I'm in Love With Books and I Feel Fine! What Are You Reading in Autumn 2023?

Sergio Pitol - Mephisto's Waltz (Selected Short Stories)

Pitol is one of the very best dozen or so writers I have discovered over the last few years through translation and his take on the short story is really interesting because they are at times like sketches of what a writer could do with a story.

Also very few writers integrate their reading into their fiction. The last story starts with a commentary on Thomas Mann. A couple finish with a commentary on the story just told.

This could be a bit like Borges but in between you have the story of fictional people doing fictional things. He integrates a lot of his life in them, so they take place while in a place he was put in through his real life as part of Mexico's diplomatic service.

I went through most of it yesterday and in the morning these are the impressions.

I finished Mary Trump's book. It was OK-ish, but didn't tell much about Donald that wasn't already obvious in 2020 to anyone who had been paying even a modest amount of attention and whose head wasn't buried in the personality cult. My conclusion: overhyped and underdone.

I started Evelyn McDonnell's The World According to Joan Didion and finished Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout.

Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson (which is about finding the right words)

I'm between book club novels, am on pause in my obsession with John Le Carré and Dennis Lehane, and am listening to an audiobook of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I'm assuming you are all more acquainted with this novel than me.

I love the story. A fantasy horror novel written in purple prose about two 13-year old boys trying to overcome evil in a small town, and a father trying to help them. It is a good book for Halloween

Henry Green - Caught. Besides the goings on between two firefighters it has some great writing on The Blitz.

The Man Eater Of Malgudi, R.K. Narayan -Protagonist works as aprinter whose front office doubles as sort of hang out space for the denizens of the (fictional) Indian village he lives in. One day a burly taxidermist (!) muscles his way in and unilaterally decides to become his tenant, all the while bullying his friends at every opportunity. This has the sort of cozy, gently satirical bent that makes you feel like you've known the characters for agees. There's a bunch of books in the series it seems. This one's dedicated to Graham Greene "for many years of friendship".

read Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo, which is the 4th? Kosuke Kindaichi mystery (the 3rd released in english) and it was less good than the previous two. 70+ more to go...

On a brief vacation I read The Moving Target, one of Ross MacDonald's earliest Lew Archer novels (the first one?). Now reading Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene, which so far as I've read merits the descriptor: droll.

Our Man in Havana is one of those books I read as a kid that embedded itself in my brain and pops up at odd moments.

xp I loved The Moving Target, and the rest of the Lew Archer novels that I've read. They are like a travelogue of the underbelly of 1940s - 1950s Los Angeles.

Finished The Buddenbrooks, which was a bit of a morbid slog. Each character briefly flickers, chokes, and stays around for another 250 pages to watch another character do the same thing as the cycle repeats. Each character is ultimately quite internal, the only meaningful interactions happen within the family, one or two secondary characters excepted. Everything remains at the domestic level of alliances and marriages and buying houses, with the political developments (1840 to 1880 or so) treated very discretely. I have loved family novels where nothing happens inside / the agitated outside is blocked out (The Leopard), so maybe I just need to accept some dislike of young and old Thomas Mann (he wrote The Buddenbrooks in his twenties, and he was old at the time of Dr Faustus) while considering The Magic Mountain one of the greatest masterpieces.

The next book to come with me in my bag is Mysteries (Knut Hamsun) if that's what's it's called for you guys too.

Finished Mouthful of Blood by Toni Morrison where a lot of her shorter non fiction work is compiled.
Enjoyed it, but it took me a couple of years to get around to. Picked it up during first year of pandemic.
Pretty good anyway. Now need to read her fiction work that I've picked up over last few years.

Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Have had this for a while too and again should have read it long since. But have had it lying around and thought I really should read this and another couple of titles on palestine and the Israeli state structure. I am surrounded by books, quite literally and do want to read most of them.
So hoping I can eventually do so.
I was going to get around to Angela Saini's Patriarchs next but now think that will wait .

Alfred Metraux Voodoo In Haiti
late 50s ethnological look into the syncretic religion in one of the places it most prevailed in.
Quite interesting .

August Meier & Elliott Rudwick From Plantation to Ghetto
70s book on black history in what became the United States.
INteresting to read this when I'm used ti much more recent books on the history which have come out after years of decolonisation and anti racist thought being more prevalent.
Pretty good and i do think I am coming across some details that I don't remember from elsewhere. Not sure to what extent this is a go to source for later books. I came across it in a bibliography from something anyway.
Both writers seem to have written quite widely in similar areas black history and human rights and things.

The Power of Language Viorica Marian
recently published book on the effects of multilingualism on the individual and the society they are part of.
Looks at linguistic relativity and things. & associations created by the resemblance between different words and even momentary triggers of initial letters etc.
So somewhat interesting.I think I was looking for more on something I read about how language speaking breaks down within families . Where if the family is multilingual it can come down to communication between different individuals within that family being primarily in different languages between specific individuals. So father talks to daughter in language a , to son in language band mother to daughter and sibling to sibling may be primarily in a different language than one to another member of teh family. Which is something I came across in a Guardian or Observer review of a book a few years ago. NOt really seen that in here so far. But what's here is interesting.

