Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023-24?

Finished The Dark is Rising - as noted here

"The Dark Is Rising" - Classic or monumentally boring DUD

…the first few chapters are marvellously evocative and spooky, almost as good as Garner and Le Guin, and the rest is a bunch of pompous stodgy lore that only an 11-year-old could love (NB this is a book for 11-year-olds).

Rewatching the intro to Box of Delights on YouTube is a
briefer and cheaper way of getting to where this ends up.

I finished the Iliad. The bardic function of the poem, which was to steadfastly glorify the ruling class by commemorating (and inflating) their deeds of courage and wisdom, and praising their family wealth and pedigrees, is front and center at all times. The pace can get pretty slow and draggy when it condenses that function into making long lists of such stuff. The real fascination for me is how capably the poem rises up to function as great literature, in spite of that heavy burden of flattery. When it hits its marks, it's incredibly powerful.

Now I'm reading The World My Wilderness, Rose Macaulay. It's set during the immediate aftermath of the second world war.

closing out 2023 with the worst book i've read this year: the last one by will dean

woman goes on a cruise with her boyfriend, wakes up the next morning as the only person left on the ship, which is still steaming somewhere at full speed

this is the sort of premise that cannot possibly end well, but perhaps the journey might be interesting? no. plus completely half-assed characterization and an ending that is honestly insulting. fuck you will dean

Sounds like one that might be better abandoned.

This month's book club selection is How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Thus far, the premise is that climate change has caused some virus or viruses long dormant in Arctic ice to spread, causing a pandemic that affects children first and foremost. There seems to be some sort of redemption building, which is good, because otherwise it feels like an exercise in literary sadism.

Also, it features a talking pig.

Tolstoy - Hadji Murad (second time)

William Goldman - Adventures in the Screen Trade
Cormac McCarthy - The Border Trilogy (a combined edition of all three books)
Louis Menand - The Free World
Various Authors - Great Detectives
Guy Dubord - The Society of the Spectacle

re: McCarthy, I never made it past All the Pretty Horses. I should give the rest of the trilogy another go, if for no other reason than that my brother loves it so much.

mary shelley - frankenstein
was surprised at how different it was to the film versions i've seen. was dismayed at how long it was for a shortish book. could quite happily be half the length. although perhaps one wouldn't get the full effect of what a whiny prick frankenstein is. would never have finished this if it were a recent novel.

As it happens, I finished The World My Wilderness before the witching hour of NYEve, but after posting my 'WDYR in 2023' list. Oh well, pobody's nerfect. It was fine. Macaulay did indulge her penchant for burbling over ruins on a few occasions and the cast of characters, while cunningly sketched, stayed only fitfully vibrant or alive. As a novel of Europe adrift in chaos after the wreckage of WWII it quite succeeded, but from a peculiarly British ruling class perspective.

the memory monster by yishai sarid - short and quite powerful novel about the way in which the holocaust is remembered in israel.

HHhH by laurent binet - more nazi stuff. the conceptually ambitious metatextual stuff doesn't work, which is a shame because it dominates.

stone blind by natalie haynes - the perseus and medusa story. great fun.

the iron king by maurice druon - the first part of the the series that supposedly inspired game of thrones. france ca. 1400. i haven't read GoT, but i've seen the show, and this certainly reminded me of early seasons before all the wizard bollocks. quite trashy, nowhere near the political or literary sophistication of e.g. wolf hall. but pretty good fun. will probably read the rest.

first love by gwendoline riley - very good, very sad novella.

finishing the year with the https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/books/review/paved-paradise-henry-grabar.html, which is great. i'm sympathetic, but the book is very persuasive and surprisingly well written and funny.

the ebook of the new Natalie Haynes, Divine Might, which is Pandora's Jar but featuring goddesses, is 99p on Amazon.co.uk today

just finished paul murray's "the bee sting". next up "the leopard"

Finished How High We Go in the Dark. I can't say I would strongly recommend it. It reads like a collection of loosely connected short stories, which it was originally, and the final chapter relies on a deus ex machina that rings a little hollow. In the interview at the end, the author seems super nice and earnest, and he obviously put a lot of thought and work into the book, but in the end it just wasn't as great as it might have been.

