2019 Winter: The What Are You Reading thread that came in from the cold

The successor thread to 2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?. I hope it shall be a worthy one.

As of January 1, I am closing in on the finish of Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay, a low-key but altogether satisfying novel of the sort that often gets called 'a minor classic', largely because it is flawless, but with so light a touch that it seems a shame to saddle it with the ponderous reputation of A Classic.

And now, ILB, what are you reading?

I finished David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. I started Muriel Spark's Symposium yesterday.

What We Did instead Of Holidays.
Interesting read. Have gone off Clinton Heylin a lot since I read his Sgt Pepper's book but this was OK even if I didn't agree with all of his opinions.
Covers Fairport Convention and offshoots up to the turn of the 80s.
Had me wondering why I haven't got around to getting physical copies of the other 70s Albion band cds since I love Battle of the Field.

Memphis 68 the 2nd Barney Hoskyns soul trilogy book.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L Frank Baum.
Bought it a couple of years ago but hadn't got round to reading it.
Not read any of the Baum stuff before?
Early 20th century which might show in places.

looking to finish Tara Westover's Educated this week; it's been a good read.

I read the first of Ferrante's Neopolitan books. I think I'm cribbing from James Wood here, but it did feel like a confessional barrage. Extraordinary conjuring of place and character though. I look forward to the next books.

I've also been dipping in and out of Bernd Henrich's Mind of A Raven, a book detailing Henrich's obsessive pursuit of the raven, without offering any kind of holistic hypothesis concerning the title of the book. My favourite sections are his fieldwork, where he seems to have that 'I've found a way to live well' glow about him.

About to start The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers.

I swallowed the third Ferrante novel in one gulp two weeks ago. My favorite of the series, or I've grown accustomed to her approach.

I know I have been critical of Colm Toibin, but for Christmas I was given the collection of his essays on Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and their fathers, and read it in a couple of days. In book form it all felt better, though he still has a big tendency to retell the basic story of Ulysses for a page at a time. The essays are expanded and richer in the book, with a more charming Introduction.

Next, Stacie Williams' BIZARRO WORLDS: a book ostensibly occasioned by Lethem's FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE but, halfway through, mainly about other things, social issues, race and gentrification, with Lethem as an aside.

im reading elif batumans the idiot
im abt half way thru
i like it

Be warned, halfway through is when The Idiot decides to tread water for 200p

Halle Butler: Jillian -- very black comedy about two differently awful women who loathe each other forced to share an office as they wreck their personal lives, very good
Katharine Kilalea: OK, Mr. Field -- first abandoned book of 2019! nothing deeply wrong with it per se, it just meandered along unexcitingly and I couldn't be bothered
Tade Thompson: Rosewater -- Nigerian-set sci-fi, pretty compelling so far

beginning to make my way through a few things from yerman james’ v stimulating twitter thread of favourite 2018 reads.
up first:
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts - blasted through this in a day. great, fun hard SF with cryogenics, AI, black holes and deep space, deep-time travel. only realised the message within a message wasn’t a weird kindle/OCR artefact about 20 pages in as it appeared in light grey rather than vivid red.

also reading The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood (of which more when i’m not typing on my phone)

the reification and the proletariat essay from György Luckács’ History and Class Consciousness

Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries (not amazing but a handy aggregation of lives and info)

the four books - yan lianke. christmas present, interesting satiric exploration of the great famine, re education camps and the state manipulation of mind

when the time comes - josef winkler. history as grotesque necrology. i’m alternately struggling and fascinated by this. not wildly convinced by the translation, awful typeface, hypnotised by it nevertheless. will write more when &c.

circs of reading it came out of buying sister in law the latest javier marias berta isla. on the front cover carried a quote from The Indepent along the lines of “is there a finer living European writer of sentences” or something. i’d been re-reading Pierre Michon’s Winter Mythologies and Abbots, and had become interested enough in some of the word choices as to pick up the original Grench Abbés, and felt that yes here was an extraordinary living european writer of sentences clearly and objectively better than Marías whatever his other virtues.

having this conversation led to friend suggesting winkler both on those grounds and the medieval bent also present in michon, so my reaction *against* the winkler is was interesting to me. as i say will try and explore more when i have time.

in meantime i’m going to have to reduce simultaneous book reading before i go back to work.

so my reaction *against* the winkler is was interesting to me.

finest living writer of ilx sentences &c.

Glad you liked The Freeze-Frame Revolution! Have you read any other Watts?

no, but my eye has now been caught by his other stuff (and i’ve got to read the spin-off FFR short story obv). which wd you recommend next?

i v much enjoyed the gimmicky conceptual way he co-opted the reader into the informant role at the end, more intermittently present than even the cryogenically frozen participants.

blindsight is his best other book.

There are actually several FFR-associated short stories, all abailable here: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
They're the ones with (Sunflowers) after the titles.

I had to do a lot of waiting around today, so I grabbed a slim Simenon, The Bar on the Seine. It's kind of nice that two of the most prolific writers of the 20th century were Wodehouse and Simenon, so one may always be certain of finding a title of theirs to fill in the spaces between the more labored and laborious books of other authors.

Another one on the JM list and another one read gulped whole in a day - The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy.

Over the last handful of years I’ve read more and more of this kind of writing - acts of liberating and of motherhood. non-dogmatic explorations of love and grief, of separation from the patriarchy and its imposed categories, especially but not only gender. of managing to create and care and be when your time is not your own. Didion, Rivka Galchen, Maggie Nelson, Kate Briggs (who suggests Roland Barthes’ late lectures provide a sort of structure for this sort of writing), an occasional facet of Helen deWitt. Often mutually referential. Part of me thinks they are, or should be a new way of writing.

In some respects this didn’t excite me as much as some of those other names. But it is very good on writing, and that reflects a focus on the carefully written sentences. (it is also good on grief, pain, loss, being a woman - i say that last with an awareness that it sounds stupid - what could *you* know - but all i can say is that it speaks lucidly of what other women have said on similar subjects).

it made me want to read some of her fiction.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts - blasted through this in a day. great, fun hard SF with cryogenics, AI, black holes and deep space, deep-time travel. only realised the message within a message wasn’t a weird kindle/OCR artefact about 20 pages in as it appeared in light grey rather than vivid red.

I'm reading this too (almost done), got it from the same twitter thread. The concept is fun, writing is decent I guess, but the constant profanity in all the dialogue sounds so dumb and unnecessary. Do sf writers do this to try and balance out the pretension of all the techno-speak?

Also I'm looking for something fun to read on an upcoming trip to Argentina. Too bad this won't be out in time (Nocilla Trilogy by Agustin Fernandez Mallo):
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374222789

afraid to say i read your post Jordan and said “Really?” because it didn’t jump out at me at all. but it’s perfectly possible i may be obscenity blind. so i just went back in at random and did find a few fucks etc.

i think it’s because these are intended to be weary working stiff, cynical engineers but forced almost against themselves to hold some sort of dream of what they are (even negatively: Viktor). the language just helps emphasise that a bit. as i say, didn’t bother me particularly or feel forced.

well i say that - i did just find a page that contains this:

“They don’t trust us,” Kai said, rolling his eyes. “Eight million years down the road and they’re afraid we might—what? Trash our own life support? Write *Sawada sucks farts* on their scale models?”

so uh... i mean i don’t even really know if that makes sense. is that a thing people *say* even?

Haha. I don't have a problem with profanity in general, it was just overused and made the tone feel juvenile (not as bad as 'The Martian', which I couldn't get through, but similar).

Ummm, tmi but also I was reading it out loud to my partner bedtime story-style, which made the dialogue really stick out. Otherwise I probably would have glossed over it.

oh no i quite like reading out loud/bedtime story (assuming it’s been requested of course lol) and there’s nothing like it to reveal quirks of style.

At least 2 pf the Nocilla books can be ordered from the UK

And the 3rd one will be out in a couple of weeks:

https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/nocilla-dream

https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/nocilla-experience

https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/nocilla-lab

*goes to Patagonia*

I haven't read many memoirs, but Molly Brodak's Bandit seems like a near-perfect balance of show x tell, an integration of astute speculation and crisp declaration, both evocative as hell, without getting too arty---a few whut-does-this-mean turns, but maybe more re my simple male minds, and she's enough of a story teller to know when and how to come back to certain things left hanging, though can't (sometimes won't) answer all questions.
Title refers to Daddy (also Molly, as collegiate semi-pro shoplifter), who claims trauma as a Vietnam War vet and as youngest member of a family of refugees,who mostly survived forced labor in the Nazi penal system, but not every such durable and resourceful offspring becomes a gambling addict (and what does that mean anyway), and not every gambling addict becomes a serial bank robber, and not every serial bank robber does time, comes out and gets his job with GM back, retires and eventually gets busted again (first in 1994, second 2009), and is an elderly jailbird still, or as of the book's publication in 2016.
Construction and compartmentalization of professional and private life certainly runs in the family, and ain't that America. Relevant observations of educational system (especially guidance counseling, medical (esp. post-op) and mental health diagnoses (passing templates, incl. addict, bipolar, schiz, and from the Psychopath to spectrums).
Had to pace myself in reading, because it's so intense and dense, mostly in good ways, with the seamless editing of ritual and metamorphic thought, incl. figures in a clearing, discoveries made while putting it all into public words, into prose (only previous book a prize-winning collection of her poetry).
Another reason not to binge on it: tends to turn up this reader's sense of self-observation.

Rosamond Lehmann's The Echoing Grove. My first by her. I now sense I didn't pick the best one to start with. Somewhat typical mid-20C womens' fiction (and therefore very much my kind of thing if done well). A love triangle in which a woman has an affair with her sister's husband. Lehmann obviously had talent to burn, and writes very well but she occasionally veers into a more, heightened/poetic/impressionistic/free associative style that I found a bit hit and miss. I found myself skimming at times.

All the same I'm still interested in picking up another of her books (apparently TEG isn't very typical). I've also picked up the bio by Selina Hastings which I'm enjoying very much so far.

By complete coincidence, I picked up today a Rose Macaulay poetry collection (from 1914, original edition) because it looked intriguing, and because the poetry I saw in it was great...and then upon ilxsearching found that Aimless damn well kicked off this thread with her! I will have to read Towers Of Trebizond now...

Finished the last of the Neapolitan quartet, which is an ungainly name for what is undeniably one novel in four volumes, which should probably be called “my brilliant friend” based on the titling in Italian but we’re obliged to use as the title of volume 1. Anyway, a moving and confounding work with all the best qualities of a thriller.

