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.

I've started reading Envy, Yuri Olesha. It's a satire first published in 1927 when writers in the USSR were still feeling expansive, experimental, and enthusiastic about their future place in the new society. It has a wild, inventive energy that's just a bit manic, but fascinating. This is the recent translation by Marian Schwartz in NYRB Classics.

Just re-read two Ross Macdonald mysteries, The Barbarous Coast and The Goodbye Look. As good as I remembered, possibly better. Macdonald's whole intergenerational-warfare theme (parents vs kids, with the older Archer always taking the kids' side) has surprising power. Now I'm re-reading Don Winslow's The Force, which is not as good as I remembered. The prose is very choppy and faux-tough guy; not as bad as James Ellroy, but pretty bad.

Oguz Atay - Waiting for the Fear

So far, this is an amazing set of short stories from the Turkish writer. Its very Kafka in the sense they all center around a man trapped by his mind, though the environment and circumstance make an appearance from time to time. The title story is about a similar length to 'The Metamorphosis', and while he is a different on a sentence level the ambition is to go that high. He could have many readers in future. If we have one.

I didn't like The Force at all. It was boring and the plot was cable t.v.-level and i kinda was just rooting for every cop to die. my dad likes don winslow. i think that's why i read it. he had it lying around. that book gets raves.

Bernhard Schlink - Olga

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins. The author is best known as author of "The Reader" which was adapted into a film adaptation starring Kate Winslet, but I have neither read that book or seen the film. This book is nice and short for a novel (only about 200 pages), and it moves quickly - the action covers two lifetimes. At the beginning you feel like its going to be a fairly conventional story, but without giving any spoilers, lets just say it tends to take unexpected turns and delights in confounding reader expectations. Its a moving story of human tenderness, loss and aging.

Envy was short. I finished it last night. I'll retract my description of it as a satire. It begins as if it will go that direction, but it doesn't sustain it for long. Instead it becomes increasingly dreamlike and chaotic. The reality of the characters and everything around them get swallowed up by a steady outpouring of fantasy images, loosely tethered to feverish ideas about the new Soviet world being imagined into existence. It's a strange book, full of wonder, fear, elation and confusion.

Love Envy. Think it was my 2nd or 3rd NYRB classic.

Dow, I wanted you to see my new thing. I don't know if you saw it...

you guys can read this if you want. i like you guys.

i figure you come here...

Oh and while i'm at it i'm reading my second Daniel Woodrell book Tomato Red.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71RD2xxBpKL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

oh wow xyz I'm just seeing that you read the Jelinek. I'm a fan of her work and I've been waiting for this translation since it was announced, I bought it but it is of course on the stack.

Because I’m normal and definitely not a dumbass I’ve got half a dozen on the go. Just finished the researcher’s first murder by John finnemore & concerning the future of souls by joy Williams & am partway thru payment deferred by cs forester, heir to the glimmering world by Cynthia Ozick, mist by Miguel de unamuno & mother to daughter, daughter to mother ed tillie Olsen. Meanwhile i have book club next week and haven’t started this months book

Ozick's last few novels have been nothings for me, so I hope you enjoy it.

She’s got the stuff so I think it’ll be a decent read, am very into the setup (will read this one v slowly cause it’s on my tablet) tho the caricature Marxists are corny

I didn't like The Force at all. It was boring and the plot was cable t.v.-level and i kinda was just rooting for every cop to die.

Agree with all of this. His previous trilogy — The Power of the Dog, The Border, and The Cartel — was a lot better, but of course I was able to get those from the library; this one I had to go and pay for.

I bought 20 paperback Westerns for $1 each this weekend, which I have a use for, and found a copy of B. Traven's The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre on the same shelf, so I'm reading that now.

I've been leaning into the detective and spy thrillers more this year than I ever have previously. Now I am reading Journey into Fear, a 1940 spy novel by Eric Ambler. The plot shows that it was written after WWII had begun but before the collapse of the Maginot Line when France was overrun by the Nazis, adding a bit of historical interest.

all the 30s and 40s ambler books are cool. can't say i followed him into the 50s and 60s.

mist by Miguel de unamuno

I read this in the Barcia translation, which translates the title as "Fog". Enjoyably singular.

I watched the Joseph Cotten-written adaptation of Journey Into Fear years ago. Orson Welles plays a Turk.

That Turkish head of the secret police is a character Ambler used in multiple books.

oh wow xyz I'm just seeing that you read the Jelinek. I'm a fan of her work and I've been waiting for this translation since it was announced, I bought it but it is of course on the stack.

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Monday, 28 October 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Cool. I'd put it on top of the stack, its really something else..

Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes - found a cheap copy last week with a terrible movie tie-in cover from the 80s. I quite liked it - gets a little heavy-handed about its messages but they generally work, since the narrator is a teenager who styles himself an authority on the world he flits around in, until he realizes that there are things going on that's he's been completely ignorant of in all these subcultures that he thinks he understands.

I liked City of Spades best in that trilogy. The teen narrator of AB seemed like a Sunday School Holden Caulfield, but your take makes me think maybe I should try again, though really tired of Unreliable Narrators.

i didn't really think of him as unreliable exactly, he's just very confident in being a teenager-about-town who knows all these disparate groups - Jews, immigrants, gays, criminals, etc - and then things start getting seriously violent and it upends his conception of the city he lives in and how much he actually understands.

Cool. I'd put it on top of the stack, its really something else..

I appreciate this because things move down the stack so quickly, my shelves are thousands-unread-and-growing yknow - but I genuinely used to write Yale University Press yearly to ask "how's that Children of the Dead translation coming along," and I hunted down the lone English extract that had been published in a pretty obscure 90s journal (the bus crash)...I'm reading Balzac right now and I wanna get through Old Goriot and one more but then I'll take this prompt, I'm looking forward to it.

finished trollope's "the warden" then floundered a bit before falling into thackeray's "vanity fair" -- the contrast between the two is instructive

trollope is also on my "time to read more of him" list, I did Barchester Towers like 20 years go

The Way We Live Now is stone cold--- also, "It was fun, in a strange kinda way. " (Willie's blurb)

i didn't really think of him as unreliable exactly, he's just very confident in being a teenager-about-town who knows all these disparate groups - Jews, immigrants, gays, criminals, etc - and then things start getting seriously violent and it upends his conception of the city he lives in and how much he actually understands

And I still gotta check this:

Only other AT at local library: first Lily Dale, The Small House at Allington---good?

― dow, Friday, August 30, 2024 3:20 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

good!

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 6, 2024

Sexology by Alex Kovacs - This is a mate so my opinion may be suspect, but it's a delightful novel about a large brood living in a Highgate house with their unconventional mother (she is a sexologist, thus the title). Reminded me of Goscinny's Petit Nicolas in its insights into the eccentric inner lives of children, though unlike that this is very much not a book for all the family. Juliet Jacques blurb on the back.

Anyone picked up the new Alan Hollinghurst?

My fave passage so far in the novel Tomato Red that I'm reading.

"She stepped backwards, into the house, and let the door shut between us. It was passing strange how different she looked in her own true clothes and her own true home, swaddled in her own true history. A big share of her sparkle dulled as that pooched-out screen door slammed her inside."
"Then she moved backwards, deeper into the shadow. All I could see was that she was barely there, like something you almost recall: the Pledge of Allegiance, your daddy's real name."
"Come on in Sammy. Share the stink."

let me tell you, these books are a hoot. you can read 'em like candy. he teaches me stuff though. candy doesn't usually teach you stuff. they make me want to write a story! i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing...

I have a bunch of the Woodrell books to read then i'm on to the fantasy mole trilogy! that should take me to the snow if there is any.

"sonny liston was a friend of mine" - thom jones

this is great

a great book for real.

I have that one and the one before it, Cold Snap, but for some reason I don't own The Pugilist At Rest, his first (and best) collection. I should get one on eBay one of these days.

yes def gonna search out his other ones

Ordered a copy tonight. Alibris claims it's brand new — I hope it's not a shitty print-on-demand copy, which is happening more and more lately.

I'm reading Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson. It's difficult not to map Williamson's fascism backwards but this is so beautifully immersive that any blood and soil stuff feels ridiculous. In places it's so vicious and alive. This could be Cormac McCarthy.

The otters lay up near a cattle shippen, among reeds with white feathery tops. A dull red sun, without heat or rays, moved over them, sinking slowly down the sky. For two days and two nights the frosty vapour lay over the burrows, and then came a north wind which poured like liquid glass from Exmoor and made all things distinct. The wind made whips of the dwarf willows, and hissed through clumps of the great sea- rushes. The spines of the marram grasses scratched wildly at the rushing air, which passed over the hollows where larks and linnets crouched with puffed feathers. Like a spirit freed by the sun's ruin and levelling all things before a new creation, the wind drove grains of sand against the legs and ruffled feathers of the little birds, as though it would breathe annihilation upon them, strip their frail bones of skin and flesh, and grind them until they became again that which was before the earth's old travail. Vainly the sharp and hard points of the marram grasses drew their circles on the sand: the Icicle Spirit was coming, and no terrestrial power could exorcize it.

Just finished Dead in the Water, a totally gripping piece of investigative journalism about a pirate hijacking in the early 2010s. I don’t recall getting so sucked into a book for a long time, which is amazing given that it’s largely about the intricacies of shipping container insurance. The cover is a dud – could easily be glossed over at a bookshop – so I’m very grateful for the effusive recommendation on Max Read’s substack as I never would’ve noticed it otherwise.

thx. I just put a library hold on Dead in the Water.

When I first tried to read Tarka the Otter, I gave up after one chapter. Then the second time I finished it and immediately reread it, with the vocabulary fresh in my mind, so I could focus more on the story.

I wish I had someone to read it out loud to. The book sings.

Émile Zola's The Belly of Paris, inspired by Dwight Garner's “The Upstairs Delicatessen, which drops a novel and essay or poetry collection to read every other sentence.

!!!!

"In 1974 he began working on a script for a film treatment of Tarka the Otter, but it was not regarded as suitable to film, being 400,000 words long."

Hmm, 400,000 words and zero dialog!

Pulled Fight Club off the shelf yesterday in a burst of "Wow, I still own this?" surprise. Woof. That is some BAD writing. Leaving the ideas aside, on a pure sentence level, Chuck Palahniuk just cannot do the job.

Vladimir Sharov - Be as Children. Complex story where the lives of Lenin, a murderer/priest and a holy fool are told and reflected through Russian history, from the medieval-era monarchism/orthodoxy right through Bolshevism (the novelist was a student of pre-modern Russia), and where the continuities of varying faiths -- including communism as one -- are the main thread. Nobody does 'fate of the soul' type novels like a Russian!

Published in 2008 (he died about ten years later). This could be seen as a dig at communism, but it feels a lot of richer in its telling of lives and deaths. I really like him for this.

Anyone read Jamaica Kincaid? I'm sure I've read a couple stories. My bookstore got lovely reissues of most of her book.