2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread

Happy New Year, y'all. Welcome to the first What Are You Reading thread of the Reform Era.

Due to a slacking off in the pace at which ILB's WAYR threads have been piling up posts, combined with some mild grumbling from our Southern Hemispherical friends about our quarterly threads constantly referencing the wrong season for them, I thought maybe we should ditch the old quarterly/seasonal format for a sleeker, modern streamlined thread. After the first six months we can decide if we want or need one or two WAYR threads per annum.

I'm about to start in on Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey of Homer. It's waiting for me at the public library (currently closed for New Year's Day). Meanwhile I'll browse around in David Hinton's translations of the poems of Wang Wei.

Here's a link to last year's final WAYR thread: Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall of 2024?

I'm reading Hard to Be a God by the Strugatsky brothers, given to me by a friend years ago.

I think I left it sitting around because I mistakenly thought that Refn movie (Only God Forgives) was an adaptation? Even though I already loved Roadside Picnic. Idk, very silly of me. But I'm Strugatsky-pilled after reading The Doomed City and I'm glad to have it on hand (any other Strugatsky recs?).

I'm reading about the moles.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/917AlrBb9aL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

ALTERNATE COVER

https://archive.org/services/img/isbn_0600204340_no1/full/pct:200/0/default.jpg

alternate alternate U.S. cover

https://images.pangobooks.com/images/a260111c-a71b-4229-8be5-e881e035cb9a?width=800&quality=85&crop=1%3A1

"the savage kingdom of moles"? goodness me!

"I think I left it sitting around because I mistakenly thought that Refn movie (Only God Forgives) was an adaptation?"

The 2013 movie version of Hard to Be a God is nuts! watch it after you read it. There is also an earlier one with Werner Herzog in it but i've never seen that one.

I just recently finished “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe, so am continuing this particular rabbithole with an overview history: a re-read of “The Troubles” by Tim Pat Coogan. I somehow lost my original copy & mr veg gave me a new one for xmas
He writes quite beautifully but it is a bit slow going as my holiday-brain struggles to keep hold of all the info

oh and am also reading “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent” by Judi Dench w Brendan O’Hea

series of long-ranging interviews w Judi on the various Shakespeare characters she’s played over her career; at times line-by-line /scene-by-scene insights into her perspectives on the characters & the text, it’s pretty fascinating!. a friend gave it to me for xmas, i hadn’t even heard about it, loving it so far.

Great moles.

Yes, good moleage indeed.

In prep for teaching Faustus next term, I'm reading Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford. Being Burgess, it's full of language games, and he's hot on Latin filth*. Marlowe's time in the 'service' of Walsingham is really well put together, particularly the sections in Paris; it's great on the scuzz and grime of London (the brutal death of Babington is vivid and disgusting); I love the conversations over pubs with Raleigh and co, the dramatisation of Catholic and atheist guilt like a cloak over everything. It's probably a bit 'do you see' about Marlowe's sexuality but some of the sex is great all the same. There are also some 'chubby hmm' moments where he's working out his 'might line' drunkenly walking the streets and when he first tries 'the nymph' tobacco with Raleigh. I'm enjoying myself immensely.

*Irrumabo - Latin for fuck (I think). It appears in a poem by Catullus and in the phrase Irrumabo Omnia Et Facti Pirata, which translates to "Fuck everything and become a pirate”, which is 100% my new motto.

I think yearly threads are a good idea, fwiw. Happy new year you lot.

Happy new year! We made it. We can continue to read more.

Fleur Jaeggy - Proleterka

89 pages of very tightly written prose.

I found the mole book on my parent’s bookshelf over Christmas. On the inside cover there’s library stamp from my middle school library. I guess I borrowed it around 1990 and forgot about it. Or quite possibly I just stole it. Maybe I’ll actually read it this time.

I’m reading the new Richard Osman, it’s the start of a new series, the usual undemanding fun. I always try to give myself something easy at the start of the year, when it’s miserable and I feel like I’ve forgotten how to read.

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025? And then if you eventually want to add a second, can guess the rest.

Anyway, I'm currently going back and forth between The Brothers Mann and Babel 17, young Delany's driving ambition proving compatible w the competitive sibs'.

Just finished the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow. Won't be getting the second. The long discursive sections that make up almost all of the book might have been hypnotic if my attention had been captured, but it wasn't. There is something compelling about it, but it's hard to say what. Maddening.

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025?

Why not the current title?

The Penguin Book Of Korean Short Stories - Focuses on the modern Koreas, def nothing pre 20th century has appeared yet, but surprisingly there are some Northern writers!

South Korean writer Yi Munyol's "The Old Hatter" takes the cake in terms of a traditional mentality that feels alien to a Western reader in 2025. Check this lament:

Our old morality went the way of the old learning. The pious man who cooked his son to feed his old father; the filial daughter-in-law who cut off her finger to bring her mother-in-law back to life by feeding her drops of blood; the faithful wife who took her own life after her husband's death - we have totally forgotten these virtuous people, whose memory once shone brighter than any monument of gold. The world now belongs to those sons whose filial piety amounts to not striking their aged fathers, daughters in law who can earn praise by not throwing out their old fathers-in-law, and wives whose loyalty simply meant not having children by other men.

Society is in the gutter!!!

Very different indeed is Pak Taewon's A Day In The Life Of Kubo The Novelist, a stream of consciousness piece about a sad young man walking through the nightlife of Seoul. It's fascinating both as an example of how Beaudelaire, Woolf and Joyce (who gets a namedrop) were being digested outside of Europe, but also as a glimpse of Korea under Japanese occupation, a period which coincided with the beginnings of Westernization, writers in thrall to modernism, women hitting the bars in the style of flappers, etc.

Taewon ended up joining the North when the civil war came and stayed in N Korea until his death in the 80's; he had his right to write revoked for a few years but apparently regained it. NO IDEA what his later writings are like. He did leave a daughter in the South though, who in torn had a son...who turned out to be Bong Joon-Ho, you may have heard of him.

Thanks Daniel! I really want to check out Korean lit. Local library is closed for repairs, though relocation seems more and more likely (and then Local Library War can ramp back up, maybe with more xenophobia, considering return of Mr. T.)

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025?

Why not the current title?

Pierre Senges - Rabelais's Doughnuts

A very short collection of stories and essays. Going for a bit of Borges here -- favourites are an essay on libraries, both actual and fictional, and a monologue by a counterfeiter -- its pretty good

i finished a book in 2025 which afaict means im ahead of 2024 already- i was gifted all the presidents men

anyway it tripped along more than i had expected and didnt get too bogged down in all the names, i enjoyed it

Currently reading Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, which I bought in December. Giving it one chapter a night. It's good, but he clearly hates the Weathermen and has a red-hot hate-boner for Bernardine Dohrn.

Also downloaded a couple of ebooks that I'm either dipping in and out of (the Ellison) or going to get to soon:

Julia Armfield, Private Rites (apparently a modern gloss on King Lear focusing on three daughters after Daddy's death)
Alex Van Halen, Brothers (autobiography)
Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of... (grabbed this just for his writings on jazz)

not far along, but

FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS, paul cooper: awkwardly written and handwavey, doubt i'll continue

BLISS & BLUNDER, victoria gosling: retelling of camelot with arthur as a tech billionaire, gwen as his influencer wife, etc. which may not sound all that promising but it's brilliant so far

Currently reading Raymond Smullyan - The Tao Is Silent. Prefer his style in smaller doses, honestly, although I'll finish this.

If I were you I'd skip it and just read the best bit online: Is God a Taoist?.

Currently reading "The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics" by Henri Bergson. The last book published in his lifetime, it's a collection of essays and lectures written over a twenty year period, but it holds together pretty well, since Bergson is at his most readable, and a couple of the essays were written specifically to tie the collection together.

Started rereading Moby Dick because Backlisted did their Christmas episode on it. I had vaguely remembered it as a good story with quite a lot of asides about whaling; I'm now finding that it's maybe 85% essays on whaling and 15% story, mostly concentrated in the first and last chapters. There are moments where Ishmael goes, "Now I really must tell you about X," and X is, like, the wooden fork that the harpoon rests in when it's in the boat, and tbh I really think the book would have survived without a chapter on it. Still good, though.

it's the way he does it, though, reveling in his knowledge, like some mad monk ov Dark Ages (not a sociable guy ashore, and sea life is getting pretty dark too, he even disappears for a while)

I stopped really keeping track of what I was reading around August of last year— I was reading but not in any organized fashion, feeling a little harried and disorganized in my thoughts and patterns.

In any case— this year I have resolved to take more organize joy in my reading and listening.

So far, I have finished ‘Skip Tracing,’ a book by Philly poet Ken Bluford. It’s his first major collection though he is nearly 75– it seems he was active in poetry in the 70s and 80s and then sort of dropped out for whatever reason and is finally having a little renaissance. Excellent book, the Tom Weatherly comparisons are apt but there is a classical air to some of Bluford’s poems that is really striking.

Also finished ‘The Climbing Zine: Book One,’ a collection of writing from the first twelve issues of a climbing-based zine out of Colorado. The best pieces are up there with some of the best adventure writing I have ever come across, and the worst pieces were among the most indulgent and insipid I have ever read. Only some athletes are good writers!!

Now just about to finish Emmanuel Hocquard’s ‘Conditions of Light,’ translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel. Uncanny, elegiac, formally restrained sequence of poems, with each iteration consisting of five poems of five lines each. Quite lovely, here is a nice sample from this morning:

It is noon touches the back
In the darkness photos await
The dough rises on the type
shop stool
The very idea of relation

Read Alex Van Halen's autobiography, Brothers, in a day. It's pretty good. He quotes from other relevant figures' VH books (David Lee Roth's, producer Ted Templeman's, former manager Noel Monk's) and tells you what he agrees with and what he disagrees with, and he's affectionately scornful of Roth, calling him a dilettante and a dummy but an immensely talented live performer/attention magnet on multiple occasions. Worth a read if you're a Van Halen fan; it will make you hear the records differently.

I'm about a third into Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation. It reads swiftly and clearly, but isn't prosaic at all. To achieve that she clearly trimmed and paraphrased rather than trying to save every detail and repetitive epithet in the text. Some people would consider that editing Homer like that is the height of presumption. Not me. I commend her for doing an excellent job, while losing nothing of real importance and producing a first rate modern translation.

For some unfathomable reason I also read the 90 pages of Introduction and Translator's Note, which delved far too deeply into the immense pile of marginalia that has accumulated around Homeric texts. What's worse is that I'd already rummaged around fairly thoroughly in that junk drawer back in college, so there was nothing new for me to learn.

Ia Genberg - The Details. A woman's life via her remembrances of 4 people. Liked it a lot.

Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place for Shady People. Short story collection, mostly set in Argentina, mostly horror or macabre/unnerving/supernatural in tone. I enjoyed it but I feel like I was missing a lot of stuff that someone more intelligent would get out of it.

Jean Paul - Maria Wutz

Maria Wutz?

Wutz it to you

Maria Wutz:

https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/maria-wutz-jean-paul

I really liked it but was reading it on a plane journey with two very nervous people sat beside me.

on a chapbook spree, though I did try to break it up with a book of poems which I decided was MFA-core slop after the first fifteen pages.

Augusto Monterosso - The Rest is Silence

Novel released in the late 70s, now available in a translation from NYRB.

Its about the 'life' of a literary critic in a small fictional town, by the name of Eduardo Torres. It starts with a few testimonies by others (unreliable, with digression as king), then we move to his 'criticism' (its ofc terrible, this is like the first novel I've read that really lampoons Sunday supplement crit properly), then we have aphorisms (most bad, but some might be good, this section is totally playing with your expectations of this kind of writing), and then an analysis of one of Torres' poem by a 'colleague' (or a rival, or Torres under a pseudonym), with a final two page commentary on the whole thing just before publication.

If you are into criticism its funny. If you are not you can read these as short stories -- which is what Monterosso spent most of his career publishing in Mexico (where he lived in exile from Guatemala). Whatever way you read it there isn't a lot like it.

Its possible this is the only way he could structure something approaching a novel.

Starting 2025 in suitably apocalyptic style: negrophobia by Darius James and late victorian holocausts by Mike Davis. Might have to go lighter for the next one

A while back, a friend said I should get into writing YA fiction because it can be lucrative and remain interesting, and because my poetic field has been feeling pretty fallow recently, I decided to dive into some newer YA books to see whether I think I could pull it off.

Of course, the first book I chose absorbed me completely for several hours and brought up some painful memories of adolescence. ‘Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe’ by Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a lovely book, narrated by Aristotle, a fifteen year old loner with some family drama, inner rage, a loathing of most other boys. He becomes friends with Dante, who is more of a hippie free spirit with a loving set of academic parents. It’s set in El Paso in 1987. I won’t give away much, but the essential drama of the book is Ari learning to “stop fighting the war he’s fighting” against himself.

It’s hard to read books like this sometimes— they didn’t really exist when I was a teenager. I wish they had, as I probably would have felt a lot less alone. Also tied into this thread is the idea that if my parents and the general environment hadn’t made me so afraid to be myself, my life could have been very different, and much happier. It’s a fool’s errand to obsess about what could have been, but it’s hard not to do so when looking back on how repressed and broken I was for much of
my teenage life.

What I am happy about is that teenagers today have these sorts of books. I am getting the sequel out from the library this afternoon.

I really liked Aristotle and Dante too, but I gave up on the sequel before the 100pg mark. The writing was super banal and just...bad in a way I don't remember the first book being (sample line of prose from the sequel would be something like: "I don't like it when Ari is mad at me. It makes me feel sad").

Queer YA is kinda my thing, so I'm here for any recommendations you need.

crypto— please give me all the recs for queer YA! thanks in advance <3

i am hesitant about reading the sequel because i have heard similar things, but i guess we’ll see.

I'd say start with Bill Konigsberg's Openly Straight--and then if you like it, move on to its (actually good!) sequel, Honestly Ben. Don't want to claim anything as authoritative as these being the *best* queer YA novels, but I did make them a focus of my dissertation, and I include Openly Straight whenever I get to teach my Gay Life & Culture in the 21st Century course (the students usually respond very positively to it). But there's plenty more where that came from, so feel free to reach out whenever you're ready for more.

I'm reading a posthumously published novel by Barbara Pym, An Academic Question. The narrative voice has many touches of her somewhat rueful and self-deflating humor, but I can see why she held onto it; it's a bit underdeveloped.

Currently reading "Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man" by Friedrich Schiller, and also slowly making my way through "Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014" by Alice Munro.

xpost thanks crypto, going to get that transferred to my local branch library.

today i *did* go to the library to get the Aristotle and Dante sequel, then read some reviews and thought better of reading it— i loved the first one and would rather not have it tainted, tbh.

Also took out ‘Darius the Great is Not Okay,’ ‘Boy Meets Boy,’ ‘Different for Boys,’ and a few others. Already finished ‘Different for Boys’ because it’s more like a short story, but it had its small moments.

Richard Russo “risk pool.”
I’d like to thank whoever it was (Scott?) who recommended him after I mentioned Richard ford. I adore this book, don’t want it to end.

yeah i love Russo’s books, he’s great

The Risk Pool is my fave of his.

xxxp

Boy Meets Boy is David Levithan, no? He's hit and miss for me--I nearly hurled Will Grayson, Will Grayson, his collab with John Green (the Fault in Our Stars guy) against the wall--but when he's on he's on: Every Day is a clever speculative/fantasy thing about a being who inhabits a different person's body each day, and Two Boys Kissing is a story of contemporary queer teens narrated by a Greek chorus of gay men who died of AIDS during the 80s and 90s. HIs latest, Ryan and Avery, is nice queer romance between a gay boy and a trans boy (I've assigned my students an excerpt from the novel this term). Some of his other books, though, show the obvious signs of an author who makes their living putting out a novel a year.

Don't know Different for Boys--one for me to check out! I've had Darius sitting on my shelf for a while now, so it's about time I got to that one.

Thread delivers---thanks, xyzzzz two days ago), and all others following!

Finished Dangerous Visions. Gave up on Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi, the simultaneous whimsical and smart-aleck style was not at all appealing. Started The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald.

crypto, i like Darius so far.

i couldn’t get through 15 pages of the Levithan— the narrator’s voice was so unlike a teenager’s and the setting so wildly unlikely given the time period that i gave up on it rather quickly.

Camilo Jose Cela - The Family of Pascal Duarte

In which a man, "cornered and terrified" by life jots down his thoughts, which become of interest to the authorities. This is set just before the Spanish Civil War and Cela's misanthropy and nihilism were in full flow from this, his first novel.

A mode which he would go on and refine in The Hive.

The Boys from Brazil! Features one of the worst intros I’ve ever read to a book in my life, by someone called Chelsea Cain. It did not predispose me to seek out her work.

Anyway, I haven’t ever seen the film but i I roughly knew what this was about. Brilliant opening so far.

Now I'm reading Breakout, a 'Parker' crime novel by Richard Stark. It's the kind of thing one can read in a day, if you care to put in about 4 or 5 hours. These novels have laconic style by the carload, which makes them fun to read.

Boys from Brazil update: they’re cloning Hitler!

Nürnberger said, ‘The initial batch must have had a higher success-ratio than he expected.’
‘I can’t help feeling,’ Klaus said, ‘that you’re a little bit pleased by the achievement.’
‘Well, you have to admit that strictly from a scientific viewpoint, it’s a step forward.’ ‘
Jesus Christ! Do you mean you can sit there and—’
‘Klaus,’ Lena said. ‘Oh – shit.’ Klaus slapped the almonds down.

another levin where the surpise ending is in the middle, leaving him half a book to show how it plays out.

see also: Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, Sliver. in fact, most of them.

I'm reading Lucia Berlin's *A Manual for Cleaning Women*. I'm a doofus and read 'cleaning' as a verb, which on reflection is weird. But the process of learning who Berlin writes about has been instructive: the lonely, the lost, the people on your bus who look afraid to touch the ground. I did wonder if there was an element of misery tourism about some of the early stories but the further I go with her, the less this matters. People have compared her to Carver but I sense more heart and the unadorned prose quarries great depths. The title story is extraordinary.

https://shortstoryproject.com/stories/a-manual-for-cleaning-women/

I started reading The Pigeon Tunnel, John LeCarre. It's billed as a memoir, but I've read a third of it and it is more a series of anecdotes having to do with when, where & how he got the material for his books. He doesn't reveal much about his private life or thoughts, which is fine with me as long as the anecdotes are sufficiently interesting.

his collected letters might be good if you do want more private life and thoughts (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/john-le-carres-search-for-a-vocation)

Finished The Boys from Brazil. What a weird book, but fun (?) The ending is so predictable but again, fun. Think I rank his work I’ve read so far as:

Stepford Wives
Rosemary’s Baby
The Boys From Brazil

a mile of shit
This Perfect Day

Never read The Boys From Brazil, but the movie is hilarious.

More YA— finished ‘Darius the Great is Not Okay,’ which I wish had more “queer” content because of how it was marketed but which I liked nonetheless, as well as ‘The Chandler Legacies,’ about a group of students, four of them queer, at a boarding school with an abuse problem. The latter was good but it felt like not enough played out on the page for some of the characters to be acting as they were toward each other. Could have used more dialogue, more actual action instead of implicit action.

I broke down and started the Aristotle and Dante sequel, crypto, and while I can see what you (and other reviewers) have written about it, at least the first half of the book feels almost ambient in tone and emotional content— a lot of intense love and feeling pulsates through it— so I can forgive the sort of limited stylings of the prose.

xp I’m definitely going to seek this out and watch it this weekend

xp to Tabes. I have a creative writing class on a Friday afternoon. It's been a slow process getting to know the kids in there, who are mostly queer, trans and/or neurodiverse. One kid totally opened up today (we were writing about Gothic themes) and they recommended Aiden Thomas - a queer, trans Latinx writer. The Cemetery Boys series is supposed to be good. I did see the dreaded phrase 'MFA in creative writing' when I Googled them.

for some reason my parents took me along to see 'the boys from brazil' when it came out, which is kind of crazy as it is rated R (for what IMDB calls 'severe violence') and i was six years old!

i don't remember any of the details apart from a hand being clapped over my eyes multiple times

I have heard of that series, chinaski, thanks for the rec!!

I read the first Cemetery Boys book and enjoyed it. Didn’t know it had become a series.

Hanna Johansson - Antiquity. blurb calls it a female lolita or some such. it isn't really. jornalist befriends/becomes obsessed with an artist, goes on holiday with her and starts to transfer said obsession to artists teenage daughter. p good.

To Cook A Bear - Mikael Niemi. historical crime novel set amomgst the sami community in northern sweden. didnt enjoy the crime bits but loved everything else.

Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

About a 1/3 of the way through this story of murder of a painter in the sultan's 14th century court. It had an amazing opening which is told from the POV of the killed.

crypto, i finished the Ari and Dante sequel, and while it certainly could have used some major editing, i actually kind of loved it, as its poignant moments did feel honest and real, despite some naff dialogue here and there.

that Dante gets into Oberlin made me laugh and laugh— i clearly am the crybaby wuss in my relationship, so thst this fictional character made the same decision I did was super humorous to me.

The end of the affair. Enjoying it, six chapters in. I don’t know anything about it, picked it up from a charity shop on the strength of the first paragraph. I haven’t read any Greene since the obligatory Brighton Rock class at uni.

YES. I love The End of the Affair so much. Keep us updated please

For one thing, the Catholic path of Affair has many more forks than Brighton Rock's doctrinaire punk (not saying that's not the better novel, but will have to re-read the more controversial, challenging, obsessive Affair, which has Green flair to spare, although it's not so sparing).

Greene!

Read Judas Priest singer Rob Halford's autobiography, Confess. It's pretty hilarious at times: he talks about glory hole encounters with fans, and about sneaking gay references into Priest lyrics that he only explains/reveals to his bandmates years later ("Jawbreaker" is about a giant cock!), at which point they shrug and say, basically, "Yeah, that tracks." But he also talks a lot about his alcoholism and cocaine addiction (he's been in recovery for close to 40 years) and some pretty tragically fucked-up relationships. He's a smart guy and it's a good book. Definitely worth a read if you're a fan, but even if you're not, you'll learn a lot about an interesting person who's led an interesting life.

Picked up Levithan’s ‘Boy Meets Boy’ again, despite my negative first impression, and while I still rolled my eyes more than a few times, there were some moments where the narrator speaks some lovely truths that felt like things I felt and talked about as a teenager. Genuine moments. So, not all bad!

