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

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---

I've never read any Didion. Davis mentions her a couple of times already in the first chapter. Thanks for helping put her on my radar.

She started getting better in the 80s, when, as Alfred says, "Reagan broke her," and she became more aware of what, in this late book, she considers to be her own maudlin assumptions, in the context of Cali spectacles and traditions.

I'm reading *Red Harvest* by Dashiel Hammett. I'm enjoying it immensely, but, never being particularly capable of coping with a huge range of characters, I'm kind of just clinging on for the ride.

mark s (or indeed anyone else, but i feel Mark Will Know), I'm still on my PD James jag. I don't think I've seen this usage of 'up' to indicate traffic problems before. Does it have a specific meaning other that which can be inferred from the context?

One of the characters has to make a trip out of London into the country to inspect a hospital:

‘There’s that, of course,’ conceded her friend. ‘And the John Carpendar’s in a very pleasant part of the world. I like that country on the Hampshire border. It’s a pity you’re not visiting it in the summer. Still, it’s not as if she’s matron of a major teaching hospital. With her ability she easily could be: she might have become one of the Great Matrons.’ In their student days she and Miss Beale had suffered at the hands of one of the Great Matrons but they never ceased to lament the passing of that terrifying breed.

‘By the way, you’d better start in good time. The road’s up just before you strike the Guildford by-pass.’

Miss Beale did not inquire how she knew that the road was up. It was the sort of thing Miss Burrows invariably did know.

otherwise, the novel contains a really exceptional description of a murder by oesophageal tube...

And then it happened. There was a squeal, high-pitched, horribly inhuman, and Nurse Pearce precipitated herself from the bed as if propelled by an irresistible force. One second she was lying, immobile, propped against her mound of pillows, the next she was out of bed, teetering forward on arched feet in a parody of a ballet dancer, and clutching ineffectually at the air as if in frantic search of the tubing. And all the time she screamed, perpetually screamed, like a stuck whistle.

that's just the specific moment, there's a long really tense lead-up as well. really very good.

otherwise recent reading includes:

The Evolution of Agency by Michael Tomasello, which I might cover elsewhere

Journals – RF Langley (again - a favourite book)

A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer's Row – Eugene R Robinson (memoir, and a lot of fun as you might imagine)

The Trees, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier – Perceval Everett. Books lying on a pile for ages, for some reason I had a block on reading any of them. The Trees was extremely enjoyable, but it felt *really* loose to the point of carelessness, but then I read an interview where he said he realised he wasn't being fair to southern whites (it's immediately obvious and disconcerting how nasty he's being), and then he went 'well, fuck it'. and yeah, that works. Both Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier made me laugh out loud once or twice, which is no mean feat. Again, he'll take risks and not worry too much about how well he achieves what he was going for. The meat of his books is in the interaction the artificial set-up provides. The section in Erasure on his mothers decline while on holiday is exceptional writing imo. Tense, managing the different levels he's set up for himself very well.

Robinson - Muriel Spark. The book that got me out of my slump of reading supposed literature composed of indifferent thinking and imagination expressed in indifferent words. As soon as you pick up Spark every sentence crackles with its intent to deliver something sharp about the people, events and situation of the book. There's a sort of mildly irritating facetiousness surrounding one of the characters, a Dutchman iirc, but the whole experience was extremely invigorating and stimulating.

Specimens of Families – Yu Miri, prompted by posts here (really good essay/fiction vignettes of family relations esp wrt the Korean/Japanese Zainichi experience)

Politics on the Edge - Rory Stewart. A comic novel.

Material World: A Substantial Story of our Past and Future - Ed Conway. V good as far as these things go. The journalistic manner... well, i feel bad carping, because one thing about my reading this year, is realising just how much good feature writing there is out there (The New Yorker, the FT Weekend to pick two, have an exceptionally high hit rate for their commissions). One of my favourite books is The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William E Blundell. It's a skill. But extended to book length, the methods and manner are tedious and unenlightening i think. Go figure. Still, the book summarises useful and important information about the anthropocene/anthropogenic world.

How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our Shared Systems for a Changing World – Deb Chachra. easy to read, pleasant and informative company, but i've got 2/3rds of the way through and I'm not actuall sure i've learned much? I've been interested in the infra substrate of our digital world for a while, so maybe i've just picked up most of the info elsewhere, but it feels oddly fluffy. not sure what the problem is actually. it walks and talks like a good book.

there's others, but can't remember for the moment what they are, which is probably just as well.

I would take it to mean "the road has been dug up / taken up".

ah! ledge, thank you. that is indeed obvious now you state it.

i mean it's a little opaque. but yes, i think that must be it.

I dimly thought it might mean "filled up with traffic."

btw I haven't read it, but think ilx consensus finds her novel Children of Men inferior to screen version, and gen. obnoxious/narrow-minded as well.

