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

What Iris Murdoch should I start with??

What did you make of the Carr, Alfred? I am going to dig into Bob’s new one when the semester ends, too

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

The Carr? Mildly dull. I liked most of About Ed.

Oh man. Love A Month in the Country, sorry you found it dull!

A Month in the Country is perfect!

I read Héctor Tobar's *Deep Down Dark* about the Chilean mining disaster. I've started Richard Holmes' monster biography of Shelley but not sure I have the stamina.

v belated answer to fizzles (long after he needs it; long after others have decoded it accurately) re "the road is up"

i: yes, i have encountered this now and then -- very possibly in early 20th century crime fiction (wimsey etc)
ii: i had half-reasoned (i.e. w/o applying much genuine thought and no research) that somehow it derived from the era of e.g. plank roads and such, where the surface would be something you could lift up and lean at the side when digging holes was necessary? (not that plank roads were ever much of a phenomenon in the uk as far as i know)
iii: … at the unreasoning edge of my mind i also had the notion that a safety barrier in front of a roadworks was somehow like the drawbridge being up
iv: "it's been dug up" makes much more sense but i don't think i ever got that far

Oh man. Love A Month in the Country, sorry you found it dull!

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, December 1, 2023 9:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

A Month in the Country is perfect!

I usually love mid-century UK/Irish fiction (Pym, Bowen, Taylor, etc.) or the same fiction set in the early to mid-century.

I’m almost done with Henderson the Rain King. I would rate it as lesser Bellow. This may be a terrible thing to say but I think Bellow is more fun to read in his cranky, misanthropic mode. I’m not really sure what he was trying to accomplish with this sort of Joseph Campbell slash The Golden Bough type of exploration of myth, ritual and archetype; lots of it is less compelling to me than he seems to find it. And after Henderson arrives in Africa, the laughs get fewer and further between as Henderson becomes less of a satirical antihero and more of a straightforward hero.

I finished A Gambler's Anatomy, Lethem. I can't say I loved it, but it was weirdly compelling because he writes so vividly, creates an unfamiliar but convincingly detailed world, and he kept driving the story and characters ahead at a hard pace in unpredictable directions. Those were its virtues.

My eventual difficulties with it were fairly central. Lethem seemed to know exactly what he wanted to write about but his main interest in the book wasn't the story or the characters. Those existed as throwaways, just contrivances that allowed him to write about his real interest, which was stitching together two extremely specialized worlds: high stakes backroom gambling on backgammon and a particularly exotic branch of neurosurgery. Once he'd accomplished this virtuoso feat in the first half of the book, he just sort of winged it for the remainder and let the characters collide rather aimlessly until they reached a dead end.

Front Lines, Juliet Jacques - Compilation of her journalism. Was expecting it to be much more of a chronicling of the UK's descent into terf island, but it doesn't really get too granular on that, good for my blood pressure. The early pieces really drive home how much has changed, both in terms of vocabulary but also of things that now seem obvious still needing so much explaining at the time. It also gets a bit repetitive - Jacques herself in the foreword makes a joke about there being a potential drinking game here where you take a swig every time Sandy Stone's "The 'Empire' Strikes Back" gets namedropped. I really enjoyed an essay on being stuck in a train with some fellow footie supporters and having to negotiate all the conflicting impulses - did they clock she's trans, will it code too male if she gets deep into the trivia, will she be reinforcing sexism if she pretends she just knows a few names. Also, lots of good stuff about queer groups in Eastern Europe and sundry trans and queer artists.

Mystery Of The Yellow Room, Gaston Leroux - Book club pick. Fine as far as this kind of thing goes - gotta admit that if you start including maps of the building in order to further detail your mystery you've lost me, I just don't care enough about the whodunnit - but fascinating to me due to an unfortunate purchase: local bookstore said it was only available in hardcover, and when I went to pick it up...it turned out to be one of those shoddy jobs ILX's own James Morrison sometimes details, with the cover clearly a GIS result for yellow + room. Anyway as someone who's used to a Criterion/NYRB/Fantagraphics mode of cultural consumption I actually found it quite novel to read something where the original text has NOT been lovingly treated. Turned out to not be too bad, though the translation was clearly done by someone better at French than English - thus the detective asking that nothing in the room "be deranged", for example. Aside from that, only one other note of the bizarre - an observation that was clearly supposed to be a translator's note just showing up in the middle of the text, letting the reader that "in the original translation" the word was translated into killed but you can safely use murdered. Ok!

