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

Finally reading Left Hand of Darkness, which, not news, is very good.

dow - Thank you for taking the time to read my incoherent hopelessly generalizing (throwing in the kitchen sink) posts. I agree with your point and hope that science and human belief in progress will be humbler and more aware of its limitations and open to a wider range of possibility while not as eager to draw conclusions and profit.

correction: belief in human progress

I finished Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away. I was wondering about the title. Apparently it's a reference to those who walk away from a crime in progress rather than getting involved or trying to help. I guess it could also have a secondary meaning as those who walk away from a fight (as opposed to those who have to be carried away). It made me want to visit Venice. Her control is superb. The prose is unassuming. You never get the sense that she is showing off or trying to sound "literary", but you often stop to marvel at how economically and precisely she describes something rather subtle. Her recurring subject is human psychology under highly stressful circumstances, within a social milieu of midcentury American wealth, a wealth that insulates them from lots of unpleasant things, but which fails to protect them from their most critical vulnerabilities. Her characters often seem to be caught in a trap which is at least partially of their own devising, and which ratchets tighter and tighter around them.

correction: a wider range of possibilities

yes indeed.

Diana Wynne Jones Dogsbody
Nell Gaiman wrote a foreword to an edition of this which is included in the anthology of his shorter pieces which I just finished. I think he has a more general piece on her too. I hadn't realised she also wrote a series that included Howl's Moving Castle which I know from the Studio Gibli animation.
So this is a children's or YA book on a star system being sentenced to a lifetime as a terrestrial dog during which he also needs to find an element of the reason he was sentenced.
Seems quite good so far. Mid 70s book for children that mentions the troubles in Ireland as a backstory for one of the supporting characters. Interesting detail that must have been a semi controversial personal choice at the time. This character us seen to be good I think when Irish were vilified in UK media at the time and still being discriminated against when it came to housing/accommodation.
Well have it part read so going to get through the rest of it.

Neil Gaiman Welcome To The Cheap Seats
Collection of short pieces including reviews, forewords, speeches etc.
I'm going back through to copy the worksvhe mentions for future reference.
Thought it quite interesting. Think it has turned me onto some new work.
Diana Wynne Jones most immediately.
I picked it up because of a piece on Samuel Delaney who I'd just read about in Graham Lock or Paul Gilroy or somewhere.

I have been reading THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ELIZABETH BOWEN. Mostly I have read her first volume, ENCOUNTERS (1923), contained in it. These stories are very short. They are often very Jamesian, especially in dialogue. But they also carry a strong charge of eccentricity, perversity, mischief. I can see the youthful talent here, but most of the stories aren't substantial enough to be so satisfactory.

When she gets on to a couple of slightly longer stories just a couple of years later - 'The Parrot', 'The Visitor' - a change emerges. The stories have more resonance. 'The Parrot', describing a young woman trying to retrieve a lost parrot, is striking. 'The Visitor' is poignant.

In theory I would like to read this whole book but it' nearly 800pp long and I have over 650pp to go. So likely I'll put it back on the shelf till another time.

Having finished The Bachelors I will modify one part of my earlier appraisal. The pacing suffers in the second half as she tries to manage a large cast of characters with a multifarious web of connections and the pace loses momentum. Not quite up to the usual Spark standard, but still very readable.

xp ha I enjoy kid Bowen's mischief etc., but yeah her POV gets wider and deeper as she goes along through the century (b. 1899-d. 1972). Seems to get a bit depressed sometimes during the Depression, but WWII homefires get her going again, and---can you be "on a roll" if it pretty much lasts 30 years? (thinks of Willie Nelson's catalog) Yes.
So I hope you'll come back to this collection now and then. Where should I start with her novels?

I confuse the Elizabeths' short fiction. Taylor's are wryer, piquant.

The Death of the Heart. xpost

Dow: Bowen's early novel THE LAST SEPTEMBER is outstandingly interesting.

I return to a book of which I've read parts more than once and parts never: R.F. Foster's MODERN IRELAND (1988). Ireland in 1600, where he begins. is something I've never known about before.

