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

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.