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

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.