has been a while.

Typing out this representative bit from a story called Black Step:

"They tell me Dad committed suicide for reasons he dreamed up. His mind was too active. He had a round mind and it roamed. He could imagine any kind of hurt. He could imagine the many miseries of this world flying over from everywhere to roost between his ears, but he couldn't imagine how to get away. Ma loved him past his end and has never kissed another man. She loved his mind, his round, roaming mind that made her feel a glowing inside her skin between those spells of blight. He waited all of a calm spring night for some fresh serious pain to come into his heart and kill him."

let me tell you, that story is a humdinger.

All my reading feels work-related at the moment*. I just finished the Jonathan Bate biography of Ted Hughes. He does a good job of explicating the work, particularly the later translations and *The Birthday Letters*. Overall though, it's too fond and chummy and he simply can't/won't face the central fact of Hughes' foul masculinity, or his rank politics.

*I don't mind this. Quite happy to have a period of study, tbh.

Agree on Tóibín, Alfred. I find him unremarkable as a stylist but his books have a cumulative power. I think about Brooklyn often (and not just because Saoirse Ronan).

He had a round mind and it roamed

I've never heard the expression a "round mind" before. Google also doesn't turn anything up. Maybe it's an original locution? I imagine a mind like a marble that won't stay in one place when you set it on a flat surface.

Also like a fish bowl

relatable

absurd and telling that Colm Tóibín didn't title it Lon Gisland

Stefan Zweig, Journey into the Past. Didn't do much for me except the bit when they come across the marching fascists, a brief startling interruption into a rather melodramatic tale.

George Eliot, Brother Jacob. As disposable as The Lifted Veil, the broad satire doesn't really sit well with her. If you read either of them as a short taster I can't imagine they'd inspire you to discover more.

Now I'm midway through The Vegetarian, I discovered my wife had bought it a few years ago on the kobo.

Portrait Of A Lady, my first Henry James. Was apprehensive as to what degree I'd be able to engage with reflections on the differences between US and UK observed in the 19th century, but turns out I'm hooked.

So envious.

Hearing this excellent Desert Island Discs with Stuart Hall, where he picks (around the 45 minute mark) Portrait of a Lady as the book he wants to take with him, led me into Jamesland, where I've been a tenant ever since:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0094b6r

somehow reminding me---from "In that progress of life which seems stillness itself,"-- WHAT ARE YOU READING SPRING 2013?:

In Season One Episode Two of Boardwalk Empire, Mrs. Schroder reads The Ivory Tower, while recuperating from a spousal-abuse-induced miscarriage. Somehow I wouldn't think Henry J. would be the go-to author in such a situation, but I've never heard of that book. Anybody familiar with it?

The Ivory Tower was republished by NYRB in about 2006 as I recall
I think it is very very late James
unless I am mixing all this up with something else

― the pinefox, Tuesday, April 16, 2013

no pinefox you are correct - ivory tower is unfinished and was only published after james' death. it seems a p recondite choice, but not having read it, i don't know if it has a spousal-abuse-induced-miscarriage theme, also.*

there's another late late (eg post-golden bowl) HJ abt time travel that i haven't read (yet!)
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The Ivory Tower is as good as any late period James but its scenic structure – often no more than a couple characters talking to each other at a time, punctuated by bursts of Jamesian rumination – takes adjusting. This period of James reminds me of classic Ozu.

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, April 16, 2013

*Ward is referring to a theme that would be the same as in Mrs. Schroeder's storyline early on.
What Henry James time travel story is that??

― dow, Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Whoops, just noticed that I referred to said theme first.

The Sense of the Past is an unfinished novel by the American author Henry James that was published in 1917, a year after James' death. The novel is at once an eerie account of time travel and a bittersweet comedy of manners. A young American trades places with a remote ancestor in early 19th-century England, and encounters many complications in his new surroundings.

in addition to various Hesse and Trollope books which i've documented on their respective author threads, i've been chipping away at F. Braudel's "The Identity of France," which is kind of overwhelming in its detail but almost always interesting. also have been slowly making my way through Tahar Ben Jelloun's "Partir" which is excellent, moody, vague.

I finished A Gun for Sale. It was pretty much OK, but nothing I could get excited over. It does accurately capture the weary fatalism among the UK ruling class and intelligentsia circa 1936 regarding the coming war in Europe. But quite a few novels of that time echo the same thoughts.

I think my next book will be Living with a Wild God, Barbara Ehrenreich. It sounds like the sort of no-genre, one-off book that no publisher would touch if the author weren't already well-established with an audience willing to read whatever she wrote. In the hands of a capable writer such offbeat books are often excellent.

Elias Canetti - The Book Against Death.

Canetti is an almost unique figure in literature in that he almost always published one book of a type/form. So one novel, one study, a memoir (divided in three parts), a book of literary crit, a travel book.

These are notebooks on the subject of death. Aphorism to quotes to whatever material he could gather on the subject, divided by year, from the late 30s to 1994, when he could write no more.

This is in many ways the time for this book to appear.

I'm reading We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie by Noah Isenberg. So far there have been chapters about the origins of the source material (the unproduced play) and how it was developed at Warner Bros, a chapter on the Hollywood political environment and movie depictions of Nazism before the war, and a chapter on the lengthy roster of European exiles who starred in the film.

Just read and really enjoyed Tommy Orange’s There There, which I believe table recommended, although that’s not why I read it, sorry. Looking forward to reading the sequel– or is it a prequel? – that came out earlier this year, *Wandering Stars*.

Back to (prev WAYR? mentioned, I think) Katherine Anne Porter: "Old Mortality," omg! Circling the remains and mystery of belle Aunt Amy, though clear enough in its way (and really one of the cirling becomes central, in a jolting spiral[she's got company]).

I'm reading We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie by Noah Isenberg. So far there have been chapters about the origins of the source material (the unproduced play) and how it was developed at Warner Bros, a chapter on the Hollywood political environment and movie depictions of Nazism before the war, and a chapter on the lengthy roster of European exiles who starred in the film.

Fun book -- read it last summer.

I admire how "Old Mortality" upends what we think we'll learn about Aunt Amy.

yeah personal and other historical elements, still recognizable to an extent, like the artifacts, keepsakes, now flotsam and jetsam more than ever----everything is upended, incl. reactive resolutions of other main character, along with her cautionary self-awareness, in part molded from her place in family etc.,passing through "her hope and ignorance."

is that too spoilery---story is really how she gets there (as hell)---

Fun book -- read it last summer.

