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

Time to put aside the sultry pastimes of summer and say farewell to Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?. I recommend you settle down in a corner where the light is adequate for reading. You don't want to ruin your eyes, do you?

I'm partway into Persuasion, Jane Austen's final completed book -- according to the overly long Introduction that I hurriedly skipped past. Unlike its tedious Introduction, this book slaps!

i just read havana glam, attributed to wu ming 5. a series of epigraphs begins the second part of the novel, ectopistes migratorius, including one attributed to johnny rotten in a 1977 nme interview: "david bowie's cuban period represents the first serious attempt to make socialism sexy." alternate history. in 2045, president alfred albert wank is supporting a project by theoretical physicists jurgen grabowski and peter hans goldbaum to send temponauts back to 1944 to force the americans to carry out the plans they drafted to obliterate the soviet union with nuclear weapons. this is the only way to halt the vietnam war, the rise of the counterculture, leftist movements around the world, and the final war of 2022. first part: chrome-spangled americana and jazz on the radio, a tender european evocation of the golden age, occasionally channeling philip k. dick, with the first temponaut pursued by the oss as a nazi spy, then running afoul of james forrestal, and materializing among the navajo (i will stereotype: europeans love american indians, jazz, reggae, which will come in later, all of which they romanticize as noble savagery). second part, second temponaut, after the wank government learns of his failure reading the ripples of time through official archives, goes back to complete the job. there is a lengthy interlude in jamaica, with the second temponaut, having decided to continue his fight against communism within the intelligence community, taking part in jlp/pnp street fights (dueling agencies, cia and cuban intelligence), with wank's own political struggle in the background (dueling parties, reconstruction vs. tradition). third part, third temponaut, third attempt in the form of a cultural atomic bomb. the results of the instability in time are listed: this is lengthy, and includes not only the return of the passenger pigeon, ectopistes migratorius, but also david bowie's conversion to communism. this—sending bowie to havana—was part of the wank scheme, it seems, to disrupt cuban communism with individualism, hedonism, rebellious fashion, and music celebrating chemical and sexual excess. wank falls. bowie meets the first temponaut on navajo land. skip to the epilogue. good pulpy sci-fi whatever the political message if there was one.

now reading Thomas Seethaler's The Tobacconist, an affecting but somewhat ominous coming-of-age story set in Vienna in 1937

About to start Lark Ascending, by Silas House. Another book club book I had never heard of till this month's host picked it.

David Olusoga Black & British
Long history of black presence in Great Britain and some British presence elsewhere. I like Olusoga's writing and this is really good. Gives more depth to some stories I've come across elsewhere.
Don't think I'd quite come across the interwoven story of British loyalist blacks from the American colonies, Nova Scotia, the Sierra Leone settlement attempts, Equiano, what a scam the initial set up was, proximity of slaving network and on in quite this depth before.
There's probably at least one book fully dedicated to the story though. &;here it's one story out of many from 500+ years covered. Book is 500+ pages long so I shouldn't have backburnered it to the extent that I did

For The Many Not The Few
Graphic novel looking at popular uprisings in Britain over 700 odd years.
With a linking narrative of a white grandfather talking to his part Indian granddaughter and telling her about these events.

Lark Ascending is a very quick read; I started it yesterday and am halfway through it. It's a dystopian novel that owes a huge debt of gratitude to The Handmaid's Tale, both the book and the show. It's not bad. He writes well enough to make me want to know what happens next.

Have read a few things large and small since my last check-in, but am currently reading Loop, a book of poetry by John Taggart. I had never read him before, but a friend gave this to me, and I’ve taken to it— strange, insistent poems and repeated images in a wide variety of forms. Hypnotic, in a way. A new poet to investigate more!

Flaubert - Madame Bovary. The books canon is good.

I read Galveston by Nic Pizzolato, the creator of True Detective. It was riddled with cliché but he writes place beautifully and that was enough to carry the relatively thin storyline.

