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

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?