Just got started on another Ross Macdonald 'Lew Archer' novel, The Underground Man (published 1971). The early set-up of the story is economical, effortlessly engaging, and damn near perfectly paced. The man could write a story.

I'm going to try reading The Tale of Genji, the Tyler translation.

So far I'm finding that it's a book that must be taken slowly, 5 minutes a page if not more. So probably over 100 hours in total.

Lucas Hilderbrand - The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After
Harry Crews - The Gospel Singer

as I said re 2023 reading:

Truman Capote:
The Early Stories of Truman Capote (half good, promising)
Other Voices, Other Rooms (maybe half good, disappointing)

sense of personal concerns as generator of characters' situations

Read Atlantic Island by Tony Duvert. A friend had told me this book was actually quite an astonishing indictment of bourgeois adult values and attitudes toward children, and in fact, she was correct, tho sometimes the means by which Duvert got there— depicting sex between teenage boys— was obviously icky. Like a more French and less hallucinatory Burroughs in this way, the book held some sentences that bowled me over, such as: “When you fall into the grip of those who have the right to be virtuous at your expense, you can never get out.”

Now I am reading Anne F. Garréta’s Sphinx, a pretty engaging short novel about a love affair between two characters who remain genderless and utterly ambiguous throughout the book. Digging it so far!

im seong-sun - the consultant
korean thriller about the restructuring consultant of an all pervasive company referred throughout as simply 'the company' whose job is to plan the deaths of anyone in need of 'restructuring'. v good flow and world creation but somehow slight in the end.

I just finished Mike Davis' City of Quartz. Amazing, amazing book, I didn't want it to end.

I thought the chapter on the Catholic church was going to be boring, but it was incredible. I would be curious about the church's legacy/impact/power since 1990. I would presume it has declined due to the fallout from the church molestation scandals and as most church attendance has declined.

The Urantia Book. Curious if there are other readers lurking around ilx

I finished the Ross Macdonald book, The Underground Man. In order to create an increasingly dense series of plot twists in the last twenty pages of the book he incrementally revealed that an improbably large number of the characters had converged at the scene of a murder that took place 15 years earlier, while at the same time most of them were unaware of each others proximity.

Surprisingly, this scarcely believable level of improbability didn't detract from the story at all for me, because the real interest wasn't generated by the mystery of whodunnit, but by the complexities of the characters as humans.

It's my turn to host book club, and I have picked a book recommended by my brother: Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It looks to be a near-future dystopia in which inmates of the private prison system fight to the death for a chance at release. Very solid reviews.

boy, Harry Crews thinks he's Flannery O'Connor, eh

I have to confess to enjoying A Feast of Snakes. It definitely sits in the guilty pleasures bin.

I don't like to dismiss Major Novelists out of hand, so I'm picking that one up on Sunday.

It's my turn to host book club, and I have picked a book recommended by my brother: _Chain-Gang All-Stars_, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It looks to be a near-future dystopia in which inmates of the private prison system fight to the death for a chance at release. Very solid reviews.

I barely get time to read but just finished Babel by RF Kuang - anyone read it? Think I was expecting more from it and it began to seriously annoy me. But, guess it kept me reading.

I barely get time to read but just finished Babel by RF Kuang - anyone read it? Think I was expecting more from it and it began to seriously annoy me. But, guess it kept me reading.

I was really disappointed by it (it had been highly recommended to me), for roughly the reasons here: https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2023/07/02/the-fall-of-the-tower/

i quit it after like 100 pages

It was like someone has tried to crowbar 2020s online discourse into the mouths of 1800s Oxford students and it felt so off even though I appreciate the actual positions of the characters. (The most minor, yet most jarring to me in some ways, was one of them declaring a dessert was supposed to be "sticky toffee pudding" which might sound like a jolly old traditional English pudding but is far more recent! like if they'd talked about Cheesecake Factory!). For a book about language, the way they spoke was bizarre.

I really loved the idea of how the magic 'works' but it had hardly changed the world apart from making existing things more efficient.

I should say a friend of mine who is not white found it really nailed some of his experiences of talking about nations of "Brown" people with white people.

I finished *The Age of Innocence*. Obviously the word 'perfect' is overused but well, sometimes it's the only thing that will do. It left me sobbing my poor ragged heart out.

Oh that sounds exactly my thing. Will see if we have it

It's quite well done

A model of decorum there, Alfred.

