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 Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil b/c why not

I've tried to read Sybil twice and both times totally failed to get into it, but I can't remember exactly why. Hopefully you will have better success than I did.

I've enjoyed Disraeli's buoyant, heavily politicized rendering of recent parliamentary history in the first chapter.

I'm reading *Sky Daddy* by Kate Folk. It's a 2025 novel about a girl who wants to marry an aeroplane and die in an air crash. So far, so Ballardian. The narrative voice is quite flat and genuine, with no obvious flourishes of style, and with none of Ballard's signature surrealist or psychoanalytic obsessions (so far, at least). It's funnier than Ballard, too, at least on a pure sentence-to-sentence level. I am entertained.

Budge The Absence
Banshees etc drummer's memoir. Has him functioning as an alcoholic for years and not able to communicate fully.
I'm finding it quite an interesting read.
& it does cover his time in earlier bands though quite rapidly.

King Kong Our Knot of Time Pat Williams
Story of the production of a South African musical at the end of the 1950s.
Production that brought Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela to light.
I would love to see a version of the performance and pick up a soundtrack. Play itself fictionalises the story of a real life boxer who had been around a few years earlier.
Picked the book up in Chapters at the start of the year. Now half way through it. Interesting book.

The Siege Of Krischnapur, J.G. Farrell - Absolutely devouring this. I came for the anti-Empire fire and brimstone but wasn't expecting this also to be a capital N novel in the 19th century mold with a wide cast of characters and telling internal monologues. We follow the British, and Farrell does a good job of establishing many different types, all at odds with each other, all arrogant and ignorant of where they are in their different ways. Also made me realise I need to learn more about muslim/hindu/sikh dynamics under colonial rule.

Finished Kenneth Martin’s Aubade in a short few hours. Could have stood to be a little longer, but of course Martin was 16 when he wrote it, so.

I couldn’t help remark that the protagonist of Martin’s book shares a name and several qualities with the protagonist of Willa Cather’s short story, “Paul’s Case,” a favorite of mine.

Love Cather and don't know Martin, so there's two I gotta read.

Young adult gay fiction? Sold!

Martin's book was published in 1957 and cause quite a stir at the time.

as for Cather, here's "Paul's Case":
https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss006

I used to teach "Paul's Case" my first two years.

I put Aubade in my queue. Anything to avoid Sátántangó.

Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica. In the future animals have been culled due to carrying a fatal disease that kills humans. In turn, cannibalism becomes first accepted and then legal.

I’m maybe 20% in. Do I like it? Too soon to say. Concept is…not really great imo, but some good chilling detail, like the matter-of-fact way they cover that first homeless people and then migrants started disappearing before cannibalism was legalised. The butcher shops having new maps of cuts that are not shown to customers. The anecdote about the family who were found to be keeping slaves and the entire group - family and slaves - have been dispatched to the municipal slaughterhouse to become “special meat”. Pretty accurate in conveying a sense of wickedness of the general population that many dystopias don’t attempt. Maybe I do like it!

Honestly, no, this was terrible. Disappointing cos there’s a ton of interesting ideas. Always very wary of criticising prose of translated works cos I’m not seeing the work as it was written. I think the unadorned prose style works really well for the subject matter but there are just some tonal duds that landed badly. Like constantly saying people looked “surprised”. It was so repetitive. Everyone is either surprised or revelling in how much they like eating human flesh all the time. It’s very two note.

The ending was predictable from a mile off. Yes our narrator learns to love Big Butcher. No we don’t ever find out if the animal virus was fake or real (though the text strongly alludes to it being fake).

It’s not all bad, like I said previously the work has a lot to say about class and racism and the evil of governments. But despite all these ingredients and the subject matter, it’s just kind of flat. It’s a shame cos I really wanted to like it, but in the end I’m not sure I’ve been more disappointed by a dystopian work since One Perfect Day.

I’m

I'm still reading "The Recognitions" by Gaddis. Already 500 pages in, so it looks like I may actually finish it this time. I tend to read it fairly quickly when I do sit down with it, which for a book like this, means I am missing a lot. But I'm ok with just getting the general gist of the more difficult passages. Gaddis loves to have party scenes with a large number of characters talking at the same time, with interleaved chunks of unattributed dialog - set off with dashes rather than quotes in the style of Joyce - so quite often one is left with a sense of the kinds of things that people in that social circle are saying, but maybe not always attributing words to specific characters, which to be honest, is probably fine. There are some particular chapters which I quite enjoyed, and others which were a bit of a slog, so overall a mixed bag. The mix of high and low is often pungent and fresh, even 70 years later - e.g. veering from abstruse medieval scholastic philosophy to scatological humor in the same paragraph. I can see how this might have inspired Pynchon.

I've been reading in a Penguin Classics volume titled Three Revenge Tragedies. Of the three plays I've finished The Revenger's Tragedie, Tourneur. The other two are The White Devil, Webster, and The Changeling, Middleton. Mentally comparing the Tourneur to Shakespeare, the contrast is pretty stark, like comparing a half-baked potato to a banquet.