Oh yeah, scored a copy of Richard Morton Jack's book on Nick Drake from a different library a few days ago too. Bit not really started it yet.

& just read a book on the history of Motown called Dancing in the street : Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit by Suzanne Smith

and David Olusoga's Black & British which was pretty good but he seems to have left out details I read in his other books that I would have included in this . SS Verdala the troopship carrying the BWIR troops from the West Indies to Europe detouring into a storm in waters way further North than the troops were provisioned for and causing death and a great deal of damage thanks to frostbite etc to about 600 of them. Would have thought it was important enough to repeat. It's in his The World's War whichis earlier,
Think I did notice a few others but otherwise pretty good history that covers a lot of areas I wasn't as familiar with. I like the author and am reading through a lot of his work.

The Narayan was a delight! Laughed out loud a few times, and it's just such a cozy delightful environment - will def pick up more of his novels when I see them.

Now on to Junichiro Tanizaki, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi. Currently our lord is still in puberty and having a sexual awakening seeing women wash the decapitated heads of enemies brought back from battle. So there's that.

Susie Boyt's Loved and Missed (New York Review Books) is described by an American reviewer as "a disarmingly droll tragicomedy about imperfect motherhood and fractured families," without getting too cuet about it, apparently (also: New York Review Books). Mentions that this is the only Boyt book published in the States so far, other than My Judy Garland Life, which looks like my kinda memoir. International correspondents! Are her novels good??

I'm about to finish Hugh Eakin's Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America, have cracked open Hua Hsu's Stay True, but am uh hesitating before opening The Netanyahus.

The Power of Language Viorica MarianThe Power of Language Viorica Marian
finished this may have to come back and reread in future. Author is running a Lab dealing with multilingual behaviour studying it etc.
It did touch on some interesting stuff .
Ideas of effect on cognition of having more than one language etc.
Just out I think or at least library system just got hold of it and i got 2nd loan on this copy

Hua Hsu's Stay True

My sister gave me this for my birthday. Will probably get to it next year.

My 2666 reread has reached the part about the crimes. I'm not sure I want to keep going.

Up in the Old Hotel - Joseph Mitchell. Collected New Yorker articles. Highly recommended to anyone who loves reading about antiquated eccentric characters of the 20th century.

― Chris L, Thursday, October 5, 2023 5:20 PM (one week ago)

Commitment by Mona Simpson (in progress)
before that Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood (improbable but endearing)

The two novels make me aware that writing is a skill that perhaps up to a point can be taught. Not to disparage the latter, which I recommend for the anguish of motherhood (the soft unformed back -- from another novel by Mary Gaitskill; the trust (and what to do with it); the rejection later).

i am finally reading some of the various collected writings of myles na gcopaleen. no doubt i'm missing a lot of important context, but nevertheless excellent stuff.

Reading the Netanyahu’s atm Alfred… if ever there was a time

Morning reading of Clark’s Heaven on Earth continues. I’m on the Poussin chapter at the moment, and it is as extraordinary as Clark’s whole book on Poussin.

During snatches of the day and at night, I have been switching back and forth between Stephen Van Dyck’s People I Met from the Internet and Emily Martin’s Making a Salt Ridge.

The former is essentially a long annotated list of people that the author met from the internet as he was discovering his sexuality, grieving his mother, moving to LA, etc. It’s engaging and is giving me some more ideas about a piece I am working on around queer millennial aesthetics.

The latter is a book of poems from one of my favorite poets working today— strange looping pieces that are invested in melding the personal and emotional with more material and abstract elements of language. That it goes between many forms helps keep engagement up.

I wanted to read something spooky so I picked The Cipher by Kathe Koja, it won some awards 30 years ago. Started off well, very edgy / grungey, and an unusual take on eldritch horror. But it was far too long, didn't go anywhere interesting after the first few chapters, more characters kept coming each more awful than the last.

i got about 1/4 of the way through "thinking fast and slow" which is supposedly one of the few things worth keeping from the TED talk/unreplicable psych experiment era. it was not.

that's been on my long list for a while, what's up with it?

'death egg' by nathan duggan. juvenile, vaguely edgy, post-alt-lit-adjacent poetry. bought bc i follow the guy on twitter. enjoyed maybe 1 out of every 5 poems, which is a good ratio i think

2666 update: I just reached the part (in the Part About the Crimes) where the seer appears and tells her life story and recites poetry about the moon. Her appearance is so necessary and so timely; and it feels so much like life, to read page after page and feel nothing but despair, and then to encounter this wonderfully hopeful and curious and worldly voice that insists upon speaking in the midst of so much bloodshed and nonsense.

I felt the same as caek about Thinking Fast and Slow. It was touted as a revolutionary leap forward in understanding cognitive processes, but it struck me as achieving a set of blindingly obvious conclusions by pursuing novel, but rather poorly designed, experiments.

yep.

at the very least it's extremely long for the amount of stuff it has to say, which is typical for the genre.

apparently some of it (like a lot of psych) doesn't replicate either. 400 pages of just so stories.

i heard the same "better than you'd expect for the genre" things about the taleb books. wondering whether to bother with those now.

am finally reading some of the various collected writings of myles na gcopaleen. no doubt i'm missing a lot of important context, but nevertheless excellent stuff.

