2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread

Happy New Year, y'all. Welcome to the first What Are You Reading thread of the Reform Era.

Due to a slacking off in the pace at which ILB's WAYR threads have been piling up posts, combined with some mild grumbling from our Southern Hemispherical friends about our quarterly threads constantly referencing the wrong season for them, I thought maybe we should ditch the old quarterly/seasonal format for a sleeker, modern streamlined thread. After the first six months we can decide if we want or need one or two WAYR threads per annum.

I'm about to start in on Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey of Homer. It's waiting for me at the public library (currently closed for New Year's Day). Meanwhile I'll browse around in David Hinton's translations of the poems of Wang Wei.

Here's a link to last year's final WAYR thread: Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall of 2024?

I'm reading Hard to Be a God by the Strugatsky brothers, given to me by a friend years ago.

I think I left it sitting around because I mistakenly thought that Refn movie (Only God Forgives) was an adaptation? Even though I already loved Roadside Picnic. Idk, very silly of me. But I'm Strugatsky-pilled after reading The Doomed City and I'm glad to have it on hand (any other Strugatsky recs?).

I'm reading about the moles.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/917AlrBb9aL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

ALTERNATE COVER

https://archive.org/services/img/isbn_0600204340_no1/full/pct:200/0/default.jpg

alternate alternate U.S. cover

https://images.pangobooks.com/images/a260111c-a71b-4229-8be5-e881e035cb9a?width=800&quality=85&crop=1%3A1

"the savage kingdom of moles"? goodness me!

"I think I left it sitting around because I mistakenly thought that Refn movie (Only God Forgives) was an adaptation?"

The 2013 movie version of Hard to Be a God is nuts! watch it after you read it. There is also an earlier one with Werner Herzog in it but i've never seen that one.

I just recently finished “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe, so am continuing this particular rabbithole with an overview history: a re-read of “The Troubles” by Tim Pat Coogan. I somehow lost my original copy & mr veg gave me a new one for xmas
He writes quite beautifully but it is a bit slow going as my holiday-brain struggles to keep hold of all the info

oh and am also reading “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent” by Judi Dench w Brendan O’Hea

series of long-ranging interviews w Judi on the various Shakespeare characters she’s played over her career; at times line-by-line /scene-by-scene insights into her perspectives on the characters & the text, it’s pretty fascinating!. a friend gave it to me for xmas, i hadn’t even heard about it, loving it so far.

Great moles.

Yes, good moleage indeed.

In prep for teaching Faustus next term, I'm reading Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford. Being Burgess, it's full of language games, and he's hot on Latin filth*. Marlowe's time in the 'service' of Walsingham is really well put together, particularly the sections in Paris; it's great on the scuzz and grime of London (the brutal death of Babington is vivid and disgusting); I love the conversations over pubs with Raleigh and co, the dramatisation of Catholic and atheist guilt like a cloak over everything. It's probably a bit 'do you see' about Marlowe's sexuality but some of the sex is great all the same. There are also some 'chubby hmm' moments where he's working out his 'might line' drunkenly walking the streets and when he first tries 'the nymph' tobacco with Raleigh. I'm enjoying myself immensely.

*Irrumabo - Latin for fuck (I think). It appears in a poem by Catullus and in the phrase Irrumabo Omnia Et Facti Pirata, which translates to "Fuck everything and become a pirate”, which is 100% my new motto.

I think yearly threads are a good idea, fwiw. Happy new year you lot.

Happy new year! We made it. We can continue to read more.

Fleur Jaeggy - Proleterka

89 pages of very tightly written prose.

I found the mole book on my parent’s bookshelf over Christmas. On the inside cover there’s library stamp from my middle school library. I guess I borrowed it around 1990 and forgot about it. Or quite possibly I just stole it. Maybe I’ll actually read it this time.

I’m reading the new Richard Osman, it’s the start of a new series, the usual undemanding fun. I always try to give myself something easy at the start of the year, when it’s miserable and I feel like I’ve forgotten how to read.

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025? And then if you eventually want to add a second, can guess the rest.

Anyway, I'm currently going back and forth between The Brothers Mann and Babel 17, young Delany's driving ambition proving compatible w the competitive sibs'.

Just finished the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow. Won't be getting the second. The long discursive sections that make up almost all of the book might have been hypnotic if my attention had been captured, but it wasn't. There is something compelling about it, but it's hard to say what. Maddening.

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025?

Why not the current title?

The Penguin Book Of Korean Short Stories - Focuses on the modern Koreas, def nothing pre 20th century has appeared yet, but surprisingly there are some Northern writers!

South Korean writer Yi Munyol's "The Old Hatter" takes the cake in terms of a traditional mentality that feels alien to a Western reader in 2025. Check this lament:

Our old morality went the way of the old learning. The pious man who cooked his son to feed his old father; the filial daughter-in-law who cut off her finger to bring her mother-in-law back to life by feeding her drops of blood; the faithful wife who took her own life after her husband's death - we have totally forgotten these virtuous people, whose memory once shone brighter than any monument of gold. The world now belongs to those sons whose filial piety amounts to not striking their aged fathers, daughters in law who can earn praise by not throwing out their old fathers-in-law, and wives whose loyalty simply meant not having children by other men.

Society is in the gutter!!!

Very different indeed is Pak Taewon's A Day In The Life Of Kubo The Novelist, a stream of consciousness piece about a sad young man walking through the nightlife of Seoul. It's fascinating both as an example of how Beaudelaire, Woolf and Joyce (who gets a namedrop) were being digested outside of Europe, but also as a glimpse of Korea under Japanese occupation, a period which coincided with the beginnings of Westernization, writers in thrall to modernism, women hitting the bars in the style of flappers, etc.

Taewon ended up joining the North when the civil war came and stayed in N Korea until his death in the 80's; he had his right to write revoked for a few years but apparently regained it. NO IDEA what his later writings are like. He did leave a daughter in the South though, who in torn had a son...who turned out to be Bong Joon-Ho, you may have heard of him.

Thanks Daniel! I really want to check out Korean lit. Local library is closed for repairs, though relocation seems more and more likely (and then Local Library War can ramp back up, maybe with more xenophobia, considering return of Mr. T.)

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025?

Why not the current title?

Pierre Senges - Rabelais's Doughnuts

A very short collection of stories and essays. Going for a bit of Borges here -- favourites are an essay on libraries, both actual and fictional, and a monologue by a counterfeiter -- its pretty good

i finished a book in 2025 which afaict means im ahead of 2024 already- i was gifted all the presidents men

anyway it tripped along more than i had expected and didnt get too bogged down in all the names, i enjoyed it

Currently reading Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, which I bought in December. Giving it one chapter a night. It's good, but he clearly hates the Weathermen and has a red-hot hate-boner for Bernardine Dohrn.

Also downloaded a couple of ebooks that I'm either dipping in and out of (the Ellison) or going to get to soon:

Julia Armfield, Private Rites (apparently a modern gloss on King Lear focusing on three daughters after Daddy's death)
Alex Van Halen, Brothers (autobiography)
Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of... (grabbed this just for his writings on jazz)

not far along, but

FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS, paul cooper: awkwardly written and handwavey, doubt i'll continue

BLISS & BLUNDER, victoria gosling: retelling of camelot with arthur as a tech billionaire, gwen as his influencer wife, etc. which may not sound all that promising but it's brilliant so far

Currently reading Raymond Smullyan - The Tao Is Silent. Prefer his style in smaller doses, honestly, although I'll finish this.

If I were you I'd skip it and just read the best bit online: Is God a Taoist?.

Currently reading "The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics" by Henri Bergson. The last book published in his lifetime, it's a collection of essays and lectures written over a twenty year period, but it holds together pretty well, since Bergson is at his most readable, and a couple of the essays were written specifically to tie the collection together.

Started rereading Moby Dick because Backlisted did their Christmas episode on it. I had vaguely remembered it as a good story with quite a lot of asides about whaling; I'm now finding that it's maybe 85% essays on whaling and 15% story, mostly concentrated in the first and last chapters. There are moments where Ishmael goes, "Now I really must tell you about X," and X is, like, the wooden fork that the harpoon rests in when it's in the boat, and tbh I really think the book would have survived without a chapter on it. Still good, though.

it's the way he does it, though, reveling in his knowledge, like some mad monk ov Dark Ages (not a sociable guy ashore, and sea life is getting pretty dark too, he even disappears for a while)

I stopped really keeping track of what I was reading around August of last year— I was reading but not in any organized fashion, feeling a little harried and disorganized in my thoughts and patterns.

In any case— this year I have resolved to take more organize joy in my reading and listening.

So far, I have finished ‘Skip Tracing,’ a book by Philly poet Ken Bluford. It’s his first major collection though he is nearly 75– it seems he was active in poetry in the 70s and 80s and then sort of dropped out for whatever reason and is finally having a little renaissance. Excellent book, the Tom Weatherly comparisons are apt but there is a classical air to some of Bluford’s poems that is really striking.

Also finished ‘The Climbing Zine: Book One,’ a collection of writing from the first twelve issues of a climbing-based zine out of Colorado. The best pieces are up there with some of the best adventure writing I have ever come across, and the worst pieces were among the most indulgent and insipid I have ever read. Only some athletes are good writers!!

Now just about to finish Emmanuel Hocquard’s ‘Conditions of Light,’ translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel. Uncanny, elegiac, formally restrained sequence of poems, with each iteration consisting of five poems of five lines each. Quite lovely, here is a nice sample from this morning:

It is noon touches the back
In the darkness photos await
The dough rises on the type
shop stool
The very idea of relation

Read Alex Van Halen's autobiography, Brothers, in a day. It's pretty good. He quotes from other relevant figures' VH books (David Lee Roth's, producer Ted Templeman's, former manager Noel Monk's) and tells you what he agrees with and what he disagrees with, and he's affectionately scornful of Roth, calling him a dilettante and a dummy but an immensely talented live performer/attention magnet on multiple occasions. Worth a read if you're a Van Halen fan; it will make you hear the records differently.

I'm about a third into Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation. It reads swiftly and clearly, but isn't prosaic at all. To achieve that she clearly trimmed and paraphrased rather than trying to save every detail and repetitive epithet in the text. Some people would consider that editing Homer like that is the height of presumption. Not me. I commend her for doing an excellent job, while losing nothing of real importance and producing a first rate modern translation.

For some unfathomable reason I also read the 90 pages of Introduction and Translator's Note, which delved far too deeply into the immense pile of marginalia that has accumulated around Homeric texts. What's worse is that I'd already rummaged around fairly thoroughly in that junk drawer back in college, so there was nothing new for me to learn.

Ia Genberg - The Details. A woman's life via her remembrances of 4 people. Liked it a lot.

Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place for Shady People. Short story collection, mostly set in Argentina, mostly horror or macabre/unnerving/supernatural in tone. I enjoyed it but I feel like I was missing a lot of stuff that someone more intelligent would get out of it.

Jean Paul - Maria Wutz

Maria Wutz?

Wutz it to you

Maria Wutz:

https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/maria-wutz-jean-paul

I really liked it but was reading it on a plane journey with two very nervous people sat beside me.

on a chapbook spree, though I did try to break it up with a book of poems which I decided was MFA-core slop after the first fifteen pages.

Augusto Monterosso - The Rest is Silence

Novel released in the late 70s, now available in a translation from NYRB.

Its about the 'life' of a literary critic in a small fictional town, by the name of Eduardo Torres. It starts with a few testimonies by others (unreliable, with digression as king), then we move to his 'criticism' (its ofc terrible, this is like the first novel I've read that really lampoons Sunday supplement crit properly), then we have aphorisms (most bad, but some might be good, this section is totally playing with your expectations of this kind of writing), and then an analysis of one of Torres' poem by a 'colleague' (or a rival, or Torres under a pseudonym), with a final two page commentary on the whole thing just before publication.

If you are into criticism its funny. If you are not you can read these as short stories -- which is what Monterosso spent most of his career publishing in Mexico (where he lived in exile from Guatemala). Whatever way you read it there isn't a lot like it.

Its possible this is the only way he could structure something approaching a novel.

Starting 2025 in suitably apocalyptic style: negrophobia by Darius James and late victorian holocausts by Mike Davis. Might have to go lighter for the next one

A while back, a friend said I should get into writing YA fiction because it can be lucrative and remain interesting, and because my poetic field has been feeling pretty fallow recently, I decided to dive into some newer YA books to see whether I think I could pull it off.

Of course, the first book I chose absorbed me completely for several hours and brought up some painful memories of adolescence. ‘Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe’ by Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a lovely book, narrated by Aristotle, a fifteen year old loner with some family drama, inner rage, a loathing of most other boys. He becomes friends with Dante, who is more of a hippie free spirit with a loving set of academic parents. It’s set in El Paso in 1987. I won’t give away much, but the essential drama of the book is Ari learning to “stop fighting the war he’s fighting” against himself.

It’s hard to read books like this sometimes— they didn’t really exist when I was a teenager. I wish they had, as I probably would have felt a lot less alone. Also tied into this thread is the idea that if my parents and the general environment hadn’t made me so afraid to be myself, my life could have been very different, and much happier. It’s a fool’s errand to obsess about what could have been, but it’s hard not to do so when looking back on how repressed and broken I was for much of
my teenage life.

What I am happy about is that teenagers today have these sorts of books. I am getting the sequel out from the library this afternoon.

I really liked Aristotle and Dante too, but I gave up on the sequel before the 100pg mark. The writing was super banal and just...bad in a way I don't remember the first book being (sample line of prose from the sequel would be something like: "I don't like it when Ari is mad at me. It makes me feel sad").

Queer YA is kinda my thing, so I'm here for any recommendations you need.

crypto— please give me all the recs for queer YA! thanks in advance <3

i am hesitant about reading the sequel because i have heard similar things, but i guess we’ll see.

I'd say start with Bill Konigsberg's Openly Straight--and then if you like it, move on to its (actually good!) sequel, Honestly Ben. Don't want to claim anything as authoritative as these being the *best* queer YA novels, but I did make them a focus of my dissertation, and I include Openly Straight whenever I get to teach my Gay Life & Culture in the 21st Century course (the students usually respond very positively to it). But there's plenty more where that came from, so feel free to reach out whenever you're ready for more.

I'm reading a posthumously published novel by Barbara Pym, An Academic Question. The narrative voice has many touches of her somewhat rueful and self-deflating humor, but I can see why she held onto it; it's a bit underdeveloped.

Currently reading "Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man" by Friedrich Schiller, and also slowly making my way through "Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014" by Alice Munro.

xpost thanks crypto, going to get that transferred to my local branch library.

today i *did* go to the library to get the Aristotle and Dante sequel, then read some reviews and thought better of reading it— i loved the first one and would rather not have it tainted, tbh.

Also took out ‘Darius the Great is Not Okay,’ ‘Boy Meets Boy,’ ‘Different for Boys,’ and a few others. Already finished ‘Different for Boys’ because it’s more like a short story, but it had its small moments.

Richard Russo “risk pool.”
I’d like to thank whoever it was (Scott?) who recommended him after I mentioned Richard ford. I adore this book, don’t want it to end.

yeah i love Russo’s books, he’s great

Thanks for the James picks!

Ward, do you know this one? Just about the only Brit crime of its era that I've read--as re-posted on ILE's Crime Fiction

From Literary Treats thread---a bit cozy except for serious undercurrents/tow x nervous energy, under pressure (characters not so sure of happy ending, me frequently distracted in the moment from being sure, also how how will they get there??)

Recently: Strong Poison, my first Dorothy L. Sayers, in which Lord Peter Wimsey's sterling powers of detection, also nerves, are challenged by the sensational murder trial of young Harriet Vane, a mystery writer who lived in sin with the young dead man, also an author. Zingers fly, especially from the excitable Lord P and his pals, but so rare to find them doing so through perfectly timed shades of dark realness (real enough): a lot of crime shows so try to do this, but Sayers just does it. Prisoner Vane is necessarily the least mobile, least confident character, but credibly convinces Wimsey that she's innocent (well probably). All the women here are credible, in a variety of roles, and one of LP's employees at what seems like a secretarial agency, and is, to a certain extent, but mainly is about detecting white collar crime, one of these ladies gets sent up north to do crucial legwork.
Relationship of W. and V. nuanced, and intro assures us that they did not go running around as Mr. and Mrs. Detective for several more volumes.
― dow, Tuesday, August 13, 2024

I plowed through Sybille Bedford's A Favourite of the Gods, a delight.

Thanks Dow - Strong Poison is on the list! I tried another Sayers/Wimsey, The Nine Tailors, and found it convoluted and boring, but I think I may have picked the wrong one to start with there. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing etc - too much about bell-ringing, not enough blud.

Interested to hear yr thought on Ngaio Marsh, Daniel. I've been reading quite a lot of British crime in recent years - a real gap in my knowledge - and tried Marsh's first novel. It was among the weakest I've sampled - preposterous resolution - but I understand she got better later. Am intrigued by her novels with a theatrical/back stage setting.

Death At The Dolphin is one of those!

I go to crime fiction for atmosphere and a sense of millieu. My partner goes to crime fiction for mysteries to solve along with. I am loving the book, she hated it.

The murder only happens 100+ pages in and I have not yet reached the resolution. But I am taken in by the tale of Peregrine, a passionate man of the theater who gets a chance to revive an old Victorian theater due to a mysterious benefactor. The world is evocatively described, though I will own to being a bit of a mark for old London novels - hand me half a dozen geographical landmarks I recognise and then make it clear that people were living around them in OLDEN DAYS (tho tbc this is not a period piece) and you've pretty much got me. Perhaps partially due to not having had enough of that sort of thing in the past - a shockingly small amount of Portuguese novels take part in Porto, and obv even less in S. Miguel.

There is a portrayal of a "dumb" actress that feels pretty misogynistic and a lot of casual homophobia throughout. Kinda feel like the novel's handling of gayness is something that couldn't have been published ten years earlier and ten years later would have been handled differently. Still, easy to underrate the past - there's a character who gets very upset about a British artifact being bought by Americans, "yeah that does suck, btw been to the british museum lately", I snidely thought, only to have the character mention that if he had his way the Elgin Marbles would be in Athens now.

Thanks Daniel - I think I am somewhere between you and yr partner. I like my whodunnits v trad - lots of suspects, restricted location, red herrings, clues, disguises, secret messages etc, all wrapped up by the detective in lengthy exposition at the end. In this regard, I think Christie is kind of exemplary and she cheats less than ppl sometimes suggest. I would agree that her atmos/sense of place is generally perfunctory, but thenI still haven't really found any non US writers who can match ppl like Chandler, Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Elmore Leonard for establishing mood, millieu, point of view etc while still motoring home their plot without any detours into 'fine writing' - and all with snappy dialogue to match. But there are of course other pleasures. Perhaps the stand alone Brit classic I have enjoyed most so far is The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) by the interesting and versatile Anthony Berkeley - a tricksy meta commentary on the nature of 'detection' (again, similar genre self-reflexivity present even in early Christie - crime fiction seems to have been self-aware much earlier than say Science Fiction).

speaking of meta, maybe,Maigret's Failure keeps coming to mind lately: he blames himself, though no one else does, but what the hell do they know---case continues---

I'm a few pages from finishing Mani and I feel able to make a more complete (& entirely personal) assessment of it, in particular the prose style. On the whole I'll stick to my overall positivity about Patrick Leigh Fermor's ability to wax lyrical in striking, but not overdone, style, but I know I must add some qualifiers.

He is always at his top form when relating anecdotes about his encounters with the people of the Mani, or elsewhere in the Greek hinterlands. He served most of WWII behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Crete, so those experiences get some mention, too, but not as war stories. They are always people stories. He also gets high marks for descriptions of his travels through the peninsula on foot.

He sometimes ties himself in knots attempting to convey the totality of his near-ecstatic response to watching a sunrise as it progresses upon the Greek landscape. For me the effect was one of a gushing superfluity of words that my brain could not translate into anything pictorial. He also has a passion for Greek orthodox ikons and devotes one overlong chapter to making essentially the same point in different words a couple dozen times, because he is valiantly striving to implant his appreciation into the reader and thinks enthusiastic repetition will effect your conversion. He conspicuously wears his philhellenism on his sleeve. I'm inclined to forgive him that.

So, yes, he does stumble about in purple prose here and there. At such times my strategy was simple. When my eyes began to glaze, I ran them further down the page until he moved on to something else. This was generally about 100 to 200 words at a whack. I recommend this strategy to others, fwiw.

As for the worth of the book, it is in a class almost by itself. The isolated village life it describes (published circa 1958) does not exist today. In that sense this is a portrait of bygone times. But what a portrait!

I forgot to add that he undertook this journey through the Mani with his wife Joan who accompanied him every step of the way. She is mentioned (briefly) on maybe 3 or 4 of the 350 pages. By the end of the book her ghostly absence was hard to overlook or justify.

So the book club consensus was that the mystery in Death At The Dolphin wasn't actually solvable. I didn't try, but did feel a bit deflated by the conclusion that turned a rather sinister and ominous atmosphere into something sadly mundane...though really isn't that the sad fate of mysteries in general. A lady who had worked in theatre in the 70's said the atmosphere was very well captured, which I felt vindicated by.

but thenI still haven't really found any non US writers who can match ppl like Chandler, Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Elmore Leonard for establishing mood, millieu, point of view etc while still motoring home their plot without any detours into 'fine writing'

True but then Chandler was kicking against the British mystery tradition in the first place, no? I think the French have managed to produce writers that have those qualities in spades, Jean Patrick Manchette for instance. Not read much British hard boiled fiction but a friend swears by Ted Lewis.

The only 'hardboiled' British crime writer I know at all is Derek Raymond, who is kind of his own genre really - 'gore noir'? Have only read one novel by Manchette, plus the Tardi adaptations, but yes, definitely not 'cosy'. I need to re-read 'The fine art of murder' to remind myself of Chandler's kicks, but his life story kind of prefigures the experience described in Hoggart's The Uses of Literary - a tweedy Brit educated at Dulwich College whose conception of culture is blown apart by exposure to the slangy energy of American popular culture.

Have some books arriving today or tomorrow, which is good, because this Leavitt book is intolerable. I want to strangle its protagonist.

Put the Leavitt into the ‘give away’ pile without finishing it, have started the NYRB edition of Sanford Friedman’s ‘Totempole,’ which is beautiful so far.

I'm reading a selection of short stories by author Maurice LeBlanc, featuring an early-20th century gentleman-thief whose primary alias is Arsène Lupin. He's a fantasy figure, whose matchless intellect, fabulous personal fortune, and impeccable manners make him a kind of infallible superman. The main attraction is that the stories are clever light entertainment in the same way as the Sherlock Holmes stories. They pass the time pleasantly and aren't overly long or demanding.

Lupin defeats Sherlock Holmes, sorry I meant Herlock Sholmes, in one famous story.

Love to pick up Leblanc books in French, perfectly suited to the non fluent speaker.

i'm 200+ pages into Joyce Carol Oates's "American Appetites" from 1989. it starts strong, and includes one scene i will surely never forget, involving a dance performance gone horribly wrong at a birthday party, but i've grown a little weary of these characters and of JCO's style and tendency to, somehow, right when you thought she couldn't, or wouldn't need to, she manages to add, again, more commas. i'm not sure why i am sometimes drawn to upper middle class ppl having a disappointing experience in some literature, but elsewhere it feels very tiresome. i hadn't read JCO before and was surprised to find that in this book at least she feels very much in the vein of Yates, Updike, et al. in terms of documenting the mundane and horrifying inner lives of people who seem trapped by their middle classness. idk, i don't actually know enough about american lit to speak intelligently on it, i guess i just always thought she was somehow more "experimental." hoping to finish tonight

ime when JCO hits, she is incredible. she doesn’t really miss, per se, but there’s a lot of material that is merely okay

yeah i’m probably underselling it, there’s some astonishing prose here and heartbreaking moments but also like for some reason she uses the word “inchoate” a lot and she stops to linger, or does she linger to stop, inverting sentences as if there’s some hidden meaning there when i’d prefer to keep it moving. and some things you can wring meaning out of, shadows and trees and pots and pans, and i get that novelists are gonna novelist but she overdoes it sometimes

I liked some of her early 70s short stories, with a sense of control, though also like she might let go any second ( and if not in the story, then just past the last page). But---along with reading reviews of many novels that followed---and her snotty Tweets didn't help---somehow the early stories were enough.

But that's me, not just her, I mean Walker Percy seemed more likable than either of us, and yet somehow The Moviegoer--so good---was also enough.

(I don't care about Updike's novels, but enjoy his book reviews, at least the ones compiled in Hugging the Shore: they're comfortably and carefully detailed, so that I can reasonably or impulsively decide whether something might be worth a try, whether he likes it or not.)

I had always kind of dismissed her due to her sheer ubiquity until I read this short story, then became obsessed with her for a while. Now just fine with her.

https://www.gcmhslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/HowIContemplatedtheWorld.pdf

The only thing I've read of hers was The Hazards of Time Travel and it was a huge dud. Do not recommend.

I don't remember being overwhelmed by commas but there was a lot of stuff in quotation marks for no apparent reason.

Probably super basic of me, but I love "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Haven't read much else by her.

I finished A Fairly Good Time, one of Mavis Gallant's few novels, and started Susan Cheever's critical biography of her dad's writing life.

Moving through Totempole at a steady if slightly slow clip. It’s a fantastic book, highly recommend it— despite its era, beginning in the 1930s and ending during the Korean War— it does a fantastic job of detailing how sensuality and emotionality is beaten out of young men during childhood, and also how it emerges again. Perhaps my experiences growing up color my impressions, but I deeply appreciate the work.

In the meantime I also finished Liz Waldner’s book, Play, an interesting book of poems that essentially takes place as two overlapping monologues over the course of 20 poems and 65 or so pages.

I just posted about a poetry book I'm reading in the poetry thread. Should I be doing that here instead? (hey, that rhymed!)

aiui double entry is the preferred accounting method

For reasons that are vague to me I have begun reading a doorstop narrative history of D-Day by Anthony Beevor, titled D-Day. Because it was the single largest military operation in the history of the world I expect it will have a nearly infinite trove of anecdote and incident to choose among in telling the events of the invasion. I hope Beevor has selected well. If it starts to drag I'll jump ship.

I just started Audrey Golden's book on The Raincoats Shouting Out Loud.
Not got beyond the intros yet cos I only finished Synths, Sax and Situationists this morning.
but it looks really good.

Finished Sanford Friedman’s ‘Totempole,’ and have to say it’s a truly great novel, wrote about it above, but definitely recommend it to any interested.

Next up is Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House.’

I got bogged down in that D-Day history. The scope of the assault was so massive and sprawling that every page, paragraph or sentence bristles with lengthy proper names. As a conscientious historian Beevor rightly feels it necessary to fully identify each brigade, battalion or division (of every nation's armed forces, including the Germans), every officer, non-com or enlisted man cited (including full name & rank), every ship, every bridge, canal, river, village, hamlet, town or other geographic feature. There's no possible way to keep all this sorted and cross-referenced in my mind without superhuman efforts and it slows the narrative to a crawl. It's hopeless. It's getting binned.

xxxxpost speaking of Raincoats, I'm so glad that sleeve led me to this year's Gina Birch album, Trouble. It's on Bandcamp. Did not know about the book, thanks.

‘Deep House’ is much different than I expected, but I guess this is because I have never read Lin’s work before. I thought it was going to be a novel, of sorts. Instead, it’s a social history-cum-memoir of gay marriage and unions between gay men. Honestly finding it quite interesting, as I haven’t been reminded of a lot of this history in recent years— DOMA plays less in my brain than the AIDS crisis, and always will. What I am finding most invigorating about it is that Lin is, like me, both skeptical of and sympathetic toward gay marriage, despite being gay married myself.

I finished O Pioneers!, the last major Cather novel I hadn't read. Started Jill Lepore's We The People.

I enjoyed O Pioneers! Solid Cather. I finished the Ross Macdonald detective novel and am currently reading the Calvin Tomkins bio of Marcel Duchamp and "Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton.

When I read O Pioneers! I especially appreciated Cather's low key handling of material where a less self-assured author would have amped up the melodrama.

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Ace of Spades: Often ludicrous but compulsively readable YA thriller about queer Black students at a posh private academy with a nasty secret. Almost feels calculated to be easily adapted into a limited series by Netflix, Prime, or whatever, which wouldn't be the worst thing, but reading a 400 pp. book structured in such a way that a SHOCKING NEW TWIST pops up every 30-40 pages or so is a bit wearying.

That's a lot of books these days, and comics too! Other mediums now serving as submissions to get a streaming deal is pretty bleak.

Still going chapter by chapter through Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ I have also started Henri Bosco’s ‘The Child and the River’ for bedtime reading, and it is unbelievably gorgeous— I want to read it in French, I bet it’s even more beautiful.

In the decade after The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton wrote a series of best-selling novels that stayed out of print until the mid '90s. I'm reading Twilight Sleep, a 1927 novel about frivolous long-in-the-tooth flappers embracing birth control, spirituality, water diets, and other fads. It's the writer of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence but with a reduction if not elimination of dramatic/ironic tension; it's like a spring in her machine broke.

Twilight Sleep was what my and many other Moms had right before giving birth, for several generations, dunno if it's still a thing. Good shit.

The Silver Book, Olivia Laing - Gay romance between a British art student who dropped out of the Slade and an older Italian set designer; their affair unfolds as the latter works on Fellini's Casanova and Pasolini's Saló. I tend to bounce off novels featuring real historical figures but so far I am enjoying this a lot, good stuff on Italian regional differences and an entire chapter devoted to the set designer preparing a New Year's Feast that's #goals.

Henri Bosco’s ‘The Child and the River’

I read his “Malicroix” a few years ago. Strange book, not sure that I fully understood it. It also prominently features a river.

barely been posting at all here for personal reasons, but said to myself that i would do a couple of posts covering the latter part of the year, in a slightly diaristic mode ordered by experience rather than book, as such.

I had a memorable late autumn experience, just walking to the station early-ish in the morning. Tattered gunsmoke clouds against a silver sky with higher clouds lit a soft rose by the rising sun, golden and burnished trees, and carpets of golden leaves. I had recently been to Antwerp, and visited the Plantin-Moretus museum, dedicated to that family's printing business - strong recommend btw. Entirely coincidentally, I had been reading Lucien Febvre's well put-together history The Coming of the Book, in which the Plantin-Moretus family feature fairly heavily in their place. Against that luminous autumnal foreground the memory of reading combined with the pressed leather walls, densely dark rooms and leaded lights of the Antwerp museum, with its peaceful, secluded courtyard and sense of fruitful and productive business, of industry and capital put to good use.

The combining of intellectual emotions and immediate physical environment felt intensely rich, expressive of the infinite depth of the world, and i felt at the same time such sadness and disgust at the indignities to which political and corporate power puts its name. Capital used, not industriously, as in that printworks, but ruinously, malignantly destructive of and antagonistic to that richness. (naive i suspect - it's hardly that printing wasn't at the exact centre of the most socially irruptive forces in a battle over the spiritual make up and power bases of the world)

I had been meaning to re-read Gerard Manley Hopkins' notebooks and diaries for some time, and this experience prompted me to actually get them out of the library again and explore how he meticulously scrutinised his experiences of nature, and his experience of God, belief. Partly because I'd been feeling emotionally, cognitively even, disconnected from the world, and partly because i have a very slow burning and casual interest in understanding the operation of metaphor in a digital world, where the material substrate of the infra is not substantially connected with the aesthetic experience of the internet for most people.

Also reading him for poetic wisdom in entries such as:

Tuncks is a good name.

Gerard Manley Tuncks. Pook Tuncks.

All this did also send me to Francis Spufford's Unapologetic - his modern contribution to Apologetics. I quite like reading apologetics occasionally, but don't really know why I picked the Spufford - i'd seen someone recommend it? i hadn't really enjoyed Cahokia Jazz. I came close once to (a very private) religious conversion, but in the end it didn't seem possible to make the leap to faith. I found Spufford clear sighted and reasonably, if blandly, lucid in his arguments for Christianity, but the writing itself is often a nauseating version of C of E pastoralism, sappy paternalism, church hall tea parties and insulting charity to those who didn't ask thank you. A grotesque of the well-meaning. I've just been revisiting to find some of the worst examples, but need to go and get some stuff for tea, so will revisit later.

I love that bit from Hopkins’ journals, also his illustrations of flora are incredible

theyre definitely a treasure!

another set of books have come from a decision at the beginning of last year to spend as much time exploring Paris as I could afford. Partly because it's only a single train change from my doorstep, partly because I am learning French, very unevenly it should be said. So my guidebooks have been Lucy Sante's The Other Paris, Eric Hazan - L'invention de Paris (il n'y a pas de pas perdus), and Jacques Yonnet's Rue des Maléfices (translated somewhat oddly as Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City - the translation itself seems decent I think). All Max Read recommendations - I must head over there and thank him. All of them are excellent informal histories, or imaginations, of that city of zinc and plaster, providing underlying stories and portraits of the quartiers and arrondissements.

Maléfices is a terrible book for a French beginner; full of obscure and outdated Parisian argot, totally unusable today, and yet I have particularly enjoyed working my way slowly through it, underlining and looking up anything I don't understand, slowly translating. The patchy uneven progress through the text has been the perfect accompaniment and overlay to the patchy, peripatetic, non-linear progress through the city, a sort of guttering candle.

It's been a very enjoyable experience constructing and uncovering an experience of a city, partly through reading, partly through walking, drinking and eating, and i look forward to more in 2026.

i should add that it’s always been a city i’ve bounced off before - could never navigate a meaningful path through it and was suspcious that i could like it. it’s always enjoyable the process of reversing an opinion like that.

1144 messages for the year. Which is reasonable.

aimless has created a new thread:
2026: What Are You Reading?