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

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.

agree with that totally^

from memory, some of the prose is extracts from longer pieces? don't think there's been any lengthier translations since as far as I'm aware.

Yeah extracts from longer pieces, more novella/novel length. Then there are a couple of things that seem to be extract from plays (or pieces that are play like I'm construction) and they aren't as good.

There is some more straight prose, such as the study of older artists, which didn't make too much of an impression.

Terry Jones Medieval Lives
Annual sized book tie in to the tv series from the early 00ies. Somehow got shipped to the children's section when sent in from another library. Think that's just a glitch.
Have read a few of his books and thought they were great. Stumbled on his one on Chaucers Knight and thought it really good.
Saw the tv series at the time of release I think. Enjoyed.
This turned up in local 2nd hand bookshop a few weeks ago and reminded me of its existence. So now borrowed a copy.

Paul Crooks Ancestors
The novel based on his research into his family history features a character renamed August after having been kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in Jamaica. It's ok as a novel, don't think it's what I expected. Think I may go on to read something on his research methods or how to do it yourself. His webinars have been good.

August Meier and Elliott Runwick From Plantation To Ghetto.
Early 70s book on US black history.quite in depth and I think I'm coming across details I'm not remembering from later work on the subject.
Not sure to what extent this is a recognised source for later work. I found out about it from a bibliography but not sure to what degree it's picked up on elsewhere.
I think it's good and does have me wanting to read other things by the authors.
Don't think there's a Doug Sahm connection. & only just clicking on writing about the book that one of the authors' first names happens to be the same as a character in the other black history work I read this week.

Ancestral Imprints: Histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance
Thérèse Smith
just got this out of the library too. Maybe should have waited since I have a few things coming soon. But did look really i8nteresting. Looking into the early days of recording traditional Irish music both annotation and early days of actual audio recording..
Do want to know more about this stuff ever since hearing Farewell To Ireland the Proper box set of the early New England recordings of bands from the Police Force and Fire service. Probably before too I think, think me getting the set reflected an earlier interest.
I picked up on a lot of roots stuff after getting into things like Dylan who had prompted a writer to look into his influences in a book I read in the early mid 80s and also artists like Nick cave and the Gun Club who were investigating root sinfluences from a non purist perspective. Which all may reflect an earlier taste I hadn't fleshed out much before.
That Tony Russell book on early country ties in too. So basically fleshing out things i have a vague interest in.

I recently read The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia. This is the 2nd of his books that I've read, and I didn't like it as much as the other one (To Each His Own). That one was more psychological, filtered through the perspective of one main character. This one takes a more omniscient perspective and purposely keeps the characters somewhat anonymous - even to the point of having chapters which are just dialog of unidentified voices. Its a more journalistic approach to describing a sociopolitical situation. It's admirably compressed and ingenious in rendering the reality of the "mafia" in Sicily in the mid-20th century, but it just didn't have the same emotional heft for me.

There's a good Damiano Damiani film version of that. Lee J. Cobb as the don!

Next up for the book club: Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn. A first novel by a Hawaiian author that won the PEN/Faulkner in 2020 for best debut novel. Looks like a good read.

Commitment is remarkable so far for its flatness, which seems deliberate and do not remember from her other novels. So there is a choice and one could change.

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

― Stevo

I am reading my second Hanne Ørstavik book and she's quite incredible but very hard going thematically. stylistically she's very exact and very easy to read, a real pleasure, but thematically she's just unstinting -- the other one I read was about her partner's cancer, this one's about a pastor reckoning with suicide of both friends and parishioners. remarkable, remarkable writer, really honestly breathtaking, but I may give myself a little space before I try the third of her books that's been translated into English

Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Israeli historian without a Zionist agenda looks back at the setting up of the state. Maybe that's more with an anti Zionist stance.
So is exposing the extent to which anti Arab feeling was there from the start.like it's not a bug it's a feature.
Quite good so far and I should have got to this sooner. Picked it up from a charity shop a couple of years ago. Picked up a few things on Palestine and Zionism that have sat around waiting to be read. So really is about time.

The Evolution of Human Rights Paul Gordon Lauren
History of the idea of Human Rights. Goes back to before Magna Carta. I was struck by people apparently viewing rights as tangible in themselves instead of hopefully as a mutual understanding in a societal network or practically as leverage in a legal setting. So thought I'd better learn more about how they were understood widely.

i thought the start of this book seemed familiar, but perhaps he's trying to point out that finding bodies in a ditch is quite common in the 87th precinct. got another 40 pages in and found an ocr error highlighted. checked records and i'd read in before... in february. wtf.

was only 120 pages so i finished it anyway, started saturday evening, finished monday morning, so the damage to my stats wasn't that great.

Anyone read Elsa Morante's Lies and Sorcery? It just got the NYRB treatment and it looked great at the bookstore yesterday.

Really looking forward to reading it in a few months. Only one of her novels I haven't read

William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet

Think Julius Caesar is the only of the major tragedies left.

good writer

shame about the bayesian priors

I started The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, something I heard about through ILB. Off to a nice start!

Finished Emily Martin’s book of poems as well as Steven Van Dyck’s novel, now onto nightly enjoyment of Laura Riding’s Close Chaplet and Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead. Riding is wonderful as always, and this is my second Hjorth novel since her Will & Testament was such a hypnotic and intense psychosexual family drama.

https://i.imgur.com/m1zUnN9.jpg

Continuing apace with Hjorth, started Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, a book inherited from my grandmother after she passed. Dense, informative, and horrible in every way one
might imagine.