Good movie, anyway.

i'd like to shout out The Doll Who Ate His Mother by Ramsey Campbell, a delightful satanic cannibal story set in 1970s liverpool, with special praise for the heroine's blind obliviousness to the fact that the hippie she has a crush on is the same maniac she's been trying to track down and who stole her dead brother's arm so he could eat it, and how she doesn't realize this until he is literally coming at her brandishing her dead brother's arm

https://media.tenor.com/i_atQEwIDwsAAAAd/chef-kiss-sam-de-leve.gif

Oh yeah, Stephen King held the spotlight on The Doll... in the Ramsey Campbell section of Danse Macabre. He said he thought The Parasite was "better," but---also good comments by Campbell in reply to King's letter (also memorable responses of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, James Herbert, and Harlan Ellison. Shirley Jackson was already gone, but King brings cogent quotes re writing of The Haunting of Hill House from her "Experience and Fiction.")

Re-read Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, a book which I lost in the move from west to east coast and which I found myself wanting to take a look at this fall. Since her passing last year, it has become enormously expensive, but I bought a copy as a birthday gift to myself.

Really an astonishing book, so full of radical enjambments and fervid utopic thinking that it really feels sui generis, truly one of a kind.

Ilan Pappe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Horror story of the destruction of Arabic Palestine with tolerance of multiple faiths to make way for the state of Israel. Told by expat Israeli academic.
I wasn't very familiar with the story of the Nakba prior to this. Am now a bit more so but want to read more.

Elizabeth Badinter The Myth of Motherhood.
French feminist looks at history of attitude to what constituted motherhood in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Pretty scathing. Glad that Rousseau cropped up at the right time if this is to be believed.
Thinks well written and translated.
Think it dates from around 1980.

Richard Morton Jack Nick Drake
Great in depth history of the introvert singer. I've got as far as the summer before him going to Cambridge.
He's spent time in Southern France and got notably good on guitar

Myth Of Motherhood is v good but be aware Badinter took a sharp islamophobic turn later on.

nice try, sly dow, but you can't tempt me to read any more stephen king, not after i've already read howevermany dozen of his books and

jfc his tics

gotten wise to his

seriously this is so obnoxious

writerly affectations (tho he does generally seem to be a solid dude, and the responses by the other authors do sound intriguing... dagnabbit fine maybe i will finally check out danse macabre)

yeah but anyway for reasons obscure to me i'm now on The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein even though i think i hate it

in particular there's a bit where a mennonite-ish guy thinks lustily of his wife "naked as old mother Eve" and i fear it may be some time before i can wipe that blotch from the carpet of my mind palace

I finished that book about the Holy Roman Empire and Ottoman Empire in the early part of the sixteenth century. Because the author limited himself for the most part to relating facts it didn't at all support the idea of some grand wrestling match between Christianity and Islam. One galling detail was that in his afterword the author confidently writes as if the book I had just read actually did support the 'clash of civilization" bromides. Nope.

Basically it told an old story of a bunch of autocratic rulers seeking incremental gains of power, cleverly lying to each other, waging stupid little wars that kept trading the same territories back and forth, or grandiose wars of conquest that failed to conquer much. On the fringes of all this idiocy was Martin Luther, a shameless egoist, stirring up trouble to no good end. Whatever religious faith or civilization mean, they don't mean the hot mess that this book described.

xxxpost yeah cat, as said on Rolling Speculative, I had to get used to King's writing all over again, especially his big frisky Cujo-breath romps of enthusiasm, but he does know his genre, with digressions and joekyness to minimum in the section about works ov Campbell et al, and authors' comments are noteworthy, esp. Bradbury's.

I'm reading The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon. I wouldn't say it's required reading, she spends at least as much time going over territory I'm already familiar with from other neuroscience books, as she does in deconstructing gender myths. The main message seems to be that studies that show gender differences in the brain are often low quality, highly selective, or unreplicated; studies that confirm the null hypothesis (no differences) are, as usual, less likely to be published; any genuine differences are population level, often with 90% or more overlap between populations; and finally and most importantly the brain is highly plastic and it's impossible to disentangle the influence of our highly gendered/sexist society.

Cordelia Fine's Delusions Of Gender does something similar with regards to the idea of "biological" early childhood differences

good title!

I attempted to give The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen a go, but had to ditch it at the 1/4 point. Tbh I was wrestling with the urge to give up on it practically since the first pages. Ostensibly a comic novel, I just didn't find it very funny. And minus humor there wasn't much other reason to keep reading about basically uninteresting characters doing uninteresting things.

Next up is Henderson The Rain King, a Bellow which I haven't read before. Not to beat a dead horse, but I've had more genuine laughs in the first 10 pages than in the 160 pages of The Corrections.

Fascinating. I found Henderson as funny as a truck, but this might be my problem with late Bellow.

1959 is late Bellow? But yes, maybe my least favourite of his and probably reads as a p racist text now (I slogged my way through it 30 plus years ago, so can't actually remember much about it now, other than that it was a chore rather than a pleasure).