To stay with the TD world for a bit longer, I started a book of Thomas Ligotti short stories. The story I read last night, 'The Frolic', is a curious thing. There was a Cheever vibe in the uneasy middle-class calm of the set and setting but everything was underlit by this kind of diseased atmosphere that built as the story progressed. I fell asleep pretty much directly after I'd finished the story and had the most intense bout of sleep paralysis, where I was being consumed by a sallow, clinging fog. Which is a 100% recommend in my book.

I think my reading of this would benefit from some knowledge of Lovecraft, of which mine is cursory at best. Is there a Lovecraft text I should start with or a book of criticism I could get?

I need to reread Madame Bovary to recall the role of the pharmacist and the situation/place/setting/environment.

In Deacon King Kong, I am relishing the multi-generational and multicultural proximity, nicknames, differences in urgency (across and in spite of generational divides), but I am still reading and figuring out what the author has to say in his personal canon ... even if they are stories told and heard for pleasure ...

which translation of bovary?

i'm rereading nazi literature in the americas by roberto bolaño with some friends. haven't read it in years but it's a surprisingly durable bit. not among his best but bolaño was a formative writer for me when i was in high school and returning to his work it always feels like a reservoir i can still tap.

i just finished middlemarch. i don't care what anyone says, and this might surprise you, but it was good. there i said it.

Bruno Bettelheim Uses Of Enchantment
Mid 70s work where German psychologist looks at fairy tales as analogies of personal development. How the self matures at.
Pretty interesting I guess. I think that might just about fit with the ideaof folk tale as passer on of societal values and customs etc which is what they traditionally did. I haven't been fully convinced by bits of it like him talking about a class full of kids who were convinced that paper models of the comet Kohoutek somehow were the comet and treating them with a lot less respect after its pointed out that they're not. Seems like something missing in the retelling.
I'm finding it interesting anyway though not totally convinced.

yeah, i'm going to request it from my library.

can anyone recommend a recent, tight, 200 pages or so crime book that's not a turn down for a long plane flight?

"which translation of bovary?"

Davis.

Has anyone attempted to read different translations of the same book side by side? After reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang, I became aware of mistakes that were simple vocabulary and made me question my understanding of the original text. I could have detected those errors (I think).

I read that Han defended that translation after a lot of ppl criticised it, but that may just be professional courtesy

That's interesting, re: Vegetarian. There hasn't been an evaluation of much Korean literature in translation, mostly because it's quite a recent thing to have this much Korean Lit in English.

Whereas there is much more Japanese literature in English over decades with some commentary on past translator's efforts.

As I don't know any source languages (the language I grew up with I've forgotten through lack of use) I just look at the literary fluency of the English I am reading.

xp - Deborah Smith has gone on to translate Kang's other books too..

I'm wondering if choice of first language matters, and if the author has discretion (or influence or true freedom of agency) or whether it lies with the publisher.

Interesting discussion about the translation of The Vegetarian here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/han-kang-and-the-complexity-of-translation

can anyone recommend a recent, tight, 200 pages or so crime book that's not a turn down for a long plane flight?

We read Blacktop Wasteland for book club. It's an entertaining read, although it does have a couple of scenes that make you go, "Oh, come ON!"

I've really enjoyed the series by Caimh McDonnell, called somewhat tongue-in-cheek "the Dublin trilogy" (which is now up to something like 7 books). The first one is called A Man with One of Those Faces. I find him vastly entertaining.

i read both Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. the guy writes plots where the narrative never stops moving and most people don't escape alive, based on that pair. he's a good one, though for sure the twists and turns of the tales are frequently outlandish. i'd recommend both, they're swift reads. i intend to read his other pair.

i'm reading All God's Children by Arthur Lyons, the second in his Jacob Asch series. thus far in the story, it's another '60s L.A. counterculture gone to '70s seed private eye tale (similar to the first novel The Dead Are Discreet), with Jake hunting down a missing girl caught between a religious cult, a post-religious cult deprogrammer, a drug-dealing biker gang, and several others. thanks to ian for the recommendation on this series, it's excellent. apparently Lyons wrote a lot about cults prior to tackling this detective series, and he seems to know the inner workings of them inside-out.

the twists and turns of the tales are frequently outlandish.