Started Memento Mori by Muriel Spark (Hampstead set lady gets anonymous calls reminding her she must die; spiky as always) and A Woman Like Me by Diane Abbott (so far, childhood in Paddington coming from Jamaica, a tale I've read in enough books now that it feels familiar - which is good I think, this is part of the UK's story and should feel like a well trod story).

xp

For some reason, I'm having a hard time remembering much about Boy Meets Boy, even though I'm sure I read it. But yes, not surprised to hear that Levithan's unevenness (which I spoke about upthread) manifests itself within a single text.

Refresher: its narrator has been out since elementary school, he’s just gotten over a weird break-up when he falls for a new kid in town, one of his best friends is a drag queen quarterback named Infinite Darlene, the town is quirky and rainbow-flagged, very northern New Jersey rather than Connecticut but close to NYC.

Ahh yes, I remember Infinite Darlene especially. I think this is the one that also begins with a bunch of queer kids gathering at a bookstore on a Friday night. Another thing with Levithan: the characters and even the situations in his novels can be a bit interchangeable. You could have told me that any of those characters/scenarios belonged to Two Boys Kissing (which I liked) and I would've believed you.

Yep! Yeah, it has the feel of interchangeability.

Ran out of YA books while others arrive from interlibrary loan, so decided to reread some Genet lmfao. “The Criminal Child” and “Fragments…” remain beautiful and bewildering texts for me in many ways, I can always find something new to ponder in them.

I'm most of the way through Earthlings, Sayaka Murata. It starts out playing with the the theme of alienation by having the narrator as a young girl in a dysfunctional family claiming she is from the planet Popinpobopia. It eventually moves into much grimmer territory.

Because I haven't finished it I can't absolutely say for sure that the carefully selected cover blurbs that portray the novel as "hilarious", "joyous", or "intoxicating" are misleading to the point of absurdity, but there's nothing in the first 4/5ths of the book that I'd remotely characterize that way. This is, at its center, a novel about dehumanization and its enormous psychic costs.

I think of it as Murata's big fuck you novel after Convenience Store Woman became a big success. It only gets grimmer.

Read a ton of Junji Ito & ordered Remina (Hellstar Remina?) and The Black Paradox to continue. Currently reading Happy Mania by Moyocco Anno which is a kind of proto Sex and The City manga from the late 90s. Pretty fun.

Also reread Rosemary’s Baby at the weekend.

Ps if I could murder a fictional character it would be Guy Woodhouse

But he was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross

Plus the Anacin commercial

Ito is like the Agatha Christie of horror manga. He does same thing every time and every time I fall for it.

Ira Levin: what if husbands were bad (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives)
Ira Levin: what if Nazis were bad (The Boys from Brazil, reality)
Ira Levin: what if…I wrote the worst book of all time (This Perfect Day, Son of Rosemary)

On the rec of a friend, I took Denton Welch’s ‘In Youth is Pleasure’ out from the library

Ps if I could murder a fictional character it would be Guy Woodhouse
― triste et cassé (gyac), Wednesday, 22 January 2025 20:23 (yesterday)

But he was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross
― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, 22 January 2025 20:42 (yesterday)

And a lot of TV commercials.

robertson davies, fifth business. which is -- and i'm not sure i've ever used this word before -- marvelous

Clark Ashton Smith - The Dark Eidolon & Other Fantasies: am only about 5 stories in (just finished ‘City of The Singing Flame’) but I am loving his writing so much. Great fun so far.

Tabes friend otm. Denton Welch rules.

Ira Levin: what if husbands were bad (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives)

A Kiss Before Dying is good, too.

started RED SHIFT, which is pretty fucked up!

xposts to chinaski— the Welch is so good but almost unbearable— Welch expresses the discomfort, anger, and resentment that Orvil feels so well that it is almost impossible to not be returned to one’s own teenage existence. excellent book.

crypto, what are your opinions on Simon James Green? ‘Boy Like Me’ looks up my alley but it is thoroughly unavailable at libraries here, and i don’t want to dole out the cash for it if the work is crap.

I don't know him! A quick search though, and it certainly looks fascinating. I'll be tracking it down soon, and I'll report back.

Does your library allow you to make purchase requests? Doesn't mean they'll definitely stock the book, of course, but maybe worth a shot.

ah, another for us both to check out, it seems.

you can make purchase requests but it might take a year for anything to come of it. the Free Library of Philadelphia, like everything in this city, moves quite slowly

Excited for YA in this thread! I've been out of the biz and haven't read these titles but it makes me happy that these books exist and are good (and are needed by young people).

what the hell, i just ordered it— i figure that even if i don't like it, i can always put it in a LFL and some gay teen in the neighborhood can find it and enjoy it.

i did read a few reviews of it that were pretty good, as well as one which was hilarious in that it seems to have missed the point entirely— it railed against Green's "political biases and diatribes against Margaret Thatcher," but the book is very much *about* Section 28 and a secret epistolary romance between two young men in the margins of a novel about homosexual men. you can't really write about repression of homosexual representation in 1994 without addressing Thatcherism and Section 28!! (and i know this as a yank!)

perhaps the WAYR thread is not the place for it, but this sort of cognitive dissonance is something i've been thinking about quite a lot recently. so many lite conservative types on both sides of the pond don't seem to have a problem with being gay, but do seem to have quite a problem with gay people speaking out against their own dehumanization at the hands of conservative politicians and "thinkers." i've never quite understood it— seems as bizarre to me as the old "hate the sin, love the sinner" ideology of the church.

glad yr down with the YA train, too, io. i'm finding it a rather fruitful exercise in "genre thinking."

I worked in YA publishing for over 10 years! Big fan. I didn't read it as an actual young adult (I skipped from children's books to adult Sci-f) but I've come to appreciate YA a lot in my old age.

I hardly read any YA stuff when I was a young adult— other than the SE Hinton books and some of the teen scream stuff from Pike and Stein, I pretty much avoided anything marketed toward my age demographic.

Junji Ito’s Gyo.
My husband, the Junji Ito fan: “Isn’t there a giant shark in that?”
Me, a mere dabbler in the man’s work: “The fish have wheels.”

haven't posted in a longish while. thought i'd update on a few things i've read recently. means it's a longish post uncharacteristically.

Nick Harkaway – Gnomon
This was really enjoyable at first - a death - a state murder in custody, after severe mental torture in fact - in a highly informationally controlled future (a zero crime, full mental transparency set up), the individual in question surrounding themselves with layered multi-timezone stories as a sort of firewall against their true identity. An investigator going further and further down into the layers of conspiracy and as she does so unravelling her trust in the state. Not wildly original in that sense, but dials the nonsense and complexity up to 11. Noirish, bit cyberpunk, bit silly, fun. But it really unravelled in the final third, and badly needed some ruthless editing and authorial discipline. Also as a consequence waaaaay too long.

Tudor Parfitt – Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich
Strong piece of academic writing on the construction of race and - well, what the subtitle says really. One dynamic that I always find fascinating – the battle of 'incorrect' religious assumptions about race - 'monogenetic' from Adam, inclusive of all types - versus 'scientific' thinking at the progressive frontier of knowledge: secular and constructing a theory of separate 'races' ie f'ing racist. even when it is in good faith the minutiae of academic wrangling does not widen its scope to recognise the motivational impulses of wider economic and political desire with which its 'reason' is operating - such things are as it were 'baked in' to the theorising. Paul Hazard's *Crises of the European Mind: 1680-1715* also illustrates this very clearly obviously, that period being the crucible of so much enlightenment and secular thinking and knowledge.

Lisa Robertson – Baudelaire Fractal.
Opened it up and cried out 'Oh god, not another 'I' book' by which i don't just mean written in the first person, but one most concerned with the internal experiences and psychological/emotional responses of the narrator. So much of it. I picked up a VS Pritchett short story during the middle of reading this and you're in the presence of this tensile prose, being crafted right in the middle of the world and of people. the constraints of the inner sensational life are rarely defined enough for the prose not to feel slack, too little is required of it, of the author. Still, on what I got through, this was a much better 'internal life consumed by an œuvre' book than that one that did the same with Shakespeare's sonnets. i might pick it up again, but i weary of the mode.

Jill Lepore - These Truths
Single-volume history of the US, picked up mainly because my knowledge of US history and its order and general sweep is shameful - i've got most of the bits, but how do the bits fit together. And this is v good for that, though I think the latter part is pulled out of shape by a disproportionate concern with polling, the media, and the political manipulation of public opinion. more generally 19th century demagoguery and hucksterism is a useful template for today - wacko religious and social extremists hopping on a train and whipping up crowds in halls. It's also highly useful to see the evolution of political coalitions, and be reminded that politically speaking 'left' and 'right' as European terms aren't that helpful as guides to how the political values are distributed in the US, or be reminded that terms like 'progressive' have a specific historical context and meaning. and ofc it's 'useful' to be reminded for just how long, in what different forms, and how intensely racial equality has been violently beaten down, socially and politically evaded, and how any legal and constitutional remedies are manipulated via a self-serving casuistry or just torn down by largely white male political and financial interests, whose method is to create racial resentment out of economic circumstance. nothing new, but by god it's a long, unfinished story.

Elizabeth Hand – Generation Loss
Really enjoyed this. Self-destructive, slightly psychic nihilism as route to the heart of a crime. I think one of the main reasons I enjoyed it is that the genre wasn't clear to me for a long time – crime thriller, the supernatural, realism, a psychodrama woven round digital and photographic aesthetics: all are held in a sort of suspended potential for much of the novel, which is impressive and brings a strong sense of tension - you're not sure which way anything or anyone's going to go. the alien, slightly malevolent Maine coastline in winter has the flavour of Lovecraft, people generally are dangerous psychically or actually. The main character Cass Neary's voice is vivid and appealing - as most reviews have shown it's hard not to use the word 'spiky'. the resolution is a little formulaic - those tensions have to get resolved in the end after all and the novel itself acknowledges its rather silence of the lambs dénoument. i probably would have preferred a sort of unresolved realism, but the whole was definitely good. looking forward to the further planned reissues in the series.

Robertson Davies – What's Bred in the Bone
Really excellent. Preferred it in fact to *The Rebel Angels* - the first in the Cornish series, which was very enjoyable but too much facetious in the end for me. What's Bred in the Bone concerns the life of Francis Cornish, whose death set off the events of the first volume. Davies is excellent at capturing a sense of the press of magic and religious thinking into the real world. I think it was Tom E on bsky who was asking about a good book for one of his children to go to from their regular fantasy reading, and the Deptford trilogy was one of his suggestions. They do the inverse of the best children's fantasy, where the world of magic is easily available and accessible (for a child and under certain circumstances). In these novels it isn't accessible, but the characters exist in a place where you can feel its press on the contours of their lives.

Its expressed in one way and in rather a bluff manner by Cornish's Catholic grandfather in a deathbed letter:

Another language is something I won't call religion, because all through my life I have been a firm Catholic, without truly accepting everything a Catholic ought to believe. So I cannot urge you sincerely to cling to the Faith. But con't forget it, either. Don't forget that language, and don't be one of those handless fellows who believes nothing. There is a fine world unknown to us, and religion is an attempt to explain it.

but there's a really delightfully realised figure, more in the Roberston Davies mode, and putting the same thing in very different terms, derived from the workings of the just pre-WW2 *Schloß* Cornish is staying in, refurbishing and not-quite-faking-or-is-it paintings as apprentice to an Italian art restorer possessed of the Evil Eye in a complicated fraud on the Nazis.

"But as a wise man I know – or knew, for the poor fellow is dead now – used to say, Life's a rum start."
"The very rummest. Like this room in a way. Here we are, cosy as can be, even if we have no focus. What makes us so snug?"
"The stove, obviously."
"Yes, but have you never thought what makes the stove so warm?"
"I've wondered – yes. How is it fed?"
"That's one of the interesting things about these old castles. Dividing all the main rooms are terribly narrow passages – not more than eighteen inches wide, some of them, and as dark as night – and through those corridors creep servants in soft slippers who poke firewood into these stoves from the back. Unseen by us, and usually unheard. We don't give them a thought, but they are there, and they keep life in winter from being intolerable. Do they listen to us? I'll bet they do. They keep us warm, they are necessary to us, and they probably know a lot more about us than we would consider comfortable. They are the hidden life of the house."
"A spooky idea."
"The whole Universe is a spooky idea. And in every life there are these unseen people and – not people exactly – who keep us warm. – Have you ever had your horoscope cast?"

That world is perhaps not so 'fine'. The slippered silent figures rushing about in the darkness and confined passages around our lives, attending to it in invisible ways, impossible that they be wholly benign. Davies is v good at this sort of thing, exploring the transactional layer between the mundane and the spiritual, and of course similarly in The Fifth Business, the spiritual role of figures to one side of a central action.

The book is also extremely good about the political importance of and centrality of art, no less free from machinations than the rest of the world. And generally the writing is just extremely enjoyable.

And this is v good for that, though I think the latter part is pulled out of shape by a disproportionate concern with polling, the media, and the political manipulation of public opinion

I enjoyed it a lot too, just as a single volume synthesis of US history. I think she's a good prose stylist. but I'm much less keen on her essays for the New Yorker.

your criticism makes since given her own recent research has focussed on the history of social science/opinion polling etc. she wrote a book about it. excerpted here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-the-simulmatics-corporation-invented-the-future but you couldn't pay me to read it.

ah right, that's interesting caek - thanks. the prose does get out of control sometimes, when it aims for a high style it doesn't work. but yes, extremely handy summary and generally very readable.

just going back thru thread, pleased to see mentions of Denton Welch - such a strange writer, in a period that produced some quite strange rich writing - those non-modernist 20thC inheritors of fin-de-siecle obsessions. denton welch has a fine sense of style and irony, which helps leaven it all as well.

Y'all have sold me on Welch. I just ordered the handsome-looking Penguin Classics edition of In Youth There's Pleasure.

a problem i have with him is whenever i hear his name or see peppers or pimentos i'm reminded of this entry from his diaries:

Last Monday I went to supper with Noel Adeney. We had cold soup flavoured with claret, and fennel in long green shreds; then a sort of pilau of rice, onions fried, pimento excitingly scarlet like dogs’ tools, and grated cheese. The tiniest new potatoes and salad. Afterwards plums, and creamy mild tomato cocktail to drink.

Fizzles, Robertson is a mentor of mine and I can’t disagree with you more about ‘TBF,’ but understand that it isn’t for everyone.

Had to scroll back to realize table wasn't talking about Robertson Davies (who's great, btw).

Ha. Yes, the Welch is really wonderful, the final scene is extraordinary.

After setting Henry James aside for 3 or 4 years, I've started reading What Maisie Knew. This novel has been described on ILB as a litmus test for whether a reader will cotton to the writing style in James's late period. So far it's not looking good for the happiness of our future relationship. While I'm appreciating the delicacy of his observations and intricacies of his prose on a certain level, I'm finding the effort required has not yet been adequately repaid in terms of my interest in the story being told. I may lose the struggle and move on to other pastures. I'll decide tonight.

I took a whole Henry James class in grad school and thus have been able to conclude that the only James I like is The Ambassadors; there's a warmth and humor to it that I haven't been able to find in the rest of his work.

I'm finally reading Sophie Lewis's Abolish the Family after listening to eleventy podcast episodes with her yay!

I know that title was chosen for shock value, but... on its face it's stupid. Marketing is like that.

Families are more diverse, more complex, and more entwined with how humans have always lived than whatever version of the family that book is meant to address.

Lol from what I know of the contents of that book its not really marketing.

Halfway through: Antonio do Benedetto - The Suicides.

A journalist investigates a number of suicides which is a launchpad for an interest in the subject. The author himself was jailed sometime later (he was tortured in prison). This was Argentina just before the military coup but it doesn't reference what is going on in the country. You may infer that this isn't a happy place but if you didn't have context you wouldn't reach for anything.

The contents might be unhappy but the writing is making me very happy.

Antonio di Benedetto. Bloody autocorrect.

Lewis is an execrable human being, too, but that’s neither here nor there . (We were friends, once).

crypto (and other interested parties), Simon James Green’s ‘Boy Like Me’ is really good so far— will report more when I have it finished.

Fizzles, Robertson is a mentor of mine and I can’t disagree with you more about ‘TBF,’ but understand that it isn’t for everyone.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Sunday, 26 January 2025 18:43 bookmarkflaglink

right! i should have been clearer that actually i quite enjoyed TBF, which i thought was clever and well put together - it just suffered from being at the end of a long list of books written with that highly internal perspective. a very good example of the straw that broke the camel's back. in other circumstances i think i would have relished it! but your comment has prompted me to promise to myself i will actually finish it at some point.

Ahhhh that's disappointing to hear, table. I'm going to enjoy the book anyway, but to hear that definitely chills my general enthusiasm for her.

i mean, many of our most interesting thinkers have been totally awful people. Lewis is certainly an interesting thinker, imho! that was one of the reasons we initially hit it off. i won’t air any more of what happened between us, though.

and xpost to Fizzles, yes, that’s totally understandable. if you haven’t read other Robertson, i think the best entrée to her prose writing is ‘Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture.’ The essays there on suburbs, public space, and ‘the idea of the hut’ are incredible, imho— and that’s to say nothing of her poetry, which often borders on the sublime. Here is an early version of one of my favorite poems of hers:

http://jacketmagazine.com/27/robe.html

thanks table, sounds great - will check out.

I shelved What Maisie Knew. It felt too much like being fed by a person using a tweezers instead of a spoon. Instead I picked up Hill, the English title given to the first published novel of Jean Giono. This is the NYRB edition from 2016.

I gave up on Gnomon pretty early on; it didn't seem to be going anywhere, and wasn't even going nowhere in an interesting way. Felt like a puzzle for the sake of a puzzle.

Finished Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage (a history of radical terrorism in the US from roughly 1969-1984) this weekend. It's good; he seems pretty conservative himself but keeps it in check for the most part, other than the occasional excessive rhetorical flourish (describing someone as "stringy-haired" or getting sniffy about commune members all swapping partners back and forth). The FBI don't exactly cover themselves in glory, and he doesn't bend over backward to defend them.

Also read Daniel Spicer's brand new biography of Peter Brötzmann. It's pretty good, though I would have appreciated more info about his childhood and the overall social context of German free jazz. There's plenty of that in Christoph Dallasch's Neu Klang, though, including plenty of quotes from the Brotz himself. Harald Kisiedu's European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism In Germany 1950-1975 also fills in some gaps. But Spicer had a relationship (journalistic and somewhat friendly) with PB going back 20+ years, including many interviews, and he talked to plenty of bandmates, too. Recommended if you're a fan; I'll be writing an essay-length review for my newsletter eventually.

Oh wow thanks for the Robertson poem, tables. "an early version"! Seems appropriate for turns herein.

I picked up a VS Pritchett short story during the middle of reading this and you're in the presence of this tensile prose, being crafted right in the middle of the world and of people. the constraints of the inner sensational life are rarely defined enough for the prose not to feel slack, too little is required of it, of the author.

What I get sick of is the I that explains every goddam thing, of a multitude (unless I'm sincerely trying to read myself to sleep), and the one that makes too big deal of being Unreliable, like they just invented it.

Finished Simon James Green’s ‘Boy Like Me,’ which details a relationship between two boys that starts in the margins of an illicitly held school library book about gay teen romance during the time of section 28 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28)

It then becomes a real life romance and a truly beautiful, enraging book about love and resistance to bigotry and those in power who would have us queers shut up in closets. Best queer YA book I have read, hands-down— made me weep, particularly as it acknowledges the fact that this history hasn’t gone away. Well worth the time.

crypto, you really must read it.

Anyway, now onto Édouard Louis’ ‘The End of Eddy.’

xp

Just put a hold on it at the library. Thanks!

Just ordered Eleanor Barraclough's Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, which appears to be detailed examination of quotidian household objects retrieved from Viking settlements (they were really into combing their hair, apparently).

There's a new Thomas Perry book out, Pro Bono. I like Perry a lot, but his stuff is pure snack food; I go through them in a couple of hours, so I might buy that as an ebook.

Halfway through: Antonio do Benedetto - The Suicides.

A journalist investigates a number of suicides which is a launchpad for an interest in the subject. The author himself was jailed sometime later (he was tortured in prison). This was Argentina just before the military coup but it doesn't reference what is going on in the country. You may infer that this isn't a happy place but if you didn't have context you wouldn't reach for anything.

The contents might be unhappy but the writing is making me very happy.

Halfway through: Antonio do Benedetto - The Suicides.

A journalist investigates a number of suicides which is a launchpad for an interest in the subject. The author himself was jailed sometime later (he was tortured in prison). This was Argentina just before the military coup but it doesn't reference what is going on in the country. You may infer that this isn't a happy place but if you didn't have context you wouldn't reach for anything.

The contents might be unhappy but the writing is making me very happy.

I finished the Jean Giono book. In addition to the story and characters, it retains a kind of anthropological interest, capturing aspects of an older peasant worldview that has shifted as country life lost its isolation and self-containment.

Now I'm reading Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger. If you've read any of the novels or memoirs about life in the WWI trenches nothing in it will come as a surprise or shock. It's hard to imagine a grimmer war. It's main virtue is its lack of analysis. It doesn't attempt to impose any bigger framework outside the immediate battlefield. It stays faithful to how war looks, smells, tastes and feels to a foot soldier.

Finished the Muriel Spark. Gripping and darkly funny but boy it's a bleak world she portrays.

Bible & Sword Barbara Tuchman
this book is seriously in need of decolonisation. But comes from 1956 so wonder if that is simply predictable.
It's a book on the connection between Britain and Palestine over the centuries. It starts in the Roman era and traces pilgrimage and influence over the time to the author's current day.
Author has some nice turn of phrase which means I might read some of her later work. She lists a bibliography so did at least some research. But what is conspicuously absent is an arab or other indigenous population perspective. She refers to the enemy during the crusades as Turk.
She views Palestine mainly as the ideal home place of the Jews and the indigenous population as movable to fit the Jews return.
I thought this might be a good way of seeing the historic perspective of the British over time. I think it does that to some degree but I'm never sure to what extent the perspective belongs to the author.
So would love to find a similar overview from a perspective that was less positive about colonialism and more aware of indigenous and non-Western perspectives. I think this book is relatively well known so it has presumably occurred to somebody to provide a similar work.
So I've read it and can see some rather deep flaws while having enjoyed it to some extent.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families : stories from Rwanda Philip Gourevitch,
book telling the story of the Rwanda genocide through anecdotal means concerning a cast of characters.
Quite great, I'm halfway through it.and think its pretty good.