Carr, Fire in the Belly
Neale, Closing the Gap
O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube
Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins
Phillips, Terrors and Experts

This book is about psychoanalysis but looked interesting. The patient comes to the analyst for expert guidance through the dark wood, the way Virgil guided Dante. It would be worth reading about how that works out in practice (and quotations abound: Kafka, Stevens, Woolf, Johnny Rotten). The book turned out to be about everything but that.

Descartes' cogito famously started by doubting the existence of everything, but found certainty in the existence of the doubt, and hence the mind (D. thought he could recover the entire world). Phillips does something similar, but for him, the only certainty is Freudian theory (but most of that is now optional too). We know that there is a unconscious, and that there are fears from infancy (e.g. of castration), and that dreams have hidden meanings, because Freud said so. But that is all we know. So the reader gets unanswerable questions like:

So instead of asking, Is there an unconscious?, we might ask, In what sense are our lives better if we live as though there is one?

If there was no such thing as repetition, what would we be using fear to explain? If there was no repetition -- if we stopped believing in such a thing -- what self would we have knowledge of?

the question, who are we dreaming for? is bound up with the question, What kind of object is the dream for us? What do we want to use dreams to do for us?

Spoiler: there are no experts. Phillips describes a world in which the analyst and the patient float in a void, neither knowing what they are doing, while orbiting the fixed reference point of Freud's vocabulary. The unasked question is whether it is of any help to anyone except the analyst who is getting paid for it. The reader must have a total commitment to the ritual of psychoanalysis, while renouncing any justification for it. I don't have any such commitment, and this short book was a very long slog.

I've launched into Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk. It's a first person narrative and unfortunately I'm not really enjoying the voice of the character who is delivering every sentence and every thought in the book -- although it feels like the author intended readers to rather like and admire the narrator. To me the narrator seems too much like an ersatz 'wise person' whose philosophy is eccentric, but still intended to be insightful and admirable, but comes across to me as just a bunch of random apothegms that don't add up to anything much. I'm about 90 pages into it. I'll read some more tonight, but may just set it aside if I continue not 'feeling it'.

Vashti Bunyan Wayward: Just Another Life To Live
Quite charming book , really enjoying it. Read the first third or something similar in one sitting. So now she's on the walk to Skye.
She;s just had boyfriend Robert dump even more of her stuff to show she doesn'ty need it. Without prior warning
So sounds like she's going through traumatic events but is more reflective of it than anything. Talking about the process of losing naivete etc.
I think I need to hear teh Immediate recordings a bit more thoroughly and give the Diamond Day a few more spins.

I’ve also started morning reading Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum , a pretty dense if interesting book chronicling the formation of the US poetry canon between 1940 and 1990, with especial bile saved for the advent of the “program era” and the myth of the stable subject’s “voice” as an emblem of American greatness. It’s equal parts information and polemic, like other Rasula books. The man has read a lot of utter shit to reach his conclusions— I applaud his fortitude.

Samuel Beckett - Three Novellas
L.F. Celine - Fable for Another Time

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

i just finished Cortázar's Blow Up and Other Stories. Absolutely loved this collection. For me, he has a lot of the formal invention of Borges with way more emotional punch.

What do people think of The Pursuer, the longest story about a Charlie Parker jazz figure? There is a bit of hep cat to the writing but I really loved this story - the writing seemed to try to capture a bebop fervor without resorting to Beat poetry tricks. I guess I'm going to read Hopscotch at some point.

I started Mike Davis' City of Quartz last night. Any initial trepidation about dryness was immediately blasted away - this reads like a Caro book written by an angry guy with a sandwich board - every word is chosen to inflame.

I went ahead and finished Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I just had to accept that, for me, the character of the narrator as a kind of silly far-fetched caricature of the 'wise old crone', even if caricature was not exactly the author's intention.

I finished The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. Nominally science fiction, for most of its length it reads more like an idiosyncratic form of nature writing. The book it most reminds me of is Edward Abbey's memoir of living as a park ranger alone in a cabin in a desolate desert in Utah, Desert Solitaire. Like Abbey, Haushofer's narrator also evinces a strong preference for the company of animals over that of her own species. The most lyrical passages involve her love for her adopted dog, Lynx. The book is also often repetitive, but I guess that the life of a subsistence farmer would be fairly repetitive.

What do we think of Ian Kershaw? I'm thumbing through The Global Age: 1950-2017 at the library and it looks fine for a airplane trip this week.

Algiers Third World Capital Elaine Mokhtefi
memoir of writer who moved to Paris in the early 50s then Algeria in the early 60s after falling in love with an activist from there.
I've just read about her knowing Frantz Fanon around the time he died. I hadn't realised he wasa war hero.
Pretty good so far, I think I got turned onto this from looking up Stokely Carmichael in the library systen after finding a book by him in a bibliography of something I read recently. I think he appears later on in this but not got that far so far. I know he wound up there when he was on the run as did Timothy Leary I think.

disastrous period of reading to the point where I wondered why the hell anybody reads fiction at all, fully nauseated by what passes for higher literary forms and modes. i may cover the contributing factors and partial recovery from same at some point (finally picking up the percival everett books lying around helped in part - thanks Tim).

anyway, just picked up a PD James, Mind to Murder, who was always a favourite of my mum's and many others of that generation ofc. her books are always extremely well *put together*, efficient establishing of scene, relationships, motivations etc, impressively so, but for all that I find them a bit colourless. these days the quality of their descriptions and construction makes them very good as period documents, evoking what has to be considered I suppose a different age (ie one in which I grew up, or immediately preceding that period), but one that no longer maintains. Or if does maintain at all it's in remnants and recollections in certain mental, social, cultural or geographical enclaves (daily telegraph, home counties, reruns on britbox etc).

This is set in a mental or psychiatric clinic and I'm v much enjoying that slightly colourless mood tbh.