(Last night I dreamt that I couldn't figure out subject verb order from glosses of ancient Greek in textbooks because I was in front of people and skimming through grammars they handed to me. It was all very frustrating and pointless, the way most dreams seem to be once you get older, and I woke up late. I need to check out that link. I am still reading Deacon King Kong and making sense of it. Both books I've read by McBride point out that black slaves in the U.S. were kept from learning how to read; it seems to have lasted or had effects long after slavery ended.)

Lud in the Most Hope Mirrlees
Fantasy novel about a town on a frontier with Fairyland that I don't know if I'd guess came from as early as it does. May just be down to pervasive influence or something.
Doesnt seem overly dated though not sure exactly what I would think a book of its time that was would be like.
Trying to read it while half asleep and fluey. Think I'm enjoying it but not as deeply enchanted as it sounded from a description of it by Neil Gaiman had me hoping.
So hope it's something I can revisit.

That book seems to get namechecked a lot.

Finished Loop by John Taggart, moving onto Mohammed Zenia’s Tel Aviv, a book of poems that is doing a lot of interesting work around colonialism’s signifiers while also being very strangely beautiful. I don’t know the poet well, but have read with him twice in somewhat strange circumstances, and have always enjoyed his work— glad I found out he had a book!

I finished Lark Ascending, it was a lovely book. I also finished The Elegant Universe, which seemed like a real accomplishment. I started in on another of Greene's books, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. I find this stuff daunting but fascinating.

I'm reading A Month of Sundays, a candidate for some of the worst sex writing I've ever read.

Just got Paul Crooks' Ancestors about him
Managing to trace his family back through Jamaican slavery. I know he eventually traced things back to Africa not sure that's covered here.
So analogous to Roots but by a working class British West Indian guy.
I've seen webinars by the author so am very interested in reading this.

Slogging through Powers’ Bewilderment. Narrative is zzz but I am thinking differently about having respect for other sentient beings

yeah it's a mistake

i wanted to respond to the wondering of youn. i will share my experience and general feeling. it is not unlikely especially when talking about a language pair like korean-english that nobody proficient in the language apart from the translator themselves ever looked at the text. even if they engage an editor that knows the language and/or has read the original, readability in english rather than fidelity is the focus. sometimes, a step earlier than this, submitting a translation to the author's own agent or when getting permission to translate, the agent or author might have quibbles over actual translation errors (these will be in a sample)(these might require overliteral translations that get reversed by an editor later) but that seems rare.

moving out of romance language to romance language, it's usually possible unless you have produced a text in english unreadably faithful to the original (this plagues asian languages in translation still, where translation is dominated not by writers but academics), to rip them apart line by line, looking for the infidelity required to produce something readable in english.

I've run out of freebies, but translator of a (linked) Korean short story discusses it here: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-yi-mun-yol
Han Kang on her own story: https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/han-kang-02-06-23
Which is also in this round-up of linked commentaries: https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/sunday-reading-lost-and-found-in-translation

Real grab bag on my bedside table at the moment:

Emmanuel Carrere - 97,196 Words: Essays
James Ellroy - Silent Terror
Polly Barton - Fifty Sounds

I'm reading a pop history book I picked up at my favorite charity bookshop, The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley. Its 'hook' is describing a large delegation of US government diplomats and legislators, more than 60 of them, including the Secretary of War Howard Taft, who sailed to Asia in 1905 in furtherance of President Teddy Roosevelt's intense desire to acquire more colonial possessions and expand a US empire across the Pacific. Its real purpose is to expose how deeply white supremacy was embedded in the highest levels of the US power structure, founded in the exact same Aryan mythology that the Nazis later made use of.