Also at times a reflexive and ambiguous commentary on autofiction and the undermining of women’s writing, to which Ferrante’s pseudonymity adds further involucration.

I just read ‘the Torture Garden’, by Mirbeau (inspired by a 2000AD story) - I liked the writing very much, though obviously a difficult read. Is anything else by him worth reading? I think I’ve heard people say ‘21 Days of a Neuresthenic’ is good?

The Diary of a Chambermaid is the only one I've read, but it was lurid and good.

Starters the year with a couple of sharp Archipelago Press titles: Bacacay by Witold Gombrowicz and Love by Hanne Ørstavik. The former I don’t j ow how to talk about without being deeply tedious (something something warped short stories dipping far enough into the absurd to be fascinating and feel pointed something something). The latter I can’t really talk about without being spoilery but it’s really Norwegian and it’s really brilliant.

I just finished Stacie Williams' BIZARRO WORLDS.

Hi Fizzles, back in Sept. I pasted-reposted a Rolling SF etc conversation about Watts from way upthread: one James Morrison advises, "Start with Blindsight, then Freeze-Frame Revolution." Think he's also the mentioner of another good 'un set in the Blindsightverse. I've only read (and enjoyed!) a few anthologized stories. All of Watts' stories were posted on his site, free reads, but then he warned about bogus downloads being sold, might've removed them.

Love by Hanne Ørstavik is great and incredibly sad

Echopraxia is the Blindisght sequel, and you very much have to have read Blindsight first, ideally immediately beforehand, in order to remember what's going on.

Paul Schrader The Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer

I think I read that book before seeing any Ozu, and having a wrong impression that Ozu would be much less fun than he is.

For fun, I picked up a NYRB collection of stories by Conan Doyle, The Adventures and Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. In spirit and quality they are somewhere midway between Alexandre Dumas and "A Boy's Own Paper", but unquestionably fun.

Is there a particularly good story you'd recommend? Doyle meets Dumas sounds right in my comfort zone, but I've struggled with the Gerard stories when I've tried them in the past.

Virginia Woolf, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

You perhaps misunderstood my allusion to the "Boy's Own Paper" aspects of the stories. They lack all the nuance and deeper psychology of Dumas, instead delivering their adventurous derring-do along with some gentle comedy to deflate any chance the hero will be taken seriously. If I may invent a category for them, they are first rate throwaways.

xpost to dow - thanks for that. really must make an effort to keep up with that thread more.

also want to read Love by Hanne Ørstavik.

in the meantime The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard, trans. Mark Polizzotti. An enjoyably strange book: a novelistic history of the outbreak of the second world war. Its tone veers around a bit - some in the “gallic style” - cheerfully carefree judgments on people and the contents of their heads (reminiscent slightly of Paul Hazard in his excellent Crisis of the European Mind), occasionally careful reference to documentation, and novelistic gusto and verve with anecdote. but it has some moments of very high impact. the complicity of industry with nazi politicians as just the normal cost of doing business present in the opening scenes, a vivid contempt for the English aristocratic and political classes (Chamberlain collecting rent from Ribbentrop as he left his role as ambassador to go back to his new role as Foreign Minister in the Third Reich). The mixture of fatalism and helplessness of politics during these moments of great significance is conveyed extremely well.

i see it just got a bad review in the spectator as well so an additional gold star for that.

our man james gave it a good review

Alex in Numberland. Book on maths that I started last year then I think drifted away onto something else without getting very far into. Now getting much further into.
& I saw its sequel while i was in London. Finding it pretty interesting so far.

Broadway Babies Say Goodnight Mark Steyn
HIstory of musicals which i picked up from a charity shop last year, started then drifted off to other things and have again picked upa nd got further into. Just reading about Hammerstein.

Memphis 1968 Stuart Cosgrove's 2nd Book on Soul and cultural history.
Read the Detroit 67 last year and really enjoyed it. Now got one chapter into this and reading about james Carr etc.
Looks like it should be about as good.

yes, i’ve been rinsing out james’ 2018 list at the beginning of the year: there were a number of things, this last included, that i really wanted to read. and as expected they’ve all in some way hit the mark.

moominvalley in november

it has such a sad, strange vibe

I'm going to read a few of those from james' list too, I think: convenience store woman ; other minds ; love ; order of the day ; and, maybe, moon of the crusted snow

I would love to read a fraction of what Real ILB James reads, but I can't keep up any longer. Not saying, just saying.

Where what who is 'James' list'?

Reading Will Storr's Selfie. I should have known from the title but there's an interesting book in there, amongst all the pages of barely-hidden research, the fact that everyone he quotes is a 'Professor' (as if it's a badge of honour, or he's trying to justify the 'and now this' nature of the narrative) and the breathtaking amount of supposition. I'll probably persevere because, well, it's January.

Ben Myers' The Gallows Pole was excellent. Like The Proposition co-sung by a pissed David Peace.

in the meantime The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard,

I've since read another by him, Sorrow of the Earth, which is a similarly done look at the treatment of Native Americans in the early 20th Century, and the weird showbiz career of Sitting Bull in Buffalo Bill's circus. Not as good as The Order of the Day, because it shoehorns in a completely unrelated story at the end to try to hit an uplifting ending, but still very interesting.

xpost

it keeps resonating for me. it’s a really good book i think. almost like a series of dioramas, vividly painted, a flair for interpretational flourishes. i don’t think there’s a more powerful depiction of how these events, images, and great historical catastrophes emerge from and are present in the common run of things.

it’s v hard to believe this isn’t written with an eye to current events both in general aim and with specific references (hitler promising to build the largest bridge, the tallest building etc). normally i’m v wary of “relevance” and especially wary of the ww2 and current day neo-nazism, alt and far right analogies(continuity and reference, fine, ww2 and build up as analogue not). yet vuillard makes as convincing a case as i’ve seen by displaying in condensed form a set of understandings (social, intellectual, ideological, pragmatic, narratorial, emotional etc) about how history operates, which is v impressive.

I really hope more of his work gets translated.

should i read Third Reich by Bolaño?

Yes. The only work of serious literature that mentions the Judge Dredd role-llaying game.

Sorry, Chinaski, "James's list" is my blather here: http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2018/12/excellent-books-what-i-read-this-year.html

Giving Le Guin’s ‘Always Coming Home’ a second chance. I enjoyed it when I first tried to read it, but I got lost somewhere along the way.

Just a note that the very, very good HUMAN VOICES is a quid on kindle at the mo

Two books published by the Dorothy Project (the first two of theirs I've read, will definitely read more): "Wild Milk" by Sabrina Orah Mark and "Dan" by Joanna Ruocco. Both exist in dreamy (maybe kind of Pynchonny) worlds of ungraspable semi-reality to variously pointed effect, I took the point in each (at least in part) ot be patricarchy's slippery distortions.

Both are VG but of the two I'd pick "Wild Milk" as my favourite, partly because the instability seems to come from within the language of the stories. I have no idea about SOM's approach but I found myself speculating that she takes a story premise and does some kind of cut-up or word association on it and then allows that distortion to drive a new story. Consistently interesting and affecting.

Finished Selina Hastings bio of Rosamond Lehmann. Her life reads like a glossy soap: celebrated beauties (women and men), minor aristos, aesthetes, marriages, divorces, celebrity, multiple/often disastrous affairs, devastating bereavements, monstrous egotism, borderline looniness. Hastings does a good job of capturing it all for the general reader: it's a professional, properly researched bio that resists the temptation to sacrifice readability for scholarly heft and reads almost like popular fiction. All very enjoyable.

Following Chuck's recommendation I put Human Voices onto my Kindle although it cost £1.99 rather than a quid.

That biography sounds good !!

David Foster Wallace: 'E Unibus Pluram: Television & U.S. Fiction' (essay written 1990, published 1993; a different media age)

reading the vuillard.... 50 pages in, hmmmm not sure... it reads more like a (very opinionated) essay rather than fiction per se

JUst got Heavy Metalloid Music by Jesse locke been wanting to read it since I heard it existed.
IN depth history of Hamilton ONtario's Simply Saucer including post band bio of Edgar Breau the singer/guitarist and then the reunion /band reappearance since I'm not sure how many of original band are in the 2010s version.

I think it IS an opinionated essay rather than fiction, or maybe it's some other odd cross-genre exercise

yeah it’s a rum one. right at the beginning he talks about the descriptive opportunities fiction can afford, which he makes use of, but will also lean periodically on the presence of documentary research, without that doing much more than assuring you that such documents exist. eg its reference to Schischnigg’s memoirs means it’s quite difficult to discern what is directly taken from the memoirs and what is fictional imagination.

his moral judgments are straight out of the certainty of the high gallic style, of which i’m quite fond - shriving off the necessary caveats and sketched alternatives of historical uncertainty and leaving your main judgment forcefully asserted.

i’m happy with the blurrings. i think the selection of depicted events and the overall force and brevity make it feel like a highly insightful dream.

I finished All for Nothing by Kempowski. Overall I thought it was quite effective. Hopefully not to give away any spoilers, but it felt like one of those novels where 80% of the action happens in the last 20% of the pages. Despite the omnipresent air of menace, the stately atmospheric pace of the first part doesn't prepare you for the swift descent into brutality. As the carnage piles up, you almost feel like you've been ejected from a sophisticated art-house period piece and landed in some kind of Coen brothers' black comedy. However, even in the beginning sections, when the story seems to be drifting on revery (though it's never quite clear whose revery), the story does make steady progress in its sideways, crab-like fashion. It does leave you with plenty of food for thought, which is usually a mark of a good read. After that I read my self-help book for the year, Mindset by Carol Dweck. The book does have the advantage of having something worthwhile to say, but it just keeps saying it and saying it, though it is mercifully not a long book.

I couldn't handle anything serious, so I just read Why Not Catch-21?, Gary Dexter, a collection of 50 newspaper columns that discuss why different books were given their titles. It's literary trivia, but moderately interesting and of a suitably low-wattage that it could be read in a doctor's waiting room. Just what I wanted.

Currently reading second Boileau book, after the excellent She Who Was No More, namely Vertigo. Both have been turned into movies.

Still only 2/3 through rereading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

I can revere Woolf and trust that she is a magnificent artist, and what she tries to do in this novel is remarkable; eg spending pages in going beyond the human and trying to show how space and nature subsist over time without people in the picture.

