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

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