Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019/2020 reading thread

The book does gently contextualise the Christian elements of Christmas and place them in deep(er) time but it still has an implicit religiosity about it, I think. Which isn't a criticism at all.

The series overall is more explicitly pagan, but as you say, Cooper reads much more like two-way syncretism than, say, Phillip Pullman or C.S. Lewis. Midwinter is fixed and eternal and belongs to everyone, and Christmas has been hung off of it. But if the rector says God is what is fixed and eternal, the Old Ones won't press the issue (although they will wipe your memory of the conversation).

Seconding the STILLICIDE love, really well done

Finished The Doomed City. Five stars, god tier, would buy from this seller again. I don't often say this kind of stuff, because I think in 2020 genre entertainment complaining about not being taken seriously is not a good look, but this truly is a book whose standing I think would be much higher if it wasn't seen as a science fiction novel.

Now rereading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold for a book club.

I just finished “The Plotters,” by Un-Su Kim. It’s a contemporary thriller set in Seoul, and follows an assassin-for-hire, as he discovers he has a conscience. Reviews described it as darkly hilarious, but it wasn’t especially. Just prone to occasional wry asides? One of the blurbs on the back cover describe it as “Tarantino meets Camus,” which isn’t totally inapt. I think that maybe I don’t like contemporary thrillers

Finished /The Doomed City/. Five stars, god tier, would buy from this seller again. I don't often say this kind of stuff, because I think in 2020 genre entertainment complaining about not being taken seriously is not a good look, but this truly is a book whose standing I think would be much higher if it wasn't seen as a science fiction novel.

just read TS Eliot’s review of Monstre Gai and was amused by the parenthesis here:

As for his own philosophy (and theology - for i can’t accept his affirmation of the stupidity of Angels) he does make me think.

I'm reading the cheerful, romping The Painted Bird for the first in anticipation of the film.

the doomed city is so strange and powerful. it has correspondences with monstre gai by wyndham lewis i think - and the magnetic city of which the characters are denizens. but it’s also substantially different and rich in different ways - the social observations, the work that takes place in the city, the uncertainty of its metaphysical or indeed political status. i’m not sure i fully appreciated it at the time but it’s a book that’s really stayed with me and i’m going to return to it i think.

Will have to check out that Wyndham Lewis! It made me think of Kafka, Bulgakov and (in more genre fic terms) China Mieville. Was also reminded of Alfred Kubin's sole novel, which is very similar in that it is about an artificially constructed city that ppl volunteer to join and then all sorts of chaos breaks loose, but Kubin's vision feels shallow in comparison, flippantly nihilistic and only really interested in seeing people suffer. The Strugatskys put their characters through terrible stuff too but they clearly care about why humans are the way they are and how, perhaps, they could become better.

One thing the additional material in my edition of the book clarified for me is that while for much of the novel I had taken the protagonist to be a scathing portrait of what they hated about the country they were living in - the stalinist fanatic who becomes corrupt, bourgeois and elitist as he moves up the ranks - he is also a portrait of the authors themselves as they grew slowly disenchanted with the Great Experiment. So while it's easy to hate Andrei the narrative in many ways is him slowly shedding the certainties of youth, and the ending allows for the possibility that once those are gone he could possibly start over and do better.

First two books of 2020:
Magda Szabo - The Door (1987)
Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall (2018)

After a month of emotionless depression it's nice to know that I can still cry, as these both made me do. "The Door" highly recommended.

Lydia Davis' Essays One. I've never read any of her stories before, but I loved this. Plenty of exceptional essays about writers and writing, delving into the detail about what makes certain writing effective. The only ones that left me a little cold were the ones about visual artists, but that is probably more to do with my own lack of knowledge and interest in that particular area. One of those essay collections that has made me want to read everything from her, every writer she writes about, and also gave me more confidence in writing myself.

Also just finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which immediately goes on to my list of all-time favourites. I'd previously read Housekeeping which I thought was just OK, and an essay collection of hers which I liked but don't have a particularly strong memory of, besides her Calvinism. I'm a sucker for novels that are bold enough to spend their entire length basically just exploring what it is to live a good life and be a good person, and how one might handle the trials that life will throw your way. There was also something profoundly hopeful in this novel that I needed in my life right now, as I feel increasing anxiety about the way the world is going. Its constant recognition of the small beauties in every day life, the value it places on a small but dignified life, the constant wonder at the fact that we even exist at all, the inevitability of all things passing...it's easy to wallow in dread, but this pulled me out of it, at least for a little while.