I have a nice hardcover reprint of Mystery of the Yellow Room, part of a facsimile series from 'the Collins Crime Club'. Appears to be the original 1909 (uncredited) English language translation. An introduction notes that Hercule Poirot enthuses about Yellow Room in the 1963 mystery The Clocks, so I'm guessing it was a formative favourite of Christie's too. Talking of whom, I'm also a sucker for secondhand copies of those Christie first edition hardcover facsimiles that Collins issued in the last decade or so - some great covers, Christie p much always had good covers on her bks, h/c and s/c - an underestimated part of her appeal imho.

Maps are p much as fundamental to the whodunnit as they are to the fantasy epic.

I finally finished Dostoyevsky's The Idiot which took me a long time to read. I was enthralled at times and completely lost at others. The ending was great though.

I've now picked up Little Dorrit again after putting it down for a year and I've started War & Peace. I'm hoping to make good progress over Winter.

I've also read a bunch of Simenon's Maigrets recently - quite fun!

I’ve started reading book 5 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Jon Fosse, of recent Nobel fame, makes an early appearance as one of his writing instructors.

I've bought Jon Fosse's The Other Name: Septology I-II as an audiobook but haven't listened to it yet.

As part of my book club (now in its 29th year!) I read Tan Twang Eng's Book of Doors, a fictional account of W. Somerset Maugham's year in Penang on the Malay Peninsula in 1920-1921.

It was fine. My 10 book club compatriots overall voted it as the third best of the 8 books we read together and discussed in 2023 (following Tom Crewe's The New Life and Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds. My favorite was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

I'm currently splitting my reading each evening. First I read some of the recent new translation of Homer's Iliad from Emily Watson. After which I read some poems from Wsilawa Szymborska's Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 for some lighter fare before trying to sleep.

Emily Wilson! serves me right for relying on my memory

And while you are it, make sure you also fix in your mind that her father is A.N. Wilson and not, say, Angus Wilson.

Though I did take a months-long break because it was depressing me too much, I finally finished a re-read of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Here is one of the final pieces in the book, which is particularly pertinent given the current world situation.