No noticeable racism as of yet, except when the narrator remarks that a hotel he stayed at was so fancy that it didn't admit Jews, although clearly this is meant ironically.

I'm currently reading another Ross MacDonald, The Far Side of the Dollar. It moves swiftly.

I wish I'd read *Red Harvest* in one or two sittings because, in the end, I lost my way with the plot (sort of the point, I guess) and just held on for the ride. The body count in the book is kind of astonishing, almost approaching farce.

The emptiness of the subjectivity in the novel is interesting to me. Right there at the birth of a genre the sense of a character who is pure action, pure verb, driven by an urge to finish the job, to *solve* (to loosen), and whose motivation remains forever clouded - it's right there, fully (un)formed. I'm sure there are hundreds of PhDs about it but I'd love to read more about its genesis.

This of course doesn't nearly explain what he did with the material, but as wiki points out:

The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (fictionalized as the Continental Detective Agency).[2] The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.[3]

...One Man, Two Guvnors (a play featuring James Corden) is an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 1745 comedy Servant of Two Masters (orig: Arlecchino servitore di due padrone, or Harlequin Servant of Two Masters), relocated to 1960s Brighton.
When Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars was a smash in Italy in the fall of 1964, Leone’s work came to the attention of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Leone had used Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai movie Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) as the entire basis for his plot, with some (very) minor differences. Leone received a letter from Kurosawa, pointing out that ‘I have just seen your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film’. Kurosawa claimed copyright infringement and demanded payment. Leone, clutching at straws, discovered that both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars bore a passing resemblance to Goldoni’s play. After some negotiation, Kurosawa and co. were allowed exclusive distribution rights to A Fistful of Dollars in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, plus 15% of the worldwide box office. It’s now been established that both Yojimbo and Fistful were influenced by numerous sources, including Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (titled Piombo e sangue, or ‘Lead and blood’ in Italy) and the western-set Corkscrew.

Judge for yourself who borrowed what from where:

A Fistful of Dollars

Yojimbo

Servant of Two Masters

Red Harvest

Corkscrew

: Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns and Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult published by I.B. Tauris

Oscar and Lucinda again, finally. I first thought about rereading about a year ago. So much prose from this lives in my mind but none more so than this:

“Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet–it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too…we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed…I cannot see,” he said, “that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence…It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.”

…”That such a God,” said Oscar, “knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager…That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing the line first, unless…unless–and no one has ever suggested such a thing to me–it might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine.”

And this, too, about Oscar’s father, a fierce Plymouth Brethren minister who is also a naturalist:

Wardley-Fish had an impression of a killjoy, love-nothing, a man you could not send a birthday present to in case he smelt the racetrack on it, a man who would snatch a little Christmas pudding from a young boy's mouth. But where he might have expected to find a stern and lifedenying spirit, he found such a trembling and tender appreciation of hedgerow, moss, robin, and the tiniest of sea creatures that even Wardley-Fish (it was he who thought the "even") was impressed and moved.

Leaning against the counter at Martindale's with all the heavy physical awkwardness of a fellow waiting for his wife at the milliner's, he read this passage: "the pretty green Ploycera ocellata was numerous; but the most abundant, and at the same time most lovely species was the exquisite Eolis coronata, with tentacles surrounded by membranous coronets, and with crowded clusters of papillae, of crimson and blue that reflect the most gemlike radiance."

Now Wardley-Fish thought himself a man's man, steeped in brandy and good cigars, and if expediently-he had renounced the racecourse, he had no intention of abandoning the hunt, which he still rode to at Amersham whenever it was possible. Further, he imagined himself stupid. He had been told so long enough, and had this not been his father's opinion also, he would never have been pushed into a life as a clergyman. His early wish had been to study law, but he was told he had not the brain for it. He had not questioned this assessment and had therefore decided, whilst still at Oriel, that he could only hope to advance himself through connections, the most effective of which would be made through marriage.

He claimed to have no ear for poetry or music and yet he was moved-it nearly winded him-by the elder Hopkins's prose. Where he had expected hellfire and mustard poultice, he found maidenhair and a ribbon of spawn. "I found the young were perfectly formed, each enclosed by a globular egg, perfectly transparent and colourless."

To be able to feel these things, to celebrate God's work in such a lovely hymn, Wardley-Fish would have given everything and anything. He felt, in these simple, naturalist’s descriptions, what he had never felt—what he should have felt—in the psalm beginning “I will extol thee, my God, O King; and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever.”

Thanks for giving me the necessary nudge.

I'm reading The Jokers, by Albert Cossery, who was born in Cairo in 1913 to a Greek Orthodox family and wrote his novels in French. This one is set in an unnamed middle eastern city by the Mediterranean. It's short, cynical and dances on the edge of nihilism. My copy is an NYRB edition, translated by Anna Moschovakis. This one is not in my wheelhouse, as the saying goes, but It's good to get out my wheelhouse from time to time.

Gotta keep your shoulder to the wheel.