There's that feeling that you only really get with novels that you're in the presence of an intelligence so vast and refined that it's like being known.

It's 'how many 'thats' can you fit into a sentence', Saturday.

Wharton's one of my favorite novelists.

1) What should I read next? and 2) do I dare watch the Scorcese film?

The House of Mirth. You'll feel the noose tightening around your neck.

The Scorsese film is one of his best.

I haven't tried any xxxp Harry Crews novels yet, but his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is amazingly good. Tough-minded teacher Mary Karr, in The Art of Memoir, says she's partial to it, while noting how it breaks some of her rules, and greatly prefers it to his fiction, likewise Casey Cep, in an astute New Yorker presentation. Those who do like the novels usually mention A Feast of Snakes first.

xp I thought the film version of The House of Mirth was quite good as well. Gillian Anderson is underappreciated as an actor.

Yeah, I thought it was good when first released, haven't seen it since, would like to.
Here's what I said about xp AC on a WAYR? thread last year:

In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, the earliest memory of Harry Crews is of waking up under a tree with his excellent dog Sam, both of them in early morning sunlight: he's a sleepwalker who's hit it lucky, in and out of place. The place, into which he now centered by tobacco farming, is late 30s Bacon County, Georgia, sometimes extending across the St. Mary's River into Jacksonville, Florida's Springfield Section of tiny shotgun row houses and cigar factories, with the youngest children, like himself, left to their own devices.
In Bacon and the Section, he's the mostly the audience, including that of the glossy people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, so fantastically intact, unlike almost every one else he sees, that they must have wounds under their clothes: he and his friend Willalee and Willalee's grandmother, Auntie.a self-proclaimed conjure woman and ex-slave, tell each other stories about the Sears people: the audience continuing through the creative process.
Little Crews also responds and is responded and susceptible to an increasing number of people, becoming "a parade" of vistors to his bedroom, when he's confined with "infantile paralysis" (nice work, Dr. Colombo). Many of these are people he knows or recognizes---though not the faith healer from the next county---in a new context, with him more an audience than ever, but for their attentions. Scary, especially when Auntie
s dropping knowledge, though things were already disturbing enough, hence the sleepwalking, and now he feels in place (for one thing, he can't wake up in a dark field, because he can't get there).
The second session is even better: almost boiled alive, he now qualifies for actual treatment, by drying light and soothing spray (which becomes a protective coating) while he's under a protective shell, which he compares to the top of a carriage, with his Sears Roebuck Catalog and a tablet for his detective novel, about a boy detective who carries fireworks for protection. He's also allowed to keep an attentive baby goat in there---all things for the twice-struck child---
Before, in between, and after these confinements, he can disappear like a tiny Ishmael, one whose reappearances become more self-revealing, traced in and out of place, for keeps---spoiler of sorts: a mind-fuck evangelist appears, an alibi of sorts for very bad child Crews deed, but a plausible one, as far as he goes, which is pretty far, in a professional way. Even I, Boomer suburbanite, was singed by one during a brief primary school encounter, while preschool Crews and his crew get the extended treatment, as isolation's captive audience.
There are what I take to be fictional outcroppings, but not much to stumble over. He learns from the stories of men (character-driven, funny) and women (action, cutting the surface)--the former told while taking a break, the latter not so much.

“the house of mirth” is extraordinary

“the leopard”, which I finished today, was also extraordinary

^^ otm

I'm about halfway into A Lost Lady, Willa Cather. There's still time for a change of direction, but so far it tilts toward romantic sentimentality in a way that is uncharacteristic of Cather.

My suspicion is that this is partly due to a technical issue, where she fails to adequately disentangle and distinguish between her own omniscient/objective narrative voice and a narrative perspective strongly tethered to one of her central character's point of view. Cather is usually very intentional about such technical nuances, so this apparent leakage of romance into the 'omniscient voice' passages is puzzling to me.

The Leopard is amazing. Whole scenes whirl in dusty corridors of my mind.

I read (or, rather, listened to) Steven Price's novel about Lampedusa's writing of The Leopard, called (not surprisingly) Lampedusa. Now I have to read the source material.

I'm about halfway into A Lost Lady, Willa Cather. There's still time for a change of direction, but so far it tilts toward romantic sentimentality in a way that is uncharacteristic of Cather.