Come off it. – The critique of the tendencies of contemporary society is automatically countered, before it is fully expressed, by saying that things have ever been so. The excitement thereby so promptly abjured, testifies merely to the lack of insight into the invariance of history – to an unreason, which proudly diagnoses everyone as hysterical. Moreover, the critic’s attacks are said to be merely hamming it up for the gallery, a means of claiming special privileges, while whatever they are nonetheless upset about is well known and trivial, so that no-one can be expected to waste their attention on such. The evidence of the calamity comes to benefit its apologists: because everyone knows everything, no-one is supposed to say anything, and it may then continue unchallenged, hidden by silence. What is affirmed is what philosophies of all political stripes have trumpeted into the heads of human beings: that whatever has the persistent gravity of existence on its side, is thereby right. One need only be dissatisfied to be already suspected of being a global dreamer (Weltverbesserer). The consensus employs the trick of ascribing to opponents a reactionary thesis of decay, which is untenable – for is not horror in fact perennial? – by discrediting the concrete insight into the negative through its alleged failure of thought, and those who rise up against the shadow, are maligned as agents of the shadow. But even if things were ever so, although nonetheless neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the British colonial administration of India deliberately burst the lungs of millions of human beings with poison gas, then the eternity of horror is revealed by the fact that each of its new forms outbids the older ones. What endures is no invariant quantum of suffering, but of its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the talk about the growth of antagonisms. Any other kind would be innocuous and would pass over into mediating phrases, the renunciation of the qualitative leap. Those who register the death-camps as a minor accident in the victory procession of civilization, the martyrdom of the Jews as world-historically insignificant, do not merely fall behind the dialectical insight, but invert the meaning of one’s own politics: of stopping the extremity. Quantity recoils into quality, not only in the development of the productive forces, but also in the increase of the pressure of domination. If the Jews are exterminated as a group, while the society continues to reproduce the life of workers, then the comment that these former are bourgeois and their destiny unimportant to the larger dynamic, turns into economic spleen, even insofar as mass murder is in fact explicable by the decline of the profit-rate. The horror consists of the fact that it always remains the same – the continuation of “prehistory” – but unremittingly realizes itself as something different, something unforeseen, overwhelming all expectations, the faithful shadow of the developing productive forces. The same duality applies to violence, which the critique of political economy pointed out in material production: “There are determinations common to all stages of production, which are generally fixed by thought, but the so-called universal conditions of all production are nothing but... abstract moments, by which no real stage of production can be understood.” (Marx, Grundrisse, page 88) In other words, to abstract out what is historically unchanged is not neutral towards the matter , by virtue of its scientific objectivity, but serves, even where it is on target, as a fog in which what is tangible and assailable disappear. This latter is precisely what the apologists do not wish to concede. On the one hand they are obsessed by the dernière nouveauté (French: latest novelty) and on the other hand they deny the infernal machine, which is history. One cannot bring Auschwitz into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states in terms of a mere gradual increase of horror, regarding which one preserves one’s peace of mind. Certainly, the martyrdom and degradation suffered by those in the cattle-cars, completely without precedent, casts a harsh, deathly light on the most distant past, in whose obtuse and unplanned violence the scientifically organized kind was already teleologically at work. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what has not yet been, which denounces what has been. The statement that it’s always been the same, is untrue in its immediacy, true only through the dynamic of the totality. Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end

I didn't find out until I'd finished reading Other Voices, Other Rooms that the character Anabel was based on Capote's friend Harper Lee, which certainly made sense: Capote-figure Joel's relationship with tomboy A. is increasingly complex and fraught, while other characters just hit their marks when it's time for generally tedious dialogue. Social conditioning has made them this way, spells out the author, via 13-year-old Joel. It's messed up the isolated misfit Anabel too, but she's pushing back,pushing and pulling Joel as well.
Unfortunately their adventures lead to b-/c-movie scenes (were even crappy carnivals of late 30s not prepared for rain?) and then to re-visions of recombinant imagery from Joel's earlier inner space whirligigs: more vivid constructs, now Extra Special Effects crusting Southern Gothic into subgenre sureties---although before and even sometimes during this, Capote, like young Ray Bradbury. sometimes effectively draws on Poe, another driven technician (whom Capote mentions in his intro as a "blurred" influence in his childhood writing: down deep yes, but in an unquiet grave).
(Anabel seems at first as stereotypical as the others,straight and gay, black and white, male and female, but for the familiar surface leads elsewhere).
Also true of Joel, although after all the detail work, "certain intuitions" about himself zip toward the historic ending, while Anabel does all the gender-bending heavy lifting---but along the way, Joel has developed a case of the shrewds, becoming Capote, so it works out plausibly enough after all.
Have I told too much? Devil's still in the many unmentioned details, and lively. Hilton Als has commented v. favorably on some of the short stories, so that's where I'll go next.

Most of these characters have been connected, sometimes by the author, to people he knew, but Lee seems to have been the closest, judging by her effect on the writing.

Having finished the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska before finishing The Iliad I was in need of another 'lighter' book to intersperse with the traumatic tale of bloodshed, so I picked Sure, I'll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford. I shall probably need yet a third or fourth candidate before I'm done with the Homer.

Balfour's Shadow David Cronin
History of British meddling with the area formerly known as Palestine. Helping Zionist Jews move into the area before WWII and moreso after. following through to 2017 showing a history of arms sales through the 50s, the truth about the supposed neutrality of the Thatcher years and on. Including Reagan, Blair, Brown and others.
Good book and seemed to be a quick read. Came recommended in a pro Palestine group I'm in.

