2026: What Are You Reading?

Happy New Year everyone! May your coming days be low in stress, high in satisfaction and full of nourishment for the body and soul. If you'd like to share any kind of thoughts or information about what you're reading, this is the place.

I've been marking time until New Year's Day is over to start my next book. At the moment, I'm strongly drawn to re-reading Varieties of Religious Experience, William James. As a general goal, I'd like to increase my percentage of re-reads this year.

This time around, because the 'What Are You Reading?' threads tend to be the de facto catch-all thread for I Love Books, and because most of us employ Site New Answers as our primary entry point for ILX, I thought a dull, but straightforward thread title would make it easiest to identify in the crowd.

Here's a link to the 225 thread: 2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread

So, happy reading, y'all! Let the gabfest commence!

after very long Trollope in December i went completely the other direction with a Neuromancer reread

I found a neat book called The Names of Comedy, by Anne Barton, about the art of naming characters in comic drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Jonson). I'm going to try to read it over the remainder of break. I love topics like this which blend philosophy of language and literary studies.

"They confronted a fundamental choice: whether to give 'speaking' names, as Adam did in the garden, expressing the nature of the characters, or 'accidental' names which allow for greater independence and for change. These different attitudes towards naming are bound up with the larger debate about the truthful or arbitrary nature of language itself; the debate was formalized in Plato's Cratylus and continues today."

Brought Michael Amherst’s ‘The Boyhood of Cain’ with me on a short jaunt to NYC, where I’ll be reading in the annual Poetry Project marathon if anyone is attending

I've almost finished Francis King's recently back in print The Domestic Animal.

mentioned on the what did you read thread, but i am working my way thru october, china mieville's narrative history of the russian revolution. it's somewhat of a historical blind spot for me, so i'm enjoying it so far. mieville does a great job of sketching out the key figures and capturing the history-shifting drama of the moment

and also succinctly explaining the ideological differences between the various revolutionary factions

So funny, I found ‘October’ to be so dry as to make me utterly somnolent every time I opened it. It is currently on my “to sell/give away” pile, could hardly break 25 pages.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

Vijay Prashad The Darker Nations
A history of the Third World from a series edited by Howard Zinn

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie. A fictionalised account of the lives of two 14th/15th century female christian mystics. Very interesting really, I might take a look at one of the primary texts, The Book of Margery Kempe, considered to be the first autobiography written in English.

Heading into that Lockwood everyone hated. So far surprised by the conventional, third person style that it is written in. She felt she needed to switch it up I guess.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

I know the general outline— I took a few Russian history and art/culture courses in college— but I think that generally speaking, most history books aren’t for me, so it is probably a me problem.

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

I have, as indicated above, begun to re-read Varieties of Religious Experience. Because it was written and delivered as a series of lectures it was originally meant to be heard, not read, which makes for a somewhat more conversational authorial voice. I find it reads easily and reveals Wm James's character through the way he addresses his audience and makes his points. I find real pleasure in that aspect of the book, above and beyond which he was a very acute and congenial (to me) thinker on this subject.

"down there on a visit", christopher isherwood

also about ¾ way thru "the book of eve" by carmen boullosa which i was enjoying at 1st but have kind of bogged down in now

Currently giving Nixonland a go. I’ve decided this is the year to read all the fat books on my shelf that I’ve been avoiding. Also America seems to be more and more perplexing so I might as well learn something about y’all.

loved nixonland

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

Oh yeah, definitely. Tbh, this is a book that's been sitting on my shelf since forever. I bought it a long time ago, read a few chapters, and then set it aside. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time. But I was reminded of it when I read Tomkins's piece about being 99 years old in the NYer this past year and picked it up again. I'm glad I did, because for whatever reason I'm enjoying it now. It's very light on any kind of art criticism or any thoughts about the deeper meaning or theory of art. Duchamp was an unusual person who lived during interesting times and had a lot of interesting friends, and the book mainly focuses on that aspect. Tomkins has a worldly, understated style which suits the material. Duchamp claimed to have retired from producing art when he was fairly young, and insisted that everything he made after that was not art, and Tomkins respects that intention, leaving it up to the reader to ascribe whatever significance to the little artifacts he crafted and sold or gave to collector friends or the odd poems/puns he had published under his nom de plume, Rrose Selavy.

Tomkins on Duchamp is just the break I need from the hagiographic Andrew Jackson bio (by Robert Remini) I'm about to finish. Thanks.

About 1/3 of the way through Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. Feels bit like Elfriede Jelinek + Thomas Bernhard on either steroids or hallucinogens or both. Pretty great but I have to take in small doses at a time.

Just finished reading Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, which I thought was dreadful, but it has at least the virtue of being an interesting failure. Typed out a longer reflection but ultimately it's not worth it. Felt like he really fumbled the ghost story and was never able to successfully incorporate the other part of the story (hypochondriac womanizing alcoholic inn owner has a depressing life experience), so that both felt kind of flat and incongruous. I would explain why I feel this way, but that would require me to open the book again, which I don't want to do

Ah, see, that's one of the few Amis novels I like (the others: Lucky Jim, Girl 20, Ending Up, The Old Devils).

(I also read it in musty library hardcover form in 2007 before NYRB's handsome reissues a few years ago, so).

I like three of the four you listed (haven't read Girl, 20), so this was the first time an Amis novel left me cold

Will probably finished the Lin book today, am also reading Michael Amherst's 'The Boyhood of Cain' before bed. After a bit of a slow start, things are starting to pick up about 40 pages in— our protagonist's personality is coming more into view, and the tensions of the book are making themselves more apparent. probably the first time a book has been described to me as a "slow burn" and actually been that!

I just finished Gerald Murnane's Inland. Kind of amazing, couldn't stop reading it. I'll have to read more of his work now. A great example of how brilliant abstract writing with some depth can be, even when what's beneath is intangible. I note Claire Louise-Bennett is one of the hype quotes on the back of my edition and that makes sense as I now realise her work is like Gerald Murnane if the first-person narrator was Mrs Doyle from Father Ted.

I've resumed The Hemlock Cup, a biography of Socrates by Bethany Hughes after abandoning it last year. Really enjoying it, it's sort of a history of the time as well as his life, just sort of interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict and she has a knack for story.

Love Murnane, still think it's criminal that he hasn't won the Nobel

I love some of the digressions that become sort of meta-observations of the writing process, there are some in which the exact technique he's describing is embodied in the form he uses to describe it but he's still writing lyrically and freely as he does so, and not explaining or outlining. Virtuoso stuff.

interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict

Socrates lived in an exceedingly interesting time and place, spanning the Periclean rise of Athens to an imperial power, its collapse during the Peloponnesian War, and the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants. Also the cultural and intellectual ferment that accompanied all these events. An unusually well-documented, incredibly concentrated, and very archetypal historical period.

This is what I'm learning - the war and political conflict are incredibly interesting and obviously prescient, at any time I guess but also now.

I know a bit about Roman history as did Latin in school but don't really know Greek and this has a great narrative flair to it. Obviously a very different subject but it was recommended to me when seeking another history book as enjoyable as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Already there's so much I didn't know, Socrates hated the written word!

Socrates also had his failsons.

Started end of '26 as I ended, with a bunch of yoga books

Elisabeth Kadetsky - First There is a Mountain. A book where a Californian journo goes to yoga intensives in India given by yoga master BKS Iyengar (whose teachings I know well as I have been practicing his form of Hatha Yoga for ten years, and teacher training rigorously in it for the last three years). Its also about India, anorexia, processing family trauma while looking and being fascinated by a flawed man who had a tough upbringing in utter poverty in post-colonial India and went on to popularise Yoga in the West (while being overlooked at home). Its a properly written (very New Yorker style) book (she ran several interviews with him for it), and it gets uncomfortable as some of the people around his studio (potentially including Iyengar's son) are clearly highly sympathetic to the Indian far-right, and there's plenty on the feedback and tensions between East and West and the underlying post-colonial order. I think its pretty readable to a non-yoga student though you may want to look up some of the poses and bits of background on yoga philosophy to get more of a grasp.

Also finished:
Svātmārāma - Hatha Yoga Pradipika (notes by Krishnamacharya, tr. Mohan) - the 'best known' medieval Hatha Yoga book, with commentary by BKS Iyengar's Teacher
The Gheranda Samhita (tr. Mallinson) - another Medieval Hatha Yoga manual
Shadow Yoga, Chaya Yoga - Shandor Remete (former student of BKS Iyengar who went onto develop his own school of Hatha Yoga, to the extent I have started practicing some of it

At various stages:
BKS Iyengar - Astadala Yoga Mala (vol. 1, of 8) - collected interviews/writings
Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)
Swara Yoga Treatise - this is a sort of Tantra Yoga manual, can't make much of it, a lot of Vedic astrology and morals

you're mainlining the inner peace

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

Abel Ferrara’s autobio - A breezy, entertaining read. Messy, wild, full of great anecdotes.

Teoría del color ( J. Pawlik)

Started the first of Darwyn Cook’s “Parker” adaptations

you're mainlining the inner peace

― LocalGarda, Monday, 5 January 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Namaste

Most of my reading is through audiobooks. I recently very-much enjoyed David Szalay's Booker Prize-winning 'Flesh'.
So I was surprised to see a lot of people online didn't like it, including one or two people on ILX. Maybe it's because the narrator was extremely compelling, but frankly I thought it was fantastic.

Szalay employs a deliberately stark writing style to mirror the lead's taciturn character, it's an exploration of masculinity, sex, trauma, class and outsiderness. I saw a few people expressing frustration that the writer denies the reader any insight into the main character's inner life. I'd say this is what makes the book special. There is a world of meaning expressed in small-talk exchanges like: "How are you?" / "I'm okay." / "What do you mean 'Okay'?" / "I don't know...".

So yeah, bare on description, bare on emotional exposition, but somehow I could imagine every character and location extremely vividly. And despite nothing in the book having ever actually happened to me, every scenario and conversation felt relatable. Do readers really need their characters to be gregariously pouring their hearts out on every page? For me this was an enjoyable (if bleak) and quick read.

My first book this year was a novella: The Alienist by Machado de Assis. Not essential, not at all unpleasant either. The satire takes up the whole space and we are left with stock characters, some witticism, and a light atmosphere, when it seems like he could have fleshed it out and touched a bit more on the philosophical aspects of madness.

And now I'm in the first pages of Of Human Bondage, which is my first by Somerset Maugham. The length looks daunting, but it's the start of the year, so Godspeed.

I have also picked up Thus spoke Zarathustra at my parents for a first look in over 20Y. I thought I would just skim through, but I may end up rereading. At age 17 I was looking for deep truths, now I am curious to what extent this was a personal, therapeutic, self-psychanalysis book for Nietzsche, fed by bitterness or regret. Not that I would reduce it to this lens, but taking advantage that it's an open book lending itself to different interpretations.

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table)

Gay Bar impressed me in 2022.

going to grab a copy of that one

reading new paltz, new paltz, first novel by erstwhile(?) ilxor(???) mike powell (if none of that turns out to be true, he's a colleague whose work i've admired for a decade-plus). it is totally fucking excellent

Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)

i checked this out based on the title and your description and i may have to get a copy. good first page!

i used to go to yoga classes billed as "iyengar" style in d.c. the woman who taught them would scream at students and wasn't shy about let's say emphatically making adjustments by hand. she was unhinged lol.

Schiffmann is really nice. There are a few meditations in there (he is v much into meditation as well as yoga), and he has an interesting technique he relates to from a Hatha Yoga teacher (Joel Kramer, who has articles you can find on his site and are v interesting if you practice) that is about finding energy lines, whereas Iyengar Yoga is about alignment in the pose and specific sequencing.

The teaching can be v strict. My teacher was taught by Geeta Iyengar (the daughter, who sounds worse, in the Kadetsky book she relates how she was reduced to tears by her) and she is v tough but its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down. But its done in a yoga context so people walk out, hate it etc. Its not for everyone and will probably die out. But I probably wouldn't want to teach if it was for my teacher. There's a lot of fluff in yoga, as she says.

The younger Iyengar crowd are a different generation, and they are much nicer.

its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down

yeah this was the vibe. my take is - martial arts intensity without the rush of combat? lol no thanks.

on the other hand the difficulty and pain of actually adjusting skeletal alignment sort of calls for that approach. and people who want to be pushed like that are definitely around.

i remember her asking students to make the skin on their legs move. lol wtf? not to get on too much of a tangent.

Headstand and shouldderstand for 10+ minutes with deep backbends/forward bends/twists will probably be the nearest I get to combat lol

Yeah stuff around skin is a more advanced instruction and shouldn't be given to any beginning students tbh. In general classes I am going to ask you to engage your thigh muscles and lift up the kneecaps and so on. Those kinds of instructions should suffice and work at a more "gross", rather than subtle, level.