Neu Klang Christoph Dallach
Oral history of Krautrock. Starting with the childhood context of several of the players and the Second World War and its wake.
It follows them through the next couple of decades and cultural innovations.
So I'm still in the era before the Krautrock scene itself has begun, and the Beat era hasn't been looked at in depth yet.
Looking forward to reading through this and hopefully being turned onto more sounds I'm not familiar with from a genre I've been somewhat aware of for decades.

Two Headed Doctor David Toop
an exploration into Dr John's Gris Gris lp . Looks into biography and prior of the lp itself and the various players on it. Also looks into the history of New Orleans and the lore tied into voudun and other beliefs that are referenced in the songs.
Also serves as something of a memoir of the time Toop was first connecting to the music.[show hidden text]
Very very interesting book on one of my fav lps. Has me wanting to read the rest of Toop's work.

New Ugly Things turned up at the start of the week and I have read part of the review sections and not really got into the articles.

Speaking of bleak, I am almost through Édouard Louis’ ‘The End of Eddy’ and it is a wildly grim depiction of northern French country life, told from the perspective of a young queer man looking back on his upbringing. The book caused some controversy in France, it seems. Anyway, the prose can be a little plodding at times, but then erupt with moments like the following:

‘Each day was a new ordeal: people don't change as easily as that. I wasn't the tough guy that I wanted to be.
And yet I had understood that living a lie was the only chance I had of bringing a new truth into existence. Becoming a different person meant thinking of myself as a different person, believing I was something I wasn't so that gradually, step by step, I could become it. (The calls to conform would come later: Who does he think he is?)’

It’s a familiar misconception, right? But the bluntness with which Louis writes these sorts of bits is quite great, and the book’s strongest suit imho.

wonder if I missed this on January 7th and today cos I was looking for a What Are You Reading or simply Reading through the search engine

this month was tidying up things so i finished the final third of my Laurie Lee trilogy about the spanish war, the last four Euripedes tragedies (Buckley translations, which annoyingly used the roman names for the gods), and a bunch of lafferty and cyberpunk shorts.

Perelman, The Trouble with Genius
Gallagher, Kaboom

book telling the story of the Rwanda genocide

Check out Peterson and Herman, Enduring Lies

A load of my library transfers came in— reading the book that was made into the gay teen drama ‘Love, Simon.’ I have seen the movie, weirdly on a flight back in 2018, but I am interested in seeing what the book does.

I like (not love) Simon in both book and movie form. I tried Becky Albertalli's latest--the title has already slipped my mind--last year and couldn't get through it, but it looks like she's been basically writing variations on Simon ever since.

yeah, i can sort of see how this one goes— i think maybe I will dislike this one because I hate Simon’s voice? it feels just a bit too ‘adult woman trying to approximate teenage boy’ for me.

I liked Simon by the end of the book, but still thought it was a little too ‘middle aged woman approximating teenage gay boy voice.’

Then I began ‘Openly Straight’ around 8p, read it until 11:30, then finished it this morning. I thought it was really lovely and empathized with Rafe, the protagonist, and his struggles against what he felt were the strictures of ‘gay identity’ or whatever. I think my main problem was that I really liked his relationship with Ben, and wanted to see whether it was rekindled… but I guess that’s what the sequel is for. Another to put on the library holds.

Isaac Deutscher - The Prophet Armed
Carrie Courogen - Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
Mavis Gallant - The Uncollected Stories

xp

Yay! I'm looking forward to teaching the novel again in a few weeks.

And yes, the sequel is definitely worth a read. Report back!

Next up is Phil Stamper’s first book, ‘The Gravity of Us.’

Read his Golden Boys a while back. Don't remember it being anything special, plot or character wise, but some of the opening chapters beautifully capture that feeling of high school ending and you and your friends going your separate ways. After that, I seem to recall it turning into a pretty typical romcom.

Yeah, honestly just going through a list and learning more about the genre as I go.

Among the things I really like about ‘Boy Like Me,’ ‘Openly Straight,’ and the second iteration of ‘Aristotle and Dante…’ is that they don’t shy away from a few more sexual moments— which is not always the case with these books. They obviously can’t be *too* sexy or detailed, duh, but in ‘Simon’ and a few others I read, there just isn’t much mention of sex at all. I wouldn’t say this is a problem, really, except that it’s completely unrealistic— teenagers, especially teenage boys, are the horniest beings on the planet, and I don’t even recall a scene in Simon where he jerks off! So sure, tame the sex scenes and make them PG or PG-13, let them be one or two sentences long, which is certainly what I am doing in the YA novel I am writing, but don’t remove them entirely. Teenagers are sexual! Don’t write that out, they can take it! I certainly longer for those sorts of scenes when I was a teenager.

‘longed for’

But the bluntness with which Louis writes these sorts of bits is quite great, and the book’s strongest suit imho

His style is very understated and tough, kind of Hemingwayesque, in the way it can limn complex emotional states in disarmingly simple prose. Its almost like the ideal of masculinity that he felt so constricting growing up remained in his writing style, even as he evicted it from all other parts of his life.

Teenagers are sexual! Don’t write that out, they can take it!

and give it

(sorry)

I finished the Friedrich Schiller "On the Aesthetic Education of Man". It was rather high-flown and bewildering after the relatively direct and plain-spoken style of Bergson. I don't feel I got much out of it. I'm also still reading the Alice Munro story collection. I think I read one or two of her stories in the New Yorker back in the day, where many of these stories originally appeared, but I don't remember them being so good. Maybe I was too young to appreciate them. She is brilliant on how she handles the passage of time.

Its almost like the ideal of masculinity that he felt so constricting growing up remained in his writing style, even as he evicted it from all other parts of his life.

Yeah, I would agree with this, and it totally works in that it’s a little disarming!

Just put the books on hold at the library. Thanks.

I bought the Cemetery Boys thanks to the thread. Will report back.

I'm re-reading J.A. Baker's *The Peregrine*. It's a strange book. Baker was an introverted man, working for the AA, who, in his spare time, stalked peregrines across the Dengie Peninsula in an isolated corner of Essex. Not that you'd know it from the text because Baker is oddly obscure about his chosen area of focus.

The text operates as a space of preservation: Baker recognises that the land is changing; farming conditions are choking the life out of the area and the peregrines are dying off. He aims to become one with the land, as he puts it 'to lose the human taint'. As such, there are a lot of subject-less sentences, as Baker paints impressionistic vistas of land and sky. He aims for alchemy - words becoming place, landscape. In places he overshoots but it's a hell of a trick when it works. In some ways what he describes could be any era; in places, it feels pre-or-post-human in the sheer abundance of bird life. I dimly recall some of what he encounters - the swarms of swifts, globes of insects above oaks trees - and absolutely feel the absence of it.

The peregrine's view of the land is like the yachtsman's view of the shore as he sails into the long estuaries. A wake of water recedes behind him, the wake of the pierced horizon glides back on either side. Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries. But what does he understand? Does he really 'know' that an object that increases in size is moving towards him? Or is it that he believes in the size he sees, so that a distant man is too small to be frightening but a man near is a man huge and therefore terrifying? He may live in a world of endless pulsations, of objects forever contracting or dilating in size. Aimed at a distant bird, a flutter of white wings, he may feel as it spreads out beneath him like a stain of white - that he can never fail to strike. Everything he is has been evolved to link the targeting eye to the striking talon.

Also started Katherine Rundell's *Super-Infinite*, a biography of John Donne. She's in an ecstatic register too but is quite up-front about the book being something of a hagiography. It zips along; I'm enjoying it.

Things I picked up from the library today:

Tom Breihan's The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music (Breihan's a fellow Stereogum writer and a friend)
John D. MacDonald's Bright Orange For the Shroud
Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

i've had to put down the confessions by catherine airey. there was a particular line, which I can't find now, which made me feel very strongly that it wasn't worth putting any more effort into reading. one thing - if your 2001 NYC teenager, and your 1970s Irish farming teenage girl, moving to NYC sound *exactly* the same apart from a shift in grammatical voice then I think it's a problem. these people should be exciting! and they are put in exciting or dramatic situations (eg inadvertently drop acid just before the twin towers). but the style - you can see the author very visibly behind the pasteboard masks. it's also extremely banal (a horrible word, but there it is). frankly i found myself longing for a bit of martin amis, and it's not often you hear me say that, but come on, let's have some *fireworks*. it's invidious really to quote quite innocuous excerpts, as this sort of thing is very unfair in isolation,

‘What can I get you both?’
‘I’ll have the poached eggs, please,’ Harold says, though you’re sure he never looked down at his menu.
‘I’m not really hungry,’ you say, which isn’t true, but you’ve been putting on weight from all the pancakes, said you’d give them up for Lent.
‘You eat eggs?’ Harold asks. He looks back at the waitress before you have a chance to answer. ‘Two poached eggs. And coffee.’ ‘Perfect.’
The waitress takes the menu back from Harold then walks back towards the bar.

: |

It simply won't do. It really won't.

dow - apologies, I didn't answer your question upthread about Pritchett, and i'm not really in a position to now, as i can't find my copy of the Baudelaire Fractal (which I must insist was actually *ok* - especially in its pleasing and synthetic conceit - just at the tail end of reading a lot that has a similar texture or approach).

but i did think it was worth quoting the Pritchett I read, or part of it, at least in part to bring some enjoyment to my posts - i'm cavilling and carping a lot, which gets tedious very quickly. This is from the start of a story A Careless Widow:

After taking a two-mile walk across fields half-way up the headland, to break himself in, as he put it, on the first day of his holiday, Frazier got back to the hotel. He had a bath to get the last of London off his skin, then, avoiding the bar already crowded with golf players, he went out on to the terrace to be alone. He had been coming to this hotel for three or four years in the spring, a man who liked to stay in a place full of middle-aged people, many of them so well-known to one another that it was simple for him to avoid them and to be alone. Off he went to walk all day; off they went to the golf course or to drive about in their cars. If he was slightly known it was by his surname: 'Frazier with an"i" he would say with a piercing pedantic stare, giving a roll to his stone-blue eyes as he said it, like a tall schoolmaster mocking a boy. He was, in fact, a hairdresser who came to this lonely part of the Atlantic coast to slough off the name of Lionel, as he was called at the rather expensive *salon de coiffure* in London, where he was eagerly sought after. ('You know,' ladies said, 'how difficult it is to get an appointment with Lionel.') He was a tallish, slender man, not one of your sunken-chested barbers, gesticulating with comb and scissors as they skate about you, grown cynical with the flatteries of the trade. On the contrary, despite his doll's head of grey hair and the mesh of nervous lines on his long face, he was as still and as dispassionate as a soldier.

I'm not even sure this is a first-rate Pritchett short story tbh - it's been a long time since I immersed myself in his Collected. But this was electrifying. First there is just a sense of fresh air of being outside the subject's head. Not entirely of course - but this is a writer who has absolute discipline and control over the boundaries, of the action and meaning of each individual sentence. So, 'to break himself in, *as he put it*, on the first day of his holiday,' which then allows further on, 'to get the last of London off his skin' without need to label this as his internal intent. There are no Amis style fireworks here of course; you'd almost call the writing plain, but it is emphatically not banal. There are traces of humour of course, as this is Pritchett. I particularly liked 'or to drive about in their cars.' Each sentence is in some way revelatory, either in establishing important matters - who he is, where he's from, and that this is a regular, well grooved experience for him (and therefore capable of dramatic disruption - immediately there is a tension - also from the fact that people do odd things when they detatch themselves from their day-to-day professional and social life) - or in surprising you - the fact he is a hairdresser. plus there is sharp insight of 'grown cynical with the flatteries of the trade' - an observation that has general human application, wider than just barbers. we feel it. this, in a microscopic way, is what real humanism is, and is part of why we read.

This is writing on a hair trigger, to paraphrase Geoffrey Hill*. Therefore it defines 'slack' - to finally get round to answering your question, dow - through being its opposite.

i'm really very firmly of the belief expressed in Éric Vuillard's L'ordre du jour** 'La littérature permet tout, dit-on'. You can, to put it as i do to myself more frequently, do whatever the hell you want with fiction, that's part of the point of it. but it needs to be done well, otherwise why bother reading it.***

* He actually said 'this is language on a hair trigger' in his lecture "Legal Fiction" and Legal Fiction - because he's talking about the incredible pressures on language in intense political situations (he's talking about Robert Southwell's 1595 An humble supplication to her Maiestie, the year of his martyrdom), specifically what the word 'deem' is doing in various bits of prose. So this is more an IA Richards or Empsonian observation (eg in The Structure of Complex Words) and I'm not quite sure the Pritchett is quite so 'hair trigger' as all that, but it is *writing*, it is proper *writing*.

** I've just picked this up again, but in French, partly to practice, but also because one of its main scenes, the opening scene, is how German capital paid willing, approving obeisance to Göring and Hitler. I liked this book - a récit as Vuillard would have it - a sort of visibly authorial guided tour of a subject - though I liked his similar War of the Poor substantially less, feeling it was playing fast and loose with its matter, which retrospectively undermined my appreciation of L'ordre du jour. In other words, I'm sympathetic to this TLS review(£), which concludes:

This is not enlightening as history. At best it tells us what we already know in somewhat caricatural form. Nor is it memorable as literature, except perhaps to someone who knows nothing about the 1930s. But it did win the Prix Goncourt.

However, I still like it, mainly because I am an *absolute sucker* for this sort of thing:

Le soleil est un astre froid. Son cœur, des épines de glace. Sa lumière, sans pardon. En février, les arbres sont morts, la rivière pétrifiée, comme si la source ne vomissait plus d'eau et que la mer ne pouvait en avaler davantage. Le temps se fige. Le matin, pas un bruit, pas un chant d'oiseau, rien. Puis, une automobile, une autre, et soudain des pas, des silhouettes qu'on ne peut pas voir. Le régisseur a frappé trois coups mais le rideau ne s'est pas levé.

(The sun is a cold star. Its heart, spines of ice. Its light, unforgiving. In February, the trees are dead, the river petrified, as if the springs had stopped spewing water and the sea could swallow no more. Time freezes. In the morning, not a sound, not even birdsong. Then an automobile, and another, and suddenly footsteps, unseen silhouettes. The play is about to begin, but the curtain won’t rise.)

That spectral start. Those cadences. Plug it into my veins. Possibly in its own gallic manner this is as facile as the prose about which I'm grumbling, which again is only to say what should be obvious - that it's really always in the end about what you enjoy, not apodictic notions of 'good' or 'bad' writing.

*** When i set out to free myself from what i felt was a stifling pre-occupation with the classics, the broad graduate canon, and read more that was happening now, I recognised this would mean reading more that was not so good, mediocre or even downright dross, and that when reading i should, as well as responding to the less good, make a conscious effort to identify what succeeded, what was interesting or good. i'm not doing that at the moment, and i should try harder, i think, but as i say, right now, i'm not in the mood, and am a bit exasperated.

incidentally, while speaking about things i've enjoyed and 'language on a hair trigger,' I picked up Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle. Now as I'm not even close to being even an amateur Hegelian, not even a hegelian e-girl, and it's been a long while since I've engaged with Kierkegaard, i'm having to step lightly through it so i don't get entangled and never emerge again. this means the chief delight is the sheer briskness with which she approaches her subject, almost to the point of bullying it to give up insight and establish a footing.

just from the introduction (i'm only halfway through Chapter 1 and 'may be some time'), her description of the replacement of 'knowledge with discourses', critique with 'plurality', conceptuality with 'the Other' as being "intellectual velleities" insufficient to the task, brought a shout of laughter. it seemed particularly applicable to our time. not you will understand, due to that thread of anti-continental philosophy that does anti-intellectual spadework for the anti-woke movement, but an casting that energetic irritation into indeterminate vacillations of public expression and public thought that get subsumed into 'ah! the discourse!' (i realise i'm plugging very technical into very demotic uses of terms here, but on the basis there is overlap, after all - surely this is one thing we *can* learn from the hegelian e-girls it's that transactions between the universal and the particular are being subjected to a massive DDOS attack and we need to shut everything down until we figure out what the hell is going on).

also enjoyed Rose's 'philosophy of history is seen to be continuous, narratological confection of paralogical discontinuities' which is one reason why i like for instance the visible reasoning of a Braudel, and mistrust in many ways, despite him being one of the few genuine and in so many ways admirable public intellectuals, Adam Tooze - swap out 'continuous narratological confection of paralogical discontinuities' for 'polycrisis' and 'ordoliberal-marxist dialectic'

Started the Phil Stamper debut, gave up after about 40 pages. I hate reality TV and don’t care much for NASA, and the narrator keeps using the term “American Hero,” which makes me want to vomit, so no thanks.

Started ‘Golden Boys’— much more interesting cast of characters, tho who knows what I will think in 100 pages.

I was looking for a What Are You Reading or simply Reading through the search engine

That's why this thread should at least have "Reading" spelled out in the title.

Good point, Halfway. Hadn't thought of that.

Booming posts, Fizzles!

'to get the last of London off his skin'

When i set out to free myself from what i felt was a stifling pre-occupation with the classics, the broad graduate canon,

That spectral start. Those cadences. Plug it into my veins. Possibly in its own gallic manner this is as facile as the prose about which I'm grumbling, which again is only to say what should be obvious - that it's really always in the end about what you enjoy, not apodictic notions of 'good' or 'bad' writing.

i realise i'm plugging very technical into very demotic uses of terms here, but on the basis there is overlap, after all - surely this is one thing we *can* learn from the hegelian e-girls it's that transactions between the universal and the particular are being subjected to a massive DDOS attack and we need to shut everything down until we figure out what the hell is going on).

Goncourt

xxxp etc

He aims for alchemy - words becoming place, landscape. In places he overshoots but it's a hell of a trick when it works. In some ways what he describes could be any era; in places, it feels pre-or-post-human in the sheer abundance of bird life. I dimly recall some of what he encounters - the swarms of swifts, globes of insects above oaks trees - and absolutely feel the absence of it.

TLM is walking around--

I finished Acceptance/third Southern Reach book. Didn't enjoy it as much as the first two. Found it hard to stay focused during the middle third, dragged a bit for me. I'll probably wait a bit before attempting the fourth.

Started Prophet by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché. Alternating that with a Junji Ito, Lovesickness. Disturbing, as ever.

I picked up an audiobook app that does a small number of celebrity AI voiceovers that are actually... quite good? The uncanny is charming rather than offputting. I have Burt Reynolds reading my school psychology textbooks and Laurence Olivier narrating an EPUB of The End of The Affair. John Wayne is also rather special doing Peter Rabbit. "Kertyschoo-uh!"

There's also a much more basic female robot voice on my iPhone that I've been using for ages on my EPUB reader - Stephanie, maybe? It's totally affectless and bland but very listenable - it's the Dyslexie font of voices. The comic timing on her reading of Nora Ephron's Heartburn was much better than the Meryl Streep audiobook.

Funny, salsa shark, Acceptance was probably my favorite of the Southern Reach books, though I haven't read the fourth.

I finished 'Golden Boys' yesterday and started its sequel, 'Afterglow,' today. Unlike crypto, I find at least two of the book's characters to be interesting enough to continue reading— the affable but troubled jock and his boyfriend, the 'art fag' of the group. There is something to the first book's beginnings that really gets down the feeling of going into the summer before senior year— as for the boys in the book, it was a transformative summer for me, and not at all in the ways I expected.

Anyway, I have a nice stack right now, so I'm just going to keep plowing through.

Finished ‘Afterglow,’ which had some nice drama about book bans and small town bigotry.

Now on ‘The Vast Fields of Ordinary’ by Nick Burd. There’s a continuum here with Dennis Cooper, in some ways— disaffected, nihilistic, artistic older teenage boy with absent but wealthy parents trying to figure shit out all while falling for difficult/shitty dudes.

The Burd book had some lovely moments— cemetery sex, some teenage gay domesticity, some wild moments— but ended in a way that was so abrupt that I couldn't really wrap my head around it. And it didn't even end in the way that assures a sequel! Bad job in that regard. The author seems to be in marketing now, hasn't written anything else.

enjoying Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by dorian lynskey, who may or may not be an erstwhile ilx0r

^ If you are UK ilx that hits different

In the blurbs:

'Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound' – Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't

Reading a second book by Patrick Ness, ‘More Than This,’ which is about a young man who dies and then wakes up in some sort of afterlife that’s very similar to a part of the life he left behind… still in the beginning chapters, seems promising.

Openly Straight! Thanks for the rec, table. I'm half finished.

That was crypto, not me! but i cosigned the endorsement after reading it.

The Ness book is a sort of sci-fi gay teenage book that is very philosophical and weirdly troubling, actually— I am enjoying it.

oh, sorry, crypto. The praise still stands!

(yes, I enjoyed Openly Straight, am looking forward to forward to the sequel too)

Woo!

I just finished a couple of short pieces by Honore de Balzac that NYRB packaged together under the title The Unknown Masterpiece. Both stories featured obsessed and perfectionist artists. The writing style (as translated) interested me; the coloring was very heightened and romanticized, skirting close to the ecstatic, but Balzac kept it under sufficient discipline, so as not to produce the bad purple prose of a lesser Romantic. Well, mostly not.

I think my wife has a copy of that; I'll check the shelf.

Finished Tom Breihan's The Number Ones last night; he writes 20 essays on 20 #1 pop singles from the 1950s to the 2000s, beginning with Ricky Nelson (the first song to hit #1 on the newly established Billboard Hot 100 chart) and ending with BTS. I didn't know anything about BTS, so it was very interesting to learn that their songs are often strongly critical of Korean society. Imagine if the Backstreet Boys had sung social protest anthems. His hook is that each of the songs he selected, out of hundreds of possible options, marked some kind of change - either to how music was marketed and sold (Soulja Boy) or to how it sounded (Human League). There are no Taylor Swift or Drake songs included in the book.

Vladimir Sharov - The Rehearsals.

Set in Russia at various times from about the 1650s to the 1930s, though it begins near the present as its a novel that delves into much of Russia's past, with a found diary of a man who runs a series of Rehearsals of a crucifixion play. The writing around this medieval bit of art is amazing though it then becomes a narrative of a people on the run across time, trying to find a god/a home, via a series of pile on digressions. There is a lot here about Jewish exile history that crosses over into Russian peasant history right into a communist present where someone, somehow, survives the Soviet prison camps.

Finished ‘More Than This,’ a Patrick Ness novel about a dystopian future/present where many people have opted to go into a sort of permanent alternate reality because of the horrors of living, but the protagonist and several others find themselves outside of that zone due to the ways in which they died in that alternate reality— it’s a strange book, though I did find parts of it quite moving.