Shlomo Sand The Invention Of The Jewish People
Tel Aviv based academic looks at the history of the "Jewish People" and questions the idea of unity. He sees that a core belief spread among a disparate group of peoples.
I'm reading a section where he's looking at archaeological investigation into what had been Palestine. During which several former mosques were simply destroyed instead of being surveyed or had digs assigned to them. He talks about the lack of evidence before a certain time which would be when the supposed kingdom had existed. Also talks about the Bible having been looked at as a unified historical source which had been dismissed in the work of Thomas L Thompson. one of whose books I chanced on in a charity shop at the time I had just been reading about him.
Interesting book. Think I may read his Inventionof the State of Israel.

I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp Richard Hell
Memoir by punk bassist. I've got to where he's just moved to New York.

I haven't read The Iliad since my freshman year of college in 1984. I need to reread it. IIRC, we read the Lattimore translation, which came out in 1951.

I'm counting this time through The Iliad as technically not a re-read, because it's a different translation than the Robert Fitzgerald one I read 40-odd years ago. This Wilson translation is eminently clear and forceful, while retaining enough metric interest that I think an audiobook version would be very attractive.

I have a T.E.Lawrence translation floating around somewhere that I still need to read.

I read Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey, it was revelatory.

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, which is actually working nicely as a sequel to Musil's Man Without Qualities, finally finished that a couple of months ago. The next thing I read after MWQ was Penman's Fassbinder book, which had an important quote from ... Robert Musil. Anyway, in the Bernhard, Musil's magnificent philosophical openness, and semi-smirking delight in the follies of the Austrian upper classes, has curdled into a disdain and loathing of everything and everyone, author included - the narrator of Woodcutters keeps admitting, he's as bad as everyone else. Bernhard's use of repetition is exceptional and definitely musical, in keeping with the book's milieu of elite musicians/composers, and at times I've been reminded of the third great Austrian writer I know, Elfriede Jelinek, although Bernhard is more passionate and less ironic than Jelinek, although both write with teeth, or blades.

Great stuff, Ward. Did you like Musil in the end?

I did! Obviously there are frustrations - the constant abandoning of any narrative momentum in favour of another philosophical diversion really felt like a deliberate strategy to shake off the uncommitted reader - but with these monster book there is definitely a kind of snowball effect as you get used to the style, and get more familiar with the characters and their world. By the end, I almost felt that Musil could have wrapped things up in another 100 pages or so - or could have carried on forever. And as when I finished In Search of Lost Time, for days afterwards I was haunted by a feeling of loss, that I no longer had this unique, challenging voice in my ear.

Reading short storied by Mavis Gallant, who really is the greatest version of that New Yorker read-between-the-lines school of short fiction imo. Also impressed by her breadth: in the first three stories, we get a British expat couple running a hotel in Switzerland, an Italian peasant girl and a French Canadian teenager - all psychologically convincing.

Also reading very different short stories by Lafcadio Hearn; born in Greece to a local mother and Irish father, worked in the US and the Caribbean as a journalist, then moved to Japan and assimilated fully, getting a Japanese name and everything. He proceeded to get deeply into Japanese folklore, and his collections of ghost stories, while published in English, have become canonical texts in Japan and inspired films like Kwaidan. A lot of the stories in this collection are a little too blank for me, but I like when he goes really weird, like the one where SPOILER a dude falls asleep and his soul gets kidnapped by ants.

Yeah I was impressed by the Mavis Gallant short story I read too (The Four Seasons). Need to read more. It was Jett Heer’s strong recommendation on Twitter that had me check her out.

I read Gallant's Paris Notebooks last month: she records the gyrations of les soixante-huitard with sympathy, their parents with disdain. A few summers ago I spent time with her massive short story collection.

"- but with these monster book there is definitely a kind of snowball effect as you get used to the style, and get more familiar with the characters and their world."

Yes. Half of the time with a lot of great books is spent in almost relearning to read again...

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase: not enough Wolves.