It was mostly pretty fun, but I could've done without the last chapter, which I mostly skimmed. The author seemed to fall prey to the tendency (probably endemic to college profs) to try and make "old" material hip and relevant to the youth by showing how it continues to be referenced in contemporary culture. This led to a tedious chapter recounting SNL skits and Simpsons episodes that probably weren't that funny to begin with, and are much less so when described in a verbal synopsis. But overall a good book.

I'm about 3/4 through the Barbara Ehrenreich book and I was wrong about it being a no-genre one-off kind of book. It's a memoir that happens to include a very striking and unusual event that does create reverberations in Ehrenreich's subsequent life, but was hardly determinative. The publisher's marketing dept clearly decided to play up the most sensational bit as the hook to generate interest.

Well, it worked on me. Ehrenreich's style is vivid and engaging, and her life provides some interesting material, but it's a memoir, so you either decide her life story interests you or not. I'm going to finish it, so there's my answer to that question.

christopher isherwood, goodbye to berlin

The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy

christopher isherwood otm, sort of. maybe not a genuine monster but the distanced amusement doesn't sit well with me.

Sergio Pitol - Taming the Divine Heron. The main character is an author, and lads, he's blocked up.

I've read everything by him in English (as I've probably said a few times before). Not much more to add.

I have that one, but I haven't started it. I was disappointed to learn it is not a literal sequel to The Love Parade, which I liked a lot and wanted more of.

Yeah, was a bit confused as I thought it was a sequel, part of a trilogy, but halfway through and as always it's enjoyable. I love his voice..

Bewilderment, my first Richard Powers novel, inspired by seeing him talk at my local bookstore last Wednesday. A minor typographical tic -- the boy's replies are italicized -- gets annoying.

So xetc.post "Old Mortality" was satisfyingly shadowy and swirly, with POV character Miranda observing various pieces, speculating, seemingly on the right track, especially when partially corrected by an older eyewitness, who grew up with Aunt Amy
---then "Noon Wine" is a train across the plains, relentless logic on schedule, although penultimately too dependent on uniform response/rejection of neighbors---to someone overselling, overpleading,yeah---but Red State boondocks me hasn't observed such a consistent pushback against Stand Your Ground, at all---and wonders that it would be such in 1905 South Texas---after the closing of the frontier, in changing times, but still---I guess Stand Your Ground is always next to Keep Your Distance, and the neighbors are favoring the latter---but the way the Crowd comes from various squirrelly angles, not so predictably, for instance in the best stories of Sherwood Anderson, makes for a more satisfying read than the more monolithic trope of conformity, the ritualizm of "The Lottery," even, seems a little ponderous ultimately, despite good details of character and how it's set into local custom, and law, I think.

But the characters of "Noon Wine," even the slightly overgothicky interloper---of course the point is he has to be upsetting, and calculatedly, compulsively means to be---def have shadows and stay with me, the place too.
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" maybe even moreso, with the rugged, rolling clarity of a higher, wider, deeper range of affecting notes, in a few rooms, across a clamorous hick city, still way out West, where the reader is (again?) going around and around with what could well be the same Miranda, as the Great War homefront sails into the Great Influenza Epidemic---only thing: the kind of very orchestrated extended dream sequences that "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" was too dependent on, also show up here---there's a way of measuring out, pacing such thought processes (which Porter melds to implausibly coherent dream epics), as Iris Murdoch does, when checking in with one of her outwardly more inchoate The Red and The Greencharacters, likewise Richard Wright making the rounds of Bigger Thomas in the uncut, Library of America Native Son--but neither of these feature dreams.
Nevertheless, as with "Noon Wine," there's so much momentum and other powers, so much horizontal and vertical, that I have to give it up for Porter once again, trying to brace myself for whatever's next in this somehow always late night reading.

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" was the first story I re-read when the pandemic began.

i've never been able to finish a richard powers book. not that i've tried in years. i knew for a fact i was never going to read the big tree book when maria was reading it. anyway, they make me zone out for some reason. maybe they were too david foster pynchon for me? i can't even remember.

I got a hundred pages to go and I find it hard to pay attention.

I've only read *The Echo Maker*. It was 500-odd pages long and enjoyed the density of his prose but all I really remember is a car crash and some whooping cranes.

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" was the first story I re-read when the pandemic began.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

(My musically prodigious great uncle and his wife died of it, up in Chicago, where it came in with the troops, apparently: a major factor in many places. Their kids were raised by my great-grandparents, amidst much tumult.)

Echo Maker is also the only Powers I’ve read. I must have read a good review at the time, and I figured I should finally see what the fuss was about, having skipped Gold Bug Variations, which was popular when I was at college. But I found it kind of dry tbh. I haven’t been inspired to try another.

Scott, have you tried Orfeo (his music one)? I think you'd like that.

He's really been having a run with the nature books but I haven't read any of them yet.

I read Bewilderment around the time my son was born, so it hit very hard. I read a couple of his old books back when I wanted to study american postmodernism at university, and found them quite cold, and I would never have thought he'd write a book that would make me tear up like that.

The ending is lovely.

i tried to read Operation Wandering Soul and Gain. i remember all the reviews for Galatea 2.2 when it came out but i don't think i tried that one.

I've started reading Envy, Yuri Olesha. It's a satire first published in 1927 when writers in the USSR were still feeling expansive, experimental, and enthusiastic about their future place in the new society. It has a wild, inventive energy that's just a bit manic, but fascinating. This is the recent translation by Marian Schwartz in NYRB Classics.

Just re-read two Ross Macdonald mysteries, The Barbarous Coast and The Goodbye Look. As good as I remembered, possibly better. Macdonald's whole intergenerational-warfare theme (parents vs kids, with the older Archer always taking the kids' side) has surprising power. Now I'm re-reading Don Winslow's The Force, which is not as good as I remembered. The prose is very choppy and faux-tough guy; not as bad as James Ellroy, but pretty bad.

Oguz Atay - Waiting for the Fear

So far, this is an amazing set of short stories from the Turkish writer. Its very Kafka in the sense they all center around a man trapped by his mind, though the environment and circumstance make an appearance from time to time. The title story is about a similar length to 'The Metamorphosis', and while he is a different on a sentence level the ambition is to go that high. He could have many readers in future. If we have one.

I didn't like The Force at all. It was boring and the plot was cable t.v.-level and i kinda was just rooting for every cop to die. my dad likes don winslow. i think that's why i read it. he had it lying around. that book gets raves.

