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

^^^that book was amazing but bleak

Agreed.

Rereading The Charterhouse of Parma, first time in 30 years. I'd forgotten everything except Fabrizio's misadventures joining the Battle of Waterloo.

if I was going to be ambitious and read Dostoevsky, which one should I read?

i just finished karamazov for the second time and loved it. i really should read crime & punishment one of these days!

The Idiot is dope too! Read this and Bros as translated by David Magarshack. Good English, however faithful to the text, though Dusty's voice seems recognizable via any version.
As I reposted,from a 2024 WAYR?, on useful Iris Murdoch: Classic or Dud?

Recently finished my first Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green(1965)---study of an Anglo-Irish and Irish extended family, during "the seven or eight days leading up to the doomed Easter Rising in Dublin,1916," as jacket flap says, and I think I hit it lucky: jacket thinks this is "warmer" than previous, though also it's not too effusive/loose/garrulous, as I've seen complaints about re several later novels. This 'un moves adroitly between all the characters, checking in on latest seismic movements and dithering of male interiors, while the women are mostly known by what they say and do, incl. in male gaze.
Sex and money figure, ditto environment---weather, picturesque-to-appalling cityscapes, incl. poverty--but so what,sez character,"You can see a hundred scenes like that all over town every day"--news of the War and British promises for the peace, many points made in arguments and gossip and oratory re: Ireland, with even the mystical terrorist proving capable of second thoughts, for a while.
It's a well-tracked whirl, and I'm reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates on the US Civil War: "Don't say you know what you would have done. You don't know."

> Rereading The Charterhouse of Parma

how is stendahl in general? i find it odd that nobody does an ebook of The Red and the Black. Oxford World Classics claims to have one (2009) but none of the usual places sticks it.

he is awesome!

He's got a "Meanwhile, back in Milan" cliffhanger energy that's unlike any of the Great 19th Century Novelists.

if I was going to be ambitious and read Dostoevsky, which one should I read?

I haven’t read any in a long time but I remember Notes from Underground as being much more accessible than the others.

I had never read Dostoevsky before - Crime & punishment was my first & I really enjoyed it.

If you don't want to start with one of the long novels, Notes from Underground is a good entry point, as are some of the other short novels like The Gambler, The Double, and The Eternal Husband.

currently reading nixon and kissinger: partners in power by robert dallek. sharing this passage that made me lol. they’re such dicks

“In a more detailed account of this June 1969 encounter, Kissinger upbraided the foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, during a private lunch at the Chilean embassy that Henry had requested. Kissinger’s purpose was to answer Valdés’s assertion during a White House ceremony for Latin-American ministers that U.S. economic policies toward the region were more self-serving than helpful. The remarks angered Nixon and Kissinger, who called them “arrogant and insulting.” During the lunch, Henry contemptuously told Valdés that “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You’re wasting your time.” Insulted, Valdés replied, “Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South.” Henry conceded the point, declaring, “And I don’t care.”

love it

Just finished G Riley’s new book, The Palm House, which is more cheerful in delivery than My Phantoms but somehow no less bleak. Not quite up there with MP but still very, very good.

I'm passing the time with A Legacy of Spies, John LeCarre, wherein he revisits the story of his first big success, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, but from a very different angle. It was published in 2017, 53 years after 'The Spy, etc', and provides a bit of a treat for his loyal fans. Wisps of George Smiley waft through the novel like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. It's good enough to quietly while away a few pleasant evenings.

Ha, same, except I’m right back at “call for the dead”. Smiley seems fully-formed within single pages.

I was casting around for a while, starting books and setting them aside after only 20 or 30 pages. Now I seem to have settled into Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, in part because I hadn't read it before. Compared to Red Harvest it was a large step backwards. It has the strong odor of being poorly stitched together from three short stories that don't mesh at all. It's a thrown together mess claiming to be a novel. The only thing that saves it is Hammett's prose style, which I find compulsively readable.

Finished with Prynne (for the moment), I dove into another recently departed poet’s work, ‘Structures of Feeling’ by Hung Q. Tu. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed his poetry, which I first read nearly a decade ago— it has the post-Language chattiness and low culture awareness of the Kootenay School, but doesn’t slip into a sort of rote ideological critique that mars much of the Buffalo-adjacent poetry of its time. I am now also re-reading another of his books, ‘Verisimilitude.’

I am also engaged in Mike Amnasan’s first novel in nearly two decades, ‘The Homowack Lodge.’ Amnasan was one of the only straight cis dudes who was part of the New Narrative milieu, and his writing is criminally underrated— his narrators spell out the interior lives of desperate, toxic men in a manner that isn’t sympathetic or cloying, but plain, philosophical, and deeply affecting. I adore his work, and this book is no different.

Dain's done. I picked up a copy of The Cloven Viscount, Italo Calvino, at the local library. It is highly inventive. So far it is short on any unifying purpose or cohesion I can detect, but I'm only halfway through.

i just finished reading 'the highest exam: how the gaokao shapes china' by ruixue jia and hongbing li. it's nominally about the high-stakes test that chinese high-school students take which determines their university admissions (and much else), but more generally about the "hierarchical tournaments" that exist in chinese society. it strikes a nice blend of social science research, history, and personal anecdote. the authors are academic labor economists who wrote the gaokao themselves as youths, did their phds abroad, worked as faculty in both chinese and western universities, and have had their own children educated in both china and america. while they present a lot of empirical/'objective' data, they don't shy away from giving their personal opinions and relating their own subjective experiences, which kept it from being dry. (nevertheless, it is still a bit dry). great book

Very appealing description, thanks!

I'm almost done with The Director, a fictional depiction of G.W. Pabst's adventures in Nazi-occupied Austria.

I saw that guy do two different Louise Brooks film intros, one at MoMI and one at Film Forum, and talked to him a bit. His books are hugely popular in German and in translation to lots of other languages. I have that book but have only read the first several chapters.

Koresky loved it and on more than one occasion has said it was a real page-turner, couldn't put it down etc.

Yeah, Daniel Kehlmann, very big in Europe. I've only read 'Tyll', but liked it quite a bit.

Same, been meaning to pick up another.

Meanwhile I've finished vol II of Olav Audunsson by Sigrid Undset. I know it is completely lacking in Christian compassion and therefore against the very tone of the book - well sort of, the christianity of the time does not seem very compassionate to me - but I hated Ingrid and I'm glad she died. Olav is not much better tbh, I'm not enjoying this half as much as Kristin Lavransdatter.

I finished rereading Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, liked it quite a bit more this time. Now I'm reading 'Cinema and Desire', a collection of essays on Chinese cinema by Dai Jinhua, a 'feminist marxist' film critic. Probably the best book I've read on the subject, she has a point of view, and both knows the history inside and out and questions receieved wisdom a lot of places.

Chocky, John Wyndham - A couple's adopted son starts talking to an imaginary friend (the titular Chocky). Problem is, said friend starts asking all sorts of questions - about gender, the nature of intelligence, about mechanics and mathematics - that the boy clearly couldn't have come up with himself. Wyndham's work has been mostly reduced in the popular imagination to Day Of The Triffids and the Cozy Catastrophe genre - this lacks a catastrophe but there is certainly a lot cozy about this world of middle class villages, trips to the Coast and dads addressing their children as "old man". Meanwhile the uncanny elements adds a frisson of the eerie. Enjoyed this a lot.

The Luminous Fairies & Mothra, Shinchiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, Yoshie Hotta - Searching for a new kaiju concept, Toho studios invited highbrow leftist writer Shinchiro Nakamura to write a short story which their next film would then be based on. Recovering from the suicide of his wife, Nakamura enlisted two fellow leftist writers to write it with him, round robin style - apparently a not uncommon practice in Japanese genre fiction. So Mothra was born, and if you've seen the movie, with its vague gestures at anti-colonialism and social satire, rest assured these are way more central and explicit in the story. A joint expedition by Japan and the "Rosilicans" discovers that an island previously thought deserted, and on which the Rosilicans were conduction nuclear tests, actually harbours various forms of life, including of course the little fairies that get kidnapped and exploited by the Rosilicans. This creation was nominally a combination of the Soviets and Americans but frankly they're just the yanks, by the time the story goes into the Rosilican-Japanese military treaty everyone knows what's up. The nature of the story does make it quite fragmentary, and the translator's notes section is twice the size of the text, but if you're at all interested in Japanese postwar culture I'd heartily recommend.