So far, it has delineated just what lying, racist pieces of shit everyone connected to the conquest and brutalization of the Philippines were -- which nastiness I had read about long ago in contemporary anti-imperialist tracts written by Mark Twain, but now with added disgusting details. It's an encouraging thought that books about the violent racism of late 19th century imperialism can become best sellers and their truths percolate into some fraction of the US consciousness. But it seems like popular national mythologies are almost impossible to dislodge once they become well-established.

I remember The Imperial Cruise being a good read.

Here We are, Graham Swift (book club choice) - Kind of a big shrug for me. The stuff about being sent off as a kid during the war was good I guess. Nothing truly bad or hack about this I don't think but just kinda pointless?

Finished The Swimming Pool Library. Will is an entirely tedious protagonist - "My vanity which was so constitutional that it had virtually ceased to be vanity", lol nice try - the sections from Charles' diaries are no consolation. There was a feeling of a gathering of energies towards the end, before the last little burp of plot. I'm aware that I complained about lack of plot in my last read, I know a book can be perfectly fine without one but I think I'm just craving a good substantial story right now.

Read a decent amount of things on vacation. Highlight was probably Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris, which I mostly read while in Trieste, kind of corny I know but it was very enjoyable. Reflects on the strange history of the city and its pull upon her and a number of other writers despite its comparative lack of great sights and cultural/economic/historical importance. Found it tremendously moving towards the end, it was Morris's last book and it concludes with her musing on her own feelings about aging and irrelevance and how much that plays into her own perception of the city.

The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati - real bummer! But pretty incredible, the sort of novel that you can sum up in a brief sentence but is filled with odd, otherworldly detail and atmosphere that makes it hypnotic to read.

On The Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Junger - very odd semi-supernatural allegory that may or may not have been a swipe at the Nazis, didn't really get this tbh but it was pleasant enough to read.

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle - I really should have read the Lovecraft story it's riffing on but I thought it was a really compelling and surprising little horror novel.

still in the middle of The Garden of Seven Twilights, by Miquel de Palol - recently published by Dalkey Archive, long novel of stories within stories within stories, which I'm always kind of a sucker for. Most of the stories are pretty fun though there are some jarring shifts in tone and not a ton in the way of characters.

Travellers and The Settled Community: A Share Future John Heneghan, Mary(Warde) Moriarty , Michael O hAodha
book onIrish travellers . I wanted to get hold of some reading matter on the subject in teh wake of the Misleor festival last week. I think this has been on the shelves in teh local library for a while so I should have got to it faster. Came out in 2012.
Various essays on various factors on traveller life and interaction with settled community. I read the first couple of sections last night and it looks good.

Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan
book based on several conversations between the two from the early days of the pandemic lockdown in 2020. Gives some insight into Cave's headspace. Glad I read it, would still like a memoir from him though

Finished The Swimming Pool Library. Will is an entirely tedious protagonist - "My vanity which was so constitutional that it had virtually ceased to be vanity", lol nice try - the sections from Charles' diaries are no consolation. There was a feeling of a gathering of energies towards the end, before the last little burp of plot. I'm aware that I complained about lack of plot in my last read, I know a book can be perfectly fine without one but I think I'm just craving a good substantial story right now.

― behold the thump (ledge),

I read it after The Folding Star, The Spell, and especially The Line of Beauty, hence its slightness, its insularity.

Good to know I picked the duffer (impulse charity shop purchase).

Might get round to those others (and reread TLoB) one day.

Having just recently learned of the existence of the Two Month Review podcast, I am rereading 2666 as I listen to their episodes discussing it.

To stay with the TD world for a bit longer, I started a book of Thomas Ligotti short stories. The story I read last night, 'The Frolic', is a curious thing. There was a Cheever vibe in the uneasy middle-class calm of the set and setting but everything was underlit by this kind of diseased atmosphere that built as the story progressed. I fell asleep pretty much directly after I'd finished the story and had the most intense bout of sleep paralysis, where I was being consumed by a sallow, clinging fog. Which is a 100% recommend in my book.

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, September 26, 2023 11:12 AM (one week ago)

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.

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?