Bernhard Schlink - Olga

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins. The author is best known as author of "The Reader" which was adapted into a film adaptation starring Kate Winslet, but I have neither read that book or seen the film. This book is nice and short for a novel (only about 200 pages), and it moves quickly - the action covers two lifetimes. At the beginning you feel like its going to be a fairly conventional story, but without giving any spoilers, lets just say it tends to take unexpected turns and delights in confounding reader expectations. Its a moving story of human tenderness, loss and aging.

Envy was short. I finished it last night. I'll retract my description of it as a satire. It begins as if it will go that direction, but it doesn't sustain it for long. Instead it becomes increasingly dreamlike and chaotic. The reality of the characters and everything around them get swallowed up by a steady outpouring of fantasy images, loosely tethered to feverish ideas about the new Soviet world being imagined into existence. It's a strange book, full of wonder, fear, elation and confusion.

Love Envy. Think it was my 2nd or 3rd NYRB classic.

Dow, I wanted you to see my new thing. I don't know if you saw it...

you guys can read this if you want. i like you guys.

i figure you come here...

Oh and while i'm at it i'm reading my second Daniel Woodrell book Tomato Red.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71RD2xxBpKL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

oh wow xyz I'm just seeing that you read the Jelinek. I'm a fan of her work and I've been waiting for this translation since it was announced, I bought it but it is of course on the stack.

Because I’m normal and definitely not a dumbass I’ve got half a dozen on the go. Just finished the researcher’s first murder by John finnemore & concerning the future of souls by joy Williams & am partway thru payment deferred by cs forester, heir to the glimmering world by Cynthia Ozick, mist by Miguel de unamuno & mother to daughter, daughter to mother ed tillie Olsen. Meanwhile i have book club next week and haven’t started this months book

Ozick's last few novels have been nothings for me, so I hope you enjoy it.

She’s got the stuff so I think it’ll be a decent read, am very into the setup (will read this one v slowly cause it’s on my tablet) tho the caricature Marxists are corny

I didn't like The Force at all. It was boring and the plot was cable t.v.-level and i kinda was just rooting for every cop to die.

Agree with all of this. His previous trilogy — The Power of the Dog, The Border, and The Cartel — was a lot better, but of course I was able to get those from the library; this one I had to go and pay for.

I bought 20 paperback Westerns for $1 each this weekend, which I have a use for, and found a copy of B. Traven's The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre on the same shelf, so I'm reading that now.

I've been leaning into the detective and spy thrillers more this year than I ever have previously. Now I am reading Journey into Fear, a 1940 spy novel by Eric Ambler. The plot shows that it was written after WWII had begun but before the collapse of the Maginot Line when France was overrun by the Nazis, adding a bit of historical interest.

all the 30s and 40s ambler books are cool. can't say i followed him into the 50s and 60s.

mist by Miguel de unamuno

I read this in the Barcia translation, which translates the title as "Fog". Enjoyably singular.

I watched the Joseph Cotten-written adaptation of Journey Into Fear years ago. Orson Welles plays a Turk.

That Turkish head of the secret police is a character Ambler used in multiple books.

oh wow xyz I'm just seeing that you read the Jelinek. I'm a fan of her work and I've been waiting for this translation since it was announced, I bought it but it is of course on the stack.

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Monday, 28 October 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Cool. I'd put it on top of the stack, its really something else..

Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes - found a cheap copy last week with a terrible movie tie-in cover from the 80s. I quite liked it - gets a little heavy-handed about its messages but they generally work, since the narrator is a teenager who styles himself an authority on the world he flits around in, until he realizes that there are things going on that's he's been completely ignorant of in all these subcultures that he thinks he understands.

I liked City of Spades best in that trilogy. The teen narrator of AB seemed like a Sunday School Holden Caulfield, but your take makes me think maybe I should try again, though really tired of Unreliable Narrators.

i didn't really think of him as unreliable exactly, he's just very confident in being a teenager-about-town who knows all these disparate groups - Jews, immigrants, gays, criminals, etc - and then things start getting seriously violent and it upends his conception of the city he lives in and how much he actually understands.

Cool. I'd put it on top of the stack, its really something else..

I appreciate this because things move down the stack so quickly, my shelves are thousands-unread-and-growing yknow - but I genuinely used to write Yale University Press yearly to ask "how's that Children of the Dead translation coming along," and I hunted down the lone English extract that had been published in a pretty obscure 90s journal (the bus crash)...I'm reading Balzac right now and I wanna get through Old Goriot and one more but then I'll take this prompt, I'm looking forward to it.

finished trollope's "the warden" then floundered a bit before falling into thackeray's "vanity fair" -- the contrast between the two is instructive

trollope is also on my "time to read more of him" list, I did Barchester Towers like 20 years go

The Way We Live Now is stone cold--- also, "It was fun, in a strange kinda way. " (Willie's blurb)

i didn't really think of him as unreliable exactly, he's just very confident in being a teenager-about-town who knows all these disparate groups - Jews, immigrants, gays, criminals, etc - and then things start getting seriously violent and it upends his conception of the city he lives in and how much he actually understands

And I still gotta check this:

Only other AT at local library: first Lily Dale, The Small House at Allington---good?

― dow, Friday, August 30, 2024 3:20 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

good!

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 6, 2024

Sexology by Alex Kovacs - This is a mate so my opinion may be suspect, but it's a delightful novel about a large brood living in a Highgate house with their unconventional mother (she is a sexologist, thus the title). Reminded me of Goscinny's Petit Nicolas in its insights into the eccentric inner lives of children, though unlike that this is very much not a book for all the family. Juliet Jacques blurb on the back.

Anyone picked up the new Alan Hollinghurst?

My fave passage so far in the novel Tomato Red that I'm reading.

"She stepped backwards, into the house, and let the door shut between us. It was passing strange how different she looked in her own true clothes and her own true home, swaddled in her own true history. A big share of her sparkle dulled as that pooched-out screen door slammed her inside."
"Then she moved backwards, deeper into the shadow. All I could see was that she was barely there, like something you almost recall: the Pledge of Allegiance, your daddy's real name."
"Come on in Sammy. Share the stink."

let me tell you, these books are a hoot. you can read 'em like candy. he teaches me stuff though. candy doesn't usually teach you stuff. they make me want to write a story! i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing...