Gave the Lockwood a break, not because it's bad - not far enough in to make that judgement call yet - but because it's on my nightstand as my before getting up book, and having had quite a difficult beginning to the year feverish evocations of the pandemic is definitely not what I want my day starting with at this moment. So instead I've picked up the Dictionary Of British Cartoonists and Caricaturists, 1730-1980 by Mark Bryant and Simon Heneage. This was an impulse buy at the Cartoon Museum, seduced by both the book's format and the illustrations on the cover; only after purchasing did I think about how you don't read dictionaries and if I ever got into the position of looking up a British caricaturist surely I would now do so online. But hey, just because there's conventions doesn't mean you have to follow them and so I've started reading it the way one would do a novel. The entries are so short that I doubt any names will truly stick with me, but dry, mundane facts are a soothing start to my day - studied in Liverpool, served under regiment x in wwi/wwii (choose which one applies); lots of advertising work as well as contributions to The Tattler and a weekly strip in the Observer. That kind of thing. Perhaps if I finish it, even not retaining any names I'll have acquired a holistic knowledge of the field in these eras. Or perhaps I'll get bored with it in a couple of days and pick something else.

Interesting - do they limit themselves to newspaper editorial cartoonists like Cummings of the Express or Mac of the Mail, or are strip cartoonists and comic book artists included too? As far as I know there's still a gap in the market for a David Thomson-like Biographical Dictionary of British Cartoonists, where some sort of critical insight and a certain literary style would offer more than a Wiki entry.

A friend of mine wrote this extremely useful A-Z of British Newspaper Strips, complete with plenty of examples:

https://bookpalace.com/info_azbritnewsstrips

I like her but, yeah, I had a similar impression.

yeah. lazy writing . cartoonish misery laid on top of cartoonish misery. heavy handed allegorical crap. abysmal.

I've only read her short story collection, which I thought was good, and McGlue, which I really loved, though I guess it is an outlier stylistically for her. I've felt less and less interested in the books since those just based on what they're about and how they're discussed.

I only read "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" which was ok but haven't sought out any more. I'm currently reading "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora, which is turning into a crackling true-life adventure story.

After the raw moonshine of Flannery O'Connor's book, I'm now having a nice cuppa tea with Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings.

am halfway through 'young once', also by modiano, mentioned upthread. v similar to 'in the cafe of lost youth', sort of greyscale misery as remembered from a distant point in the future, some beautiful sentences and moments.

I have a copy of "Accident nocturne" that I think I might read this summer. I read "La ronde de nuit" in college and think I liked it but don't remember anything about it.

Making good progress on "The Assistant" which continues to be both hilarious and charming, and also reading some Deleuze on the side.

I re-re-re-reread the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald last month, this time paying attention to how well or how poorly they'd adapt to films or miniseries. It's always slightly baffled me that the McGees haven't been filmed more than they have (one feature film in 1970, one tv movie in 1983). I think the biggest problem, the main character's gross I-fuck-the-ladies-back-into-good-mental-health sexism, could be cast aside and the solid adventure/investigative stories kept intact. I've read that MacDonald hated the film of Darker Than Amber, and I know that his son Maynard is his literary executor...is Maynard the holdup? There's a market for Hyper-Competent Badassery, Jack Reacher for example. (Lee Child wrote an introduction to a reissue of the McGee series that's in all my e-book files.)

Despite being a huge fan of the McGees, I'd never read any of JDM's non-McGee work, so I am thinking about plowing through all that in chronological order. The Brass Cupcake (1950, 14 years before the McGees started appearing) is solid, prose style derivative of Chandler and not the JDM that he would make himself into later. Plot worthy of Yojimbo, could be turned into a good 90 minutes of kickass by Koepp and Soderbergh without raising a sweat.

Will look for that one thanks!

I-fuck-the-ladies-back-into-good-mental-health

There's an interesting bit in one of the later McGees where he realizes he's not attracted to a woman because she's too well-adjusted and doesn't need any of his Sexual Healing. A moment of self-awareness that JDM only addressed very obliquely in the later books, but probably would have been front and center if he'd lived to write any more.

I would bet $100 that after Maynard MacDonald dies, there will be new McGee books.

Thinking about starting a MacDonald thread.