My suspicion is that this is partly due to a technical issue, where she fails to adequately disentangle and distinguish between her own omniscient/objective narrative voice and a narrative perspective strongly tethered to one of her central character's point of view. Cather is usually very intentional about such technical nuances, so this apparent leakage of romance into the 'omniscient voice' passages is puzzling to me.

Oh, wow, interesting. The narrative framing reminded me of The Great Gatsby's, where the distance b/w us and Gatsby works in the novel's favor; it deepens his mystery.

Would love to mention something about The Chill (when you've finished it).

You're right that the Archer books are missing a little humour, and perhaps even boring at times, but I also kind of enjoy their seriousness: at the very least, they're never pompous or unintentionally camp. Plus - he's an optimist about people and empathetic about life's compromises, it's not just easy noir fatalism. I always find myself quite invested in solving the mystery - not the case with Chandler. I suppose you could say - Macdonald wrote many better books than The Big Sleep, but I couldn't imagine him ever writing a better book than The Long Goodbye.

Would love to mention something about The Chill (when you've finished it).

I finished it last night.

The many twists and turns of the plot eventually arriveded at a denouement that was pretty far toward the furthest reaches of believability. Yes, each of the many constituent elements were only somewhat 'out there', but within belief if considered in isolation. It was the concurrence of all of them in a single tight constellation of characters that pushed the odds too far for me. But ofc that's what happens when your audience demands plots so intricate they're left guessing the outcome wrongly until the final page or two. MacDonald was just doing what his fans expected and doing it remarkably well considering.

Now I'm reading How to Live -or- A Life of Montaigne, Sarah Bakewell.

pretty far toward the furthest reaches of believability

otm

I finished How to Live, Sarah Bakewell, the full subtitle of which is A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. It was a bit repetitive, as so many non-fic books seem to be these days, but on the whole I found it engaging. The gimmick of 'one question & twenty attempts' wasn't very helpful, but didn't actively detract either. The author succeeded in making Montaigne's life, work, and character consistently interesting. I'll chalk it up in the 'Win' column.

I had an extra hour, so I raced through a very slender book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which takes a brief four line poem by the T'ang poet, showing it in Chinese characters, then as a phonetic transcription, and then a literal translation of each character's possible meanings. It then gives sixteen modern translations of the poem into English, French and Spanish, with commentary on each translation. It quickly convinces you that translating T'ang poetry into modern european languages is fiendishly difficult to do well.

I've moved on to reading Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum, first published in 1929 and an instant best seller. I can see why. She handles her large cast of characters with marvelous assurance.

I am getting toward the later sections of the Thorpe biography I started about a year ago. It's actually quite a good book, if long. There is a lot to consider in this book and the life it examines, including the history of the hegemonic culture in relation to the indigenous, the shameful legacy of the same, our relationship with sport and its idols, the nature of fame. It's also an almost embarrassingly intimate view of one man's life. I kind of squirmed through the chapter quoting at length his love letters courting his (very young) second wife while still married to, if separated from, his first.

Ann Powers - Good Booty
David Yaffe - Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown
Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per
Heinrich Böll - The Silent Angel

i'm experimenting with a new method of reading while at the gym. audiobook playing in my earphones, tablet placed across the screen with ebook of same book. for the latter i use an app called BookFusion that has an "autoscroll" feature which i calibrate to match the speed of the reader. i am aware it sounds insane but it actually works. i'm too adhd to listen to audiobooks, and pure reading while running doesn't work. i also zone out super hard and find i can run for much longer, do a few extra laps to finish a chapter, etc. i find exercise insanely boring but cardio helps me with stress/anxiety so i'm hoping it sticks. finished "say nothing" by patrick radden keefe (which was excellent) in a little over a week

Jones, Loaded

Getting some non fiction in - an immense world by ed yong (life is bonkers, evolution is insane) and fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

Jones, Loaded

― alimosina, Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:44 PM

I leafed through it at the bookshop yesterday.

Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood - Difficult to talk about because, here and elsewhere, fawning over Lockwood is a) an obvious move and b) already somewhat passé; also difficult because reviewing, even in this informal setting, is about finding a way to pinpoint exactly what a writer's deal is, and her deal to a large extent is pinpointing exactly what lots of other things in life's deals are, so my insight looks pale. Suffice to say I totally loved this and laughed out loud many times.