BUT I am still doubtful about her tendency, often when doing that very thing, to go for a 'grand style' which is, maybe one could say, too 'Victorian' or 'Romantic'. She falls back a lot into dodgy (especially personifying) metaphors of eg 'And now night donned his cloak and swept all about him', which seem below the level of the best of what she is trying to do.

completed the complete saki & now onto hg well's tono-bungay which (thus far) promises to be a victorian era lower middle class bildungsroman

Finished TO THE LIGHTHOUSE again.

Yes, I have had my vision.

I'm now reading an old Penguin Classics title, Lives of Saints. The specific saints are St. Brendan, St. Cuthbert, and St. Wilfred. Miracles abound. The glory of the Lord shines in all things. The usual stuff.

Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (1808)
Bill Konigsberg, Openly Straight (2013)
Bill Konigsberg, Honestly Ben (2017)

Gregory Benford: The Berlin Project -- very weird unsatisfying alternative-history novel about the Manhattan Project in which Benford's Mary Sue hero, his real-life father-in-law Karl Cohen, gets to save the world, minimises geniuses like Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi, gets to tell off and outsmart Heisenberg and Groves, etc, and is fawned over by people like Rommel. Very odd. Like an incredibly ambitious present for his wife that somehow got published for a wide audience by mistake.

I tell you, reading Benford writing sex scenes between his father- and mother-in-law is very peculiar. Did not need soixante-neuf introduced in that context.

On book two of the Neapolitan Novels, at lunch my bartender asked me what it was about and I said it was a bildungsroman about two women in Naples. She said if I came in next week she would bring me a copy of her favorite book to read, and showed me the tattoo associated with it. The cheering of Saints fans made her inaudible so I don't know what book it is. I suppose I should bring her a book too?

Once I finish the Ferrante novels (which are a pleasure to read) I am going to find more Barbara Comyns to read, she is great.

recommend who was changed and who was dead

Not that it isn't brilliant, but I did think there were a lot of unnecessarily bad sentences in To The Lighthouse, or parts where a slight lack of clarity made me have to stop and check who was being referred to. I dunno if that's intentional but I remember thinking that along the way as a general impression. I loved it though.

Reading John McGahern's Collected Stories at the moment. I've read some dour Irish stories in my time but the world he paints really is grim. V good stories though. Just finished Wendy Erskine's Sweet Home - also short stories. All set in Belfast, one of the better modern collections I've read of late.

For the Eric Vuillard readers, he responded to criticism in the NYRB about his approach to writing history--I uploaded it here:
https://www.scribd.com/document/397893674/Pages-From-2019-02-07-the-New-York-Review-of-Books

Looking at the Wikipedia list of Comyns novels, it appears I've read the four dating from before the sixties and the four dating from after the sixties but none of the four from the sixties. I have enjoyed them all, I think maybe I liked The Vet's Daughter best.

completed the complete saki

Does that include, like, his jingoistic novel about Germany invading the UK? Always wondered how he fared outside of the comical short story mold (in which he's awesome).

His what now? I had never heard of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_William_Came

ooh, that's available on project gutenberg. will add it to my todo list.

it did indeed include it... totally bizarre mix of social comedy & pre-wwi invasion anxiety! his other novel the unbearable bassington was much more readable, though that doesn't come close to the sharpness of the stories. less said about the plays the better.

recommend who was changed and who was dead

yes! I want to read that and/or the Veterinarian's Daughter next... I've read Sisters by a River, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, and the Juniper Tree. Have you read any of her four books from the 60s?

(I'm in the same boat as Tim it seems, mostly because the pre/post 60s Comyns books seem to be the ones that are reprinted)

Started Devil's Advocates book on The Shining.

Finished Susan Orlean, The Library Book, which is a warm blanket of a read, highly recommend it. Started Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers, which is starting off like a knife trick.

The Veterinarian's Daughter sort of passed through me when I read it but it's grown in my imagination. It's like a perfect Gothic doll's house of a book. I totally twin it with We Have Always Lived in the Castle in that respect.

Against my better judgement I bought John Lanchester's 'The Wall', mostly because I used to dig utopian/dystopian literature. So I just finished the Decipherment of Linear B, which I enjoyed a lot, and I'll get to the Wall after Sartre's 'the Ghost of Stalin'.

Toni Morrison, PARADISE.

If anything, it seemed better than ever on this ... 3rd reading? Probably one of her strongest novels. The late sequence where the women all reappear is quite mysterious and touching.

(Accidentally, I appear to have started 2019 reading only female authors, a change from 2018.)

nora ephron, HEARTBURN. it's a trip so far

Love that book.

I finished Lives of the Saints last night. ftr, St. Brendan's life was so phantasmagoric as to be unconnected to any recognizable reality, St. Cuthbert came across as a fairly good-hearted ascetic, and St. Wilfred came across as a calculating and self-enriching church politician. Chateaubriand's memoir might be the perfect foil with which to follow this crew, but I haven't really decided what to read next.

Maybe this one?
https://oneworld-publications.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/650x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/9/7/9781786074416_14_1_1.jpg

Aargh sorry big pic

Finished Human Voices by Penelope Fitzerald. Perhaps the most purely enjoyable of the 5 or so books of hers that I've read, but still I'm left feeling I'm not quite the right reader for her and that I enjoy her work less than I should given that it's the kind of thing I tend to like and obviously brilliant. I keep hoping things will click into place with her but it hasn't quite happened yet.

Giorgio Bassani: Within the Walls -- first of the Ferrara books, but the 4th I've read, because they were retranslated into English out of order -- 5 long stories/novellas

xpost

I get that! Offshore was a very "nothing quite clicks" book for me, but like every other book of hers it's haunted me for reasons I can't explain, in a pleasurable way

Having read two (maybe three) of Bassani's novels over the years, and enjoyed them, it hadn't occurred to me that he thought of them as a single work. Excited to read the rest by and by.

I read "Normal People" by Sally Rooney and "Dusty Answer" by Rosamund Lehmann - it wasn't deliberate but they're an interesting pair, ninetyish years apart stories of progress through adolescence (and university) to a messed-up adulthood of sorts. Both VG, don't think either will make it to an ongoing home on the shelves.

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN

I heard that starts great and then deteriorates

As do we all

Still only 2/3 through rereading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

I can revere Woolf and trust that she is a magnificent artist, and what she tries to do in this novel is remarkable; eg spending pages in going beyond the human and trying to show how space and nature subsist over time without people in the picture.

BUT I am still doubtful about her tendency, often when doing that very thing, to go for a 'grand style' which is, maybe one could say, too 'Victorian' or 'Romantic'. She falls back a lot into dodgy (especially personifying) metaphors of eg 'And now night donned his cloak and swept all about him', which seem below the level of the best of what she is trying to do.

― the pinefox, Saturday, January 19, 2019 3:03 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that middle section might be interesting to reread in the light of the recent turn towards ecofiction or whatever we're calling it: the mission it perhaps shares with the powers novel from last year

Some of us start bad and then deteriorate. xp

James Morrison: fair observations on both counts.

PS I had not seen Tim's important addendum. Also accurate.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

I've started Robert Saviano's Gomorrah - partly because I've always wanted to know more about Naples and partly for some background for the Ferrante novels (of which I've read the first). It's gripping enough, so far.

Back on Iris Murdoch, UNDER THE NET. Going very slowly with this, though. Coincidentally and rather randomly Michael Wood recently reviewed it for the LRB.

Outline by Rachel cusk

a couple John Scalzi novels: The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire

Giorgio Scerbanenco's 1966 Milan-based noir novel A Private Venus, which was very simple in its story but pretty exceptional I thought.

Read Harry Martinssons epic poem 'Ainara' about a spaceship that gets thrown off course and hurtles towards infinity. It's been adapted to the big screen. It's good.

Currently reading Homer's The Iliad in the Robert Fagles translation.

I read Ainara--it IS good--and had no idea it had been filmed. Not even sure how that would work!

Now Gregory Benford is arguing with me on Goodreads about my view of his book.

I read Ainara--it IS good--and had no idea it had been filmed. Not even sure how that would work!

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), 29. januar 2019 00:11 (fourteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It doesn't really work, at least not perfectly. But it's an interesting film. And it turns out it's 'Aniara', not 'Ainara', had to ctrl-f 15 instances of that mispelling in my review :(

You have to admire the neck of people still convinced German car manufacturers will force Merkel to see sense, when May has turned a deaf ear to every single business leader here.

Balls! Wrong thread, no idea how that happened guys.

I just read Lorrie Moore's A GATE AT THE STAIRS (2009) for maybe the fourth time - carefully, over a day or so.

I must have written about this book here every time I've read it before, and the posts would show my views going up and down, my doubts and praise mixed. This time it won me over again. So it's mainly just a lesson in the vagaries of rereading, the mystery of how you see different things.

There are one or two bad things, but as I knew they were coming they didn't bother me. Other, good things still worked. And a surprising amount, especially in the latter half, felt new to me - as though I had read it too fast before. Much of it the detail of landscape, weather etc that I knew was there but perhaps hadn't focused on; but also scenes, phrases, conversations, impressions.

The scene where Tassie goes to the restaurant is poignant and loaded; I hadn't recalled that it came before her brother was killed. It's odd that LM doesn't make more of what the bill comes to at the end of this feast, as that's surely part of the point of the place. Then there is a whole scene with Tassie driving home on her scooter, in a rainstorm, that I had quite forgotten.

Her neglecting to read the brother's fateful email still doesn't ring very true, but the brother's death and the emotional impact and grief was powerful for me this time round.

On balance I now can't but feel that this is more a very good novel than a notably flawed one.

I finished "heartburn" which I enjoyed but cooled on majorly by the end. her narrator was very astute and funny but it never really coalesced into that compelling a narrative

continuing my moomins reading next with "finn family moomintroll"

I would like to go back to Moomins!

It might not be so far from Lorrie Moore.

(In fact coincidentally on my own bookshelves all my Lorrie Moore is literally next to the first Moomin book.)

I needed something simple, so I'm reading The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson. It subscribes to the 'bad seed' theory of serial killers, but that was a commonly held idea in 1954. Apart from that, its plot is damn well put together and it's psychologically perceptive.

The Anubis Gates
Jean Renoir book on Pierre Renoir

That would be Pierre-Auguste Renoir, his painter pops.

Finally started on Bad Blood. Hurrah

I read "The Living Are Few, The Dead Many" by Hans Henny Jahnn - really good and convincingly unnerving. the back of the book says (something to the effect that) it's halfway between German gothic and German expressionist, and I have no reason to doubt that.