I have a bunch of the Woodrell books to read then i'm on to the fantasy mole trilogy! that should take me to the snow if there is any.

"sonny liston was a friend of mine" - thom jones

this is great

a great book for real.

I have that one and the one before it, Cold Snap, but for some reason I don't own The Pugilist At Rest, his first (and best) collection. I should get one on eBay one of these days.

yes def gonna search out his other ones

Ordered a copy tonight. Alibris claims it's brand new — I hope it's not a shitty print-on-demand copy, which is happening more and more lately.

I'm reading Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson. It's difficult not to map Williamson's fascism backwards but this is so beautifully immersive that any blood and soil stuff feels ridiculous. In places it's so vicious and alive. This could be Cormac McCarthy.

The otters lay up near a cattle shippen, among reeds with white feathery tops. A dull red sun, without heat or rays, moved over them, sinking slowly down the sky. For two days and two nights the frosty vapour lay over the burrows, and then came a north wind which poured like liquid glass from Exmoor and made all things distinct. The wind made whips of the dwarf willows, and hissed through clumps of the great sea- rushes. The spines of the marram grasses scratched wildly at the rushing air, which passed over the hollows where larks and linnets crouched with puffed feathers. Like a spirit freed by the sun's ruin and levelling all things before a new creation, the wind drove grains of sand against the legs and ruffled feathers of the little birds, as though it would breathe annihilation upon them, strip their frail bones of skin and flesh, and grind them until they became again that which was before the earth's old travail. Vainly the sharp and hard points of the marram grasses drew their circles on the sand: the Icicle Spirit was coming, and no terrestrial power could exorcize it.

Just finished Dead in the Water, a totally gripping piece of investigative journalism about a pirate hijacking in the early 2010s. I don’t recall getting so sucked into a book for a long time, which is amazing given that it’s largely about the intricacies of shipping container insurance. The cover is a dud – could easily be glossed over at a bookshop – so I’m very grateful for the effusive recommendation on Max Read’s substack as I never would’ve noticed it otherwise.

thx. I just put a library hold on Dead in the Water.

When I first tried to read Tarka the Otter, I gave up after one chapter. Then the second time I finished it and immediately reread it, with the vocabulary fresh in my mind, so I could focus more on the story.

I wish I had someone to read it out loud to. The book sings.

Émile Zola's The Belly of Paris, inspired by Dwight Garner's “The Upstairs Delicatessen, which drops a novel and essay or poetry collection to read every other sentence.

!!!!

"In 1974 he began working on a script for a film treatment of Tarka the Otter, but it was not regarded as suitable to film, being 400,000 words long."

Hmm, 400,000 words and zero dialog!

Pulled Fight Club off the shelf yesterday in a burst of "Wow, I still own this?" surprise. Woof. That is some BAD writing. Leaving the ideas aside, on a pure sentence level, Chuck Palahniuk just cannot do the job.

Vladimir Sharov - Be as Children. Complex story where the lives of Lenin, a murderer/priest and a holy fool are told and reflected through Russian history, from the medieval-era monarchism/orthodoxy right through Bolshevism (the novelist was a student of pre-modern Russia), and where the continuities of varying faiths -- including communism as one -- are the main thread. Nobody does 'fate of the soul' type novels like a Russian!

Published in 2008 (he died about ten years later). This could be seen as a dig at communism, but it feels a lot of richer in its telling of lives and deaths. I really like him for this.

Anyone read Jamaica Kincaid? I'm sure I've read a couple stories. My bookstore got lovely reissues of most of her book.

I started reading Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. It was a gift. It started with some interesting stats - Americans alone spend enough time watching TV to craft 2000 wikipedias very year - but it was shaping up to be relentlessly positive about the internet's power to transform society. That might - might? - have been fine in 2010 when it was written but now it's like a bad joke. Back to the charity shop with it then.

Anyone read Jamaica Kincaid? I'm sure I've read a couple stories. My bookstore got lovely reissues of most of her book.

A Small Place is key reading about colonialism but I don't suspect you'll be saying "jeez, I hadn't thought of it that way" like I was in college. still, a very good book that takes about an hour to read. the pitch of her ire is perfect and her sentences glow, she's underpraised as a stylist.

Starting off my noirvember with Nelson George's The Accidental Hunter.

I've been reading a pop history of the Pacific NW, The Columbia, written by Stewart Holbrook in 1956. The book was commissioned by Rinehart as part of an ambitious series about American Rivers. Holbrook was quite well known in his day. He's a bit in the Bill Bryson vein, but a better writer, consistently lively and entertaining without Bryson's tryhard cleverness.

He's all but forgotten now, but Holbrook clearly knew how to deliver the goods; the history is sound and he includes many interesting tidbits. My favorite so far is that when Lewis & Clark arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805 one of the Clatsop women living nearby had a tattoo on her forearm that read "J. Bowman".

oh wow xyz I'm just seeing that you read the Jelinek. I'm a fan of her work and I've been waiting for this translation since it was announced, I bought it but it is of course on the stack.

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Monday, 28 October 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Cool. I'd put it on top of the stack, its really something else..

― xyzzzz__, Monday, October 28, 2024 5:24 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

well, I did bump it up to the top, but after a few chapters I'm not sure I'm going to make it -- or at least not in this moment. I used to read a fair bit of hard-going literature like this, I've read almost all of Gass, spent time with e.g. Blake Butler et al, but this is incredibly dense stuff...the annoyance of the election may have me reaching for, idk, Trollope or somebody, something nice and linear.

somehow with two threads got confused and bookmarked the other one, hence my absence in this one.

i have read a few books, most notably Lyn Hejinian’s final poetry book, ‘Fall Creek,’ which proved to be a fitting end to her œuvre— a 90 page long lyric tracking a hawk in a landscape, but also about the end of life and the thinking that comes with it. she knew she was going to die, and it comes across. amazing book.

now I am in the middle of ‘Chevengur,’ which is by turns hilarious and really chilling.

after reading Iphigenia and the Iliad in september, i started november with Jennifer Saint's Elektra which accidentally turns out to be the exact same thing told by slightly different people (Elektra being Iphigenia's sister. the book is her point of view, and Clytemnestra and Cassandra, so it's Iphigenia in Aulis, The Iliad, and onto the Oresteia, probably).

Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, my first time in 30 years. I'd forgotten how with the lightest touch he knocks Brits for their snobbery, tourist snobbery, and colonialism. The perfect first novel.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey. A day (or sixteen orbits) in the life of six astronauts in the space station. Not science fiction. At this point in time it reads like an elegy for the planet and as such is a heavy bummer.

