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

During the past week my reading was more on the order of sampling a handful of books. I tried out The Tree Where Man Was Born, Peter Matthiessen, but I wasn't in the mood for his scattershot mixture of travel narration and miscellaneous facts.

My next try was re-reading The Campaigns of Alexander, Arrian (as translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt). It traces the successive battles fought by Alexander the Great after succeeding to the throne of Macedon, mainly while conquering the Persian Empire. Oddly, it felt similar to the Matthiessen. It too was a narrative that stops frequently to cite various tribes, towns, geography, and a host of unfamiliar proper names, but it better held my interest for a while before I set it aside. I'm pretty sure I'll get back to it and finish the re-reading.

After that I flitted over to re-read Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer. I'll probably finish it before resuming Arrian. I'm aware that it has been criticized in the mountaineering community, but factual exactitude as journalism is not my primary reason for reading it. Krakauer clearly cites the unreliability of anyone's memory of what happened that day regarding events that happened in white-out weather, far above the Death Zone, under extreme physical and mental duress.

waterface, ‘Will & Testament’ is her best-selling novel for a reason— sold 170,000 copies in Norway. it is hypnotic, couldn’t put it down despite absolutely dire subject matter

word, will check it out, thanks

reading James by Percival Everett, enjoying it but I wish I would have taken the time to re-read Huck Finn before I read this

oh yeah i did a back to back reading of them and it really enhanced the experience

James is so good, I loved it

As I am teaching both Huckleberry Finn and a different novel by Everett (Erasure) this semester, I guess I really should read James, huh?

I came across some very enjoyable outtakes from Finn in the University of California Press collection of his works---think they might also be in a Library of America volume---discovered the UCal trove at a small branch library in an obscure neighborhood, which had quite a few other books, all good, that I'd never seen anywhere before---lovely area, and I daydreamed about moving there, near the library, then read that there was a "plume" ov pollution underlying that whole leafy, book-rich snugness. Yesterday, at my local library's discard shop, I bought ]The Complete Stories of Mark Twain, random dips into which are already reminding me that Borges was a Twain fan.

Got James on my reading pile, but similarly haven’t read Huck Finn (about which I feel mildly embarrassed) and had been feeling i should read it first, so thx for the guidance wf.

Reading Night Soldiers by Alan Furst. The main thing that is surprising me throughout the course of the novel is what an extraordinarily good writer, technically speaking, Furst is. It’s not really in the service of much exactly, other than having enough imaginative and lexical space to find precision in what he wantzs to say. It’s also tremendously well organised – the recruitment of spies in the initial chapter, the logistics of the maquis and spying in the later French Resistance sections.

I can imagine he’s the sort of writer who would be brought in as a doctor on any number and types of book - ‘This is a mess! Get Furst on it!’ cries the publisher.

Just really impressive, but as I say, having come more or less direct out of The Door, this is not exactly in the service of any deeper power. And that is fine of course.

I saw some fools on bluesky definig ‘genre fiction’ as a marketing or branding strategy, which ofc it is in a sense. But I am wary of literary versions of genre, and the ‘sameness’ of genre (which seemed to be one of the criticisms iirc), is in fact its great virtue. As Amis said of John Dickson Carr, methods and motifs recur and repeat in the manner of a nightmare (i’m ion a train at the moment and will try and find the exact quote when i get home tomorrow). Or as MES said of Johnny Cash ‘every damn song sounds the same and it’s great’. I won’t find the exact quote on that.

Yeah, genre has often been used in either a derogatory, dismissive sense or else conversely as an excessive from-within-genre boosterism, rather than as a set of useful conventions for each individual practitioner to try their hand at and see what can be done with them.

Thanks for persuading me to check Furst out, Fizzles.

I love Furst! Night Soldiers is excellent- it feels like it’s going to be dry but there’s all this great subtle character stuff that just pulls you all the way in.
And the detail is immaculate

^ this. the detail really is immaculate. great way of putting it. he clearly has enormous fun writing. “what names shall i put in this international list of pre-war european habituées of the paris demi-monde. how exactly *would* spy recruitment have gone. you get a sense of deep reading across many areas v lightly worn. a writer that enjoys the presence of good sex without trying to write it exactly. i think he’s just v skilled.

v interested to hear what you think when you get to it, Alfred. i’m not sure whether you’ll like it or not!

Hey I read Night Soldiers this year too, my first Furst. One of the things I really liked, in addition to the good things already mentioned, was the narrative line involving the young American woman fighting on the side of the leftists in Europe and getting caught up in these momentous events - and surviving them and realising life will never be as REAL again. I was ambushed by unexpected emotion at the end of her story.

Agree that the organisation of basic materials is v impressive - but you do have to pay attention!

as i’m sitting here reading it, getting slightly drunk in a paris restaurant, i feel i havent quite done it justice in terms of its depth. by saying it had little depth.

some things i think it does well:

- he picks moments from before and during the war that give a sense of change and duration
- there is a wonderful phrase or observation that is i think somewhat at the heart of the book, that i think is the heart of the book in some ways, where a character says:

“That the French had let him go at the behest of the Poles surprised him not at all. The two conquered nations were old friends, sharing a taste for romanticism and idealism that had got them every sort of misery for a hundred years. But they shared also a near pathological conviction - that romanticism and idealism would in time be triumphant - which made for a battrered old friendship but a durable one”

what do i like here? well, there’s the truth of the matter - those two nations *do* have that affinity and it’s part of their charm, when they remember it.

i love “battered old freindship” - there’s a sort of authorial approval and affection here, which is quiet, below indirect speech, and site entirely in the word “old”. i dont really understand it. where’s empson when you need him.

i like that it’s both proverbial sounding and consistent within the world of the novel. this strikes me as something great writers need to be able to do. i am not saying Furst is a great writer. but i think he’s probably more skilled than a number of great writers.

more when ive drunk more.

probably.

ban Fizzles

Hey I read Night Soldiers this year too, my first Furst. One of the things I really liked, in addition to the good things already mentioned, was the narrative line involving the young American woman fighting on the side of the leftists in Europe and getting caught up in these momentous events - and surviving them and realising life will never be as REAL again. I was ambushed by unexpected emotion at the end of her story.

Agree that the organisation of basic materials is v impressive - but you do have to pay attention!

yes! to all of this. completely agree.

lol where did ban fizzles come from. i approve.

Agree that the organisation of basic materials is v impressive - but you do have to pay attention!

yeah the plot lines are *really* subtle. i like that as well.

audition by katie kitamura

bracing myself to not like this because a friend i trust didn’t, but it’s kind of fun and mysterious so far

― flopson, Tuesday, August 25, 2026 1:24 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

finished this today. i think it was good to brace myself, because i probably enjoyed it more with lowered expectations. cool concept (i think the least spoiler-ey thing i can say is that plot bears similarities to the film birth by jonathan glazer) but i wish it went somewhere darker with it

I can start those Furst novels anywhere, right? They're a series?

Night Soldiers is the first a series. that’s the only one i’ve read but my understanding is they are pretty loosely coupled, which probably means starting wherever you want isn’t going to create any narrative difficulties. someone who’s actually read the others might want to advise tho!

*first in a series

Fizzles's posts are making me think I should re-read "Night Soldiers". I think I probably wasn't paying enough attention when I read it. This is usually my downfall with spy novels. I'm not really that good at following subtle plot points especially when paired with a large cast of characters (not sure if this was the case in Night Soldiers, but its a general weakness of mine). Speaking of the last book I finished, I even had trouble following the plot in Spark's "Memento Mori" at times. Not that the plot is especially complicated, but a few of the characters have tangled backstories which are revealed gradually via small hints dropped like pebbles in the gently flowing stream of witty dialogue, forcing me to keep straight who did what and with whom and to frequently flip back through pages I should have read better the first time. But in the end I think I did get it all straight, and the book itself was quite enjoyable and suitably chilling.

it’s the case with Night Soldiers. i can see v easily it would be hard to follow if you’re not in the right frame of mind for it. i should probably restate my original point that overall the book is ok. it’s v impressive writing (imv) but im not sure it quite creates enough of an undertow of feeling or the profound. that’s not exactly a problem ofc, but even reaching within similar genre le carré, some Oliver Harris (clearly a less good writer), or in a different register Jack Petro’s excellent No Ordinary Spy or, Graham Greene (obviously).

i reserve the right to change my opinion on this!

uh unfinished thought there - even within the genre of spy fiction those writers deliver a sense of the cryptic meaning of life and identity, something mysterious beneath the mystery as it were. and in the case of Jack Petro, also manages to be v funny.

'why q needs u: a history of our letters and how we use them' by danny bate

fun pop historical linguistics. each chapter is a letter of the alphabet. fact-filled and quite cleverly written, very enjoyable summer reading brain candy

― flopson, Thursday, June 11, 2026 3:25 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

it took me two months to finish this book. i suppose i was not always in the mood to face its powerhose of linguistics facts. but i just turned the last page last night, and it was a cracking good read. so excited to flopsplain the great vowel shift, red/blue/green alphabets, the third century roman schoolteacher who invented the letter g so he could spell his own name, and many others for the rest of my life

Thank-Q for this recommendation - I'm about halfway through it and yes, it's a lot to take in and I'm not sure my brain has held on to much of it. But reading this kind of thing blows my mind about how zillions of past-oes spoke and wrote so very differently and how we even know/infer any of it. (I have to confess I've put it on hold when I'm on actual holiday and have read about 4 trashy murder mystery books instead!)

tell us about the murder mystery books!

I’m 50 pages into ‘will and testament’ and I can feel my claustrophobia intensifying

I started with "Kill Your Darlings" by Peter Swanson, which I enjoyed. then picked up a couple others of his which overlap quite a lot and the endings are a bit crap - but I'm just enjoying reading fluff!

A problem with Furst, I would say shallowly, is that he has never had a good cover designer.

Thank-Q for this recommendation - I'm about halfway through it and yes, it's a lot to take in and I'm not sure my brain has held on to much of it. But reading this kind of thing blows my mind about how zillions of past-oes spoke and wrote so very differently and how we even know/infer any of it. (I have to confess I've put it on hold when I'm on actual holiday and have read about 4 trashy murder mystery books instead!)

― kinder, Sunday, 6 September 2026 09:36 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

happy to hear you're enjoying the book!

I’m 50 pages into ‘will and testament’ and I can feel my claustrophobia intensifying

― urmbchjo, Sunday, September 6, 2026 9:38 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

pretty sure i read the first 200 pages sitting in a single position on a cold day in early January 2023.

I’m reading “The Shards” by Bret Easton Eliis for the first time. I am a casual fan (I loved Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, struggled w some of American Psycho for obv reasons but enjoyed the idea, Glamorama was about where I got off the boat)

pretty intoxicating return to his roots. his attention to micro-specific detail is pretty spectrum-y but the numbness is so well conveyed, it’s really working for me. And narrating as his current/future self adds interesting layers to the recollection

Anyway, about 1/3 way through and enjoying it way more than i expected to

dennis cooper - i wished

masterpiece

being asked to write a review of that when it came out was truly an honor of my life tbh

i'm in awe of the imaginative powers of DC's mind

perhaps a shallow comparison, but i do find i wished bears some similarities to robert luck's jack the modernist and margery kempe. lots of differences, but the core conceit of a wonderfully intelligent and imaginative person kind of "overanalyzing" a relationship in a very free prose and turning it into something wild and surprising

Was in a big reading slump for a few weeks and read Will and Testament over the long weekend and I don't know what to say. devastating story written perfectly, with plenty of long sentences and passages that resonated and made me put it down for a second. I probably read too fast but it was amazing, one of the best I've read this year so thanks Table.

I finished my re-read of Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander, published as a Penguin Classic. It is obvious that Arrian was a military leader, making his history similar to Thucydides in many ways. He is meticulous in recording the details of sieges, the order of battle, terrain, strategy, even minor mop-up operations against smaller tribes and villages. There's a lot of geography, too, though much of it is wrong.

Arrian's history deserves its reputation as the best ancient source for this kind of information, even though it was written some four centuries after Alexander's death. He does include some of the more famous anecdotes that reveal facets of Alexander's character, but these only occupy a tiny portion of the work. If anyone wants to get into a more comprehensive bio of Alexander, you can't do better than Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon, 353-326 BC. That Alexander guy was a real piece of work.

I really must read more Cooper.

I'm reading Nancy Mitford's Wigs on the Green.

I devoured “will and testament” in two days. it was hypnotic. the scene in the accountant’s office had me almost breathless

yes yes yes more Vigdis Hjorth converts!! when you’re ready, “Is Mother Dead?” is the next one to snap up.

re: DC, Cooper and Gluck were/are part of the same milieu, and what you’re writing does make some sense, but i think that’s just a general quality of most New Narrative writing.

Alfred, have you read The Sluts?

I've read no Cooper since the '90s and I should. I see several novels at the library?

Anyone gotten to that new Marlon James yet? Extraordinary reviews. About a circle of gay lives in late '80s Jamaica.

I've got it on hold at the library. Can't wait.

i couldn’t get into James’ last book at all, tho the new one does sound amazing

Table! I finished My Loose Thread. I don't know what to think.

Couple of advance tracks here---be sure to play loud enough to get all the details; you won't disturb the ambient groove thing:
https://jeremycunningham.bandcamp.com/album/passing-fires

oops, that was for the International Anthem thread.

Alfred, that one is among the more brutal of his books.

I think that one thing Cooper does better than almost anyone else is describe the way that the dull
violence of empire imprints on understandably disaffected youth. His work doesn’t celebrate it, but it describes it perfectly.

My Loose Thread made me rewatch Elephant.

Was off back with mum in S Miguel and it was the perfect setting for finally reading Wizard Of Earthsea - shepherds walking down misty hills to raging seas, yup, that's just outside my window mate. Loved it predictably enough, was really impressed by how different the prose was from the other LeGuin I read (The Disposessed).

I didn't mean to carry on in an island manner but somehow I reached for Whisky Galore by Compton Mazkenzie (one for the novelists no one reads anymore thread?). I was a little wary at first of an English oxbridge type writing a book whose main premise is "the Scottish are drunks lol" and I certainly have no idea if the Hebidrean accents are credible (lots of p's for b's), but at least Mackenzie's sympathies lie squarely with the locals and the interfering English military are figures of mockery ("we must all do our part for England, I mean, Britain" a coronel splutters).

Was off back with mum in S Miguel

good on yous