Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall of 2024?

Recently read Back, first HG that I don't quite buy yet. I want to read Under The Net.

As We Seek Moderation!!! In All Things!!!!!! What are Your Reading in Autumn of 2024?

I came home from a trip and I didn't do proper diligence before launching my own thread. I apologize for stepping on dow's thread.

I finished Pier Paolo Pasolini's Boys Alive, his fictional homoerotic take on what Rossellini did with Open City only with street kids. Also Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, reissued with a 2022 afterword in which he calls out Trump and other avatars of anti-democracy.

I've wasted too many brain cycles trying to decide which of these two threads is the correct one to post on. Please someone lock one of them or I will become paralyzed like Buridan's ass.

I'll ask a mod to lock the other thread. Meanwhile, here are the relevant posts that were made to the other one before this was straightened out:

I have just finished Black Money by Ross MacDonald. It had a very elaborate red herring of subplot that consumed the greater part of the build-up to revealing the true thread of circumstances that lead to the Required Murder(s), but I've discovered that I do not read him for the unraveling of the mystery, but for the pleasure of the characters and quotidian details in the stories he constructs.

Now I am re-reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I first read it around 1971, when it was not just recent but critically relevant to the times. I was about 16 and in high school and I found it wholly persuasive on the level of his lived experience and the evolution of his worldview. I decided it was time for a revisit.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, September 22, 2024 8:24 PM

Reading the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow. Took three or four times starting this book before I got traction.

― default damager (lukas), Sunday, September 22, 2024 8:43 PM

Oops, wasn't done ... anyway i'm slowly warming to the book's method, I'd call it an endless series of digressions but that suggests a foreground / background distinction that is questionable.

― default damager (lukas), Sunday, September 22, 2024 8:47 PM

Rereading Passing, Nella Larsen. Still rules.

― Daniel_Rf, Monday, September 23, 2024 2:16 AM

yuko tsushima, territory of light

for some reason it has taken me a week or more to read this v short bk, i guess i'm finding parts of it laborious even tho overall i give it the thumbs up

― pere uwu (doo rag), Monday, September 23, 2024 2:56 AM

I started reading Octavia E Butler this summer and am completely hooked, just finishing Parable of the Talents and looking into which one to read next.

― John Backflip (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, September 23, 2024 6:40 AM

Also, here's a courtesy link to the summer 2024 WAYR thread:

'In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne': What are You Reading in Summer 2024?

flopson, so cool you know Hamish! i hosted him for a reading here in Philly last week and he was excellent, also he is v handsome and lovely to talk with.

No prob, Aimless (hang om to that title).
Following recent ILB cheers for Nunez, I just now got The Vulnerables from library, which also has What Are You Going Through.

I've started reading "The End of Eddy" by Edouard Louis, billed as a novel, but described by the author as a true story. Stories of overcoming rotten childhoods seem to be perennially popular. We'll see if this one is better than average.

iirc End of Eddy was effective

Elfriede Jelinek - Children of the Dead

Like Platonov's Chevengur, this book also took its translator (Gita Honegger) decades to bring it to English. Both books published this year, and if the Platonov is about a world that could've been but never came to be, then Children of the Dead is the world we ended up with. This is set in an Alpine resort in Austria, which is populated by ghosts but everyone -- the main 'characters' or otherwise -- are reduced to wandering souls, where it seems that one thing is on: the TV.

And if this might sound like a tired satire against the consumerist hell we have built then its never been written like this. I see that Jelinek has: 1) Translated Gravity's Rainbow into German and 2) was a blogger, writing her polemics on her website, and weirdly enough this dense, barely plotted 'novel' is like an amalgamation of the two things. Just someone writing crazy pages on rotting flesh (flesh in decay forever and ever) to the TV which is turned onto, well, German TV? Detergent Commericals, Sports, whatever, the thing is always on, providing the juice for another polemic against Austria...oh and did I say there were Nazis here?

I wouldn't recommend it, but idk I'll never read anything like it (and I'll definitely need to read it more than once). When she won the Nobel this book hadn't been translated. The novels were pretty good, but I never felt like reading them again. Haneke's film of The Piano Teacher was better than the book (which was her best till this), but with Children of the Dead you can see that for once the Nobel committee have some ballsy taste lol. You can see why one of the judges resigned over the decision, anyhow..

I have started rereading Don Quixote, one chapter at a time, in the original. Love those black Catedra editions.

And I am also rereading Hyperion, this time just my old pocket book in French.