I’m about halfway through The Crimson Petal and the White, which I started a few days ago, and greatly enjoying it so far. My impressions so far are good but I’ll write up more when I’ve finished. Did anyone watch the series adaptation and was it any good? Especially if you’d read the novel?

Read the first Montalbano book. An excellent translation but the book itself was not great. I imagine the series gets better as it goes along, especially if you’re Italian and/or Sicilian and/or have terrible sexual politics, but the feeble mystery and the broad slapstick passing for local colour weren’t enough to tempt me to try another

I finished Dahlen’s ‘A Reading 1-7,’ have now started the next books in the sequence. Finishing the Hewitt book, which turns out to be more about how gay men deal with depression and shame, told through the lens of the author’s graduate thesis on Hopkins.

Soon will have to go into crunch time for a review of a reissued favorite book that got handed to me today, so that’s exciting but also daunting. How to review your heroes!!

I've been reading in a Penguin Classics volume titled Three Revenge Tragedies.

Speaking of Pynchon, that book was parodied in TCOL49.

The fifth act, entirely an anticlimax, is taken up by the bloodbath Gennaro visits on the court of Squamuglia. Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom’d talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.

I finished 'The Mirror and the Light', I got bogged down a little in the middle but tore through the last 100 pages. I think I first started reading Wolf Hall about 10 years ago, so it feels like a momentous occasion #slowreader. Next up: 'A Place of Greater Safety'

October - halloween themed

Polidori - The Vampyr
Le Fanu - Carmilla
Aickman - The Wine-Dark Sea (collection)
Various - The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories
Ray Bradbury - The Emissary

first time for the first two. their tropes have been repeated endlessly since though. like vampires using anagrams of their names as pseudonyms.

the aickman wasn't as good as the first collection. (Wine-Dark Sea, The Trains, Growing Boys, The Fetch, The Inner Room, Never Visit Venice, Into The Wood). inner room and the fetch wwere close though.

the penguin had a lot of familiar things in it, not all victoria. the signalman, monkey's paw, o whistle, a few things from Household Words christmas editions. mixed. lots of women (apparently victorian ghost stories were 75% women writers)

I'm 50yrs old and an English teacher and I've never read Wuthering Heights.

The weather's terrible, and everyone is horrible and racist. It's the Real England thread, with added tuberculosis, basically.

love Wuthering Heights. Hateful little book.

lol

I finished the other two revenge tragedies, White Devil and The Changeling. They were an improvement upon the Tourneur, in that the leading characters were more recognizably human rather than speaking parts exemplifying a motive. Still, as a reader from our time and place it was hard to find enough reward in them to justify disentangling the tortured diction only to discover crude puns, or simple greed and bloodlust. These plays survive mostly as anachronistic curiosities beloved by scholars, imposed on students, but without a contemporary audience.

Next up is Sun City, Tove Jansson.

Cliche to say it, but I envy someone reading Wuthering Heights for the first time--especially if you're going in expecting something different (which I suspect is the case with many contemporary readers)

I finished Hewitt’s ‘All Down Darkness Wide.’ It was okay but didn’t really make me excited about reading his other books.

I keep thinking about Zizek's axiom that cinema doesn't show us desire but tells us *how* to desire.

I'm rereading Sons and Lovers, first time in 35 years, and am enjoying the hell out of it. Morel the toxic father is so well drawn.

Re-reading Obasan by Joy Kogawa, which I am teaching this week. Do people outside of Canada know this novel?

I don't :(

Starting off noirvember with David Grubb's The Night Of The Hunter.

I always wonder if certain source novels for classic films are worth reading, that one included. Let us know!

Lee Server in his Mitchum bio defined the novel as "Lovecraft meets Faulkner" so my expectations are high!

I finished Sun City, Tove Jansson. Compared to her excellent works (I'm setting aside the Moomin books from this consideration), The True Deceiver and The Summer Book, this one felt like only a partial success. She assembles a diverse collection of characters who've reached old age and in them she illustrates how each of them acquired a certain amount of wisdom and weakness within the boundaries of their characters. That much was successful insofar as it went. But given the vast breadth of her subject matter, her chosen characters are necessarily reduced to mere rapid sketches, and enormous territories of experience are conspicuously absent. She also includes two young characters, a Jesus freak man and a Madonna-like Mexican immigrant woman, but her imaginative sympathies for them miss their mark rather badly. I'm glad I read it. I liked much about it, but I kept stumbling against its imperfections and they distracted me.

Now I'm reading Six Records of a Floating Life, Shen Fun, a minor Chinese classic from circa 1810.

oops! Shen Fu

Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a great novel with many individual parts and with an unexpectedly happy ending

It is about two interconnected Indian families and their respective unmarried daughter and son, who both travel to live in NYC, with one coming back to live in India

I like their story not only because it tells so well the details of life in Delhi and Allahahbad and NYC but also because I can relate to their isolation and inability to successfully grasp for a connection

reading the new lee child reacher book at work cos it's the kind of book you can easily read between customers without losing the flow and because I do like scenes of reacher beating crap out of shitheads. anyway in the same paragraph he introduced 2 characters one named steve mclaren and the other david moyes and any subsequent time they show up has me chuckling at the mental picture it conjures up for me. it hasn't rained yet tho :(

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes Jonathan Rose
a book I've been meaning to read for years, I think I may have read a Guardian or Observer review when it was released.
Author is looking at autodidacts across time in early chapters veering between the 18th and 20th century so I'm not sure how chronological the bulk of the book is. Pretty fascinating though and throwing up some titles I'm going to try to get to read. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus for one.
Anyway, I'm finding it a really good read. But may dictate some of my reading for quite a while.

I had the same problem with Sun City, Aimless. In addition, I couldn't stop singing the Artists United Against Apartheid hit.

I ain't gonna read Sun City.

You and countless millions from all walks of life. It's a big tent. ;-)

A few from the last few months:

Fragments from My Diary, Maxim Gorky. I really liked this at first, colourful sketches of truly eccentric characters from a lost time and place. But I got bogged down when it came to the revolution and it took me a few months to finish, reading a couple of pages every few days.

The Trees, Percival Everett. A weird mish-mash of wacky humour (vietnamese detectives who introduce themselves in order: "ho." "chi." "minh."), serious and dark political commentary, and zombies.

On the Calculation of Volume I and II, Solvej Balle. Not as groundbreaking as some of the blurbs suggest - very reminiscent of Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson and The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, but without their overarching and bleak commentary on humanity as a whole. Pretty good though, I will get vol III.

And The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers - an ok character study of eccentric crop circle makers in the 80s, moderately entertaining but I won't be rushing to read any more of his work.

Flesh is a novel by Hungarian-Canadian author David Szalay. It is a study of straight masculinity. It follows the rise of a kid from a housing project in Hungary to wealth in London and then his fall. It skips to various points in his life. The narrative style is spare and completely refuses to express any deep interiority, which is an unusual storytelling strategy. The character is instead revealed through his choices and reactions. Some readers have criticized it for being just a portrayal of a hanger-on, but I think it is surprisingly effective. This novel did end up on the short list

― Dan S, Tuesday, October 7, 2025

This is the novel that won the Booker Prize 2025 yesterday

hungarian authors going through a bit of a purple patch recently (ok, two)

So, Night Of The Hunter:

Since the film version is such an assured and sui generis work, I was a bit surprised to discover that the main differences between movie and novel for a long time are, rather prosaically, Production Code issues - the novel talks about sex, including a wedding night where Preacher violently rejects the mother's amorous advances because of his psychosexually charged puritanism. It also goes harder on the critique of pentecoastal preachifying, as she joins him and rants about her evil desires and how the Preacher cured her of them. It did start to rankle a bit with me how all the characters who fall under his spell are female - the mother, the young daughter, Icey. But then the strongest resistance against him also comes from a woman.

It's towards the end that the book deviates from the film most,or at least from my memories (it's due a rescreening). It suddenly switches to first person perspective, and shows us how psychologically scarred the boy now is, incapable of looking at Preacher in the courtroom, seeming to have entirely forgotten people he knew just a few short months ago. Perspective then switches to the old lady, as Christmas approaches, and once more to the boy, ending on a somewhat hopeful note.

Now I'm on The Glass Pearls, by one Emeric Pressburger.

the novel talks about sex, including a wedding night where Preacher violently rejects the mother's amorous advances because of his psychosexually charged puritanism

Though likely less explicit than what's on the page, I seem to recall this making into the film?

I had asked you to report back when you mentioned you were reading this, so thanks! I'll check it out one of these days.

It might be, as I said I need to rewatch.

Overall I'd say the novel is very good, but not quite at that neglected masterpiece level where I'd be shouting from the rooftops for everyone to read it. Definitely curious to read more from the author, though - looking like a cross between Colonel Sanders and a riverboat gambler in his author pic helps.

I opted for a non-fiction book selection this time, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte (2018).

It was very much designed as an overview and a popular science book, so the 'hard' science details were few. Any bright 12 year old could absorb this book. But because, as of 2018, a new dinosaur species was being discovered at an average pace of one a week, it contained much information that was new to me. Our understanding of the ~200 million years from the late Permian extinction to the Chicxulub asteroid has been filling out very rapidly as new fossils have been found and a host of new tools applied to their study.

Needless to say, I haven't been keeping up on my dinosaur lore apart from whatever hit the mainstream media, so it was interesting to get a sense of how much our knowledge has been greatly enriched in the past half century.

Next in the queue is a late stage Ross MacDonald, The Blue Hammer.