Then I re-read Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book about "Let's Talk about Love" by Celine Dion, which is maybe even better than I remember it, a (the?) genuine classic of self-consciously anti-rockist music criticism.

Really need to read that Wilson book

Reading Fools' Parade, by Davis Grubb, author of The Night of the Hunter: the first 52 pages of this 1969 mass-market paperback, densely packed w detail and tiny type, is newly released ex-cons on a train, taking them away from Glory, a Depression-era prison town, also hometown to the youngest, but the Big Guard has told him not to come back, and also, "I'll see you after sundown." Mattie, by far the oldest (and after 47 years of prison work, with an already famously-infamously large check in his breast pocket) fears that it is so, that his handcarved eye's vision of young Jimmy Jesus jumping the train and heading back, with Mattie and the others forced to follow, cannot be turned off or blinked, despite all the sense-talking and reassurances in the world of twilight.
So far, good use of Faulknerian purple prosody in pulp mode, but maybe better-paced than WF himself did this kind of thing, with backstory and other flights reeling back into moment-to-moment shifting tensions of character development afoot and underfoot, in train drone, vibration and momentum: "Still is still moving to me," as Willie Nelson muses.

Also: "The shit you can't take back, " currently my personal definition of noir.

imo, the Thompson book would have been better without trying to bolster its credibility by reference to clinical psychiatric literature. The story and character were strong enough to compel belief on their own terms. Thompson's choice to switch his writing style in the last few pages to something more terse and confused was an unfortunate blemish, too. Even though it was obvious what he was attempting through that stylistic choice, he would have been better off sticking to the style he'd established for the previous 240 pages; the impact of the ending would have been greater.

Otherwise, an excellent crime noir novel.

I finished "Invitation to the Waltz" by Rosamond Lehmann. By about half-way through I thought I wasn't going to like it. Popular romantic fiction, somewhat sentimental, the more aristocratic characters embarrassingly idealised, the naive heroine learning to be suspicious of the manipulative, dishonest, undeserving poor. But the second half (a description of the heroine's first ball) is a sustained triumph, brilliantly observed, empathetic and full of original touches. Also beautifully written.

Now re-reading Henry Green's "Concluding", my favourite of his novels.

Mine too.

Trollope - Framley Parsonage
Zachary Leader - The Life of Saul Bellow
Louis Gluck - Ararat

Still slowly progressing with UNDER THE NET.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, Katrine Marçal. Really good on how Adam Smith's worldview was influenced by Newtonian physics, the Chicago school of economic's attempts to justify women doing housework from an economic pov is sad lols, as to be expected. Mostly she rails against the construct of the Economic Man, pointing out how absurd it is to look at humans as rational actors. Some of the studies cited feel a bit too close to the Freakanomics stuff she decries but overall very interesting.

Suddenly half way through aforementioned Fools' Parade---amazing how the purple haze prose throws up roadblocks to pull-push me through, accruing momentum every stealthy-squirrelly second (or at least paragraph). Grubb must have a stop-watch down in there somewhere.

Beginning to hate Bad Blood. It's interesting. Yet I am already looking forward to next book, ie Falling Angel.

I am re-reading one of Patrick O'Brien's nautical novels, The Mauritius Command, on account of my mind recently being reduced to the consistency of chewing gum. These Aubrey/Maturin novels are somewhat corny, but they're packed with amazing tidbits of historical research. O'Brien clearly had fun writing them.

I’m reading pinocchio in venice, a real robocop of a novel

Part Mann.
Part Collodi.
All Coover.

Vita Sackville-West: Grand Canyon -- still not sure if I'll finish this, but every time I'm about to give up it gets interesting again. Written in 1942, set in world where the UK made a peace deal with the Nazis and basically let them have Europe. The book takes place in a hotel by the Grand Canyon full of European and British refugees. But it also has long, airless stretches of tedious conversation that feel like stuff from a third-rate Victorian novel.

hm, better you than me

Exactly what I was thinking! Please let us know how it turns out, okay?

'twixt land and sea, being 3 novellas by joseph conrad.

UNDER THE NET growing on me -- as it nears halfway, it gets into some lovely material about London, c.1950, which is very period (bombsites) yet also just recognizable now (Holborn Viaduct, St Paul's Cathedral). Loads about Cheapside pubs. Tim H should read this but probably already has.

I should, and I have not.

I read "Europe In Sepia", a collection of essays about immigration and culture and other stuff, by Dubravka Ugresic (an Amsterdam-based Croat). It was very good.

Yeah, Under The Net is a lot of fun.

The Vita Sackville-West got weirder. Everybody died in a bomb blast at the halfway point, but didn't know they were dead. So it became an entirely different sort of unsatisfactory book. Would not recommend this at all. Though I gave enjoyed other novels by her.

Sounds like PKD's UBIK !

Which is curious as of course PKD also wrote an alternate-outcome-WWII novel, not long before that.

In both cases he did it waaaaaaay better. And unlike in UBIK, VS-W straight off tells the reader everybody has died the moment it happens.

What did she write that's good? Seems, even from this description, as if there *might* be something I'd like.

All Passion Spent, Seducers in Ecuador, and No Signposts in the Sea were all good. Still haven't read The Edwardians, which is supposed to be her big one.

Having some trouble getting into Black Leopard Red Wolf (audiobook version) mainly because there's just so much cracking of skulls, grabbing of balls, fish swimming in vaginas and evil uncles that, especially as it is somewhat cartoonishly read by Dion Graham, it kind of topples into self-parody. Does itl work better in print? I really want to give this a fair shot, not least since it's the most hyped release in a while.

That's more or less what put me off a brief history of seven killings so I think I'll be skipping this one.

Hmmm. I guess it's not all about Graham then.

I didn't really get on with Saviano's Gomorrah. I get his garrulous, immersive style and why he chose it but the luridness wore me down and I'm not sure to what end.

Started Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona - my first of hers. The narrative voice is wonderful.

The carl wilson book on bad taste. So excited!

The whole concept of 'taste' having a hierarchy is very weird.

Yeah, I totally agree. (One thing my best friend and I completely disagree. She's a total snob. I of course "recommended" dan brown to her. Haha)

The hierarchical thing seems like it has always been about class distinctions and nothing more. Authors and artists themselves sometimes buy into that kind of thinking, but the best artists rarely do because it is nearly impossible to make real art out of such flimsy material as 'having good taste'.

Jane Gardam is wonderful, chinaski. You'll be hooked.

After that, maybe try Old Filth.

I feel hooked already - gentle and ingratiating but with an undertone of menace. Old Filth on the list, cheers.

With half-term coming I decided to fill my 'great American novel' whole (like it needs filling) with the last of the Bascombe novels. What's the opinion of Ford around here? I found him stultifying at first (putdownable, if I'm being an arse) but both the Sportswriter and Independence Day have mushroomed in my imagination.

Giving Edwardian apocalypse fiction a go with M.P. Shiel and The Purple Cloud.

xp hole, not whole ffs

I enjoyed the collection of Maeve Brennan's short pieces for the New Yorker, The Long-Winded Lady. It's a fairly restrictive formula, but I found them compulsively readable. They usually consist of something that Brennan observes while walking around or dining alone in a restaurant in Greenwich Village or Midtown Manhattan. If she ever dined with another person, you won't hear about it in this book. The gorilla in the room of course is loneliness, though she never lets on or mentions that emotion. Instead she captures a tiny slice of life, often an overheard conversation that reveals something of the character of the stranger she is overhearing, though as a rule, you never quite hear enough to figure out what's going on. There's something very soothing in the regular reappearance of her favorite restaurants and hotels, places that would probably nowadays be classified as shabby chic - genteel, sophisticated but not as a rule terribly glamorous - though in one story she happens upon a movie scene being filmed in a Midtown hotel lobby where she often takes her afternoon coffee, and Julie Andrews makes a brief but memorable cameo.

Maeve Brennan is a wonderful writer with a very odd life. She ended up mad and institutionalised, sometimes convinced she was married to James Joyce.

Ugh, that can't have been much of a fantasy solace, seems like. The Wikipedia article is quite a read: she was very social early on in America, and some think she inspired Breakfast at Tiffany's; Albee was a big fan too. Says her fiction is very different from The Long-Winded Lady pieces, incl. stories of a marriage over the years: In the final Derdon story, "The Drowned Man", Rose has died and Hubert has to pretend that he is overwhelmed with grief for his dead wife, "... she was gone, she had been good, and he wished he could miss her." Also a novella,very belatedly discovered, first published in 2000,
---yet another bleak, somehow appealing description here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeve_Brennan But I'll prob start w TLWL.

Warlock by Oakley Hall

hamsun - pan
buchner - lenz
keller - green henry

I’m reading Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, interesting by Sianne Ngai, a critical look at the subtitular aesthetics and their utility for reading the artworks of late capitalism/the postwar period.

All I know of Brennan comes from this review:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n17/joanne-oleary/what-makes-a-waif

which incidentally I don't actually like much and includes the preposterous sentence:

It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made all other countries seem strange.’

Just finished UNDER THE NET. Rich, rangy, diverse, picaresque, full of life, full also of caricature and silliness. Sometimes it attains stillness, poignancy, reflectiveness also. An 'animal novel', with its pervasive dog, in the way that Lethem said about Dickens (or the way that Lethem tried to do with CHRONIC CITY). A notably London novel - the only scene to take place outside London is a trip to Paris, which is also beautifully drawn.

This is only the second Murdoch novel I've read. I doubt that I would ever like any other better than this one.

Would recommend all of Brennan's fiction. Really, really REALLY recommend it.

I also think Under the Net is the best Murdoch I've read, certainly the only one I unreservedly enjoyed.

Something like 20 years ago I read a W G Sebald book: "Vertigo". I didn't get on with it at all, and avoided reading him again until I came across a cheapish copy of "The Emigrants" in the run of Harvill editions that I kinda/sorta collect. I am not going to talk about Sebald, whose work I imagine you're all much more familiar with than I am, except to say that I think "The Emigrants" is absolutely amazing and I now have a sense of why people seem to rate him so highly.

I also read "This Wounded Island vol 2: Another England" by J W Bohm, the second volume of a serious-spoof psychogeographical project in which a fictional German academic tries to understand the UK by drifting around and contemplating the nondescript; I raved about vol 1 and this one's maybe even better, it pulls off the trick of being funny and a bit unsettling.

Jack Kelley's The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America , the new Saul Bellow bio, and a Louise Glück collection.