After deciding to put down Lapvona— a decision buoyed by a post on Instagram about it that garnered dozens of reactions that ranged from "I liked her other books but I hated this" to "this is unreadable, boring bullshit and so are all of her books"— I have started Henry Blake Fuller's 'Bertram Cope's Year,' a 1919 novel about a young man who seems utterly unwilling to engage with the matchmaking talents of an interested doyenne, instead showing utter devotion to his male roommate. You get the subtext!

you guys are making me curious about lapvona now lol

i think i’ve read everything else shes written, more or less liked it all to varying degrees but for some reason i didn’t feel compelled to read lapvona. but i feel like the critical tide turned against her around then, kinda tempted to read it in the hopes i can contraristan it

Read Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting in five days after encouragement by LocalGarda. Think I will be thinking about this one a while.

Trauma is circular, the world is dying and the past isn’t past. This book hit me hard on some or all of these. It’s bleak and brutal BUT peppered with humour that stops it getting too harsh. The prose is often beautiful:

Above them was one of those perfect autumn skies that graced the city only rarely, a brilliant, cloudless silver-blue against which the trees' golden-red foliage glowed as if lit from within; around them, fallen leaves circled over the cobbles in sudden rushes, like debutantes whirled on the roguish arms of the wind.

When Imelda meets her future father-in-law:

But then the crowd parted and a man appeared He looked like something out of The Godfather A head of silver hair slicked back An enormous coat you could fit two or three people in A pink tie A polka-dot handkerchief poking out of his top pocket Someone who had made money it was plain and wanted you to know it He comes up to them this fella and fixes them with an eye like he'd caught the servants drinking his sherry And Daddy's speech that he's making dies away in his mouth and there's silence

When Dickie is spending time in the woods with his prepper friend:

A few yards away, Victor sits on the log, a silhouette except for his face, lit up blue by the screen of his laptop. This is how he likes to relax in the evenings - cleaning his gun while watching American survivalists give tours of their own bunkers, show off their equipment, air their conspiracy theories. Sometimes their voices weave their way into Dickie's sleep: he finds himself dreaming about George Soros, wire cutters, deals on Amazon Prime.

There is so much pain, and beauty too. I was drawn to Rose, the aunt who has the sight. Every single scene with her is a masterpiece of foreshadowing, whether the characters realise it or not. There’s a plot point in one of the later Night Watch books where a Prophet character is stalked by a supernatural creature that aims to kill him before he can deliver his prophecy. He evades death by shouting his prophecy into the hollow of a tree. There is a moment with Rose that echoes that for me, though tonally quite different.

It is in Ireland of course and it’s an incredible blend of past and present, which of course still blend especially when some horrific national trauma is surfaced. Ghost estates seamlessly coexist in the same reality as the tale of the fairies that Imelda keeps thinking about. But the real horror (besides unresolved trauma) is climate change, approaching slowly but certainly and a subject all the POV characters think about whether fleetingly or obsessively. After all, their town is destroyed by a flood.

There is a story, which everyone has heard growing up at some point, about the man who stumbles upon a feast with the fairies in the side of a hill. They are beautiful, golden, welcoming. He finally departs and resumes his journey home. When he arrives to his town, his house is gone, as are his family. Everyone he knew has been dead for a hundred years.

This story is echoed at key points of the book and although the book flirts with some supernatural elements (Rose having the sight, the black dog) they are second to our own manmade horrors. There is a scene where Cass, the family’s daughter, sees a disgusting old paedophile buying children’s magazines in a shop to lure victims, and this is later revealed to be her brother’s online pursuer. It particularly hurt me that Imelda’s first impression of Big Mike was entirely accurate, given her history. And Dickie spends his life living a kind of half-life, with moments of love, but it’s like the diet version of the happiness he could have had. His chapters are devastating because he is largely a young character forced into a role he was no way ready for by death and repression. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

Every character in this is superb. I will think about this for a long, long time.

^ lovely write-up

I'm still reading Walser's The Assistant, and taking in some supplemental material as I do so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfBDgSNPcKI
Susan Bernofsky: Magical Writing - Robert Walser's Microscripts

She mentions in passing that Walser and Hesse were contemporaries, something that had never occurred to me. It's interesting to think that Walser was born only a year after Hesse (1878 and 1877 respectively, and actually closer to nine months), and that their second novels were published only two years apart (The Assistant in 1908 and Beneath the Wheel in 1906), and further that both of these novels tell of a young person who becomes a kind of apprentice. Beyond this, the books couldn't be more different. Reading Hesse, though, you have this sense of continuity or continued cultural interest, since the '60s, that has kept his work more or less alive (there must be dozens of cheap paperbacks of his work in every used bookstore in the United States), whereas with Walser there's the tragicomic circumstances of his retirement from writing, death in obscurity, and then a much later rediscovery (at least in the anglophone world) which maybe is what makes his books feel much more distant in time. Bernofsky also points out that The Assistant sold out of its first two printings (2,000 copies in total), and that while this was undoubtedly a success, Walser sulked when he compared these numbers to those of Hesse and Mann, who both would've been selling around 20-30k copies of their books at this time. Still, Bernofsky mentions that a review of Kafka's first collection of short stories in 1912 describes Kafka as "one of these Walser types" -- not nothing. So anyway it's definitely interesting how things can change. For a long time, not ever having looked much into it, I would've thought that Walser's works were plucked from some obscure Swiss mountainside, not that he was hanging out in Berlin with Max Beckmann, for a time anyway

That sounds excellent, gyac, thanks for writing on it. I am going to find a copy.

Yeah, thanks for both those posts. I'm starting Walser's "Masquerade" and Other Stories, translated by Bernofsy. Just finished Wlliam Gass's intro, which was appealing.

i have a crush on susan bernofsky. she rules

Jennifer Egan - Manhattan Beach

never read Goon Squad, from what I've read this book is a big departure

'a brief history of intelligence' by max bennett

very fun and addictive pop science. about connections between neuroscience and artificial intelligence

― flopson, Saturday, February 28, 2026 6:48 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

this turned out to be one of the best things i've ever read

it turned out to be less about ai and more about comparative biology. the clever experiments that scientists have devised to probe the limits between the brains of primordial worms, vertebrates, mammals, chimpanzees, humans were a revelation to me

now reading pop 1280 by jim thompson

I also reread a few Travis McGees in the past couple months. I copied out some of the sex scenes because wow this style.

Mood shifted and meshed into another mood. Small fires glowed and then flamed up. There had been no need for words. There were no restraints, no hesitations. We shared each other without words, meeting with such a great need, such a wonderful sensitization to each other that it could have been the second thousandth time we had been with each other rather than the second. The great need made for quickness, and then there was a half slumberous time like a glow of embers, and then the rise of need again, and it lasted long. Very long. That was the best of it, the long way it went and the long time it lasted.

And then there was the sweet drugging time of resting, all unwound, all mysteries known, somnolent there in a narrow wedge of light from a bathroom door open a few inches. Time moves slowly then, as in an underwater world. She had hitched herself to rest upon me, so distributed that she seemed to have no weight at all. She had her dark head tucked under the angle of my jaw, her hands under me and hooked back over the tops of my shoulders, her deep breasts flattened against me, used loins resting astraddle my right thigh, a spent mild whiskery weight.

From time to time she would take a deep breath, and let it out with little catchings, little pulsings of heat against my throat. With my eyes closed, I slowly and lightly stroked the smooth contours of her back, from the moist warmth of shoulders, down to the papery coolness of the small of her back, the deep curve where she was as narrow as a child, then on to the swelling fruit of hips, richer to the touch than to the eye. When I brought my hand back, if I flattened it, pressed more strongly against the small of her back, it would bring on a little reflexive pulse of her hips, a small clamping of her fingers, a quicker inhalation-all fading echoes of the way it had been.

the clever experiments that scientists have devised to probe the limits between the brains

You might love Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith; I did.

ty, added to list

finished The Three Musketeers and have maybe revised my plans to read the other 3000+ pages of the rest of the series. I'm not sure it quite grabbed me enough.

(didn't watch the 2014 adaptation which ran for a few series so must've adapted the later books too. maybe I'll try that. if audiobooks count as reading and graphic novels count as reading then surely this will)

the clever experiments that scientists have devised to probe the limits between the brains

A friend has been raving about The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth too but I haven't picked it up yet.

Really enjoyed The Bee Sting. I read some of his others because of it, but they didn't grab me as much. He still writes a good read, though.

I’ve ordered the rest and I’ll report back, but I’ve heard that yeah!

I finished Roberto Bolaño's Amulet and William J. Cooper, Jr.'s John Quincy Adams bio.

I'm enjoying the shit out of A.S. Hamrah's just published collected film crit.

Alfred, what did you think of Amulet? I loved that one.

I read it too fast. A couple of those fever-dreams resonated. I wondered how the subject would've worked had Thomas Bernhard written it.

love hamrah

I finished Robert Walser's "The Assistant" and started Simenon's "Le coup de lune." Somehow it seems significant to me that Walser's protagonist is named Joseph Marti while Simenon's is named Joseph Timar. Marti, Timar, like mirror images of one another.

No one is reading, it seems.

Anyway, I finished a book of poems by local poet Thomas Delahaye, whose work is strange. I admire it greatly. One of the poems in this most recent collection includes the line “Being hot online is pure,” which might be one of the funnier lines of poetry I have read in the past decade.

Also, I am reading ‘The City and the Pillar,’ which I have never read before, a fact which some of you might find surprising.

I am always reading a comic and a book. Currently working my way through a collection of Creepy comics which are basically comfort food. Reading Let’s Go To Hell, the Butthole Surfers book. The writing is standard for indie-rock bios but it’s the Surfers so there’s loads of good stories.

Also, I am reading ‘The City and the Pillar,’ which I have never read before, a fact which some of you might find surprising.

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table)

Which version?

Original 1948

I've been reading essays lately, first a few by Isaiah Berlin from a collection titled Russian Thinkers, which included his most famous 'The Fox and the Hedgehog' about Tolstoy, and now a collection by John McPhee titled Irons in the Fire'.

I finished "Solito". The relevance to current political controversies is obvious, but the book is entirely lacking in editorializing. Reminds me of "My Struggle" in the way it completely reinhabits the mind of the author's younger self. Great book.

Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye about the making of Chinatown is one of the best of its kind. Excellent reporting. It doesn't elude the inevitable nostalgia about a time when Robert Evans' Paramount was at one point making The Godfather Part II and Day of the Locust at the same time. It provides Evans and Polanski's biographies without evading the excesses of the former and the crimes of the latter. Jack Nicholson comes across best: a guy who never forgot his friends, who kept a bowl of $50 bills on his kitchen counter for anyone at his house who needed the money as well as cocaine in every room, and who might've been a writer-director if stardom hadn't happened.

I just ordered The Big Goodbye the other day, really looking forward to it

Currently reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey, unintentionally timed to coincide with the current moon mission

On a side note, the McPhee book was published in 1997 and in the titular essay he directly quotes a Nevada cattle rancher as saying, "This isn't my first rodeo." He was using it in the same metaphoric sense that we have all come to know. Quite a nice surprise to see it so near the original source.

I want to read some more McPhee on how he writes, then read some of the writing that he's referring to.

Brief comparative descriptions of xpost The City And The Pillar once had me thinking that the second version might be better

Still reading my previously mentioned Walser,"Masquerade" and Other Stories, which is uneven, as Gass's intro and translator Berofsky's outro don't mention, though Gass goes on about the difference between wish and will: only way in which he gets to anything neg---it's not more uneven than a lot of collections, though also (partially via backstory) it can seem like outsider art, in the sense of the artist's more idiosyncratic interests sometimes taking over, sometimes in a too persistently reductive way---but then it's over, because these stories (and they are stories) are also very short. (speaking of backstory, I just now consciously remembered that museum of outsider art in Walser's native Switzerland, where he lived most of his life).

Speaking of life, it's a big influence on his readers, incl. me, in my current way (which may be overtaken by later reading, as w Berlin Alexanderplatz): it's a beautiful story, sucking for him, poignant for us. Beautiful, first rate, the sad tall lady! Some favorite Walser terms.

just finished

breakneck by dan wang

i think i read too many reviews/posts about this which might have spoiled it, it but it felt pretty insubstantial. i loved reading dan’s annual letters from china on his blog and this has very little of the charm and detail. still, decently informative bigthink on a topic of importance

pop 1280 by jim thompson

western thriller black comedy with an unreliable narrator. consistently funny and fun to read, but a bit too gratuitously violent and cynical. curious about the 1981 french film noir adaptation (titled ‘coup de torchon’) have any of you seen it?

Yes

is it worth watching?

I've always been curious about both the novel and the Tavernier film

They are both great

what i've always heard