Jean Renoir - La Grande Illusion

(Read the script for the film)

"private citizens", tony tulathimutte. couldn't decide for a while whether i thought it was (a) crap or (b) good depiction of a bunch of people who are crap, but as i approach the p100 mark am tending towards (b).

reckon next novel i read has to be from the 1950s at the latest tho, as an old geezer i am just naturally hostile to these fucking zeitgeisty internet-age type novels.

btw it's spring here not autumn

Good point. Maybe we should q1-4 for these threads going forward.

Andrew Holleran - The Kingdom of Sand

If I ask for it to be changed to 4th Quarter, what's Winter of 2024-25 going to be? Just wondering (time is not my forte).

Once that's straightened out, we might need a poll--although whoever chooses a title could always change quarter to season or vice versa.

Having really enjoyed her first three novels, I cashed in some Waterstones vouchers on the new Sally Rooney, purchased on the day of publication. It came with free branded stickers and cupcakes, which my five year old enjoyed.

I’m sure I’ll read it before the end of the year, but the size (it’s about 150 pages longer than her previous novel) and Rooney’s new. Clipped. Short sentences. Style. Has put me off a little, so I’m reading Prince Caspian instead. I’ve never read the Narnia books before so thought I’d try to get them all done before Christmas. (I’ve finished a pitiful amount of books this year due to studies, so I’m goosing my numbers with what I assume are easy reads.)

Trumpkin the Dwarf should've made an appearance in a Rooney novel.

Dear Little Friend seems like more of a ferrante title

What are you reading in the Year of the Whopper?

If I ask for it to be changed to 4th Quarter, what's Winter of 2024-25 going to be? Just wondering (time is not my forte).

― dow, Thursday, 26 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

There would be no season just quarters.

So winter would come in for some of Q4 and some of Q1.

(I was joking about all this BTW)

Or maybe we could put an asterisk on the season:

Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall* of 2024? (*Spring in the Southern Hemisphere)

(*Autumn)

We could settle this democratically. At the turn of each season we could start a thread to nominate titles for the following season, e.g on April 1 for the thread title at the next solstice. Then we could poll the titles, e.g. in early June, with the winner attached to the upcoming WAYR thread, starting the nomination process at once for the next WAYR thread, etc. In this way we could dilute the vote of northern hemisphere ILBers to the point where the southern hemispherians might slip in a reference to their notorious seasonal eccentricity every 5 or 6 years.

I propose that the representatives of the Southern Hemisphere get to pick the thread title 32% of the time, based on their landmass.

anyway...

George Eliot, The Lifted Veil. A curiosity, nothing more, despite the best efforts of the afterword to paint it as a clear exemplar of her moral philosophy.

Now on to The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk.

Olga was talked about on front row last week or so, but i'll be damned if i can remember what they said.

oh, actually, i remember thinking that it would be something you'd like

found the episode, i'll listen after i've read the book.

Domenico Starnone - The House on via Gemito

Apparently Starnone is Ferrante's partner and their fiction is pretty similar. Naples, working class life from the 50s onwards as the son grows up to be something else entirely, yet carrying the weight and violences he grew up with. This is written from a more male perspective as opposed to Ferrante.

Its a really good, rich read. Like Ferrante I just couldn't put it down.

so this was september

Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides, trans. Buckley)
The Iliad (Homer, trans. Wilson)
Iphigenia in Tauris (Euripides, trans. Buckley)

there's a big gap in the story between the last two, which is basically filled by Aeschylus' Oresteia and maybe Euripides' Orestes which i'll get around to. The Odyssey and the Aeneid in there as well somewhere, plus another dozen Euripides plays. i'll get to all those eventually.

does anything cover the first 9 years of the trojan war?

(the above mostly prompted by the references to Iphigenia in the trollope i read in august. in fact she came up twice within a couple of days the way these things do)

I just finished The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Having earlier this year read the second volume of Taylor Branch's history of MLK, Jr. and the civil rights movement, which also pulled in Malcolm X's part in the struggle, there was a tremendous amount to unpack in the autobiography and a multitude of contrasts, conflicts, and complements between their two approaches. Any conclusions I can draw immediately will by necessity be offhand and a bit scattered.

What strikes me first is that both men were powerful speakers and organizers, but while MLK, Jr. was raised and educated to take the mantle of leadership, Malcolm only rose through the sheer power of his drive and intelligence. I put this book down amazed at what an absolute force Malcolm made himself into just out of his raw experience and his will. Both men knew they would die a violent death for accepting their position of visible black leadership.

