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

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.

Got my bundle from the Sublunary editions sale.

Osvaldo Lamborghini - Two Stories
Horacio Quiroga - Beyond

Really good to go much much deeper into Latin American writing with these two short translations.

I finished American Poetry Wax Museum, which truly is the most important book to understanding the US poetry canon. (Returning to discussions of yesteryear, it also does a handy job of explaining why a mediocre poet like Robert Lowell continues to be so ‘popular’). Highly recommended for those interested in that kind of thing.

Have since plowed through:
- Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In: a fine if a little too neat book of poems by young psychoanalytic theorist and queer scholar. Honestly was a little bored reading it.

- Zan de Parry, Put It In See What It Does: de Parry is one of my favorite living poets, and the way this large chap absolutely nails the cadences and verbiage of middle America in an earnest and not-mocking way is incredible. Can’t wait for this guy’s first larger-press book this year.

- Oswell Blakeston, The Cobra King: A collection of pithy queer erotic poems from this legend of the 20th century. Excellent small book.

Like others, I am currently reading About Ed. Per usual, Bob’s prose is incredible, though I expect things to get more messy as I am only two sections in.

It will -- in the best sense.

I read Lawrence Block's *Sins of the Fathers*. I loved how stripped back it was (even for a noir) but the central theme was kind of on the nose.

Now reading Barbara Pym's *Quartet in Autumn* (my first Pym). It's essentially a comedic miniature about the 'grey lives, thinly led' of four characters approaching retirement but there is something savage about it, almost existential. The comedy comes from how straight Pym plays it: there is no attempt to ennoble the characters, no vast secret visionary interiority (take your pick: Ford, Updike, Salter etc); equally there is no accumulative undertow, no sense of something being 'held back', like *Remains of the Day* or whatever. There's lots of Larkin here, some Patrick Hamilton. The author she most reminds me of is Elizabeth Taylor, although there is a sense that at least love can save us in Taylor's books. Maybe it's just the shitty December weather but dang, it's hitting quite hard.

I love the Scudder books but haven't read that one - my local charity shop has a copy so might pick it up. Yes, Block's recognisable stamp (for me) is that strange combination of subtlety and sudden over-on-the-noseness (as well as his meticulous but nigh-invisble mystery plotting).

I like reading old kids books at Christmas and this year its "The Dark is Rising", which I didn't read as a child because there's no anthropomorphic animals as main characters. It's very good on atmosphere in a way that I appreciate as an adult but probably would've bored me as a child. Incredible sound design.

The early Scudder books (Sins of the Fathers is the first) are thinner, more straightforward mystery novels. There's a three-year publication gap between the third (Time to Murder and Create (1977)) and fourth (A Stab in the Dark (1981)) books, and you could almost say the series doesn't really start until then.

I really enjoyed "Eight Million Ways to Die" but "Ginmill" (four years later) is a whole other, spectacular thing

The book version of 'it gets good in S9'!

It will -- in the best sense.

Osvaldo Lamborghini - Two Stories

Please let me know what you make of this one. I'm a big big fan of Sublunary, and I have pretty decent exposure to experimental writing, but I thought this was genuinely complete nonsense, a chaotic surface with nothing underneath.

Didn't think much of the first story, but the second held some interest with it's exploration of different relationships and sexualities in that period of oppression in Argentina's history. It reminded me a little of Hilda Hilst's writing though yeah a lot more chaotic (or modernist lol)

Would probably get hold of another book of his, were it to be translated, which I am not sure it will.

Osvaldo Lamborghini sounds like a mysterious author from a Bolano novel.

There is a quote by him in the PR for the book:

"It scares me."

I am guessing we should begin a new thread for winter, yes? I will do so later today.

Glück’s About Ed seems to find me weeping over my oatmeal every morning, an image just bathetic enough that I have to question why I am crying— is it for Bob? For Ed? For all of my dead friends? Past loves? Who knows. It’s an incredible book.

A new WAYR thread has been hatched:

Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023?