Koresky loved it and on more than one occasion has said it was a real page-turner, couldn't put it down etc.

― The Man Who Sold the Unisphere (James Redd and the Blecchs),

sure is -- I read 171 pages yesterday

I read The Director a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it, although I wonder why Kehlmann decided to structure the novel this way. The last portion about the filming of the lost film was fantastic.

I also really enjoyed Tyll and his earlier Measuring the World, that contrasts the lives of Humboldt and Gauss.

I just finished The List of Seven by the Mark Frost. Read it in the 90s as a teenager and remembered almost nothing about it except that I liked it then, but this time I thought it was pretty dull despite the made-for-the-movies chase sequences and narrow escapes. More Indiana Jones than Sherlock Holmes, with Arthur Conan Doyle as the hero and cameos by Helena Blavatsky and Bram Stoker.

the director has been on my list for a while, hoping to read it soon. glad to hear the good people off this thread liked it

currently reading 'vox' by nicholson baker. finding it every bit as titillating and funny as i'd imagined

Oh wow, that's another one I read in the 90s! Started with 'The Mezzanine' and worked my way through a couple of Bakers after that. I should revisit those novels some day.

The only Daniel Kehlmann I've read is F, which didn't make much impression on me at the time.

I enjoyed The Fermata for a while, but then it seemed/got/was too static, which, for a story of stasis, you could say was the success/power/nature/etc. of structural integrity.

I finished the Calvino. Although the plot rested on a mixture of violence and cruelty, its handling of these are explored so lightly that it felt sort of trifling. The fact that it was novella-length reinforced that impression, but it also made the investment of time and mental energy required to read it equally trifling, so all's good. It was intended to be taken as a fairy tale and stayed true to that model.

Now I'm starting into Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe.

I read Daniel Kehlmann's The Director with my book club. It was put forth by one of our members in Germany. I didn't really like it, it seemed disjointed and pedestrian and I read it begrudgingly.

Everyone else in my book club loved it however. As with everything we've read together, the discussion afterward gave me a better appreciation for the book.

Our book club starts out by the host asking a few rote questions - did you finish it? did you like it? can you recommend it to others? I'm always reading and finishing the books, and I like more of them than others in the book club, but there are very few books we read together (or that I read alone for that matter) that I can recommend to friends of mine

Some of the POV shifts resulted in a disjointed read, but the exchanges b/w Pabst and Louise Brooks, Garbo, and Goebbels were imaginatively pungent. I'd recommen dit.

When I saw him talk at MoMI he gave an explanation for why he liked to write from different points of view, something about how it was related to how misunderstandings arise which he finds very interesting iirc

Anyway I read further in The Director but I have a shorter one of his I need to finish first.

many xps

there is certainly a lot cozy about this world of middle class villages, trips to the Coast and dads addressing their children as "old man

Good description of the vibe, I remember it fondly. I also remember the scene where the kid cries because chocky doesn't think their new car is hella cool and says brakes are silly, it should have one engine to go forwards and another to stop. Which I always thought was a rubbish idea, now I realise chocky should've known about electric motors and regenerative braking. Sadly Wyndham was not so prescient. /irrelevant nerd thoughts

Have you read The Midwich Cuckoos? Despite the village etc. setting, seems like it might not be so cozy, considering the movie.

I have not, but the movie's an all time fave.

I think I've read everything Wyndham ever wrote. Mostly in my teens or early 20s.

Apparently there's a crime novel, a posthumously published novel, and a few short stories and novelletes that I missed.

He's been my used book store go-to recently.

I'm backing off from Anthills of the Savannah. Achebe has introduced about a dozen 'central' characters in the first 50 pages and every scene so far consists of dialogue, so you have to keep them all straight in order to follow whatever is happening (which is not much, yet - this is still in the set up phase for any action that might come later).

I'm sure that if I stuck with it I'd discover it's a good and worthwhile novel, but I just don't have the attention for it right now. I'm capitulating. I'm marking as my reading failure more than as a rejection for cause. I'm just going to fall back into crime fiction for a while. I can't cope with anything more complex right now.

i’ve never read ‘anthills’ but ‘things fall apart’ is one of my all-time favs, is light on dialogue and has a small cast of characters