Tony Russell's Country music originals : the legends and the lost
I think I need to get myself a personal copy of this and work through it dilligently. Descriptions sound really enticing.
& I could do with a better knowledge of teh area. Same wioth prewar blues I guess, I know some artists who I've come acros over the years but there is a lot more I could know and some variety ion styles etc.
THis comes with suggested listening and a decent bibliography for further research. THink there may be other music from similar era that I could do with a similarly in depth resource on.

The hidden treasures of Timbuktu : historic city of Islamic Africa John Hunwick,
coffee table sized book looking into the history of Timbuktu and what is there. It is a town that was established in 1100 that was for years used in tropes about faraway unknown places but was a source of learning for most of teh time it has existed
HUnwick looked into the papers taht are stored there and found things apparently lost prior to him doing so. So I need to avoid simply seeing things from a white saviourism perspective. What's here looks good and nice to have access to books on this and related subjects, would just prefer more indigenous perspectives I guess.

Michael Ingantieff Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
Essays and responses from talks given in 2000 at a conference in Princeton in the wake of the 50th anniversary of teh Declaration of Human Rights. Quite interesting and a reasonably quick read.

Not So Black and White Kenan Malik
a look into the history of the idea of white supremacy.
Quite interesting, covers a lot of ground I have read about elsewhere.
Picked this up off teh new books shelf in the local library. So glad to see they are buying things like this in.
Nice long bibliography to turn me onto new things i haven't read yet.

What I read this summer:

Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show
Enrique Vila-Matas - Bartleby and Co.
Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr. Ripley
Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
Herman Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener

Hell of a run. Sinking into term-time senescence with a Reacher novel.

R.F. Foster's MODERN IRELAND (1988).

I read this about 20 years ago. It took me . . . well, it felt like forever. I probably should have read some other works on the period first; he assumes a fair amount of background knowledge, if memory serves.

Yes. The oddity of the book is that it looks like an introduction that will tell you the facts on each period, but its actual method tends to be eg "contrary to much that has been written since, Catholicism did not at the time imply disloyalty to the Crown" or "Accounts of the famine have tended to overemphasise national factors" - leaving you wonder: who has written that, when and why? And what is the basic statement here, outside of controversies? The whole book is more Meta than it looks.

On the other hand, he's a fabulously well informed historian and an unusually fine writer.

Diana Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle
pretty well written children's book . I'm realising that I'm picturing Spirited Away when I was thinking of teh Studio Ghibli animated version. Though I think I must have seen this.
I don't remember having read tyhe author before Dogsbody last week. Some of her work was around when I was the target age but I don't remember coming across her. She can write really well and subtly introduce themes that are somewhat leftist. Characters in this talking about being exploited etc. Think I may read some more in future but definitely wanted to read the source of the animation's story even if it isn't the thing I was thinking of. Think I've seen a bunch of the Studio Ghibli films so now going to look up the source for Spirited Away

Augusto Boal Legislative theatre
Brazilian radical theatre theorist writes an experimental beta version book about the chance happening that had him in elected power and applying his theatre techniques to governing.
I want to read through all of teh author's work to see what he actually stood for since I think the group that semi introduced me to him whitewashed him heavily. Wound up with a really reactionary take on his work and I think a deep weakening of what he stood for. Very very white liberal BS group who I wish could be kept away from teh subject of race since tehy seem to be absolutely tone deaf on it.
Boal and Freire seem to be writers I think have a great deal of value. Freire has complained about his process having become popular and tehn having its application watered down heavily in teh process which I think is also true of Boal's work.

I’ve read Charmed Life and Archer’s Goon recently, both by Wynne Jones, both excellent, especially Archer, which has very lefty 1980s children’s TV vibes. I love how predictable her stories are - you realise, reading them, how much other adventure fiction leans on tired Hero’s Journey/Save the Cat templates.

Whoops I mean UNpredictable

I finished Poems of the Late T'ang, A.C. Graham. The introductory essay and notes on the translations I found very helpful in understanding how much is, by necessity, lost when translating these poems into English. The translations themselves were better as poetry than some of the attempts I've read, but seldom invoked that sense of excitement one gets from good poems.

Now I've started on The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, Joshua Cohen. The distinct personality of the narrator's voice is strongly established from the first and it carried me forward swiftly and easily into the story. It remains to be seen if the features that make it so distinct eventually wear on me, which is a danger when so much depends on that voice. I hope not.

I am reading Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson and again wondering about class in the UK and the meaning of provincialism and ties to land (and what will replace it). As an outlook, provincialism has come to mean familiarity: one could imagine a lifetime resident of NYC being presumptive about knowledge of that city but as restricted in movement as a person from a one stop gas station apple pie diner passing through rest stop exurban locale: sophistication has been tied to place but will it continue to represent barriers to experience (tied to wealth)?

So looking forward to this thread title receding into the distance
</jerk>

Hi. If that was meant for me (or about what I just posted), I am curious about what provoked it.

Sorry no it’s just a knock at the thread title, every time it pops up on SNA I suppress a flare of irritation. Hence the jerk tag.

I have remembered to return to the book I was reading, BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL.

(What I meant to ask is how can willful ignorance or lack of curiosity other than of one place be labeled provincial in one context and sophisticated in another if as a result what one knows is equally narrow however deep?)

I found the Charlotte Mendelson book I had to read for book club (The Exhibitionist) to be loaded with some pretty heavy class snobbery, amongst many other faults.

xpost youn, I just finished reading Henry Green's memoir Pack My Bag, where he looks back at different group dynamics and shared attitudes on the home estate (among different classes and ages. also eventually the manor becomes a hospital for Great War officers, getting patched up to go back to the battlefield" they are very kind to him, hard for other adults to manage), in primary and middle-to-secondary (the latter being Eton, though he doesn't name either), and Oxford (compared in some flash-forwards to London), and finally to fellow workers, total professionals and lifers, in his father's foundry---whom he finds liberating to work and socialize with, though is amazed and amused at some of the attitudes they share with his upper-class fellows, "for different reasons," he says, leaving us to do our own homework---he does provide some striking examples, though.

So, although he doesn't use the term, "provincial" is something he keeps coming back to, incl. tracking his own attitudes, conflicts in different social contexts.

"hard for other adults to manage" means adults other than the officers themselves; Henry is a child at this point.

Also the influence on group and self (behavior, image), while going through schools, of The War (they died for you---also a kiddie riot on the day Armistice is announced), of the Russian Revolution (ooo you're a rich boy), and the General Strike, which Henry tries to flee, hiring a car in Oxford as soon as it's announced---

He who once scanned every schoolmate's face for signs of disgust-justifying blue blood ("while being closely related to a lord myself").

t some of the attitudes they share with his upper-class fellows, "for different reasons," he says, leaving us to do our own homework

the unforeseen

There's a cost involved "You look awful" (something of a complaint/accusation, it seems) "I received a message, my parents are dying." (Other boy shuts down, moves away

Of course the rich kids and the workers can be seen as trying to nullify fear, so "for different reasons" only goes so far, though so do their life situations, and their lives.

In Almost English, the protagonist is a girl with a Hungarian grandmother and great aunts who attends a boarding school called Combe Abbey after attending a school in Ealing where she leaves her (former) best friend Ursula. She lives in Westminster Court. I think the class differences are presented drastically (and perhaps not with the intention of reinforcing class snobbery). The protagonist appears awkward (and is outright clumsy and dreamy the way girls can be), but the reader is sympathetic because she is so young and inexperienced and the sister of the boy who wants to and does bring her home for the weekend is so deliberately cruel. I don't know what will happen with the fathers yet (but be wary on their turf).

dow - I think part of the adventure of being an anthropologist (or Henry Green) would be to experience the intensity of social and cultural ties and ways of being, which become even more salient when you can cover much over limited ground. It is interesting how estates in Great Britain and France were taken over as hospitals and schools in WWII. (Two great wartime innovations worthy of fantastical treatment as probably has been done -- Morse code, the Underground Railroad ...)

Westminster Court is in Bayswater (which may mean something to London/UK residents).

I recently finished Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, a rather funny and poignant comedy of manners set among a group of elderly widows and widowers who are year-round residents at a shabby-genteel London hotel that functions as a retirement home. It seems that all residents come from a similar class stratum, though there is much policing of small gradations of propriety and manners between the residents, and much backbiting and tallying of minor slips. The main character, Mrs Palfrey, holds herself to a higher standard than the rest, at least in her own mind. After that, I read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. All three of the Cathers I've read have been solid entertainment.