Then just completed the sequel to Bill Konigsberg’s ‘Openly Straight,’ entitled ‘Honestly Ben.’ This one got a lot of flack from reviewers and scolds because the protagonist doesn’t think his sexuality can be labelled— he just happens to be in love, both romantically and physically, with his best friend, who happens to be a guy. Having known several people for whom this was the case, including an ex of mine, I found the online commentary about the book inane and guided more by ideological rigidity than acceptance of people as they are. Is the “gay-for-you” trope annoying? At times, sure, but not here. I really cared about the protagonist and his relationships, and felt the book dealt with them with a lot of grace and empathy.

Yeah, the criticisms of Honestly Ben are as predictable as they are annoying. Too bad: I've read a lot of queer YA, and particularly gay-male YA, and HB remains remarkable (in my experience, anyway) for its fluid take on sexual identity.

Glad you dug these books!

I just received my copy of Honestly Ben. I'm surprised at myself for wishing Rafe and Ben have a happy ending (no spoilers!).

I was also surprised at myself, Alfred! I honestly just love Ben— I guess I’ve met a lot of Ben types in my life.

This is the story of my life, actually. I befriend a guy, gay or straight, and we end up charming the fuck out of each other. In my late twenties and early thirties I had more than one dope sigh, "Man, if I was gay..."

Yeah, my late teens and early to mid twenties were a parade of straight guys who were my best friends for a season….

Finished ‘Release’ by Patrick Ness, the third book I have read by him during my perhaps unlikely venture into queer YA.

Ness is a strange writer, and this book was strange. An ancient myth involving a faun and a Queen collide with a contemporary reality of a murdered tweaker woman and a gay boy and his group of friends in exurban Seattle. Hard to really get at more than that, but I will say that the protagonist has some moments with his evangelical father that made me wince because of the similarities to interactions I had with my parents while growing up.

The sex scenes were the best I have read in any gay YA book— intimate and real without feeling, well, too pornographic for YA.

I know I have been posting a lot here, probably because I *do* find these genre investigations exciting, and also because obviously I am working through some stuff. Thanks for your patience….

And perhaps to put less strain on this thread, should I start a YA fiction thread?

Nah (or yeah but not for that reason, it’s fine here!)

a young adult fiction thread

thanks wins.

tabes, I just read the Walden Pond scene b/w Rafe and Ben and I'm dying.

lmfao i loved that scene, i am so glad you are also enjoying the book. thanks crypto!!

I've actually started a document listing all of the QYA titles you (table) reference in this thread that I haven't read, along with your comments, so I know which ones to prioritize. At the top of that list (which my library is taking its sweet time getting to me): Boy Like Me. So, thank YOU!

Boy Like Me is really one of the best of the ones I've read— it made me weep several times.

YES. I love The End of the Affair so much. Keep us updated please

― gyac, Sunday, 19 January 2025 18:08 (three weeks ago) link

Same, loved it. I’m always curious to read about what it means to be Catholic (I’m Jewish but my partner was raised Catholic, taught by nuns until high school, the whole shebang) although I’m guessing this is not an entirely representative text of The Catholic Experience. On top of that - loved the thick wartime atmospherics, the sexy doomed romance of it all, Golders Green (!), the Maurice-Henry bromance, the way London feels like a real place and also a living dream where only seven or eight people ever exist. It’s weirdly funny too - I thought, this is how to do an unsympathetic narrator - it’s like it’s been written by sometime who’s very capable of being funny, but has (rightly) chosen not to be.

I guess people get annoyed by the coincidence and deterministic plotting of the final third? But it struck me as right for the story and not annoying in the way depressing plot-turns can be in e.g. Hardy.

Honestly I am Catholic and I found the Catholicism the least interesting aspect of it cos I’m like reading this and going THAT’S WHERE HE WENT WITH IT??? Oh Graham…. But that’s subjective ofc and not the experience of most readers and it’s not enough for me not to love it. I think it comes across really cheesily in the film - which is really good btw but not up to the book’s standard - and I think the depiction of his wrestling with his hatred of God and ensuing way the plot plays out is pretty interesting.

I also think the sense of place in this is incredible. I’m in Covent Garden fairly frequently and I’ve passed what I’m pretty sure is that grating they stand on to kiss a million times. I’ve passed the church on Southampton Row a billion times, but I’ve never been inside and, honestly I should go. Look at that interior!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Christi_Catholic_Church,_Maiden_Lane

I love how someone is always crossing the Common and thinking about someone else crossing the Common or going to cross the Common themselves. I love the onions scene - how postwar dinner is that - and how conscious that whole scene is. And Henry, how Maurice sees him and hates him for being married to Sarah but can’t dislike the person?

Tl;dr it’s a great great book and I love that you enjoyed it

Good discussion itt, I love Greene but haven't read that one yet, bumping up the list.

Reading Hot Milk by Deborah Levy. The young protagonist has accompanied her demanding mother to spain to visit an expensive clinic to find out what's up with her mother's legs. The doctor may be a quack. The young woman is failing to finish her anthropology degree. She has fallen into sexual relationships with a young medic who treated her jellyfish stings and a random spanish woman, who has a boyfriend. She hasn't passed her driving test but has to drive her mother around. I'm not sure why I should care about any of this. I should give up but I'm over half way through.

Reading ‘Outline of my Lover’ by Douglas A. Martin— deeply affecting.

I've had a smile since finishing Honestly Ben yesterday morning.

I should reread The End of the Affair. I got to it when Neil Jordan released his adaptation. I went through a big Greene kick at the start of the pandemic. His precision and mordancy always work on me but often I put down a novel and think, "Is that it?"

Lutz Seiler - In Case of Loss

Just picked this up on a whim, a bunch of essays by a German poet who won the Buchner Prize (a list I do look at now and then for German Language writers), gotta say I am just not feeling German culture over the last year (post-Gaza) and its probably better than I have space for rn.

Finished the Martin book—

fans of REM, take note: the book is a fictionalization of Martin’s relationship with Michael Stipe over the course of several years when Martin was a college student in Savannah. It’s not exactly flattering to Stipe, but I will say that the book operates more as a meditation on obsession and loss. And it’s not all about Stipe, either; here is a passage about a boy Martin’s narrator was obsessed with in high school.

Trying to near him swallows me, all of my concentration goes only to him. And I am focused with that challenge. It saves me, buoys me through years and days. He becomes my lesson in want, is my want, my only.

There are some comparisons to Duras to be made, and I think they’re apt. Good book!

Began Bill Konigsberg’s ‘The Music of What Happens.’ Seems like it will be a typical jock-meets-nerd type teen gay romance with some added plot elements… including one around assault and consent that seems like it might set the book apart.

Haven't read that one. Only non-Ben and Rafe book of Konigsberg's that I've read so far is Destination Unknown, which I believe was inspired by his own gay-coming-of-age in NYC in the 1980s, with most of what that setting implies. I liked it though; the chapters (like the novel's title) are all taken from New Wave songs of the era (including one chapter titled "Coming Up Close," after my single favourite song of all time), and the love interest is obsessed with Dale Bozzio.

The 'Til Tuesday song? Nice!

I just finished a short, early novel by John Le Carre, A Murder of Quality. It was his second published novel. His writing style was already quite mature and he had created his long term protagonist in George Smiley, but in this book Smiley seems intended to develop into yet another of those brilliant amateur detectives so beloved in British murder mysteries. In an Introduction written decades later Le Carre sums it up as "a flawed thriller redeemed by ferocious and quite funny social comment." I agree with that assessment.

I've tried and tried with Le Carre. I just don't speak his language, I guess.

Yeah, same. At first I thought it was a failure to understand genre, but I love a lot of other stuff in a similar vein.

Gave up on Hot Milk. Started You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, about Cortes and Moctezuma. So far seems like the anti Wolf Hall - Moctezuma is depressed, Cortes is a buffoon, no-one seems to know what is going on.

I read a few of Le Carre's novels during the pandemic and finally Got Him.

What I love about Le Carre is that everything terrible has already happened; the books are all looking back, assessing damage, cleaning up, and telling yourself, "Well, we survived, I guess." They're perfect for middle-aged men.

And Whigish sentimentalists, yearning for empire.

The joke's usually on them, especially in the later novels

Yah, was gonna say Le Carre's novels are scarcely a ringing endorsement for the competence of the British intelligence service or the Foreign Office, nor are they given to nostalgia for the former empire. More often they excoriate the entrenchment of the class system in the upper reaches of the civil service.

‘The Music of What Happens’ was good, though my point about the jock-meets-art-fag things stands… what complicates matters is that there is a huge issue of sexual assault, as well as addict/unstable parents. It was refreshing to read, in some ways— boys finding out about each other and life as a team. There are some sexual moments, but no sex between them for reasons that I won’t get into. Decent book, Konigsberg is a good writer.

I started it this morning. The title kept nagging at me; then I remembered Helen Vender used the title for one of her early essay collections.

It’s from a Heaney poem!

Now onto ‘Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun,’ a book I picked up in the YA section of the library based on gaydar alone— no stickers or other indications on it— and indeed, it is a gay YA book about a Mexican American kid in Corpus Christi and a Vietnamese kid in LA who fall for each other over Twitter. it’s wholesome and real and has a lot of Spanish and Vietnamese language mixed into it, which is really cool. (Author’s name is Jonny Garza Villa).

Read their Ander & Santi Were Here, which was...fine.

Since Boy Like Me appears to still have some holds on it, I think I'll make The Music of What Happens my next QYA read.

I have Boy Like Me too. You guys rule.

Oh Alfred, Boy Like Me absolutely wrecked me.

to folks who liked arisotle and dante, i’ll make a strong recommendation for john corey whaley’s “highly illogical behavior.”

cute, smart, and uncreepy — which isn’t how i feel about a bunch of the other ya romance i’ve read in the past decade

I’ve heard of that one but haven’t read it. Adding it to the list!

thanks soda, on mine now too

Finished the Villa book.

It was pretty good, to be honest, though in a way that felt a little strange.

So many of the gay YA books have protagonists that have decent relationships with their parents. A few exceptions, sure, but there seems to be a ton of emphasis in the genre on kids being worried about who they are and the parents ending up being fine with it.

The father of the protagonist in the Villa book is undoubtedly the most evil father in any of the YA books I have read— not in a cartoonish way, but in the way that everyone knows and expects out of homophobic dads. I guess it might be weird to say it, because it was painful to read at times, but it was *good* that this book didn’t sugarcoat things. So many kids still get kicked out of their houses when they come out, it’s wild to think about.

Anyway, certainly not the most artful or politically astute of the books I have been reading, but pretty lovely, and nice to FINALLY have some Asian representation in one of these books for once.

The Double Life Of Arsene Lupin - The Lupin books are quick, easy reads for when I want to practice my French, and a dashing jewel thief is certainly a more comfortable read in the 21st century than many of the other archetypes of turn of the century popular lit (victorian explorer, supercop, etc.). I haven't been reading them in order, and it's been ages since I picked one up, but it feels like he's a harder man in this...previously I'd only remembered him tricking the police and rich victims, but here he gets several innocents involved and manipulates them in rather cruel ways, even if the book always stops short of making him a real rogue. I was going to speculate that the competition of the Fantômas stories, featuring a totally ruthless criminal, might have forced Leblanc to heighten things a little, but turns out this is from 1910 and Fantômas started in 1911.

Started Édouard Louis’ ‘History of Violence.’ Harrowing.

I read The End of Eddy a while ago and enjoyed it.

Yeah, I don’t know if “enjoyed” would be the word I would use to describe my reaction to ‘The End of Eddy,’ but I thought it was interesting. What I find fascinating is the contrast between the two— Louis’ tight prose in ‘Eddy’ is much less so in ‘History,’ which feels much more sprawling, undifferentiated, jumbled. But then again, it is a book detailing a more acute, specific act of violence rather than a general ambient violence, so these stylistic choices make some amount of sense.

"Enjoyed" isn't the right word, no. Let's say Louis' control over the material.

...impressed me.

yes, that was my reaction too

Picked up Boy Like Me, thanks for the recommendation.

I’m halfway through “Still Pictures” by Janet Malcolm, it’s completely delightful.

I just re-read Eiger Dreams, Jon Krakauer, a collection of a dozen or so short magazine pieces about mountains and climbing. The sport has continued to grow and change, but these pieces have aged very well because they aren't really about technique but about a certain kind of obsession, written by someone who knew it from the inside.

that’s my favorite Krakauer, Aimless.

Have y'all read James Salter's novel about mountain climbing?

Solo Faces? Yes. Great book.

I'll have to look into it & see what's up. I've a hunch the most interesting part of a mountain climbing novel would be the least fictional and most focused on the climbing.

I need to get that. I love Eiger Dreams. Climbers by M. John Harrison is a great, ah, climbing book.

I'm reading *The Mermaid of Black Conch* by Monique Roffey. She's a British-Trinadadian writer and this is a magical realist fable in which a woman is cursed to be a mermaid, and, centuries later, caught by some American tourists. A local guy saves her and gradually nurses her back to health. It's gentle and warm (so far), written in a mix of patois and fragmentary poems.

Aimless, the climbing parts of Solo Faces are quite interesting, but it’s really about the obsession and drive that get a climber to do the things they do. Harrison’s book is much more about dirtbagging, on the other hand— they’re sort of a study in contrasts, with Salter’s being much more in debt to the modernist novel and Harrison the post-modern. at least in my thinking.

I liked Harrison’s book a bit better, tho, if only because it feels closer to my own experiences

Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945 has taken a turn in its final third that's less interesting to me than what came before, so I might give up on it. I got two more John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novels from the library and am going to try one of those tonight.

what did milton mayer write about the germans, during the war, that you found uninteresting?

Alan Moore, The Great When - So far this is repeating the tricks from Jerusalem, multiple protagonists, jumps in time, psychedelic and mystical imagery mixed with British working class/leftist history. At least the black character is less clumsily portrayed this time.

I just can’t with Moore’s prose. I feel like a 12 year old again, trying to decode one of those impossible long pages of captions in Swamp Thing. I need the pictures! I might have to put them beside Neal Stephenson in the “sounds interesting, won’t read” pile

I had a similar experience when I first cracked open Jerusalem during the pandemic, but being a Moore fanboy I took it as a challenge abd focused on understanding each sentence. In a way that kinda retaught me how to read? So much writing these days doesn't demand that kind of attention (cf discussion elsewhere about no one doing description anymore), it felt really good to get back to that kind of concentration. Not that I can pretend I always read like that now.

I really enjoyed You Dreamed of Empires. Partly because it's a fascinating period of history - I didn't know Cortes made alliances with many indigenous groups, or that he was invited into the palace in Tenochtitlan (the floating city at the heart of the Aztec empire), or that Tenochtitlan was a wonder of the world which awed the Spanish. But I also enjoyed the modern, sardonic tone (though he didn't shy away from the brutality and barbarism on both sides), and the occasional flash of postmodernity (e.g. an unexpected brief appearance of the music of T-Rex).

Oh I also read The Great Arc, about the 19th century project to create a triangulation survey of India, and calculate the curvature of the earth along the way. An incredible undertaking which took decades, cost hundreds of lives (from disease), uprooted locals and destroyed their homes (yay colonialism), was a celebrated scientific achievement at the time and is now almost completely forgotten. The surveyor general, George Everest (pronounced EVE-rest) is only remembered for one thing (the mountain), calculating the height of which was merely a side effect of the survey which he didn't do and didn't particularly care about.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlett Letter

Talked about this a bit on the 'classic' book thread

Gert Hofmann - The Parable of the Blind

This is fantastic. A 'back story' of the six blind men painted by Brueghel in his "Blind Leading the Blind", told in a Beckett like fashion, from their POV.

I just finished A Long Strange Trip by Dennis McNally, the official history of the Grateful Dead. I loved the first 60%, which only goes through like 1972, but it is a bit thin after that. It weirdly skips over things I would have liked to hear more about (1973 is basically reduced to Watkins Glen, 1974 to the Wall of Sound and cocaine) and emphasizes other things I dngaf about like the trip to Egypt in 1978. The last few years and Garcia's deterioration is pretty grim.

I started reading Billy Budd, Sailor and enjoying it already.

Started Martin Wilson’s ‘What They Always Tell Us,’ a book that is technically YA but reads a lot more like an adult novel about teenagers. Two brothers in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, one of whom recently tried to kill himself. Interesting things happening in their dynamic, and it seems like they both might be gay? Anyway, I am enjoying it, feels very naturalistic and not as antic or contrived as some other YA I have read recently. Maybe also because it’s older and there isn’t as much manic texting and stuff?

This feels a bit like a confession, but I checked out a Richard Stark 'Parker" novel, The outfit, from the library without realizing that I'd read it a couple years ago. As I started reading it seemed vaguely familiar. About 1/3 through I knew for sure that I'd read it before, but I recalled so little about the details that I was still able to enjoy it. I went ahead and finished it. Again. It took me two nights, so it's not like I wasted a lot of time on it.

xp

Don’t know that novel, but yes—-the breathlessness of a lot of social media age YA prose can be exhausting and even a bit alienating for an oldster like me. Another one for me to check out though!

xp this is perfectly fine! you've read a lot of books; not all of them are necessarily memorable

Jean Paul - Logbook of Giannozzo the Balloonist

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann. Just yer standard contemporary political critique via literary historical fiction. Abounds with startling insights and images.

xpost to crypto: finished it today. a really lovely book about brotherly love and learning how to care for others. the younger brother is gay, but it’s more a part of the story of how the two brothers find each other as brothers again.

(i am an only child— probably makes sense to all of you, lmao— but i love reading books about siblings)

The Music of What Happens disappointed me after the other two Konigsbergs. The characters struck me as pallid imitations of Ben and Rafe. Also, he's not great at three-dimensional girls.

Yeah, agreed about that one, tho I thought the actual themes of the book were important.

I mean, it was the first gay YA book I’ve read that dealt with SA in any kind of meaningful way

I mean, it was the first gay YA book I’ve read that dealt with SA in any kind of meaningful way

oh yeah by far the most harrowing -- when I got to a certain chapter I got a lump in my throat.

Istvan Orkeny - One Minute Stories. (The title is what these are)

How are you finding One Minute Stories? I loved it (as you know)

Oh really love them! They seem to draw on a lot of what I love about specifically Hungarian fiction circa 1920s or so, which is like this pure love for the pleasure -- but also horror -- in the everyday. The footnotes are really useful in adding context of that post-war eastern euro life.

Cool! I think they have something of the Daniil Kharms about them also, which is high praise. I have vol2 here if you ever need more.

May do. I'll revive the FAP thread.

(Have you read this collection btw? You might like it: https://www.europaeditions.com/author/338/geza-csath)

crypto, the description you gave and those online don’t do justice to how absolutely brutal ‘Two Boys Kissing’ is. maybe it’s because I get very emotional when i think about the worst of the plague years and all the men we lost, but i am finding it hard to read this book without becoming overwhelmingly sad.

Gezaesthetics, nice.

My wife and I are in the process of updating our 20 year old Advance Directives -- the legal form that allows you to state your treatment preferences if your medical condition makes you incapable of communicating them in real time. So, old age and end-of-life issues were in the front of my mind when I picked up a book at the library that purported to discuss old age through the lens of philosophy, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilling Life, Daniel Klein.

I read it. It was definitely aimed at an audience that must be gently coaxed into reading a book about anything as serious as old age or quotes such serious philosophers as Epicurus or Sartre. At 160 pages, within a small format and using plenty of white space, it was designed like those "gift books" people do not buy to read themselves. The writing style was light, the wisdom on display was determined to appear as innocuous as possible, lest the reader take fright and stop reading. It succeeded. It took me about 3½ hours to read.

I can't quarrel with the author or his advice, basic as it was. It even helped remind me of a few things I knew, but which were getting lost in the ephemera of daily life. Verdict: it knew its purpose and its audience and did what it could to match its ambitions to reality. iow, it was sorta OKish.

Finished the Levithan— really astonishing book tbh, much better than I ever could have anticipated. There is a section toward the end that was particularly rough-going, emotionally, but after a while I settled into the voice of the chorus, and it no longer made me sad, but grateful.

what did milton mayer write about the germans, during the war, that you found uninteresting?

It became less him quoting his German neighbors (fascinating, unlike anything I'd read before, a lot of very strong parallels to life in MAGA America) and more him lecturing the reader on anti-Semitism (I can get that from any number of other books).

Finished another John D. MacDonald book, Pale Gray For Guilt, last night. The general plot (Travis McGee and some friends set up an elaborate financial con to avenge the death of a friend and make a ton of money for his widow) was pretty good, but the pretty gross sexism, conveyed in long pseudo-hip internal monologues from McGee (the book is from 1968), undermined it pretty badly.

The Language of the Third Reich : LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii : a philologist's notebook Victor Klemperer,
fascinating look at language used in Germany under Hitler which doubles up as a memoir of the Jewish author's time under the regime. I think I have some of his diaries from the time so far unread, & I caught a talk on him at the local University a couple of decades back.
This comes as a load of pretty short chapters which makes for quick reading or at least would do if it was the only thing I was reading at the same time. Pretty good anyway.

Rise and Kill First : The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations Ronen Bergman,
thick book on the history of Israeli secret service and its supposedly sanctioned killings. Quite interesting. I think it turned up inn the bibliography of something I read recently. Possibly Maya Wind's Towers of Ivory and Steel her boom on the tie in between Israeli universities and the Israeli military

Mother nature Sara Blaffer Hrdy,
A look at mother hood in nature across several species though largely as regards the human. I was recommended her as an author by Angela Saini I think both in something I read and as an answer in a Q&A session.
Interesting book but the size and shape are a bit awkward. Oversize and heavy. Do want to get through this and read the other couple of titles in the library system.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families : stories from Rwanda Philip Gourevitch,
book on the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath. Mainly told in a series of anecdotes about the people the author interacts with in the country as he investigates the story. Oretty good,

Mumbo jumbo Ismael Reed
satirical novel written by black author in the early 70s concerning the US going through the jus grew epidemic.

The culture of flowers Jack Goody
history of relationship between man and flowers across several civilisations. I think I need to check secondary sources about lack of relationship in Africa and some other places the author mentions. But this is mainly pretty interesting.
I'd come across comment on a language of flowers in a 60s annual for a girl's comic and have wanted to know more ever since. In that different flowers sent to a loved one had different messages by variety. Lead me to thinking this would be interesting and hopefully give a better picture of the lore involved, I'm in Ancient Egypt and Rome so far. So will hopefully know a lot more in a couple of hundred pages.

