2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?

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I like the Aeneid, even the very hilarious part in Hades where it goes full Augusts propaganda. I've never read either Homeric epic in a verse version, though.

Frederik B, Friday, 26 July 2019 11:35 (five years ago) link

x-post. Yeah, Heaney did book 6, it was very good.

Leaghaidh am brón an t-anam bochd (dowd), Friday, 26 July 2019 20:33 (five years ago) link

I've never really gotten into cortázar. have read rayuela and final del juego. think i like the short stories better but not enamored altogether

bookmarkflaglink (jim in vancouver), Friday, 26 July 2019 20:46 (five years ago) link

just remembering that there is a manic pixie dream girl in rayuela

bookmarkflaglink (jim in vancouver), Friday, 26 July 2019 20:58 (five years ago) link

Think Cortázar’s significant other -Carol? - was not an MPDG herself but he was aware of his predilection for such.

U or Astro-U? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 27 July 2019 00:53 (five years ago) link

Chapter 133 of HOPSCOTCH, where character Traveler reads a bizarre encyclopedia or future plan for society, seems to me quite well done, imaginative, executed with dedication. It feels a lot like Borges's famous 'Chinese encyclopedia' but developed at great length. The translation conveys Cortazar's interest in specific wordings.

the pinefox, Saturday, 27 July 2019 13:47 (five years ago) link

Hong Gildong was fun, kind of a Robin Hood tale where Robin also has wicked awesome magic powers. Could've done without the last third that just describes dude's life after he's become the ruler of an island realm, though.

Now it's on to At Dusk, Hwang Sok-yong.

Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 28 July 2019 15:23 (five years ago) link

Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies, his late sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. His powers aren't fully up to the task any more; it's mostly scenes of interrogation, and the end of the book comes too abruptly; but it's short, moves swiftly enough considering its elderly cast, and rounds out the earlier stories with portraits of Smiley and company before and after the events of those novels. His usual tone of disgruntled melancholy feels well-earned here.

Brad C., Sunday, 28 July 2019 15:46 (five years ago) link

I checked out a copy of Basque History of the World from the library and started to give it a whirl two nights ago. I will bring it with me on the weeklong camping trip I'll soon be leaving for, but I am not certain my interest in the plucky Basques drives down quite that deep. I'll bring several other fallback choices, too.

A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 28 July 2019 17:34 (five years ago) link

I read The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom. It's a novelistic companion piece to his Staring at the Sun book about his therapeutic explorations of how we deal with death and how best to live our lives. Yalom basically asks the question 'what if I could have Schopenhauer in one of my therapy groups?' and goes from there. It's clunky and Yalom isn't really a novelist but it's affecting and finds new ways of thinking about grumpy old Arthur.

Now reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I loved the wildness of Housekeeping very much; this is much more measured but it's got its hooks into me and is a good companion to the Yalom.

Good cop, Babcock (Chinaski), Sunday, 28 July 2019 17:49 (five years ago) link

I hadn't recalled the MPDG element in HOPSCOTCH but rereading chapter 1, it's true - like an ur-text of the idea.

I finished the novel at midnight. As far as I can tell, the last two chapters are left bouncing back and forth infinitely. I didn't like the ending. I didn't really like the beginning or the middle either. But the earlier parts held more life and promise.

the pinefox, Monday, 29 July 2019 07:32 (five years ago) link

Meanwhile Paul Mason attacks Object Oriented Ontology, Bruno Latour, Rawlsian ethics, Utilitarianism, Althusser, Bergson and post-humanism, while saying he'd like to march under a banner with a randomly generated snowflake.

One of the most bonkers, scattergun books I've ever read - curiously similar in certain ways to Wyndham Lewis's hilarious epic polemic TIME & WESTERN MAN, which makes a very similar anti-vitalist, pro-stability case; something that PM doesn't seem to have considered, as that book (being by Lewis) is generally associated with the political Right.

Yet for all its theoretical daftness, I probably agree with most of PM's ultimate political conclusions.

the pinefox, Monday, 29 July 2019 07:36 (five years ago) link

I seem to be making a habit of reading recent booker winners. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) was everything the reviews said - daring, inventive, weird, compassionate, human - but also strangely slight; despite being 200+ pages it read like a short story. Milkman (2018) was more fulfilling.

