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

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.