I've been reading John Keegan's The Face of Battle. It has its interesting moments, but I am not quite sure why its reputation is so lofty.

The THIS WOUNDED ISLAND book sounds quite interesting and distinctive.

I remember that I was reading THE EMIGRANTS when I wrote the song 'Please Don't Get Married (Without Asking Me)', around August 2000.

But I wouldn't want to imply that the one influenced the other.

I read "The Punishments of Hell" by Robert Desnos, which is a proto-surrealist stream of images (or load of old nonsense, if you prefer) which feels like a narrative but isn't really. It features many leading Dadaists, lots of dismemberment and disaster, quite a lot of spanking and also various perversity. It kind of reads like one of those Bosch paintings set in 1920s Paris. I'm happy to have read it but wouldn't necessarily recommend it (the Jahnn book I mentioned upthread from the same publisher is much more interesting and unsettling I think, and unsettling is my main measure of success for this kind of writing).

Finished my first book (that I began back in December) last night yay me

Back on Paul Beatty, THE SELLOUT (2015).

winding down w joyce carol oates 'what i lived for' its a great peppy personal one man & his demons type book, a classic tragedy, and up there w the best of her books ive read for sure

I am not going to talk about Sebald, whose work I imagine you're all much more familiar with than I am, except to say that I think "The Emigrants" is absolutely amazing and I now have a sense of why people seem to rate him so highly

go straight to the rings of saturn tim, it is imo even more amazing. vertigo is def his first and least successful attempt at the style he develops

Read Austerlitz last year for the first time, and it is also amazing

I just read So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, due to hearing it recommended on the Backlisted podcast, thought it was fantastic - spare, sad, plays with ideas of fiction and memoir in a way that feels like he’s trying to be as honest as possible with the reader.

Also read Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson which is one of the best books about music I’ve ever read.

The "expanded edition" of the Wilson that came out a few years ago has some worthwhile additions--including retrospective essays by at least two (former, in one case?) ILXors.

Omg the wilson book is in my top ten. I haven't finished it (ab 30% to go) but it is just perfect.

I tried to re-read Austerlitz recently and my god, it's got melancholy in its bones. I had to bail out for the sake of my health.

A Long Way from Verona is a joy to behold. I've been trying to work out *why* and I think it's just a simple truth that lifts from the page thanks to her noticings.

I would tend to agree that THE RINGS OF SATURN is the Sebald to read, though there is a bit of confirmation bias in this -- it's the one I have read most often by far, and in its concern with East Anglia (it even starts in a hospital where I was more than once treated myself) is by far the closest to home for me.

But I agree that if Tim liked another WGS then he should try this one.

Finished THE SELLOUT again. Pretty powerful tour de force, though perhaps more so first time round.

I will read Rings of Saturn but only when I find it in the appropriate Harvill edition.

I read "The Return of the Soldier" by Rebecca West, which is a sharp little thing (mostly) about class and growing up/old, set in the context of WWI.

Finished the sublime carl wilson book. Now reading the true history of chocolate (mainly for work).

I think I own that Harvill edition. Maybe two different Harvill editions.

I should read THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER especially if it is quick.

Back on THE LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN - tremendous.

The Return of the Soldier is a pungent little book. I recommend it. I read The Fountain Overblows in August after finding a NYRB edition for cheap on the each and it disappointed me.

I third (fourth?) the Sebald rec. What put me over was Austerlitz, thanks to which I returned to The Emigrants.

Yeah, Return of the Soldier is short and powerful.

David grann flowers of the killer moon

^still over 100 holds on that at my library

Just one more mention of xpost Fools' Parade, in case you were thinking it might be worth checking out, based on my descriptions of Part I---the rest eventually runs out of steam and keeps going, plotwise, although some okay (no longer more than that) bits of characterization and conversation keep showing up right to the end. Not the Davis Grubb to start with (at least I hope there are better ones)---if you have a choice, but if you don't and are inclined toward purple Southern Depression noir pulp, then try this (unless it costs more than a dollar, say). Try the older libraries first.
Not the usual pause for reflection, just thank u, next (Nate Chinen's Playing Changes: Jazz For The New Century[2018]).

xps- it’s started showing up in used bookstores recently! i saw another the copy the week after i got mine. it’s amazing but grann-headz don’t need me to tell them that

Yeah, it's incredible, and well worth buying full price.

I also just finished "So Long, See You Tomorrow" - it's beautifully written but I was a little underwhelmed, or, at least, it didn't move me as much as Alice Munro doing similar things at a shorter page count. Also I ended up feeling sorrier about the dog than any of the humans.

What's the key to Austerlitz and Sebald, by the way? I know I'm missing the point, but I find the relentless quotidian detail a bit... boring.

There's something about surrendering to Sebald's rhythm, I think. Not being a German speaker, it's impossible to know if it's a property of the original, but I suspect it must be.

By which I mean it's something like walking: the motion is what carries you and it's not until later reflection that the detail of the walk seeps through.

I have stuck my toe into Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey. Not only is this set in Oregon and written by an Oregonian, two points in its favor, but a tiny vocal cadre like to insist it is a top contender for The Great American Novel. Then again, tiny cadres say that about Naked Lunch and A Fan's Notes, so go figure.

After only a few pages I am having my doubts about whether its 'greatness' is simply that it centers upon an 'outsized' character who displays strongly sociopathic tendencies, rather like Ahab, pushing everyone around him into a series of wholly unnecessary crises, which naturally generate equally pointless tension and drama. Also, it apparently has a native American character (who has not shown up, yet) who the author of the Introduction promises me will "speak truth". Not an especially good sign, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, I'll give it a shot.

any novel where i read the back and the description is idk to make something up: "this is a story of America in microcosm, the story of Clancy Biggins, the boisterous and charismatic scion of a shipping empire whose gluttonous appetites for women and violence make him and those around him...." etc etc are novels i tend to avoid. i think those were more a thing in the '60s and '70s perhaps, in american lit at least? i don't mind all books with outsized lead characters obv, i think there's just a very specific subgenre within that genre that makes me put the book down before i crack it open.

I read it a few years after it was first published, so may have been more favorably impressed by the last part than would be later--by the way it became a clash of male egos, overtly that, from the viewpoint of a female character---like he kept writing it, and then Feminism came along---or maybe he had the shift in mind all along----but the guys got tiresome anyway, and even then I suspected something of a reductive or false dichotomy (between the principal male opponents)---but maybe that was past of his point, about self-reduction; I think so---also made some points I'd never thought of, like men being influenced by their own looks, the subsequent expectations and presumptions (of self and others), how being desirable becomes a trap---good stuff about that part of Oregon back then---it's not The Great American Novel, but stay with it a while.

Kind of a Big Woods soap opera, but not too bad to read if you don't mind that.

Kesey's Sailor Song doesn't get the love it should.

Re RETURN OF THE SOLDIER, Backlisted podcast just did an episode on it: haven't heard it yet, but they're always good: https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/86-rebecca-west-the-return-of-the-soldier

I just listened - really good episode.

I started back into the Kesey book last night, but at the 50 page mark I knew in my heart I would never enjoy or finish the book, so I dumped it. Instead I picked up The Life of Cromwell, a very brief (125 pp.) biography by C.V. Wedgewood.

oh that's good! I read it in an afternoon three summers ago

What's the key to Austerlitz and Sebald, by the way? I know I'm missing the point, but I find the relentless quotidian detail a bit... boring.

― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, February 16, 2019 10:14 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

context and connection and digression are the story

I went back to Empson's SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. It seems a bit easier to follow this time around.

JUst finished Kingdom of fear the Hunter s thompson memoir. Quite good. Do enjoy him.

Alex's Adventures in Numberland book on maths, quite fascinating.

Sylvain Sylvain No Bones In Ice Cream memoir of New York Dolls' other guitarist. He's just arrived in Buffalo New York after spending a couple of years in Paris after Egypt started oppressing its jewish population so his family fled from there. INteresting so fart and he's barely a teen so very early days.

Memphis 68 Stuart Cosgrove's 2nd in his late 60s music trilogy. I really liked the Detroit volume, need to get more into this. GOt as far as Otis Redding dying.

Flann's letters reach the 1950s. I think the rest of this book is going to be less entertaining.

I finished Homer's Iliad in the Robert Fagles translation. This is the only translation of it I've read, so I'm not sure if it's always so gory, or if Fagles added some color. It definitely feels like the warrior ethic hasn't changed all that much in 3000 years. If you update the technology and leave out the gods and their interfering ways, the story could be a war movie from last year, except maybe that enslaving defeated civilians and taking the wives of the vanquished for oneself is no longer the done thing, at least outside of ISIS territory.

Now I'm reading Porochista Khakpour's Sick. So far it's not quite what I was expecting from the reviews.

Diving back into the massive and excellent BLACK WATER anthology of fantastic literature put together by Alberto Manguel. I'd read the first 350-odd pages of stories a while ago, but there's still another 600p to go.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41H3CLTZ9hL._AC_UL320_SR198,320_.jpg

And then I have to get round to the 1000-plus pages of the second volume:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Y%2BtLPON3L._SX317_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

They look amazing - not even heard of them. Is Manguel, like Borges, one of those people that's read everything?

Under strict instructions from ILB I read "Under The Net" by Iris Murdoch, and enjoyed it, thank you. Especially the pubs.

In other podcast news, the recent "Curiously Specific Podcast" is enjoyable on the subject of "Rings of Saturn".

Manguel is a bit like Borges and Umberto Eco.

This is very good piece on Dante and Dogs

I’ve had that anthology for years and years and never read any of it - I always do this with large anthologies. Also have a couple of manguel’s books about reading which I’d like to get to at some point

Found online contents lists for those 2 Manguels, if people are interested:
Vol 1 http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?279881
Vol 2 http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?320306

I'm reading Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize winner, but tbh I am not reading anything with great enthusiasm rn. I'm not really in fit shape to meet head on with anything amazingly good. Mildly diverting is about my current speed. A line in Offshore did make me laugh aloud last night, so it passes muster.

The first story in White Fire, 'The Child Who Believed', is superbly strange and apparently the only known work by the author, Grace Amundson.

It is great to hear of Tim's following instructions and reading that book.

I am also simply very impressed by how quickly he read it. It took me months (while doing other things).

I found a nice old Penguin edition in Amsterdam at the weekend and had a nice long train journey home to read it!

Only Murdoch in library: The Red and the Green---good?

I finished Offshore. Its ending was weak, in spite of Fitzgerald summoning a raging King Lear-intensity windstorm to assist her effort. However, it was, as I noted before, diverting enough, with some brief flashes of delightful humor.

I haven't chosen my next book, yet, but I plan on staying with easily-digested fare for a while longer.

I burned through Ancillary Sword, the middle book of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, in the previous two nights. They're good books and Breq is a wonderful protagonist.

Weirdly, the ending of Offshore actually happened to Fitzgerald and her family.

Relying on your personal experiences to deliver up a novel can put you into difficulties. Finding an ending is often one of the greatest hurdles to writing a novel or a play and real life seldom offers satisfying endings. This one was literally cast adrift, which sort of works, but is rather weak in terms of storytelling.

Hopefully you at least liked the ending of The Blue Flower, also grounded in real life.

I greatly enjoyed The Blue Flower, ending and all.

There was quite a backstory to life on the houseboat, as Fitzgerald's biographer eventually discovered (PF "stiff upper lip" and then some). James Wood covered the bio here and got upset that she didn't ask her rich daddy for money, to get her kids off that thing---this is worth reading, and no doubt the bio and novels are too: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/late-bloom
I did read some of The Knox Brothers, PF's bio of her father and uncles, which seemed like it could be engrossing (female relatives, incl. the author, all seemed peripheral).

James Woods on Offshore: "Despite winning the Booker Prize, it is one of her weaker novels...". To which I would agree, among the five I've read it was the least clearly conceived and executed, though it is an accomplished piece of writing.

I will take “one of her weaker novels,” thanks.

I like this bit in the James Wood piece linked above:

Penelope’s brother, Rawle, spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. His family, who had not known if he was dead or alive, first heard from him when the Red Cross arranged for liberated prisoners to send postcards home. According to Lee, Rawle “mailed the Knoxes a crossword clue,” but “no one could work out the answer.”

Talk about stiff upper lips!

I love The Bookshop and Human Voices but am meh about The Blue Flower, so whatever works for you!

That bio of her inspired this thread: ILB Brief Encounters: Literary Figures Appearing in Interesting Situations

I finished Sick by Porochista Khakpour. It was quite breezy in style, not as literary as I expected. It read more like a blog, or an email to a trusted friend. She is charmingly willing to share things that are potentially quite embarrassing. The book is about her journey through endless doctors and emergency rooms trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious syndrome with somewhat vague symptoms, though usually including headaches, insomnia and general malaise. Many doctors insist that what she really needs is a psychiatrist, and at times she edges towards acceptance of that idea, but is ultimately resistant. Finally she seizes on a diagnosis of late-stage Lyme as a reassuringly physical ailment with a prescribed course of treatment. By the end of the book, as the condition relapses, the sense of relief has mostly dissipated though, so perhaps there'll be a sequel. One can't help rooting for her, while at the same time feeling that she is usually her own worst enemy.

Now I'm reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.

I read "Tentacle" by Rita Indiana, which is a near-future post-ecodisaster transgender time-travelly (kinda sorta) thing and it seems to me rather well-done even though that's not really the kind of thing I read regularly. This is nearly the end of an And Other Stories subscription from last year and I'm pleased that has pushed me into reading things I otherwise might not have.

Last night I read The Order of the Day, Eric Vuillard. I'd hesitate to call it a history of anything; it assumes a rather large base of pre-existing knowledge about the people and events it describes. It is highly impressionistic, consistently preferring to create an atmosphere or ambience, to the point of adding small colorful details that I am certain are not recorded in his source materials - they seem to be invented or imagined - which are quite effective. In short, it is a highly filmic treatment of historic events and should be classed as counter-propaganda to the mythic glamor the Nazis so carefully sought to wrap around themselves, a glamor that still persists.

The one thing that bothered me in Vuillard's counter-propaganda exercise was the necessity he felt of striking a tone of contempt that never wavered for a moment. However much this contempt is well-merited by its objects, maintaining it so doggedly dehumanizes the subjects of the book, the author, and the reader - to the extent the reader participates in and approves of the author's tone.

That's the problem with propaganda. It can be artful, but it can never be humane. I guess if your targets are Nazis, their enablers and sympathizers, we aren't supposed to let this bother us.

I've read a bunch of Elizabeth Bowen this month. I finished Death of a Heart and started A World of Love (awful titles).

Ellen Wood, East Lynne

Alfred, please comment at some point about those Bowen novels; I've never ready any, though yammered though previous What Are You Readings about her Collected Stories.

I read Jennifer Clement's Widow Basquiat. I don't have a huge amount invested in Basquiat but this was certainly immersive and grungy. I hesitate to pathologise, but he came across as an abusive little boy. Good to know that Rene Ricard thought he had a nice penis.

I also read Andrew Hankinson's You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], which is an interior monologue based on source material written entirely in the second person [with occasional editorial interventions in parentheses]. It's brutal and certainly hits home but the narrative choice has its limitations [no Gazza, for a start]. Cautious recommend, on the whole.

I have started another quick read, The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. LeGuin. Already I can see that the movie Avatar not only stole most if its plot from this, Cameron's changes dumbed the script down quite a bit from the book.

I read “ Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner” by Karina Marçal - I thought I was picking up a book about feminist economics, which I suppose I was, but more so I was picking up a feminist book about economics and it’s deeply gendered world view. It will take a while for me to digest and it doesn’t claim to posit answers to all the questions it poses but it’s a very very good book, I think.

I also read “The future, un-imagine” which is a collaboration between Angela Gardner (poet) and Caren Florance (printer and book artist). I think Florance is a bit of a genius and I think this slim volume is brilliant but I couldn’t tell you how it works - just that I keep coming back to it and I like it more each time.

The year so far:

Josep Pla - The Gray Notebook
Violette Leduc - La Batarde
Violette Leduc - The Lady and the Little Fox Fur
Giorgio Vasari - The Lives of the Artists

The first was discussed in the ILB Notebooks thread, that and La Batarde were reads I began last year. The Lady and... is a concentrated blast of a piece of short prose, about an elederly loner who finds a fur coat, and its a great piece on the rhythms of a city (and to be Paris-specific there is a love for the Metro in its pages). Vasari's Lives.. is something I've had on my shelf for years and now finishing. The piece on Michelangelo is something else, maybe the only extended piece of pure adoration (about 70 pages) that totally comes off and is almost never boring. Its something to read a critical work -- 'lives' disguised as a fierce set of opinions on the history of art and sets out on what makes a painting good from a bad one -- without a lot of the -isms and theories that were to follow down the centuries = basically the word beautiful and good are seen at least once on every page. But its no less entertaining and great for that.

Returned slightly to Andy Beckett, PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE. I admire him but I increasingly wonder about the tendency for factitious parallels - 'As Botham led an unlikely revival on the cricket pitch, many wondered if Thatcher could do the same in the political arena'.

This is the kind of thing which when you experience it in real time clearly seems fake and irrelevant. 'As Klopp and Guardiola battled for the Premier League, many wondered if German or Catalan influence would prove most decisive in the Brexit endgame'.

But possibly I exaggerate - AB is basically a very good popular historian, and better than many others at avoiding slack repetition of standard narratives.

Blame ilx: "meet me in the bathroom." That scene passed me by completely but love reading the book.

'And My Head Exploded: Tales of desire, delirium and decadence from fin-de-siecle Prague': splendid title, fascinating, frequently overwrought collection
https://btmedia.whsmith.co.uk/pws/client/images/catalogue/products/9780/99/3446719/xlarge/9780993446719_1.jpg

The LeGuin book was just fine, very smart, not overwritten or unnecessarily protracted to epic length. The presence of the Vietnam War hangs very heavy upon this book.

Now I'm reading Stalingrad, Antony Beevor, wherein Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia become locked in a cage death match.

I read “Tokyo Ueno Station” by Yu Mira which was absolutely brilliant and bottomlessly sad. Something about it reminded me of Jean Rhys in a strange kind of matter-of-fact way.

THE LITTLE REVIEW 'ULYSSES' again.

I read “ Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner” by Karina Marçal - I thought I was picking up a book about feminist economics, which I suppose I was, but more so I was picking up a feminist book about economics and it’s deeply gendered world view. It will take a while for me to digest and it doesn’t claim to posit answers to all the questions it poses but it’s a very very good book, I think.

Yeah, I enjoyed that book quite a bit, and was also surprised that it didn't turn out to be what I'd expected. I like how it undercuts the logic of Economic Man at every turn, and it pops into my mind all the time now in everyday situations.

I finished The Purple Cloud - happy I read it but I do feel the need to get the bitter taste out of my mouth. A deranged, mean spirited book written by a clearly not at all well man. So E.M. Delafied and Consequences is my next port of call.

Your take on KM's book reminds me of Mary Wollstonecraft refuting Edmund Burke's contrast of nice British parliamentary gov/superior culture & morality to nasty French, esp. Revolution: she citing the long and twisting and often bloody road to nice (also seeing and raising Declaration of the Rights of Man w A Vindication of the Rights of Woman).

Kind of obvious, but I'm a fan.

over the weekend I finished my lazy reread of If on a winter's night a traveller…. In the past couple evenings, read Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts several years after everyone else. No less provocative, wise, and kind for the waiting.

I've been trying to get back into the swing of reading with a French translation of The Lord of the Rings, always the most immersive book for me. Maybe I will actually finish a book soon.

"The Chateau" by William Maxwell. After I bought it was was a bit concerned to to find I was being prompted to buy "Stoner" by John Williams on an "if you like that you'll like this" basis. But I needn't have worried: I've only read a quarter of it so far but whatever I think of it in the end I'm confident I'm not going to hate it as much as I did "Stoner".

Mars BY 1980 by David Stubbs.
Got back into this over the last few days. Just read the Joy Division and Depeche Mode bits.
THink I prefered Future Days by him.

Just finished Alex's Adventures in numberland which was quite enjoyable.

Also the Sylvain Sylvain memoir There's No Bones in Icecream which I'd recommend. I need to get around to reading a biography of the New York Dolls which this partially covers from an inside viewpoint.

Drinking Molotov Cocktails With Gandhi by Mark Boyle which I just started.

Thanks for the LeGuin rec, Aimless. I started The Word for World is Forest 10 minutes ago, a break from Frederick Brown's exemplary Flaubert bio, which doubles as a history of mid 19th century France (1848, Second Empire, the Commune).

Reading that I thought Frederic Brown had written a Flaubert bio, which would have been something.
https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1284316880l/439211.jpg

Lol.

THE CORRECTIONS.

oh I haven't mentioned Alter's Hebrew Bible itt yet. Still in Genesis, Abraham just circumcised his whole household. Bible's long.

I like 'The word for world is forest', but it's not one of her best books.

I'll finish it tonight.

Looking through the new translation of Bruno Schulz's stories - I think the rhythm is tight and he is more akin to Robert Walser in his tales that seem to be made up of plotless impressions that he keeps digging into until they give out and go sideways. Its interesting how he writes about a father figure and family; additonally the stories can veer into the fantastical sometimes -- stuff I am thinking more around as I am half-way through.

I finished If You Leave Me by Crystal Mae Kim
Beautifully written & would recommend but it’s not something you really “enjoy” as the story grows more and more deeply sad as you go on. It’s set in the 50’s through to the 60’s and feels like it was written in that time period, i was very impressed by the writing.

I got halfway through Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao & had to stop. Love her writing (like, seriously LOVE it) but the plot felt engineered for maximum horrors, like a choose your own adventure where every plot beat is more horrific than the last. It became suffocating, for me anyway.

I've got a Heinrich Böll novel to pöllisch off then I fully intend to read one of these because the fact that Irene Handl wrote them blows my mind:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/candied-with-a-coating-of-flies-1611301.html

History of medicine. Just started.

JUst read first coupoe fo chapters of Heads by Jesse Jarnow.
Probably should have read this by now. but only got it last month. Seems pretty compelling.
Covering a bunch of people exploring psychedelics. Jarnow started with Peter Stampfel of teh hOly Modal Rounders and has now introduced, Owsley Stanley, Jerry garcia, the Hog Farm and various others.
Have heard this is good and seems so so far.

The Likes of Us by Michael collins
calls itself a history of teh White working class which sounds like it could be iffy. BUt seems ok so far. Reasonably well written and I'm not detecting an overly right wing slant so far.

Beauty Junkies by Alex Kurczynski
25c book on the beauty industry which is my current bog book.

What Robert Walser should I start with? Didn't realize he was so prolific.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71ON0HChYFL._AC_UL320_SR196,320_.jpg

It somehow passed me by that Ways of Seeing by John Berger is not a bog standard philosophy of art text but an acme of cultural marxism that literally calls for the dismantling of capitalism. Highly recommend for those interested in the western art tradition and controversial opinions.

Berger is awesome!

classic!

I wrapped up Stalingrad, Antony Beevor, last night. Like most military history it was informative, but not very instructive for anyone who not a general. Viewed purely as a story, though, it has the fascination of pure horror. All told, the battle for Stalingrad is estimated to have produced at least 1.5 million casualties, with an exceptionally high percentage of those being fatal, due to the additional factors of starvation, lack of medical care and exposure to extreme cold. The book does a reasonable job of explaining what was a very complex and protracted campaign, viewed both at the ground level and at the highest level of Hitler, Stalin and their general staffs.

I am now reading Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor. It is rather more sedate.

Re Walser, Jakob van Gunten is also excellent starting point

And Berger really is good.

Hit return too early. berger really is good, and I had the same surprised reaction to Ways of Seeing as ledge... i assumed it would be a good but maybe slightly outdated MOR art book, but it had so much going on.

Like most military history it was informative, but not very instructive for anyone who not a general.

in that case i'd stay away from any mechanized warfare that involves attacking or defending mid-sized russian cities

I thought Stalingrad was really good! idk, maybe you're just not as into military history as you thought? you mentioned upthread you were hohum about Keegan too...

I keep looking at Ways of Seeing at the bookstore but I’m deeply put off by the typography

stay away from any mechanized warfare that involves attacking or defending mid-sized russian cities

mookieproof caught my meaning.

it's possible for a lay person to learn instructive ideas from political or social histories, but when a military history explains e.g why an offensive failed or which defensive tactics nullified which offensive tactics, this is informative in its way, but never useful to the lay person. it is purely the story of an event and must succeed or fail according to how intrinsically interesting the battle was. In the case of Stalingrad, the vastness of the suffering and struggle was epic and this book portrayed it rather well within the confines of 430 pages.

love Stalingrad. Beevor does a good job with the horror but I suspect out there is a massive and even more in-depth book regarding the battle. For now that one will do perfectly though, and always think of this when I see it on the shelf:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=65B2z_StdLE

I keep looking at Ways of Seeing at the bookstore but I’m deeply put off by the typography

I read three new or newish Dostoyevsky Wannabe titles:

overlove by Geraldine Snell is a diverting set of imaginary letters detailing a fan obsession with the sweaty drummer in some band.

Over In and Under by Emma Bolland is proper big E big L experimental literature, in which EB “translates” classic psychoanalytic texts from German (a language EB doesn’t know), using the look and the assumes sounds of the words to generate English. I suppose that makes the book like a Rorschach blot in language, the book is brief and good if you like the ideas in a text to kind of slowly emerge out of a blur of language rather than having anything like coherence.

We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner is better, I think, than “Gaudy Bauble” which got some favourable coverage last year. Again it’s a dreamy, malleable world (the lypard, which is a picture of a leopard on a leotard,turns out to be a dangerous beast with a life of its own) but this is a Real England world of the EDL and citizenship applications and exploited illegal labour, and there’s a big Stranger Things element. It’s set on the Isle of Wight.

Tim's reading impresses me and his books sound interesting.

Thanks for the advice on Walser, yall. Library has Vintage Classics trade pb Rings of Saturn: pix are pretty small, very gray---worth looking for another edition?

I think they're all like that

Re Walser, Jakob van Gunten is also excellent starting point

it's where i started! & having recently read it, will put in a word for the (mostly) middleton translated selected stories

currently nearing the end of m. duras' early novel the sea wall which works as both a family chronicle and blistering attack on colonial hypocrisy

Halfway through E.M. Delafield's Consequences. None of the comedy of the provincial lady in this one - the protagonist is miserable at home, miserable at school, miserable at balls, miserable when a man deigns to approach her. It's like Jane Austen minus the hope.

Has anyone read Wood's The Tribe? Very intrigued.

Daniel_Rf, you should read Delafield's 'Messalina of the Suburbs': it's a (very good) psychological crime novel, not at all what you might expect from writer of the Provincial Lady, but with a lot of the same clever observations.

I finished Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. It was a very precise book that convincingly embodies several very particular English character-types, of a particular generation, in a very English setting, bound to a very English set of manners and social mores, as deftly pinned down as fritillaries in a display box. Which is not to say she had no compassion for them; she did and it shows.

Taylor's portrayal of her elderly characters rang true as a bell, right down to the clichés and aphorisms in which they thought. On the other hand, her several youthful characters of circa 1970 London seemed less fully drawn and assured. Luckily they did not need to be more than what she made of them, and the success of the novel does not depend on them.

Percival Everett, ERASURE

I'm reading Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land. Someone once said to me, in a conversation about Ford's place in the 'old white bastards' pantheon, that Ford is the 'very essence of putdownable' and I do sort of get that. But I find him I think the word is comforting. There's something about the pace, the slow unfolding of his vision, the rigour of him. It fits perfectly with my fitful reading.

Bascombe is a shithouse; a version, like Rabbit, of Manifest Destiny incarnate. But I can't let him go. One thing I've noticed in this book, in particular, is Bascombe's weird lack of an unconscious and how his motivations are all surface. I can't decide if this is an aversion to depth psychology or that his unconscious is actually spread around him; that the visitations are character based, landscape based. There's Ralph, of course...

One thing that Ford does that bugs me: using the 'like the great poet said' line and quoting from Roethke or Randall Jarell and not giving any attribution. How does that work with copyright etc?

Percival Everett, ERASURE

This essay wonders how the American lit scene would've been different if John Williams and Yvor Winters had had their way:

The belated success of “Stoner,” then, prompts a cultural counterfactual. What if cool analysis and formalist precision had gained greater purchase at the time? The letter-perfect novel might have become something more than an apprentice exercise, more than a rite of passage for the American novelist in search of an authentic voice, and a different postwar canon of American fiction might have taken shape, elevating such titles as James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” Ann Petry’s “Country Place,” Thornton Wilder’s “The Ides of March,” Cynthia Ozick’s “Trust,” Richard Stern’s “Other Men’s Daughters,” J. F. Powers’s “Morte d’Urban,” Jean Stafford’s “The Mountain Lion,” William Maxwell’s “The Château,” Louis Auchincloss’s “The Rector of Justin,” Richard Yates’s “The Easter Parade,” and Evan S. Connell’s paired volumes “Mrs. Bridge” and “Mr. Bridge.” (Connell, who studied creative writing at Stanford, served on the divided 1973 National Book Award jury.) By the early two-thousands, people would have been writing essays bemoaning the unjust neglect of Norman Mailer, Bellow’s misunderstood mid-period, the overlooked postmodernism of Pynchon and Barth.

this is a much less boneheaded essay about williams than the one i read the other week

It did send me to the library to reserve Other Men’s Daughters. I've read most of the others mentioned. Big thumbs up to The Mountain Lion, The Rector of Justin, and The Easter Parade.

Rather than settle into a full-length book, I was noodling around last night in the Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. Her essay on Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex would not win her many plaudits among the bulk of ilxors, but was quite interesting nevertheless. Her critical essays touching authors less explicitly political seemed better grounded and nearer to her métier.

that NRYOB edition of Hardwick's essays has become favorite bedside (re)reading. She wrote well about Wharton, James, MLK, Jr. and two wonderful things called "Melville in Love" and "The Prose of Poets."

I really want to get to that.

It's really good, what I've managed to read of it, at least. Same with the short story collection.

Percival Everett, ERASURE

Everett is a great writer, but also the ultimate example of someone who does so many different things in different books that you can't pin him down. I think I've loved 75% of his stuff, been so-so on 15%, and absolutely mystified by 10%.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is really something. Halfway through. First hundred pages were tough, because the narrator – being interrogated – recounts a stream-of-consciousness saga of his past in hallucinatory, poetic prose, and delights in sharing his violent and weird sexual reminiscences. I think the violence/sex are intended to disorient the narrator's interrogator, but they also disorient the reader. The setting for the story is broadly African, so far left uncolonized, and the narrator gives few concrete details about the relationship between fantasy/magic, hyperbole, and sarcasm. It seems like every page has a paragraph I have to re-read to determine if it's intended literally, figuratively, or as a provocation to the interrogator. There are some really lovely bits of prose, such as a faux-naive (maybe) description of Christianity (maybe) a people who eat their god every seven days. It feels like a mad mash-up of Chip Delaney, Gabo, and Joseph Conrad.