The Pingularity (ledge), Tuesday, 30 July 2019 10:57 (five years ago) link

Milkman was a thrill, deeply touching and hopeful

president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Tuesday, 30 July 2019 15:44 (five years ago) link

Olsson, The Weil Conjectures

The author's life as seen through the prism of the famous Weil siblings. Subjectivity index: 700 millianaïses.

Who will stand up for 62: A Model Kit?

alimosina, Tuesday, 30 July 2019 17:15 (five years ago) link

Is The Weil Conjectures good? Can't tell from your description.

curiously similar in certain ways to Wyndham Lewis's hilarious epic polemic TIME & WESTERN MAN, which makes a very similar anti-vitalist, pro-stability case; something that PM doesn't seem to have considered, as that book (being by Lewis) is generally associated with the political Right.


it is hilarious. it’s also fascinating as a sort of “fork-in-the-road” book - anti-bergsonian flux, anti sensational and emotive interpretation, an underpinning of catholicism, and focused on stability, as you say.

as if Lewis has furiously stuck a stick in the ground and said this is the correct way and is furiously watching the entirety of history and its people wander off down the other path.

Fizzles, Wednesday, 31 July 2019 06:53 (five years ago) link

but i should add v entertaining and enjoyable. and stimulating.

Fizzles, Wednesday, 31 July 2019 06:54 (five years ago) link

Is The Weil Conjectures good? Can't tell from your description.

The author had a brief fascination with mathematics in college before becoming a fiction writer and mother. She also had a certain fascination with Simone Weil as the representative of an ideal, as some young women used to. The book is partly a reflection on her past self and partly an impressionistic collection of biographical anecdotes about the Weils (in the present tense, with no quotation marks, as separated chunks of text). Simone was an iconic figure of the postwar era, now less well known (in the author's judgment). Andre was a giant of 20th century mathematics and unknown outside it. The author's consciousness is not enough of a binding agent to hold the book together, but she is able to consider the two Weils proportionately, which other writers do not. The book is short and vindicated more by its plain historical matter than by its thick subjectivity.

alimosina, Wednesday, 31 July 2019 17:59 (five years ago) link

So is that a measured thumbs up, alimosina? Because that book seems sort of in my wheelhouse, although I am somewhat skeptical of some of the positive reviews I may have just read.

U or Astro-U? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 31 July 2019 18:07 (five years ago) link

being sceptical of positive reviews is such a great pleasure and a useful heuristic. *this person likes it but in a way that suggests i will not*

Fizzles, Wednesday, 31 July 2019 18:46 (five years ago) link

I didn't regret reading the book. The author's efforts to understand her younger self were not arresting, but her distillation of both of the intransigent Weils' lives into a series of luminous details was worth the time.

alimosina, Wednesday, 31 July 2019 19:01 (five years ago) link

Thanks. I was thinking if you really liked it a lot you would have posted about it on the other thread.

Am I the only one who really likes that poem about Simone Weil by Thai Sweet Chilli SensationsRowan Williams?

U or Astro-U? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 31 July 2019 21:38 (five years ago) link

Thanks, alimosina. i might give it a go. Interested in both the Weils (and know bugger-all about Andre Weil)

Also there's Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up!

U or Astro-U? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 1 August 2019 00:37 (five years ago) link

You do?

alimosina, Thursday, 1 August 2019 00:52 (five years ago) link

Ha, thanks. I sat in on a course with Karen Uhlenbeck for a little bit once. Did we discuss recent Freeman Dyson book on the other thread already?

U or Astro-U? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 1 August 2019 00:57 (five years ago) link

Finishing At Dusk. It strikes me that the protagonists - the millenial with vague artistic aspirations working herself to death in dead-end jobs and the boomer architect pining for the sense of community he felt during his youth in the slums, slowly realising how complicit he's been in gentrifying away that community - could be from pretty much anywhere in the "developed" world. It's strong, heartbreaking stuff, very much recommended. Kenzaburo Oe is a fan.

I got this selection of New Voices Korea texts that I saw an ad for in the LRB. Slim little volumes. Hopefully some of them will be less devastating than this Hwang Sok-yong, but I'm not holding my breath.

Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 1 August 2019 15:16 (five years ago) link

I also am reading MILKMAN (though still haven't finished CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE).

the pinefox, Thursday, 1 August 2019 20:21 (five years ago) link

Summer has been mostly bad not good - just not enough time to read shit.

I finished the first part (of four) of Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries and right now its tone is kinda unlike much I've seen in German Literature (or anywhere else). There are snatches of warmth for people and life -- despite what it brings -- which I am still grappling in this story (each chapter is a day in 1968) of what is at heart a conversation between mother and young daughter, where the former recounts her young years in Nazi Germany to the latter, growing up in New York in the shadow of the ongoing war in Vietnam. I have a lukewarm liking for it, and I want to spend all my time wrestling with it except I am busy till the end of the month. So in the meantime I am finishing Abdellatif Laabi's Bottom of the Jar, an account of a childhood in Morocco with a few poetic turns that aren't quite landing and also aren't enough for you to turn away from either. Finally Wolfgang Hilbig's novella The Tidings of the Trees which is of course great, the guy's sentences are great. When you like you like.

xyzzzz__, Thursday, 1 August 2019 20:33 (five years ago) link

I finished Dorothy MacArdle's The Unforeseen, which I had purchased in the Forgotten Books reprint edition, which is basically just a facsimile of the original first edition in a generic green paperback cover. A good print job and nice quality trade paperback binding though. It was an interesting and slightly odd book, because it deals with spooky occurrences (mainly prevision) as a realistic possibility. I don't know if Macardle herself took them seriously as a possibility, but the book does. It reminded me of Gustav Meyrink's The Golem in that way, though that's an even weirder book. Apart from that, the book is a well-written Gothic thriller/romance set mainly in the hills of Ireland just outside Dublin between the World Wars, and the main characters are educated upper-middle class people, though some of the interesting parts of the book also deal with itinerant tinkers who camp out on their property for a time, in a practice which seems unique to Ireland (not sure if it still occurs).

Now I'm reading Svetlana Alexievich's Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of WWII. It was written in Russian in 1985 but apparently has just been translated into English. It's quite powerful stuff, hard to read at times, mostly stories of atrocities witnessed by children at first hand, but with judicious editing that makes them flow almost like fairy tales, I guess like the old bloody fairy tales of pre-modern times, with the German soldiers taking the role of the evil trolls or goblins. I was reminded a bit of The Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel. Hard to put down.

o. nate, Monday, 5 August 2019 01:24 (five years ago) link

Milkman just freaked me out by mentioning Playboy of the Western World, when Synge was an answer in the Times crossword today. So I guess I’m reading that next.

Leaghaidh am brón an t-anam bochd (dowd), Monday, 5 August 2019 10:31 (five years ago) link

Reading the Playboy next? It'll only take you a couple of hours.

I don't think I have yet reached the MILKMAN reference to it. Something to look forward to.

I finished CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE around midnight. I didn't even expect it to end - I turned the page and I was on the last page. Paul Mason winds up talking about writing on Bondi Beach, somewhat losing his thread, not for the first time.

A curious book - is it really a whole book at all? A compendium of articles and talks posing as a unitary book? His last section offers a series of 'reflexes' for radicals today. One is 'never give in', but the substance is mainly about secessionist movements and why they scare neoliberalism. The next is called 'Live the anti-fascist life', but his main example of doing this is a soldier friend of George Orwell's who literally went out and shot lots of people. Fascinating and moving account, but not an obvious practical model for people today.

It's something of a mess, a scrapbook, a spontaneous farrago. Yet (I will say one last time) when it comes down to it, I agree almost entirely with every basic political message and conclusion it has to offer.

the pinefox, Monday, 5 August 2019 14:02 (five years ago) link

moving on to Jenny O'Dell's "How to Do Nothing" and "Black Elk Speaks", plus this Kate Wilhelm short story collections that has one of the most atrocious 80s covers ever
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fbooks%2F1287017096i%2F890465._UY630_SR1200%2C630_.jpg&f=1

Some of it is great some of it is trite, but it's always well-written, she is a great prose stylist. Never thought I would be praising short fiction originally published in Redbook but here we are.

