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

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?

why are you reviving the 2025 wayr thread? because these are some books i read towards the second half of 2025, about which i kept meaning to post here, including over Christmas 2025. also because the words here *belong* in 2025 and not in 2026. also the fact that it is overlong as usual means it only sits at the end of a done thread rather than interrupting a live one.

T Singer – Dag Solstad. I was immediately put off by this being *once again* a novel of solipsism, and once again a young man, bookish (ofc) and feckless. That type. That tone. Let's call it - very broadly - the Notes from the Underground tone. The writing was v good quality though and his introduction to the small town of Notodden was charming and amusing. And actually the more abstract theme - what is the ontological status of a book and its characters, its main character, what is the nature of their relation? - as a thread through everything is lightly and well done. But halfway through this main character does something so evidently objectionable and selfish that I decided to stop reading. Those things aren't intrinsically bad in a book, but where this main character is your cipher, your companion of uncertain written composition - ie where they are *doing* something where you have to use them as a guide for other themes - I just thought 'why would i want to spend any more time in the company of this person, so constructed, or the consequences of this action? Ok 'selfishness' may be a construction in a book where they are meaningfully the *only* character:

In this novel she is subordinate to Singer, playing the role of a minor character, and that's not Singer's choice but *the choice of the author who is writing this book*. For Singer, in real life, Merete Sæthre was at that time a main character, but that's not what she is in this fictionalised description of what – it has be to understood – is the only extant description of Singer's life, and most likely also the only possible description. Because it has to be admitted at this point in the story it may seem mysterious that Singer could be the main character in any novel at all, regardless of quality, but here it can be divulged that it's precisely this mysteriousness that is the topic of the novel, and attempts will be made to turn this into reality.

In this situation my instinctive response 'i'm really not interested in what yerman does any more tbrr' and put the book down. I do wonder, on the same theme, what my response to Lolita would be these days. I enjoyed it when I read it. But now I just think 'why would you use *that* subject to illustrate what you want to say'. i may revisit it though i have no particular desire to do so. this was also roughly at the time of all the BookTok discourse about people not wanting Bad People in their fiction or w/e and I thought yeah, maybe i'm the same here. though specifically it's the fact that T Singer is one of those solipsistic 'what am i' novels that makes it so objectionable.

i don't entirely disagree with the idea that characters in a novel should be ones you would be amused or interested to be in the pub with (not *like*, but be able to say afterwards 'wow, that woman' 'what a fuckin guy, jesus' or w'ever.

Seven – Joanna Kavena

This was extremely mediocre. I was originally going to say crap, but that would be unfair. I normally like books built round game-like rules, ludism generated by rules and constraints. obviously this is a science-fiction state of mind. but this book was less about the rules of the game (i may have missed something in the reading - my mind was very dull at this point) and more the game as a sort of central object around events and people revolved.

The Vorrh – Brian Catling

I can't find my notes. I some pithy notes, statements to make. The immediate impression was wonderful, of a writer reconfiguring and defamiliarising, fantasising a period of history, and letting descriptive language slip its normal bounds of definition to create quite an effective sense of approaching something *new*. Impressive. A gallery of monomaniacal and quixotic individuals suffering from folly - including Raymond Roussel and Eadward Muybridge - each suffering from an actual or inferred psychological deformity are gravitationally pulled towards the psychic black hole and singularity of The Vorrh. Sounds great! Kind of is. But also it is a book - quite a long book - of relentless description in mannered cadences, and that eventually is tiresome rather than enjoyable. It is extremely gothic, I guess, in some ways. Pleased it exists. Quite pleased I read it.

The other problem here is that I was seriously questioning my desire to read fiction, and my ability to get enjoyment from it. Am I interested in novels any more? Only poetry seemed interesting. So my reviews here are unreliable because i think generally it's good to point out the things that work in a book, to be engaged, but nearly everything here will indicate someone who is failing to engage.

Then (I think) I went on to read Declare by Tim Powers. I'd read and enjoyed his Last Call - a good Vegas book. This is fun but way too long. Deliberately written i believe as a cross between Le Carré and Lovecraft, there are some great moments - the Djinns, and the laying the corner stone of the Berlin Wall. There was something unpalatable... about his portrayal of Guy Burgess. Oh yes! He really lays it on thick with his stutter and not really very well. In some of its secret underlying patterns it had a flavour of Pynchon, but much more superficial, which was annoying because I'd just bought Shadow Ticket and didn't feel like reading it immediately after. One thing that Declare did do very well was quote from Kim:

He pointed through the window—opening into space that was filled with moonlight reflected from the snow—and threw out an empty whisky bottle. “No need to listen for the fall. This is the world’s end,” he said, and swung off. The lama looked forth, a hand on either sill, with eyes that shone like yellow opals. From the enormous pit before him white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight.

such that i went 'my god, i should read Kim again. Maybe I'll enjoy it this time.