I mean it is fiction, and yes it's set in space, but it's not SF.

that's currently everywhere. probaby a function of the booker nomination.

yeah i started reading it as it popped up in my library app, it did catch my eye earlier this year though.

well, I did bump it up to the top, but after a few chapters I'm not sure I'm going to make it -- or at least not in this moment. I used to read a fair bit of hard-going literature like this, I've read almost all of Gass, spent time with e.g. Blake Butler et al, but this is incredibly dense stuff...the annoyance of the election may have me reaching for, idk, Trollope or somebody, something nice and linear.

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Wednesday, 6 November 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Understandable. Doubt I'd be in the mood for it rn.

Like my other great read of the year was 'Chevengur' and while I was enjoying it whenever I picked it up I was taking care of my cat who was ill at the time, so it was hard going. Something that should have taken a week took a month.

Re-reading Thom Jones' first short story collection, The Pugilist At Rest.

Currently reading Ernest Shackleton's memoir of the ill-fated Endurance expedition to Antarctica, "South". Started slow, lots of latitude and longitude readings, but has really blossomed into a total vibe. Engrossing and memorable.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/10/paul-bailey-obituary
Are his books good?

My last of days was there to contemplate
when words absconded from me
as long ago as Nineteen-forty-one.
I must have heard the nurses talk of death.

My last of days was often in my mind
when I was decked out in school uniform,
clutching my mother’s hand for the assurance
it wasn’t in her nature to provide.

My last of days was an obsession with me
in all the years I was romantically inclined.
I cherished the idea of being doomed.
My happiest day was when a stranger said
I looked like Keats.

My last of days was cast aside
for glorious intervals
when I began to function in the world.

My last of days returned to me
with the last days of friends I loved.
I suffered an abundance of them.

My last of days is getting closer now.
I fear I have to welcome it.

paul bailey wrote that. its about his death. and now he is dead.

books he loved:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview32

i have never read him. the British contingent here are our only hope for opinion. his books sound interesting.

I've been reading Dead in the Water after I noticed Chuck_Tatum's endorsement, which convinced me to find it in my public library. It's a true story about the ugly underside of maritime insurance and its determination to overlook organized crime, fraud and even murder so long as everyone involved walks away with a fat profit. The pair of authors are to be commended for their investigative work.

In terms of style points, it's basic journalism; the writing leans heavily on loading sentences with adjectives, and it feels padded out in places in order to extend it to proper book length, but the story itself is strong enough to carry my interest along. I just get a bit impatient when it wanders for a paragraph or two into extraneous slice-of-life details before getting back on track.

What can I say? I'm just picky about style points.

Dead in the water is a good ripping yarn imo.

Just finished Come My Fanatics on Electric Wizard. So need to get a more playable version of Dopethrone.

Also reading a set of essays called The Holocaust and the Nakba comparing and connecting the 2 interlinked nightmares.
Quite good so far.

Volume 2 of Steven H Gardner's Another Tuneless Racket Punk history the volume actually directly covering punk.
Quite interesting coverage of a load of bands I'm somewhat familiar with and a few I'm less so.
May still need to get the last 2 volumes.

Thanks for the Bailey response, Scott---yes, his books (as described in that obit) do look interesting---for a while I thought the poem was a Roger Waters lyric, but I gather poetry wasn't one of his main things.
Speaking of Electric Wizard, didn't you go to high school with a girl who was in that band? (Scott, anybody.)

I'm being mean--sorry, Paul, wherever you are.

he doesn't care. he's dead.

well, that's some consolation.

i've been reading this article about maurice cabon

https://ile-en-ile.org/cabon/

if anybody has any leads on how to track down any of his books (particularly the novels), i'd greatly appreciate it.

*marcel cabon, écrivain DE maurice

Noirvember reads:

I Married A Dead Man, Cornell Woolrich - This all happens in the first chapters, don't think it's really spoilers, but tagging nonetheless. A woman wakes up to find her man has left her, leaving five dollars and a train ticket back to her hometown of San Francisco. She is also pregnant. Not knowing what else to do, she takes the ticket, and on the train she meets a young couple - the girl is also pregnant, and they are meeting his parents for the first time (they've never so much as seen a photo of her!). Our protagonist and the other woman are chatting in the train's powder room (different times) - she asks her to hold her wedding ring while she washes her hands...and at that moment there's a horrible train crash. The protagonist wakes up to find herself in hospital, having given birth (!), and finds that the name on her sheet is not hers but rather that of the other woman. Both she and the husband are dead, and now the grieving in laws want to meet the woman they think is her dead son's wife, and the baby they think is their grandson.

Some absurd developments in this but it's pretty much a perfect noir novel, just full of style and angst and fear. Highly recommend.

Nada, Jean Patrick Manchette - Follows a band of anarchists as they plot to kidnap the American ambassador to France. The gang are a combination of suicidal doomers, adventurers and violent sociopaths; the wider left is shown opportunistically using the incident their various agendas. A pro establishment novel, then? Not at all, because the bourgeois society the characters rub up against is unfailingly one of self-righteous stupidity and, bad as the gang gets, they are never quite as horrific as the cops chasing them, who are on the whole bloodthirsty fascists using every means at their disposal to slaughter their prey. This reminded me of many Italian crime and conspiracy films from the 70's in its rampant despair, except even in those you usually have some characters who are the voice of conscience, even if they end up dead too. Here there really is no respite, aside from the pleasure of the (somewhat too eagerly namedropped) Jazz records occasionally playing on the radio. Not a pleasant place to stay too long, but I mean, I asked for noir, and it don't get any darker than this.

lol I didn't tag, daniel u idiot

You told just enough for me to want those. Knew I needed more Woolrich in my---life, hadn't heard of Manchette!

Reading the reissue of Woe To Live On by Daniel Woodrell with an intro by Ron Rash. Originally published in 1987. Adapted for the screen by Ang Lee as Ride with the Devil. The third installment in my Woodrell mega-read.

https://target.scene7.com/is/image/Target/GUEST_4cca6ba5-9adf-4d69-9b46-1655f8ec8ebc?wid=488&hei=488&fmt=pjpeg

hadn't heard of Manchette!

I discovered him through Jacques Tardi's comics adaptations, started picking his stuff up whenever I went to France and thought I had gotten myself a nice little deep cut to boast about - but alas, as always, the dreaded tastemakers at NYRB Classics were two steps ahead of me and have released many of his novels.