Οὖτις, Monday, 5 August 2019 16:22 (five years ago) link

I spent last week camping and hiking, but also managed to read several short books.

The first was The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, a strange little novella by Thomas Mann. It was not apparent from the edition I read how much of this "legend" was invented or reworked by Mann, but it was pretty clearly based on a pre-existing story. To give a hint at its strangeness, it revolves around two friends who decapitate themselves, and with the aid of a goddess are revitalized, but with their bodies attached to one another's heads.

Next, I read Not to Disturb, Muriel Spark, another novella, from the early 1970s. It felt like the treatment for a film script, very compact in its descriptions and dialogue and very dramatic in its premise, but ultimately it felt insufficiently human, in ways that her earlier books never do, and its satire was a bit too forced to seem realistic, but neither was it quite farcical enough to float blissfully free of reality. Still, not a bad book, just far from her best.

Lastly, I read Maigret Has Scruples, Georges Simenon. As with many of the Maigret novels, the real excellence of it is not in the imaginary crime or its solution, but in the creation of a wholly comfortable and fully inhabited world with apparently minimal effort on the part of author or reader.

I shall now return to The Basque History of the World and finish it.

A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, 7 August 2019 18:01 (five years ago) link

Finished MILKMAN. In the end I felt it was about as good as people say. Something of a black comic masterpiece.

the pinefox, Thursday, 8 August 2019 12:23 (five years ago) link

Just read "When You Reach Me", a Newberry-winning kids book from 2009, after Jia Tolentino mentioned in the NYT By The Book section. It's terrific, easy to read in <3hrs, and would def recommend if you liked "Holes"

Also just finished "The Beginning of Spring" on my Penelope Fitzgerald sprint which is amazing as usual, without being anything like one of her other books, as usual.

Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, 8 August 2019 23:29 (five years ago) link

That’s the Russian one?

Another Fule Clickin’ In Your POLL (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 8 August 2019 23:31 (five years ago) link

with the poor bear :(

The bear scene is amazing

Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 9 August 2019 04:20 (five years ago) link

I'm reading another British miniaturist: Elizabeth Taylor. I finished A View of the Harbour, have started A Wreath of Roses.

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 9 August 2019 11:47 (five years ago) link

Taylor is fabulous. I think A View of the Harbour is the best of those I've read but can recommend Angel, too. Miniaturist is a good way to describe her, albeit the inner landscapes of the lives she portrays are vast. I have A Wreath of Roses somewhere.

Good cop, Babcock (Chinaski), Friday, 9 August 2019 13:27 (five years ago) link

I read John Higgs's Watling Street. It's a bit of a mess to be honest. It wants to be a Bryson-esque travelogue, with some more immersive almost Iain Sinclair like meditations on place (another interview with Alan Moore, about Northampton!) but doesn't commit to either. It's full of historical and cultural generalisations that made my teeth itch and it's got a Brexit framing narrative that hasn't been properly considered and consequently feels tacked on.

And I'm getting old and tetchy but what happened to editors? At a macro-level, this could have done with some architectural work and at a micro-level, there are some weird decisions with bits of text that read like placeholders that someone simply forgot to take out.

Good cop, Babcock (Chinaski), Friday, 9 August 2019 13:32 (five years ago) link

My wife just recently read When You Reach Me to our son, and she said that I would probably like it.

o. nate, Friday, 9 August 2019 14:25 (five years ago) link

It’s excellent – minituarism for kids, even! And a pretty good all-ages read

Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 9 August 2019 14:34 (five years ago) link

I would strongly recommend reading as little as possible about it first, though

Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 9 August 2019 14:35 (five years ago) link

I would like to read it at some point. I think they took it back to the library. I finished Alexievich's Last Witnesses and am now reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk.

o. nate, Sunday, 11 August 2019 02:05 (five years ago) link

I'm reading another British miniaturist: Elizabeth Taylor. I finished /A View of the Harbour/, have started /A Wreath of Roses/.


A Wreath of Roses has one of my very favourite openings to a book.

Fizzles, Sunday, 11 August 2019 06:47 (five years ago) link

I just finished it -- doesn't come together, or at least the ending doesn't play.

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 11 August 2019 11:06 (five years ago) link


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