Neu Klang Christoph Dallach
oral history of Krautrock which was pretty fascinating. One of several books on the subject I've read.
I've enjoyed some of the music involved for the last few decades, think I've heard about some new material in reading this. Good read anyway.

I've read three Jim Thompson novels in two days, which feels like too many - it seems like the kind of mindset you want to ration yourself on. Two of them are about small-town sheriffs who pretend to be kind of dumb while secretly murdering everyone in sight, but oddly it's not repetitive; I could happily read an entire series about different small-town sheriff serial killers.

Neither book is up to the level of something like In A Lonely Place, but they do have the same double-exposed quality of putting you inside the mind of someone who thinks they have complete control over the way others see them and they're making all the right moves to manipulate people, while also showing you that actually people know there's something seriously off about them.

The unreliable narrator thing is really good.
What I've read by Thompson has been great.most of of it that sociopathic lead character thing.
But there are also some semi autobiographical things on working in hotels etc.
I think he wound up writing for the Ironsides tv show or was it vocalising some of the shows for reading consumption.

I came across him in the mid 80s at a time when a load of pulp fiction authors were being anthologies for a series where 4 novels would appear in one book. Was that Black Spring Press?
I think he was also somebody musicians I was in6o were talking about. Plus thete were a few films of his work appearing. The Fritters and Killer Inside Me and things. A remake of The Getaway that gets the end even more wrong than the Peckinpah 70s version came out in the mid 90s too.

autocorrect substituted vocalising for novelising there.

& Fritters for Grifters.

About halfway through ‘We Are the Ants,’ a sort of speculative queer YA book about a lower-class gay kid in Florida who gets abducted by aliens on a regular basis. The end of the world, his boyfriend’s suicide, and a number of other factors complicate the already complicated picture. Well-written, despite some of the allegorical elements feels heavy-handed at times.

feeling heavy-handed, that is.

My favorite Thompson novels — I read a bunch in the late 80s/early 90s when they got reprinted in trade paperback — are The Killer Inside Me (one of the aforementioned psycho-sheriff stories) and A Hell of a Woman, which starts out as dark, almost despairing noir and in its final chapters swerves all the way off the road into genuine horror.

The Fritters Inside Me is the title of my autobiography

I've started in on Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban, but I don't yet feel totally committed to it. There's something about using alternating diary entries by two main characters, where everything in the narrative is either retrospective or contemplative, that might turn it into a bit too much of a grind. The writing has many flashes of wit, so that's promising.

Blasted through a third and for me final John D. MacDonald book, The Green Ripper, today. It's from 1979 (the first two I read were from 1965 and 1968), and you can really feel the age difference in both author and protagonist. Travis McGee is a burnt-out case, and John D. MacDonald is putting long speeches into a supporting character's mouth about how civilization is doomed, the earth's going down the toilet, overpopulation, economic collapse, blah blah blah. And instead of con artists, McGee is going against a transnational terror organization sponsored by Communists and disguised as a cult, and (I don't expect anyone else here to read the book but SPOILERS AHOY) he winds up massacring like a dozen people. The whole thing was grim enough that I actually found myself missing the dollar-store Playboy philosophy stuff from the earlier books. It was a really joyless and mean-spirited book. I can't see myself seeking out more, but if I do they'll definitely be from earlier in the run.

Finished ‘We Are the Ants.’ An interesting look at friendship, family, and grief. The protagonist’s world has ended, in many ways, and he doesn’t see a point in continuing for much of the book, but a number of incidents converge so that he recognizes that he wants to live. Nice book for the nerdy gay teens.

Finished Adam Silvera’s ‘They Both Die at the End,’ a heavy-handed parable about two teens who were previously strangers living their last day alive together. It’s the sort of book that has lessons, and despite the fact that those lessons are worth pondering and in some cases living out, it felt a little too ham-handed for me. Maybe good for the same age group that loves ‘Dead Poets Society’ and such.

I am slowly formulating some thoughts on why some of the more speculative queer YA doesn’t work for me in the same way the more naturalistic stuff does, and it has to do with this heavy-handedness— which seems like an unfortunate convergence of genre conventions rather than ‘bad writing,’ per se.

Began Phil Dellio's We Don't Wanna Know: 51 (or 52) Music Videos That Should Never Disappear which I started (and may continue) writing about here:

Martha, My Dear: ILM's All-Time Video-Poll Results Thread

(ugh, thought I linked my post--scroll down to the most recent posts if you're interested)

My only Travis McGee so far I won't name, because spoilers: his self-loathing spills over into sexist behavior at one point---as in Groucho's "I wouldn't want to be in any club that would have me as a member"---she brings revenge, an innocent bystander gets hurt, McGee helps him out kinda, being Mr. Volunteer Problem-Solver, which he also loathes---"I'm an overeducated beach bum": he's a maybe early example of the Dysfunctional Detective here, and it works pretty well (email me for title).

Finished The Chymical Wedding by Lindsay Clarke, which I had picked up in a used bookstore knowing almost nothing about it - came out in 1989 to some critical acclaim and does not seem to have left much of an impact. I found it very enjoyable to read even when I was a little dubious about how good it actually was - it just felt nice to be reading something with its level of ambition and the feel of a classic novel. It has a bit of Arcadia and Middlemarch to it - two stories in the same location, separated by 150 years, with the modern-day characters trying to find the remnants of the work of a father and daughter who devoted decades to the Hermetic Mystery, and perhaps communicating with them across time. The actual substance of the alchemical business everyone's obsessing over remained pretty obscure to me, and one of the main characters acts like such an asshole most of the time that it got a little hard to believe that anyone could put up with him, but it somehow stayed compelling most of the time. It lost me a bit as it reached a rather hysterical climax and the characters' dialogue got ever more verbose, but then won me back somewhat with a much calmer extended coda.

I finished Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban. Although its structure bears some resemblance to alternating diary entries, it's execution belies that idea and that's good, and here's why. By evading the constraints that would be imposed by mimicking diary writing too exactly, it lets the author slip out of a number of stylistic dead ends and lets the story flow more naturally. The book is densely packed with introspections and social observations and as one blurb phrases it, "witty detail, mordant intelligence, and self-deprecating irony", which strikes me as more accurately descriptive than the average blurb. I did get a bit impatient with how intensely uncomfortable the main characters were in their own skins, but by the end of the book they've gained some small amount of headway in that regard.

I think my next book will be The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow. It starts right out citing Kahneman and Tversky, and regression to mean, so I hope it pulls in some ideas and examples that reach past these.

Finished Konigsberg’s ‘Destination Unknown,’ and while it’s not up to par with the duology, it’s an incredible book. Here’s why, via an anecdote:

I was in a queer lit class during my second year of grad school. Kevin Killian, my mentor (whom I miss dearly), was the professor. He had assigned us a few chapters from Wojnarowicz’s ‘Close to the Knives,’ which I had already read and re-read a few times by that point.

In discussion, we were talking about the text, and this guy a few years younger than me said “I just think Wojnarowicz is a little over the top. Like, a little melodramatic.” And there was silence in the room.

And then I did something I had never ever done up until that point in my life, and which I have never done again, and I basically started yelling in class about tens of thousands of men dying of AIDS and the government not giving a shit and a rotten homophobic society, and basically demanded that he answer whether it was “melodramatic “ to write as Wojnarowicz did under those conditions, his best friends and his lovers and his entire community dying around him. He sort of stared at me, dumbstruck, and Kevin looked at me sadly. I had to leave the classroom because I was crying, just openly crying because I couldn’t understand how someone— a gay man my own age— could not understand the stakes of his existence, and the stakes that were Wojnarowicz’s. I remember shaking with sadness and rage in the courtyard of the building, unable to find a lighter for a cigarette, just crying.

Since that moment I have always worried that young people, especially gay boys, have no conception of what the Plague years were like. I didn’t live through them as an adult, but I have read enough to have some conception as to how devastating it was. Many times my fears about younger peoples’ lack of knowledge have been confirmed . But that’s why Konigsberg’s book is so important: it is for young people, and it tells a story of love and the closet and AIDS that young people need to hear. I am grateful that he wrote it, and though I am obviously not the audience for it, I am glad I read it.

Glad you liked it, table.

I assigned BPM, the film about the Paris chapter of ACT-UP, to my class a few weeks ago, and I got the feeling, while trying to engage the room in discussion, that maybe five of them might have even bothered watching it.

BPM is one of my essential films.

I was in my mid-twenties when some hope emerged and fully out when someone with AIDS stood a chance of staying alive but it was too late: I'm in a sense permanently scarred by growing up in the plague's shadow, in large part b/c my dad's half-brother died of AIDS on Thanksgiving 1995.

Never seen BPM, in the queue now.

crypto, it's astonishing to me that so many young people seem to think this history doesn't concern them.

firstly, people are still contracting HIV! HIV/AIDS is not a crisis that is over!

secondly, the era of mass death from AIDS-related causes was less than 40 years ago, which is incredibly recent, and yet the presentist mindset (which includes the availability of anti-retrovirals, PrEP, etc) means that people think it doesn't concern them any longer.

thirdly, some of the lessons of ACT-UP and other groups should be studied more closely in terms of resisting current attempts at repression.

in any case, i am going to start I'll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip by John Donovan, which is commonly conceived of as the first YA novel with queer/gay themes, published two months before Stonewall in 1969. the content is supposed to be pretty tame, but i am still excited to read it— many compare it to a gay Catcher in the Rye.

Yes to everything in your first post.

The Donovan novel is better than you might expect for a queer YA novel that was published in 1969, though it does establish some of the cliches—clearly based on the leading psychological beliefs at the time—that quickly became wearying when I was going through all bunch of early QYA books for my research a few years back. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.

I read ~65 pages of The Drunkard's Walk and it's dreadful. I wasn't learning anything either new or useful and as soon as the examples tried to apply statistical methods to examples that weren't as determinate as coin flips, card games or lotteries their applicability quickly drifted into nonsense. It'll be headed back to the charity shop.

Finished the Donovan— it is a nice little book, though the tropes of the parents are grating to say the least. How many absent fathers and alcoholic bipolar moms are there in queer YA? I will say that the talk that the father had with the narrator reminded me a lot of the talk my father had with me when I first came out, 30 years after this book was published. It made me wince a bit, really, because how insane is it to say to a kid, “well you know if you keep feeling that way you’re going to ruin your life.”

I liked the narrator quite a bit, and felt for him.

How many absent fathers and alcoholic bipolar moms are there in queer YA?

Too many. That aside, I mostly agree with you about the novel. I like that it ends with one of the boys being basically okay with his sexuality--again, in 1969.

yeah, Altschuler was a great character in that way. i really liked the weepy candy lady too.

i know nothing of queer YA, but absent parents have been a trope in children's literature for literally ever

Disney's 'family films' are known for the frequency with which their young protagonists having one or more dead parents.

Guessing the dynamics are different when it's specifically an absent father within the context of gay YA, especially with a title from the 60's when "a kid turning gay means there was insufficient masculine influence" was still a mainstream opinion.

Yes. We're talking about specific forms of absence and neglect that align with the prevailing psychological "wisdom" of the time.

yes, that is correct, but why don’t we let mookieproof and Aimless enlighten us some more.

Oh good, nothing more there.

Finished Adam Silvera’s ‘More Happy Than Not,’ and I found this one much more enjoyable than his ‘They Both Die at the End,’ probably because the speculative plot element felt more likely — it revolves around a memory-erasure procedure— and the protagonist’s pain and circumstances are also much more complicated and deftly depicted. In particular, there’s a flashback scene where the protagonist’s memory-erasure operation fails and he remembers every indication of his burgeoning sexuality, from when he was a little kid onwards. It felt raw and real in a way that Silvera’s other novel did not.

Now onto Fritz Peters’ ‘Finistère,’

I've avoided Silvera for reasons I can't quite pinpoint beyond the premises of his novels all sounding gimmicky in that Groundhog Day-type way that a certain subset of YA fiction (and numerous recent films and TV shows) seem predisposed towards. Then again, I (sometimes) like David Levithan, and a number of his novels might be classified the same way--certainly my favourite of his, Every Day, has a high-concept hook. But your description of More Happy Than Not sounds intriguing--much more so than They Both Die at the End, which is the Silvera I seem to see referenced most often, and whose premise always struck me as particularly unappealing. I'll give it a shot.

I think you’ll find something in it, crypto— the sequence I described above is quite moving, honestly, and though the book does suffer from some of the usual tropes, the protagonist is sympathetic enough to keep them from crowding out our care for him. Also, it was nice to finally read a book about a gay kid whose family isn’t wealthy— the book is centered in housing projects in the Bronx.

Reading Fritz Peters’ ‘Finistère,’ a novel that sold over 350,000 copies when it was first released in the 1950s. It’s about a wealthy but sullen gay teenager with family troubles who has an affair with the physical education instructor at his private school. It plays into many of the tropes that these sorts of books do, but has some moments of psychological clarity that are rather astonishing—

“Love, Matthew knew, is not something that happens twice. With a singleness not of purpose but of inevitability, he knew at fifteen what he himself might forget at twenty, that love is - he invented the phrase himself - a passport to immortality. Because he did not know or recognize the possibility that love is in any sense mortal, that it can die or fade; because his love for Michel had made him come to life and not buried, whatever doubts Matthew had had about himself and the world around him had been erased.

No longer did he dream or fill his mind with fantasies. There were no debates, no questions, no internal arguments. The sense of guilt that had formed questions inside him, pointing an angry finger at him because of what he had learned with André, not only did not reappear, but vanished. What had happened to him, for it was not that he had done anything - he would have been powerless to direct or prevent any of it and had only followed the current in himself and in Michel - was an answer, an end to all fear. He was in love, there was nothing in him that was not open and free to the person he loved, and his separate parts, individual segments of his self which had warred inexplicably against each other, were fused into one whole vital unit.
There was no question of good or bad, right or wrong, normal or abnormal. It was as useless for him to pretend that he could make any moral judgment of himself as it would have been to pretend that a volcano had no right to erupt. He had exploded into life, a process that defied judgment. It was not a question of approval or disapproval, acceptance or rejection; he could not have been more dominated by what he felt if he had lost the power of reason entirely.”

damn

February's reading was 5 different Steve Erickson books (*not* Stephen Erickson), 3 of which i've previously read, in the 1990s.

Rubicon Beach (3rd read, but the only bits i remember were the last 8 pages)
Amnesiascope
Days Between Stations (4th read)
Arc D'X
Tours Of The Black Clock (2nd read)

i remember them being like the non-M Banks books, but i'm not so sure. Arc referenced bits of the previous 3 and had the writer write himself in (only to be beaten up, possibly killed, after 10 pages by neo-nazis). bits of art scene in post-catastrophe LA, hitler as an old man, twins, thomas jefferson and his slave mistress, time travel, lost films, long train trips over the sea, lots of sex. all very confusing, perhaps deliberately.

March is Zola

(it's steven rather than stephen, but not him either way, but steve)

Why the fuck am I rereading The Tommyknockers? Oh right, because David Brown is on Altair-4.

Have to say the Gard meltdown over nuclear power is actually great in terms of how King depicts the mind of the aggressive, mouthy drunk so well you know it’s got to be more than a bit of self description in there.

The thought of the nukes rose in Gardener’s mind – at hours such as this it always did, like a rotting body floating to the surface in response to cannonfire. At hours such as these – and at this stage of drunkenness – the certainty that he must alert these young men and women to the problem always floated up, trailing its heat of anger and irrationality like rotted waterweed. As always. The last eight years of his life had been bad, and the last three had been a nightmare time in which he had become inexplicable to himself and scary to almost all the people who really knew him. When he drank, this rage, this terror, and most of all, this inability to explain whatever had happened to Jimmy Gardener, to explain even to himself – found outlet in the subject of the nukes.

I read Amnesiascope in high school or shortly after, and found certain images and the overall vibe fascinating and sticky, but it didn't really hang together as a book in the way I wanted it to. Maybe I should revisit it.

I finally finished the Alice Munro story collection and returned it to the library. This is the one that covers the second half of her career (starting from 1998's _The Love of a Good Woman_ and continuing through 2012's _Dear Life_). I quite enjoyed it and would like to read the collection that covers her earlier career at some point. Her range is remarkable: she can do the more commercial "New Yorker" type stories of sex and adultery, but also can pull off light farce, historical drama, crime and murder, family history (both fictional and autobiographical), and more atmospheric pieces that deal with seemingly minor events and the passing of time.

She's got one about about an older woman still in bloom, also with the lightest veil of dementia settling in: not at all melodramatic, just eerie, uncannily plausible, as if I'd already been there (and maybe come back for a while?)

Koogs, I've read all those Steve Erickson books! I love them, with the exception of Amnesiascope. I thought that one felt almost like a parody of what he'd done before. I really disliked it.

Is that “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, dow? That one is a definite highlight. It really captures that feeling I get from some of my favorites in the collection. It’s the uncanny sense of realizing how normal it is for things to be weird.

Yeah, she's too good at that. Must--recall--title----anyway, early in there, belle does something odd on the street, but charms an inquiring cop, who waves her on her merry way.

The Tailor and Ansty Edward Cross
Book about a couple of rural Irish characters by their neighbour. Quite charming.

The Culture of Flowers Jack Goody
I have just read the chapters on the Language of Flowers which were initially a semi fictional piece of French Orientalism written in the late 18th and 19th centuries but I think caught on and became a real trend. This crossed the channel into the English world and then the Atlantic to the U.S. and I read about it in a 60s annual from the sister comic to the Eagle and finally got to read about it here too. But it doesn't really go into it in depth and explain the code flower by flower. They appear to have changed a bit over time too.
Interesting book though.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Mother Nature
Hrdy now looking at infanticide as I've got about 1/2 way through the book..

Ugly Things
Big feature on Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band. Band is just forming at the point I've got to.

The Language of The Third Reich Victor Klempeter
Still working through this too and finding it really interesting.
Looking at new coinages tied to the years in question etc. Very good writing.

Finished ‘Finistère’ last night— I was going to save it for this morning but the final five or so chapters are so shocking and brutal that I couldn’t help but keep reading. I knew how the book ends, but wasn’t sure how dramatically that end would occur.

Basically, the final chapters show all the adults around the teenage protagonist either becoming aware of his queerness and exploiting it, rejecting him, or failing to comfort him in his despair over the the former two situations. All of his illusions of love, how it had buoyed him and his spirit, are dashed. It is awful, just awful, but as the quotation I shared evidences, the writing is so superb and psychologically probing that it made the book one of my favorites I have read in some time.

(Fwiw, this is not a YA book, for those who might be interested but avoid the genre).

Going to now compare it to André Aciman’s most famous novel, ‘Call Me By Your Name.’ I watched the film on a long plane journey— it was somehow part of the inflight entertainment options— and mostly remember crying at the end, and the peach scene.

The film improves on Aciman's occasionally fusty prose. I look forward to your take.

My students...didn't really take to Openly Straight this year. Some complaints included the annoying privilege of the protagonist, and the use of ableist language throughout (I'm somewhat ashamed that I never really caught the latter despite several readings). Last time I taught the novel was 2022, when it went over much better (and better still the year before). The times they are a-changin'?

Wild how I was just having this conversation with my partner about how many students and young people seem unable to accept that characters in books don’t need to perfectly reflect their values. We are in deep trouble if this is as universal as it seems.

Also, your students are wrong ;-)

Konigsberg writes many scenes in locker rooms and on the field. What did they expect?

Some students got this: one made a comment about "literary puritanism" that felt like a polite rebuttal to some of the general comments the class was making, but on the whole, I kinda fear what table fears. At this point, though, I'm more struck by the notion that 19 and 20-year-olds are already reading a novel from 2013 as "dated."

(I also suspect that, as with my assignment of BPM a few weeks back, a good number of the students didn't even bother reading the book)

God, what a shame. I would love to be in your class! The only queer lit class I ever took was the one I mentioned upthread, with Kevin Killian in grad school. It was incredible, of course, but I could have used one when I was an undergrad, too.

I read The Juniper Tree, Barbara Comyns. The only remarkable thing about it for me was the narrative voice, which occupied an indeterminate space somewhere between simplicity and passivity. The plot may strike a stronger chord with other readers because it illustrates many of the difficulties that come with women's socially-defined role, but in the half century since the book was written those difficulties are hardly news to anyone who's paid much attention.

I'm about halfway through The Confidential Agent, one of Graham Greene's 'entertainments' from 1939. It almost falls into the category of wartime spy thriller, but it suffers a bit from its extremely vague hand waving about the nationality of the main character and the nature of the fictional war being fought there, even though these events are central to the mechanisms of the plot. Had Greene waited another six months or so, he'd've had plenty of material along those lines.

The film improves on Aciman's occasionally fusty prose. I look forward to your take.

Chalamet was alarmingly well-cast. Besides the look, he's convincing as a boy wonder fluent in literature, opera, punk, history, etc.

true.

btw I hope I didn't come across as a skeptic. I liked the novel quite a bit: I read it a couple years before the film. From what I remember the last 50 pages made everything click.

you came across as a bit of a skeptic but i totally get it— the movie improves on the book. i will need to watch it again when i am not on an airplane lol

Doing some rereading: Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene remains darkly hilarious and moving, the cigarette case revelation really hit me this time. Now it's Muriel Spark, Ballad Of Peckham Rye.

At a friend's recommendation James Klise's I'll Take Everything You Have.

Daniel_Rf, a helluva twosome.

God, CMBYN is really good:

“That morning he went into town alone. Post office, Signora Milani, the usual rounds. I saw him pedal down the cypress lane, still wearing my trunks. No one had ever worn my clothes.
Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself— like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier's bone together, the other man's heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.”

I need to reread. I remember preferring it to the (also good) movie.

I'm currently grading student essays where I allowed them to select their own topic for critical analysis, and I'm struck by how popular CMBYN (the film) remains among young people year after year. What it does right that Openly Straight is, apparently, doing wrong is something I need to consider.

I wonder whether it has to do with confusion— so much of CMBYN is about Elio’s contradicting emotions and desires, his willingness contrasted against his fecklessness. It feels raw, real, and… well, romantic. Whereas ‘Openly Straight’ relies on the protagonist deciding to deceive himself and those around him, and though it doesn’t work, it also doesn’t necessarily endear him to a certain type of reader.

Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures, slim but just as good as anything she’s done, which for me is as good as it gets.

Also James’s Figure in the Carpet, which I loved as much as I despised Turn of the Screw. It’s basically Ringu with book reviewers, with a VHS swapped for the prize of being the smartest asshole in a small field of assholes.

