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

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.

Joe Sacco Palestine
Collection of the mid 90s comic by American comics writer. Pretty scathing story of his trip to Palestine, what he saw, what he was told by residents. Possibly a good entry point to the situation there. It is about 30 years old but still seems very very topical.

Nick Soulsby Thurston Moore : we sing a new language
Oral history of Sonic Youth member's solo catalogue. very interesting overlook. I enjoyed teh author's biographyof the Swans a few years ago too.

Michael'Ó hAodha Insubordinate Irish' : Travellers in the text
Limerick academic's book on representation of travelers in other media. Very interesting look at representation itsel and how travellers have been villified over the centuries. Some looking at how they are shown in myth and lore and the effect it has in real world treatment of the people. Enjoying this so may be looking for more by the author.

Black Panther / Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby ; foreword by Nnedi Okorafor ; introduction by Qiana J. Whitted.
collection of early stories of African superhero .Does leave me wodnering when Wakanda became a modern metropolis though. & keep seeing levels of uncomfortable racism.

Algiers, Third World capital : Black Panthers, freedom fighters, revolutionaries Elaine Mokhtefi,
pretty good memoir by ex pat American activist. Really enjoyed this.

Re: PD James, there is just such a volume of description and dialogue, and so much scene-setting biography of peripheral characters, I immediately feel the need to skim, and the details and characters are never engaging enough to be immersive and indulgent in a comforting way. Which is to say, I don't like her books.

I confused PD James with Ruth Rendell when I was looking up an adaptation of a work I enjoyed (La Ceremonie)

easily confused! (in my personal experience anyway,
just the names, the period, the adaptations, i think they’re fairly different writers, right?).

and chuck yes - i always struggled with pd james, i think even dislike might be too strong. i just found them v dull.

seeing fiction (to pick an admittedly narrow lens out of the various options), as applying a set of organising principles to the world/cosmos, she comes out rather better. and the operations of a professional and successful fiction writer aren’t uninteresting. “highly competent” is a dull evaluation but also pleasing in a way.

in comparison, for example, to a lanchester, who makes such hash of organising the world, or eg solenoid which, although it has some points of interest, seems frankly lazy, idly edited, requiring high levels of indulgence on the part of the reader. pd james is *assiduous* and for some reason today (tho not before and who knows possibly not after) it’s appealing to me.

I have now renewed The Hidden Reality twice. It's a great read, it's just something I need to take in small increments (which is very unusual for me).

I am tentatively reading a history of the 16th century conflicts between the Holy Roman Empire and the vigorously expansionist Ottoman Empire. It's titled Defenders of the Faith and the author is James Reston, Jr. and it was published in 2009.

I have several misgivings going into this one, mainly because in the years immediately preceding the book's publication this historical period was being actively used by neo-cons to serve their "clash of civilizations" propaganda that accompanied the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That narrative added plenty of fuel to the anti-Islamic surge after 9/11. Among the book's blurbs was one from the Washington Times newspaper that echoed that narrative slant. Further, I remember James Reston, Sr. as a staunch apologist for the Vietnam War. So, I'm exceedingly wary of how this history is being presented.

So far, the book seems uninterested in reinforcing that neo-con slant. The biggest flaw I've noticed is a tendency to use 'punchy' but simplistic prose to keep the narrative pace as swift as possible, and focusing heavily on anecdote and colorful characterizations, while glossing over motives and political complexities.

Started Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs for my "huge books to read before getting up" slot. Very interesting to see a foreign, fanciful look at the UK - at one point he talks about a character "never leaving Britain" but later mentions he "wanders all over, without ever leaving England and Scotland". Is the character anti-Welsh or did Hugo just forget? I'll have to keep reading.

I'm usually an apologist for Hugo's bloglike digressions but have to admit that the description of a character's cottage having a piece of writing affixed to it that details the proper forms of address for different members of the nobility which goes on for like seven pages...I skipped that.

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.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Friday, November 3, 2023 10:25 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

An update: I absolutely love this book and look forward to diving in every night. It's much less rant-y than the 2006 intro had me believe. Still in the first chapter, but he's quickly drawing all these connections across the history of LA and across different fields and eras, architecture, art, Ornette Coleman, Pynchon, pre- and post-war academia - really impressive stuff. I'm reading this in the run up to a visit to LA and CA in early December - all my poor beliefs in the CA myth getting shattered :(

Davis is a GOAT, most of his books are worth reading. Late Victorian Holocausts is one of the most relentlessly bleak yet eye opening books I have ever read.

I've been enjoying Donald Fagen's book Eminent Hipsters. The first half is sort of a musical autobiography via short essays on various artists who influenced him especially during his youth. The second half is a lovably dyspeptic tour diary of a tour he did with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs (not with the Dan).

PBKR, this might be too much right on top of City of Quartz, but at some point you might also enjoy Joan Didion's Where I Was From---dig past tense, re lifelong struggle with her Golden State pioneer legacy of myth, early Cold War schoolbook histories and much else before and after: it's acerbic, empathetic,confessional, searching, finding, without getting preachy, in some curveball timelines that always fit the experience(of what it's like to live and groove and age in this lovely artificial paradise of religious and financial and techno-revelations, of righteously freedom-principled govt.-tapping water projects, aircraft factory-centered burbtopias etc.) like when the scales fall from her eyes again, and/or relate to more disorientation/re-orientation---and yeah, lifelong---