Nada's great; I've read four of his books — The Mad And The Bad, No Room At The Morgue, and Fatale — all through NYRB editions. They have three others that I think I might pick up, since they're having a sale at the moment.

Recently finished "A Shining" by Jon Fosse. I picked it up at the library mostly out of curiosity because of the Nobel and because it was short, only about 70 pages, so in that uncanny valley between a long story and a short novel, though it's published as a stand-alone book. It wasn't bad, kind of interesting. The blurbs on the back mentioned Beckett and that seemed apt. It was sort of dream-like, with elements of farce, but also slightly disturbing.

J.G. Ballard's The Kindness of Women. Thoughts?

I needed a quick, light read, so I pulled out The Misty Harbor, a 1932 Georges Simenon featuring an early (and more working class) version of Maigret. This one isn't set in Paris, but in a village in Brittany, so it has a different atmosphere.

Is it good?

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: I have a hard time thinking of books in binary terms of good or bad, because even bad, awful, terrible books are read and enjoyed by somebody and I've struggled to enjoy or finish plenty of stone cold classics.

Thanks. Currently having trouble staying w/gafa Tristram Shandy, but will keep trying for a whie. No prob w current bedtime Dave Barry's Greatest Hits.

J.G. Ballard's The Kindness of Women. Thoughts?

I meant to ask: what are your thoughts, Alfred?

John Milton - Prose Writings

In which Milton essays on things like...how a democracy should be, that it should be led by the best of us to serve the people, how censorship is bad not good, how kings and Catholics are bad not good!

To pick this up, in this week of all weeks!

The Bhagavad Gita.

Finally read it, but after years of yoga practice it really explains yoga as a system of spiritual, austere, devotional path/practice, and its good. If I had only begun a practice this might have put me off as you can see a cult-ish path.

As a text it has some poetry to it.

I'm currently reading Kusamakura, Natsume Soseki. It's his one-off experimental novel, where he attempted to write a contemporary novel (in 1906) that captures the 'spirit of beauty' by adapting older conventions contained in travel narratives like Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, with an added chapter of comic horseplay in the tradition of Jippensha Ikku's Shank's Mare. It is slow-paced, rather lyrical (it features haiku), and has far more philosophical digression than plot. So far it is somewhat intriguing, when taken in small portions.

even bad, awful, terrible books are read and enjoyed by somebody

If that somebody isn't you, then the books are bad, awful and terrible (with an asterisk)

yes, but just by praising a book as very enjoyable without giving a more detailed appraisal amounts to my making a recommendation that others will enjoy it. I shy away from that, if only because my personal standards for enjoyment have proved to be quite inconsistently transferable to other readers.

I'm currently reading Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar. Based on the title I would've expected, you know, a book about an immigrant in Montana, but actually no, this is basically an Ivy League grad-school campus novel, set at Columbia University in the early '90s. The title seems to be some kind of obscure joke about the fact that there is a town named that (actually its Emigrant, Montana in Google Maps). It's kind of two books in one: a novel of straight male sexual awakening, and a hagiography of a charismatic, politically active, left-leaning professor.

Alan Hollinghurst - Our Evenings
James Schuyler - Alfred and Guinevere

Victor Serge: Notebooks 1936-1947

Amazing concentration of death (a commie anarcho person he knows is dying every five pages) and life (descriptions of Mexico and what he sees of the place, the conversations he has, etc.) within these pages.

Serge is marvelous

I'm reading some poetry, After Callimachus:Poems, Stephanie Burt. The poems could be considered either as fairly loose translations or as very free adaptations of a wide selection of the surviving poems and fragments of Callimachus, the most popular of the Alexandrian poets under the Ptolemies.

I expect I'll be splitting my reading time between this and a couple of Richard Stark's hardboiled crime novels featuring 'Parker' as the main character. I just picked these up from the public library.

coincidentally, Callimachus keeps getting quoted in what I'm currently reading - Divine Might by Nathalie Haynes - this morning it was Demeter and her trees.

re orbital, 5 parts on radio 4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m001v3jr

cue debate about whether listening is reading...

Finished The Doomed City by the Strugatsky Brothers and thought it was fantastic.

That's a damn masterpiece, agreed.

The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen - great, prob my fav book i've read this year. it's about a tiny one family norwegian island.

In Defence of the Act by Effie Black - almost bad enough for me to not finish. i did but kinda wish i hadn't.

Finished The Doomed City by the Strugatsky Brothers and thought it was fantastic.

bought it.

The Richard Stark 'Parker' novel I just finished, The Hunter, was the first in the series, although I hadn't planned it that way. The most interesting thing about it was that instead of falling into the currently common form of a "police procedural" it was purely a "crime procedural", concentrating its interest in how the crimes of the main character are accomplished, with the added twist that his adversaries, accomplices, and victims are all operating outside the law. The closest anyone comes to operating by the norms of society is the Outfit, the highly corporate crime syndicate. The author has to pull off the feat of making the plot as drily believable as possible, while essentially writing a male fantasy where getting what you want is wholly a matter of knowing the best way to apply extreme violence wherever it is required by the logic of the situation.

By way of contrast, reading Burt's translations of Callimachus has been very pleasant. She has provided him with a voice that is consistent, appropriate and appealing, through language is poised, lively and convincing., even when it is self-consciously anachronistic. Which is to say, I'm really enjoying it.

the parker books have always had a lot of fans here. as well they should! despite my traumatic experience meeting westlake i would be the first to say that he sure could write a humdinger.

I've only read the last Parker, Dirty Money, when he was well within his groove, living and occasionally killing only by code(think the author said of the first book that, other than revenge, Parker doesn't really know what he wants, but keeps going..)(I only know that book via Point Blank's otm zen timing: Point Blank and Get Carter are thee 60s crime classick flicks.)
What's funny in Dirty Money: Parker loves to plan complicated operations, which keep going awry, and he really loves that too, though he'd never bother to say so (too busy). Humming along.

Get Carter is from 1971! Though set in the 60's yeah.

After I finished reading the Callimachus last night I "auditioned" a copy of Fledgling, Octavia Butler. I only got 7 or 8 pages in before I nope'd out. Not what I was looking for. Maybe some other time.

The most interesting thing about it was that instead of falling into the currently common form of a "police procedural" it was purely a "crime procedural", concentrating its interest in how the crimes of the main character are accomplished, with the added twist that his adversaries, accomplices, and victims are all operating outside the law. The closest anyone comes to operating by the norms of society is the Outfit, the highly corporate crime syndicate.

The best crime novels treat cops as incidental at best.

Had meant to ask this before---anybody here read Ted Lewis? Is he good? Also wondering about the bio mentioned below.
wiki:

Lewis moved to London in 1961 with £70 he earned from his first illustration commission, the Alan Delgado children's book,The Hot Water Bottle Mystery.[2] His first work in London was in advertising, and then as an animation specialist in television and films (among them the Beatles' Yellow Submarine).[4] His first novel, All the Way Home and All the Night Through, was published in 1965, followed by Jack's Return Home, which created the noir school of British crime writing and pushed Lewis into the best-seller list. The novel was later retitled Get Carter after the success of the film of the same name...Lewis's final book, assessed as his best by some critics, was GBH, published in 1980, the title referring to grievous bodily harm in British law.[8][9][10] Lewis died in 1982 aged 42 of alcohol-related causes.[11]

In October 2017 Nick Triplow published a detailed biographyGetting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir.[12]

In 2020 The Ted Lewis Centre opened in Barton upon Humber celebrating his life and works.[13]

Jack's Return Home one I'd like to start with, since GC the movie left a rare impression.

I read George Melly's Paris and the Surrealists. As Melly is keen to point out in the introduction, it's really a book of Michael Woods' photography, with some of Melly's memories of visits to Paris - first as an ingenue in search of nourishment, second with introductions from ELT Mesens to meet Breton et al - as a narrative diversion, and as such it's largely successful. Mostly, it's a series of walks and that's catnip for me - the kind of book that makes me map out a series of walks I'll never complete.

It led me to this weird 1978 documentary - another walk I'll never complete; another walk the BBC would never commission today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIG0ahCinSo

I have started Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone, 50 pages out of 2000, but its a relatively easy read.

In which a man finds his own contemporary life somewhat unsatisfying, so spends time with the old books, wondering where the fuck we have gone wrong.

At least that's the vibe I'm getting.

But its also something I am looking to read into. My last book was Victor Serge's notebooks, whose writing life was a lament for the Russian revolution.

As the sense of humanity on the edge of the abyss grows stronger day by day, month by month, year by (how many years left?) it felt like right book right time.

Finished my noirvember with Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underground - very much on the same level as the first Ripley book, Highsmith a master at making you root for an objectively fucked up protagonist and share in his hatred for antagonists who are, actually, right and much better people. In this case that's a severely depressed guy who has decided he is going to confess to having forged dozens of his late friend's paintings for profit. Did not appreciate the book ending on a cliffhanger tho.

i like when The Stranglers show up in that BBC video up there!

xxxpost

I'm halfway through The Quiet American, Graham Greene. Not surprisingly, the quality of the prose is excellent, but at heart it's an argumentative book and I'm not impressed by the quality of his arguments.

The 2002 film starring Michael Caine handled the ambiguities better. But then Graham Greene often writes compelling books that don't follow through on his arguments or back away from their implications.

My opinion is based entirely on "Brighton Rock", so take this with the appropriate grain of salt. I agree that Greene does want his books to dramatize larger philosophical questions that have applicability beyond the immediate concerns of his characters (ie, to work as a "novel of ideas"). His "argument", if you want to call it that, works by posing ethical questions that the reader might expect they can easily resolve, and then cutting off their usual avenues of resolution, leaving them in a quandary or "problematizing" their moral instincts. I'm not sure he ever offers them a firmer ground to stand on, which maybe can feel like a cop-out.

Brighton Rock is his great one, a lot of the other "major" ones fall short imo.

Never really could get into his novels. For vaguely similar concerns I much prefer Muriel Spark, to name one.

What makes them similar?

Catholicism, I'm guessing.

I read and semi-enjoyed the Klosterman’s The Nineties: comforting, vapid. A lot of it is really about the early 2000s. There are a lot of sentences like “times change - that’s what time does”. And there is an underlying “I’m going to mostly write about straight white men and you’re going to lump it” attitude - it feels more like it was written by a young boomer than an older Gen Xer. But it’s an easy read. CK’s style hasn’t changed that much since I last read him in the mid 2000s - complexities get dumbed down, simple things get overcomplicated.

Finished my noirvember with Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underground - very much on the same level as the first Ripley book, Highsmith a master at making you root for an objectively fucked up protagonist and share in his hatred for antagonists who are, actually, right and much better people. In this case that's a severely depressed guy who has decided he is going to confess to having forged dozens of his late friend's paintings for profit.

Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel arrived today, a book that is likely to cause me to buy a bunch of other books.

I needed to mix in some non-fiction, so I'm reading The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen. It covers many of the discoveries made regarding the transfer of genetic information and how DNA gets modified, including a process called horizontal gene transfer, where DNA can be swapped between highly unrelated organisms. It's popularized science, so it includes a lot of character sketches of scientists and humanizing narratives about how they made their signature discoveries, but it also tackles some difficult molecular biology without flinching away from the thornier details. As an ex-technical writer, I admire Quammen's courage in trying to put some real science into a book for the general public.

i read half of Quammen's The Song of the Dodo and i LOVED what i read. it was fascinating. but then it got too science-y for me.

I read "The Best Minds" by Jonathan Rosen, a book that was one of the NY Times 10 Best picks for last year. It reminded me of "Imagining Robert" by Jay Neugeboren, another memoir about a relationship with someone suffering from schizophrenia, an outside perspective on madness so to speak, although it wasn't as good as that one. I think lots of the cultural anthropology stuff about depictions of schizophrenia in the culture, the author's thoughts about the 90s literary theory craze, etc, could have been cut. It would have been a more tightly focused book.

Whew, that Mary Gaitskill substack (all tho words I've read for free).

I finished The Tangled Tree several days ago, but have nothing pressing to say about it that couldn't be derived from my post back on Dec. 5. As usual with this sort of book, I find the main thing is to get the gist of the science, what new things are now established as sufficiently proved, and where it may be leading. All the specific facts will quickly vanish from memory.

It took me a few days to start my next book, Peach Blossom Paradise by a Chinese author, Ge Fei. I haven't been able to connect with it very well so far, though I'd have a hard time explaining what the difficulty has been. It engages me just enough that I plan to plug away at it a while longer.

