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

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:
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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
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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).