I used an epub reader that read it in the voice of Burt Reynolds – fantastic (really).

I read a book I found i one of those Little Free Library boxes, The Death of Woman Wang, Jonathan D. Spence. It tries to convey a sense of what rural life among ordinary Chinese peasants was like in the last half of the 1600s, a chaotic period when the Ming Dynasty collapsed and the next dynasty of Manchu rulers hadn't been strongly established. It's short and it's history (non-fiction). I appreciated the author's intention to escape the dry recitation of facts in his narrative, but he only partly succeeded.

I had finished The Confidential Agent, so I left it behind in the Little Free Library as a donation. It wasn't one of Greene's better efforts.

Finished CMBYN— a real gem. I ordered a copy for myself, I have a feeling I will need to read it again
sometime

I love the hotel bar conversation over martinis, of course.

I’m back on my usual bullshit (reading books by or about William James) with Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll With William James.

I love the hotel bar conversation over martinis, of course.

‘What would animals say if we asked the right questions?’ not living up to its table of contents so far, but there’s still time:

A for Artists: Stupid like a painter? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
B for Beasts: Do apes really ape? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
C for Corporeal: Is it all right to urinate in front of animals? . . . . . . . . 15
D for Delinquents: Can animals revolt? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
E for Exhibitionists: Do animals see themselves as we see them? . . . . 29
F for Fabricating Science: Do animals have a sense of prestige? . . . . . . 37
G for Genius: With whom would extraterrestrials want to
negotiate? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
H for Hierarchies: Might the dominance of males be a myth? . . . . . . . 53
I for Impaired: Are animals reliable models of morality? . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
J for Justice: Can animals compromise? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
K for Killable: Are any species killable? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
L for Laboratory: What are rats interested in during
experiments? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
M for Magpies: How can we interest elephants in mirrors? . . . . . . . . . 97
N for Necessity: Can one lead a rat to infanticide? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
O for Oeuvres: Do birds make art? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
P for Pretenders: Can deception be proof of good manners? . . . . . . . 123
Q for Queer: Are penguins coming out of the closet? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
R for Reaction: Do goats agree with statistics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
S for Separations: Can animals be broken down? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
T for Tying Knots: Who invented language and mathematics? . . . . . 153
U for Umwelt: Do beasts know ways of being in the world? . . . . . . . . 161
V for Versions: Do chimpanzees die like we do? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
W for Work: Why do we say that cows don’t do anything? . . . . . . . . 177
X for Xenografts: Can one live with the heart of a pig? . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Y for YouTube: Are animals the new celebrities? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Z for Zoophilia: Can horses consent? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

I take it this is where to find recs for queer YA novels

he's convincing as a boy wonder fluent in literature, opera, punk, history, etc

he ought to be, he went to laguardia hs

Deflatormouse, this is the place.

My favorites since I dove in:
- David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
- Bill Konigsberg, Openly Straight and Honestly Ben
- Simon James Green, Boy Like Me
- Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
- Patrick Ness, Release and Different for Boys

I started Nick White’s ‘How to Survive a Summer,’ about a gay grad student suddenly confronted with memories of his strict religious upbringing and a summer at a conversion therapy camp that ended in tragedy. It is beginning slowly, but is finally at a low simmer about 70 pages in. (This one isn’t YA, necessarily, it just looked interesting and had decent blurbs).

My favorites since I dove in:
- David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
- Bill Konigsberg, Openly Straight and Honestly Ben
- Simon James Green, Boy Like Me
- Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
- Patrick Ness, Release and Different for Boys

thx! since the titles are promising enough and i fly through these books (between reading heavier nonfiction stuff about my interests), i went ahead and ordered/reserved/downloaded all of these
i’m sure i’ll have read as many as i like well enough to finish by the end of summer!
i’d also like to read some queer YA novels by women, i will scan this thread sometime soon but lmk :D

Last night I read a modern English translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Bernard O'Donaghue (Penguin, 2006). Unlike most modernizations this one doesn't attempt to reproduce the caesura and alliterations within each line. The result was very readable and recast the poem into a more truly modern poetic form, while still hewing near to the general form and narrative tone of the original. I liked it. It's still a damn good story.

I read Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's *In Praise of Shadows*. 1) it's made me want to spend more time in the candlelight of my spare room/meditation room and 2) it's cost me a fortune in lacquerware.

Now reading *Intervals* by Marianne Brooker. Brooker's mum was diagnosed with an aggressive form of MS in her 40s. The book partly tracks her mum's extraordinarily dignified and resourceful decline and eventual choice to end her life through VSED, but is also, inevitably, an indictment of the wretched state of disability care in the UK. Brooker was a PhD through much of her mum's final years, so the book is constructed much like (whisper it) Maggie Nelson's work, with critical theory alongside frank passages of memoir.

I'm plodding through Domenico Starnone's The house on Via Gemito, his first dud novel.

d also like to read some queer YA novels by women, i will scan this thread sometime soon but lmk :D

fully admit that I have mostly been reading YA that's focused on boys, both cis and trans, because I don't think it's really my place to write or be interested in lesbian or sapphic-related YA. as a result, most of the books i've been reading have been by men, with a few exceptions. i think crypto might have better recs on that account, tho!

I finished Nick White’s ‘How to Survive a Summer,’ a novel regarding one gay grad student’s experience in a conversion camp as a fifteen year old… Almost Southern Gothic in its characters and plot, there were some rather interesting twists and turns to the plot, but generally speaking, it was just “okay,” and the ending felt rushed. There is nothing worse than when a character speaks about a deep emotional change in themselves, but nothing comes of it except that declaration. Perhaps a good example of a book that could have dealt with less intricate plotting, and more intricate character work.

Now I am reading Edmund White’s ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ for the first time— I have really only read White’s introduction to the selected Genet, so I am enjoying getting into the rhythms and logics of his prose.

I put White's latest on reserve yesterday. I tend to read him even when I want to throttle him.

Yeah, i want to read the new one but figured i should read the older stuff first

Or at least a few older works

States of Desire is a treat if you're after older Edmund White.

Dipping into Mariana Enriquez's collection A Sunny Place for Shady People; reminds me of Intan Paramaditha's Apple and Knife.

Thanks— going to be honest and say I don’t really care for this book, tho, and might not finish it.

The blithe assumption of privilege and sophistication seems inhered within his style itself, which is withholding and clinical. I sort of hate it!

Well, okay, I don’t hate it— I just find the tenor of his recollections rather affected in a way that isn’t present in other COA memoirs, even of the gay variety. In some ways there is a sense that I actually might dislike Edmund White the person, and that might be what bothers me so. There is sophistication, reflexivity, the life of art and of the mind— but I simply do not sense an iota of anger or rage or resentment. Maybe White’s childhood was actually like this, I don’t know, but so much of my own— particularly after I discovered my sexuality— was spent with some variety and intensity of these negative emotions, whereas White simply seems to relax into resignation.

I alluded to your problem a couple days ago -- sometimes I want to choke him. He assumes his readers care about Renaissance art or whatever; his tastes are never, ever vulgar. But I've made my peace with it, mostly. James Merrill, on the other hand, delights me, perhaps because he never lost his camp humor and for using insouciance as a muse.

Yeah, I am putting this one down.

Well, instead, I picked up and finished Shaun David Hutchinson’s ‘The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley.’ Hutchinson is in the same vein as queer YA writers like Adam Silvera, but only because there are premises in his books that take some suspension of disbelief to get past. After that, he is a much better writer than Silvera, and ‘Andrew Brawley’ is no different— the characters are complex and the book does a nice job of thinking about existential questions in a way that doesn’t patronize teenagers but also isn’t too heavy. I like his work!

Since he’s the best-selling out of all of the current crop of queer YA writers, from what it seems, I am reading Adam Silvera’s ‘History is All You Left Me.’ It’s about a teenager with OCD whose ex/boyfriend has died tragically, with the book’s form jumping between their past together and the present, post-death reality.

One thing that I do appreciate about Silvera is that he is able to depict the studied (and thus false) insouciance of teenage boys in a way that feels natural.

Another is that his books often dwell on mortality, which seems to run against many of the other streams of queer YA. As a teenager who lost several friends to suicide and tragic death myself, I appreciate that Silvera treats mortality in the way that he does.

I am currently reading Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series, four novels about a near future Europe that's split into somewhere around 100 countries, some of them very small indeed. The first one, Europe In Autumn, takes place mostly in Eastern Europe, with a detour to England, but there's a lot of geographical fucking around, obviously, and toward the end it takes a turn into the realm of imaginary/conceptual countries, not unlike China Mieville's The City and the City. Europe At Midnight is up next.

not unlike China Mieville's The City and the City

I finished Silvera’s History is All You Left Me, and while it does do some really lovely work in thinking about how young people dealing with grief, there are other elements of it that I found really unbelievable, distractingly so. Why do two gay boys in later adolescence, who live on the Upper West Side and go to a fancy private school, have the interests of 13 year olds? I realize I am old and that kids today are different, but still, the queer teens I knew/know were never into this kind of stuff.

I was talking about it with my partner but I think it’s related to my inability to understand certain strains of nerd culture— like I can’t handle full grown adults who are really enthusiastic about Star Wars. No shade, I just don’t get it.

table, I remember you bounced of October but what other Mieville did you try? I thought October was unreadable too but C&TC is very good.

I tried C&TC and PSS— I honestly can’t figure it out, but I think that one part of my dislike has to do with what I view as a high-mindedness that isn’t deserved or very interesting. For me, it’s a common issue with speculative works, which explains why I rarely contribute to those threads on ILB and don’t talk about that sort of writing very much. What’s funny is that I love the work of one of Mieville’s mentors, M. John Harrison, both the speculative and non-fiction.

fair enough!

I've only read a few of Mieville's books and they didn't really stick with me. TC&TC did because it worked as weird noir, and the idea of geography being at least partly imaginary is the only thing it has in common with the Hutchinson book. (Didn't Mieville turn out to be some variety of piece-of-shit? I feel like he disappeared for a few years for bad reasons.)

I'm reading Solo Faces, James Salter. I'm halfway through and the ghost of Hemingway is all over this book, mainly in that the inner lives of the characters, both men and women only see the light of day in tiny doses, like inmates in a supermax prison. So far, the women barely exist except to be emotionally captive to the men, whose mystique of inner strength compels their adoration. Where the descriptions of climbing come in, it's spot on. Luckily, there is plenty of climbing in the book.

I loved Solo Faces

Didn't Mieville turn out to be some variety of piece-of-shit?

Seems so! Not that widely advertised though so he still gets a pass most places. Having just discovered Brian Catling I'm not sure I need to read this guy again anyway.

I finished Domenico Starnone's The House on Via Gemito, a plod. I'm rereading Thedore Roethkie's poems for the first time since grad school and picked up Robert Stone's Children of Light.

I finished Solo Faces. The story took a turn just past the midway point to became more interesting and more fully engaged with the humanity of its main characters. The Hemingway-esque flavor persevered, but story began to channel the better aspects of Hemingway -- apart from a scene near the end that involved **the main character along with his climbing partner from the past, now paraplegic from a fall during a climb, playing Russian roulette**.

Finished K. Ancrum’s ‘Icarus.’ Honestly, a book with an interesting enough premise for YA— son of art restorer and thief gets caught by son of rich art collector, and they fall for each other— but which then gets bogged down in too many other “issues.” It’s like the author had a checklist— genetic abnormalities? chronic disease? child abuse? bisexuality? Check, check, check, and check. I mean I get it, of course, but as a result it sort of felt like the most annoying sort of dating profiles in novel form.

Finished ‘Brave Face,’ a memoir by queer YA author Shaun David Hutchinson. Interesting mostly in how our experiences had some parallels despite an 11 year age gap. Probably would be quite helpful for teens.

I've seen the name, but I've never read any of his stuff. I'm honestly more inclined to start with fiction than a memoir; have you read anything else by him?

Just got a small pile of QYA from the library--including, finally, Boy Like Me. Will report back!

I've seen the name, but I've never read any of his stuff. I'm honestly more inclined to start with fiction than a memoir; have you read anything else by him?

Just got a small pile of QYA from the library--including, finally, _Boy Like Me_. Will report back!

Yes, do report back about Boy Like Me!

I liked it.

I finished Domenico Starnone's The House on Via Gemito, a plod.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 March 2025 bookmarkflaglink

Funny, loved this book. Finished it pretty quick.

I didn't find the father compelling enough, I suppose. The other two novels of his I've read impressed me.

Finished Eleanor Barraclough's Embers Of The Hands: Hidden Histories Of The Viking Age last night. Lots of interesting (if occasionally speculative) insight into Norse people's actual lives, gleaned from analysis of clothing and everyday objects as well as runestones and even rune sticks (they didn't use pen and paper, they carved runes into pieces of wood, and some are pretty funny, like one that's a bartender telling a customer, Your wife says to come home, and his response is so poorly carved — due to drunkenness — that it's indecipherable).

I made short work of a short work, Skeletons in the Closet, Jean-Patrick Manchette and now I'm reading another short one, Oranges by John McPhee. It's about oranges. It was published in 1965, so many of the parts that were about contemporary orange farming in Florida are now purely historical. For some reason I can't get excited right now about anything over 250 pp.

what I view as a high-mindedness that isn’t deserved or very interesting. For me, it’s a common issue with speculative works, which explains why I rarely contribute to those threads on ILB and don’t talk about that sort of writing very much. What’s funny is that I love the work of one of Mieville’s mentors, M. John Harrison, both the speculative and non-fiction.

tables, you do still like Heavenly Breakfast and maybe some other Delany, right? Can't think of other titles you may have mentioned.

Now---coming out of convalesce, hopefully---I'm still re-reading Babel-17(1966) very slowly---had thought of Harrison's Slow Glass, even, before your mention of him----slo-mo suits thee young SD's care with each sentence, each word, which usually pays off---emotional subtext of life during extended wartime is strong throughline, though I expect to eventually have probs with some of the good-faith space opera plot-twists again (maybe not! I'm already picking up on stuff I missed the first time) ----and to proceed, this time, through the rest of The Complete Nebula-Award-Winning Fiction of Samuel Delany (80s collection w added commentaries by the author).

convalescence, dammit

dow, Delany usually includes enough gay sex in his work to make me like it. He’s also an infinitely better stylist that Mieville could ever hope to be.

Currently reading Megan Nolan's Acts Of Desperation (alcoholism and abusive relationships in 2010's Dublin; quite psychologically insightful) and Fighting Stars, a series of academic essays about stardom in the Hong Kong martial arts cinema genre.

I am reading a novel by Bart Yates, ‘Leave Myself Behind,’ that is alternately classified as YA and an adult novel— I think it’s more YA, if only because the narrator is a foul-mouthed seventeen year old. Other than some of the dialogue being hopelessly unrealistic in some places and deeply embarrassingly realistic in others— a reminder of how the ‘r’ slur was once more common parlance— the plot is interesting enough and the sex scenes are among the best in any of these books

I started David Levithan's Ryan and Avery .

It's cute.

Oh, that’s the continuation of a story that begins in Two Boys Kissing! That is the favorite of his books i have read.

Finished a weird one after the Yates book, Brian Malloy’s ‘The Year of Ice.’ It’s about a hunky dudebro in the late 70s in Minneapolis with a LOT of family problems and an unfulfilling social life who is very, very gay. He never comes out, he never goes to a gay bar, he never resolves why he is so moody and angry all the time. I guess this is the way it was (and is!) for a lot of people, but while his voice was entertaining and there were dramatic moments that made me gasp, it was a strange book.

Now onto ‘Lie With Me’ by Philippe Besson, translated by none other than Molly Ringwald.

just finished the core books of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Kings series.

masterful historical fiction that covers the 30 years leading up to the outbreak of the hundred years war, mostly in France but with bits in the courts of Edwards II and III.

clearly the inspiration for the non-fantasy bits of game of thrones. not going to sit here and tell you it's up there with wolf hall as a literary work, but it's not trash either. if you are the kind of person who likes the sound of reading six books about kings poisoning each other and their idiot sons, corrupt popes, etc. then I highly recommend it. (the audiobooks are very well read by Peter Joyce too.)

per wikipedia

The Sunday Times called The Iron King "dramatic and colourful as a Dumas romance but stiffened by historical accuracy and political insight" and a "blood-curdling tale of intrigue, murder, corruption and sexual passion".The Times Literary Supplement described it as "barbaric, sensual, teeming with life, based in wide reading and sound scholarship ... among the best historical novels".

I agree with that!

("the core books" because the 7th volume was published many years after the first six and is a completely different thing. read the first ten pages and gave up.)

Just finished Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour's Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, which was surprisingly boring. But if you want to read interviews with a bunch of music executives talking about the rise and fall of "alternative" as a market (first untapped, then exploited to the hilt, then completely burned down), well, this is the book for you, as tales of corporate negotiation seem to get just as many pages as tales of "rock 'n' roll debauchery," yawn.

Finished the Besson, a slim little book with an outsized punch. Some have called it similar to Brokeback in that there is a torrid affair that is broken off by circumstance and one young man’s unwillingness to confront his sexuality, but the comparisons end there.

The last fifty pages are just horribly sad.

It was made into a movie, which looks like it takes quite a few liberties with the novel. I will have to watch it at some point.

Now onto Tomasz Jedrowski’s ‘Swimming in the Dark.’

Swimming in the Dark has an annoying moment when the narrator refers to Debbie Harry as “Blondie.” Blondie is a band!

He’s Polish, give him a break! ;-)

(I write as the son of a Polish immigrant)

I've started Dave Hutchinson's Europe In Winter, the third book (of four) in the Fractured Europe series. I've also just received Andrew Berish's Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse in the mail. I'm quoted in that one — not hating on jazz, but describing the current parameters of the scene as I laid them out in my 2022 book Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century. The book's pretty good so far; I think I'll interview the author when I finish it.

Finished ‘Swimming in the Dark.’ Some great moments, some predictable ones. I especially like how the narrator spoke of his youth— one thing that many books ellide after brief mention is the awakening of same-sex attraction. It’s always, “I knew since I was …” and then it’s over after a few sentences. Here, there’s an enormous section of the book’s beginnings dedicated to the narrator’s love for and heartbreak over a childhood friend, and it really resonated.

I also liked the inclusion of samizdat as a plot device.

Now, relatedly, I am going to dive into another book about homosexuality in Communist Poland, ‘Foucault in Warsaw,’ a nonfiction book that looks fascinating.

I've been reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but skipping around a bit. It's not the kind of book to read front-to-back, but I'll probably read well over half before I set it aside. He's an acute sort of guide to the subject, appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of the various philosophical systems propounded, how they develop, are contested, fall out of favor, then are revived in new forms. He's especially good where philosophy overlaps with mathematics and logic, as it often has.

I think my wife has a copy of that; I'll check the shelves.

Re-read Joe Ide's Righteous yesterday. It's a crime novel, the second in a six-volume (as of now) series about a guy named Isaiah Quintabe (initials IQ), who's sort of a Sherlock Holmes of East Long Beach, CA, but more inclined to kick the shit out of people while solving their problems. I liked the first book in the series a lot, but this one was not as good and I haven't read any of the later ones. Ide occasionally comes up with a vivid image, like this:

"Manzo backhanded her so hard her head did a Linda Blair, and she collapsed like somebody had yanked out her skeleton. The blow was so sudden and violent Isaiah and the other Locos made ooh faces."

‘Foucault in Warsaw’ is fascinating— a look at the Polish queer underground of the mid-20th century via state/police reports, denunciations, and other official documents.

I'm currently reading "The Bostonians" by Henry James. It's surprisingly funny so far.

On some days I rate it James' best.

That's encouraging. I remember you rated it in the top group when you rated all his novels. I've only read some of the shorter fiction, but decided to try again with the novels so I downloaded the complete novels on my Kindle and read the first pages of a few here and there, trying to pick one to start with, and this one seemed the most inviting.

Pulled out a Library of America noir anthology and am reading Cornell Woolrich's I Married A Dead Man, which is about a woman who assumes the identity of a woman who died in a train wreck, and insinuates herself into the dead woman's family. (She feels bad about it, but she's got a baby to think about.)

That book rules yeah. Wrote about it on here recently. Good ol' days when trains had freshening up rooms for gals to chat in.

March
Zola: L'Assommoir - depressing
Zola: Nana - depressing

Finished ‘Foucault in Warsaw,’ truly an incredible book. In the spirit of keeping in the region of Slavs, I began Mikhail Kuzmin’s ‘Wings,’ which caused a huge scandal in Imperial Russia due to its out and out endorsement of homosexuality. Interesting book so far.

I laid Western Philosophy aside for now and am reading The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen.

Marilynne Robinson's Reading Genesis, her interpretations of the goings-on in the first and best Bible book; and Nick White's How to Survive a Summer.

Let me know what you think of the White— I was not totally convinced by the ending, and there were some plodding moments where I felt the hallucinatory aspects of what happened to the protagonist was undercooked, and other times where it was overcooked. Weird book!

Oh, I'm in the second act and it's a plod -- and this is the heart of the book! I've preferred the scenes where he's on the road.

Yeah, and the scenes where "the incident" is explained in full are kind of incredible, really good pacing a build-up....but it made me think that there was a lot of extraneous fluff in the book's first parts.

Yeah, and the scenes where "the incident" is explained in full are kind of incredible, really good pacing a build-up..

Yeah. And he respects the reader to fill the lacuna.

The Sound Of The City, Charlie Gillett - I have a fascination for early histories of Rock, from before the narrative was so consolidated...fun to see what surprising names crop out, what names surprisingly do not and such. Last one I read was Nick Cohn's Awopbopaloobop, which was flippant and shockingly cavalier about calling black artists that Cohn (white) found to be pandering to white audiences as "Uncle Toms". There is thankfully nothing like that so far in the Gilett book, which perhaps suffers a bit from going too far in the other direction, very dry and conscientious. Am enjoying the deep dive on indie labels tho, and no book that gets me firing up The Speciality Store again can't be all bad.

the speciality STORY lol

Finished Pledging My Time by Ray Padgett, a Dylan book discussed on a Dylan thread. Now starting Amulet by Roberto Bolaño and I am already loving it. The narrator's voice and the connection to The Savage Detectives is going to go down real easy.

I read This Is Memorial Device by David K33nan. The premise is an oral history of a band that didn't exist and, as such, the book functions as a kind of memorial device itself - for Airdrie, specifically, but also the post-punk scenes that existed in various shitehawk towns around the UK in the early 1980s. It's written in a series of stream-of-consciousness, ecstatic voices, full of K33nan's usual obsessions of new age charlatans, Crowley, sex magick and the foggy spaces between dreaming, drug states and visions. A sort of coherent narrative rises out of the murk. It made me think of Radio On, amongst other things. I liked it.

Read Kuzmin’s ‘Wings,’ which was interesting if not as spicy as I imagined it would be, and am now splitting my time between Jenn Soong’s ‘My Earliest Person’ and a re-read of ‘Our Lady of the Flowers.’

i read aliocha coll's 'attila'. very beautiful novel, reminded me a little of 'modern love' by constance de jong or even hannah weiner - that is, very rarefied and complex language in service of an inscrutable premise and structure. one of those works that feels like you're looking too closely at the writer's mind - fantasy, desire, obsession. he trained as a doctor and so the book also has these very precise anatomical descriptions at times, which remind me of some of the stuff you get in early ballard

i also read halle butler 'banal nightmare'. great book about millennial pretensions and anxieties. v sharp throughout but there's one sequence in particular set at an air hockey table which was brilliant

Looking fwd to 'Attila'

Currently reading J.F. Martel's Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action. It's short.

Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place for Shady People. Short story collection, mostly set in Argentina, mostly horror or macabre/unnerving/supernatural in tone. I enjoyed it but I feel like I was missing a lot of stuff that someone more intelligent would get out of it.

― oscar bravo, Thursday, 9 January 2025 21:26 (three months ago)

Recently finished this book and feel the same, for both this and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, another one of her collections. There are some really great horror moments or interesting set-ups in a lot of the stories but I often struggle with the endings, since so many feel unsatisfying to me. I'm not sure I can articulate why. I can live with an ambiguous ending, which a lot of these have, but sometimes it feels like the stories aren't quite finished or the endings are more abrupt than ambiguous.

I finished The House in Paris last night. I usually try to give a brief review when I've finished a book but in this case I don't feel like I could do justice to the book. I disliked it, but my feeling of dislike was based in a visceral dislike of the pre-WWI middle class society within which all the characters exist. It didn't help at all that Bowen's confident and authoritative narrative voice spoke entirely from within that society. I detected no hints that this narrator was not intended to be fully trusted or the author secretly wished to flay her impeccably cultured characters with the withering contempt their presumed virtues deserved. Other than that, it was well observed, almost too much so.

Why do they deserve contempt?

I expect it from Wharton, not Bowen.

Finally started Boy Like Me. Fun so far--Green's self-consciousness about the style of such novels is cheeky and refreshing--but I'm assuming its about to get less so.

Slightly.

They deserve contempt because they are imaginary people created by the author as representative specimens of what I think is a contemptible culture. To feel contempt for them is not directed at any real human being and may safely be recognized as directed at the culture that formed them. Had Bowen endowed them with a bit more humanity, my contempt might have been mingled with pity, but it wasn't possible in this case. They were too much like effigies in a wax museum, extremely detailed down to the eyelashes, but lifeless. They had multitudes of gestures, but no personhood.

I had not read Bowen previously, so I had formed no expectations such as yours. If this is what I should expect from Bowen, then this is not a relationship I wish to cultivate. This is a purely personal reaction and not a claim to universality. As I said, the strength of my dislike for the book means I don't claim I can do it justice.

Bowen's a lyrical writer. The House in Paris is not one of my favorites: The Heat of the Day and The House in Paris are my favorites. I'm just surprised, given all you've read (I think) of this period, that her default tone should be contempt. Contempt is easy!

Finally started _Boy Like Me_. Fun so far--Green's self-consciousness about the style of such novels is cheeky and refreshing--but I'm assuming its about to get less so.

Reading Simon Schama’s “Rembrant’s Eyes”.
Entertaining enough for a biography though seems to be peppered with lots of dubious speculation. This is my first Schama, though, and I’m not quite sure I’m gonna handle 400+ more pages of his consonant schtick.

Case in point :

“The switch from woodland groves running with game, or languid, vaguely Latin scenery…favored by foreign courts, to fishermen hanging their nets…or riders travelling rutted tracks beneath a wer and steely sky…”

This sentence goes on some more. Yikes!

*”RembranDt’s Eyes”

what is 'vaguely Latin scenery'

Columns, guys dressed up as Centurions.

xpost yeah, the book is full of this kind of stuff. BIG "however" is that the guy obviously knows his subject and can spin an entertaining yarn out of what would normally be dry, academic details. In the meantime I'm also reading essays in a couple of good Rembrandt exhibition catalogs to balance this.

Started reading Osamu Dazai’s ‘No One Knows,’ which I picked up on a whim recently.

I read Caleb Femi's poetry collection, Poor. It's good stuff. I'm now reading Jay Bernard's Surge, which is also excellent.

Grabbed two old Thomas McGuane novels, Nobody's Angel and Something To Be Desired, at the library yesterday. I read both 30 years ago when I worked at Barnes & Noble, but they hit different (as the children say) now that I actually live in Montana.

I still haven't read any Bowen novels, though found The Collected Stories doorstop to long trek, never a slog: born with the century, teen prodigy around WWI, also feeling the 20s, 30s, 40w---WWII really gets her doing---on into late 60s, a few years before she died---what a range of characters, settings, approaches, takes, all long---I'm ready to read it again.

Reading Musil’s ‘The Confusions of Young Törless’ for the first time, the latest edition translated by Mike Mitchell. It’s quite something!

“Then it was also possible that there was a gate leading from the bright, everyday world, which was all he had known until now, to another stifling, surging, passionate, naked, destructive one. That between those people whose ordered lives are lived out between the office and the family as if in a stable, transparent structure of glass and iron, and those other downtrodden, bleeding people, filthy from dissipation, lost in a maze of corridors full of bellowing voices, there is not only a bridge but their boundaries are contiguous, secret and close and crossable at any moment...

And that would only leave the question: how is it possible? What happens at such moments? What is it that shoots, screaming, up into the air, and what is it that suddenly goes out?”

It's good!

I just finished In the Wake of the Plague, Norman Cantor, a rather meandering and desultory book of 14th century history that made me think that the author (a university professor who had a big success with a previous book, The Civilization of the Middle Ages) submitted a book proposal to his publisher, had it accepted, got a substantial advance and then discovered that his proposal was far more ambitious than he had the time, energy or wit to write, so he simply recast his lecture notes and shoved it out into the world.

oliver harris elliot kane novels -

A Shadow Intelligence is excllent. Spy thriller set largely in Astana, which kicks off with the protagonist seeing a video of *himself* in a few days' time in a hotel in Astana, a place he has never been. crunchy SIGINT/OSINT etc technology and terminology, smart-not-dumb on information manipulation on social media, and generally having fun at the front edge of industrial/political espionage and geopolitics. a slight sense, as in his Nick Belsey books, of a dream logic or forces driving things, bordering but never quite actually supernatural. it's a potent mix, despite some perhaps slightly silly race-against-time explosive action towards the end.

the subsequent novels aren't as good - in fact:

a shadow intelligence (v good), ascension (q good/okay - incidentally odd to revisit this place from a different angle after reading In Ascension), the shame archive (largely bad and unpleasant).

that is interesting in itself, as his nick belsey novels did something similar - the hollow man was excellent I thought, chandler like in terms of a non-detection logic running in parallel with and sometimes driving the main plot. deep shelter was also good, but not as good - however, the UK's cold war nuclear war infrastructure is a hell of a theme and setting, and again, the book uses that theme well to drive psychological insight. The House of Fame - it's been a while, but i remember thinking it was v disappointing in comparison.

curious as to what's happening here - one option is that reading these in quick succession, i just tire of the mode and manner, but i'm pretty indefatigable when it comes to decent genre ime, the other is that Harris only has two-books of decent ideas per property. idk. seems weird. anyway, A Shadow Intelligence is very good.

Also reading Perspective(s) by Laurence Binet but as I'm crawling through it in french it's difficult to comment just yet.

oh and also picked up Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell having *quite* enjoyed Piranesi. i just couldn't get through two pages of it - it's got that 'lightly flavoured with 19th C mannerisms style' without actually having the density actual decent 19thC writing has. i think in different circumstances or in the right mood i might enjoy it, but it was immediately irritating in the mood i was in so i've set it aside for another day.

I finished "The Bostonians". Not sure I'm quite ready to tackle one of the late James novels, but this one was funny, well-paced, with a number of finely drawn characters, and also interesting to read from a modern perspective given that the romantic hero (or anti-hero? James keeps his cards close to the vest) is an unrepentant anti-feminist (an admirer of women in general and particular, but one who believes that the highest calling of a woman is to please a man).

Now I'm reading "Hunchback" by Saou Ichikawa, a bite-sized portion after the feast.

in your honor I reread the first 100 pages. Structurally bizarre, right, almost 20th century: a third of the novel devoted to ONE night. James, it's true, withholds the full measure of his...skepticism towards the women's movement. He's fond of Ms. Birdseye and Dr. Prance because he reduces them to Dickensian caricatures on whom he devotes the full power of his mid-period descriptive abilities. It's also true that he loathes Basil Ransom even more.

He's quite clear how repugnant Ransom comes across at his most courteous, i.e. oiliest.

I don't know if he really loathes Ransom. He gets a lot of amusement from contrasting Ransom's Southern idea of courtesy (which includes the deployment of unctuous flattery when the situation demands it) with the much more buttoned-down New England version, but you always get the feeling that Ransom is trying to do what he thinks is right according to his lights.

I thought by the end of the novel it's clear he has enormous sympathy for Verena's potential imprisonment in marriage, no?

No I agree that he portrays the romance as a tragic mistake for Verena. It's complicated. Now I want to see the 1984 Merchant Ivory version with Christopher Reeve doing his best Southern accent as Ransom and Vanessa Redgrave as Olive Chancellor, although the age difference between Olive and Verena is more exaggerated in the film than in the book.

It's a dead film: pedantic, literal, with the pace of a slug. Redgrave is excellent, though: she nails the stubbornness, the flighty romanticism, the New England conservative tradition that James pokes fun of. Linda Hunt and Jessica Tandy are well-cast too.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell... i just couldn't get through two pages of it - it's got that 'lightly flavoured with 19th C mannerisms style' without actually having the density actual decent 19thC writing has. i think in different circumstances or in the right mood i might enjoy it, but it was immediately irritating in the mood i was in so i've set it aside for another day.

Wound up ragequitting both McGuane novels. His style is insufferable to me now, almost as bad as DeLillo but with "drunken, divorced scion of privilege as misunderstood tragic hero" bullshit in place of Boomer mythopoeia. But when I dropped them at the library I found a copy of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Chain-Gang All-Stars. I loved his story collection, Friday Black, so I'm excited for this.

Finished ‘Young Törless,’ now onto Uzodinma Iweala’s ‘Speak No Evil.’

had a similar reaction to Jonathan Strange etc.; same with r.f. kuang's babel

Midway through Mann's Doctor Faustus, I'm finding it mostly fascinating, occasionally bewildering - I'm not sure if lowe-porter's translation makes the discussions of e.g. nationalism even more oblique than they're meant to be. Also the fixation on a 'national character', usually with a glowing reference to the german one, is kind of silly. (The Magic Mountain suffered from this too.)

It's depressing how relevant it is today - when he speaks of the nazi's "crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness (...) the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and confusion of standards; the abuse, corruption, and blackmail of all that was good".

had a similar reaction to Jonathan Strange etc.; same with r.f. kuang's babel

― mookieproof, Sunday, 20 April 2025 02:20 bookmarkflaglink

that's interesting and quite reassuring - it's such a popular book, and on paper something i'd quite like - so i wondered whether i was letting over fastidiousness get in the way of broader enjoyments.

Hungry beat : the Scottish independent pop underground movement 1977-1984 Douglas MacIntyre,
Oral history of the Scottish Underground scene from the time of punk to the mid 80s. It touches on some bands from elsewhere who were involved with Bob Last's Fast label including the Pop Group, Human League etc.
I picked this up in London on my last trip, read first 100 or so pages at the time. Then put it down in a pile I've only recently rescued it from.
It's now my bathroom book so is finally being read.
I'm trying to get to hear the bands mentioned as I go through it. Now onto the 2nd wave of Postcard.

American holocaust : the conquest of the New World David Stannard,
heavy scathing history of uropean discovery and oppression in the Americas. Goes initially into Spanish misbehaviour and spread of disease exponentially decimating and devastating native population This had happened more than enough as they worked their way across the Caribbean before reaching the continental mainland of the Americas. Then went onto being intentionally sadistic. One wonders what would have happened if contact hadn't happened or happened in a more salubrious, egalitarian way.
Book goes onto British colonial contact with the natives further North and a lot more sadistic behaviour. Intentional genocide of various tribes. Though the term genocide is much later. Europeans seeing natives to be either dispensable or to be used solely for labour.
So pretty depressing.

Hollow land : Israel's architecture of occupation Eyal Weizman,
Book on Israeli architecture and urban development that also looks into the sociology of the oppression of Palestine. Quite interesting.
I'd like to know what's in the update of this 2007 book that came out a couple of years ago. I had the newer book on order for an age and it wasn't being fulfilled by the library that has the copy.
Now library got me the older version.

Montaillou : Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294-1324 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
the closest to first person accounts of what life was like for peasants in medieval France. These are based on accounts taken by a local inquisition at the time so based directly on the individual's personal deposition.
Haven't got very far into it so far but it seems pretty interesting.

think I'm reading at about half the speed of last year. Still getting through some really good stuff.

the Iweala book is quite interesting to me— not sure whether it’s classified as YA or not, but its protagonist is definitely a senior in high school.

what makes it different from other books of its kind is that the protagonist is the son of two Nigerian immigrants, both very successful and relatively well-off and religious. you can see where the conflict arises when the protagonist leaves his phone at home with Grindr and Tinder open…

to delve personally for a second, it’s really only recently that it dawned on me that one of the reasons behind my mom’s virulent homophobia (when I was growing up) and her continued, stated dislike of things that are “too different” is that she was an immigrant, who grew up having constantly to prove herself worthy in this horrible society. being different meant failure, and failure wasn’t an option.

in a sense, this is what the book is about: one young man trying to reckon with himself amidst the people who raised him not wanting to understand him, his world, or his desires. the author is doing a good job!

finished the Iweala, which had an unexpected twist 2/3rds of the way through, then protagonists shifted. not sure how i feel about it— in some ways the book felt like a perfect tragedy, in other ways it felt like the incident at the story’s heart was an excuse to wind the book down when more could have been done.

I'm halfway through Judith Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender?. Last night I went to bed underlining Pope Francis' remarks on trans people. J.D. Vance didn't kill him: Butler did.

So the Butler did it?

boom

Haha. I started *Who's Afraid of Gender?* yesterday. Still on the introduction but yeah, ouch.

Wanna read that Butler.

Forgot to post about Boy Like Me when I finished it, so: liked it a lot, but a bit painful because it would have fit almost too perfectly into my proposed, but rejected, postdoc project. Doesn't mean I've abandoned the project, but reading something so ideally suited towards my research so soon after being denied funding for said project kinda stings. But yeah, I love the use of literature as a covert means of communication, and then eventually as a weapon. I love that that the Thatcher stand-in (the principal, although I guess the character literally named Margaret kinda is too) is not just ignorant and bigoted but gleefully sadistic. As the author's stated purpose is tell a 30-year-old story that could have easily taken place right now, it is helpful to be reminded that these people actually get off on their cruelty. A worthy addition to the QYA canon!

Nice, glad you liked it, though of course I am sorry it stirred up some ugly feelings.

Neither your nor the book's fault!

I am going to begin Lee Williams’ ‘After Nirvana’ today.

Current toilet reading - Miscellaneous Verdicts Writings on Writers 1946 - 1989 by Anthony Powell (who decorated his own lavatory with a large collage - just the kind of incidental detail Powell delights in in his own reviews). Sample sentence:

The first time I saw Ivy Compton-Burnett was at a party given to watch the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race from Chiswick Mall.

That's right

the closest to first person accounts of what life was like for peasants in medieval France.

That’s a good way to put it. I read this last year and can recommend.

I'm currently re-reading The Dalkey Archive, Flann O'Brien. It was the last of his works I read and my estimate of it suffered from my having read the others in near proximity. His re-use of the bicycle conceit glared too obviously and offended me. This was at least 25 years ago. I was young and easily prodded to moral outrage.

I dedicate these pages to my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that I'm only fooling and warning him to see to it that there is no misunderstanding when I go home.

That was completely sincere. O'Brien's Catholicism was so ingrained that the furthest he could diverge from it was a sort of hypothetical ironic Manichaeism, expressed in that nasty dialogue with Augustine.

The Third Policeman frightened him, and he seems to have wondered if his subsequent misfortunes in life were a punishment for having written it, according to Cronin. The Dalkey Archive was a safer revision of it. "I was only joking."

There used to be a kind of parallel Catholic culture with novels like Mr. Blue. We have lost the sense of stepping outside the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy in literature. Joyce did, and one can imagine O'Brien's thoughts as Joyce's posthumous fame grew. O'Brien was going to put Joyce in his place once and for all.

Trouble With Lichen, John Wyndham - Two scientists (one male, one female) stumble upon a lichen that can slow down the aging process. Both keep it secret, for different reasons: the older male scientist because he believes its scarcity will lead to global conflict trying to secure it, the younger female scientist meanwhile believes it will be so destabilizing that institutions will work to suppress it. The man keeps the secret to himself, the woman however comes up with a plan. Shades of The Man In The White Suit, and like that film it doesn't slot neatly into current left/right categorization, capital, the church, government and the union movement all being portrayed as essentially inept. The female protagonist is pretty surprisingly well done, not for 2025 mind but for being written by an older man in 1960 she's a pretty cool feminist badass. Stray line that still hits the target in our time of Rowlings and such: "everybody's prone to regard his local anthropological set-up as a law of nature". In the "of its time" department: concerns about overpopulation and a shocking flippancy amongst the scientists in applying their findings to people who have no idea they're being messed with. There's also a problematic age gap in there, relativized by the novel's central conceit. Anyway this was a very good time!

Beast In The Shadows, Edogawa Rampo - Starts with a woman being hounded by the 20's Japanese equivalent of an incel. She receives letters, and Rampo is very good at making you want the evil bastard to get caught. Mild spoilers: at one point it threatens to become just sort of conventional, kink shaming and misogynistic, but at the very end it goes somewhere else entirely, somewhere quite terrifying.Spoilerless version: if you find yourself not liking where the book is going at one point, I recommend holding off judgement until the last page.

I've also been dipping into the first volume of the Penguin Book Of French Short Stories, a two volume collection I bought because my wife's family has gotten used to giving me French books for xmas and last year I was out of inspiration for names to come up with.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/319430/the-penguin-book-of-french-short-stories-1/9780241462003
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/319431/the-penguin-book-of-french-short-stories-2/9780241462065

Interesting glimpse at anglo attitudes towards France on those covers. French means naked ladies, if it's modern it still means a naked lady but with weird colours because it's modern.

I'll Take Everything You Have, by James Klise: queer YA that flirts with noir. I don't think it's entirely successful--the earnestness of the former genre is at significant odds with the cynicism of the latter--but I enjoyed the setting (1930s Chicago) and I liked the protagonist, and in general I welcome more QYA stories set in the pre-Stonewall era.

Can't say I loved Doctor Faustus, in the end. Being largely ignorant of classical music doesn't help but how interesting can detailed descriptions of fictional musical works really be? And idk, considering it was written during WW2 and the fall of Germany, and features a narrator writing a book during WW2 and the fall of Germany, to me it didn't feel like it dealt with the situation, and the problem of nationalism, urgently or stridently enough. One page of the narrator lamenting over the terrible situation to 50 pages of abstruse allegory. But hey it's probably me who's being basic here.

I love Mann and have read several of his novels twice but I can't with Dr. F.

Ok, I'll get round to the others at some point then (I loved TMM).

Anthony Price, Labyrinth Makers, pulpy proto-Indiana Jones thing from 1970babout a British historian/spy. Looked like a fun romp, was recently reissued by Penguin, and Price is well thought-of by authors I’m fond of (like John M Ford), but it was kind of low-mid-brow sexist twaddle. It’s a long series and this was only the first book, so maybe it gets better, but I won’t be trying.

anthony price is so fuckin weird. i actually quite liked the labyrinth makers (yes, v period sexism). but he does really weird concept novels - and by the way weird does not equal
good here. there’s one where the entire plot, the entire thing you’re reading turns out to be a misdirection. another where he decided to do an entire spy novel entirely in dialogue iirc - a greek independence spy novel. i’m it sure i expected anyone to name check price here and it’s made me quite excited to excavate my recollections. (once again a writer who fulfills my desire for the“this really isn’t very good let me read lots more of it” genre)

About to finish Lee Williams’ ‘After Nirvana,’ which has turned sadder and sadder as it goes on. Street kids, prostitution, squats, drugs— all in the Portland of the mid-90s. The author never wrote another novel but is now a theater critic for the Oregonian.

Now Reading: The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

Its a short novella, weird Lovecraftian thing - one of Mark E Smith's fave books apparently

Lovecraft was an admirer of Machen, via US jounralist Vincent Starret irrc - Lovecraft the great inheritor of Machen, and I think you can track tentacles, horrific corporal corruption, bubbling masses and an awful lot of the comic book horror/sci-fi imagery back to Machen.

and yes, Smith was a fan of Machen - a member of the Arthur Machen society in fact, along with Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbuy in fact. 'I laughed at the Great God Pan' - taken from a comic book is a line in the track Leave the Capitol, itself v cognate with Machen's Hill of Dreams romance.

really glad i used “in fact” there twice when i didn’t need to use it at all.

Thats interesting. For some reason, I always thought Lovecraft's stories were from the late 19th century

maybe because they’ve got such a strong flavour of that atmosphere. it’s where he picked it up - his essay on supernatural horror in literature is good for this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_Horror_in_Literature?wprov=sfti1

finished Framley Parsonage. it was down to 8 pages an hour at times, not because it was difficult, but because i'd rather be doing anything else.

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all the hot trollope news...

started a reread of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and there's a trollope reference i didn't notice in issue 1, and one for zola's Nana. (and all the schoolgirls are from classic kid's books: pollyanna, rebecca of sunnybrook farm, what katy did... and the schoolmistress is from victorian porn)

Recently No Ordinary Spy by Jack Petro. This was really good. I must admit I picked it up once, and then read the sentence on the second page "Shear instinct [sic] brought Winston frantically thrashing to the surface" and thought what the hell is this.

Anyway, the rest of the book is free from egregious whatever the hell that is (OCR error? doesn't look like one]. The tone, entirely surprisingly, reminded me most of (the excellent] Venusberg by Anthony Powell, with a sybaritic fleck of The Ginger Man, maybe. Anyway, it's an extremely enjoyable read, funny - a touch of the comedy of the naïf - with the flavour of accuracy, and it seems it was semi-biographical at least. It has that feeling of carelessness in wartime administrations - there's Waugh as well as Powell here, and maybe also a touch of Peter de Vries. Anyway, a genuine delight.

Also: Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of MIlitary Coups by by Naunihal Singh. This is an academic work with assiduous citations. The central thesis is that rather than internal competitions of military might, or general contests for popular support against unpopular regimes, the mechanics and outcomes of coups can best be explained as solving for co-ordination problems within a polity's military. Singh focuses on Ghana for his evidence as it provides a series of coups originating from different parts of the military and with a number of different outcomes.

I probably won't finish all of it as it's really only the centrally stated thesis that I need - I don't need to go into the full chapters for each area – but there's much of interest here, looking at the logic that governs acquisition of power in moments of volatility, and how information and information spaces are used to manage that contest.

Back when Mark E. as Machen stan was news to me---from Rolling Spec:

The Irish literary magazine Poetry Bus edited by Collette O’Donoghue and Peadar O'Donoghue bears on its masthead a Mark E Smith quotation: “If you’re going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.”

The latest issue, Poetry Bus 10, includes my 16-line poem 'With The Great God Pan in Whitby'. This was inspired by one of the memorable occasions of the original Arthur Machen Society, a weekend in the North Yorkshire harbour town when Mark E Smith, singer and songwriter with The Fall, joined us, with his girlfriend. We met at The Angel, where Machen had stayed, and explored other places associated with his visit.

MES was a keen Machen fan and wanted to hear about the Welsh writer’s stay there during the First World War, as a reporter investigating rumours of suspicious activity on the cliffs. There was nothing in the reports, but instead Machen filed pieces for his paper, the Evening News, on ‘Wonderful Whitby in the Moonlight’, and on the town’s famous trade in jet jewellery. The stay also inspired his atmospheric story ‘The Happy Children’.

The poem recalls some of the, er, interesting incidents of this Whitby encounter with MES.

This well-designed paperback offers 55pp of contemporary poetry from a diverse international line-up.

(Mark Valentine)

Link to magazine in original of this post:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2022/09/with-great-god-pan-in-whitby.html

― dow, Monday, October 24, 2022 4:15 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

excellent! v vaguely seem to remember this being partly covered or mentioned in The Fall fanzine The Biggest Library Yet, tho it’s a loooong time ago now.

― Fizzles, Tuesday, October 25, 2022

I finished Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa. I'm a fan of the trend of 80-page novels, especially when I can get them from the library so I don't have to worry about getting my money's worth. It's the perfect length for getting to know a new author, especially when they leave you wanting more, as in this case. I also finished A Stroll With William James by Jacques Barzun. This one probably could have been a bit shorter, it seemed to wander a bit off topic in the second half, but as a summary of James's thought and significance it felt more on point and insightful than the James bio by Richardson.

James Joyce - Finnegans Wake.

(About 50 pages from the end, finishing tonight) I found it very readable with the ten page chapter by chapter outline in the Oxford's classics edition. It took me two months but that was life getting in the way, actually read a 1/4 of it in the last couple of days.

Understanding line by line is like 1%, on the other side is the sense of humour that sets this internal laugh in me. If you are not laughing with it I would say its impossible, unless you can decode the language but that would take a guide and work, but if you tune in to the humour and the ordinary poetry of a child's rhyme (I would say a lot of it is like a children's book)* then you just glide through it. I didn't think I would ever read this but in a convo with a twitter mutual I forgot there is this music to listen to.

Its a transformation and/or extension of language, but it comes from English and its structure. There are actually phrases of normal bog standard English scattered around and last night there was about two pages of everyday English just to Telegraph this v point.

*I haven't read any since I was a child but it feels like a recovery of a language we lose as we grow up.

For reasons best known to myself I spent a weekend reading the Tom “insane Corbyn book” Bowers book about the Beckhams, who I hate. Fed the hater in my soul. I will not be taking questions, nor do I expect any!

Its a transformation and/or extension of language, but it comes from English and its structure. There are actually phrases of normal bog standard English scattered around and last night there was about two pages of everyday English just to Telegraph this v point.

My feel is that the book is a language sponge. He used as much as possible from every language and dialect as he could to mock English, but its all done to make him laugh.

A lot of the world didn't but you can only put it out there.

Finished Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Chain-Gang All-Stars and Andrew Berish's Hating Jazz: A History Of Its Disparagement, Mockery, And Other Forms Of Abuse. Interviewing Berish next weekend.

I liked Adjei-Brenyah's story collection Friday Black better than this novel, which is about a near-future gladiatorial combat league using prisoners as combatants. Yeah, yeah, carceral state bad, America a capitalist hellscape, Americans addicted to spectacle and greedy and amoral, blah blah blah. One of those books that doesn't ask a single question the reader isn't already sure they know the answer to.

Yukio Mishima - Voices of the Fallen Heroes. The title story of this brand new collection of stories comes down to a set of fascistic monologues from members of one of those fringe right-wing groups, the likes of which have no chance of gaining power.

This is the stuff. On the page it really works..

I finished "You Dreamed of Empires" by Alvaro Enrigue, a quasi-historical novel that takes place over the course of a few days, narrating the arrival of Cortes and his followers in the imperial city of Tenochtitlan and his first meetings with Moctezuma. It's fascinating historical event to think about, and Enrigue has a powerful imagination for filling in the unknowable, focusing on the politics in Moctezuma's court and the hapless lieutenants who have to navigate his fondness for psychedelic mushrooms and summary executions.

been meaning to check out the Mishima, thanks for the reminder

Slowly reading Jalal Toufic’s What Was I Thinking?. Like most of his books, it’s the sort of thing that feels insane and a little dry at moments and then there are pages or sections that seem to explain everything in the most cogent, astonishing way possible. One of my favorite thinkers.

Michael Leali, The Truth About Triangles: cute Middle Grade novel about a 12-year-old boy navigating his parents' marital and financial problems, his dream of appearing on a cooking show, and his crush on a new boy at school. The second book I've read by this author; the first, Matteo, was more fantasy-oriented, but in both I like the way he writes queer early-adolescent characters. There's nothing in this book that wouldn't be totally appealing, legible, and appropriate for a middle school audience, but Leali's attentiveness to relationship dynamics--between parent and child, child and siblings, child and friends, and child and romantic interest--feel authentic.

Next up: the new Judith Butler, which I am surprised/delighted to find that my local public library actually carries.

Yo, Daniel RF! Meant to say: if you want more 60s music writing, try Charles Keil's Urban Blues and Ellen Willis's early collection Beginning To See The Light (two editions now; I read the first). Also, though he's much more of a purist than Keil (thinks young Buddy Guy is too rock 'n' roll), Paul Oliver has some striking takes, maybe insights, in The Story of the Blues Likewise Bill Malone's first edition of Country Music U.S.A., in which he's amused by Johnny Cash dressing all in black, "like a Method Actor," abd "The fact that Cash, of all people," with his hard-scrabble background, should feel the need to so impress us with the image of Authentically Deep Country Artist etc. (also ends this late 60s edition book with thanks to an invaluable collector in New Zealand, reminding us just how hard it could be to find older country records in America sometimes just a few years after release)
For jazz, you can't skip Leroi Jones's Black Music and Blues People:mostly short pieces, seemingly effortless prose poetry, and shit-stirring.

See also ILM thread Good Books About Music.

I just found this note I made from Doctor Faustus - astonishing(ly bad) writing, apparently 'epigonal' means 'relating to, or characteristic of, a prehistoric culture of coastal Peru and Chile'?? (Though an 'epigone' is a follower or successor.) I'd love to know how the John Woods translation renders it. (This is the worst bit in the middle of a huge paragraph):

applying it unconcernedly as free building material and making tradition felt, re-shaped into the opposite of the epigonal

how long ago?

The note, or...? I made the note (took a pic on my phone) when I read it last month.

The note. Thanks. I thought it was older: would've been cool to find a note from younger self denouncing the translation

Got a little bored of the Toufic, so I bought Torrey Peters' Stag Dance at Chicago Midway— a physical copy, in an actual bookstore in the airport, mind you— and have been enjoying it.

Reading Judith Butler's new (and, so far, awesome) Who's Afraid of Gender?, the first 90 or so pages of which are primarily about the Vatican's war on "gender ideology," during the election (or whatever) of a new Pope is kinda jarring, but I welcome the distraction.

yeah I was quoting those passages in the pope thread last month

crypto and table: more queer YA recs, please!

If you're up for something a little off of the usual coming-out/romance course, I recommend Andrew Smith's Grasshopper Jungle, which is plenty queer, in addition to funny, weird, and gross.

Also, not strictly QYA, but have you read The Boys on the Rock, by John Fox?

My most recent book was another Eric Ambler spy novel from the pre-WWII era, Epitaph for a Spy. It was OK, but not his best.

I've been noticing lately that I'm very hit-and-miss this year about finding new (to me) books that I really connect with, so I'm re-reading a book I enjoyed about 15 or 20 years ago, The Guide, by R.K. Narayan. This may turn into a trend of choosing to revisit more of the books I haven't read in a long while, but always expected I would read again.

I recently finished "Vita Nuova" by Dante Alighieri in the new Joseph Luzzo translation. Excluding the scholarly matter such as end-notes, it comes in at a little under 100 pages, so right in the sweet spot length-wise. Hard to classify, it's sort of a novelistic essay about a love affair which existed almost entirely on the spiritual plane, with only a grudging acknowledgement of material reality, so in that sense it reminded me most of Andre Breton's "Nadja".

Psalms

Not to liveblog the new Butler or anything, but the passage on Rowling is a dazzling piece of—I dunno—critical empathy? I needed it, especially as Rowling’s public behavior in the last year or so has become particularly despicable.

A. G. Mohan - Krishnamacharya: His Life and Teachings.

Great, great book by one of Krishnamacharya's former students, who was taught yoga by him for the last 25 years of his life in Chennai (he died at 100 years old). Covers how he was as a teacher and as common person, and how he observed ethical principles which are underpinned by yogic, Vedantic type philosophies that only now I am investigating in more depth. He really took an ascetic lifestyle -- living almost in the shadows of society while being part of it to earn a sustainable living -- and seemed to really push as far as it could go.

Reread The Crying of Lot 49, still so sharp and sweet.

I finished Amulet by Roberto Bolaño. I liked the more grounded first half than the metaphysical second half, but came around toward the end and really loved it. I don't know anyone else who writes about kind of mundane things with such weight and dread. His characters wandering aimlessly around Mexico City, mostly talking and discussing poetry, feels so post-apocalyptic.

Alfred, if you haven’t read Two
Boys Kissing by Levithan, I think that was the most recent QYA that I was bowled over by.

I did buy some interesting coming of age novels at my pal Jeff Maser’s warehouse a few days ago— the first edition of Keith Hale’s Cody, as well as Boy by James Hanley. I will be reporting back on them.

I did, liked it too.

I'm reading and re-reading a bunch of classic novels to help students with coursework.

*Lolita* was a re-read. God, I howled through it this time - at its viciousness, the unbridled glee. I also felt, much like my recent reading of Donne, I was being shown the raw nerves of the form. It succeeds utterly on its own terms - in art, where nothing matters, where everything is allowed. I'm fascinated (or not, I guess) by the fact that librarians across the States reported that the book was often borrowed, but rarely finished.

*The Virgin Suicides* was a first-time read. Eh, I quite liked it. It doesn't really have much to say about its subject but that's the point of the book, really: it's male fantasy. Eugenides does some nice stuff with narrative voice (first person plural) and he can yeast-up language right enough and, like Lolita, despite the subject it's very funny at times.

Now reading *1984*. It's a re-read but as much as I can remember the gist of things, lawd Orwell can be fusty and dry - particularly after the riot of Lolita (and Eugenides, relatively speaking). I've read *The Road to Wigan Pier* in the intervening years and I recognise in that register that he so often slips into - something verging on disgust - when he writes about the working class, that I can't unsee it. No denying the darkness at the heart of things, and the completeness of his vision.

(I took a break to read Roger Deakin's account of trekking out to Barnhill, where Orwell wrote most of *1984*, and not swimming the Gulf of Corryvreckan. God, do I want to go to Jura.)

I know what you mean about Orwell. At heart he's a precise analyst of social ills, an earnest polemicist, an honest man of principles, but he has no sympathy for humanity in the raw. He knows this about himself, tries to overcome it in his earnest way, but he never really succeeds. Maybe that's why his one piece of fiction that truly works is Animal Farm.

Yeah. And god, the representation of women in 1984 is, uh, rudimentary, at best. I have to look away when he's writing about sex.

Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry Vassily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenberg
reports written up by 2 Russian writers based on witness accounts of German Army progress through the Soviet Union in WWII.
pretty heavygoing, this version is 500pp long and has some description of a massacre per page.
So this is what the Eastern European Jews had to try to live through but it does not make it prescriptive as behaviour to turn on a different population once they survive. I got hold of this around Xmas and it got put on the backburner and it really is pretty intense. Not sure if it is a good idea to read it now when the survivors descendants are reenacting behaviour way too close to this.
Otherwise still reading quite a bit on Palestine.

Read a Harlan Coben book, The Boy From The Woods, this weekend. Felt like he was setting up to write a whole series with the title character as protagonist but I'll have to check Wikipedia to see if there have been any sequels. It's typical Coben: rich people being shits in upscale New Jersey suburbs, but instead of adultery like in a litfic novel it's kidnapping and murder and whatnot. The prose was rudimentary; I can't remember a single sentence of it, but I went through it like a bag of caramel popcorn.

I nearly bought that a few weeks ago. Saw It in a charity shop.

finished Stag Dance and quite liked it, especially the titular novella and the second story.

Arrived back home after six days away to find Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings had come in the mail, digging into that now.

would looooove your judgment since I uh didn't like it.

Interesting, I am only 100 pages in and it seems quite a regular Hollinghurst— race, class, queerness. I guess I should expect more action as I move further.

Halfway through Casanova's (abridged) memoirs (this is like 1/7th of the whole lot). The guy sure got about!

I'm re-reading The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America, Tim Flannery. My first reading was a good two decades ago, so only a small amount of the information stuck with me.

It starts out with the Chicxulub asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and moves forward to modern times (Anthropocene). I'd forgotten that the asteroid came in from the south at a low angle, so that both the shock wave and debris were directed straight north toward North America, basically destroying almost everything above ground as far north as the Arctic circle. Basically a clean slate that took millions of years to regenerate much more than dense fern forests and a handful of amphibian species. Of course I'll forget most of this soon enough, but it is interesting to contemplate the deep past.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Were people back then more tolerant / understanding of all the nautical verbiage? Three paragraphs on the merits of "proper stowage" lest a vessel "under a double-reefed foresail alone" should be "thrown upon her beam-ends to starboard".

> Were people back then more tolerant / understanding of all the nautical verbiage?

moby dick

AGP went places i didn't expect

like antartica

actually, thinking about it, AGO must pre-date Moby Dick.

Prob less a question of tolerance and more that the level of knowledge about sailing was higher?

I've been reading the first volume of Arthur Rubinstein's memoirs "My Young Years". It helps of course if you're interested in classical music and playing the piano, but so far it's been fascinating as a glimpse of turn-of-the-century upper-class European society in cities like Warsaw, Paris and Berlin. Rubinstein is a sensitive observer of human psychology.

The Night Watch series, which added a sixth book at some point. Author’s politics not great Bob!

As it was when I read The Line of Beauty and the two main characters were also the names of two beloved men in my life, I found that many elements of the first part of Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings resonated with my own life experiences — I came out late, I had to leave uni in the middle of an exam period because I was having an anxious/existential crisis, I was also on scholarship at a posho private high school… It was a strange experience, honestly, to read something that so mirrored my own experiences, albeit with some notable differences— the protagonist in this book is not white, which adds an extra element to his outsider status, and his mother is queer, and my parents are certainly not that. Anyway, I am interested in what happens in the second section, and also curious to banter with you, Alfred, about what you found so “not good” in it.

Same here. I'm going to pick up my copy again in the next couple days to refresh my memory.

I should note that of course, if we’re going with UK definitions , I was on scholarship at a posho public school, or what is called a private school in the US. Just to clear that up

So was I from kindergarten to 12th grade.

I think I have two major qualms with this Hollinghurst book.

For one, the protagonist is simply too passive— his racial and sexual difference are issues, of course, but there is never much dwelling upon them. Of course, many people go through their lives in such a way, but the issue is that conflicts sort of rise up here and there, and then deflate without him actually doing anything about them.

The other complaint is that nearly 300 pages of the book are dedicated to the protagonist’s life before he turns 30, and then the remaining 175 move at a rapid clip from the mid 30s to the 40s to his early 60s to what I believe will be his late life and passing— in other words, it is front-heavy, and I am not sure this strategy works, despite the fact that as I get older, the first thirty years do seem more substantial and important than I ever thought they would be at the time.

Anyway, still have a bit to go and I do enjoy Hollinghurst’s prose and feel tender toward the protagonist, but I do rather think it one of his lesser efforts

My friend, you've nailed my two objections exactly.

I finished The Eternal Frontier. I thought it was insightful and offered some interesting perspectives in connecting the similar behaviors of successive waves of new species as they entered post-asteroid North America. I especially appreciated his drawing links between the behavior of the Clovis culture humans who first entered the continent circa 11,000 BCE from Asia and the post-Columbian colonizers from Europe, under the broad idea of "ecological release".

He paints a familiar and grim picture of the present ecological destruction, which unfortunately differs far more in scale than in kind. At the tail end of the book he attempts to inject some hopeful perspective regarding what might be done to hasten repairs to the ongoing damage, but they ring rather hollowly right now. I doubt there are any suggestions he could have made that felt both realistic and hopeful under the present circumstances. The best hope I can muster is knowing that over the long run nature will always have the last word and that life is fantastically tenacious and endlessly creative.

differs far more in scale than in kind

tbc differs from the ecological effects of the first humans spreading into NA

Currently working on Zeinab Badawi's An African History Of Africa, which has pissed me off by starting with Egypt. Fuck the pharoahs, I want to know what I don't know. Also reading Ben Lerner's The Topeka School, which is annoying in a DFW-ish way (more Brief Interviews... than Infinite Jest; so far my impression is that Lerner is crushingly humorless, whereas DFW at least thought he had jokes). Might not make it to the end.

Lerner is an asshole, by all accounts

Read L'usage du monde (N. Bouvier / illustrated by T. Vernet), a classic travelogue from 1953 written after the pair drove a Fiat 500 Topolino from Switzerland to the Khyber Pass, at the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a trip that lasted 18 months including a long winter in Tabriz, Iran. His sense of place is remarkable and focused on impressions - the road, nature, details, encounters with or without understanding, and their own position as travellers far away from home. It's very mature, full of sensitivity, entertaining. Also it feels like it couldn't be reenacted: the world feels too connected now, the past is truly a different country.

Also read We have always lived in the castle (Shirley Jackson), my first by her and really enjoyed it. Contemporary, witty, more of a black comedy and less dark than I anticipated.

I finished the Hollinghurst last night. The ending…well, honestly, it infuriated me, but enough about that.

Now I am reading Keith Hale’s Cody, a somewhat forgotten gay novel (maybe YA?) that was lauded by Burroughs and others at the time of its release.

Oh yeah, I read Cody way back when. Memory is a bit fuzzy, but I do recall one detail that seemed out of the ordinary, in a good way, that I don't want to get into lest I spoil anything (we can come back to it). I read it as YA, but there are definitely details that separate it from the genre--especially as it existed in the 80s.

Put aside both of the books mentioned above for a day and blasted through Moon Zappa's memoir, Earth To Moon. Apparently both of her parents were huge assholes, not just Dad! Though Dad was responsible for turning Mom into a rage monster with his never-ending infidelities and complete emotional coldness. It's a pretty depressing and infuriating book, but I think even hardcore Zappa fans at this point recognize that the man was extraordinarily flawed so I couldn't call it surprising in general, only in certain specific details.

I've started reading 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, Mark Kurlansky. I lived through it. I was 13 years old. I read the daily newspaper, w weekly news magazine (Time), and watched network and local news on weekdays, so I was very aware of all the shit that went down that year, day by day and week by week. It was grim and relentless, but I was insulated by my age and surroundings; it was all happening 'out there somewhere' in the adult world I hadn't yet joined. Not sure how I'll feel about a lengthy revisit to that time, but I'm game to give the book a chance and see what comes of it.

I was living in the Deep-ass South, midway between two racial hotspots, and remember the rest as you mention; I'll pass on that one for now.

L'usage du monde sounds awes, hope to find it in English. Speaking of We Have Always Lived in The Castle, I finally read it also, the edition w Lethem afterword, which is excellent (there should be many more afterwords, fewer forewords).

Karen Russll's short fiction, incl. some of the stories collected in Orange World(2019), has increasingly tended to meld magic realism with consistently too-real eco-concerns. Her recent novel, The Antidote---the second ever; I haven't read 2011's Swamplandia!---eventually moves past said meld into razory wide-screen history. the kind you can look up, as a Polisn immigrant to the Great Plains recalls "germanization" and expulsion, with Bismarck quotes along the ones of, "The Pole has his nature and I have mine; I don't mind. But we shoot wolves." The immigrant sees how this relates to treatment of the Indiians (called that here by Indian Agents, Progressive schoolteacher, and everybody else, except some of the Indians). he gradually finds himself participating in this treatment, at first by perceived necessity, and then some.
His son, a modern (Dust Bowl) man, finds out about this, and wants to make amends--wants his neighbors to too!
The preceding and following magical realism becomes overshadowed, and some of the latter even lapses into "fantastical conceits," as the author cheerfully mentions in her afterword (not what I meant by xpost "there should be many more afterwords.")
I wish that her sacrifice had gone in the opposite direction: that she had published the immigrant's narrative as a short novel etc--could have had so much impacted, granular power, and some of the better chapters might have worked individually or as related stories as well.
I don't know, I may re-read the whole thing, now that I know what's going to happen. It's certainly better than her fellow (punkier) short fiction ace Kelly Link's debut novel, The Book of Love, which I did finish, but almost wished I hadn't (still a loyal follower of both writers, will stick to the stories for now).