2026: What Are You Reading?

Happy New Year everyone! May your coming days be low in stress, high in satisfaction and full of nourishment for the body and soul. If you'd like to share any kind of thoughts or information about what you're reading, this is the place.

I've been marking time until New Year's Day is over to start my next book. At the moment, I'm strongly drawn to re-reading Varieties of Religious Experience, William James. As a general goal, I'd like to increase my percentage of re-reads this year.

This time around, because the 'What Are You Reading?' threads tend to be the de facto catch-all thread for I Love Books, and because most of us employ Site New Answers as our primary entry point for ILX, I thought a dull, but straightforward thread title would make it easiest to identify in the crowd.

Here's a link to the 225 thread: 2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread

So, happy reading, y'all! Let the gabfest commence!

after very long Trollope in December i went completely the other direction with a Neuromancer reread

I found a neat book called The Names of Comedy, by Anne Barton, about the art of naming characters in comic drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Jonson). I'm going to try to read it over the remainder of break. I love topics like this which blend philosophy of language and literary studies.

"They confronted a fundamental choice: whether to give 'speaking' names, as Adam did in the garden, expressing the nature of the characters, or 'accidental' names which allow for greater independence and for change. These different attitudes towards naming are bound up with the larger debate about the truthful or arbitrary nature of language itself; the debate was formalized in Plato's Cratylus and continues today."

Brought Michael Amherst’s ‘The Boyhood of Cain’ with me on a short jaunt to NYC, where I’ll be reading in the annual Poetry Project marathon if anyone is attending

I've almost finished Francis King's recently back in print The Domestic Animal.

mentioned on the what did you read thread, but i am working my way thru october, china mieville's narrative history of the russian revolution. it's somewhat of a historical blind spot for me, so i'm enjoying it so far. mieville does a great job of sketching out the key figures and capturing the history-shifting drama of the moment

and also succinctly explaining the ideological differences between the various revolutionary factions

So funny, I found ‘October’ to be so dry as to make me utterly somnolent every time I opened it. It is currently on my “to sell/give away” pile, could hardly break 25 pages.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

Vijay Prashad The Darker Nations
A history of the Third World from a series edited by Howard Zinn

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie. A fictionalised account of the lives of two 14th/15th century female christian mystics. Very interesting really, I might take a look at one of the primary texts, The Book of Margery Kempe, considered to be the first autobiography written in English.

Heading into that Lockwood everyone hated. So far surprised by the conventional, third person style that it is written in. She felt she needed to switch it up I guess.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

I know the general outline— I took a few Russian history and art/culture courses in college— but I think that generally speaking, most history books aren’t for me, so it is probably a me problem.

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

I have, as indicated above, begun to re-read Varieties of Religious Experience. Because it was written and delivered as a series of lectures it was originally meant to be heard, not read, which makes for a somewhat more conversational authorial voice. I find it reads easily and reveals Wm James's character through the way he addresses his audience and makes his points. I find real pleasure in that aspect of the book, above and beyond which he was a very acute and congenial (to me) thinker on this subject.

"down there on a visit", christopher isherwood

also about ¾ way thru "the book of eve" by carmen boullosa which i was enjoying at 1st but have kind of bogged down in now

Currently giving Nixonland a go. I’ve decided this is the year to read all the fat books on my shelf that I’ve been avoiding. Also America seems to be more and more perplexing so I might as well learn something about y’all.

loved nixonland

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

Oh yeah, definitely. Tbh, this is a book that's been sitting on my shelf since forever. I bought it a long time ago, read a few chapters, and then set it aside. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time. But I was reminded of it when I read Tomkins's piece about being 99 years old in the NYer this past year and picked it up again. I'm glad I did, because for whatever reason I'm enjoying it now. It's very light on any kind of art criticism or any thoughts about the deeper meaning or theory of art. Duchamp was an unusual person who lived during interesting times and had a lot of interesting friends, and the book mainly focuses on that aspect. Tomkins has a worldly, understated style which suits the material. Duchamp claimed to have retired from producing art when he was fairly young, and insisted that everything he made after that was not art, and Tomkins respects that intention, leaving it up to the reader to ascribe whatever significance to the little artifacts he crafted and sold or gave to collector friends or the odd poems/puns he had published under his nom de plume, Rrose Selavy.

Tomkins on Duchamp is just the break I need from the hagiographic Andrew Jackson bio (by Robert Remini) I'm about to finish. Thanks.

About 1/3 of the way through Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. Feels bit like Elfriede Jelinek + Thomas Bernhard on either steroids or hallucinogens or both. Pretty great but I have to take in small doses at a time.

Just finished reading Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, which I thought was dreadful, but it has at least the virtue of being an interesting failure. Typed out a longer reflection but ultimately it's not worth it. Felt like he really fumbled the ghost story and was never able to successfully incorporate the other part of the story (hypochondriac womanizing alcoholic inn owner has a depressing life experience), so that both felt kind of flat and incongruous. I would explain why I feel this way, but that would require me to open the book again, which I don't want to do

Ah, see, that's one of the few Amis novels I like (the others: Lucky Jim, Girl 20, Ending Up, The Old Devils).

(I also read it in musty library hardcover form in 2007 before NYRB's handsome reissues a few years ago, so).

I like three of the four you listed (haven't read Girl, 20), so this was the first time an Amis novel left me cold

Will probably finished the Lin book today, am also reading Michael Amherst's 'The Boyhood of Cain' before bed. After a bit of a slow start, things are starting to pick up about 40 pages in— our protagonist's personality is coming more into view, and the tensions of the book are making themselves more apparent. probably the first time a book has been described to me as a "slow burn" and actually been that!

I just finished Gerald Murnane's Inland. Kind of amazing, couldn't stop reading it. I'll have to read more of his work now. A great example of how brilliant abstract writing with some depth can be, even when what's beneath is intangible. I note Claire Louise-Bennett is one of the hype quotes on the back of my edition and that makes sense as I now realise her work is like Gerald Murnane if the first-person narrator was Mrs Doyle from Father Ted.

I've resumed The Hemlock Cup, a biography of Socrates by Bethany Hughes after abandoning it last year. Really enjoying it, it's sort of a history of the time as well as his life, just sort of interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict and she has a knack for story.

Love Murnane, still think it's criminal that he hasn't won the Nobel

I love some of the digressions that become sort of meta-observations of the writing process, there are some in which the exact technique he's describing is embodied in the form he uses to describe it but he's still writing lyrically and freely as he does so, and not explaining or outlining. Virtuoso stuff.

interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict

Socrates lived in an exceedingly interesting time and place, spanning the Periclean rise of Athens to an imperial power, its collapse during the Peloponnesian War, and the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants. Also the cultural and intellectual ferment that accompanied all these events. An unusually well-documented, incredibly concentrated, and very archetypal historical period.

This is what I'm learning - the war and political conflict are incredibly interesting and obviously prescient, at any time I guess but also now.

I know a bit about Roman history as did Latin in school but don't really know Greek and this has a great narrative flair to it. Obviously a very different subject but it was recommended to me when seeking another history book as enjoyable as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Already there's so much I didn't know, Socrates hated the written word!

Socrates also had his failsons.

Started end of '26 as I ended, with a bunch of yoga books

Elisabeth Kadetsky - First There is a Mountain. A book where a Californian journo goes to yoga intensives in India given by yoga master BKS Iyengar (whose teachings I know well as I have been practicing his form of Hatha Yoga for ten years, and teacher training rigorously in it for the last three years). Its also about India, anorexia, processing family trauma while looking and being fascinated by a flawed man who had a tough upbringing in utter poverty in post-colonial India and went on to popularise Yoga in the West (while being overlooked at home). Its a properly written (very New Yorker style) book (she ran several interviews with him for it), and it gets uncomfortable as some of the people around his studio (potentially including Iyengar's son) are clearly highly sympathetic to the Indian far-right, and there's plenty on the feedback and tensions between East and West and the underlying post-colonial order. I think its pretty readable to a non-yoga student though you may want to look up some of the poses and bits of background on yoga philosophy to get more of a grasp.

Also finished:
Svātmārāma - Hatha Yoga Pradipika (notes by Krishnamacharya, tr. Mohan) - the 'best known' medieval Hatha Yoga book, with commentary by BKS Iyengar's Teacher
The Gheranda Samhita (tr. Mallinson) - another Medieval Hatha Yoga manual
Shadow Yoga, Chaya Yoga - Shandor Remete (former student of BKS Iyengar who went onto develop his own school of Hatha Yoga, to the extent I have started practicing some of it

At various stages:
BKS Iyengar - Astadala Yoga Mala (vol. 1, of 8) - collected interviews/writings
Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)
Swara Yoga Treatise - this is a sort of Tantra Yoga manual, can't make much of it, a lot of Vedic astrology and morals

you're mainlining the inner peace

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

Abel Ferrara’s autobio - A breezy, entertaining read. Messy, wild, full of great anecdotes.

Teoría del color ( J. Pawlik)

Started the first of Darwyn Cook’s “Parker” adaptations

you're mainlining the inner peace

― LocalGarda, Monday, 5 January 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Namaste

Most of my reading is through audiobooks. I recently very-much enjoyed David Szalay's Booker Prize-winning 'Flesh'.
So I was surprised to see a lot of people online didn't like it, including one or two people on ILX. Maybe it's because the narrator was extremely compelling, but frankly I thought it was fantastic.

Szalay employs a deliberately stark writing style to mirror the lead's taciturn character, it's an exploration of masculinity, sex, trauma, class and outsiderness. I saw a few people expressing frustration that the writer denies the reader any insight into the main character's inner life. I'd say this is what makes the book special. There is a world of meaning expressed in small-talk exchanges like: "How are you?" / "I'm okay." / "What do you mean 'Okay'?" / "I don't know...".

So yeah, bare on description, bare on emotional exposition, but somehow I could imagine every character and location extremely vividly. And despite nothing in the book having ever actually happened to me, every scenario and conversation felt relatable. Do readers really need their characters to be gregariously pouring their hearts out on every page? For me this was an enjoyable (if bleak) and quick read.

My first book this year was a novella: The Alienist by Machado de Assis. Not essential, not at all unpleasant either. The satire takes up the whole space and we are left with stock characters, some witticism, and a light atmosphere, when it seems like he could have fleshed it out and touched a bit more on the philosophical aspects of madness.

And now I'm in the first pages of Of Human Bondage, which is my first by Somerset Maugham. The length looks daunting, but it's the start of the year, so Godspeed.

I have also picked up Thus spoke Zarathustra at my parents for a first look in over 20Y. I thought I would just skim through, but I may end up rereading. At age 17 I was looking for deep truths, now I am curious to what extent this was a personal, therapeutic, self-psychanalysis book for Nietzsche, fed by bitterness or regret. Not that I would reduce it to this lens, but taking advantage that it's an open book lending itself to different interpretations.

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table)

Gay Bar impressed me in 2022.

going to grab a copy of that one

reading new paltz, new paltz, first novel by erstwhile(?) ilxor(???) mike powell (if none of that turns out to be true, he's a colleague whose work i've admired for a decade-plus). it is totally fucking excellent

Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)

i checked this out based on the title and your description and i may have to get a copy. good first page!

i used to go to yoga classes billed as "iyengar" style in d.c. the woman who taught them would scream at students and wasn't shy about let's say emphatically making adjustments by hand. she was unhinged lol.

Schiffmann is really nice. There are a few meditations in there (he is v much into meditation as well as yoga), and he has an interesting technique he relates to from a Hatha Yoga teacher (Joel Kramer, who has articles you can find on his site and are v interesting if you practice) that is about finding energy lines, whereas Iyengar Yoga is about alignment in the pose and specific sequencing.

The teaching can be v strict. My teacher was taught by Geeta Iyengar (the daughter, who sounds worse, in the Kadetsky book she relates how she was reduced to tears by her) and she is v tough but its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down. But its done in a yoga context so people walk out, hate it etc. Its not for everyone and will probably die out. But I probably wouldn't want to teach if it was for my teacher. There's a lot of fluff in yoga, as she says.

The younger Iyengar crowd are a different generation, and they are much nicer.

its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down

yeah this was the vibe. my take is - martial arts intensity without the rush of combat? lol no thanks.

on the other hand the difficulty and pain of actually adjusting skeletal alignment sort of calls for that approach. and people who want to be pushed like that are definitely around.

i remember her asking students to make the skin on their legs move. lol wtf? not to get on too much of a tangent.

Headstand and shouldderstand for 10+ minutes with deep backbends/forward bends/twists will probably be the nearest I get to combat lol

Yeah stuff around skin is a more advanced instruction and shouldn't be given to any beginning students tbh. In general classes I am going to ask you to engage your thigh muscles and lift up the kneecaps and so on. Those kinds of instructions should suffice and work at a more "gross", rather than subtle, level.

Gave the Lockwood a break, not because it's bad - not far enough in to make that judgement call yet - but because it's on my nightstand as my before getting up book, and having had quite a difficult beginning to the year feverish evocations of the pandemic is definitely not what I want my day starting with at this moment. So instead I've picked up the Dictionary Of British Cartoonists and Caricaturists, 1730-1980 by Mark Bryant and Simon Heneage. This was an impulse buy at the Cartoon Museum, seduced by both the book's format and the illustrations on the cover; only after purchasing did I think about how you don't read dictionaries and if I ever got into the position of looking up a British caricaturist surely I would now do so online. But hey, just because there's conventions doesn't mean you have to follow them and so I've started reading it the way one would do a novel. The entries are so short that I doubt any names will truly stick with me, but dry, mundane facts are a soothing start to my day - studied in Liverpool, served under regiment x in wwi/wwii (choose which one applies); lots of advertising work as well as contributions to The Tattler and a weekly strip in the Observer. That kind of thing. Perhaps if I finish it, even not retaining any names I'll have acquired a holistic knowledge of the field in these eras. Or perhaps I'll get bored with it in a couple of days and pick something else.

Interesting - do they limit themselves to newspaper editorial cartoonists like Cummings of the Express or Mac of the Mail, or are strip cartoonists and comic book artists included too? As far as I know there's still a gap in the market for a David Thomson-like Biographical Dictionary of British Cartoonists, where some sort of critical insight and a certain literary style would offer more than a Wiki entry.

A friend of mine wrote this extremely useful A-Z of British Newspaper Strips, complete with plenty of examples:

https://bookpalace.com/info_azbritnewsstrips

But hey, just because there's conventions doesn't mean you have to follow them and so I've started reading it the way one would do a novel.

Love this idea

Currently giving Nixonland a go. I’ve decided this is the year to read all the fat books on my shelf that I’ve been avoiding. Also America seems to be more and more perplexing so I might as well learn something about y’all.

― a hoy hoy, Saturday, January 3, 2026 2:24 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

this post inspired me to pick up my copy of Reaganland, made it through 60 pages on Monday night

Interesting - do they limit themselves to newspaper editorial cartoonists like Cummings of the Express or Mac of the Mail, or are strip cartoonists and comic book artists included too?

From the preface: "with a few exceptions, we have excluded artists who were primairily strip cartoonists, animators and book illustrators as belonging to a different genre".

Stuff does overlap obv but I think the authors are mostly interested in the continuation of the 18th century caricature tradition rather than narrative art.

As far as I know there's still a gap in the market for a David Thomson-like Biographical Dictionary of British Cartoonists, where some sort of critical insight and a certain literary style would offer more than a Wiki entry.

That does sound rad, sadly this isn't that; there are occasional opinions on the quality of am artist's work but the authors are much more concerned with letting you know what brand of pens a certain artist uses. Sometimes the dryness works in its advantage tho, as in the entry for one Nicolas Bentley, godson of G.K. Chesterton, which includes the line "for a short time he worked as a circus clown".

I've finished Wittgenstein's Mistress, a re-read after 30 odd years. I didn't find it as expansive or acute or moving as I expected / vaguely remembered. I also could have sworn that at some point the narrator explicitly ponders her situation, particularly the absence of animals, perhaps wondering about the fate of flowering plants in the absence of bees, or some such. There is nothing like that at all. I fear that was just my brain at the time engaged in its usual literal minded search for explanations.

this post inspired me to pick up my copy of Reaganland, made it through 60 pages on Monday night

― budo jeru, Wednesday, January 7, 2026 12:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i was reading this again last night, was really taken aback by the 7-8 typos i encountered over the course of just a few pages. i can't remember the last time i encountered such a barrage of errors from an author and publisher of such stature. maybe times have changed and this is the new normal, idk

Having failed to make it through the first 15 pages of a Brandon Sanderson book (recommended by a friend who cites him as her favorite author), I am giving fantasy another try with The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss) at the rec of a different friend.

Also reading Raymond Carver for the first time in ages and ages.

Recently finished White Noise. I'm glad I read it, though I'm not sure how I feel about DeLillo overall and not sure I'll be diving into more of his stuff any time soon.

Which Carver are you reading, the stories I guess?

A friend gave me this awesome British edition that has Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Cathedral. I just started at the beginning and dip in once in a while.

Ah lovely, I love all those, also been ages since I read them.

I love Cathedral so much, one of my favorite stories to teach

That collection, really.

Finished Michael Amherst’s ‘The Boyhood of Cain.’ I wouldn’t recommend it— felt sloggy at the beginning, and rushed and incomplete towards its end. There is a quality to the protagonist that I found to be quite well-done— he embodies the ever-questioning, rebellious yet childishly petulant qualities of pre-teens— but the action surrounding him (the narrative itself) leave something to be desired.

Now I have started on a NYRB classic, JR Ackerley’s ‘We Think the World of You.’

The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr: a Black queer train porter travels across Canada in the 1920s dealing with obnoxious passengers, obsessing over a pornographic postcard left behind in the train's lavatory, and possibly suffering from strange sleep-deprived hallucinations. This won some big Canadian literary prizes a couple years ago, and I'm happy for Mayr's success (I've met her a few times, and she's cool), but I'm 50 pgs from the end and...still kinda waiting for something to happen?

Now I have started on a NYRB classic, JR Ackerley’s ‘We Think the World of You.’

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Friday, 9 January 2026 09:37 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

loved this one

Me too. His memoir about his dad is terrific too.

Still reading The Varieties of Religious Experience. Under the present circumstances it is a bit eerie, but touching, to see how James fully assumes that conversion to and adherence to Christianity means an embrace of Christian love and charity, and an increase in the tender emotions of pity and compassion. Lord help us.

It's a beautiful book: so austere yet so inquisitive.

Nixonland is blowing my mind, although I feel like it shouldn't be. It's fascinating to see how much nothing is new and the republicans of today are acting the same way of their elders, all culture war poking the bear until something sets off innocent people and then they can point and say 'look at these savages' while liberals don't know what they are doing at war.

While waiting for the bus this morning, I noticed a charity shop had a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience in the window and thought I would go back and look at it when it was open after work. Seeing the above makes me think I should grab it.

The Swann Way. Funnier than I expected. A breath of fresh air as I struggle through The Waves: finding only blips of beauty in an otherwise tough slog. The City and Man by Strauss: T
thrilling pol-phil, real highlight passage today where he accentuates the Right-vs.-Necessity question in a commentary on the Melian-Athenian dialogue. Up to Caro's LBJ pt.3, just the best stuff. Was thinking Perlstein's three books would be a good follow up when I get through Caro. Flicking through Lev Shestov's Athens & Jerusalem intermittently too; Russian Jewish/Christian philosophy going full Jerusalem.

Woolf's The Waves?

Yes, sorry for the sacrilege

i almost considered FPing you for it tbh.

No, I get it! On my third reading I almost threw it across the room; you accept its queer-in-every-sense wave-length (sorry) or you don't.

Also finished: Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and Fosse's Morning and Evening and his essay collection Angel walks through the stage. Never been reduced to a blubbering mess by a book, till Morning and Evening

Waves is just way too overcooked for me!!! The slips from solipsism to shared-conciousness are really something, but the book spends most of its time in the first mood (in my read) and suffocates because of it

I was very tempted to give up on it last night a little over halfway through but I thought it wouldn't be fair to it considering its reputation and that these are exactly the kind of works that need the whole runtime to do what they need to do..... but so far it has been waves crashing over me in the sense of disallowing my poor head to come out of the water for air+perspective. 50 pages to go; but I do worry my favourite thing about the book might be finishing it

I feel that way about most of Woolf’s novels!

I love To The Lighthouse but when I first read it I remember thinking there are a lot of parts where who is saying or thinking a thing is unclear and not in some intentional way that adds to things.

I read Pedro Páramo last year. Off-putting, dreamy, and memorable. Didn’t enjoy it when reading - felt like something out of a comp lit class - but I’ve grown to feel a little protective of it. I’m on Voice of Blood by Gabriela Rábago Palafox, which is a slim Mexican feminist-eco-queer-vampire-spec fic thing available for the first time since the ‘90s. Still chasing the high of Our Share of Night.

Currently reading some recent queer graphic novels. Namely:

Alex L. Combs & Andrew Eakett, Trans History: From Ancient Times to the Present Day: A mostly fantastic and comprehensive attempt to render trans history in graphic form. I could see using this in a classroom--and, in fact, it will likely end up being very useful for a current research project on queer joy and pedagogy that I am in the very early stages of developing. One complaint, if I have to be that guy: the white, trans authors state upfront their desire to interrogate their white privilege/bias and include a wide range of voices and identities--which they definitely accomplish in surveying the history, but once they hit, say, the post-WWII era the book becomes almost entirely America-centric, which feels like one bias they neglected to interrogate. Maybe I'm just being a cranky Canadian, but whatever--I still (mostly) adore this book.

Andrew Wheeler & Rye Hickman, Hey, Mary!: Sweet story about a Catholic boy realizing his sexuality, largely via a crush on an openly gay peer, and attempting to reconcile it with his faith. Maybe the very rare text about religion and queerness that doesn't resolve with the abandonment of one's faith? At the same time, the authors and several characters in the story hold the Catholic Church to account on its ongoing history of homophobia (plus, you know, the other things). Warning for my fellow crybabies: contains a tear-jerker of a coming-out scene.

Just started Alison Bechdel's latest, Spent, which I may have more to say about later. Ditto Maia Kobabe's much-censored Gender Queer, which I finally got around to checking out of the library.

Finished Ackerley’s ‘We Think the World of You,’ finding it by turns heartbreaking and infuriating. I loved it! Ha.

In the evenings before bed, I have been reading Pasolini’s ‘Boys Alive,’ which has been nice— drifting off in the mind of rapscallions in the Roman summer heat is not a bad way to drift off.

Next up is Stephen Spender’s ‘The Temple.’

I like how you're sifting through the midcentury gays.

Yep!! That’s part of the goal.

Or should I say “current reading project”

I'm currently about halfway through "Orbital", last year's Booker prize winner by Samantha Harvey. I kind of wish that narrative verse was still a thing, because I think this would've worked better that way. Its a sort of meditation on scientific progress, humanity's relationship with the earth, and the awesome scale of the universe. There has been minimal plot so far. I feel it strives for weightlessness but the need to conform to prose expectations keeps its feet planted on the ground. Maybe I'm just thinking that because I'm also reading (still) through a Robinson Jeffers collection.

Orbital felt really insubstantial to me at the time and made no impression, maybe I should read it again

I'm looking forward to Vigil by George Saunders. There was a great interview with him a few days ago in the NYT. Lincoln In the Bardo from 2017, about his grief for his dead son Willie and for the coming civil war, is an experimental novel that won the Booker Prize. It is narrated by ghosts ('bardo' meaning intermediate state) in a cemetery. It is not for everyone, but I loved the audiobook, it was read by 14 great readers, including a bunch of famous actors

I took nothing away from Orbital either.

just finished "we have always lived in the castle", shirley jackson/just started "counter-clock world", philip k. dick

Tonight I'll mop up the last 20 pages of The Varieties of Religious Experience. It's crammed with lengthy footnotes which kept slowing me down, because the notes were full of interesting matter, but they broke up the flow of the original lecture to which they were appended pretty badly each time I dived into them. Apart from that, it's a wonderfully careful and dispassionate appraisal of the florescence of religious feeling and highly accessible to the non-specialist. A truly admirable piece of thinking and writing. I like that Alfred called it inquisitive and austere. Both adjectives are very apt.

oh yeah & "all shot up" by chester himes, just finished that this morning

I’m reading White Flight by Kevin Kruse. I think it’s his first book and very academic, so kind of a slog as he charts the push for “respectability” amongst the ghouls pushing for neighborhood segregation in the post-war Atlanta. I was raised there, so learning some things that I was never taught at the time. He does a good job of explaining how politics and bureaucracy created this myth of falling property values when black people move into once white-only neighborhoods that were stated as fact when I was growing up there. Also cool to see how strong black coalitions in Atlanta were able to push back politically so that Gov Hartsfield could claim it as the city to busy to hate

Fault Lines (which he wrote with Zelitzer) is also really really good.

Reading the lit mag that a friend put together with his students. Contributions from Lauren Griff, Claire Vaye Watkins, Sheila Heti, Greg Jackson, and other such heavies.
https://www.eitherormagazine.com/store-1/p/issue-1

Alison Bechdel, Spent: Meta/auto/whatever fiction about Bechdel anxiously spending the COVID years working on a book inspired by Marx's Das Kapital and resenting the success of an HBO show based on one of her earlier books, all while dealing with her partner's newfound YouTube success, her MAGA sister, and her friends' awkward attempts at polyamory. Admittedly the kind of self-indulgence that will annoy a lot of readers, I nonetheless enjoyed it even as some of Bechdel's satire comes off as groan-worthy. I spend so much time with (fictional) young queer people these days that I guess I found this detour into the lives of some sixty-something queers pleasantly refreshing.

Alex Gino, Melissa: Middle-grade novel about a trans-girl working out her gender identity as her fourth-grade class puts on a production of Charlotte's Web in which she wishes to try out for the "girl" role of Charlotte. A sweet, affirmative novel that has unsurprisingly been " routinely challenged" (I was finally motivated to read it when a colleague included it on her syllabus for a course on banned and challenged books).

Next up: taking a quick break from contemporary queer lit for Joyce's The Dubliners, which I've never actually read front to back.

Various Bosch books, Don Winslow’s border trilogy, etc.

I read my first Richard Stark novel recently and it was awesome

This seems to be (for me) Year Two of mostly crime novels, a curious attempted escape valve from a blighted era

I needed an easy short book, so I read Maigret and the Toy Village, Georges Simenon. It met all the normal standards for a Maigret novel. Perfectly satisfactory light entertainment.

For me the most remarkable thing about it was that it was subscribed at the end as: L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer, 1942. It was listed in the front matter as: Copyright 1944 by Editions Gallimard.

What made these dates pop out for me is that the novel gave no hint anywhere that France was under occupation by Germany. The story was utterly void of the war or any detail that life was not as it always was and always had been. Uh, what???

Did you ever read Dirty Snow/The Snow Was Dirty? Published a few years after the war and set during the occupation, with this atmosphere of utter degradation, crime is basically legal as long as you don't run afoul of the occupiers, truly grim novel.

From the Wake Up Dead Man thread:

As usual the plotting is whatever, but I'm a Big Sleep plot-doesn't-matter guy...

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, December 13, 2025

Did I already post about this? Our book club just finished reading The Big Sleep and we discussed it. The plot was extremely convoluted, requiring a couple of readings to make sense of, and my cohorts were not willing to do that work. I don't blame them

The place and scene descriptions were incredible, though, and the dialog was totally hard-boiled and funny, making it worthwhile. The book was better than the movie

I'm a plot-at-least-kinda-matters guy, so I prefer The Lady in the Lake to The Big Sleep.

(the novels, that is; the film of TLitL is basically a failed experiment)

xxxpost Could a French novel candidly referencing the War/occupation be published during those years? Maybe the title and the absence are there to signify, if you want to take it that way (seems likely, but I haven't read it).

i've made it 200 pages into Reaganland, it's really interesting but there's a lot of threads to keep track of and i'm unsure if i will make it through all 1000 pages. i don't quite look forward to reading it every night, which is usually my metric for whether i'll finish a book or not

Could a French novel candidly referencing the War/occupation be published during those years? Maybe the title and the absence are there to signify, if you want to take it that way (seems likely, but I haven't read it).

Certainly none of the French cinema of the time I've seen acknowledges it outside of subtext. I know the nazi preference in Germany was for most artists to produce escapist entertainment, rather than the straight propaganda we most know the regime for; guessing that when applied to France this strategy could include making the occupation invisible.

i've made it 200 pages into Reaganland, it's really interesting but there's a lot of threads to keep track of and i'm unsure if i will make it through all 1000 pages. i don't quite look forward to reading it every night, which is usually my metric for whether i'll finish a book or not

― budo jeru,

It's so much fun! Stick with it. Also: skip the boring parts.

yeah with 1000 pagers skipping/skimming stuff that's not engaging is key

just finished The Intellectual Life of The British working classes by Jonathon Rose.
really enjoyed it, might go through and get a load more reading suggestions.Have Sartor Rasortus already.

A daughter of Isis : the early life of of Nawal El Saadawi, in her own words
which is an interesting read about the Egyptian childhood of the great activist.

Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal Michael Hann
a history of the turn of the 80s metal revival scene. Picked it up in a charity shop a while back. Thought I'd learn about the scene since it touches on some things I enjoy.

Ugly Things 70 latest edition arrived last week. So working my way through it.

I like The Long Goodbye's approach to plot: sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't, but that seems intentional rather than accidental or the result of poor planning.

I have no idea if Chandler plotted Long Goodbye in advance or improvised - it doesn't matter! The balance just works.

The Long Goodbye is good but basically overshadowed by Altman's film for me.

Thanks to Francesca Wade's lively new bio, I've been reading Gertrude Stein's more obscure work, like Ida.

I'm now reading Grief Lessons: Four Plays, Euripides, as translated by Anne Carson. Last night I read Herakles. After reading so many expansive works of prose over the decades, the compression and simplicity of greek tragedy is a huge leap into a different world - one I hadn't visited in many decades.

Having watched the (not very good) Del Toro Frankenstein I finally picked up the novel. I had it in mind that it was a bit of a slog, compared to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula, but I'm enjoying it so far - quite a few of the plot elements have survived into the film versions, which makes the power of Mary Shelley's imagining feel very present, still. Some of the writing is pretty dark - Frankenstein haunting charnal houses for corpses he can use - shocking in intent and effect, and it does feel like you're seeing the birth of Gothic horror happening page by page. My favourite bit up to now - Frankenstein glossing over the details of how exactly he brought an eight foot patchwork body to life, in case anyone hearing his explanation uses this forbidden knowledge to go off and make another monster.

Reading the Norton critical edition, with disappointingly basic footnotes, compared to the much more interesting notes in the Norton edition of Dracula.

A Mouth Full of Saltby Reem Gaafar. set in sudan. better than anything i read last year.

xpost Good discussion of the different editions of Frankenstein:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/e7d6qj/which_version_of_frankenstein_do_you_prefer_the/#:~:text=There%20are%20actually%20THREE%20versions!,Mary%20Shelley%20after%20heavy%20editing.

(All by Mary, though some early passages maybe interfered with by Percy.)

thanks, Alfred, for the encouragement

I finished Murnane's Inland, which was amazing, and Bethany Hughes The Hemlock Cup, also very good.

This week I read American Psycho, which I'd never read before. I guess I am trying to read satire for my own writing and I imagined, from the film, it would be a satire that had real density as regards time and place and behaviours. I wasn't wrong about that, lol. I guess to an extent it's a cliche to say of a satirical story "oh it's still so prescient", and maybe prescience over time is no less a quality indicator than something which was perfectly accurate about a time that has now passed and is harder to understand. Maybe it's even less a quality indicator. I don't know.

All of that said, it is weird, the repeated adulation of Trump, the very specific entitled misogyny which linguistically and aesthetically feels very Andrew Tate. The bodybuilding.

It was a little too long and sagged a bit as it went on but there just aren't many satirical novels that pack such a weight of well-observed, studied detail. Would be open to any recommendations here.

I am now reading A Day In Summer by JL Carr, which is a sort of darkly funny story about a man who visits a small English town intending to murder the person who ran over and killed his child. It moves very rapidly from person to person and I'm enjoying this, the sense of an entire town and its inhabitants depicted across one day. He has a really nice sense of England even if it's an older, faintly archetypal version.

Sorry it's Bettany Hughes*

Im reading James Ellroy's "The Cold Six Thousand" at the moment. So unrepentantly sleazy, I think Im going to need a long hot bath once I finish it

xpost

Thanks dow, the Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein - mentioned in that reddit thread - 'is based on the 1918 first edition text, published in three volumes', and includes supplementary material on the textual variations (which as I'm reading for pleasure rather than study, am not going to get too bogged down in, but useful to have to hand).

XPs to LG

The Trump thing is a prime example of a contemporary reference that makes total sense cos Trump was despised at the time by NY’s upper crust iirc? Spy Magazine repeatedly went for him, there’s this infamous Vanity Fair profile of the time as well:

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1990/9/after-the-gold-rush

It’s quite difficult to make the case now that AP isn’t deeply misogynistic as Ellis has become a total right wing piece of shit apart from whatever deniability he had at the time, but I’ve always said depiction isn’t endorsement and that the casualness of the misogyny in this work is part of the character’s worldview. Women are disposable, just like casual acquaintances, restaurants that aren’t hot anymore and $10,000 shoes that are from last season.

Nevertheless it is a part of what makes this such a deeply uneasy work and fascinating as time passes to look at its reflections in the world we now live in. It’s one of those works where the people being satirised really do not get, or care to, the bit, and that’s tainted it by association but it’s still a great book. Just not an easy read imo. I haven’t read it in years cos I really need to be in the right mood for it.

Still, it’s got some great and funny moments. I love when his internal monologue when the detective is at his office is escalating into hysteria and he drops this gem:

“That I'm heir to the unfortunate information that his penis had a name and that name was Michael?”

You can feel whatever remained of his soul shattering. Why do I know this, why has my mind retained this, why is it that name?

Having watched the (not very good) Del Toro Frankenstein I finally picked up the novel. I had it in mind that it was a bit of a slog, compared to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula, but I'm enjoying it so far

I sadly did find it a bit of a slog - kept myself entertained by imagining the ultra-verbose monster as the one from the Universal movies, his long monologues existing only in his brain as everyone else hears groaning - but I should give it a second try.

I'd suggest trying The Last Man, which I read in college and shows another facet of Shelley's talent.

Frankenstein is incredible, the scenes where the doctor is chasing the monster through the Arctic are all time

My go-to answer whenever I'm asked to name the greatest novel ever written. Sometimes it's even my favourite as well.

Frankenstein 1818 > Frankenstein 1831

Currently reading "Christendom" by Peter Heather. Approachable, opinionated history in a non-technical style. The author's judgments seem broadly right, or at least reasonable, to me so far.

i'm re-reading Brothers Karamazov for the first time since my early 20s and having that classic feeling of getting entirely different things out of it this time. it's a funny mishmash of knockabout domestic drama, humanist religious inquiry and kind of proto-psychological description - people are always doing things in this book that they can't explain, that make no sense to them, emotions getting the better of them

I Think if you can get through Dracula you'll have no trouble with Frankenstein

. it's a funny mishmash of knockabout domestic drama, humanist religious inquiry and kind of proto-psychological description - people are always doing things in this book that they can't explain, that make no sense to them, emotions getting the better of them

That's the glory of Dostoyevsky -- and why Nabokov detested him (he was weird).

That's true of Karamazov for sure, but I found it immensely readable. I read the first 100 pages of Demons and it feels like more of a slog (set it aside a few months ago)...almost entirely gossipy domestic drama so far, and it also feels like prologue to a story that hasn't started yet.

Even taking into account that you didn't really have to worry about losing the reader's attention when there was little else competing for their attention, Brothers K always had something engaging in the different bits.

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo

going full tankie in 2026 and loving it

Oh, if it's not clear, Nabokov was full of shit.

He was definitely a patrician snob.

xxp yes mate!

the key to enjoying Dostoevsky imo is to avoid the dreadful Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. Magarshark or Garnett is what you want

interesting!

mine is by david macduff and it’s terrific. my only quibble is with the word “voluptuaries” which was idk probably a defensible choice when he wrote the translation but reads very strangely now. would have been better as “sensualists” or similar

or “decadents”

I read the Garnett Brothers K, and my 'Demons' is also Garnett. :/

Brothers Karamazov has been stuck in my Top Picks Kindle Deals list for over a year now. Which is odd because i bought my copy from kobo website. it is unread. any year now...

"Voluptuaries" is a fun word, and we still know what it means! Have only read xpost Magarshark Dustys and enjoyed those. Totally second Alfred's tip on The Last Man, which I was thinking about this morning. It's tight enough that even basic description can be spoilery, but look up what Joanie Loves Chachi and I were saying about it on a previous WAYR? if curious. Not a Frankenstein rehash, but as much of a trip with layered subtext in its own way.
Description of American Psycho reminds me of what I said on another thread about re-reading Tender Is The Might, w Dr. Scott as pathologist of privileged White American male, with bits of himself under the scope pretty often.

I got this collection of Agatha Christie books for a few bucks on Kindle and I'm pretty addicted to them

she is snooty about the working class though lol

Frankenstein was the one book that I connected with back when I was the worst English major ever

Which Christies do you like? I'm reading my first one currently (Roger Ackroyd).

I got this collection of Agatha Christie books for a few bucks on Kindle and I'm pretty addicted to them

she is snooty about the working class though lol

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, January 23, 2026 9:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

When I was an easily scared kid of 10-12, I was addicted to the Agatha Christie books our library had. I must have read nearly 20 of them with lurid covers like this:

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9639bb_9b61d81c64e64cf3af7b4c01557ae9b0~mv2.jpg

or these:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/QpoAAeSwdstpLY~v/s-l1600.jpg

That Postern of Fate cover scared me so much. Wtf is up with that horse?

The covers had lots of skulls, syringes, and dripping daggers. The titles seemed definitive: Evil Under the Sun and Death Comes as the End. I would look at the covers over and over again deciding which to read, which might be too much. I was a weird kid.

Finished Spender’s ‘The Temple,’ which was fascinating— the specter of the Nazi party’s rise as the protagonist engages with the young, gay life of Weimar Germany is quite something.

I started W.K. Stratton's The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film and am plowing through it. Excellently reported.

I started W.K. Stratton's The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film and am plowing through it. Excellently reported.

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 25 January 2026 17:28 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

is it replete with tales of carousing, hellraising booze-soaked escapades?

i am currently reading “red star over china” by edgar snow. writing is gripping, almost a piece of adventurous travel writing as much of political history, and full of colourful characters. at times the documentary becomes quite sense but it’s ok

It is, but less than I dreaded. It treats Peckinpah as a serious artist; I'd no idea how well-respected his scriptwriting skills were, for ex.

Feel like later on he sort of ended up more like the caricature of himself, but for The Wild Bunch he is still at the height of his powers.

well-respected his scriptwriting skills were,

Started in on Matthew Stadler’s ‘The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee.’ Very strange first 100 pages

The latest anthology of short stories by Julia Jacques. A lot of pretty explicit s&m in this, thoughts and prayers to those reading over my shoulder on public transport.

Words Are My Matter by Ursula Le Guin. Essays, book introductions and reviews. Some of the essays are a little out of time, but the intros and reviews have given me plenty to add to my to-read list. Having all these pieces in one place makes it seem like she had an idée fixe about genre pigeonholing and the lack of respect for SF. Not that she was wrong, but I think things have finally improved on that front.

When I was an easily scared kid of 10-12, I was addicted to the Agatha Christie books our library had. I must have read nearly 20 of them with lurid covers

There's a great paperback art book devoted to the lurid covers of an artist called Tom Adams:

https://letterpressproject.co.uk/inspiring-older-readers/2022-11-13/agatha-christie-cover

I'm about 3/4 through The Lost City of Z, David Grann. The story at its base is plenty fascinating. There's the eccentric, but indomitable explorer of the Amazon, his revival of the search for El Dorado, his nascent anthropological research, his race with a rival, and his eventual mysterious disappearance into the jungle without a trace. Everything you need for a ripping yarn. I now await the culmination, where the author also enters the Amazonian jungle in search of traces of his protagonist and for the Lost City he was so certain would be found there.

If the book has one weakness it is one shared with a great many of the non-fiction narratives I read. The author spent a ton of time and energy researching the story, traveling the globe, interviewing members of his family, amassing notes by the bushel basket. After going to so much trouble to acquire all that biographical and familial material, he feels bound to make use of it. For me, there's much more of it than is required to tell the main story, so the pace of the telling slows while the author pursues side tracks allowing the tale to meander before he resumes the central story.

James Gray's film version of The Lost City of Z is wonderful, still my favorite film of 2017.

I finished the Z book. The ending was most satisfactory, even if it could be anticipated by those who have read 1491 by Charles Mann. Now I've started to read Greenmantle, by John Buchan, which is both a novel of espionage and intrigue, and an artifact of the British colonial period, right at the moment when it had driven straight over a precipice, but retained the habit of thinking of itself as the most robust empire in world history. iow, circa 1916.

I started Scott Eyman's Joan Crawford bio and Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, only my third Fyodor.

I bought this bundle of all the Agatha Christie Miss Marple books and it's been a fun escape, on my fourth so far this year

Speaking of those xpost lurid Christie covers, last night I re-read Orwell's review of No Orchids For Miss Blandish, and OMG no cover could have come close to this tale, as retold by O---any of yall read it??? Review is in Collected Essays. Had somehow forgotten just how freewheeling-on-a-mission these could be, like ilx megaposts on caffeine blast---but this 'un is pretty tight; all he has to do is describe the thing.

Have any of you read the book itself, I mean: No Orchids For Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase--published in 1939, filmed in 1948...

Finished Pasolini’s ‘Boys Alive,’ translated by Tim Parks. Incredible book— glimpses into a ragtag crew of poor Roman hoodrats in the years following WW2, the writing and the characters have an incredible energy and propulsion to them, even when they’re not doing much of anything. Pasolini makes the idle of a day bathing along a filthy river into something of a wondrous adventure. That there are also incisive moments where the reader is made to understand the sheer poverty and destruction that so many were living in during the post-war period is also a testament to his powers as a writer. Highly recommended.

that book sounds really good. I see that they have it at City Lights

easily one of the best books i have read in the past six months.

New York Review Books os the bomb.

Is too!

Finished Stadler’s ‘The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee.’ A strange, labyrinthine novel that doesn’t have a solid resolution— I enjoyed elements of it, but was also sort of flummoxed by some of the postmodern moves, as they seemed wholly unnecessary.

Found a really good fanzine: The Beast With Two Paperbacks, dedicated to second hand finds that the author has scored under four pounds. The first issue includes reviews of a preposterous 70's men's adventure book, a sociological study of a council flat in Northern London (Pelican book) and a comparative analysis of a novel by horror writer Ramsey Campbell and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing. All great stuff, but I was particularly hooked by the first article, about Simon Raven, a posh, openly bisexual postwar writer with an unquenchable thirst for scandal. The procedure that got his work published must be amongst the strangest in literary history: his contract stipulated that he be given a house in rural Kent, a weekly stipend and publication of pretty much whatever he came up with, the obligation on his side being that he never set foot in London again. The parents of a lover, trying to tear them apart? A former lover seeking certainty that Raven wouldn't kiss and tell? Something entirely unrelated? Who knows, but this set up lasted for thirty years!

Simon Raven an interesting character I have read about, but never read any of his work. Might have to resolve that soon!

I began Sylvia Townsend Warner's 'Mr. Fortune's Maggot.' It is, of course, brilliant so far.

I've only read the first Alms for Oblivion novel, The Rich Pay Late, it was like a nastier, more carelessly written Anthony Powell (and sharing with Dance to the Music of Time a supernatural element largely submerged under social comedy). Keep meaning to read more, although slightly wary that as the sequence progresses, the 'politically incorrect' aspects will be amplified.

Raven left London for Deal, where Charles Hawtrey also lived, as noted by Roger Lewis in his book about Hawtrey (Charles and Simon crossing paths in a pub in Deal is a radio four play waiting to happen...)

The book reviewed in the fanzine is outside Raven's big series; it is actually an espionage novel. Fanzine author does stress Raven doesn't care for anyone who doesn't share his social standing tho.

I just finished Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler," which I hadn't read since college. I'd say overall it holds up, although I felt slightly bogged down in the horniness of a couple of the later chapters. Still, I'm a sucker for Calvino's irreverent fabulism and trickery. I particularly appreciate how he manages to make his love of reading as a core component of human connection shine through even the zaniest of plot devices. And there were five of six passages, maybe, that totally blew my socks off, which I will need to hunt down and type out.

Next on the docket is Adam Greenfield's "Lifehouse," which was a gift. Thirty pages in and it's fine and well reasoned enough, even if I think Greenfield gets a smidge too sentimental at times. Not that I blame him, I mean I'm sure the end of civilization is difficult to write about in such detail, from an emotional perspective.

i read "the baron in the trees" last year and really enjoyed it, i've never gotten around to "winter's night" but its on my list for this year.

recently picked up my first stephen king novel since i was a kid, "11/22/63" and its the kind of goofy fun that i need right now but boy oh boy does this guy love to write. his characters all seem to have the tarantino disease where nobody uses one sentence when five could do.

I finished Greenmantle a few days ago. The plot was utterly preposterous. The main point of interest I derived from it was how glowing an opinion the British ruling class had of themselves and how little it was merited.

I also just finished Henry James' early novella, Daisy Miller. It was a nice little story with some deft literary touches in the telling. The originals upon whom all the characters were based, whose class also provided the audience for this sort of story, may still exist somewhere, but if they do, they have prudently retreated out of public view. Because of this severe disparity between the original audience and the audience of today, I found it impossible to judge to what extent James meant to expose the folly of his characters and their society, beyond those follies that would have been obvious and accepted by his readership who were members of that society. After a century and a half the light has changed.

I'm almost done with Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, recommended by Toni Morrison: bat shit in the best way.

I found it impossible to judge to what extent James meant to expose the folly of his characters and their society, beyond those follies that would have been obvious and accepted by his readership who were members of that society

Do you mean, "Does he judge Daisy Miller for her recklessness?" I'd say, "It depends." With James, POV is (most) everything. Winterbourne being a chowderhead complicates our reactions. It's clear, though, that he and the narrator love her.

The virtue in James' method is that he describes the thoughts, words and actions of his characters with painstaking accuracy. What has changed most in the interval are the perceptions of his readership regarding those details. As for the perceptions held by James, I have too few clues to judge by. Whether James 'loved' Daisy is not at all clear to me. Even transposing her behavior into a modern society and its standards, she was rather insufferable and Winterbourne's interest was more infatuation than love.

just finished "the wicked go to hell" by frederic dard & just started (rereading) "hollywood babylon" by kenneth anger

My fave Calvino so far is Mr. Palomar, whose anxiously vaulting calculations/speculations may comically and otherwise mirror the author's own, also perhaps autobiographical in other ways I won''t spoil.
Was surprised that I only got into about half of Invisible Cities, but may try again, since I own that one.

I find Daisy charming. *shrugs*

The main point of interest I derived from it was how glowing an opinion the British ruling class had of themselves and how little it was merited.

Also of note is the page that descends into insane anti-semitic drivel, implying that jews are behind Germany's ascendancy as a military power.

Continuing with Sylvia Townsend Warner, with ‘The Salutation,’ the follow-up novella to ‘Mr Fortune’s Maggot.’ Also reading another Matthew Stadler book.

she's so funny -- I discovered her during the pandemic

'a history of canada in ten maps' by adam shoalts

suspect this is not the highest quality of scholarship but it's breezy

i picked that up on a recent trip to ontario and the bookseller described him as "the indiana jones of canada", which is a mental image i will always treasure

lol yeah i googled him and was impressed that he is in a canoe in seemingly every single photo ever taken of him

https://adamshoalts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/205415472_283141513558192_6945875472374742644_n1.jpg

I finished "Christendom" by Heather. I guess you could count it as a vote in favor of the "Great Man" theory of history. He focuses on contingency and decisions by a small handful of individuals that tipped the balance at key moments of history, leading to the monolithic church of Medieval Europe - ie. people like Constantine , Charlemagne, etc. He is skeptical of stories that depend on objective materialist processes or inexorable low-level forces. Its an interesting book about a period of history that I was not well versed in (300-1300)

I just reread Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson. I first read it in 1972 when my older sister gave me a well-thumbed mass market paperback and said, "read this." I was a senior in high school and hardly knew what to make of it. At this late date it's more artifact than art, as much of a reflection of the peculiarities of its day as Greenmantle was. It says more about the tail end of Nixon's first term and the visceral national trauma than anything ever printed in the NYT in those years.

Been on a good run of reading this year.

Finished JL Carr's A Day In Summer, really liked the idea and structure and the sort of benevolent story he does well.

Since then have read The Bee Sting by Paul Murray and Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson. Both very good, the former sort of amusing post-Celtic Tiger family story, very of our times, the latter a really bizarre Brit abroad novel.

Now reading In The Cafe Of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano. Such a typical plot for a French novel.

Heh, what exactly do you mean by this last, although maybe I can guess.

Loved The Bee Sting, although almost everyone else in my local library reading group hated it. Still want to read Skippy Died. Have has my eye on Fernet Branca as well.

Been covering all the bases in my reactions to novels this year.

I just finished Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams, which I was totally absorbed and knocked out by. It’s very much “my type”, as far as novels go, so I don’t want to overhype it, but my god, this book 😍

Earlier, I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, based on the synopsis and wide-ranging high praise. I found it to be very thin and hackneyed, a dud. The writing is propulsive in a way that’s superficially entertaining but kind of hollow (in my case. good for a trans-pacific flight, but not much else) 🥱

And between these, I read Gilead by Marilynn Robinson. I felt very neutral about this book. Neither positive nor negative reactions, just square in the middle. 😑

More emojis on ILB imo

what inducements are you offering?

Heh, what exactly do you mean by this last, although maybe I can guess.

So my feeling in saying it was very French is that a lot of French literary fiction (accepting it's a loose term) seems to cross over into mystery or murder or detective stuff. I haven't read deeply in this area but Alain Robbe-Grillet comes to mind as another example.

Finished one Stadler book, which I didn’t like much, and now am reading the last of his novels— actually his first published book— which is much more enjoyable.

It has the rather sloppy title of ‘Landscape: Memory,’ but is essentially an historical bildungsroman about a young man from an eccentric progressive family in San Francisco during the first world war.

My wife and I are in Albania, we walked into a bookstore on the main square in Tirana and I bought Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams. Devoured it, picked up The Siege by same. This has the same simplicity of language but is more obviously upsetting in terms of content. Next planning to get The Concert.

First one is about a department within the Ottoman Empire that collects and interpets the dreams of its subjects to assist in controlling the Empire.

The Siege is about an Ottoman siege of an Albanian castle in Skanderbeg's time. It's 90% from the perspective of the Turks, and is straightforwardly pro-Albania, but not simplistic. They're easy reads but very rich.

These sound awesome

Started on Swann's Way. Delighted to learn that Swann has a mullet.

Have started The Immoralist by Andre Gide now.

I am reading the Travels of Marco Polo in the Penguin edition edited and translated by Ronald Latham, whose Introduction informed me that there is nothing like a definitive text to work from, but rather a very widely divergent set of MS copies in many different languages, including Irish. And the lost original was a ghost written collaboration with a Pisan writer of French romances named Giambattista Rustichello. iow, an endless wealth of tangled provenence for later scholars to play with.

As a pre-Gutenberg best seller, all copies of the book had to be copied by hand for the first centuries of its existence, which led to lots of differences and embellishments of the text.

Appropriate to their subject that these last two posts shared so much continuity, yet were written by two different people (as far as I know).

Marco Polo's compendium of 'exotic' traveler's tales seems to have suffered more than most from additions and subtractions inflicted by its copyists. He seems to have been a very hard-headed and practical merchant at heart, but well-educated and sharp enough to have been an envoy or diplomat as well.

Started on Swann's Way. Delighted to learn that Swann has a mullet.

Oh, fun, I just recommended Swann's Way to my bf minutes ago. Which translation? (I really like the newer Lydia Davis)

I got three Penguin Archive paperbacks for Valentine's: Prose Edda, The Hunger-Artist, and... The Blazing World, which I randomly had never heard of before receiving it.

Started reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel after being told by a friend i would love it. Idk if i’m going to finish it, it has some nice ideas but it feels like a YA novel - it’s so didactic, and none of these characters feel like they would be talking this way or think this way about themselves in the 1830s. There’s a bit early on where she’s describing the protagonist learning all this information about Britain and London and it kinda reminded me of that passage from Ready Player One that people mock all the time where he’s listing off all the 80s detritus that he’s absorbed. Is it a YA novel and i just hadn’t realized, or is that just how modern fantasy-ish novels are, or is it just not good? Tbh i hardly ever read fantasy or recently written novels.

i was similarly Not Into It, but i don't think 'must be YA' is a useful or correct criticism

You may be right, there’s just something about how little she seems to trust the reader to understand the themes or the emotions of the characters that made me wonder who the target audience is. But I don’t mean to tar all YA with that brush.

Oh, fun, I just recommended Swann's Way to my bf minutes ago. Which translation? (I really like the newer Lydia Davis)

The "fully revised and updated" Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin. Seems fine and very readable, though I've just read Lydia Davis' article on her own translation which points out its shortcomings. It has the footnote where I learned about the mullet (Swann wears his hair Bressant style - "Bressant, a well known actor who introduced a new hair style which involved wearing the hair short in front and fairly long behind.")

bobby finger - four squares

interweaves scenes from the life of a gay writer living in the west village, at age 30 (in 1992) and 60 (in 2022). first 50 pages were a bit glum/nostalgic but my mom (who read it before me and lent me her copy) promises it picks up from there. well-written and funny so far

interweaves scenes from the life of a gay writer living in the west village, at age 30 (in 1992) and 60 (in 2022).

This suggests 30 years passed between those two dates, surely some mistake?

lol

Finished Nixonland, then spent a rainy day with Kawabata's Snow Country.

Now picking up the Goldfinch, about halfway. It is good but long winded; I wonder if she cut half of it, would it have been a better novel?

I started reading "Shadow Ticket" by Thomas Pynchon. Its pretty fun so far. As with a late-period Dylan album, the emotion I get is mostly a kind of awe mixed with gratitude that he is still doing his thing in his own inimitable way after all these years. It also feels more coherent to me than the other later-period Pynchon I've read (Vineland) although I read that one a long time ago.

otm. i was touched by how much fun you can sense he was having while writing. its not a valedictory feeling or victory lap thing or anything, just that he's still doing the fun thing he loves to do for as long as he can do it. on every page you can see he clearly just loves writing and making shit up so damn much.

finished four squares. dull but readable

now starting ‘flesh’ by david szalay. excited, given the polarized reactions it seems to have generated, to find out which side i’ll come down on. after the first ten pages: still unclear

Finished Stadler’s ‘Landscape: Memory.’ Given Stadler’s later turn, this debut novel reads more like YA (complimentary). Part of it are deeply affecting, so much so that I sort of hesitated in finishing it because I knew it was going to end poorly. This bit from the end, after our protagonist has lost his lover and best friend, stands out:

‘How can I remember? It's not that I remember him. It may not be him I remember. I am a living thing with roots planted in the ground. I'm a rotting tree.

Why did you love him?

I can't think of this. Everything I tell you will be a lie. I didn't know him. I knew him without ever thinking and that made me able to love him. That is, he wasn't disfigured by my thinking ideas of him until the end, when I loved him most, or loved what I thought was him, when I needed the words that would contain him, and he died then. I was desperate for him, for the words that would say it.

Why did he die?

Why? His body heavy as stone, the water raking across its bed. Flesh could not hold him inside, failed to resist the ocean dragging down his throat. His dull opened eyes, unseeing, turned toward the bottom. His body died, his shell.

Why does it matter, then, his dying?

Why must a body contain him? What is this experience of soft, warm flesh? Spirit? I don't know what it was I held in my mouth then. It was much more than simply him. What is it to be breathing the breath of another, to lie in sleep, our open mouths touching? Is that all gone simply because his body's gone?
Yes.

Why do you remain here?

I returned because of the weather. It rains down on me. I'm knocked flat on the ground here into mud. Or else I'm no longer here. There are other places. They all bring me back here. I'm water caught in a storm.

Is this a resolution?

Is there a sound to tell us, a blessing, a cure?

By ‘end poorly,’ I meant end in tragedy— and I loved the two main characters so much that I didn’t want that to happen. A good book will sometimes make one hesitant to get to its final pages, this was one of them.

Marco Polo has been slow going. I like to read works from the distant past for the light they shed on how humans operated then as compared to the present - and Polo's account does provide many dozens of interesting glimpses of the civil structures of eastern and southern Asia in the 13th century CE. The main difficulty for me has been the mind-numbing repetition. I've read countless paragraphs that follow the same pattern, often word-for-word, along these lines (paraphrasing):

'Leaving X region you travel southwest for five days to enter Z region which is controlled by the Great Khan. The people here are idolators, live by industry and trade, and use paper money. They have an abundance of silk, which they export, and plenty of all the goods necessary to support human life. They have their own language and the area is full of fine cities. There is nothing else of interest here so we shall now consider another place. ...Leaving Z region you travel south for 11 days and... etc.'

Even skimming rapidly past such bald descriptions to arrive at the more varied and detailed descriptions takes time and effort, if only because there are so many of these bare bones almanac entries. otoh, the best parts are full of truly amazing facts, so I persevere.

Last week I finished Adam Greenfield's Lifehouse. I thought it was okay. The most interesting things I learned about were Murray Bookchin and his decisive influence on Abdullah Öcalan and Autonomous Rojava. I would read a whole book on this, and probably soon will.

On Saturday I sat in bed and read all of Bolaño's By Night in Chile, which I found to be excellent, but I'm pretty much a mark for his whole deal and have liked everything I've ever read by him. A friend and I were talking about maybe reading Savage Detectives together, but my experiences tell me that he is an author who it's perhaps best to read alone.

posted some half-baked thoughts on By Night in Chile on the Bolaño thread in case anybody is interested

Started on Swann's Way.

More than 3/4 done but Swann in Love is really trying my patience.

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels - For some reason I thought this was the Pym novel with the gay character, and it isn't -- that's "A Glass of Blessings" -- but I kept thinking - is it HIM? No, is it HIM? Maybe it's EVERYBODY. Either way, wonderful, and I loved the subversive ending, where the male (sort of) protagonist dies and nobody minds, and in fact everyone realises life is better without him. My six year old daughter asked me why I was laughing when I was reading it and I couldn't explain. Good!

Adelle Waldman, Help Wanted - I remember really enjoying Nathaniel P back in the 2010s, but this was a dull, diagrammatic follow-up, like a very bad Tom Perrotta novel. DNF.

Jonathan Coe, Proof of My Innocence - This is the first Coe I've managed to finish since House of Sleep. It's flawed in the usual Coe way (he should be banned from writing about people born before 1986) but really enjoyable. He's just so much more fun in puzzle-box mode.

Also a noteworty gay male in Pym's The Sweet Dove Died.

More than 3/4 done but Swann in Love is really trying my patience.

Lydia *Davis's* translation, sorry!

*later* "plot twists"

Reading John Broderick’s ‘The Pilgrimage.’ It has sucked me in.

Finished the Lockwood. Can def understand why reception has been chilly - feel like more of a prose poem, which might raise the interest of those who liked her poetry better? Events do happen to the characters - the pandemic, health problems, travel - but most of it is this stream of consciousness. Reminiscent of the first half of Why Is No One Talking About This, except this time the in-group is centered not around twitter brainrot but covid brain fog - which leaves me out.

Now reading Crime And Punishment for the very first time. Soon I will know why he sad up in him room.

oh, also reading Judith Butler's Who's Afraid Of Gender. Sometimes informative - the extent to which the catholic church has revved up the transphobia under the last cuddly pope had passed me by - sometimes funny. i think it's maybe aimed at an audience newer to the topic.

It's an excellent read.

I blazed through several Pym novels at the height of the pandemic; Less Than Angels I really fell hard for.

I had a copy of The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron, sitting in my pile to read and thought it might make a good follow on to Marco Polo. It's late 1930s travel book by an English author traveling mostly in Iran and Afghanistan. There's no hiding that he's a colonial era British snob, educated in Eton and Oxford, but his snobbery largely revolves around what he sees as the shockingly unrecognized superiority of Persian architecture from 500 BCE up until about 1500 CE.

He's the sort of 'renegade' who hated Hitler and Nazism with a passion, but mainly because they represented the triumph of savage barbarism over every vestige of 'civilization' (as exemplified by, let's say, Persian culture from 500 BCE to 1500 CE). This allows his book to be eccentric enough to soften and mute the murmuring undercurrent of British snobbery that he cannot help but carry with him on his travels.

'a brief history of intelligence' by max bennett

very fun and addictive pop science. about connections between neuroscience and artificial intelligence

feb

Feb 2026
Ed McBain - Calypso (#33)
Ian Rankin - The Naming Of The Dead (#16)
Seishi Yokomizo - The Little Sparrow Murders (#6)

long running detective series month. there are 54 of the former and 77 of the latter, being translated about 1 or 2 a year, and out of order. there's also a film series done by name japanese director (kon ichikawa) which i wish someone would buy the english rights for.

started Three Musketeers, 7 years to the month after reading TCOMC

i've heard that the first Kindaichi, the honjin murders, was a huge hit for pushkin press.

I love Pushkin. I bought it because of the cover. It was okay, and I would read more Yokomizo.

So far (about 1/3 of teh way through), MYRB Berlin Alexanderplatz's dangerously damaged clod Franz is shambling third behind Bigger Thomas (at least in uncut Library of America ed.) and McTeague (fourth if you count Morgan Wallen). Yes, despite Frank Norris's dumbo notions courtesy of race science, which he seems to apply to white nationalities, even---Doblin's take on this kind of Great War vet, nationalist and nascent National Socialist and pre Jan.6, is apt and would be fair even if he didn't so far portray his fellow Jews as equally freaked out in their way---but the bits of modernist boilerplate are most effective in de facto contrast w tedium of the main storyline---so my question is, what's a good nonfiction history, memoir etc. of the Weimar Republic?

I recently read Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, Barbara Comyns. She's an odd duck among British novelists of her era. She mingles the commonplace, the unusual, and from time to time the impossible, all in a voice that is at once naive in its effect and sophisticated in its means. Her work never feels labored over, but like she just decided "I think I'll make up a story", then sat down and wrote it out.

now starting ‘flesh’ by david szalay. excited, given the polarized reactions it seems to have generated, to find out which side i’ll come down on. after the first ten pages: still unclear

― flopson, Sunday, 22 February 2026 11:58 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

final verdict: very good

now reading jack the modernist by robert glück

Yay!

Really enjoying Adam Johnson's The Wayfinder, 250p in and I'm glad there's 450 to go, it's been awhile since I've felt that way about a novel.

Yay, Jack the Modernist.

Incidentally, I’m halfway through Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles and enjoying it, but also chose it bc it’s a short book of short stories and didn’t want to jump into something as long as the orphan master’s son.

I'm 500ish pages into The Goldfinch and have another 300ish to go. It really seems like it could have used an editor and I don't like the main character but I still feel compelled to finish it.

finished andre gide - the immoralist, what a grubby, nasty story, lol.

nearing the end of kazuo ishiguro's the unconsoled, i've enjoyed it generally though parts of it a bit of a slog. it's obviously not entirely satisfying and that's sort of the point.

really enjoying my reading this year, i loved patrick modiano's in the cafe of lost youth, just devastatingly sad at the end, haven't had an emotional reaction to a book like that for some time. i think ultimately though i like experimentation i need big obvious feelings to really love a book, i am what i am, lol. there are some lovely lyrical moments of melancholy in it.

next up is prob gonna be william trevor - reading turgenev, have read almost every short story of his but none of the novels. after that gonna read another modiano, young once, most likely.

then i think i will read a second murnane having loved inland as mentioned upthread. i'm sensing i'll prob enjoy any of his work but any thoughts on where to go next with him would be welcome.

I finished Joyce's Dubliners last night. They're fine naturalistic short stories, but compared to dozens of other short story authors who were his contemporaries these didn't strike me as particularly outstanding examples of the art. I say this partly in reaction to the writer of the Introduction to Dubliners who claimed that everything Joyce ever published was "a masterpiece". I'm sure Joyce never made such a claim for his early work, even if he came across as a bit arrogant in defense of his two last works.

I enjoyed the one Modiano I've read, "Paris Nocturne". I'll look for that one, after your recommendation, LG. I recently finished "Shadow Ticket" by Thomas Pynchon. Started fun but got increasingly sloggy towards the end. Now I'm reading "I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz", a collection of mostly magazine pieces from the mid-70s thru late 90s. Some in which she doesn't seem particularly invested in the subject can be fairly perfunctory, but many of them transcend the occasion of their writing and capture something of the spirit of the times and LA society as well as Babitz's sense of humor.

i'll try that one also at some stage. my sense is a lot of the books mine quite similar ground or even have similar plots. he seems relatively unknown to the man on the street given he won the nobel prize.

xxxpost Amazed at such a reaction to Dubliners, though my earlier take on Berlin Alexanderplatz is prob atypical---once I filed a complaint, however, it got better, is still improving.

I don't think I've ever read all of Dubliners other than a few stories that were assigned to me in school. That experience probably dulled my enjoyment of them. I can think of countless story authors from that period that I would read before Joyce, tbh.

the dead is so fucking perfect tho

I can understand not finding this or that story unimpressive beyond its early 20th century realism, but besides "The Dead," Dubliners has "A Little Cloud" (devastating to read in college after your friends have left for school while you stayed home, presumably ignorant and cowed), "Grace," "The Boarding House," "Counterparts."

I'm reading James Merrill's newly republished memoir A Different Person, Otto Friedrich's City of Nets, and rereading The Magician's Nephew.

I'm not saying the Joyce stories are bad, just that I didn't find them enjoyable. But my taste in stories perhaps runs a bit more low-brow. For early 20th century stories, give me Jack London, H.G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lu Xun, H.P. Lovecraft, etc.

There is a lot going on in Dubliners under the scrupulously minimal naturalism

I don't think those writers, maybe Lovecraft aside, are lowbrow!

(I'm not sure high/low brow applies to short fiction imo)

Well, I think my taste in stories was shaped by reading things like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" collections of horror stories and Poe at a young age. I still kind of think ideally stories should have a kind of twist at the end or something should happen. To me highbrow stories are ones where nothing really happens.

Reading Olga Ravns 'The Wax Child'. Think it might be my favourite of hers.

Started Robert Walser's "The Assistant." It seems to me that Walser excels at crafting characters whose peculiar genius is to weaponize their apparent servility in ways that flummox their masters, though impossible to chastise on account of scrupulous manners and just-out-of-reach insinuation. That Joseph, the assistant, genuinely doubts his self-worth and his abilities, and that he also feels deeply and lovingly, makes him all the more appealing as a rascal. 50 pages in and can't wait to get back to it.

characters whose peculiar genius is to weaponize their apparent servility in ways that flummox their masters, though impossible to chastise on account of scrupulous manners and just-out-of-reach insinuation

when i was a teen i once eavesdropped on a conversation between my parents where they said something almost like this about me

characters like that can be traced back in literature at least 2200 years & that's a conservative number

Do it.
"Insubordination of manner" is what the military calls it, Mose Allison's vocal style too. It works pretty often.

To me, highbrow fiction of whatever length--fiction of what I think of as literary merit/appeal, presents characters who make a choice, take a turn: prob of free will, chicken egg can be implicit, explicit, or maybe not dealt with---because that's the other key element: there's room for interpretation, for the reader's personal take, the writer trusts the audience, the story, the writing, the writer, enough to leave that room. If it's just a good point about experience, howver impeccably, inarguably, inescapably made--that's middlebrow---not nec. a bad thing in its way, maybe news you can use, even, if you come across it early enough--but can come to seem like slightly dusty minor realism, for inst---which is maybe why my mother skipped "The A & P" and went on to teaching "The Garden of Forking Paths," also Marquez, Pushkin, Faulkner (and "Araby, " I think, sometimes "The Dead.")

Lowbrow can be as wily as genuwine highbrow, in its way, of course; Borges found it useful.

A guy I worked with years ago asked me what I was reading in the break room, I said it was a book of short stories & he said “I read some short stories once, some of them were good & some were just some wanker going to the shops”

He was older & Irish so it is possible he was thinking about Dubliners

lol

I've started Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away. Feels very Southern Gothic but the horror is entirely fueled by her highly orthodox Catholicism looking aghast at the products of deep-rural southern Pentecostalism.

She's so weird and horrifying and good.

Finished John Broderick’s ‘The Pilgrimage,’ a somewhat savage satire of the sexual mores and taboos of wealthy Irish Catholics outside of Dublin. Lots of homosexuality, extramarital affairs, odd class dynamics in and outside of the bedroom. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Next up, a former student has started a fiction book club, and asked me to join, so I shall be reading my first Otessa Moshfegh, ‘Lapvona.’

Love stories about some wanker going to the shops tbh.

Crime & Punishment - I think I'd already heard vague things about this book's influence on the hard boiled tradition, or perhaps I'm just too much in that world, but this feels so much to me like the origin point of every panicked noir unreliable narrator. Also quite funny in its way.

You might also like Berlin Alexanderplatz as post-Dusty, proto-Brecht-Weill, proto-hardboiled, compared to what Dos Passos was doing early on, though some dispute this (to me this goes a bit deeper into characters' emotions think/under their skin), also compared to Joyce, but author didn't see the influence, def hi/lobrow, first 130 pages or so sloggy but then builds and builds.

Franz is an obsessive thinker, replaying the same brain tapes, some of them less often---out of prison after killing his girl, he tries to go straight, though the other side of prison life, brutalistic institutionalization, also prior war experience periodically surface in his brain---he's presented in implicit contrast with others of similar background and proclivities---the author's Old Testament interjections sometimes seem superfluous, but brief---F. notices himself "philosophizing like a drunk" at one point (very late), but mainly articulates as a realist/fatalist: "It won't grow back." True---but wouldn't be any fun if the author let him settle for that permanently (I haven't quite finished, but don't think he settles).

I did not think of that book as proto hardboiled though it's been ages. I mostly thought it was interesting how formally experimental it is compared to Fassbinder's sedate tv version (last ep obv excluded).

Haven't seen Fassbinder's version---"sedate" is the last thing I expect from him, having seen his movies!
Franz remains, as I first thought, closer to inchoate McTeague and Bigger Thomas (in the restored LoA Native Son than Dusty's damaged intellectual-spiritual seekers---speaking of whom, I took xp The Violent Bear It Away as O'Connor's Franny and Zooey, in terms of distancing herself from the kind of seeker extremism that she had been become famous for portraying, and sympathizing with in principle--- compatible with the "spiritual crisis" of Kafka's characters that she wrote about in her University of Iowa writing student days, the diaries published much later---though also: the kid was born in a car wreck?! Some (deliberate?) self-parody in there at times? Like don't take these Southern Gothic tropes too seriously?

As I move further into The Violent Bear It Away it is becoming easier for me to see the more programmatic aspects of it, as a critique of society seen through the lens of theology, even though these aspects are mostly submerged beneath a fairly sensational gothic surface. I'll need to finish it before I can see how my present impressions hold up as I follow 'the boy' has he wades deeper into the "fallen world".

i'm reading into the carpathians part 1 by alan sparks. he has a propulsive and succinctly descriptive style that befits a travelogue. there's a kind of hunger to his writing and i'm curious to see if it's every satisfied. the first book to hook me in a while.

Against the machine : on the unmaking of humanity Paul Kingsnorth
recent book on why society evolved in the way it did and how it can be changed that I was at the launch for. Mark Boyle's close neighbour so he turns up in the text. Interesting and thankfully a pretty quick read since I was neglecting it while reading Hannah Arendt and it needs to go back soon.

Frantz Fanon The Wretched Of The Earth
early decolonisation classic by Algerian paychiatrist

I need to revisit Flannery. I did a long-ass drive over the holidays and had all her short stories being read aloud to me in sequence and they got so repetitious! Not that they were bad at all (they're awesome), maybe they just weren't meant to be digested back-to-back-to-back like that

Dubliners is spectacular and I started a re-read this past weekend without knowing it was under discussion, here, but I'm #1 sucker-for-Joyce

Artemisia by Anna Banti, about Artemisa Gentileschi. This is a hard read and very much not conventional historical fiction. It's full of authorial interventions - Banti lost her first draft in an explosion in WW2 and the book opens with the author herself sitting on a path in her nightdress, crying over the loss of her Artemisia. Aside from these interventions it's mostly written in the third person but still extremely introspective, major events in Artemesia's life like her rape and trial are dealt with in a few lines, but the repercussions continue in her head down the years. Judging from the wikipedia page (sorry!) it seems to change or elide a lot of biographical detail. The kind of book you feel like you need a decoder for, or would re-read if you were really into it. Sadly I'm not, I will finish it though.

Welp, I finished The Violent Bear It Away and the more programmatic and broader interpretation I'd been building in my head fell apart. It came back down to the level of human clay interacting with the power of god's awful mystery. She's "weird and horrifying and good," indeed. That's enough.

I felt like Yourcenar's book 'Memoirs of Hadrian' was a better version of what 'Artemisia' was trying to do.

Mentioned that I was reading Ismail Kadare, moved on to The Concert which has a lot about Albania's relationship with China after its break with the Soviet Union. And like the previous two books of his I read, it has nothing good to say about Asia, as far as I can tell. Kadare sees the world in terms of the light of European civilization, with its apotheosis at the Renaissance, against the collectivist darkness and despotism of Asia.

Now Albania spent hundreds of years subjugated to the Ottoman empire, Kadare grew up in a Muslim family but was himself atheist. Someone coined the term "frontier Orientalism" to differentiate the way the Balkan countries use Asia as the Other compared to the way colonial powers used it.

Still it's jarring. Maybe the picture will get more nuanced by the end of the book, but I doubt it.

I felt like Yourcenar's book 'Memoirs of Hadrian' was a better version of what 'Artemisia' was trying to do.

Yeah I really liked that. Could be worth a re-read.

Berlin Alexanderplatz didn't end the way I thought it probably would and kinda should, but a deeper realism/fatalism, still on the march, though: it seemed fitting. Looking back, I too accepted things that had happened in the story, incl some interludes I still could live without, but i see how most of the emphatic ones fit Franz's own experience; anyway he didn't live without them, for sure, and I can't say the book has sustained any major art-damage, although as far as the hodgepodge of international slang goes, I'd like to compare Hofmann's translation with that of Jolas---any of you read both of them, or the Jolas?

Notwithstanding my speculative takes on The Violent Bear It Away, was fascinating to read a whole novel of hers, that was the main part of the experience. Still somehow have never read Wise Blood, though movie was awesome: Huston read the South as well as I assume he did the book.

I'm planning to be in Savannah next week, maybe I'll try to visit her childhood home, which is now a museum.

I am putting down Moshfegh’s ‘Lapvona.’ Almost difficult to describe how unreadable and loathsome this book is.

I like her but, yeah, I had a similar impression.

yeah. lazy writing . cartoonish misery laid on top of cartoonish misery. heavy handed allegorical crap. abysmal.

I've only read her short story collection, which I thought was good, and McGlue, which I really loved, though I guess it is an outlier stylistically for her. I've felt less and less interested in the books since those just based on what they're about and how they're discussed.

I only read "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" which was ok but haven't sought out any more. I'm currently reading "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora, which is turning into a crackling true-life adventure story.

After the raw moonshine of Flannery O'Connor's book, I'm now having a nice cuppa tea with Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings.

am halfway through 'young once', also by modiano, mentioned upthread. v similar to 'in the cafe of lost youth', sort of greyscale misery as remembered from a distant point in the future, some beautiful sentences and moments.

I have a copy of "Accident nocturne" that I think I might read this summer. I read "La ronde de nuit" in college and think I liked it but don't remember anything about it.

Making good progress on "The Assistant" which continues to be both hilarious and charming, and also reading some Deleuze on the side.

I re-re-re-reread the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald last month, this time paying attention to how well or how poorly they'd adapt to films or miniseries. It's always slightly baffled me that the McGees haven't been filmed more than they have (one feature film in 1970, one tv movie in 1983). I think the biggest problem, the main character's gross I-fuck-the-ladies-back-into-good-mental-health sexism, could be cast aside and the solid adventure/investigative stories kept intact. I've read that MacDonald hated the film of Darker Than Amber, and I know that his son Maynard is his literary executor...is Maynard the holdup? There's a market for Hyper-Competent Badassery, Jack Reacher for example. (Lee Child wrote an introduction to a reissue of the McGee series that's in all my e-book files.)

Despite being a huge fan of the McGees, I'd never read any of JDM's non-McGee work, so I am thinking about plowing through all that in chronological order. The Brass Cupcake (1950, 14 years before the McGees started appearing) is solid, prose style derivative of Chandler and not the JDM that he would make himself into later. Plot worthy of Yojimbo, could be turned into a good 90 minutes of kickass by Koepp and Soderbergh without raising a sweat.

Will look for that one thanks!

I-fuck-the-ladies-back-into-good-mental-health

There's an interesting bit in one of the later McGees where he realizes he's not attracted to a woman because she's too well-adjusted and doesn't need any of his Sexual Healing. A moment of self-awareness that JDM only addressed very obliquely in the later books, but probably would have been front and center if he'd lived to write any more.

I would bet $100 that after Maynard MacDonald dies, there will be new McGee books.

Thinking about starting a MacDonald thread.

After deciding to put down Lapvona— a decision buoyed by a post on Instagram about it that garnered dozens of reactions that ranged from "I liked her other books but I hated this" to "this is unreadable, boring bullshit and so are all of her books"— I have started Henry Blake Fuller's 'Bertram Cope's Year,' a 1919 novel about a young man who seems utterly unwilling to engage with the matchmaking talents of an interested doyenne, instead showing utter devotion to his male roommate. You get the subtext!

you guys are making me curious about lapvona now lol

i think i’ve read everything else shes written, more or less liked it all to varying degrees but for some reason i didn’t feel compelled to read lapvona. but i feel like the critical tide turned against her around then, kinda tempted to read it in the hopes i can contraristan it

Read Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting in five days after encouragement by LocalGarda. Think I will be thinking about this one a while.

Trauma is circular, the world is dying and the past isn’t past. This book hit me hard on some or all of these. It’s bleak and brutal BUT peppered with humour that stops it getting too harsh. The prose is often beautiful:

Above them was one of those perfect autumn skies that graced the city only rarely, a brilliant, cloudless silver-blue against which the trees' golden-red foliage glowed as if lit from within; around them, fallen leaves circled over the cobbles in sudden rushes, like debutantes whirled on the roguish arms of the wind.

When Imelda meets her future father-in-law:

But then the crowd parted and a man appeared He looked like something out of The Godfather A head of silver hair slicked back An enormous coat you could fit two or three people in A pink tie A polka-dot handkerchief poking out of his top pocket Someone who had made money it was plain and wanted you to know it He comes up to them this fella and fixes them with an eye like he'd caught the servants drinking his sherry And Daddy's speech that he's making dies away in his mouth and there's silence

When Dickie is spending time in the woods with his prepper friend:

A few yards away, Victor sits on the log, a silhouette except for his face, lit up blue by the screen of his laptop. This is how he likes to relax in the evenings - cleaning his gun while watching American survivalists give tours of their own bunkers, show off their equipment, air their conspiracy theories. Sometimes their voices weave their way into Dickie's sleep: he finds himself dreaming about George Soros, wire cutters, deals on Amazon Prime.

There is so much pain, and beauty too. I was drawn to Rose, the aunt who has the sight. Every single scene with her is a masterpiece of foreshadowing, whether the characters realise it or not. There’s a plot point in one of the later Night Watch books where a Prophet character is stalked by a supernatural creature that aims to kill him before he can deliver his prophecy. He evades death by shouting his prophecy into the hollow of a tree. There is a moment with Rose that echoes that for me, though tonally quite different.

It is in Ireland of course and it’s an incredible blend of past and present, which of course still blend especially when some horrific national trauma is surfaced. Ghost estates seamlessly coexist in the same reality as the tale of the fairies that Imelda keeps thinking about. But the real horror (besides unresolved trauma) is climate change, approaching slowly but certainly and a subject all the POV characters think about whether fleetingly or obsessively. After all, their town is destroyed by a flood.

There is a story, which everyone has heard growing up at some point, about the man who stumbles upon a feast with the fairies in the side of a hill. They are beautiful, golden, welcoming. He finally departs and resumes his journey home. When he arrives to his town, his house is gone, as are his family. Everyone he knew has been dead for a hundred years.

This story is echoed at key points of the book and although the book flirts with some supernatural elements (Rose having the sight, the black dog) they are second to our own manmade horrors. There is a scene where Cass, the family’s daughter, sees a disgusting old paedophile buying children’s magazines in a shop to lure victims, and this is later revealed to be her brother’s online pursuer. It particularly hurt me that Imelda’s first impression of Big Mike was entirely accurate, given her history. And Dickie spends his life living a kind of half-life, with moments of love, but it’s like the diet version of the happiness he could have had. His chapters are devastating because he is largely a young character forced into a role he was no way ready for by death and repression. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

Every character in this is superb. I will think about this for a long, long time.

^ lovely write-up

I'm still reading Walser's The Assistant, and taking in some supplemental material as I do so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfBDgSNPcKI
Susan Bernofsky: Magical Writing - Robert Walser's Microscripts

She mentions in passing that Walser and Hesse were contemporaries, something that had never occurred to me. It's interesting to think that Walser was born only a year after Hesse (1878 and 1877 respectively, and actually closer to nine months), and that their second novels were published only two years apart (The Assistant in 1908 and Beneath the Wheel in 1906), and further that both of these novels tell of a young person who becomes a kind of apprentice. Beyond this, the books couldn't be more different. Reading Hesse, though, you have this sense of continuity or continued cultural interest, since the '60s, that has kept his work more or less alive (there must be dozens of cheap paperbacks of his work in every used bookstore in the United States), whereas with Walser there's the tragicomic circumstances of his retirement from writing, death in obscurity, and then a much later rediscovery (at least in the anglophone world) which maybe is what makes his books feel much more distant in time. Bernofsky also points out that The Assistant sold out of its first two printings (2,000 copies in total), and that while this was undoubtedly a success, Walser sulked when he compared these numbers to those of Hesse and Mann, who both would've been selling around 20-30k copies of their books at this time. Still, Bernofsky mentions that a review of Kafka's first collection of short stories in 1912 describes Kafka as "one of these Walser types" -- not nothing. So anyway it's definitely interesting how things can change. For a long time, not ever having looked much into it, I would've thought that Walser's works were plucked from some obscure Swiss mountainside, not that he was hanging out in Berlin with Max Beckmann, for a time anyway

That sounds excellent, gyac, thanks for writing on it. I am going to find a copy.

Yeah, thanks for both those posts. I'm starting Walser's "Masquerade" and Other Stories, translated by Bernofsy. Just finished Wlliam Gass's intro, which was appealing.

i have a crush on susan bernofsky. she rules

Jennifer Egan - Manhattan Beach

never read Goon Squad, from what I've read this book is a big departure

'a brief history of intelligence' by max bennett

very fun and addictive pop science. about connections between neuroscience and artificial intelligence

― flopson, Saturday, February 28, 2026 6:48 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

this turned out to be one of the best things i've ever read

it turned out to be less about ai and more about comparative biology. the clever experiments that scientists have devised to probe the limits between the brains of primordial worms, vertebrates, mammals, chimpanzees, humans were a revelation to me

now reading pop 1280 by jim thompson

I also reread a few Travis McGees in the past couple months. I copied out some of the sex scenes because wow this style.

Mood shifted and meshed into another mood. Small fires glowed and then flamed up. There had been no need for words. There were no restraints, no hesitations. We shared each other without words, meeting with such a great need, such a wonderful sensitization to each other that it could have been the second thousandth time we had been with each other rather than the second. The great need made for quickness, and then there was a half slumberous time like a glow of embers, and then the rise of need again, and it lasted long. Very long. That was the best of it, the long way it went and the long time it lasted.

And then there was the sweet drugging time of resting, all unwound, all mysteries known, somnolent there in a narrow wedge of light from a bathroom door open a few inches. Time moves slowly then, as in an underwater world. She had hitched herself to rest upon me, so distributed that she seemed to have no weight at all. She had her dark head tucked under the angle of my jaw, her hands under me and hooked back over the tops of my shoulders, her deep breasts flattened against me, used loins resting astraddle my right thigh, a spent mild whiskery weight.

From time to time she would take a deep breath, and let it out with little catchings, little pulsings of heat against my throat. With my eyes closed, I slowly and lightly stroked the smooth contours of her back, from the moist warmth of shoulders, down to the papery coolness of the small of her back, the deep curve where she was as narrow as a child, then on to the swelling fruit of hips, richer to the touch than to the eye. When I brought my hand back, if I flattened it, pressed more strongly against the small of her back, it would bring on a little reflexive pulse of her hips, a small clamping of her fingers, a quicker inhalation-all fading echoes of the way it had been.

the clever experiments that scientists have devised to probe the limits between the brains

You might love Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith; I did.

ty, added to list

finished The Three Musketeers and have maybe revised my plans to read the other 3000+ pages of the rest of the series. I'm not sure it quite grabbed me enough.

(didn't watch the 2014 adaptation which ran for a few series so must've adapted the later books too. maybe I'll try that. if audiobooks count as reading and graphic novels count as reading then surely this will)

the clever experiments that scientists have devised to probe the limits between the brains

A friend has been raving about The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth too but I haven't picked it up yet.

Really enjoyed The Bee Sting. I read some of his others because of it, but they didn't grab me as much. He still writes a good read, though.

I’ve ordered the rest and I’ll report back, but I’ve heard that yeah!

I finished Roberto Bolaño's Amulet and William J. Cooper, Jr.'s John Quincy Adams bio.

I'm enjoying the shit out of A.S. Hamrah's just published collected film crit.

Alfred, what did you think of Amulet? I loved that one.

I read it too fast. A couple of those fever-dreams resonated. I wondered how the subject would've worked had Thomas Bernhard written it.

love hamrah

I finished Robert Walser's "The Assistant" and started Simenon's "Le coup de lune." Somehow it seems significant to me that Walser's protagonist is named Joseph Marti while Simenon's is named Joseph Timar. Marti, Timar, like mirror images of one another.

No one is reading, it seems.

Anyway, I finished a book of poems by local poet Thomas Delahaye, whose work is strange. I admire it greatly. One of the poems in this most recent collection includes the line “Being hot online is pure,” which might be one of the funnier lines of poetry I have read in the past decade.

Also, I am reading ‘The City and the Pillar,’ which I have never read before, a fact which some of you might find surprising.

I am always reading a comic and a book. Currently working my way through a collection of Creepy comics which are basically comfort food. Reading Let’s Go To Hell, the Butthole Surfers book. The writing is standard for indie-rock bios but it’s the Surfers so there’s loads of good stories.

Also, I am reading ‘The City and the Pillar,’ which I have never read before, a fact which some of you might find surprising.

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table)

Which version?

Original 1948

I've been reading essays lately, first a few by Isaiah Berlin from a collection titled Russian Thinkers, which included his most famous 'The Fox and the Hedgehog' about Tolstoy, and now a collection by John McPhee titled Irons in the Fire'.

I finished "Solito". The relevance to current political controversies is obvious, but the book is entirely lacking in editorializing. Reminds me of "My Struggle" in the way it completely reinhabits the mind of the author's younger self. Great book.

Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye about the making of Chinatown is one of the best of its kind. Excellent reporting. It doesn't elude the inevitable nostalgia about a time when Robert Evans' Paramount was at one point making The Godfather Part II and Day of the Locust at the same time. It provides Evans and Polanski's biographies without evading the excesses of the former and the crimes of the latter. Jack Nicholson comes across best: a guy who never forgot his friends, who kept a bowl of $50 bills on his kitchen counter for anyone at his house who needed the money as well as cocaine in every room, and who might've been a writer-director if stardom hadn't happened.

I just ordered The Big Goodbye the other day, really looking forward to it

Currently reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey, unintentionally timed to coincide with the current moon mission

On a side note, the McPhee book was published in 1997 and in the titular essay he directly quotes a Nevada cattle rancher as saying, "This isn't my first rodeo." He was using it in the same metaphoric sense that we have all come to know. Quite a nice surprise to see it so near the original source.

I want to read some more McPhee on how he writes, then read some of the writing that he's referring to.

Brief comparative descriptions of xpost The City And The Pillar once had me thinking that the second version might be better

Still reading my previously mentioned Walser,"Masquerade" and Other Stories, which is uneven, as Gass's intro and translator Berofsky's outro don't mention, though Gass goes on about the difference between wish and will: only way in which he gets to anything neg---it's not more uneven than a lot of collections, though also (partially via backstory) it can seem like outsider art, in the sense of the artist's more idiosyncratic interests sometimes taking over, sometimes in a too persistently reductive way---but then it's over, because these stories (and they are stories) are also very short. (speaking of backstory, I just now consciously remembered that museum of outsider art in Walser's native Switzerland, where he lived most of his life).

Speaking of life, it's a big influence on his readers, incl. me, in my current way (which may be overtaken by later reading, as w Berlin Alexanderplatz): it's a beautiful story, sucking for him, poignant for us. Beautiful, first rate, the sad tall lady! Some favorite Walser terms.

just finished

breakneck by dan wang

i think i read too many reviews/posts about this which might have spoiled it, it but it felt pretty insubstantial. i loved reading dan’s annual letters from china on his blog and this has very little of the charm and detail. still, decently informative bigthink on a topic of importance

pop 1280 by jim thompson

western thriller black comedy with an unreliable narrator. consistently funny and fun to read, but a bit too gratuitously violent and cynical. curious about the 1981 french film noir adaptation (titled ‘coup de torchon’) have any of you seen it?

Yes

is it worth watching?

I've always been curious about both the novel and the Tavernier film

They are both great

what i've always heard

thanks. i will watch the french adaptation. speaking of which i noticed this on the pop 1280 wikipedia page:

In 2019 Yorgos Lanthimos was tapped by Imperative Entertainment to write and direct a new adaptation of the novel.[9][10]

i suspect this is no longer happening, but if it did, it would get a lot of comparisons to eddington. both about small town sheriffs who turn heel

I think if your problem w/ the novel is "too gratuitously violent and cynical" you def should not watch the film.

we'll see. interesting that it's set in west africa

one of the best bits in the book is when he's like "i wasn't very hungry, so i only ate some eggs, ham, six biscuits, lard, cornbread, cream and peaches"

Well Tavernier needed a racist system that could equal that of the American South - obv lots of racism in France but at that time to have something as developed it made more sense to look at colonial regimes.

one of the best bits in the book is when he's like "i wasn't very hungry, so i only ate some eggs, ham, six biscuits, lard, cornbread, cream and peaches"

i love reading older books that have this kind of thing, also as it relates to drinking. it’ll be like “after we had a couple highballs we decided to go out for some drinks” and my mouth is just agape. people just shithoused all the time.

you should've been on one of my bar crawls in 2015! I'll show you a midcentury novel.

2015 was the year i drank the most in my entire life

Maybe it's just a Southern gentleman thing, but xpost midcentury (sometimes novelistic) Agee On Film doesn't hardly mention booze (except for one time the Times Square grindhouse colleagues are passing around wine while tossing comments at Cat People, or maybe The Curse of the Cat People, as James gets inspired), and doesn't need to: when the bottles are empty, the ashtrays are full, and the typewriter's done its duty, time to fill and send out the manila, before the speed-crash totally again obliterates y'all.

i finally finished the goldfinch. it was a slog but i ultimately enjoyed it. picked up a copy of the pursuit of love by nancy mitford next.

I'm just about to finish up the McPhee collection. As always, he finds subject matter lying about that was unseen or unexplored by other writers and extracts what makes them inherently fascinating.

I noticed that on New Year's Day when I started the thread I wrote, "As a general goal, I'd like to increase my percentage of re-reads this year." I can't say I've done that at all. I don't seem to be good at sticking to this resolution; I've made it at other times and equally fell short. So maybe my next few will be revisiting books I've enjoyed in the past --sometimes decades ago. (Or I could get distracted by newer shinier objects like always.)

I made myself a rule to reread one book for every ten new ones I read, but understand that might sound a bit dire compared to just reading what you feel like.

I also want to re-read more but always find the pull of new stuff too strong - I need to somehow change my thinking from "this shiny new thing could be great!" to "yeah but it might not be and you know for sure this dusty old thing really is".

I bought but never read The Mirror and the Light, feel like I should re-read the first two first but they are so long...

Currently on The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, it's not long so I'll almost certainly finish but I am not loving its cheerfully patronising style.

I reread one novel more or less for every seven or eight books of all kinds.

> The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

currently top of my kobo wishlist, but only because it's cheap at the moment. i can't remember where the name came up, why i added it in the first place

I was searching for historical detective fiction lol - trying to find something else - and yeah I bought it because it was cheap on kobo. I should probably stop doing that.

She is rated as one of the best in that field for sure. My wife has read two novels of hers, Miss Pym Disposes and the one you guys are discussing. She adored one and hated the other, but I don't remember which was which.

This morning finished "Flight to Canada" by Ishmael Reed. I had mixed feelings about it. In theory it's something I would really like, a kind of psychedelic, zany, anachronistic meditation on slavery and other things. It was just really inconsistent, some parts were quite strong, other parts felt totally wooden. I was amused by the part about the slave masters being BDSM freaks who amassed collections of whips and chains and got together to watch snuff films. And there were a few other "funny" parts. But mostly it was a confusing slog, felt cobbled together, and it was hard to escape the impression that the characters were little more than props to hold up the many half-baked speeches that make up the book. Glad I finally read Reed but I wouldn't return to this one.

I didn't (and still don't) know my English history well enough to judge how clever - and possibly even historically ground-breaking - The Daughter of Time was, but it definitely felt like a interesting departure from the detective fiction norm, even if I ultimately prefer a country house, a group of suspects, an eccentric detective, red herrings galore...

Tey is also the star of a modern series of historical detective stories by the writer Nicola Upson. I've only read the first one, but it was pretty well done as these things go (high praise!)

despite the "princes in the tower" story being dubious, tbose kids were totally killed to protect his kingship.

I'm now re-reading the Gilgamesh epic, this time in the translation of David Ferry. It's short. I should finish this evening.

His translation appears to be reaching for a rather hieratic effect, emphasizing repetition with a pinch of archaizing. With the understanding that this is an artistic choice that can be used to sidestep literal adherence to one or another extant cuneiform version, his choices seem to have produced a fairly pleasing 'poetic' version of a poem that has no authoritative text, and where we have no idea how a recitation might have sounded on the ears of its Babylonian audience.

I didn't (and still don't) know my English history well enough to judge how clever - and possibly even historically ground-breaking - The Daughter of Time was, but it definitely felt like a interesting departure from the detective fiction norm, even if I ultimately prefer a country house, a group of suspects, an eccentric detective, red herrings galore...

It's hard to see how it was voted number one in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list compiled by the British Crime Writers' Association. There's no action, no red herrings, no characters worth speaking of (Richard and all that lot hardly count as characters in the story). As for the history I don't know enough either but it seems it's far from as cut and dried as the book tries to make out, and nor are the other cases of misleading history she refers to (the Boston Massacre, Tonypandy, the Wigton Martyrs).

The only Reed I've read is Mumbo Jumbo---long ago, and might not agree w my Stoner Age self if re-read, but thought it was trenchant as inventive (this was in 70s; in 80s I greatly enjoyed the albums of his words from various texts set to music by David Murray and others). I'm told that his even earlier The Freelance Pallbearers and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down are also really good---

Ishmael Reed's 1969 novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, is widely considered an antecedent to Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Blazing Saddles. The novel features a sharp, satirical, and surreal take on Western tropes with a Black protagonist, similar to the groundbreaking approach of the film. Reed has humorously claimed that Richard Pryor—a co-writer of Blazing Saddles—stole his work for the film

i am currently reading ‘the mind mappers’ by eric andrew-gee, a history book about montreal-based neuroscientist wilder penfield and his sidekick neurosurgeon william cone, who revolutionized the field from its barbaric early 20th century origins, and may have been secret gay lovers. good book. sharing this passage which i just read and made me lol

“ In the late nineteenth century, Paris was the epicentre of cutting-edge neurology, home to legendary figures like Broca, Tourette, and Jean-Martin Charcot, who had a cherchez-la-femme instinct to suspect syphilis as the underlying cause of neurological illness. A student of Charcot’s named Sigmund Freud must have been listening when the “Napoleon of neuroses” repeated his diagnostic mantra: C’est toujours la chose génitale.”

lol. Foucault was really interested in Charcot, as you can imagine

I don't really know what that means tbh

I grew up in the 70s and came of age then. Adam Ross who wrote Playworld grew up behind me and in a more cosmopolitan place, but he articulated that world for me in a very vivid way

Mostly, the experience of being on a wrestling team in high school - the freaky moves you were supposed to execute, the universal adoration of kids going to state championships, the harsh but somehow homoerotic coaches, the endless punishing practices, the trying to make weight to the point of having to wear a sweat-suit, the sense of total brotherhood that was fostered in being on a team but which you didn’t feel, the standing naked on a scale at the last minute and being judged by the opposing team’s coach to see if you were eligible

and especially the terror of the match itself or even more of a whole tournament of matches in a gymnasium at an unfamiliar school with people rooting against you, and what all of that meant for you and your teammates and your coach.

This book talks extensively about what I thought was a slamming experience, an experience which is still hard for me to grasp. Anyway, I think the novel is pretty good and is not like anything else I've ever read

I finished Ferry's Gilgamesh. After reading the end notes I became more aware of the fragmentary nature of what survives of this epic. The remains on the cuneiform tablets span many centuries and at least two languages, with the story itself shape-shifting over time as new tellings evolves and were recorded that better fit the needs of different and various changing Near East cultures, Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, etc. The only way to"translate" this mish-mash is to thoughtfully assemble your own version from the fragments like a choose-your-adventure book. Even as ripped apart as it is, it endures. Pretty amazing it came down to us at all.

I am 80% into Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi, and it can’t be over soon enough. To me, it reads like the most annoying food blogger you know wrote a one-dimensional parable about privilege, stretching out a short story into a book by reiterating the same points over and over and filling half the word count with ingredients lists. It’s like someone made the novel version of an online recipe that’s padded out with unwanted personal anecdotes.

This morning finished "Flight to Canada" by Ishmael Reed. I had mixed feelings about it. In theory it's something I would really like, a kind of psychedelic, zany, anachronistic meditation on slavery and other things. It was just really inconsistent, some parts were quite strong, other parts felt totally wooden. I was amused by the part about the slave masters being BDSM freaks who amassed collections of whips and chains and got together to watch snuff films. And there were a few other "funny" parts. But mostly it was a confusing slog, felt cobbled together, and it was hard to escape the impression that the characters were little more than props to hold up the many half-baked speeches that make up the book. Glad I finally read Reed but I wouldn't return to this one.

― Cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria de Episcopio, Thursday, 9 April 2026 15:14 (three days ago)

I read Mumbo Jumbo a few years ago without really knowing much about Reed, and I loved it to pieces. Wild and inventive, experimental and political, but yes, it is quite zany throughout. And while I would like to read more of his work, all the reviews do emphasise the wacky comedy side of his writing, which puts me off. Flight to Canada was actually the one I was most considering as a second Reed, but after your comments, hmm, maybe not.

Anyway, I just finished WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn, and I get the impression it is not well-liked around here, but I thought it was good. Am sampling Tzara's Dada Manifestos because I've never actually read them as a collection before (have read parts on very badly photocopied handouts at university, which tbf is maybe how they should best be read) and am about to start Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo.

I have never understood the love for Reed’s work. I find it completely uneven. As an editor he is rather brilliant, and I appreciate some of his essays despite his retrograde and bourgeois opinions of anarchists and anarchism. But his own fiction and poetry? Big meh.

And honestly, I think that’s fine! Many of the finest poetry editors and critics are awful poets, sort of comes with the territory

I am seriously not smart enough for this thread. I just finished the first book of Clifford The Big Red Dog and it’s taking me a while to work out all the subtexts and nuances packed in that slim volume.

Anyway, I just finished WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn, and I get the impression it is not well-liked around here, but I thought it was good.

It has been years since I read Clifford the Big Red Dog, yet I can still summon up in my mind's eye the image of Clifford's ineffable smile and his enormous benign presence. Truly he is the big red Buddha of canines.

Currently reading “How Life Works” by Philip Ball, and “Unbelief in the 18th Century” by John Cairns.

Heresy by SJ Parris (Stephanie Merrit), the " historical detective fiction" I was searching for early. A fun romp starring Giordano Bruno, none of your deadly serious Wolf Hall stuff here.

i really liked rings of saturn. i've not read any of the others yet but i thought it was brilliant.

Me too. Austerlitz is on my bookshelf awaiting its moment.

They're all good in their ways but Austerlitz, which I reread during peak pandemic, is the masterwork imo.

austerlitz is a little better than rings of saturn and i think it's as simple as: it's just a more satisfying reading experience when there are ghostly recurrences of a single character tying everything together. but i read the latter first so it remains my favorite

Heresy by SJ Parris (Stephanie Merrit

Finished this; despite being set in the late middle ages and featuring theological infighting, a secret book, symbolic murders, and an irascible old man, it was nothing like The Name of the Rose. It was moderately entertaining but the ending was pretty silly. Now on to Olav Audunsson whose silliness quotient will be absolute zero.

I finished ‘The City and the Pillar,’ and quite liked it despite how maudlin it was.

I also finished a book of Steve Carey’s ‘Selected Poems,’ an interesting book by a somewhat obscure figure associated with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and other 2nd gen New York School poets.

I'm about finished with The Hellenistic Age, Peter Green. Of all the imperial & dynastic ages in the history of europe and western asia, those three centuries of incessant wars, chaos, piracy, plundering, among incestuous and murderous royal families put the Byzantines and their infamous intrigues to shame. By comparison, the crimes of this age looks very ordinary.

Got two sci fis at the moment: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (too early in to comment much) and The Sword Of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett. The latter transplants Lost World sword and sorcery tropes to a Martian setting - one neat element is that the protagonist is already a stranger in a strange land at its inception, being an earthling to Mars - and then he wanders into a time portal! Gender essentialism is for mugs, natch, but if I didn't know this was written by a woman the gleefully stone age gender dynamics would not have tipped me off!

Also trying to read Au Rebours on public transport but the numerous noisy school expeditions that I keep running into have different plans, which I guess is somewhat appropriate.

Finished Thomas Delahaye’s ‘third-hindmost stately-run-dry,’ a book of poems that uses the hyphen in new and unexpected ways

Reading Dune for the first time and enjoying it, but it does go on and on and on

And that's only the first book in the, um, series,

I'm now reading The Log of a Cowboy, Andy Adams, published in 1903. The author was a cowhand with almost no school education (less than three years) who had participated in some of the last cattle drives from Texas to Montana (although his larger experience was driving herds of horses along the same trails).

The book is a novel about a cattle drive, but the author was determined to write a book about what a real cattle drive looked and felt like, not a sensationalized 'dime novel', and even with its episodes of stampedes and rustlers, the feel is very quotidian. Mainly it looked and felt like constant physical labor on horseback with little sleep for months on end.

Read Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, an atmospheric ghost story that does in fact get pretty damn scary once it gets going. Only learned after the fact that this is a commonly assigned book in UK schools, which…cool? There was an adaptation starring Daniel Radcliffe a few years back, but the reviews make it sound pretty lousy, so I’ll skip that.

There was a tv film of it that has one of the scariest scenes I've ever seen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_Black_(1989_film)

The play is also supposed to be quite terrifying.

I saw it 20 years ago, don't remember much but I don't think it was a fingers over the eyes / haunting me for the next 20 years deal. Probably spooky with a jump scare or two.

I might read the book now!

I started Colm Tóibín's latest story collection and am rereading (and loving the shit out of) Wharton's The Age of Innocence.

The play is also supposed to be quite terrifying.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

Yesssss. My grandparents took me to see it and it scared the shit out of kid-me. Loved it.

Saw the film and thought it was a proper good historical horror film

Reading Dune for the first time and enjoying it, but it does go on and on and on

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, April 22, 2026

They have tried to kill my son!

re woman in black, the newest version is on (uk) TV tonight (8th time in 3 years)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gqkb

iris murdoch - the bell

my first murdoch. so far very good

I got a signed copy of John Darnielle's This Year. Well, a signed sticker put in the front pages.

So far it is wonderful. I'm trying to listen along to each song, as i've never really dug into the super old stuff.

Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts was really unusual. It was a first-person novel about a ruminating religious 70 year old man who is reluctant to travel beyond borders, and about how borders are important to him (and maybe us), and wants to be near them. It was almost too esoteric

The surface theme of it I think is about light and colored glass, and how the light shines differently through the glass in different moments and how color is meaningful, and how even in different settings one can find comfort in familiar things

But it was most essentially about memory and the 2nd and 3rd order effects of memory

You have a memory of something, but maybe you imposed your own consciousness onto the memory and that changed the initial experience of it for you. But you also can imagine someone else imposing their own different interpretation on the experience.

Anyone who has close siblings knows what I’m saying, if you are comparing your memory with theirs. People who experience common things together have very different memories of those experiences, so you are left questioning your own interpretations

I love Murnane but haven’t read that one

I finished The Log of a Cowboy. It had the great virtue of accurately portraying a way of life that has left very few detailed and reliable records by those who experienced them firsthand. Part of that accuracy is the fact that in several places it mirrors the racism of that place and time. It does so unselfconciously, almost innocently.

There was a pecking order, a class system, but if you were white you believed implicitly that you could move around within that system, rising or falling in the pecking order, whether by your own merits or by luck. But no matter what, you permanently ranked above Blacks, Mexicans, or Native Americans. Those individuals might have their own merits or virtues that you could frankly admit or admire, but this could never raise them to the level of any White Man. That very assurance and security enabled the racism to operate with minimal overt animosity - so long as an inferior remembered their place.

On The Calculation of Volume III and IV. I feel like she dropped the ball with IV.

III slowly opens up the premise and the world but IV feels stuck, nothing happens. In I and II we're with Tara slowly learning to cope, or not, with the situation and that's good but in IV we don't learn anything about the group dynamic - basically there is no group dynamic, as someone finally realises at the end they're all similar people so there's no tension, no conflict. When Sonia and Peter announce their pregnancy everyone just accepts it, no-one has the surely natural response of questioning the idea of bringing up a child in their world. It seemed like III was going to set up something with Ralf and his project, either it would get off the ground or he would get resentful at the others' lack of interest, but in IV the whole thing is just dropped. It's only at the end that anything significant happens and it's just to set up V.

I really like I-III because they work at a surface or concrete level - this is a story of a woman stuck in one day - but there are many (largely related) metaphorical readings - environmental, political, existential. All of that just kind of fades away in IV.

Also in I there were a few little tricks or easter eggs, like when she thinks the moon is playing an april fool's trick on her, it is - or would be if time had flowed normally - April 1st. And I think there's another bit where it seems like she's in tune with the actual season as it would be, as though time is somehow still going forward under the surface. I didn't spot anything else like that in the later volumes.

iris murdoch - the bell

my first murdoch. so far very good

― flopson, Tuesday, April 28, 2026 11:10 AM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think i am going to bail on this book. too boring. thought it was going to be about nuns but instead it’s about a group of british christians in a lay community adjacent to an abbey. last chapter was their discussion of whether or not to buy a tractor. anyone read it? will it get better?

Haven't read it but if you abandon it you'll never know if they bought the tractor, can you live with that?

Alternatively: Under The Net by the same author is a straight up romp.

I'm still reading À Rebours, Huysmans. There's a whole chapter which is just the protagonist going through the whole canon of classic Latin writers and finding most of them lacking. Seems a good one for ILX's "things that used to be a huge part of the culture and now no one cares about" obsession.

the bell does get better, i read it last year.

you don't get to see much of the nuns because they are cloistered, obv. there is a bit of wimple action later though.

the thing i thought was odd was how the legend was so easily found to be true, that the old bell was found by some kid within 10 minutes.

I honestly have never been able to finish an Iris Murdoch book.

ha I read The Bell recently and I hated it so much I swore off Murdoch forever. i do not suggest finishing it, unless you're into an over the top ridiculous/dramatic ending, and no it does not get any better.

Muriel Spark is twice the writer that Murdoch is

There's a leadenness to Murdoch's approach that suggests mid 19th century overdecorated rooms but is actually a 20th century version of having one's head filled with too much philosophy; it's like she decided to write prose in the manner of George Eliot's prefatory verse.

^^^^ my man. well said. yes Murdoch is so surfacy in her writing (I had to look up prefatory) it's like reading a preface to a book but then never actually getting to the good part of the book

Glad it’s not just me!!

I am continuing apace with my reading of Prynne’s final works.

Apparently, and there have been some rumors spreading about this for years, but his graphomania late in life wasn’t just the result of being retired and etc, but was very much a symptom of dementia. I don’t think this does anything to the quality of the poems, because they retain the qualities that make Prynne the writer that he is, but it does give me pause when I flip through a chapbook and am utterly confounded by its contents in nearly every way

btw I like Iris Murdoch! I liked The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea, and The Philosopher's Pupil.

by "prefatory verse" I meant those flat-ass poems of her own composition with which Eliot would begin chapters of her novels.

I'm still reading À Rebours, Huysmans. There's a whole chapter which is just the protagonist going through the whole canon of classic Latin writers and finding most of them lacking. Seems a good one for ILX's "things that used to be a huge part of the culture and now no one cares about" obsession.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

Half of the chapters are just lists of his like and dislikes! "These flowers are banal bourgeois blasphemy, but THESE flowers are the true expression of God's art!" I think it's early in the book so you've probably already read it but the bit about sexy trains had me rolling in hysterics. Fucking loved this book.

(I say "half"... it's maybe more like, uh, "all".)

by "prefatory verse" I meant those flat-ass poems of her own composition with which Eliot would begin chapters of her novels.

I sadly have not read Eliot, and I've tried Middlemarch (but probably need to try harder) but yeah I was kind of riffing on the idea of prefatory verse as being work that explains itself and is distant or separate from the text rather than being a piece of it. work that seems out of place and introductory/throat clearing rather than being a part of the whole. there are some large sections of the first Ben Lerner novel that are like that, where I take a screen shot of the page because what i am reading seems disconncted and i look at it later and see if it makes any more sense. (it doesn't.) there's a lot of speechifying in The Bell that falls under this category for me. also way too many characters to keep track of!

I would probably pick Spark over Murdoch too, but don't think there are many paralells or similarities either way for the comparison to make much sense to me. I think of Murdoch along with her fellow existentialists - much closer to someone like Albert Camus.

Half of the chapters are just lists of his like and dislikes! "These flowers are banal bourgeois blasphemy, but THESE flowers are the true expression of God's art!" I think it's early in the book so you've probably already read it but the bit about sexy trains had me rolling in hysterics. Fucking loved this book.

Yesss! I started enjoying it a lot more once I realised no plot was going to start. The two locomotives being a blonde and a brunette, this fucking guy.

Before I read her novels Murdoch wrote a useful little book on Sartre.

I would probably pick Spark over Murdoch too, but don't think there are many paralells or similarities either way for the comparison to make much sense to me.

I tend to think of author's works in chunks of eras of when they were published, and both writers published at the same time. i realize this doesn't always make sense!

ok i’m dumping the bell, thank you all for your support. i have read sparks and i agree that sparks > murd

monthly update for april. i started early and still finished late, having not realised the length of the last one here

Zola - The Fortune of the Rougons
Zola - The Kill
Zola - Au Bonheur Des Dames

I'm following the 10 book list from somewhere on the internet but I'm going to throw a couple more in based on subject. I'm already preferring the working class tales to the politics. the best of the above was the romance between the two kids in the first book, the clandestine meetings in the wood pile etc.

next up, something completely different

I've been rereading the Oliver Sacks collection of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The sheer number of ways a brain can suffer damage or develop atypically is a bit frightening, but Sacks never fails to convey the humanity of his patients. Sacks was a natural writer. These are clinical case studies, but imbued with heart and love.

Be aware that Hat has elements of fiction in it.

It speaks to the power of the fantasy of the magical healer that readers and publishers accepted Sacks’s stories as literal truth. In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.” He explained that “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” He added that Marcus would likely call them “confabulations”—a phenomenon Sacks explores in a chapter about a patient who could retain memories for only a few seconds and must “make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses,” but the “bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance . . . cannot do service for reality.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20260101045516/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/oliver-sacks-put-himself-into-his-case-studies-what-was-the-cost

I'm OK with 'elements of fiction' in this kind of book. It's pretty clear that Sacks is engaged in storytelling rather than creating straightforward clinical case studies. If all these cases were invented from whole cloth that would be a deception that would rob them of much of their force, but I respect his right to condense and enhance in order to form them into more coherent stories.

koogs I read The Ladies' Paradise in university for a course on modernism. I really liked it. Apparently some of the descriptions in it were lifted directly from retail catalogs of the time.

Just picked up a YA novel called See You Yesterday, by Rachel Lynn Solomon, upon a colleague's request. Haven't really started it yet, but I was surprised to see the epigraph is a quote from a song by Nena that *isn't* "99 Luftballoons."

I read Gwendoline Riley's My Phantoms in a couple days. A great but sad book about existence.

^^^that book was amazing but bleak

Agreed.

Rereading The Charterhouse of Parma, first time in 30 years. I'd forgotten everything except Fabrizio's misadventures joining the Battle of Waterloo.

if I was going to be ambitious and read Dostoevsky, which one should I read?

i just finished karamazov for the second time and loved it. i really should read crime & punishment one of these days!

The Idiot is dope too! Read this and Bros as translated by David Magarshack. Good English, however faithful to the text, though Dusty's voice seems recognizable via any version.
As I reposted,from a 2024 WAYR?, on useful Iris Murdoch: Classic or Dud?

Recently finished my first Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green(1965)---study of an Anglo-Irish and Irish extended family, during "the seven or eight days leading up to the doomed Easter Rising in Dublin,1916," as jacket flap says, and I think I hit it lucky: jacket thinks this is "warmer" than previous, though also it's not too effusive/loose/garrulous, as I've seen complaints about re several later novels. This 'un moves adroitly between all the characters, checking in on latest seismic movements and dithering of male interiors, while the women are mostly known by what they say and do, incl. in male gaze.
Sex and money figure, ditto environment---weather, picturesque-to-appalling cityscapes, incl. poverty--but so what,sez character,"You can see a hundred scenes like that all over town every day"--news of the War and British promises for the peace, many points made in arguments and gossip and oratory re: Ireland, with even the mystical terrorist proving capable of second thoughts, for a while.
It's a well-tracked whirl, and I'm reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates on the US Civil War: "Don't say you know what you would have done. You don't know."

> Rereading The Charterhouse of Parma

how is stendahl in general? i find it odd that nobody does an ebook of The Red and the Black. Oxford World Classics claims to have one (2009) but none of the usual places sticks it.

he is awesome!

He's got a "Meanwhile, back in Milan" cliffhanger energy that's unlike any of the Great 19th Century Novelists.

if I was going to be ambitious and read Dostoevsky, which one should I read?

I haven’t read any in a long time but I remember Notes from Underground as being much more accessible than the others.

I had never read Dostoevsky before - Crime & punishment was my first & I really enjoyed it.

If you don't want to start with one of the long novels, Notes from Underground is a good entry point, as are some of the other short novels like The Gambler, The Double, and The Eternal Husband.

currently reading nixon and kissinger: partners in power by robert dallek. sharing this passage that made me lol. they’re such dicks

“In a more detailed account of this June 1969 encounter, Kissinger upbraided the foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, during a private lunch at the Chilean embassy that Henry had requested. Kissinger’s purpose was to answer Valdés’s assertion during a White House ceremony for Latin-American ministers that U.S. economic policies toward the region were more self-serving than helpful. The remarks angered Nixon and Kissinger, who called them “arrogant and insulting.” During the lunch, Henry contemptuously told Valdés that “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You’re wasting your time.” Insulted, Valdés replied, “Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South.” Henry conceded the point, declaring, “And I don’t care.”

love it

Just finished G Riley’s new book, The Palm House, which is more cheerful in delivery than My Phantoms but somehow no less bleak. Not quite up there with MP but still very, very good.

I'm passing the time with A Legacy of Spies, John LeCarre, wherein he revisits the story of his first big success, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, but from a very different angle. It was published in 2017, 53 years after 'The Spy, etc', and provides a bit of a treat for his loyal fans. Wisps of George Smiley waft through the novel like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. It's good enough to quietly while away a few pleasant evenings.

Ha, same, except I’m right back at “call for the dead”. Smiley seems fully-formed within single pages.

I was casting around for a while, starting books and setting them aside after only 20 or 30 pages. Now I seem to have settled into Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, in part because I hadn't read it before. Compared to Red Harvest it was a large step backwards. It has the strong odor of being poorly stitched together from three short stories that don't mesh at all. It's a thrown together mess claiming to be a novel. The only thing that saves it is Hammett's prose style, which I find compulsively readable.

Finished with Prynne (for the moment), I dove into another recently departed poet’s work, ‘Structures of Feeling’ by Hung Q. Tu. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed his poetry, which I first read nearly a decade ago— it has the post-Language chattiness and low culture awareness of the Kootenay School, but doesn’t slip into a sort of rote ideological critique that mars much of the Buffalo-adjacent poetry of its time. I am now also re-reading another of his books, ‘Verisimilitude.’

I am also engaged in Mike Amnasan’s first novel in nearly two decades, ‘The Homowack Lodge.’ Amnasan was one of the only straight cis dudes who was part of the New Narrative milieu, and his writing is criminally underrated— his narrators spell out the interior lives of desperate, toxic men in a manner that isn’t sympathetic or cloying, but plain, philosophical, and deeply affecting. I adore his work, and this book is no different.

Dain's done. I picked up a copy of The Cloven Viscount, Italo Calvino, at the local library. It is highly inventive. So far it is short on any unifying purpose or cohesion I can detect, but I'm only halfway through.

i just finished reading 'the highest exam: how the gaokao shapes china' by ruixue jia and hongbing li. it's nominally about the high-stakes test that chinese high-school students take which determines their university admissions (and much else), but more generally about the "hierarchical tournaments" that exist in chinese society. it strikes a nice blend of social science research, history, and personal anecdote. the authors are academic labor economists who wrote the gaokao themselves as youths, did their phds abroad, worked as faculty in both chinese and western universities, and have had their own children educated in both china and america. while they present a lot of empirical/'objective' data, they don't shy away from giving their personal opinions and relating their own subjective experiences, which kept it from being dry. (nevertheless, it is still a bit dry). great book

Very appealing description, thanks!

I'm almost done with The Director, a fictional depiction of G.W. Pabst's adventures in Nazi-occupied Austria.

I saw that guy do two different Louise Brooks film intros, one at MoMI and one at Film Forum, and talked to him a bit. His books are hugely popular in German and in translation to lots of other languages. I have that book but have only read the first several chapters.

Koresky loved it and on more than one occasion has said it was a real page-turner, couldn't put it down etc.

Yeah, Daniel Kehlmann, very big in Europe. I've only read 'Tyll', but liked it quite a bit.

Same, been meaning to pick up another.

Meanwhile I've finished vol II of Olav Audunsson by Sigrid Undset. I know it is completely lacking in Christian compassion and therefore against the very tone of the book - well sort of, the christianity of the time does not seem very compassionate to me - but I hated Ingrid and I'm glad she died. Olav is not much better tbh, I'm not enjoying this half as much as Kristin Lavransdatter.

I finished rereading Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, liked it quite a bit more this time. Now I'm reading 'Cinema and Desire', a collection of essays on Chinese cinema by Dai Jinhua, a 'feminist marxist' film critic. Probably the best book I've read on the subject, she has a point of view, and both knows the history inside and out and questions receieved wisdom a lot of places.

Chocky, John Wyndham - A couple's adopted son starts talking to an imaginary friend (the titular Chocky). Problem is, said friend starts asking all sorts of questions - about gender, the nature of intelligence, about mechanics and mathematics - that the boy clearly couldn't have come up with himself. Wyndham's work has been mostly reduced in the popular imagination to Day Of The Triffids and the Cozy Catastrophe genre - this lacks a catastrophe but there is certainly a lot cozy about this world of middle class villages, trips to the Coast and dads addressing their children as "old man". Meanwhile the uncanny elements adds a frisson of the eerie. Enjoyed this a lot.

The Luminous Fairies & Mothra, Shinchiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, Yoshie Hotta - Searching for a new kaiju concept, Toho studios invited highbrow leftist writer Shinchiro Nakamura to write a short story which their next film would then be based on. Recovering from the suicide of his wife, Nakamura enlisted two fellow leftist writers to write it with him, round robin style - apparently a not uncommon practice in Japanese genre fiction. So Mothra was born, and if you've seen the movie, with its vague gestures at anti-colonialism and social satire, rest assured these are way more central and explicit in the story. A joint expedition by Japan and the "Rosilicans" discovers that an island previously thought deserted, and on which the Rosilicans were conduction nuclear tests, actually harbours various forms of life, including of course the little fairies that get kidnapped and exploited by the Rosilicans. This creation was nominally a combination of the Soviets and Americans but frankly they're just the yanks, by the time the story goes into the Rosilican-Japanese military treaty everyone knows what's up. The nature of the story does make it quite fragmentary, and the translator's notes section is twice the size of the text, but if you're at all interested in Japanese postwar culture I'd heartily recommend.

Koresky loved it and on more than one occasion has said it was a real page-turner, couldn't put it down etc.

― The Man Who Sold the Unisphere (James Redd and the Blecchs),

sure is -- I read 171 pages yesterday

I read The Director a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it, although I wonder why Kehlmann decided to structure the novel this way. The last portion about the filming of the lost film was fantastic.

I also really enjoyed Tyll and his earlier Measuring the World, that contrasts the lives of Humboldt and Gauss.

I just finished The List of Seven by the Mark Frost. Read it in the 90s as a teenager and remembered almost nothing about it except that I liked it then, but this time I thought it was pretty dull despite the made-for-the-movies chase sequences and narrow escapes. More Indiana Jones than Sherlock Holmes, with Arthur Conan Doyle as the hero and cameos by Helena Blavatsky and Bram Stoker.

the director has been on my list for a while, hoping to read it soon. glad to hear the good people off this thread liked it

currently reading 'vox' by nicholson baker. finding it every bit as titillating and funny as i'd imagined

Oh wow, that's another one I read in the 90s! Started with 'The Mezzanine' and worked my way through a couple of Bakers after that. I should revisit those novels some day.

The only Daniel Kehlmann I've read is F, which didn't make much impression on me at the time.

I enjoyed The Fermata for a while, but then it seemed/got/was too static, which, for a story of stasis, you could say was the success/power/nature/etc. of structural integrity.

I finished the Calvino. Although the plot rested on a mixture of violence and cruelty, its handling of these are explored so lightly that it felt sort of trifling. The fact that it was novella-length reinforced that impression, but it also made the investment of time and mental energy required to read it equally trifling, so all's good. It was intended to be taken as a fairy tale and stayed true to that model.

Now I'm starting into Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe.

I read Daniel Kehlmann's The Director with my book club. It was put forth by one of our members in Germany. I didn't really like it, it seemed disjointed and pedestrian and I read it begrudgingly.

Everyone else in my book club loved it however. As with everything we've read together, the discussion afterward gave me a better appreciation for the book.

Our book club starts out by the host asking a few rote questions - did you finish it? did you like it? can you recommend it to others? I'm always reading and finishing the books, and I like more of them than others in the book club, but there are very few books we read together (or that I read alone for that matter) that I can recommend to friends of mine

Some of the POV shifts resulted in a disjointed read, but the exchanges b/w Pabst and Louise Brooks, Garbo, and Goebbels were imaginatively pungent. I'd recommen dit.

When I saw him talk at MoMI he gave an explanation for why he liked to write from different points of view, something about how it was related to how misunderstandings arise which he finds very interesting iirc

Anyway I read further in The Director but I have a shorter one of his I need to finish first.

many xps

there is certainly a lot cozy about this world of middle class villages, trips to the Coast and dads addressing their children as "old man

Good description of the vibe, I remember it fondly. I also remember the scene where the kid cries because chocky doesn't think their new car is hella cool and says brakes are silly, it should have one engine to go forwards and another to stop. Which I always thought was a rubbish idea, now I realise chocky should've known about electric motors and regenerative braking. Sadly Wyndham was not so prescient. /irrelevant nerd thoughts

Have you read The Midwich Cuckoos? Despite the village etc. setting, seems like it might not be so cozy, considering the movie.

I have not, but the movie's an all time fave.

I think I've read everything Wyndham ever wrote. Mostly in my teens or early 20s.

Apparently there's a crime novel, a posthumously published novel, and a few short stories and novelletes that I missed.

He's been my used book store go-to recently.

I'm backing off from Anthills of the Savannah. Achebe has introduced about a dozen 'central' characters in the first 50 pages and every scene so far consists of dialogue, so you have to keep them all straight in order to follow whatever is happening (which is not much, yet - this is still in the set up phase for any action that might come later).

I'm sure that if I stuck with it I'd discover it's a good and worthwhile novel, but I just don't have the attention for it right now. I'm capitulating. I'm marking as my reading failure more than as a rejection for cause. I'm just going to fall back into crime fiction for a while. I can't cope with anything more complex right now.

i’ve never read ‘anthills’ but ‘things fall apart’ is one of my all-time favs, is light on dialogue and has a small cast of characters

They're very different books, Anthills is set in modern day and very much about African elites post colonization. It's one of my all time faves but don't begrudge aimless not having the patience for it at the moment.

CLR James - The Black Jacobins. It popped up in one of those summer reading lists in the paper and it is really well written and engaging.

Great book!

I've been in a bit of a reading slump but some recent life changes mean I have some more time and energy now. I waffled a bit before settling on "The Rise of Silas Lapham" by William Dean Howells, which I found in a little free library last year. Was wary at first -- I wasn't in the mood for 300+ pages of the author using his boastful paint magnate protagonist as a punching bag, but the book soon revealed itself to be more like a light domestic drama with a decent amount of heart, rather than some kind of scathing social criticism. Not that there isn't any of that, but I'm content for the moment to be swept along by the plot, which is interesting enough in itself, and the Bostonian aristocracy types are treated as teasingly as the coarse new money, so at least there's that. Prose is fairly utilitarian, with only a short reverie here and there for color, but the psychological insights and windows into the small, almost unremarkable split-second moments/glances/hand squeezes of domestic life are ace

Howells excelled at these portraits. Think of him as the literary equivalent of a period realist painter. He could be savage too: if you liked Lapham seek A Modern Romance, as savage a book about divorce and sex as any French novel.

I recently finished "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus" in the 1818 edition. Currently reading "My Struggle Book 6" by K.O. Knausgard. After reading thousands of pages cumulatively by this guy, I know its a bit rich for me to complain about it being too long, but this volume in particular seems a bit padded and self-indulgent.

I whipped through a hard-boiled 'Parker' novel by Richard Stark and now I'm reading The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, W.H.Davies. Years ago I read The Road by Jack London, which would be interesting to re-read after finishing this one. My hunch is that Davies will turn out to be far less self-dramatizing than London.

Similarly, a much younger me read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London multiple times, but that was decades ago. I think it will prove to be from a different mental universe altogether from Davies.

I finished Amnasan’s ‘The Homowack Lodge,’ and am pondering writing more about it, but for the moment I will say that it is an interesting novel, and a real shame that it will probably see relatively limited readership, as is true with most of Amnasan’s novels. Part of the reason for this is acknowledged within the novel itself— Amnasan and his slightly-skewed fictional versions of himself are shy yet judgmental, self-assured yet ultimately deeply repressed individuals. The book continues along lines similar to this piece: https://egophobia.ro/?p=15175

I actually rather loved it, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Going to think on that more.

I also read a short little book by Pam Martin, ‘Three Parts,’ which encapsulate a number of personal crises as related in personal letters and poetic ramblings to Martin’s friend, the artist Mike Kelley.

I am now reading Lisa Robertson’s new novel, ‘Riverwork,’ the first four chapters of which has been promising and sumptuous as per usual with Lisa. Good morning reading.

And I am about to finish my new night book, Saralee Gallien’s ‘Rogue Wave,’ a book of poems and fevered prose regarding Gallien’s time as a nurse and a radical during the first two years of Covid. Gallien (under a different last name) is also the co-author of the wonderful radical history book, ‘Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South,’ which was certainly one of my favorite non-fiction reads of the 2010s.

'Princess Bari' by Hwang Sok-yong. A girl grows up in a big North Korean family in the nineties. So far there's been famine, political oppression, human trafficking, etc. Quite a dark book, with a bit of magical realist bullshit on top. But I like Hwang, his books are more straightforward depictions of Korean histories than Han Kang. 'Mater 2-10' is good too, though much longer, and seems to include a lot of stuff probably copied directly from left wing pamphlets in the thirties.

My May reading.

reading 'against nature' by joris-karl huysmans. quite amusing at times, lists of books i haven't read a bit difficult in places, completely and amusingly insane in other places, but overall i like the decadent tone of it. reminds me a lot of other things, and enjoy all the references to baudelaire.

next up might finally read hunger by knut hamsun.

isolated protagonist fiction summer.

I read Against Nature for the first time last year, there really is nothing else quite like it. The narrator is def the original ilxor, obsessing over their collection, insisting on hierarchies of taste, throwing out mad challops all the time.

The bit with the turtle : 0

The narrator is def the original ilxor

ha, otm

obsession with interior design the point of difference however.

Helen Garner, The Children's Bach

Well-written if self-consciously oblique. I hated everyone in it.

Still need to read that one

I finished W. D. Howells's "The Rise of Silas Lapham," it was okay. I would say that I was invested for the first 75% of the book, but I felt like ultimately the dénouement was a little maudlin for my taste. I could've used a little more treachery, villainy, low moral behavior, etc. There were some great bits, though, some fantastic gasp-out-loud moments for sure

Now about to finish up CLR James's "Minty Alley," his only novel. It is g-r-e-a-t and I can't wait to see how things unfold by the end. I'm thinking of staying in the Caribbean after this, perhaps to one of the early V. S. Naipaul novels or Joseph Zobel's "La Rue Cases-Nègres"

Harriet Clark's The Hill and Thomas Mallon's republished history of journaling.

started pedro paramo by juan rolfo. i basically never read stuff like this but i am enjoying it. it reminds me of a videogame, specifically elden ring. i read about half of it last night so will prob finish today. i like the trust placed in the reader and the quite deep sense of omniscience in the pov, not led by an author either, just like an eye and an ear on many parts of the story, all cut up and played back.

Cakes & Ale, Sommerset Maugham - A reread of a book I remembered mostly being miserable but featuring lots of London locations. Turns out it was I who was miserable when I read it and projected that onto the novel, which is basically a prolonged piece of literary criticism as well as a settling of accounts with the Victorian world of Maugham's childhood. The narrator is tasked with providing a fellow author with details about a recently deceased writer on whose official biography he is now working. The narrator, though, finds the deceased writer's novels tedious, and what he evokes instead are childhood memories of said author scandalously living in the conformist town the narrator grew up in, married to a sexually promiscuous barmaid and hanging out with people with no regards for class distinctions. At some point I felt the urge to read the Victorian writer's novels myself, to see how my own estimation would line up with the narrator's, but of course they do not exist - never thought I'd think of Maugham as Borgesian but there you go.

Perhaps influenced by all this, I am now on The Rise & Fall Of The Man Of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800 by John Gross, a charity shop impulse buy.

Still slogging through the "My Struggle Book 6", a tremendous disappointment I would say after the first 5 books. But I've also started reading "Sisters in Yellow" by Mieko Kawakami because I needed something else to read when I'm ready to throw the Knausgard across the room. It's an atmospheric and engaging noir thriller about women working in a grey-market, economically-precarious stratum of the Tokyo nightlife and hospitality industry.

I finished Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. The first 2/3 described his tramping in the USA and Canada, and included a wide-ranging mixture of experiences from acts of incredible kindness to blatant political corruption and witnessing the bloody cruelty of a lynching. He frequently waxes eloquently about the easy abundance of food. Then he loses a leg while hopping a freight, convalesces and returns to England.

The remainder of the book describes his life of dire poverty in England and a struggle to escape it that was blocked over and over again by social mechanisms designed to prevent any escape from poverty. This part of the book becomes repetitive as he describes one attempt after another to change his condition only to be slapped back down. The contrast between his mild poverty in America and dire straits in England is pretty stark.

Now I am re-reading a translation of the first five books of Livy published by Penguin Classics as The Early History of Rome. The class struggle between the rich and poor is never ending. As opposed to Plutarch, whose sympathies were tilted to the ruling class, Livy expresses in numerous ways his disapproval of ruling class greed and arrogance as the true engine that drove the poor to revolt time and again. Because his readers were the educated elites, even these mild expressions of solidarity with the poor were on the daring side.

Aimless, if you haven’t read Jack
Black’s ‘You Can’t Win,’ you might like it— was republished in the same series as Super-Tramp.

I can read about hoboing and tramps for ages tho, one of my favorite subjects tbh

pedro paramo is great! i am not sure i understand it, entirely, but it teases a logic that is just past my perception.

I've read the first few chapters of 'Sátántangó'. I'm not sure it's as good as 'The Melancholy of Resistance' (I feel the same way about the adaptations), and it's a bit tough to figure out from the book why on earth the film had to be 7,5 hours long. But I like in early Krasznahorkai how each chapter is it's own little bravura-piece, sometimes almost like a hybrid short story-essay text.

I've been meaning to pick up a copy of Pedro Paramo for a while now, it seems like it *might* be my sort of thing. Not entirely sure why I'm wavering on it, and now the comparison to Elden Ring... well, I can't tell if that makes me more interested or less!

'why q needs u: a history of our letters and how we use them' by danny bate

fun pop historical linguistics. each chapter is a letter of the alphabet. fact-filled and quite cleverly written, very enjoyable summer reading brain candy

that's a nice way of putting it, soda. it feels like there is a set of events that have definitely happened but the way they are told to us doesn't let us fully see.

i'm now reading patrick leigh-fermor's a time to keep silence, about his time spent in monasteries across europe. i've never read fermor before and tho i know something i recently read mentioned this i can't remember what.

weirdly, in the introduction he says he was living in france and emulating huysmans before he wrote this, given i just read that two books ago. kinda makes me feel there is a thread to my reading that i hadn't noticed.

by that i mean "against nature", sorry, long day

From The Rise & Fall Of The Man Of Letters, this description of Victorian periodical Saturday Review maybe belongs more on the UK politics thread but anyway, plus ça change, eh?

But where they deluded themselves was in supposing that 'the educated class' as they defined it could somehow stand permanently aloof from party interests. Not for the first time a nominal independence turned out, when it came to the test, to mean unorthodox conservatism. The Saturday has no love for Disraeli, but by the 1860's it was unmistakably showing off its colours. Contributors raged against trade unions, vied with The Times in their hostility to the North in the American civil war, jeered at the campaign to bring in a secret ballot (...)

Pedro Paramo is fantastic. Karl Ove going essay mode in book 6 was a bit tough, but the Gunnar (beginning) and Linda (end) of the book are where he hits his notes. Kinda think the frequent pedantry of 2-5 really make the highs of 1 and 6.

Just wrapping up Infinite Jest. Really glaze over when it gets slapstick, but the Ennet house sections and when the tennis academy sections are actually about tennis = great stuff. Ferdydurke a good book to read at 30, had to trudge through the slapstick (again!) to get to the genuinely captivating psychoanalysis/theoryish sections. Song of Solomon was too obvious and I didn't enjoy it. Vaim was too obvious and I absolutely loved it. Fosse flips the script on his "what if two people had the same name" plot, and instead asks the question "what if a boat was named after two people with the same name?". Finished Caro's LBJ: an analysis of power I buy. I started to lag in the series when LBJ started to lag in the series. I read and I want the big, evil, backstabbing, throatcutting, charmeleon go-getter to go and get. Which is, uncomfortable. The Guermantes Way is fantastic because the adolescent narrator is finally an adolescent. Really enjoying Robert de Saint-Loup getting what's owed to him by Rachel When From The Lord. Most of all I love Proust's doting, condescending love of poor Françoise. Just started The Passion According To G.H. and I have not grown from my teenage affection for mysticism and existentialism. It's brilliant stuff

Finished Lisa Robertson’s ‘Riverwork,’ which sucked me in… an amazing novel investigating late style, Parisian history, intellectualism, class, waterways, and most importantly, the maligned and invisibilized labor of women. Highly recommended, the year’s best novel.

Also finished ‘Shit Hike’ by Callie Garnett. Garnett is interesting because I didn’t like her first book or the first time I heard her read about five years ago, then I saw her a few weeks ago and the reading was excellent and this new book is, too. Like Callie herself, the poems dabble in woo-ey mysticism and psychedelic disjunction, but also have deep grounding and a no-bullshit, plain spoken vibe. Great book.

Now about to finish Jacqueline Waters’ ‘The Fry,’ which seems to be a series of poems around how our egos trap us and others in unfortunate situations.

Karl Ove going essay mode in book 6 was a bit tough, but the Gunnar (beginning) and Linda (end) of the book are where he hits his notes. Kinda think the frequent pedantry of 2-5 really make the highs of 1 and 6.

Yeah, its the essay mode that really ruins it for me. I feel like I'm reading a college literature class assignment. Honestly I don't know what any of this has to do with anything else in the series. Apart from that, the beginning was ok and the bio of Hitler as a young man in the middle was kind of interesting to me, since I didn't know much of that history, and K.O. is a sympathetic biographer, and somehow those themes of a troubled young man are more relevant to the rest of the series and far more readable than K.O. going on and on about the symbolism in his favorite books. Not sure what you mean by the last sentence there. If there is pedantry in 2-5, it seems to be vanishingly minor next to 6.

I finished the Early History of Rome, Titus Livius (aka Livy). I can see why his telling of Roman history eclipsed all the previous ones and became the one version everyone read. He has great skill in dramatizing history, describing the actions, words and emotions both of the named historic figures and the anonymous common people. It's colorful and moving. It entertains and informs. Solid popular stuff.

It also flatters Rome's military prowess shamelessly. Somehow the Roman legions beat the tar out of their neighboring cities year after year, killing them, laying waste to their countryside, leaving them routed, defeated and broken -- yet those same opponents came back to fight them afresh, year after year after year for a couple of centuries.

Now I'm starting in on The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins.

I read Bohumil Hrabal's "Closely Watched Trains," I enjoyed it but ultimately I'm not sure what to make of it. I think I need more historical/cultural context. Parts of it were sort of blurry (and it's very short), I guess I'm kind of uptight about reading something and I'm not really sure what's happening. I don't know if it was the translation or what, but there were some vivid images of cattle being led to slaughter, yet I couldn't figure out if the cattle were being led onto a train, since the book takes place in a train station, or if it was a flashback or something else. There were a lot of flashbacks. Perhaps I need to re-read it, this time more carefully.

I did really like the 70% that I understood. I'm not sure if I've just become more stupid, or if I wasn't in the right headspace to focus on the text like I needed to, or if the novel is supposed to be a kind of delirium -- perhaps a bit of all three

the film is a classic

I really liked Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude. Very claustrophobic short tale about a paper compactor. Definitely elements of delirium in that one, too.

Yeah, would hope so, given great title.
Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast is in library shop for 50 cents: worth it? Surived my totally unfair Random Skim Test, though that can be totally misleading, not as often as you might think, though--so, is he good?

tbf nearly any book is worth 50 cents

yeah i also think Theroux can be interesting

'the curse of chalion' by lois mcmaster bujold

do ilb sci-fi/fantasy heads rate bujold?

i'm enjoying this book so far, which i was intrigued into starting after seeing an image of this cover posted online

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/The_curse_of_chalion_cover.jpg

she's v. good; her book covers are uniformly execrable

lol that you found that intriguing!

lmao. what can i say? it spoke to me

saw this posted in the same sequence (i think it was on someone's instagram story) and added it to the list too

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/The_Wandering_Fire.jpg

that's okay, although being of a certain age i will accept no substitutes

https://i.postimg.cc/zv711XKn/1.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/kGsddXKy/2.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/rsjLLFxj/3.jpg

at any rate, your concerns would be best served at Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond

beautiful

I read the first two volumes of Miklos Banffy's Transylvanian Trilogy a few years ago, adored them but never got around to the final one, and if I did now I'd be totally lost. So I'm starting a reread of volume one.

Meanwhile also, for light relief, A Handful Of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. A good running gag is there's a village vicar who spent most of his career in India and now, old and somewhat senile, preaches without having changed his sermons to suit circumstances, so he's constantly refering to "foreign climes" and "loved ones back home". The villagers don't mind, as nothing said in church ever seemed to relate to their lives anyway.

Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast is in library shop for 50 cents: worth it? Surived my totally unfair Random Skim Test, though that can be totally misleading, not as often as you might think, though--so, is he good?

― dow, Tuesday, June 23, 2026

yes

The best thing I've read by Theroux is Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), one of the great literary love-hate letters.

I've read two by Theroux which were quite different: a sort of trashy sci-fi novel called "O-Zone" many years ago, and more recently "The Great Railway Bazaar", a travel book about taking the train across Asia in the early 70s, which was enjoyable enough.

I've found A Time To Keep Silence amazing. Maybe it's to be expected but it makes me want to visit a monastery. I did a week's vow of silence visiting one when I was about 16 as part of a school trip, lol Jesuits. A lot of profundity and a little dry wit along the way. Must read some more stuff by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Several non-McGee John D. MacDonalds, then started on the Parker series by Donald Westlake (7 books into that so far).

I really enjoyed Lois McMaster Bujold's Falling Free (1987), but she's written so many novels in different series that I've decided I'm not going to be interested in reading them all. I think I also read Shards of Honor (1986), which was not that good.

She's written like 50 books. That is too much for a casual reader. If anyone has other recommendations of hers I will listen

I thought Theroux's Mosquito Coast was deadly dull. Maybe he is a good writer though, I haven't read any of his travel writing, it was just a book I didn't like. He's another one who's written too many books to count

She's written like 50 books. That is too much for a casual reader.

also she will write a new book at any point in a timeline she's already established. which is actually cool and no doubt fun for her, but makes it tough for a new reader

Bujold reading-order guide, 2025 update lol

Thanx for Theroux comments yall.
The only Bujold I've read is Memory, an exemplary mid-series gateway, in which all references to What Has Gone Before are clear and spare; she doesn't seem to care if you don't get the deep bells ringing like they would for a longtime series pilgrim. High-born Miles V., who has paid his space opera dues, is summoned to his home planet, which fans of Jane Austen and Le Carre might enjoy---quite a fun read, and yeah, more about her on Rolling Spec.

Rolling Spec AKA Thread of Wonder.

Whistler by Ann Patchett. A lightweight but enjoyable book focussing on family and other relationship dynamics, with well observed and amusing characters. I'm also still slogging through Olav Audonsson, have finished vol 3. The guy is hard work.

Beryl Bainbridge's An Awfully Big Adventure and a collection of Walker Percy essays called Signposts in a Strange Land.

I kind of like the latter

A lot of stuff about Helen Keller because of his deaf daughter

But maybe I am thinking of The Message in the Bottle, sorry

One is a song by The Police, the other by his co-religionist Sam Phillips.

I finished "Sisters in Yellow" by Mieko Kawakami, a psychological noir set in the seedy underbelly of Tokyo that reminded me at times of Jean Rhys and Shirley Jackson. Recommended.

Whistler by Ann Patchett. A lightweight but enjoyable book focussing on family and other relationship dynamics, with well observed and amusing characters.

stick your cheffing job (ledge), Thursday, June 25, 2026

I think Tom Lake (2023) is the only book of hers I've read. It was about small town Michigan, cherry orchards, and Our Town. I really liked it

I finished a book of poems by Paul Ebenkamp, ‘Sunworshippers.’ Hard to describe his work except that it inhabits a place where zen koans, lyric precision, and a sort of flustered anger meet— really one of the best working right now, always funny and provocative.

I began a bio of GM Hopkins, but didn’t bring it on a little weekend getaway we are having, so I bought a first edition of Edwin Denby’s collected at a friend’s bookstore yesterday and have been reading that.

Currently reading Ovid's Metamorphoses. Interesting that it starts with a mostly-serious creation story followed by humorous human stories. The Raeburn translation is excellent.

oddly i've just been digging into that

i read the new natalie haynes thinking it was about medea, and it was but she has a bigger history than just the euripides play. turns out i had 5 different versions on the ereader...

Natalie Haynes: No Friend To This House
Apollonius of Rhodes: Jason and the Argonauts
Ovid: Metamorphoses Book 7
Graves: The Greek Myths ch 148-157
Davidson: Guardian Greek Myths booklet things from 2008 (The Argonauts bits)

the ovid and especially the graves felt like things that are useful references but not something i'd particularly read for fun. the ovid zips through greek myth, being mostly concerned about, well, the metamophoses, things changing into other things. the graves just reads like wikipedia. it's half footnotes but even the non-footnotes read like footnotes. some interesting bits, like why the fleece was golden and lost-wax casting.

the footnotes for the apollonius did point out all the similarities with the odyssey. it was written hundreds of years after but comes chronologically before the iliad.

258 books coming out over the next six months: https://lithub.com/lit-hubs-most-anticipated-books-of-2026-part-two

(i neither endorse nor reject the capsule reviews provided)

Read Brian Payton's Hail Mary Corner yesterday. Kind of a Canadian, 80s-set A Separate Peace that takes place at a seminary, with sex, religion, queerness, and all kinds of adolescent bad behaviour happening. Admittedly, this is sort of tailor made to appeal to me, so grain of salt, but I really liked this. May or may not be a YA novel, but as it was published in 2001, it lacks the self-consciousness about its intended audience that marks a lot of current youth fiction.

This month my book club read beasts of England by Adam biles which I’m sorry to report is a sequel to animal farm that is about us/uk politics in the current era — the following is from a non-book club group chat where I was livegroaning the experience, sorry I can’t be fucked to edit it into a cogent post:

https://i.ibb.co/qvBDH3N/IMG-0936.jpg

One page in and I am turning into the joker

(Some chatter about the book being rapturously blurbed by leading light of the uk commeltariat Ian Dunt)

My god it's trite tho. Just over halfway through and one of the big fateful turns toward disaster for the farm is when the sensible owl who is obviously supposed to lead the Animalist party to victory against the Jonesists somehow LOSES to Pearl the deluded old pig who espouses True Animalism and promises the animals that Sugarcandy Mountain lies just beneath their feet

It's a slightly more literary version of some cunt down the pub talking about “everybody gets a pony”

tbf I read the original book in prep for this and didn't really like that either. Better than this tho

(later)

Nearly finished. Just read the fabulist version of the murder of Jo Cox, I fucking hate this

(next day, less mad}

I mean it kind of is and isn't Jo Cox, the details are obviously intended to evoke that (killer shouting fascist slogans) except the character who's killed is a young goose — in this book the geese are the press, Haw-Haw being Murdoch/the tabloids in general, & you're saying well at least he isn't spelling out the “proper gander” joke, he trusts you to get there yourself, but nope, it's dropped in as a big punchline *200pp* in — whereas to be a true analogue she would have to be a pig; that's typical of the book’s woolliness <— see we can all do this shit

So jumbo is BoJo except also explicitly trump (it's dropped in right at the end that he changed his name from jumbf ffs); cosmo the owl is ed milliband but also maybe Hillary Clinton but maybe also sometimes Gordon Brown?? But again the great historical wrong turn is his losing a leadership election to the doddery extreme leftist which strictly speaking makes him… Andy Burnham lol lmao (or Owen Smith)

Venting here so I'm not too much of a gobshite at the book club tonight but that's the context for why I was so pissed off when I got to the murder part. That event was just as traumatic for politically homeless dopes as anyone & biles seems like probably a fairly benign example of the latter so it's not beyond the pale to write about but when the thinking is this unserious and sophomoric throughout it makes the deployment feel extremely cheap

I also feel like it's maybe fundamentally misconceived to try and make a state of the nation novel from a 60pp anti-communist propaganda story; AF is simplistic by design cause it's basically a pamphlet

idk his work at all, read nineteen eighty-four as a lad, so never sure how much to blame orgoodwise for all the sensible grownups who read one book and concluded that all ideology is bad. Seems like the character most valorised by melts is Benjamin the donkey who constantly says things like “things never had been, nor could be, much better or much worse” — literally “better things aren't possible” lol!

I will say some of the writing in the last 25pp or so isn't bad, once everything has apocalyptically gone to shit and the fascists are in power. But he introduces this “hopeful” counterforce at the end, where some of the animals start singing the long-lost ancestral melody that unites them all (and which Beasts of England and its many variants are a corruption of) & putting aside whether an extremely vague utopian vision based on turning back the clock is a good thing to put in your brexit book I'm like… what is actually being proposed here? At the end of all this is biles really going “what if the workers of the world… unite”. But not that obv, because that's a slogan and slogans are bad and it's also politics which is very bad. So not trying to be a cunt but I can only conclude that the flickering light in the darkness that he is wistfully and poetically describing here is… the hashtag resistance

I took a break from The Moonstone long enough to re-read Where I Was From, Joan Didion. Based on my copy of the Didion, there must be an unwritten law in the publishing world that every Didion book ever released must include some version of the five decades old photo of her in a Corvette.

It's also the best of (the few of) hers that I've read, next to The Year of Magical Thinking, and this one's about peeling away the years of magical California Pioneer (Conservative Wing) Thinking, a process that outlives most of her family, and almost herself. So kinda sucks for her, but thanks JD.

Christ, wins, that sounds abominable.

god you have no idea

Even the bit I sort of said was good (where it gets grim at the end) is annoying as fuck bc it starts being patterned after 1984, in a v stupid way — posters saying “JONES HAS HIS I ON YOU”, the Two-Minute Huzzah which is a parody of clap for carers

Finished Denby’s collected, deciding what next

I am reading, first time since 11th grade, The Grapes of Wrath.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for the first time (I’ve only seen the Polanski film).

A Handful Of Dust, Evelyn Waugh - Lots good and lots bad, as usual. I think what intrigues me is how Waugh's natural curiosity for people struggles with his enormous bigotries, occasionally winning, often succumbing. This is a surprisingly tender portrait of a collapsing marriage and in the first half, mostly written from the woman's perspective, it feels very acute, though sadly the latter half sees said woman reduced to an irredeemable figure not really comparable to what she was before, and it's not an unreliable narrator think afaict. There's some pretty good comedy - I mentioned the priest giving sermons meant for India to English villagers, there's also a moment of farce when, in order for the wife to be able to sue for divorce, the husband recruits a woman and arranges with a detective agency to be spotted at a seaside hotel, thus giving a simulacrum of adultery. Later on he decides to go on an expedition to Brazil and, well, you can guess how that goes considering the author.

Now onto a very different flavour: Pilgermann by Russel Hoban.

Many years since I went through my Waugh phase, but at the time I thought A Handful of Dust was his best. One scene has lingered with me - the one where she thinks her lover has been killed and is kind of relieved to find out it's actually her son... And the end is pretty good!

I think I liked Decline and Fall a bit more, just found it sort of funnier I guess. Tho I did like A Handful Of Dust. Vile Bodies also fairly funny, though with all of them parts of what's meant to be satire I guess have been sort of lost over time.

As with Woody Allen, you can make a case for the Early Funny Ones.

First half of Decline and Fall one of the v funniest English language novs imho - parts of it are exceptionally racist even for the time. It all moves like a rocket which Waugh can’t quite keep fizzing all the way to the end.

Ending of Handful of Dust adapted from an earlier Waugh short story called ‘The Man Liked Dickens’, often anthologised in horror story collections.

Man Who Liked Dickens

was unaware of this fact thanks

Feel like Other People (who are they?) like Brideshead and The Loved One but the real heads prefer his earlier work, as basically just stated upthread

Waugh is often funny but I think when I came to his work this factor had been overhyped - I expected something like Wodehouse and though he admired him a lot Waugh is not at all that.

They have little in common except the same bottomless fount of well-bred rotters to satirize -- and, in Waugh's case, admires.

I know them well

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. I bought this right before the 2024 election and was too depressed to dig in then, but I pulled it out and it's filling The Power Broker sized hole in my heart.

Read a nice chapbook by Kristen Gallagher, a conceptual poet working in a slightly more lyric mode.

Now I have started moving through ’Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine,’ a fascinating collection of essays and reports from Canadian experimental poets Steve McCaffery and bpNichol under the aegis of their Toronto Research Group. It’s poetics but chatty. Cool and kind of crazy. Enjoying myself.

Waugh seemed most interesting when dealing with a sense of wistfulness for Better Times, long before he and his characters were born. He deals with the downside of this, like the guy goes on that xpost rongway expedtion to Brazil, hoping to emulate the British explorers of yore. But the protagonist of Scoop is a country correspondent who limns the consolations of birds and shit, then gets mistaken for a war correspondent, is sent to Africa, where publisher of The Daily Beast is promoting conflict, for "Conservative" reasons---country mouse and his author are real conservatives in their ways, though author's caricatures cut right through much folly, and not taking as much time for racism per se (here mostly part of a flattening "what fules we all are in our own ways" effect) as I thought it might.
So Scoop and Decline and Fall are the best straight-through that I've read; yeah Handful of Dust goes downhill in second half (seems like Brideshead did the same, though the TV series was much better, read The Loved One for school and seems like it was ok? Liked that it was v. short, because brevity is the soul of wit, as he shoulda remembered sooner).

I always thought that Waugh seemed a bit off, tending to the jerkish, even aside from the racism, but eventually read some terrible things (not written by him) about his parents, and, while they can't be blamed for everything, it was like the "New Amsterdam" ep of Mad Men, when we meet off/jerkish Pete's parents: he could've been a lot worse!

"I always thought" that in reading *about* him, also some of his lesser writing, but was surprised when I got to the better of his early books, going in reverse order: sort of like reading stupid Johnny Ramone quotes and then getting to the good Ramones records.

Re-reading "At swim two birds" for the first time in over 20 years. Im enjoying it a lot more than I did back then. You just gotta go with the flow with this one, some hilarious writing

Paul Mason -"Postcapitalism' - its fine, even though it was written 10 years ago it feels weirdly dated now with the current looming threat of AI

Also listening to the audiobook of "Stoner"

the better of his early books, going in reverse order: sort of like reading stupid Johnny Ramone quotes and then getting to the good Ramones records.

t0m 3wing formerly of this parish just finished reading the entire dance to the music of time series - i think he liked it!

I spent the summer of 2007 reading it. Its effect is cumulative. I wasn't mad about it overall but I'm glad I finished it. Once in a while I'll meet someone and go, "Another Widmerpool."

A Dance To The Music Of Time is a great title if nothing else.

Learned from that John Gross book recently that Bennett wrote a guide to "developing taste" that features 350 books he deemed to be the best of English literature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Taste:_How_to_Form_It

Even in 1969 Gross was already finding much on there that no one knew about anymore; could be a fun, if insane, project to try to read 'em all.

William Godwin's Caleb Williams is a good pick: from pre-channeling Dickens to pre-channeling Kafka, or something like that. Haven't gotten far w Tristam Shandy---how's Humphrey Clinker?

The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati. Not the saddest book I've ever reda (that would be Foster by Claire Keega, then The Greatcoat) but quite affecting at the end.

HHhH by Laurent Binet. A weird one, it's the story of the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 but it starts long before the war, with the run up to the Munich Agreement, and it's interspersed with talking about how he wrote the book, his research, his quibbles about inventing scenes and dialogue and making characters out of real people, but he does it anyway, then regrets it. He'll describe a scene then in the next chapter says "oh but my research says it couldn't have happened like that" and it's all done in quite a jokey tone at odds with the subject matter. It is a page turner though.

Finished Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, which was fairly funny and good.

About two thirds into Jose Saramago - Death At Intervals. Though the sort of arch narration can be a bit annoying at times, it is generally really good and the concept is explored so brilliantly and forensically.

I like the underlying idea that death's mysteries and unpredictability are essential to so much of how we live, not just in the obvious ways but in all sorts of ways we don't really think about. Also the bureaucratic administration of death as we know it is so engrained in the state, obviously I suppose, but it's not often analysed.

I guess it's a book that makes a case for itself in that regard, not many ways we can easily examine this stuff, fiction is underrated as a tool for these kind of explorations.

John Lahr's Tennessee Williams bio and Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say.

I have confidence in Lahr on TW, because TW, but how's the Strout? Have only read Olive Kitteredge, a series of stories linked by title character, a tall, retired middle or high school math teacher who many remember as kind of scary, and she is brusque/fraught, good inner life, though fits into the Lake Woebegone older married couple groove, where all the men are getting leaky and all the women are getting harder toenails.

There are characters of different ages and proclivities, and one of the very best stories is Olive visiting her weird son, who finally comes out of his shell in NYC, which would shine this strange, shaking-up light even if we hadn't spent so much time in Crosby, Maine.

But you have to just go story by story, pick your faves on their own, for the most part (cumulative effect of son's gradual emergence is main novelistic effect). For inst, a couple under very-well-described and thought-out stress says the kind of shit to each other that you really, really can't take back, and would be great in a magazine or anthology, where you could make up your own continuation, but here, the couple shows up in subequent stories with no apparent aftereffects of this ill conversation. Oh well.
Overall, not sorry I read it, and may eventually check out follow-up, Olive Again or something like that

Those stories are cumulatively impressive, and the sequel is just as insightful. Strout's good at depicting the increasing silences of old age.

(Also, along with the Older Marrieds typecasting elements, some of the younger characters get into melodramatic set piece and/or plotty typing, bookended/upholstered by elders. But yeah, every story has its good parts, and the stronger ones support the weaker.)

I'm not a massive reader but I did read a bunch of Olive Kitteridges and the one based on the other town characters.
Enjoyed them more than I expected although they didn't always hit the mark for me, but extremely readable anyway.

The nuances of frustration and like vs love with their son quite moved me, especially in the second book when people start dying.

keep meaning to catch up here, with some other posts, unfinished business etc, but that all seems to get in the way of actually posting.

however, i just picked up Vingt minutes de silence... well, rewind, I saw Twenty Minutes of Silence, Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs (This Little Art - her very good book on translation) recommended somewhere - it's just come out in Fitzcarraldo. The brief description caused my divining rod to twitch (quiet at the back etc), so I picked it up, started and was hemming and hawing a bit, and realised 'oh wait, this is in French, I am very slowly and badly learning French, I should read it in French - this sing song looping repetition feels like it might not be a bad learning aide' so I got a copy.

arrived today, and started on it, and it was like a bolt of electricity shot up my spine. *this is the stuff* - a prose poem of sorts, a policier of sorts. reality is constructed, layered, looped and on a sentence by sentence level assessed, reversed. you get the sense of things establishing themselves, but that the need to know - there is a crime, the facts need to be established - the need to know is running up against reality, or The Nature of Things, ordering itself, not making itself available, and that the rules that govern the protean state of facts, of meaning and relation are poetic rules, facile rhyming and chiming, cadences of iteration and reiteration like waves. sentences themselves do not feel assured things, but are falling apart, held together more by the sound of things than the grammar of any logic.

establishing sentences, to establish the world, to establish... the atmosphere, facts, questions and solutions (to take the chapter titles - I've left out 'anxiety')... to establish the matter of the novel, is picked out and built up from a blank canvas. so it's not so much a whodunnit, as what does it mean to establish a world - a written, a read world - where such things as justice, culpability, grief, guilt have a place. what are the elements?

it reminded me in its opening passages of baudelaire slightly, the baudelaire of chanson d'après-midi - nursery rhyme poems of accusation and guilt, conversational . the opening 'scene' - of the Paris train, departing the station with the dead body of the father in it - is a marvel of impressionistic images, a picture of endings - the end of the world as much as anything else, it feels.

it's hard to grab snippets because some of the force is in the repetitive, contradictory ebb and flow.

Pourquoi le gris autour devient-il plus foncé ?
Je n'en sais rien.
Peut-être, est-ce parce que tu as pleuré ?
Sèche tes larmes, viens rentrons.
Non, Elle préfère pleurer. Ils sont tous pareils, attachés à ce qui les blesse, liés à l'émotion jusqu'à en crever.
C'est la première fois de sa vie qu'ellee voit des monter dans un car.
Et le klaxon pour appeler
pour appeler
pour appeler les retardataires.
Appels, adieux, rires, tintamarre.

(that's a lovely last line - there's a lightness and a playfulness to it all, which is actually where the fun of reading it comes from)

translated by Kate Briggs
The surrounding grey – why is it growing darker?
I've no idea.
Is it because you cried?
Dry your tears now, come along, let's go home.
No. She'd rather cry. They're all the same: attached to what hurts them, strangled by emotion.
She has never seen anyone board a coach before, it's the first time in her life.
And here's the horn
to summon
to summon the late passengers.
Shouts, final goodbyes, laughter, commotion.