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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just started Van Halen Rising.

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

Excellent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOL

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

travelling people by bs johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAIN: THE BIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

gutenburg lists only The Lost Stradivarius and The Nebuly Coat

Must be The Nebuly Coat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

but I shall speak no more of this

(ie no spoilers)

:D

Good decision and hilarious expression of it !

I conclude MOONFLEET.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In THE WRONG SET:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost English, rather

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

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