2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?

Red Shift is the one that, to even understand what happens, you have to work out a letter written in code, isn't it?
Garner's retellings of English folktales is a very good and rich guide to his influences:
https://d1a37ygoufymvg.cloudfront.net/resized/width-298/path-assets/covers/v1/9780007445974.jpg

Am just partway through the frankly bonkers LOGBOOK, a novella by Geza Ottlik, about two retired navy officers living in a Maori-conquered Denmark where people are forced to walk on all fours, the sailors watching athletics on TV and complaining a lot. It's in a collection called HUNGARIAN QUARTET, 4 novellas by different writers, although the Peter Esterhazy entry is only 19p long, making it not a novella.

One thing I forgot to mention about The Owl Service was its epigraph, which along with a quote from an RS Thomas poem, and a traditional song, has this runic utterance:

Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.
Radio Times: 15 September 1965

Finally getting round to something that always seems to get mentioned: Diego Gambatta's Codes of the Underworld. It's extremely good and clear on the nature and mechanics of signalling, signs, and mimicry, and the specifics of how these apply in societies and environments characterised by a lack of trust and necessary concealment.

Although I've dipped into The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard, I don't think I've ever read all of its contents. I'm picking through it again, mainly for the medical and surgical stuff in there.

Got a flight to Sydney this evening, and another one back on Thursday, so I've loaded my kindle up with more easy reading – looking forward to Strandloper (it felt appropriate for this journey from Tim's description, and the first two Garners, which I remember reading as a child. Also Liquid by Mark Miodownik, which is apparently a treatise on liquids from the view of a transatlantic flight – so fuel, taste in the wines, the sea-water beneath, the effect of pressure on bodily liquid etc.

I've also got in my list of books to read City of Devils but I've no idea where I picked this up. I'm assuming it's this 'Shanghai Noir' by Paul French. I will give it a go.

the fantastic tales of fitz-james o'brien... irish writer of proto-sf/horror/orientalist fantasy & supernatural tales resident in america in the the mid-nineteenth century. somewhat derivative (most obviously poe, brockden brown, hoffmann) magazine fiction but entertaining nonetheless.

have now read, Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Liquid. Liquid, soft science, but a fun range around materials and their properties - i learned a lot to bore the next person i’m on a flight with. As mentioned author uses the frame of a transatlantic flight to talk about them - fine - and has this slightly weird, crepey persona to go along with it - obsesses about impression he’s making in other people on the flight, refers to relationship breakdown one too many times.

WoB is v much a children’s novel. i mean i know it is, but The Owl Service wasn’t really. Dwarves and elves etc. Also feels like a juvenile work (tho don’t know if it is). Got a sinister way about it despite. Embedded in the local pennine countryside. Enjoys painting the sinister and unpleasant. Also just *ends* immediately after mass spectral plane carnage.

Things Codes of the Underworld keeps reminding me of:
The excellent Korean Infernal Affairs trilogy
Late Philip K Dick ie A Scanner Darkly

they did these things v well.

this is quite nice on writing Warhammer 40000 fiction.

So From a View to a Death >>> Afternoon Men. The former's like Wodehouse with literary ambitions while not as scabrous as Waugh.

I read Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, which among other things seems to be about how men can't understand women's art, or, worse, doggedly refuse to.

I have been a terrible reader this past month, in that my mood has been almost intolerant of any books at all, but I have slowly pecked away at Under the Glacier and it is finally winning me over. I hasten to add that I blame myself, not the book, for my reticence. It's been a hell of a stressful month.

It is one of those weird books which do not conform to any of the accepted norms of novel-writing, but is more of a throwback to pure story-telling of a much older type. The characters do not conform to any reality outside the confines of the tale and the tale happily yokes together whatever incongruities suit the purpose of the teller. All such books are intensely personal and idiosyncratic to their authors and more or less uncategorizable. I'll try to say a bit more after I've finished it.

I read Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, which among other things seems to be about how men can't understand women's art, or, worse, doggedly refuse to.

I liked this book a lot. Did have trouble identifying with the protagonist's obsession - dude really doesn't seem very appealing - but maybe that's part of the point, the irrationality of passion?

The ending really twists the knife, too (SPOILERS):

After all of her obsessing about the dude, he doesn't even acknowledge her enough to write to her, just sends her a copy of what he wrote to the other man involved.

"The Age of Wonders" by Aharon Appelfeld, the best of his I've read I think. It's brilliant on the banality and powerful nonsense/senselessness of popular racism, and of the disorientation afterwards.

Also "Cassette 86", a Dostoyevsky Wannabe sampler which is a very enjoyable half hour but maybe not the place I'd advise people to start with DW.

Tim, have you read Appelfeld's "Badenheim 1939"? Really beautifully done book that somehow miraculously manages not to overplay the temporal irony card (as in what we the readers know about happens in 1939 and beyond)

Partway into Dave Hutchinson's "Europe at Dawn", the deeply enjoyable and clever 4th book in his Fractured Europe series about political shenanigans in a near-future Europe broken up into numerous micro-states.

oh i don’t think i realised there was a fourth. going on the list.

The Iran-Iraq War, Pierre Razoux

At the risk of being down on interesting indie publisher DW, I bought A Hypocritical Reader and was really disappointed. I would have been up for a more developed version of the choose your own adventure closed loop, but once that was done the actual content of the book was torture.

I finished Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE.

His most entertaining since CHRONIC CITY at the least. In some ways excellent, yet curiously inconclusive; maybe a lot of loose ends - more than in his earlier detective fiction.

James, I haven't read that one, sounds good. TAOW also deeply deft with 'temporal irony'; one of the ways I think he does it in TAOW is by having various ironies all at play - in the first half of TAOW the kid narrator half-gets what's going on in the adult relationships around him. In the second half of the book - the "after" it moves from the first person to the third and that that distance is reduced, maybe removed.

Brand - sorry you didn't like that one, I thought it was brilliant almost - though not quite - throughout. Of course it might be that I simply like that kind of torture.

David Stubbs mars By 1980
just read half of the Miles/Sun ra section and found it really clunky.
I thought the future Days book was quite good but not so up on this.

@Tim - maybe it's an academic background question, because stuff like the reference to Barthes on the blurb kind of convinced me that it was being written in some code I'm not inclined to crack. Writers writing about writers and the meaning of writing. The angel story is OK and the repetitive Victoriana was nice (too short?), but stuff like the hipster-bashing segment I'm not sure if it's just stale jokes or a heavy parody of anti-hipster comic novels which as far as I know don't even exist.

It's hard to keep up with what people are talking about but I see this -

https://dostoyevskywannabe.com/sampler/cassette_86

- that Tim mentioned: a compilation of work by this publisher's current writers?

I don't know the writers. Tim can tell us if Mario Kempes is the 1978 Mario Kempes.

According to a note in the back of the book, Mario Kempes is neither the footballer Mario Kempes nor Argentinian, nor even called Mario Kempes in real life.

Aside from the two people who run DW, I don't get the impression that they have "current writers" in the way I think you mean - the anthologies tend to contain a bit of work by people who have "full-length" (ie usually very short) books out on the press but much more by other like-minded souls. "Cassette 85" (which I haven't read) is the most recent of these anthologies. They're doing a "Cities" series collecting groups of writers based in various cities or suburbs, which I imagine will feature even fewer already-DW writers.

I am half-way through "A Slip of a Fish" by Amy Arnold, which I'm enjoying well enough in a "wonder if this would have been published if it weren't for the success of "A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing"" kind of way, which is not to say it's *like* AGIAHFT but it shares a dense interior voice narrative. Anyway I'm halfway through that but the Aharon Appelfeld hasn't quite let me go, I am still thinking about the narrator's father being the world number 1 Kafka fan and seeing him react to the world's bewildering viciousness by working harder, being more honest. Another of the ironies I was talking about, I suppose.

I realise that I have read two novels consecutively by authors with the initials AA. It wasn't deliberate.

Your next book:

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300102734/jazz-modernism

I finished Under the Glacier. Susan Sontag wrote an Introduction in which she called it "one of the funniest books ever written." I beg to differ. It doesn't even rate as one of the thousand funniest books ever written, imo. It was a playful book and it had a humorous streak to it, but it was not especially funny, in the sense that I wished to laugh out loud or even emit a quiet chuckle, as I often do when reading Wodehouse. Perhaps it is funnier in the original Icelandic, or Ms. Sontag has a far different sense of humor than I do.

What the book did do well was to create a timeless, mythic atmosphere, using just the everyday materials one might find laying about fifty years ago in Iceland. As myths go, it was not grim, as for example the myth of Prometheus, but rather was a myth addressing our humanness, not the travails of the gods and heroes. As for giving any better idea of what it was "about", that would require more analysis than the book can hold up under. Myths need to be swallowed and swigged, not nibbled and sipped.

finished "If the Sun Dies", man that's a classic. her deliberately repetitive style wears thin here and there but the subject matter and her eye for detail and emotional rollercoaster throughout is so well conveyed. I admit I kinda choked up when I got to the "every day is a war" thing cuz man ain't that the fuckin truth.

Just found a copy of If The Sun Dies - can't wait to dig into it.

i similarly have a copy from the LAPL here now, going to dig into it after i finish some others:

- a pair of Dan Epstein baseball books clemenza mentioned on ILBaseball

- The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth by Elizabeth Tasker

- If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb (occasionally amusing musings on the theories of why we've never encountered or found evidence of extraterrestrial life. The first solution in the book is "They are already here, and they are Hungarians"

I just read a John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, that offered that Hungarians/aliens thesis based on the experiences of people who worked on the Manhattan Project with seriously odd, seriously brilliant Magyars.

I'm reading Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet - an odd book so far, occasionally funny, somewhat interesting as a panorama of mid-19th century scientific doctrines.

I've started on The Sicilian Vespers, Steven Runciman. Medieval politics are like an overly complicated board game played by hundreds of petty aristocrats and scheming clergy, all throwing their own pairs of dice at once, but Runciman seems determined to explain all the moves, which seems both admirable and delusional.

Simon Garfield: In Miniature -- an interesting and entertaining look at the appeal of small versions of bigger things, but it really stints on the illustrations, which is a shame

Natalia Ginzburg - All Our Yesterdays. Her writing is so...flat (which is almost my only observation from all my time reading her, its a very hard to sensibility to expand upon), but here it feels even more like it - as events and how they impact a group of friends in Italy before, during and after WWII seem just like another slight drama. Its not exactly 'Italian'. I need to check some of her other novels and stories but in this early one there is one page of actual dialogue (a lot of he said, she said, he asked, etc.), which is her own voice sorta coming through (rather than an application of a formal experiment) although later she would distill things a bit more. Worth a read if you lke her already.

I'm still slowly making my way through Proust. Getting into the latter stages of Sodom. May take a break after that.

As what I hoped might be some light relief but turned out not to be, I read The Last Samurai. This seems to be an ILB favourite but I did not care for it.

I'm now reading Kudos, the last of Rachel Cusk's trilogy. I thought the first two were brilliant, particularly the second one. So far this one is a falling off.

Andre Breton's anthology of black humour.

I finished The Sicilian Vespers. The "vespers" themselves, an uprising against and a massacre of the French in Sicily, were mainly carried out over the space of a week, but the history roves all about the Mediterranean and covers the half century from 1250 CE to 1300 CE. What struck me most was how rapidly the cast of characters turned over due to their habit of dying soon after they showed up, even the youngsters in their twenties. The popes especially kicked off within a year or two of their ascension.

Now I really should move directly to reading Dante's Divine Comedy, while all this is moderately fresh in my mind, since large numbers of the people I've just read about show up in Dante, most of them in hell. Instead, I've picked up one of Alfred's perennial recommendations, A Time to Be Born, Dawn Powell.

I finished Bouvard and Pecuchet, at least as much as one can finish an unfinished novel. It's a very odd book, somewhat relentlessly one-note in some ways with masses of undigested information presented to the reader, but at the same time oddly charming. Somehow it also feels quite modern, with the bumbling main pair as antiheroes in the Pynchon/Vonnegut mode, though the book feels ultimately less cynical than Vonnegut at least. There's something genuinely admirable, almost superhuman really, about their boundless curiosity, drive, and idealism. It also works pretty well as a time capsule of the late 19th century.

Finally found a copy of Forgotten Armies by CA Bayly and Tim Harper, and so far it's pretty amazing. It's about WW2 from the perspective of South East Asia, and the way it ties everything into a story told from a different perspective completely changes the way you'll look at that war. There's a sequel, Forgotten Wars, which follows the wars of indepence in the region over the next decades, and apparently does the same to for instance the Vietnam War. Must read for anyone interested in global history and adjusting for eurocentrism.

That sounds interesting - thanks!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51d0kSa43hL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71HAgtzMKbL.jpg

These are both very, very good fictional approaches to what Fred B is talking about--the first about Indian soldiers in WW1, the second about a West African soldier in WW2.

I've started reading Helen C. Epstein's Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror. A readable, interesting narrative about a history (the modern history of Uganda) that I knew next to thing about going in. I'm also interleaving with bits from Maeve Brennan's The Long-Winded Lady.

Struggling a bit with that André Breton collection. He's good at introducing the authors, but the actual content...transgression for transgression's sake, as discussed on ILX elswhere recently? Different times, I know.

Surrealists are terrible at literature. I am not 22 anymore so not allowed to re-think this.

otm

Ballard took surrealism to extraordinary places, but I wouldn't call him a surrealist, per se.

No, not quite.

Breton's Nadja works, but it's short.

"Surrealists are terrible at literature" is one of those statement which, while wrong, is truthy enough to count as good challoping.

This is Breton selected but not Breton written, tho - no actual surrealists in the stories I've read so far. And as I said, his insights on the writers in question are sometimes interesting, the texts he chooses to highlight not so much.