I finally finished Sergio Pitol's Taming the Divine Heron. I struggled with it even though it is quite short. I don't think my attention span is that great right now and I think a lot of the literary references went over my head. I admired the multiple framing devices and some of the humor, but I liked it a lot less than The Love Parade. The ending is quite bizarre!

I enjoyed The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. Interested to hear he has a new one out.

Peach Blossom Paradise was published in Chinese in 2004. The translation I'm reading is from 2020 and published by NYRB Classics.

Ah ok. I’ll check it out. Thanks

re choice of stories and their translation, what's a good Chekhov collection? Feeling the need this winter.

It is almost the solstice, which would traditionally mark the transition to a new quarterly WAYR thread. However, these threads aren't piling up posts at nearly the rate they accumulated in the past. We're averaging about 225 posts per seasonal thread. We've also been tweaked lately by some sheep fuxors about our identifying our thread titles too strongly with the seasons of the northern hemisphere.

I am making a Modest Proposal that our next WAYR thread start at the New Year and continue throughout 2025. If ILB'ers would like to discuss this proposal, I'm making a new thread for such discussion:

Should we switch from quarterly to annual WAYR threads?

the seasons thing is very parochial, northern-hemispherist

but i think even with the upcoming deluge of end-of-year posts these threads could easily cope with being 4x this size. would 6-monthly be a good compromise?

I'm currently reading "Montaillou" by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a historical study of a small French village in the Pyrenees in the first half of the 14th century, based on detailed interviews with the villagers which were conducted as part of an Inquisition into Catharism, which was endemic to the area. The records were later discovered in the Vatican archives.

Montaillou has been mentioned on ILB at least once before and it sounds fascinating. I'll be interested in hearing how it strikes you, especially on whether the author leans toward a somewhat juicier 'popular' or a somewhat drier 'academic' approach to the material.

Its somewhere in the middle. It strikes a good balance, I would say. Its not dry for the sake of being dry, but it is organized systematically, so you might get a chapter on the family and household structure in the village, for instance. You could always skip to the juicier chapters, like the one on sexual relations in the village.

Somewhere in the middle? That's my meat and drink!

The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross- Recommended by movie critic David Cairns, this mixes Le Carré style espionage with Lovecraftian horrors. Much less OMG ZANY than that description suggests, the drudgery of civil service is evoked quite adeptly and for the most part the horrors are played straight. Published in 2004, which already feels like a foreign country - there's some ableist language and very 20th century gender relations, but also more notably WAGAMAMA gets described as a yuppie central London eatery with cues around the block of fashion industry ppl trying to get in, was London ever so innocent? Anyway I'm enjoying this quite a lot.

Read Jordan Harper's third novel, Everybody Knows, over the weekend. His first two were set in biker/meth/skinhead/trailer-trash California and were really good. This one is set in Hollywood and revolves around the entertainment industry and is just as good — basically, a "publicist" whose job is to cover things up, not to make them public, falls into a truly dirty story and decides to try and make some money off of it and things get dark and violent. Three good lines from early on stuck with me:

"There's all these invisible walls that keep everybody in line. And if you refuse to see them, they just aren't there anymore. Once you walk through the walls, they never come back up again."

I did finish Peach Blossom Paradise. It contained plenty of interesting incident and detail set in a historic period of political and cultural change in China, but it never quite came alive for me. The motives of the characters were too opaque for me to feel like I understood them, so their activities felt like I viewed them from too great a distance.

I'm winding up the year with another Ross MacDonald, The Goodbye Look. I've now read enough of his Lew Archer books in a short enough period that the sameness of the plots and characters are becoming a drag on my enjoyment. otoh, his dialogue and the way he constructs a scene are still about as close to perfection as I've found in the genre.

What did you read in 2024?

annual roundup

I have started Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone, 50 pages out of 2000, but its a relatively easy read.

In which a man finds his own contemporary life somewhat unsatisfying, so spends time with the old books, wondering where the fuck we have gone wrong.

At least that's the vibe I'm getting.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, 2 December 2024 bookmarkflaglink

So I just finished this and its a little bit like that -- if 4500 or so entries over a mostly six year period amount to making a single point then I think it is that 'Modern Life is Rubbish' -- but he really goes into a lot of trouble to backing this point up. Leopardi does track it through the history of literature -- from the Illiad its mostly been downhill, although 14th century Italian literature is exciting (though he will also argue that Italians generally wrote better in the 16th century; there are a lot of kinks like this) -- and the history of language (there are detours to Sanskrit and Chinese though he doesn't know those languages), from the Greeks to the Latin to late Latin right through to the Italian, Spanish and French (he despises French and it seems to be because no writer really impresses him in it but also its the language that bastardizes antiquity the most). He will also talk about the forms of poetry: so the epic and lyric are wonderful whereas dramatic poetry gets it in the neck (Shakespeare in all but name, though he is finally named late on). He really struggles with the point of a soliloquy (like how can you can say you are suffering in words; you cannot articulate this!), but he is best when he talks about what he loves, there are many beautiful entries that are strung together and form 10 pages essays. The essay on the Illiad and how everything after is just that bit worse is a terrific 25 pages. But we also get a lot on the language by which humanity can be expressed, there is terrific stuff in here about how German and the philosophy of the time is so much more inferior to the writing of antiquity because the concepts it deal with aren't expressed as well; similarly the first scientific writing gets it in the neck (Galileo is seen as a terrific writer, but the flaw of science is that it cannot communicate well). You can go from this to debates to this day about academic jargon but because its someone who is really committed to a form humanity lost you can't really pass it off for a culture war game.

Having said that the guy's politics are a form of conservatism, but I love his writing (and what I am writing about is just some of the undercurrents within it. It is a diary and though you don't get much self-pity there is a sadness throughout the work around his life, and how that's turned out, but there are so many beautiful entries even there, one of which is about how great it is to eat alone).

As a book its a difficult sell. 20% of it I skimmed through as Latin grammarian stuff that you actually need Latin and Greek to make sense of. I would -- though I haven't read it -- possibly recommend the selections of it translated by Tim Parks.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300186338/passions/

But its only 200 pages. I would say it needs a 1000 page abridgment. Its one of the great 19th century books and I haven't seen such a great reading of Antiquity since Burton's Anatomy.

Just finished The Ministry of Time - curious if anyone else has read it. Tons of fun and I’d recommend it completely, but the ending didn’t work for me at all.

haha absolutely agree

Great write up xyzz, made me curious.

Thanks Daniel, tough book to do justice to.

There's a new WAYR thread for 2025:

2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread