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've read two by Theroux which were quite different: a sort of trashy sci-fi novel called "O-Zone" many years ago, and more recently "The Great Railway Bazaar", a travel book about taking the train across Asia in the early 70s, which was enjoyable enough.

I've found A Time To Keep Silence amazing. Maybe it's to be expected but it makes me want to visit a monastery. I did a week's vow of silence visiting one when I was about 16 as part of a school trip, lol Jesuits. A lot of profundity and a little dry wit along the way. Must read some more stuff by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Several non-McGee John D. MacDonalds, then started on the Parker series by Donald Westlake (7 books into that so far).

I really enjoyed Lois McMaster Bujold's Falling Free (1987), but she's written so many novels in different series that I've decided I'm not going to be interested in reading them all. I think I also read Shards of Honor (1986), which was not that good.

She's written like 50 books. That is too much for a casual reader. If anyone has other recommendations of hers I will listen

I thought Theroux's Mosquito Coast was deadly dull. Maybe he is a good writer though, I haven't read any of his travel writing, it was just a book I didn't like. He's another one who's written too many books to count

She's written like 50 books. That is too much for a casual reader.

also she will write a new book at any point in a timeline she's already established. which is actually cool and no doubt fun for her, but makes it tough for a new reader

Bujold reading-order guide, 2025 update lol

Thanx for Theroux comments yall.
The only Bujold I've read is Memory, an exemplary mid-series gateway, in which all references to What Has Gone Before are clear and spare; she doesn't seem to care if you don't get the deep bells ringing like they would for a longtime series pilgrim. High-born Miles V., who has paid his space opera dues, is summoned to his home planet, which fans of Jane Austen and Le Carre might enjoy---quite a fun read, and yeah, more about her on Rolling Spec.

Rolling Spec AKA Thread of Wonder.

Whistler by Ann Patchett. A lightweight but enjoyable book focussing on family and other relationship dynamics, with well observed and amusing characters. I'm also still slogging through Olav Audonsson, have finished vol 3. The guy is hard work.

Beryl Bainbridge's An Awfully Big Adventure and a collection of Walker Percy essays called Signposts in a Strange Land.

I kind of like the latter

A lot of stuff about Helen Keller because of his deaf daughter

But maybe I am thinking of The Message in the Bottle, sorry

One is a song by The Police, the other by his co-religionist Sam Phillips.

I finished "Sisters in Yellow" by Mieko Kawakami, a psychological noir set in the seedy underbelly of Tokyo that reminded me at times of Jean Rhys and Shirley Jackson. Recommended.

Whistler by Ann Patchett. A lightweight but enjoyable book focussing on family and other relationship dynamics, with well observed and amusing characters.

stick your cheffing job (ledge), Thursday, June 25, 2026

I think Tom Lake (2023) is the only book of hers I've read. It was about small town Michigan, cherry orchards, and Our Town. I really liked it

I finished a book of poems by Paul Ebenkamp, ‘Sunworshippers.’ Hard to describe his work except that it inhabits a place where zen koans, lyric precision, and a sort of flustered anger meet— really one of the best working right now, always funny and provocative.

I began a bio of GM Hopkins, but didn’t bring it on a little weekend getaway we are having, so I bought a first edition of Edwin Denby’s collected at a friend’s bookstore yesterday and have been reading that.

Currently reading Ovid's Metamorphoses. Interesting that it starts with a mostly-serious creation story followed by humorous human stories. The Raeburn translation is excellent.

oddly i've just been digging into that

i read the new natalie haynes thinking it was about medea, and it was but she has a bigger history than just the euripides play. turns out i had 5 different versions on the ereader...

Natalie Haynes: No Friend To This House
Apollonius of Rhodes: Jason and the Argonauts
Ovid: Metamorphoses Book 7
Graves: The Greek Myths ch 148-157
Davidson: Guardian Greek Myths booklet things from 2008 (The Argonauts bits)

the ovid and especially the graves felt like things that are useful references but not something i'd particularly read for fun. the ovid zips through greek myth, being mostly concerned about, well, the metamophoses, things changing into other things. the graves just reads like wikipedia. it's half footnotes but even the non-footnotes read like footnotes. some interesting bits, like why the fleece was golden and lost-wax casting.

the footnotes for the apollonius did point out all the similarities with the odyssey. it was written hundreds of years after but comes chronologically before the iliad.

258 books coming out over the next six months: https://lithub.com/lit-hubs-most-anticipated-books-of-2026-part-two

(i neither endorse nor reject the capsule reviews provided)

Read Brian Payton's Hail Mary Corner yesterday. Kind of a Canadian, 80s-set A Separate Peace that takes place at a seminary, with sex, religion, queerness, and all kinds of adolescent bad behaviour happening. Admittedly, this is sort of tailor made to appeal to me, so grain of salt, but I really liked this. May or may not be a YA novel, but as it was published in 2001, it lacks the self-consciousness about its intended audience that marks a lot of current youth fiction.

This month my book club read beasts of England by Adam biles which I’m sorry to report is a sequel to animal farm that is about us/uk politics in the current era — the following is from a non-book club group chat where I was livegroaning the experience, sorry I can’t be fucked to edit it into a cogent post:

https://i.ibb.co/qvBDH3N/IMG-0936.jpg

One page in and I am turning into the joker

(Some chatter about the book being rapturously blurbed by leading light of the uk commeltariat Ian Dunt)

My god it's trite tho. Just over halfway through and one of the big fateful turns toward disaster for the farm is when the sensible owl who is obviously supposed to lead the Animalist party to victory against the Jonesists somehow LOSES to Pearl the deluded old pig who espouses True Animalism and promises the animals that Sugarcandy Mountain lies just beneath their feet

It's a slightly more literary version of some cunt down the pub talking about “everybody gets a pony”

tbf I read the original book in prep for this and didn't really like that either. Better than this tho

(later)

Nearly finished. Just read the fabulist version of the murder of Jo Cox, I fucking hate this

(next day, less mad}

I mean it kind of is and isn't Jo Cox, the details are obviously intended to evoke that (killer shouting fascist slogans) except the character who's killed is a young goose — in this book the geese are the press, Haw-Haw being Murdoch/the tabloids in general, & you're saying well at least he isn't spelling out the “proper gander” joke, he trusts you to get there yourself, but nope, it's dropped in as a big punchline *200pp* in — whereas to be a true analogue she would have to be a pig; that's typical of the book’s woolliness <— see we can all do this shit

So jumbo is BoJo except also explicitly trump (it's dropped in right at the end that he changed his name from jumbf ffs); cosmo the owl is ed milliband but also maybe Hillary Clinton but maybe also sometimes Gordon Brown?? But again the great historical wrong turn is his losing a leadership election to the doddery extreme leftist which strictly speaking makes him… Andy Burnham lol lmao (or Owen Smith)

Venting here so I'm not too much of a gobshite at the book club tonight but that's the context for why I was so pissed off when I got to the murder part. That event was just as traumatic for politically homeless dopes as anyone & biles seems like probably a fairly benign example of the latter so it's not beyond the pale to write about but when the thinking is this unserious and sophomoric throughout it makes the deployment feel extremely cheap

I also feel like it's maybe fundamentally misconceived to try and make a state of the nation novel from a 60pp anti-communist propaganda story; AF is simplistic by design cause it's basically a pamphlet

idk his work at all, read nineteen eighty-four as a lad, so never sure how much to blame orgoodwise for all the sensible grownups who read one book and concluded that all ideology is bad. Seems like the character most valorised by melts is Benjamin the donkey who constantly says things like “things never had been, nor could be, much better or much worse” — literally “better things aren't possible” lol!

I will say some of the writing in the last 25pp or so isn't bad, once everything has apocalyptically gone to shit and the fascists are in power. But he introduces this “hopeful” counterforce at the end, where some of the animals start singing the long-lost ancestral melody that unites them all (and which Beasts of England and its many variants are a corruption of) & putting aside whether an extremely vague utopian vision based on turning back the clock is a good thing to put in your brexit book I'm like… what is actually being proposed here? At the end of all this is biles really going “what if the workers of the world… unite”. But not that obv, because that's a slogan and slogans are bad and it's also politics which is very bad. So not trying to be a cunt but I can only conclude that the flickering light in the darkness that he is wistfully and poetically describing here is… the hashtag resistance

I took a break from The Moonstone long enough to re-read Where I Was From, Joan Didion. Based on my copy of the Didion, there must be an unwritten law in the publishing world that every Didion book ever released must include some version of the five decades old photo of her in a Corvette.

It's also the best of (the few of) hers that I've read, next to The Year of Magical Thinking, and this one's about peeling away the years of magical California Pioneer (Conservative Wing) Thinking, a process that outlives most of her family, and almost herself. So kinda sucks for her, but thanks JD.

Christ, wins, that sounds abominable.

god you have no idea

Even the bit I sort of said was good (where it gets grim at the end) is annoying as fuck bc it starts being patterned after 1984, in a v stupid way — posters saying “JONES HAS HIS I ON YOU”, the Two-Minute Huzzah which is a parody of clap for carers

Finished Denby’s collected, deciding what next

I am reading, first time since 11th grade, The Grapes of Wrath.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for the first time (I’ve only seen the Polanski film).

A Handful Of Dust, Evelyn Waugh - Lots good and lots bad, as usual. I think what intrigues me is how Waugh's natural curiosity for people struggles with his enormous bigotries, occasionally winning, often succumbing. This is a surprisingly tender portrait of a collapsing marriage and in the first half, mostly written from the woman's perspective, it feels very acute, though sadly the latter half sees said woman reduced to an irredeemable figure not really comparable to what she was before, and it's not an unreliable narrator think afaict. There's some pretty good comedy - I mentioned the priest giving sermons meant for India to English villagers, there's also a moment of farce when, in order for the wife to be able to sue for divorce, the husband recruits a woman and arranges with a detective agency to be spotted at a seaside hotel, thus giving a simulacrum of adultery. Later on he decides to go on an expedition to Brazil and, well, you can guess how that goes considering the author.

Now onto a very different flavour: Pilgermann by Russel Hoban.

Many years since I went through my Waugh phase, but at the time I thought A Handful of Dust was his best. One scene has lingered with me - the one where she thinks her lover has been killed and is kind of relieved to find out it's actually her son... And the end is pretty good!

I think I liked Decline and Fall a bit more, just found it sort of funnier I guess. Tho I did like A Handful Of Dust. Vile Bodies also fairly funny, though with all of them parts of what's meant to be satire I guess have been sort of lost over time.

As with Woody Allen, you can make a case for the Early Funny Ones.

First half of Decline and Fall one of the v funniest English language novs imho - parts of it are exceptionally racist even for the time. It all moves like a rocket which Waugh can’t quite keep fizzing all the way to the end.

Ending of Handful of Dust adapted from an earlier Waugh short story called ‘The Man Liked Dickens’, often anthologised in horror story collections.

Man Who Liked Dickens

was unaware of this fact thanks

Feel like Other People (who are they?) like Brideshead and The Loved One but the real heads prefer his earlier work, as basically just stated upthread

Waugh is often funny but I think when I came to his work this factor had been overhyped - I expected something like Wodehouse and though he admired him a lot Waugh is not at all that.

They have little in common except the same bottomless fount of well-bred rotters to satirize -- and, in Waugh's case, admires.

I know them well

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. I bought this right before the 2024 election and was too depressed to dig in then, but I pulled it out and it's filling The Power Broker sized hole in my heart.

Read a nice chapbook by Kristen Gallagher, a conceptual poet working in a slightly more lyric mode.

Now I have started moving through ’Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine,’ a fascinating collection of essays and reports from Canadian experimental poets Steve McCaffery and bpNichol under the aegis of their Toronto Research Group. It’s poetics but chatty. Cool and kind of crazy. Enjoying myself.

Waugh seemed most interesting when dealing with a sense of wistfulness for Better Times, long before he and his characters were born. He deals with the downside of this, like the guy goes on that xpost rongway expedtion to Brazil, hoping to emulate the British explorers of yore. But the protagonist of Scoop is a country correspondent who limns the consolations of birds and shit, then gets mistaken for a war correspondent, is sent to Africa, where publisher of The Daily Beast is promoting conflict, for "Conservative" reasons---country mouse and his author are real conservatives in their ways, though author's caricatures cut right through much folly, and not taking as much time for racism per se (here mostly part of a flattening "what fules we all are in our own ways" effect) as I thought it might.
So Scoop and Decline and Fall are the best straight-through that I've read; yeah Handful of Dust goes downhill in second half (seems like Brideshead did the same, though the TV series was much better, read The Loved One for school and seems like it was ok? Liked that it was v. short, because brevity is the soul of wit, as he shoulda remembered sooner).

I always thought that Waugh seemed a bit off, tending to the jerkish, even aside from the racism, but eventually read some terrible things (not written by him) about his parents, and, while they can't be blamed for everything, it was like the "New Amsterdam" ep of Mad Men, when we meet off/jerkish Pete's parents: he could've been a lot worse!

"I always thought" that in reading *about* him, also some of his lesser writing, but was surprised when I got to the better of his early books, going in reverse order: sort of like reading stupid Johnny Ramone quotes and then getting to the good Ramones records.

Re-reading "At swim two birds" for the first time in over 20 years. Im enjoying it a lot more than I did back then. You just gotta go with the flow with this one, some hilarious writing

Paul Mason -"Postcapitalism' - its fine, even though it was written 10 years ago it feels weirdly dated now with the current looming threat of AI

Also listening to the audiobook of "Stoner"

the better of his early books, going in reverse order: sort of like reading stupid Johnny Ramone quotes and then getting to the good Ramones records.

t0m 3wing formerly of this parish just finished reading the entire dance to the music of time series - i think he liked it!

I spent the summer of 2007 reading it. Its effect is cumulative. I wasn't mad about it overall but I'm glad I finished it. Once in a while I'll meet someone and go, "Another Widmerpool."

A Dance To The Music Of Time is a great title if nothing else.

Learned from that John Gross book recently that Bennett wrote a guide to "developing taste" that features 350 books he deemed to be the best of English literature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Taste:_How_to_Form_It

Even in 1969 Gross was already finding much on there that no one knew about anymore; could be a fun, if insane, project to try to read 'em all.