I finished My Brilliant Friend. I was hoping it would be the kind of first book of a trilogy that can stand on its own as a novel, but instead it's the kind that's like the first third of a really long book. It feels like not much is resolved, and you can sense conflicts and themes being set up that will presumably drive the second book. It was a readable and enjoyable book, though in some ways I felt like it was missing something. For one thing, you don't get a very strong sense of place. It was hard for me to picture the neighborhood where the story takes place, and allusions to the larger social and historical backdrop are vague and slight. It also seems like there's some ambiguity in the narrator's perspective - whether its the perspective of Elena as the girl experiencing the events, or the perspective of Elena as a mature adult looking back. Mostly it's the first Elena, but then occasionally you feel the second Elena looking over the first Elena's shoulder. However, this tension kind of prevents either one from fully inhabiting the novel. I kind of miss a more fully realized authorial voice. But those are quibbles. I will probably continue the trilogy at some point.

Sorry, tetralogy not trilogy.

Quadrilogy! Except it’s really a single work imho.

VIBEOLOGY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib01_vWRpx0

It also seems like there's some ambiguity in the narrator's perspective - whether its the perspective of Elena as the girl experiencing the events, or the perspective of Elena as a mature adult looking back.

This was one of my favourite things about it.

James Redd: you're quite right, this is maybe the 3rd time I have read it. Quite a lot of my reading tends to be rereading.

James Morrison: that formal diversity is my impression of Everett, and in theory at least it sounds like something I respect a lot. 75% hit rate sounds good to me!

and allusions to the larger social and historical backdrop are vague and slight.

This is very much on purpose I think - nothing outside their neighbouhood really exists for these girls, and the recent past of their country is something the adults take pains to keep them ignorant of.

and that changes very much in the later books.

I'm now reading Washington, DC, the first-written of Gore Vidal's series of novels on American political history, this one set at the end of the 1930s. It's gossipy and slightly trashy - I think the term of art for this kind of thing used to be "juicy" - but Vidal knew his characters and his milieu well, and the political-insider content raises the level of the novel considerably.

Just finished NOCILLA DREAM, am very much on board for book 2

I'm now reading Washington, DC, the first-written of Gore Vidal's series of novels on American political history, this one set at the end of the 1930s. It's gossipy and slightly trashy - I think the term of art for this kind of thing used to be "juicy" - but Vidal knew his characters and his milieu well, and the political-insider content raises the level of the novel considerably.

― A is for (Aimless), T

If you have a yen for this sort of thing, Lincoln and Burr are legit great novels and just as fun.

In the series I've read: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Era (but not in that exact order). This one will round out the series for me.

I've also read Julian and Creation, each twice. I haven't yet read Myra Breckinridge, but somewhere along the line I did read Live From Golgotha. Also more than one of his essay collections. That about covers it for me and Mr. Vidal, so far.

You might also enjoy Henry Adams' novels, Democracy(1880) and Esther(1894, I think), giving us the DC lowdown and more!

First thought best thought (in this instance):
The World of Arthur Russell (reissued several times this decade)
Laurie Anderson: Life of a Dog, Landfall (w Kronos)
Allen Ginsberg: The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience
Guerilla Toss: Gay Disco, Smack The Brick
Death Grips: Government Plates
Jane Ira Bloom: Wild Lines: Improvising Emily Dickinson
David Murray Cuban Ensemble Plays Nat King Cole En Espaňol
Willie Nelson
Miranda Lambert
Pistol Annies
Jlin
Harriet Tubman

Also lots of other current artists, lots of comps, lots of reissues/prev. unreleases---oh yeah The Basement Tapes Complete (second thought also best thought)!

er. um.

(Aimless pulls his lips inward and looks at the ceiling)

David Foster Wallace: OBLIVION

haven't been on this thread in a while. finally fucking finished Crashed, I'll try and get round to posting something more extensive on it. For the moment: it was good, though the post-Crash socio-political implications section was not as strong as I'd hoped it would be, and in fact the whole book raised questions (which Tooze himself has raised) on the nature of writing of history about political economy during a crisis of legitimacy of same.

Now picked up Dan Davies' Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of our World. I don't know why I wanted to pick up another *money* book after Crashed but the manner here is much more relaxed but still highly knowledgable about his sphere and also enjoyable and in the footnotes enjoyable digressive - similar in many respects to his twitter presence.

Also Otaku: Japan's Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma, an application of theory to the social phenomenon of anime and manga fandom. I don't really give two hoots about anime and manga, other than having seen Tetsuo and bits of Akira. But the theoretical treatment of something of a patient zero for extremely online fandom and digital consumption generally is of great interest and I hear good things about it. So far it's good.

Also as posted on the writers diaries/notebooks thread, the Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

er lol that should read 'other than having seen Akira and bits of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The Big MIdweek Steve Hanley's memoir of his time in the Fall.
I've been meaning to read this for a couple of years. Then was in the local 2nd hand/remainder book shop when i was waiting for an event to start. So was sitting in the art section looking through some boolks and saw this sitting on a shelf in the to be shelved section. So got it pt aside, picked it up Wednesday. Now got several chapters in. THink he's just got back from touring the US for the 2nd time and his brother who was too young to get intyo clubs on the tour has replaced Karl Burns in the band again.
Very interesting.

Drinking Molotov Cocktails With Gandhi Mark Boyle
political tract about deep unfairness and violence underlying society. Quite interesting.

i have to say, i found the big midweek surprisingly irritating. i say that, because shanley was something of a hero growing up (i walked in behind him and craigness at my first fall gig and was *very* excited, daft sod). there's a sort of interest in hanley's band v smith thing, but i have to say, again surprisingly, i regularly came out on the side of smith. the beard growing thing is laughable and smith finds it rightly so. and the hanley's tacit sometimes explicit belief that the band did the good stuff and smith messed around with it (a dynamic that ultimately destroyed that spine of the group) hides a lot of potentially interesting insight around the small fraction of creative difference that is sometimes the most important.

i think there's one bit where he basically says 'smith used to have one on one sessions with us at his house where we worked on tracks' - he's referring to one scanlon had, and you're made glancingly aware of one of the channels of genius into the music, but that's pretty much the only time.

all that said, it's pretty much indispensable even if, shameless name-dropping here i'm afraid, brix did tell me at a bus stop in north london that hanley had had to cut a load of the more interesting stuff out.

xpost, sorry about that last post, meant for another board---but you might like those Henry Adams novels, Aimless!

Library of America has them in a sleek volume with Mont St. Michel and Chartres and something else I didn't read.

Reading Dick's Skull. More a short story. So it'll be finished tomorrow.

This essay wonders how the American lit scene would've been different if John Williams and Yvor Winters had had their way

I enjoyed this essay and I guess I'm fairly firmly in the Whitman imitative form camp, even if that does feel a bit like revealing a grubby secret. I've been thinking about Williams a bit and while it's clear he's practising an austere, detached (anti-Emersonian?) form, I wonder how the sections below function. These epiphanies appear in his books and often seem to be nexus points, around which the rest of the text arranges itself (I wonder if epiphany is the right word. There are more epiphany without insight or simple affective flares that shine briefly and die once more). Are they evidence of a kind of Emersonian unconscious?

Once, late after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness. The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicately and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything-the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars-seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself. With a curiously reluctant relief he again snapped on his desk lamp. He gathered a book and a few papers, went out of the office, walked through the darkened corridors and let himself out of the wide double doors at the back of Jesse Hall. He walked slowly home, aware of each footstep crunching with muffled loudness in the dry snow.

Think your speculations are on the right track---With a curiously reluctant relief Yes!

I started Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. Pretty readable so far. I guess it's kind of brave of her to write plainly about what it's like being around someone who's morbidly obese (and not always in a wholly sympathetic way). Can't decide whether or not it's in poor taste, but she's pretty good at making her characters come to life and move through the situations she's set up for them, even if some of the characterizations are a bit facile.

yeah chinaski that's very much my impression as well

Lionel Shriver is obsessed with the weight of her characters.

Just bought a beautiful Penguin Deluxe Edition of the Tale of Genji, hopefully it's gonna be my this year's obsession like the Story of the Stone was last year

I started The Power Broker a few days ago so I'll see y'all in a few months.

I finished People in the Room by Norah Lange last month, and thought it was astounding. An Argentinian avant-garde portrait of a fracturing mind.

Yeah it’s great isn’t it? It’s stayed in my head in the months since I read it, too.

Who I am reading now: this sounds like an interesting life...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2JBFBDVAAAmzJU.jpg

I’m reading Jane Eyre, guess what it’s good

SO good

great book

Have managed to get Archduke Eduard von Habsburg, great-great-grandson of Emperor Franz Joseph, to tell my wife on twitter to let me buy more Austro-Hungarian books.

Many Hungarian novels...

So little Hungarian time

There are still Archdukes?

I'm reading Jane Eyre too!

i'm not (it is good though)

i did read that Eleanor Oliphant book after a good review on Front Row. it has sold >1m copies but there's not a single mention of it on ilx. having finished it i am not really surprised. not much to recommend it.

40% of the way through Monte Cristo but am reading one volume a month and alternating it with other things.

I'm rereading Wuthering Heights!

(I read JE, WH and Agnes Grey in the same month, all great although WH was too long)

Back to Andy Beckett, PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE. Very readable yet so long that it's taking me ages.

A Voice Through A Cloud by Denton Welch, my first of his. All about the piping high gorgeousness of his prose. I kept thinking “English Thomas Wolfe” but god knows I haven’t read Wolfe these thirty years so the comparison is probably bollocksy.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Mosfegh, it’s good, maybe not as good as I’d been led to expect but that’s hardly the book’s fault. I thought I was going to read a kind of Miss Mundane gets into NYC scrapes, which I suppose I did, but the scrapes are much more sombre than the capers with gangsters I (for some reason) had imagined. Nominated for the Wellcome Prize as I understand it, presumably on the basis of it dealing with mental illness and addiction to prescription drugs?

Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis, super-brief and fantastically sharp piece on what capital does to us, mainly in terms of what capital does to our bodies. Our minds too, but critically our bodies. This nearly had me crying tears of rage on the 63 bus, I think it’s likely the best book I’ve read this year so far. It’s just so fucking fierce, just when you think it’s going to fail to be fierce.

The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading? (www)

The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading? (non-www)