Taylor and Cather are the right combination.

Digression alert! To pass an idle half hour I did some archaeology into the origins of ILB and thought I'd pass along that the first ever WAYR thread was initiated on ILB's inaugural day: Dec. 17, 2003. It was appropriately titled "What are you reading?" It accrued 83 posts in 64 days, ending on Feb 18, 2004. A duplicate thread titled "What are you reading?" was started on Feb 5, 2004. It accrued 146 posts before ending on March 16.

(I know I was both reading books and posting to ILB back then, but for some reason I didn't post to either WAYR thread.)

On that (also partly prompted by o.nate's post* and because I've thought about it before): it's a shame there isn't an easy way to search the whole 'what are you reading?' thread or database or whatever. I like reading what y'all think about books and searching within posts is a pain the arse.

*Mrs Palfrey is such a gently wise book. I think about it from time to time.

Reminds me of Updike's description of Stead's The Little Hotel. He thinks it's uneven, but as usual, goes an aptly detailed sense of narrative incl. well-paced and placed quotes, that his readers has a good chance to guess whether they might like (dislike, or only appreciate) the book, whatever his verdict. Which is sometimes a matter of tone; I think he just appreciates this one (but I'll check it out at some point) He ends with this:

Miss Stead, an outspoken left winger, enriches her perceptions of emotional dependence with a tactile sense of money as a pervasive, disagreeable glue that holds her heroines fast, in their little hotels of circumstance.

"though dying and penniless, is nonetheless consummately demanding and arrogant; and the Admiral, another decrepit Englishwoman, whoe insufferable manners induce persecution from the hotel servants. These servants, Italian and Swiss peasants in the main, and the touring artistes who perform at the neighboring night club....a Magic Mountain[like microcosm of Europe appears intended, though on a less Alpine scale

Sorry for the typos! Going by Updike's review, This book seems like it could be closer to Cather at her most acerbic, though maybe not as good, than anything "gently wise," though there is also some love in Christina's little hotel! Bad love, but still.

it's one of her slighter works (in every sense) but still worth a read. it was worked up & expanded from an earlier story that appears in her collected shorter fiction ocean of stories which i very much recommend.

Thanks! The original story might well be better, considering some other writers' work-ups.

But what I came back here to say before being reminded of that book, was that I've been struck by one more of Green's enviably succinct comparison of seemingly similar behavior across class lines:

Henry, now suitably trained and experienced, has moved up to management of his father's foundry, and goes with his cohorts to the annual company fete in Blackpool, the location they voted for. He asks an attractive, well-dressed young woman to dance, then is struck by "the corns of her right hand," yeah she's one of your foundry workers, Henry, duh. He hopes to have a little conversation as they dance--a few years earlier, still a teen and finally dancing because girls, he told one, trying to be distinctive, that he liked the chandelier. She: "How nice for the room."
But this one doesn't say anything, as he goes on about the band, the music, the food, the drink, the lighting, everybody having a good time. Finally the music stops, and she does speak: "No more, no more." Goes back to her chair.
Henry thinks this is really cool. After a lifetime of competitive chatter, he and his friends at Oxford (soon before he quit, or washed out), had come to the truly impressive sound of silence.
In Birmingham, and now in Blackpool, this young woman had no doubt heard quite a variety of male bullshit, with Henry's line of inane, generic patter available to young men of her own class as well, via movies and mags, with the smoov young gent, or better yet the cute clumsy wannabee, always good for another dance--until, and maybe she didn't know she'd had her fill 'til she met Henry, she has an honest gut reaction: "No more, no more."
He gets this, also in a gut way (as somebody who had also had his fill of many social expectations, or held out as long as possible, before throwing himself in)(also ended up as something of a hermit drunk).

that should have been ocean of story (singular). here's a review by the other antipodean stead from the lrb if you can get around the paywall.

Though she is rightfully acclaimed and translated into English, I doubt Dulce Maria Cardoso's second volume of essays is going to make it into the Anglosphere, so I'll just share one detail that cracked me up: when she was a teenager in 70's Lisbon, an older neighbour lent her a copy of "Rebecca", with the admonishment "read this so you don't end up marrying the first guy that comes along".