― no lime tangier

Have read some backstory/essays, so think I may have gotten about as much as I can w/o having actually read himself.

xps there's a kind of manic scattershot energy to black swan that makes it an entertaining read regardless of its credibility.

I finished Our Man in Havana. Highly entertaining satire, full of typically Graham-Greene-ish touches.

Now I'm reading The Knox Brothers, a family biography written by Penelope Fitzgerald mainly about her father and his three brothers, all of whom rose to prominence in British society early in the 20th century. They all have moderately eccentric personalities. I am thankful she takes pains to avoid a reverential tone and frequently leans on amusing family anecdotes, eschewing most of the formal biographic conventions. But this is a labor of love, so her love and respect for her subjects is always apparent.

i heard the same "better than you'd expect for the genre" things about the taleb books. wondering whether to bother with those now.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 20 October 2023 11:19 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

taleb is a totally different beast, he’s an apoplectic megalomaniac and it reads like he snorted a massive line of coke between each paragraph and footnote. i have fond memories of reading it as an undergrad and it was m/l my first exposure to ideas in probability theory but i can’t recommend it at all. for recent pop stats stuff i’ve liked ‘book of why’ by judea pearl (also a megalomaniac in his own way, tho more aloof than taleb) and ‘random acts of medicine’ by jena and worsham. both abt causal inference

I remember Taleb really liked the word "flaneur" and bragged that he had never run after a train.

xxxpost, Aimless, you might also dig Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, which tells more about the Knox family, also James Wood got very upset in his New Yorker review of it because stiff-upper-lip Penelope and her erratic husband were raising their kids on a funky houseboat while PF's father was sitting up there in his manse.

Despite its depressing extended depiction of poverty, foster care, and childhood addiction in the rural far west part of the state of Viginia (where the state intersects with Kentucky and Tennessee), I thought Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead was a great recreation of David Copperfield.

The NYT criticized if for not showcasing Demon's potential final success but I thought it ended on a perfect note, the moment that he realized he was going to be fine.

thanks flopson. i could not face reading judea pearl. i'm familiarity with causal inference etc. in a professional capacity so it would be a busman's holiday to an extent, but also i don't think i could read a book by him in particular.

xxxxpost oh and the Fitzgerald bio also explores how she wrote novels; the author was allowed generous access to the papers, as well as doing research elsewhere.

i reread A Town Like Alice for the first time in 30 years - i remember loving it as a teenager but i cannot for the life of me now fathom why

the ww2 stuf is maybe only 1/4 of the book, and is still the most enjoyable imo. but the whole rest of it is so stultifyingly dull!
the device of the boring narrator is stupid & forces the romance to be held at such a weird remove & adds the useless layer of a love triangle that is absolutely daft

and could i please read more about how to make goddamn alligator skin shoes for seven chapters ffs

the casual racism almost forced me to ditch it altogether; let alone the cherry on top of the facepalmingly awful approximation of australian language as told by a limey gtfoh lol

anyway yep some thing are best mot revisited :/

been reading jarett kobek but the 2nd & 3rd books i read by him weren't as good as the 1st 1. the one about how he hates the internet, but that's maybe the best book i read all year so not being as good as that is still ok. also rachel kushner's "flamethrowers" - 2nd best book i read all year maybe.

Yeah, so where should I start?

novel-wise? at-swim-two-birds (and then all the rest!) my favourites: the third policeman & an béal bocht aka the poor mouth.

the myles na gcopaleen collections i just read were the best of myles (early stuff) then further cuttings. best of has maybe higher highs, but further cuttings more digestible.

thanks flopson. i could not face reading judea pearl. i'm familiarity with causal inference etc. in a professional capacity so it would be a busman's holiday to an extent, but also i don't think i could read a book by him in particular.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, October 20, 2023 10:12 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lol i completely understand

I was going to suggest the Best of Myles which I think is a lot of his newspaper work though I haven't read it through, think I do have a couple of copies lying around though. The Third Policeman, At Swim Two Birds and The Poor Mouth are all good & I have a few more things by him lying around The Hard Life and a few others. I think I do tend to pick up his books when I see them. Did love the surrealism of Third Policeman especially policemen becoming part bike etc.

you can get the 3 novels in one omnibus edition which is all worth reading Policemen, Birds and Poor Mouth.

Archipelago Books, the great publisher of International books in translation to English, is have a fall sale through next Friday— 50% off with code “fallsale.”

Truly an incredible press, includes authors that have been discussed often on ILB.

https://archipelagobooks.org/

It's a good press. I think the postage for the UK sadly invalidates the 50% otherwise there are a couple of things I would go for.

Gottfried Benn - Primal Vision

A collection of Benn's prose with about 50 pages of poems. There are some brilliant prose pieces (only poets can write such prose), a pile on of abstracted viewpoints that could be used to cloak fairly repugnant views (he was favourable toward Nazism, even if his head wasn't as turned by it as it was for Celine), but nevertheless are an amazing read.

It's an often brilliant book, by a piece of shit human being.