I own three Robinson essay collections, and she struck me as ideal airport reading: I remember little about her essays except a carapace of erudition. Two exceptions: her Moses piece and one about Calvin, whom she thinks we've mistakenly dismissed as a, well, Calvinist.

This may well have been written already but a study of, say, Updike and Robinson and how different writers explore/wear their Calvinism would be interesting. As someone who pretty aggressively renounced Calvinism, Robert Louis Stevenson would be an interesting counterpoint.

Or Anne Brontë,

YOU may rejoice to think yourselves secure;
You may be grateful for the gift divine–
That grace unsought, which made your black hearts pure,
And fits your earth-born souls in Heaven to shine.

But, is it sweet to look around, and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness
Which they deserved, at least, as much as you,–
Their faults not greater, nor their virtues less?

...

That even the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies;
And, when their dreadful doom is past,
To life and light arise.

Robinson tried saving Calvinism from the dustbin, actually.

I don't know if it's been anthologized yet, but Robinson's piece last year about the Puritans was quite interesting to me:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/which-way-city-hill/

I recently finished Barack Obama's book Dreams from my Father, which I enjoyed. I'd heard it was actually a "good book" and not just in the "good book for a politician" sort of way. It was actually written well before he first ran for office. Of course it's more interesting to read it now, knowing what happened later, but I do think I would have enjoyed it even if it was written by someone less famous. It deals with a lot of potentially controversial topics about race and identity in a way that manages to be both frank and disarming. To oversimplify a bit, a major theme is how does a young man learn to be a black man in America, who has grown up attending a predominantly white, upper-middle-class school in Hawaii, without a black role model at home. Other themes deal with what it's like growing up with an absent father, a young man's education in political organizing, and some intriguing though brief glimpses of Indonesia and Kenya.

Now I'm reading The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen.

i never got around to dreams from my father -- it did sound interesting. i've actually held off on reading any of the obama bios that have come out because i wanted to get to that one first.

first book of the year for me is jill by philip larkin. it's a nice read so far -- his prose reminds me a lot of his poetry, brisk and filled with rather melancholy observations.

abanana - that's an intense start to 2020! I really liked both of those - I've seen criticism that Ghost Wall wimps out at the end, but I'm sort of glad it does. The Door resonated weirdly with an experience I had years ago in an old job, and really hit me hard.

I am bogged down in NORTHANGER ABBEY - need to crack on for a few hours and get it over with.

I've started the year with a bunch of poetry collections:

Christopher Marlowe - The Complete Poems and Translations
Omar Khayyam - The Rubayat
Alexander Pope - Selected
Osip Mandelstam - Selected
Anne Carson - If not, Winter
Fernando Pessoa - Poems in English

The Carson is its own thing, I think, a terrific collection of fragments - surely one of the great achievements in translation in the last 20 years. There is an alchemy at work here. Pope's Selected and Marlowe really bring it, especially with translations (of Homer and Lucan respectively, although I also loved Pope's own poetry which has quite a range from his Eloise to Abelard to Essay on Criticism, lots of learning on display). Mandelstam is my thing, always, no matter who translates it - and David McDuff's selection from his career is good curation. The whole thing has a flow, he makes Mandelstam over again and again, you just drink it in. Khayyam's poetry/games/philosophy is funny and, must be said, one for the wine drinker. Pessoa's poems originally written in English aren't that good (how does he order words holds its own fascination) however I like seeing how everything that he has ever written about comes out in this weird form.

Moving along in Bros K in very short fits so far, an odd and intimidating and disorienting book.

One of the few grad school papers I can still read was a study of jingoism and country houses framed by Pope's Essay to Dr. Arbuthnot

first book of the year for me is jill by philip larkin. it's a nice read so far -- his prose reminds me a lot of his poetry, brisk and filled with rather melancholy observations.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

Larkin is such a sharp novelist! Seek A Girl in Winter.

Essay = Epistle

I am bogged down in NORTHANGER ABBEY

I just read it over the weekend! Did you make it to book two yet? I get sidetracked so much reading Austen because I look up a lot of words and then spin off into linguistic reveries. I was so happy to see her refer to someone's address as a "direction" in Northanger Abbey, for example.

Cognate to the Spanish “dirección” = address!

that's why I was delighted! the Spanish always seemed like such an exotic word to me, but... no!