Both the Nation of Islam and the SCLC/SNCC were centered in their devotion to discipline as essential to escaping the prison that racism had built around black Americans. But the discipline of the nonviolent movement relied on the community to shape and support it while the Nation of Islam was top-down, rules-based and more coercive.

In the end the Nation of Islam, which Malcolm had elevated into a huge force in the black community through his relentless articulation of the justice behind black anger, collapsed when Malcolm was assassinated back into its original dimensions as a minor cult, because Elijah Muhammad was too small a man to carry the Nation of Islam forward and too jealous to allow Malcolm to carry it for him.

"Apparently Starnone is Ferrante's partner and their fiction is pretty similar."

His novel Trick is so great!

I read Ties, really good. Gemito (like the Neapolitan Novels) is a lot more expansive.

Last night I read The English Understand Wool, Helen DeWitt. Even granting that it was more or less a short story trying to masquerade as a novella, it was pretty thin stuff. Afterward I immediately started on So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell, another novella. It was spoken well of by multiple ilxors recently.

I seem to be reading only non-fiction lately. My last few:

Ruth Harris - Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
Stanley Cavell - The Senses of Walden
Edward G. Seidensticker - Genji Days
Lucy Sante - The Other Paris

Brad Snyder - Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment
John McGahern - The Dark

Last night I finished So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell. It dangled quite a few emotional hooks in the water, but for some reason the bait on them didn't engage me me. This was an entirely personal reaction having nothing to do with the quality of the writing or the story. I could easily see why it excited the admiration of so many ilxors, but it never quite caught me.

I finished The Empusium, I didn't love it as much as they did on Front Row. More details tbp on her own thread.

I also just finished Via Gemito and have found it very hard to put down. It has a great cumulative effect that moved me a lot at the end.

The way the narrator seems to try and fail or succeed at getting out from underneath his father's voice - I found that very formally impressive without drawing attention to itself too much.

My current book is Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. It has the vibe of an oral folk tale, but Achebe sneaks in some more novelistic elements under the radar.

I finished The End of Eddy. I would say its an impressive debut. I would read a sequel that continued on from the point where this one ends. The overall feeling is one of tightly controlled rage - but the tone is more complex than that gives it credit for. Now I'm reading "Friend of My Youth" by Amit Chaudhuri. It reminds me a bit of "The Friend" by Sigrid Nunez in its very lackadaisical approach to advancing the plot, such as there is. At least its mildly interesting so far.

That was my impression of SN'sThe Vulnerables as well, though it does incl. some spitballs re publishing, and good, actually energetic take-down of Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethelen."

Maria Gabriela Llansol - A Thousand Thoughts in Flight.

No prose like Llansol. Imagine a cross between Musil and Emily Dickinson, which is the nearest I can get to. Musil in the sense that she shares with Musil the concerns for the degraded soul (as well as a love for Nietzsche), as well as mentioning him several times (though she is into Germanic lit like Kafka and Rilke as well).

The book itself is divided into three sections, they are like diaries. One from the 70, another from entries in the 80s and the last is from the 90s. The latter is a tribute (of sorts, she could never write anything that straightforward) to fellow writer and friend Vergilio Ferreira, who had passed away at the time. Lots of interests in her reading and outlook. However, the result reads like someone trying to put something down on paper that is very internal to her and no one else, a diary barely fit for publication, in a way. The truest diary, in another. That leads to an opaqueness that is intriguing, the danger is of a collapsed music but there is just enough to keep going, she makes space by breaking up the prose into these poet like segments...

...in between these blocks of prose. She is very much a player with the forms with which writing take place and how it can look on the page.

I finished Things Fall Apart last night. A very good book, with a killer last paragraph. For me its major value was bringing to life the Ibo culture as it existed prior to European colonization, without any effort either to praise or condemn it, but simply to describe it in a human and relatable way. Recommended.

the parker books have always had a lot of fans here. as well they should! despite my traumatic experience meeting westlake i would be the first to say that he sure could write a humdinger.

I've only read the last Parker, Dirty Money, when he was well within his groove, living and occasionally killing only by code(think the author said of the first book that, other than revenge, Parker doesn't really know what he wants, but keeps going..)(I only know that book via Point Blank's otm zen timing: Point Blank and Get Carter are thee 60s crime classick flicks.)
What's funny in Dirty Money: Parker loves to plan complicated operations, which keep going awry, and he really loves that too, though he'd never bother to say so (too busy). Humming along.

Get Carter is from 1971! Though set in the 60's yeah.

After I finished reading the Callimachus last night I "auditioned" a copy of Fledgling, Octavia Butler. I only got 7 or 8 pages in before I nope'd out. Not what I was looking for. Maybe some other time.

The most interesting thing about it was that instead of falling into the currently common form of a "police procedural" it was purely a "crime procedural", concentrating its interest in how the crimes of the main character are accomplished, with the added twist that his adversaries, accomplices, and victims are all operating outside the law. The closest anyone comes to operating by the norms of society is the Outfit, the highly corporate crime syndicate.

The best crime novels treat cops as incidental at best.

Had meant to ask this before---anybody here read Ted Lewis? Is he good? Also wondering about the bio mentioned below.
wiki:

Lewis moved to London in 1961 with £70 he earned from his first illustration commission, the Alan Delgado children's book,The Hot Water Bottle Mystery.[2] His first work in London was in advertising, and then as an animation specialist in television and films (among them the Beatles' Yellow Submarine).[4] His first novel, All the Way Home and All the Night Through, was published in 1965, followed by Jack's Return Home, which created the noir school of British crime writing and pushed Lewis into the best-seller list. The novel was later retitled Get Carter after the success of the film of the same name...Lewis's final book, assessed as his best by some critics, was GBH, published in 1980, the title referring to grievous bodily harm in British law.[8][9][10] Lewis died in 1982 aged 42 of alcohol-related causes.[11]

In October 2017 Nick Triplow published a detailed biographyGetting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir.[12]

In 2020 The Ted Lewis Centre opened in Barton upon Humber celebrating his life and works.[13]

Jack's Return Home one I'd like to start with, since GC the movie left a rare impression.

I read George Melly's Paris and the Surrealists. As Melly is keen to point out in the introduction, it's really a book of Michael Woods' photography, with some of Melly's memories of visits to Paris - first as an ingenue in search of nourishment, second with introductions from ELT Mesens to meet Breton et al - as a narrative diversion, and as such it's largely successful. Mostly, it's a series of walks and that's catnip for me - the kind of book that makes me map out a series of walks I'll never complete.

It led me to this weird 1978 documentary - another walk I'll never complete; another walk the BBC would never commission today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIG0ahCinSo

I have started Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone, 50 pages out of 2000, but its a relatively easy read.

In which a man finds his own contemporary life somewhat unsatisfying, so spends time with the old books, wondering where the fuck we have gone wrong.

At least that's the vibe I'm getting.

But its also something I am looking to read into. My last book was Victor Serge's notebooks, whose writing life was a lament for the Russian revolution.

As the sense of humanity on the edge of the abyss grows stronger day by day, month by month, year by (how many years left?) it felt like right book right time.

Finished my noirvember with Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underground - very much on the same level as the first Ripley book, Highsmith a master at making you root for an objectively fucked up protagonist and share in his hatred for antagonists who are, actually, right and much better people. In this case that's a severely depressed guy who has decided he is going to confess to having forged dozens of his late friend's paintings for profit. Did not appreciate the book ending on a cliffhanger tho.

i like when The Stranglers show up in that BBC video up there!

xxxpost

I'm halfway through The Quiet American, Graham Greene. Not surprisingly, the quality of the prose is excellent, but at heart it's an argumentative book and I'm not impressed by the quality of his arguments.

The 2002 film starring Michael Caine handled the ambiguities better. But then Graham Greene often writes compelling books that don't follow through on his arguments or back away from their implications.

My opinion is based entirely on "Brighton Rock", so take this with the appropriate grain of salt. I agree that Greene does want his books to dramatize larger philosophical questions that have applicability beyond the immediate concerns of his characters (ie, to work as a "novel of ideas"). His "argument", if you want to call it that, works by posing ethical questions that the reader might expect they can easily resolve, and then cutting off their usual avenues of resolution, leaving them in a quandary or "problematizing" their moral instincts. I'm not sure he ever offers them a firmer ground to stand on, which maybe can feel like a cop-out.

Brighton Rock is his great one, a lot of the other "major" ones fall short imo.

Never really could get into his novels. For vaguely similar concerns I much prefer Muriel Spark, to name one.

What makes them similar?

Catholicism, I'm guessing.

I read and semi-enjoyed the Klosterman’s The Nineties: comforting, vapid. A lot of it is really about the early 2000s. There are a lot of sentences like “times change - that’s what time does”. And there is an underlying “I’m going to mostly write about straight white men and you’re going to lump it” attitude - it feels more like it was written by a young boomer than an older Gen Xer. But it’s an easy read. CK’s style hasn’t changed that much since I last read him in the mid 2000s - complexities get dumbed down, simple things get overcomplicated.

Finished my noirvember with Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underground - very much on the same level as the first Ripley book, Highsmith a master at making you root for an objectively fucked up protagonist and share in his hatred for antagonists who are, actually, right and much better people. In this case that's a severely depressed guy who has decided he is going to confess to having forged dozens of his late friend's paintings for profit.

Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel arrived today, a book that is likely to cause me to buy a bunch of other books.

I needed to mix in some non-fiction, so I'm reading The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen. It covers many of the discoveries made regarding the transfer of genetic information and how DNA gets modified, including a process called horizontal gene transfer, where DNA can be swapped between highly unrelated organisms. It's popularized science, so it includes a lot of character sketches of scientists and humanizing narratives about how they made their signature discoveries, but it also tackles some difficult molecular biology without flinching away from the thornier details. As an ex-technical writer, I admire Quammen's courage in trying to put some real science into a book for the general public.

i read half of Quammen's The Song of the Dodo and i LOVED what i read. it was fascinating. but then it got too science-y for me.

I read "The Best Minds" by Jonathan Rosen, a book that was one of the NY Times 10 Best picks for last year. It reminded me of "Imagining Robert" by Jay Neugeboren, another memoir about a relationship with someone suffering from schizophrenia, an outside perspective on madness so to speak, although it wasn't as good as that one. I think lots of the cultural anthropology stuff about depictions of schizophrenia in the culture, the author's thoughts about the 90s literary theory craze, etc, could have been cut. It would have been a more tightly focused book.

Whew, that Mary Gaitskill substack (all tho words I've read for free).

I finished The Tangled Tree several days ago, but have nothing pressing to say about it that couldn't be derived from my post back on Dec. 5. As usual with this sort of book, I find the main thing is to get the gist of the science, what new things are now established as sufficiently proved, and where it may be leading. All the specific facts will quickly vanish from memory.

It took me a few days to start my next book, Peach Blossom Paradise by a Chinese author, Ge Fei. I haven't been able to connect with it very well so far, though I'd have a hard time explaining what the difficulty has been. It engages me just enough that I plan to plug away at it a while longer.

I finally finished Sergio Pitol's Taming the Divine Heron. I struggled with it even though it is quite short. I don't think my attention span is that great right now and I think a lot of the literary references went over my head. I admired the multiple framing devices and some of the humor, but I liked it a lot less than The Love Parade. The ending is quite bizarre!

I enjoyed The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. Interested to hear he has a new one out.

Peach Blossom Paradise was published in Chinese in 2004. The translation I'm reading is from 2020 and published by NYRB Classics.

Ah ok. I’ll check it out. Thanks

re choice of stories and their translation, what's a good Chekhov collection? Feeling the need this winter.

It is almost the solstice, which would traditionally mark the transition to a new quarterly WAYR thread. However, these threads aren't piling up posts at nearly the rate they accumulated in the past. We're averaging about 225 posts per seasonal thread. We've also been tweaked lately by some sheep fuxors about our identifying our thread titles too strongly with the seasons of the northern hemisphere.

I am making a Modest Proposal that our next WAYR thread start at the New Year and continue throughout 2025. If ILB'ers would like to discuss this proposal, I'm making a new thread for such discussion:

Should we switch from quarterly to annual WAYR threads?

the seasons thing is very parochial, northern-hemispherist

but i think even with the upcoming deluge of end-of-year posts these threads could easily cope with being 4x this size. would 6-monthly be a good compromise?

I'm currently reading "Montaillou" by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a historical study of a small French village in the Pyrenees in the first half of the 14th century, based on detailed interviews with the villagers which were conducted as part of an Inquisition into Catharism, which was endemic to the area. The records were later discovered in the Vatican archives.

Montaillou has been mentioned on ILB at least once before and it sounds fascinating. I'll be interested in hearing how it strikes you, especially on whether the author leans toward a somewhat juicier 'popular' or a somewhat drier 'academic' approach to the material.

Its somewhere in the middle. It strikes a good balance, I would say. Its not dry for the sake of being dry, but it is organized systematically, so you might get a chapter on the family and household structure in the village, for instance. You could always skip to the juicier chapters, like the one on sexual relations in the village.

Somewhere in the middle? That's my meat and drink!

The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross- Recommended by movie critic David Cairns, this mixes Le Carré style espionage with Lovecraftian horrors. Much less OMG ZANY than that description suggests, the drudgery of civil service is evoked quite adeptly and for the most part the horrors are played straight. Published in 2004, which already feels like a foreign country - there's some ableist language and very 20th century gender relations, but also more notably WAGAMAMA gets described as a yuppie central London eatery with cues around the block of fashion industry ppl trying to get in, was London ever so innocent? Anyway I'm enjoying this quite a lot.

Read Jordan Harper's third novel, Everybody Knows, over the weekend. His first two were set in biker/meth/skinhead/trailer-trash California and were really good. This one is set in Hollywood and revolves around the entertainment industry and is just as good — basically, a "publicist" whose job is to cover things up, not to make them public, falls into a truly dirty story and decides to try and make some money off of it and things get dark and violent. Three good lines from early on stuck with me:

"There's all these invisible walls that keep everybody in line. And if you refuse to see them, they just aren't there anymore. Once you walk through the walls, they never come back up again."

I did finish Peach Blossom Paradise. It contained plenty of interesting incident and detail set in a historic period of political and cultural change in China, but it never quite came alive for me. The motives of the characters were too opaque for me to feel like I understood them, so their activities felt like I viewed them from too great a distance.

I'm winding up the year with another Ross MacDonald, The Goodbye Look. I've now read enough of his Lew Archer books in a short enough period that the sameness of the plots and characters are becoming a drag on my enjoyment. otoh, his dialogue and the way he constructs a scene are still about as close to perfection as I've found in the genre.

What did you read in 2024?

annual roundup

I have started Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone, 50 pages out of 2000, but its a relatively easy read.

In which a man finds his own contemporary life somewhat unsatisfying, so spends time with the old books, wondering where the fuck we have gone wrong.

At least that's the vibe I'm getting.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, 2 December 2024 bookmarkflaglink

So I just finished this and its a little bit like that -- if 4500 or so entries over a mostly six year period amount to making a single point then I think it is that 'Modern Life is Rubbish' -- but he really goes into a lot of trouble to backing this point up. Leopardi does track it through the history of literature -- from the Illiad its mostly been downhill, although 14th century Italian literature is exciting (though he will also argue that Italians generally wrote better in the 16th century; there are a lot of kinks like this) -- and the history of language (there are detours to Sanskrit and Chinese though he doesn't know those languages), from the Greeks to the Latin to late Latin right through to the Italian, Spanish and French (he despises French and it seems to be because no writer really impresses him in it but also its the language that bastardizes antiquity the most). He will also talk about the forms of poetry: so the epic and lyric are wonderful whereas dramatic poetry gets it in the neck (Shakespeare in all but name, though he is finally named late on). He really struggles with the point of a soliloquy (like how can you can say you are suffering in words; you cannot articulate this!), but he is best when he talks about what he loves, there are many beautiful entries that are strung together and form 10 pages essays. The essay on the Illiad and how everything after is just that bit worse is a terrific 25 pages. But we also get a lot on the language by which humanity can be expressed, there is terrific stuff in here about how German and the philosophy of the time is so much more inferior to the writing of antiquity because the concepts it deal with aren't expressed as well; similarly the first scientific writing gets it in the neck (Galileo is seen as a terrific writer, but the flaw of science is that it cannot communicate well). You can go from this to debates to this day about academic jargon but because its someone who is really committed to a form humanity lost you can't really pass it off for a culture war game.

Having said that the guy's politics are a form of conservatism, but I love his writing (and what I am writing about is just some of the undercurrents within it. It is a diary and though you don't get much self-pity there is a sadness throughout the work around his life, and how that's turned out, but there are so many beautiful entries even there, one of which is about how great it is to eat alone).

As a book its a difficult sell. 20% of it I skimmed through as Latin grammarian stuff that you actually need Latin and Greek to make sense of. I would -- though I haven't read it -- possibly recommend the selections of it translated by Tim Parks.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300186338/passions/

But its only 200 pages. I would say it needs a 1000 page abridgment. Its one of the great 19th century books and I haven't seen such a great reading of Antiquity since Burton's Anatomy.

Just finished The Ministry of Time - curious if anyone else has read it. Tons of fun and I’d recommend it completely, but the ending didn’t work for me at all.

haha absolutely agree

Great write up xyzz, made me curious.

Thanks Daniel, tough book to do justice to.

There's a new WAYR thread for 2025:

2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread