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

Have read a lot about Celine and his books, never read them. Seems like one would be worthwhile, also prob enough. Should it be Journey To The End of the Night?

To be that guy, I will ask: why read the work of such a demonstrably vile person? Not trying to ignite an art/artist discussion but really, Nazi collaborator? Someone the Nazis considered extreme in his views?

I have thought about this recently because I have been reading about and thus excerpts from Carl Schmitt, a fascist/Nazi whose philosophical writings continue to be debated and influential to state craft today. What it comes down to with him is that many of his diagnoses are correct, but his proposed responses are unspeakable.

With Céline, having read two of his books in French in college, I can honestly say that it simply isn’t worth the time— they aren’t interesting or good enough to justify reading a Nazi.

I read Death on the Installment Plan in a college Continental lit class: too long, and it has an extended gross-out sequence that I won't er spoil.

The line with me is if the books evince Nazism and iirc they don't. Same with Knut Hamsun, to me the better novelist.

Celine is a really great writer to me and I've read almost everything of published in English, and will probably read the next translation.

I wouldn't buy the books if he was a beneficiary, but as he's dead..

Yeah, he's dead, and that hero journalist made sure his widow doesn't even benefit from that book that was uncovered recently.

I can totally understand not wanting to ever be in the headspace of a nazi writer, as a personal reading choice, but I don't think reading Celine is some sort of moral failing or that it reinforces fascism. I'd wager most of his audience in 2025 despises his actual worldview.

exactly

"Yeah, he's dead, and that hero journalist made sure his widow doesn't even benefit from that book that was uncovered recently."

Yup! That was an excellent move xp

I never said it was a moral failing, I just question why, because I didn't think the books all that special plus he was a Nazi.

Thanks yall, will keep your comments in mind.
just finished another unexpectedly quick read, for yet more mixed impressions---but Nickel Mountain. my first John Gardner (the only one in local library) is not nearly close to xpost William Melvin Kelly's A Different Drummer or aforementioned The Power and the Glory, its turns into possible insight, striking ones, tend to go nowhere plot-wise, and they're in or between vast slogging scenes and/or meticulous descriptions of physical labor, tasks, chores, also drawn-out, w/o drawing me in: what Mary McCarthy called "boilerplate," to impress the reader with realness.
The main characters to tend to live toward and in and sometimes through private crises, with symptoms sone of them can't help but indicate to friends 'n' neighbors (this being somewhat Catskills Gothi,c a bit Stephen King without the horror, with some of what Sherwood Anderson called his American Grotesque---some of Gardner's characters are even described in a way that reminds me of Anderson's people as sculpted by his wife, Tennessee Mitchell), and a Jehovah's Witness seems to have wandered in from Flannery O'Connor---now, he does advance the storyline, incl. bringing on another crisis, and good for him, amid frequent fog of so-whatness.
Nevertheless, old pro JG knows how to breadcrumb even me along through these big-bottom overalls, I mean chapters, so somebody else might get into it more (as w the Kelly and Greene).

Despite gittin lively from time to time, the author seems most interested in inner lives where the more things change--slow-w-w-ly, with feeling and even nuance obediently following or leading---the more, you guessed it, they stay purty much the same, as far as most of us folks of the outer world can tell, even or especially with omniscient narration---though some turns taken in that do help the massive central character continue on his way up to heaven or hell or nowhere in particular, all good (when he's not erupting or imploding).

Finished Etel Adnan's Time, an interesting collection of poems reflecting on time, war, and memory, written in very temporally-defined moments and locations for Adnan.

Then decided, what the heck, I'll read Surge, her 2018 book, and found it almost entirely unreadable— vague, Hallmark verses. On the "to sell/give away" pile.

I have now started in on Clark Coolidge's Odes of Roba, a book written during Coolidge's 5 months in Roma in the 1980s. Haven't read a Coolidge for a while, so it's nice to get back into his rhythms and idiosyncrasies.

I've also been reading Lorine Niedecker at night, for some reason I love reading her right before sleep, the work calms me. I have read all of her Collected before, but I usually just skip around and find a page that strikes me and re-read from there. I love her!

I started my first Ivy Compton-Burnett novel Pastors and Masters.

She's a trip. The one I read in the 80s, blanking on title, was about a family: lots of deadpan inside archery, sometimes reminding me of Henry Green's more dialogue-driven novels, but with her own takes (blanking on better terms, but HG-wannabee she ain't).

Read a small batch of recent award-winning Queer CL and YA books this month, which I'll summarize here (note: this post is completely skippable for anyone with no interest in the genre).

Molly Beth Griffin and Anait Semirdzhyan (illustrations). Just Us.
Sweet picture book about family--two moms and two young children--snowed in on Christmas and unable to spend their traditional holiday with their extended families. The family compensated by creating new traditions, including a video conference with Grandma who walks them through her apple crisp recipe (the instructions are included at the end of the book--a nice touch). Readable as a commentary on how queer families are often forced to create their own rituals and traditions if they are locked out of larger family ones, or just as a nice Christmas story.

Jes and Cin Wibowo. Lunar Boy.
Beautifully illustrated graphic novel about an astronaut who discovers a child living alone on the moon, and brings him home to her family on a post-climate change "New Earth." In early adolescence, the child deals with gender identity and first crushes, along with general displacement as an "alien." I think this book bites off a bit more than it can chew, narratively, and the dialogue gets a bit platitude-heavy towards the end (as it frequently does in contemporary Queer CL and YA), but an interesting approach to allegorizing queer childhood and, again, just gorgeous to look at.

Molly Knox Ostertag. The Deep Dark.
Another graphic novel, about a queer high school girl with a closeted girlfriend, a beloved sick grandmother and...something trapped in the basement of her house. Much more stark in its illustration than Lunar Boy, but narratively quite satisfying: I could see this being adapted into a solid movie if done right--I was getting I Can See The TV Glow vibes from the early pages, though it eventually develops into something that Guillermo Del Toro could potentially do something with.

Maggie Horne. Noah Frye Gets Crushed.
Canadian Middle-grade novel about a 12-year-old girl feeling alienated by her friends' recent discovery of boys. I haven't read a whole lot of queer MG novels, but I really liked this one; it gets at a feeling that probably a lot of queer kids feel around that age (I certainly did), when the rules start changing and you start to feel different, in not always definable ways, from your hetero peers. I'm thinking of put this one on the syllabus for a course I just found out I am teaching in the Fall on The Child in Canadian Literature (discussed in the academia thread), and I'm interested in seeing how my students respond to it.

Chatham Greenfield. Time and Time Again.
Queer teenager stuck in a Groundhog Day-like time loop and soon finds that an old friend (and budding crush) is stuck there with her. I resisted this one at first out of exhaustion with the time loop premise, but I actually think this might be one of the strongest uses of that hook that I've encountered. Queer temporality is a popular thread in Queer Theory at the moment, and this novel responds to that in some compelling ways. I may end up writing about this one.

Had another five books on my stack, but I'm gonna have to return them to the library and return to them later, as I have that course to plan now. But I'm pleased: I found two I'll almost certainly be using in my teaching and research, and three others that I'm glad to have read.

Started John Langan's latest, Lost In The Dark and Other Excursions, on a plane to and from San Francisco this week. Still got a couple of stories left (the flight was only about 2 1/2 hours each way).

crypto, I was talking about MG books with a friend a few weeks ago— she has a pretty questioning, possibly queer daughter in middle school— and we both agreed that the problem with them is that they seem written for 4th-5th graders, not for 7th graders (ie 13 year olds). is this just a function of the genre?

It may be, in the sense that the authors--and more crucially the publishers--are probably hyperconscious about "appropriateness" and thus these books are careful not to step over the line towards something that would get them classified YA (or, these days, "pornography"). As most of us likely remember, though, if you are a 12 or a 13 year old who cares about books, you are probably already interested in reading above your "grade" level, and thus it makes sense that queer/questioning 7th graders might want to gravitate towards queer YA materials, rather than what is being pitched at them (in which case we get into issues of access; I don't know how rigorous librarians are about policing what young readers are allowed to check out).

The few MG novels I've read make no mention of sex, desire, etc, which I guess is funny when you consider that Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is just about the prototypical contemporary MG novel, and it is full of descriptions of changing bodies, girls sneaking looks at penises in health manuals, and things like that. But, again, I think that the whole network of MG authors and publishers is afraid to touch that stuff now.

I will reiterate that I think a MG book like Noah Frye Gets Crushed (or the books I've read by Michael Leali) feel perfectly pitched at their intended audience, to me, although I don't necessarily presume to know what 12-year-olds these days gravitate towards (for my nieces, it was anime, horror, and Taylor Swift). But ultimately, I suspect--or at least hope--that kids like your friend's daughter will find the literature that speaks to them, ignoring the strict categorizations.

I've been rather at loose ends, so I've been reading short stories by Chekhov (translators: Pevear & Volokhonsky). Russia at the end of the nineteenth century certainly did not lack for material.

Currently reading "The Correspondence of Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins, 1707-08", edited by William Uzgalis, and "The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China" by Lu Xun, translated by Julia Lovell.

I finally finished these. The first two collections in the Lu Xun anthology, Outcry and Hesitation, were fascinating. I don't think I'd ever read any fiction set in early 20th-century China, the chaotic period between the fall of the Emperor and the Communist takeover. And Lu Xun has a very interesting sensibility. The stories often center around a character not unlike the author: a cosmopolitan and educated, but economically precarious, scion of a once-respected but now fallen on hard times family from an provincial village. The stores are often astonishing in their close-run blend of tragedy and grim comedy, and their clear-eyed brutality, a bit like Isaac Babel in that regard.

It’s been a minute, but thanks for that insight, crypto!!

I'm reading a collection of Stanley Elkin novellas, including "The Making of Ashenden," in which the title character has great sex with a bear.

Finished a few smaller things, including the great Zan de Parry’s ‘Cop an Emulator.’

Now onto Clark Coolidge’s ‘Mine: The One That Goes Into the Stories,’ and Norma Cole’s ‘My Bird Book.’

Re-reading Paris 1919 … there are absurdist gems worthy of Catch-22 amidst the fairly straightforward history.

Started reading "The Unwomanly Face of War" by Svetlana Alexievich. Rather similar to "Last Witnesses" in the content and approach (except that one was about experiences people had as children in WWII, and this one is the experience of (mostly) young women), but I enjoyed that one and I'm enjoying this one too. She writes oral history as found poetry. Even though the words are putatively others', any single page of this would be immediately recognizable as her work.

finished the Cole, been a bit stuck in a funk otherwise. i really just want to read Norma Cole all the time! but i have a stack to read, so i will find something good

I'm rereading Song of Solomon, but my first time was over 25 years ago so much of its developments are fresh. I also bought Ben Shattuck's story collection in anticipation of The History of Sound.

Today I finished another book for my YA class, a classic which I had never read: The Giver by Lois Lowry. A strange book, not totally certain why it’s so controversial. I mostly found it reactionary in its extolling of the virtues of individuality and the “inevitable” totalitarian nature of communism, but most of the hubbub around it seems to be more about the baby-killing.

― czech hunter biden's laptop (the table is the table)

Old post, I know, but: my elementary school had a copy in its library - I think I first read it in grade 5 or 6 - and we read it as part of the curriculum around age 13 or 14. And these were Catholic schools! Had no idea there was any controversy.

The Giver was the first dystopian story I read and I remember feeling unsettled by it. In a good way - a kid-friendly, gently challenging way. I suspect if I read it now I'd share your reservations about the reactionary elements, though.

Reading Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites as teaching prep. A landmark text in the study of YA fiction (it came out in 2000), I'd only read excerpts up until now.

that sounds fascinating, will have to see if my uni library has it

I've been away from internet access camping for the past two weeks or so. In that time I read a couple of slim Simenon novels, one with and one without Maigret.

I also read One Man's West, David Lavender, written just after WWII regarding the author's experiences before the war, both as a hard rock miner in a Colorado gold mine located at 9000 ft in mountains that were only accessible by mule, and working as a cowboy in vast and equally roadless rangeland in southwestern Colorado.

The most striking thing was his descriptions of workdays that were frequently sixteen or more hours doing hard labor at dirty, highly dangerous work, how frequently workers were injured or killed, how totally unsafe and unregulated it all was, and nothing remotely like worker's compensation for things like loss of fingers, broken bones, or work-caused disability. All this was simply taken as a given. The working class training/culture of the cowboys and miners took it as a badge of honor to continue working no matter what without complaint -- for $30 a month and food. The author accepts that this is just how men acted, or was anything but admirable displays of fortitude and will.

have you read “Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush,” Aimless? you might find it fascinating, i certainly did, and the book you just described reminded me of it.

I haven't run across it, but it sounds interesting.

Worth looking into!

Currently reading "Tetrasomy Two" by Oscar Rossiter. It's a Frederik Pohl selection Bantam paperback that I picked up for a few bucks at a used bookstore. So far the story is as bonkers as I had hoped.

I just finished reading the NYRB paperback version of Thomas Tryon's "The Other." It inspired the Robert Milligan movie, and sold 3.5 million copies in 1971. It was a bestseller for half the year.

Somehow, I didn't know it existed.

It was such an unpleasant read. I hated it, and also I am quite glad I read it. It is about twin brothers, Niles and Holland Perry, who live on a decaying, ghormengasty farm in (fictional) Pequot Landing, Connecticut. Increasingly grisly, gruesome, weird deaths happen all around them. Mostly to members of their family. Niles begins to realize his brother is not innocent in these deaths. Realism at the beginning gives way to a grand guignol by the end, but the narrative is still closely concerned only with the psychological growth/development of its main character, Niles. Is it about haunting? Maybe, maybe not. Is it about the murders? Sorta. Obsession, loyalty, queerness? Maybe a bit, incidentally, but it doesn't seem committed to any of these ideas. It lavishes many words on the boys' Russian ancestry, on a game that may be slightly supernatural, but that has zero bearing on anything.

It is written in three sections, and between each of the three sections is a direct address by an acerbic, catty, fortyish narrator who is, incidentally, preoccupied by shapes on the ceiling of the room in which they are writing. It is generally unclear if this person is the author, or if they are related directly to the story, but they share plenty of strong, opinions about everybody in it. At times, this voice contradicts or undermines what happens in the main narrative.

The prose is self-consciously literary, "pretty," and builds out a rich and well-considered setting (ugly, inbred, of unpleasant people) who are ... not important to the story? While Niles/Holland are running around their creepy New England murder farm, there are digressions into card magic, angels, fairy tales, costumes, disability, deformity, alcoholism, grandfather clocks, and childbirth.

Anybody else?

i want to read it now

at least it sounds like Tryon had a fun time writing it

I almost bought it a few months ago.

Always been semi interested in Tryon as an actor turned writer, and a later novella of his forms the basis of Wilder's Fedora, but never actually got round to reading one of his novs .

I've had Night of the Moonbow sitting on my shelf unread for years. May have to make time for it now.

Am reading or about to finish:

Penelope Mortimer The Pumpkin Eater
Nicholas Boggs - Baldwin: A Love Story
John M. Barry - The Great Influenza

It was such an unpleasant read.

Sounds like a parody of Ada.

soda, have you seen Milligan's adaptation of The Other? I haven't read the book, but its narration, as you decribe it, is brilliantly compressed into sunlit horror: syrupy lighting of the fields etc. made me think it was gonna be Little House On The Prairie, but it's so not, so sick---and yes, all psychological, as it keeps being so purty. Milligan, having directed To Kill A Mockingbird, had the Hollywood clout, and the gift, as well as the skill, to continue working with nonprofessional child actors, and did great with the twins---plus, it's the only movie performance I've ever seen by Uta Hagen, a legendary acting teacher, also a well-documented one, as author of the very useful Respect For Acting.

Hi dow!

I saw the movie decades ago, on a shitty taped-off-TV VHS when it was OOP, and I can't remember any of it except Uta Hagen in a blue nightgown. (I only know her from Respect for Acting, too, and a bit part in a New Twilight Zone episode). In my head, the movie has gotten all tangled with Io non ho paura/I'm Not Scared (2003).

I might look the movie up. I'm a bit worried it won't convey the dread and dankness of the book. But syrupy and sun-drenched sounds appealing.

Recently I've been wondering about why literary horror acts so strangely on me at middle-age. It's grown much less effective at scaring me, and more effective at unsettling me, irritating me. I'm finding that creatures, gore and spectacle are cathartic, predictable, and come at me as a relief, like a punchline after a long comedic setup. The violence or shock of the death-act itself is frequently comforting. Anyway, death on the page is just death on the page, an aesthetic effect. And lately, it's like I can see the wires and strings holding up these special effects.

But unresolved horrors, open narrative brackets, weird thought patterns, deviance and strangeness that can't be reduced to known types (like the boys in The Other) really stick with me. I often find this in translated texts, or old/forgotten texts. It's like I've grown callused to the horror devices in my own environment, and need to find things outside to out-weird my defenses. Maybe it's growing harder for me to find the uncanny...

I'm sure other people have deeper, more coherent thoughts on this, but I wonder if part of the diminishing of my fear is that my fear of real death has diminished and the "loan" of anxiety that loads of media borrows from that internal anxiety is ... no longer so persuasive. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

John M. Barry - The Great Influenza

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 23, 2025 7:46 AM (twelve hours ago)

This is in my pile. Worth the read?

ohhhh yes

might trigger you if our pandemic affected you.

What struck me: I knew already about the Wilson administration's crackdown on speech and unyielding commitment to propaganda to win the war; but the book makes clear how this tunnel vision led to a complete -- no minced words -- wiping out of the pandemic as it was killing thousands of people a day in the United States. A grim, shall we say, harbinger.

September was

The Mabinogion, which was mostly about pigs
The Tain, which was mostly about cattle
The Prose Edda, which was mostly about wolves

the introductions for the first two both mentioned the other and Mort D'Arthur. both also very fond of lists of unpronounceable names* that sometimes went on for four pages. and both mentioned the same boardgame which nobody knows the rules for anymore, gwyddbwyll / fidchell

the prose edda tried to claim that Thor was a descendant of Priam of Troy. also mentioned jesus in the introduction and ended up talking about Danish history and the Ring cycle. seemed very mixed up. or i am. this is probably only for people who liked the Crossley-Holland and wanted to know more.

* unpronounceable for me. Ysbaddaden, Efrawg, Medb etc. it didn't help that the guide to names in the front used a character that my ereader didn't support.

I'm currently reading a collection of Dashiell Hammet's short stories, edited by Lillian Hellman, called The Big Knockover. It also includes an informal, rather affecting memoir of Hammet written by Hellman. The stories are uneven with some excellent and others pulpy, but the writing is consistently high level: crisp, direct and transparent. This collection is a companion to a second Hellman-edited collection I read last year and enjoyed, called The Continental Op.

Re-reading Anne of Green Gables, which I'm teaching this week.