THe Mike Heron memoir You Know What You Could Be: Tuning into the 1960s
which was part of the 2 for £5 deal in FOPP.
He's just got as far as meeting Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson who were playing the folk club he's appearing at. He started off asa rock'n'roller but there was no platform for anybody doing original material in that area at the time.
INteresting so far so looking forward to reading the rest of this.

The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs Tristan Gooley
just coming to the end of this, not sure how much of it I'll retain next time I walk through nature.
BUt some interesting observations that it would be good to learn.

Keith Morris My Damage
turned up in the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop so I grabbed it.
Got as far as him getting bored with Black Flag, leaving forming the Circle jerks and releasing Group Sex.
Also being housemate with jeffrey lee pierce and him leaving cos he's in love with Texacala.
Enjoying this too, knew little about him beyond him being in Black Flag and teh Circle Jerks whose material I don't know very well. Then being in a few bands later on that I know the names of but am not sure I've heard.

One of the many good things about Northanger Abbey is Isabella's overuse of 'amazingly', which I'm tempted to appropriate now and then.

"I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly"

finished The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By enjoyed it a lot mostly because it was so funny which was not what i was expecting given that the blurb was about how this was Simenon's attempt at a big serious novel instead of another Maigret, but i found Kees Popinga hilarious.

started Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad which i had avoided up until now 'cos i hated the title, but i really like it so far.

Finished NORTHANGER ABBEY yesterday.

As a text it has historical interest - lots of variant spellings; 'surprise' is usually (or always?) spelled 'surprize'; it uses words in ways we wouldn't, as has been noticed above. A very odd feature to modern eyes: it uses quotation marks around 3rd-person descriptions of speech, rather than just around the words characters say. You can, I would think, see fictional technique still being improvised here.

At times I found the story tiresome, too fixated on trivia (is it respectable for a man and a woman to ride in the same carriage? :O). On the other hand the obsession with money, legacies, dowries etc becomes really hard-headed by the end, sort of superseding the claims of romance.

I like the Bath material because I like Bath. And I think there is some really sharp social observation, comedy and satire. Isabella the greatest creation here - her 'amazingly', cited above, is prescient, as she seems to me a very modern, current figure, one who enthuses to X about how much she loves them, then neglects them; the kind of person who would now comment on every friend's social media post 'OMG love you you are AMAZING'. Austen really gets at something here. I thought Isabella might be redeemed by the end, but no.

Then there is the Gothic element, and the metafictional element, together. This is very strong - a novel partially predicated on a commentary on an extant genre and examples of it, playing off the protagonist's reading of these texts and how they affect her expectations (such preposterous scenes in the abbey where she keeps thinking that spooky things are happening!), and also often addressing the reader with talk of what we expect of a heroine. This whole aspect is cranked up really heavily in the last chapter or so, where the narrator refers to herself in the 1st person a lot. It's almost as metafictional a novel as I've read outside AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, and perhaps confirms the suspicion that C20 sorts of fictional self-consciousness are in a tradition with this earlier form of it.

Lots of interest, but I think it's a book to read quite fast, not get stuck on as I did.

I wanted to move on to Jennifer Egan's THE KEEP because I hear it's also a Gothic parody. But I don't have it so I've started on another Egan: LOOK AT ME (2001). I'm impressed so far.

A very odd feature to modern eyes: it uses quotation marks around 3rd-person descriptions of speech

If you go back another couple of hundred years you begin to see all kinds of bespoke approaches to handling dialog in text - reading contemporary transcripts of witch trials from the 17th century (which is going about as far back from Austen's time as Austen is to us) they would enclose speech in quotes but also switch all the pronouns to third person, which really throws you until you get used to it (not to mention the free-form spelling, where people aren't even troubled to spell a word the same way consistently within a single text).

Austen uses uncontracted forms of tag questions in a way modern English speakers don't ("this attic is amazingly gloomy, is not it?" vs "isn't it?" or "is it not?"). But what I wonder is if Austen is employing them in a marked way or not... was that just the usual form tag questions took in conversation during her time, or was she employing those uncontracted forms as an affect for the purposes of characterization (the way we might have a character today say "it's hot out today, is it not?" vs "isn't it?")?

I finished Iceland's Bell last night, making it the first book I've read in 2020. At this pace I'll read (quickly calculates on fingers) about half as many books as I read in 2019. Part of the difficulty I had getting through this one was not the book's fault. I've been disinterested in reading most evenings and diverting myself with crosswords often as not. But some of the problem was with the book.

It lacked fully developed characters or any true center to the plot, but instead was a historical novel that relied for much of its interest from a desultory overview of the history of Iceland, circa 1680 - 1710 AD. No doubt this period and place in history holds more fascination for Icelanders than for non-Icelanders like me. Laxness did the best he could; he was a very talented author. I just wasn't his ideal audience.

i've tried to read 'independent people' several times and never gotten very far

My reading pace has been slow this year so far, on account of having a miserable cold and mostly being too tired or miserable to read.

I've finally gotten around to Chronicles, having had it for the best part of 15 years. I like it, broadly, but I'm a little underwhelmed overall. He's great company and the early stages are magical but there's something about his aphoristic style that starts to wear thin in the Oh Mercy section. I'll stick with it.

I also thought the "Oh Mercy" section was the weakest. I still liked it overall.

Great points F. Hazel about how diverse the conventions of English writing were, the further you go back.

It all makes me wonder when it was that things finally became more codified - I suspect around the late 19th century - which ironically is also the same time that we tend to think of a new wave of literary rule-breaking starting. In other words maybe 'modernism' only appears iconoclastic because language had finally just been settled.

Reading Five Children and It, which from the get-go left A Wrinkle In Time far behind, with Nesbit's super-concentrated, occasionally feverish, empathetic, yet firm, young-auntie voice vs. L'Engle's slobbery Granny Jesus kisses (although I'm told that some of hers, incl. in this same series, are a lot better).
Looking toward my first Sebald---ILB seems to favor Austerlitz over Saturn's Rings, amIright? Those are the ones at hand.

ILB seems to favor Austerlitz over Saturn's Rings, amIright?

Poll it? (NB: I've read neither - thought I own one of them - and would not be able to vote in such a poll.)

Great points F. Hazel about how diverse the conventions of English writing were, the further you go back.

It all makes me wonder when it was that things finally became more codified - I suspect around the late 19th century - which ironically is also the same time that we tend to think of a new wave of literary rule-breaking starting. In other words maybe 'modernism' only appears iconoclastic because language had finally just been settled.

Looking toward my first Sebald---ILB seems to favor Austerlitz over Saturn's Rings, amIright? Those are the ones at hand.

― dow, Monday, January 20, 2020 2:20 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't know if ILB really does? In any case, while pure and uniquely Sebaldian, they wildly differ. Austerlitz is an all-encompassing single story: all the deviations, everything covered, is what makes up the story arch and the history we learn. 'The Rings of Saturn' is much more meandering and takes you into even more unexpected terrain, the leads not necessarily all connected to each other (I mean of course it's all connected Sebald-style, but).

I couldn't choose between the two, really (and I'm - right now - reading 'The Immigrants' for the first time, which was his debut and seems like the best introduction to him as a writer, too). 'Austerlitz' is immensely impressive - well they all are - but perhaps start with 'The Rings of Saturn', which isn't as top heavy as Austerlitz is? But then idk, Austerlitz is a masterpiece, too.

I think Austerlitz is much better. Rings of Saturn is very good, but also feels a bit like a bunch of small essays loosely connected. In Austerlitz, it all takes one shape, and is immensely emotionally powerful.

VERTIGO precedes THE IMMIGRANTS.

THE RINGS OF SATURN is always the one for me. Tremendous exhibition about it at Norwich Castle last year.

Lots of his pictures for AUSTERLITZ were also on display at UEA.

I've started reading Maria Edgeworth's CASTLE RACKRENT.

I had better not read too many books at once.

VERTIGO precedes THE IMMIGRANTS.

You are right, of course.

Except for some reason I wrote THE IMMIGRANTS instead of the correct title: THE EMIGRANTS.

In descending order:

Austerlitz
The Emigrants
The Rings of Saturn
Vertigo

They're all good, though.`

I echo Alfred's list. Austerlitz is extraordinary but, given the emotional weight of it, I don't know that I could read it again.

I'm in that delicious/enervating phase of being between books and not knowing what the hell to read.

In anticipation of a trip to the southwestern US next May I've started reading the sensationally named Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, Hampton Sides.

So far, it is a competent narrative history aimed at a popular audience. The style is workmanlike and just readable enough not to be irritating. Although it is copyright 2006 and the author attempts to embrace some of the Native American side of the story, he has already managed to use the word "squaw" several times, which tends to cast some shade on his credentials in that regard.