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

Oh right I have March of Folly lying around the bed waiting to be read.
So need to do that and maybe these others

distant mirror is an incredible book.

guns of august was solid imo.

i've had her march of folly on my list for while, but it seems the most vulnerable to reappraisal on its historical merits.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 19 September 2023 11:00 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

im curious about the stilwell in china one

I found March of Folly to be the weakest of her efforts, unless you compare it to Stilwell and the American Experience in China., which is essentially just her doctoral thesis, seized on by her publisher in order to capitalize on the immense popularity of The Guns of August.

I always run into this with history books, constantly debating with myself whether to read the boring but superficially more accurate new one or the old one that reaches further into the ecstatic truth of vivid, aesthetically sublime writing.

If you want relentless accuracy, fact-by-fact (you can look 'em all up!) as nail-by-nail x overview as compelling narrative, try Timothy Egan: The Big Burn is the life of a forest fire in rich timberland---that burned an area the size of Connecticut in a weekend---when the U.S. Forest Service was itself seen as a Big or Bigger Burn by righteous capitalists. The Service is not presented as perfect by any means, but the story zooms from macro to micro and back at just the right times, with the struggle of different groups and individuals fighting the fire juxtaposed with how things are going back in D.C. (not too much of this shit)

Righteous capitalist catnip for The Pioneer Spirit sets the stage for environmental and social disaster in Egan's even deeper-digging The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.

I'm starting into Persuasion, Jane Austen. Her prose is a precision instrument, just a pure pleasure in itself.

xp The Worst Hard Time has the distinction of being the most severely panned book in my book club, which has now been running for more that 10 years and has read more than 100 books.

Austen is gangsta

Finished Matrix. Some lovely writing but it felt mostly like a straight line journey from beginning to end, no major diversions or setbacks or unexpected events. In other words somewhat lacking in plot.

On to The Swimming Pool Library.

Swimming Pool Library is another, like Famished Road, that has been sat over there on the shelf for 30 years. ha, in fact, they are literally next to each other

(unread / unfinished)

I gave up on The Famished Road last year.

King Solomon's Mines does this (offensive) thing where the white explorers encountering a hidden civilization pass themselves off as wizards by using their modern weapons, familiar to me from many a children's cartoon and Carl Barks comic but I wonder if this is where the trope started.

My fav instance of it is in the (I'm sure otherwise not very good) Martin Lawrence vehicle Black Knight where Lawrence, transported to medieval times, turns on his lighter and goes "look, FIRE!" and one of the rampaging villagers just goes "well, we have fire".

David Olusoga Black & British
pretty decent history of black presence in Britain going back to Roman times.
It jumped forward to Tudor times to describe musicians at Henry VIII's court and then followed through teh start of the slave trade and hat it was easier to seize a shipment containing human cargo asa privateer than go through the whole process of buying from sourcel I've just read the cynical treatment of loyalists and black soldiers who fought for the loyalist side in the War of Independence in what was to become the States. & then gone through the scheme to move population incoming from that in Sierra Leone. Which I hadn't taken in previously was a combination of scam and wishful thinking by the guy who suggested Sierra leone. & that he had actually written an article/submission saying why the same place wasn't suitable as a penal colony shortly before suggesting it was a good place for a black colony.
Good book which I've meant to read for a long time but I've neglected since getting out of the library cos I'm in the middle of reading a stack of other things.

LUdd in the mist Helen Mirlees
fantasy novel that was a big influence on Neil Gaiman among others. & I was turned onto by reading his Welcome To The Cheap Seats recently.

Voodoo In Haiti Alfred Metraux
study from the mid 20th century looking at the syncretic religion and its effect on the population of the country it was prevalent in.
Its a bit racist, it is from 1947 so I guess that's to be expected. Probably could be a lot more so so maybe by comparative standards its like totally woke.
Pretty interesting and i think it is well known.
THink this was something I picked up from the bibliography of Federici's Caliban and the Witch . Another book I'm neglecting.

Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment
Scholarly study on the subject of fairytales that I've meant to read for decades. THink I was looking at it the summer of 20 years ago and didn't get to read it

Toni Morrison Mouthful Of Blood
an anthology of shorter pieces by the black author. My current bathroom book

> I gave up on The Famished Road last year.

it's almost as if i remembered this rather than just bringing it up at random 8)

took a bunch of books to amnesty last saturday, mainly modernish sf that i know i will never read again (utopia, altered carbon, windup girl) and things i've bought as ebooks since (american gods). maybe these should follow.