One I've actually read! It's great, isn't it? I was googling to remember the name of the other book, and found this about her meeting the Pope, which I will now sit down to read
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/patricia-lockwood/diary

Thanks, I was meaning to look that up!

Ted Gioia History of Jazz
pretty in depth history of jazz over 400 pages. Goes into the 21st century a bit.
I'm still on Modern Jazz, thought I'd be through this faster. But it is pretty good.

What is Modern Israel? Yakov Rabkin
History of the creation and results of setting up Israel. Looking at Zionism, its ties to the Nazi Party, the drive to secularism in Zionism. I've come across a lot of this before in Pappe, Masalha , Sand and elsewhere. So it's not as shocking as coming across the information contained absolutely freshly. But there is some dodgy behaviour looked at here. & it has confirmed the links between Zionism and the extreme right wing including the Nazi Party.
Interesting book and quite short,

Strangest genius : the stained glass of Harry Clarke Lucy Costigan
picture book on the stained glass artwork of Harry Clarke the Irish artist. I need to get into this. Still kicking myself for missing a cheap personal copy at the start of the first lockdown by not ringing a bookshop that had a few.
Great artist anyway. Seemed to have some influence from Aubrey Beardsley.

Sonic Life Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth ,mainstay's memoir. So far I'm still in the late 70s with him driving to events with his friend Harold. They're getting to a lot of gigs at CBGBs and Max's and discovering a lot of music.
Pretty great book but I'm reading a lot of other stuff at the same time so its being backburnered.

Andrew Heywood Political Theory
good primer on the subject. My current bathroom book,

fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

apparently this is called fermat's enigma, in large letters on the cover.

I started Morning and Evening, my first Jon Fosse.

"Good Morning, Midnight" was great. Haven't read a bad Rhys yet, so will definitely keep going. Currently reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt focusing on his youth: "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough. Covers a similar time period and American upper class social stratum as the William James bio I read last year.

fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

apparently this is called fermat's enigma, in large letters on the cover.

no, my copy is indeed called fermat's last theorem. enigma is the american edition. is "theorem" too scary a word for americans, like "philosopher's"?

Enigma I associate with Turing, maybe that’s why?

Oh wait

Finished a re-read of Lyn Hejinian's Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, which is, of course, none of those things. It consists of 270 free sonnets that interweave elements of Hejinian's visits to the USSR during perestroika alongside the plot of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It's a great book, much more funny and joyous than I remember it being. That said, I first read it more than a decade ago, so my memory of it might have been a little blurry.

Hejinian is well worth reading, for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. She will be missed.

Today I need to finish my fifth or sixth re-reading of Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse to prep for my poetry workshop students tomorrow, but I also am spending stray moments with a short Michael Palmer book, First Figures, which I picked up over the weekend. Palmer is an interesting poet, for while his first five or six books are quite mesmerizing in their focus on how and why we read and place signification the way the we do, his later works veer into a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring. This is one of his final "interesting" books.

It's officially Spring! Things have been a bit slack in the WAYR thread compared to days of yore, but maybe the pace will pick up a bit in a new thread. Either way, it's time for a new beginning.

Any takers for starting a Spring 2024 thread?

a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.

My grad school experience in the early 90s in a nutshell.

lol— did you get hit with too much Lacan and Derrida?

As filtered through professors like Perry Meisel, yes.

a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.

I gone done and made a new one: I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

I wonder if some of the French reputation for abstraction may have to do with translation difficulties. Just guessing it would be easier to make a long sentence with many abstract terms cohere in a language like French, with its wealth of inflections. I think many English translations try to keep the long sentences but without the inflections as hints they become rather frustrating to parse.

Thanks, Chinaski!

I mean that he utilizes a lot of abstract rather than concrete images, and this lends his poems a sort of French theoretical quality mixed with a strange messianism that I think of as rooted in “the mythic.” Part of my disinterest might be that this style is deeply dated; the other part of me believes that the poems are so hermetic that it takes a certain mindset to find a way into them. I enjoy a lot of “difficult” poetry, though— Palmer’s work simply feels like one sheer surface, whereas many of his compatriots write in multiple modes and in ways that betray surfaces of language and signification rubbing against one another. That kind of friction is ultimately absent from Palmer’s work after the mid 80s, to my mind.