Kim – Rudyard Kipling. Still found it boring. And I *love* Kipling.

But yes, reading was hard, generally.

I went to this exhibition of Ursula le Guin maps, which was great. The Earthsea trilogy, as it was then, had been some of my favourite books growing up, and the maps had been part of the strong impression they made on me. So I went back to them. I was still impressed, moved even, by the deliberate economy, as of an axe hewing a trunk, of the sentences and phrasing. A way to splice a sort of Nordic/Anglo-Saxon feel to a children's book manner of writing, but within that simplicity the specificity of vocabulary creates richness, a sense of precision. Of course learning the words of things in the world, an ontology of nature and magic, is also the subject of the book. I remember how outraged i was when I first read harry potter, where there was no sense that magic was hard earned and closely related to meaning - just a wave of a wand and a latin sounding word. Here writing and magic are cognate.

On the first day of June my brother had been in a serious motorcycle accident. It turns out now he had been a few minutes from dying on the road. I was in A&E that night when it was unclear whether he would live or die. I remember seeing him on the gurney, in an induced coma, and I've never seen someone so clearly hanging between life and death. He clearly wasn't dead - despite the situation there was something, idk maybe it was just the artificial ventilation, that indicated he wasn't just an object, but equally he very clearly was not alive - he was grey, very very inert, not quite like my brother. he *looked* sort of dead. but not quite.

where was he then, at that moment? 'Where *are* you?' i remember asking him as I stood over him. he was in between life and death. i know I've used the word ontology a couple of times here, but that's because of this: what was his ontological status at this point? and if that sounds a bit chilly, it wasn't just a question of me wondering where he was at that point, but is also, more mundane, a question of what my feelings towards him are at that point - colossal uncontrollable love, but directed at someone who has gone or someone who is here? Neither, at that moment, neither. Where does that love go? What is it that I feel? What land is he in?

And apologies, because as I write it, it all feels a bit LinkedIn, but that question - where are people at this moment - is of course one of the central ones of fiction. Solstad in his own way is tackling it, but Le Guin in Earthsea is very explicitly tackling it - and Tehanu is a hell of a response btw, obviously the best book in the series.

And apologies again, because i should have said earlier that although last year was a very long year - he didn't get out of hospital until September - he made and has made a miraculous recovery. Not without some serious issues, but still recognisably himself, can walk, can talk, can think - all of which were uncertain at one point, such that several specialists have used the word miracle (because of course that is where miracles are found - that land he was in).

I actually found the 'Ged wrestles with himself' end of A Wizard of Earthsea a little pat (it's a children's book, Fizzles!), without it dimming the central force. I also noticed for the first time that the books in the series alternate between Sea, Land, Sea and Land. This is ofc a substantial archipelago and the comparison with the Odyssey for some reason was only obvious to me on this go round.

I found work supervened, somewhat brutally, towards the end of the year - a situation that has persisted. so this post is also a bit of an explanation why i haven't posted as much as I would have liked. i haven't been reading as much, importantly i haven't been writing as much, and the quality of my thinking has really suffered.

so i'm trying to post a bit more, and i hope having got this long overdue post out of my system that's what i'll do.

oh and i should say thanks to Keith as well because if I hadn't been so alarmed by the new site design i probably wouldn't have actually got round to posting again.

Lovely post Fizzles, and not linkedin at all! Glad your brother's doing ok.

thanks Daniel.

xpost agree w all of that!

he Vorrh – Brian Catling

oh and i should say thanks to Keith as well because if I hadn't been so alarmed by the new site design i probably wouldn't have actually got round to posting again.

― Fizzles, Thursday, 13 August 2026 bookmarkflaglink

😂😂😂

Co-sign Daniel, great post and glad your brother's ok. I also worry - in the sense of "is this a mature response" - about not wanting to spend time with horrible characters. Or wanting horrible characters to get their comeuppance, I remember having a visceral reaction against The History Man when I read it 30 odd years ago.

Wish I'd seen that Le Guin exhib. I'm glad someone else thinks Tehanu is clearly the best! I've gone on elsewhere here before about it, and the series as a whole.

I read The Vorrh some years ago. It was a slog, both too much and not enough. But yes I'm also glad things like that can exist.

thanks all, especially as reading my post back my main thought was “you know you really should read through before you send, some of this is incomprehensible”. bof.

history man is a good example.

and “both too much and not enough” is otm wrt the vorrh.

As a person who loved T Singer and all Solstad I can't whatever the guy did that was so bad but I am old and memory is totally gone.

Always an opportunity for a reread.

If I read anything in '26

i’ll apprise you at the FAP!

But please don't give up on nu-ilx, Fizzles! It's getting easier for me w sandbox, and mods help.

oh i'll see how it goes. like most people i'm extremely adaptive, even to circumstances of *grebt adversity*