Just started Deacon King Kong by James McBride.

(I find myself making up thread titles for Aimless the way I sometimes make up baby names or others might play video games. I was trying to find a way to incorporate the moon or moonlight without much success. The moon can really light up one's path.)

Deacon King Kong, otoh, was one of the most beloved book club reads. Fantastic book.

What were your book club's objections to The Worst Hard Time?

I think it was just the sheer unremitting misery of the narrative. I actually found it engaging.

Yeah, somehow he finds momentum in misery! Digging through the Dust Bowl.
The Big Burn might have more of that, moving with the crackling, drying flash of the fire, drying the melodramatic/disaster porn potential to plain detail and perspective and scale of physical=mental-emotional (also strategic and tactical) considerations, scale of aftereffects as well.

(fwiw, wiki sez TWHT

won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction[2][3] and the 2006 Washington State Book Award in History/Biography.

I recently read the Keith Richards autobiography (with James Fox), "Life". I found it pretty enjoyable. At 550+ pages, perhaps it could've been trimmed a bit. The stories about the early days were the most interesting to me, and even though that "imperial" phase of the Stones only took up the first decade of their now 6+ decade run (5 decades at the time of writing), the book never completely lost my interest. For someone whose public image is taciturn, Richards seems rather loquacious in print. Not only that, he's a pretty decent raconteur, with a dry sense of humor and an ear for pungent turns of phrase. It seems like his two great loves in life are music, esp. blues and rock, and drugs, and he writes at length about both. The music parts were the more interesting parts for me. It would take a far more introspective writer than Richards to find something interesting to relate about the numberless drug experiences, which tend to become repetitive. But any way you slice it, he has lived an interesting life and managed to relate enough of it to carry the book, no doubt with the indispensable assistance of his co-author.

There Will Be Fire - Rory Carroll

vv compelling read, covering the IRA's plan to/failed attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher by bombing the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Not having known much about this story, it's fairly astonishing just how close they got to pulling off the unthinkable. The before mostly covers Thatcher's policies w/r/t Northern Ireland, bomber Patrick Magee's path towards this event, other bombings carried out, and the during is a fairly horrifying recreation of what actually occurred. The after is the tracking of the suspects, and the race to track down an IRA operative in Scotland who is part of a seemingly separate plot (and he is, but they're connected.) It achieves a nice balance without being "actually, both sides are etc etc..."

Like an old German I knew said of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, the devil saved her.

My third Richard powers, Bewilderment. kinda meh

Also recently finished Robinson’s the dark beyond the stars. Way too long

I am about 3/4 of the way through Harlem Shuffle. It's very well-written. Some passages are just gorgeous. However, if I'm comparing it to his last novel (which, tbf, won the Pulitzer), it seems a little . . . the words that come to mind are "light" and "directionless." It's more of a caper than anything weightier. I suppose it's unfair to expect every book from a writer to be as impactful as his or her best work.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, September 16, 2023

Haven't read Harlem Shuffle yet, but it is apparently the first part of a trilogy. The second book, Crook Manifesto, was just published this summer.

I really loved the two books I've read by him, The Underground Railroad (which won the National Book Award) and The Nickel Boys (The Pulitzer)

Going through Le Carré's books in order, I've now read or reread all of the Smiley novels - "Call for the Dead", "A Murder of Quality", "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "The Looking-Glass War", "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "The Honourable Schoolboy", and "Smiley's People".

I'm a long way away from "Legacy of Spies", the distant follow-up published in 2017

My next book is "The Little Drummer Girl" from 1983, which I remember being my favorite Le Carré at the time

I've heard that The Crook Manifesto is better than Harlem Shuffle, maybe more of a genre/lit (or at least character study) balance, like his zombie-hunting Zone One(clean-up of v.valuable Manhattan real estate, cause you know the plague is over). I really enjoyed that one.

still, the preview of Harlem Shuffle seemed promising: POV of a fence, usually a flat weasel in crime stories, here a scuffling small store owner lured into the shade.

How did you find Smiley’s People? Got it on the shelf, tempted if put off by the size. Certainly it opens well.

It's time again to wind down this summertime thread and move into our shiny new digs at I'm in Love With Books and I Feel Fine! What Are You Reading in Autumn 2023?. See y'all there!

xp I really liked Smiley's People, it seemed more coherent to me than The Honorable Schoolboy and less difficult to follow than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (the two previous books), and brought the original series to a nice conclusion