Pet Shop vs America: Just the right amount of both.

i read A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett and loved it. it was a nailbiter. will she get married or will she become a doctor!?! what a kickass feminist epic. from 1884. and semi-autobiographical. Sarah Orne wanted to be a doctor like her dad when she was young and would go on rounds with him but she had poor health. thus, the writing life.
i read Dawn in Lyonesse by Mary Ellen Chase. a short novel. it was cool. like an Alice Munro novella from 1935. i don't know how people from Cornwall felt about Mary Ellen's Cornwall dialect in the book. Mary Ellen was from Maine like Sarah Orne and she actually met Sarah Orne when she was 10 years old and Sarah Orne encouraged her to be a writer. And she totally became a writer!
reading - in fits and starts - No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and my only fear is that all young American novelists will begin to talk like this. But that's not Patricia's fault if they do. and besides people were already starting to talk like this after reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill way back in 2014. maybe that's even why Patricia talks like this now. anyhoo, its a funny book and zeitgeist-y and she is totally a writer to be jealous of and for some reason i can only read a chapter at a time and then i get weary.
reading No One Writes to the Colonel and other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez because i felt bad that i had never read him and i know myself so instead of a big novel i would take baby steps and read some short stories and i think i picked a winner. the stories are very charming and entertaining. and not even magical!. i really liked the one about the guy who steals the balls from the local one-table pool hall. kind of an O.Henry vibe. so, who knows if i will read the novels but i will definitely read more short stories.
i am also reading The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen little by little. its actually very easy to put down and pick up again at a later date. it is about the history of island biogeography and it is very interesting. love the story of this guy Wallace! he would go anywhere. he got so many fevers and bug bites. imagine getting so many bug bites on your feet that you can't walk for six months and have to sit in a hut on an island with no television. imagine all the butterflies you aren't catching! and Darwin may or may not have stolen all his ideas. or maybe just some of them.

But that's not Patricia's fault if they do. and besides people were already starting to talk like this after reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill way back in 2014.

I liked Dept. of Speculation, just not as much as James Wood. How do people talk after reading it?

they write like it. in short bursts.

post-google lit.

sebald had to walk ten miles a day in the snow for his fun facts.

"talking" = their writing voice.

Mostly through the Maria Bamford book now. For those who might be curious it mainly surveys her lifelong struggles with mental illness, an astonishing variety of twelve-step programs, various mental 'breaks', voluntary hospitalizations, and the like.

The tone is more than slightly manic, which serves her as a form of comedic deflection and also seems to be her most natural and accustomed way of addressing what her life feels like to her because she has a bipolar personality. The book, however, is not really comedy so much as a sort of cross between self-help and confessional. I haven't been a consumer of her comedy in the past, but it's pretty obvious that this book more or less encapsulates the essential Maria Bamford Experience. You are aghast at her and like her in about equal measure.

Lucio Cardoso - Chronicle of a Murdered House. A Brazilian novel from the early 60s, released on Open Letter.

It's a Faulkner-esque design. Multiple viewpoints on a house's scandalous goings on, leading to a decline in fortunes. All centered around a beautiful woman.

It's the first time I've read an account of an incestuous affair in a realistic-ish setting. Really well done, and very Latin.

I'm reading The Fire Within, reissued by NYR Books. I like novels whose narrative approach vacillates from free indirect to directly addressing the reader.

just finished Hardy's Trumpet Major, just started Hardy's A Group Of Noble Dames

The only "minor" Hardy novels I've read are Under the Greenwood Tree and Two on a Tower.

robert gluck - about ed

i'm about to run out of hardys to read, just a couple of the minor novels to go... but then there's always the poetry i guess.

currently reading the english (by way of czechoslovakia) novelist edith templeton's the island of desire, starts out as a comedy of haut-bourgeois manners which then turns into a satire/critique of english social mores in the second half.

that'll leave me with two hardy's to read, bott of which would probably be Pointless answers

Desperate Remedies: A Novel (1871)
The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters (1876)
and 100000000 poems

i also have the recent biography by the same woman who did the the dickens biography and i think it might be even longer

(hardy's, hardys?)

wikipedia says there are probably 50 short stories that i should go through and check - i've read a bunch in various collections. penguin has various anthologies of them, probably the same things in a different order.

Distinguishing a mediocre from a good or great Hardy poem is hard -- and part of the fun.