Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I was impressed by her early fiction: first novel, State of Grace(1973) (Florida Gothic, kinda early Patti Smith x Joan Didion), and 70s stories that made it into her first collection, Taking Care (1982). Was put off by fairly recent New Yorker story, but maybe I'll try again (maybe pick up where I left off).

Watch out for some Joyce Carol Oates-level snobbery in interview quotes.

like the pinefox, i've been reading hg wells -- a couple weeks ago i finally read "the island of dr moreau," which i've been hearing about all my life. it is almost hilariously fast-paced: as the book opens, the protagonist is escaping from a sinking ship into a fragile lifeboat, and a few pages later his two companions get in a fistfight and both fall out of the boat. a few pages later he's rescued, only to get kicked overboard for getting in an argument with the captain. then he's rescued again! but wait, it turns out it's the bad guys who rescued him! (why they bothered to rescue him is never really explained.) there are multiple chase scenes, and more than one scene where buildings get set on fire. and on and on and on! but it's masterfully done and, as with all of wells's earliest novels, very gripping. it's also quite grisly and rather upsetting in places: the basic concept (a mad vivisectionist who transforms animals into human-like beings, also for no real reason) is, thankfully, impossible. the last few pages turn quite wistful and melancholy in a way i associate with wells, who seems to me to have had a strong streak of instinctive pessimism despite being a progressive/socialist/futurist/etc.

i followed that up with another wells: "the food of the gods," the one about the food that makes plants and animals grow to giant-size. the first third of this book, which is about giant bees and wasps and cows terrorizing the english countryside, is delightful. the utterly blase reaction of many of the characters to this phenomenon is especially funny. the rest of the book, about the first giant-size humans' struggle to be treated with dignity, i found rather uninvolving and dull. i suspect there was some very specific 1904-era social satire here that flew right over my head.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

Bell hooks Teaching to Transgress.
hooks talking about a new form of pedagogy that is much more level with particular influence from Paulo Freire and a Buddhist monk called Thich Nhat Hanh.
I like bell hooks I find her very easy to read.
Had this on order since December through interlibrary loan and recently found that while there seemed to be a queue of readers there were also copies claiming to be available. I wound up ringing a couple of the libraries involved to see if I could get things moving and this turns up a week later. Which is really great. I thought I was a few behind and I would just get things faster if the people ahead of me got the available copy. But turned out even better.

Unfortunately this doesn't appear to have worked with the other book I got yesterday.
Blood and Land JCH King
Which is a native American history of America. More encyclopaedic than narrative.
It was ordered as
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz All The Real Indians Died Out.
I think it came from the same library and I'm assuming it was misfiled or something. That Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz appears to be vanishing from the system. I tried looking it up yesterday when I got home and couldn't find it. It is listed as such in my orders entry still but not through the search engine. Shame I want to read more of her work enjoyed An Indigenous People's History of the US .

In fact I am rather encouraged by the news that its characters do not turn out very special.

Feel like I should now add the caveat (spoiler): once character does spend some time in the entourage of a Rock star in 70's Laurel Canyon.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.),

This was the novel that unlocked him for me, so if it doesn't work....

I've still not read much Conrad. Did enjoy some films of his work.
& Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost which gives the background for Heart Of Darkness not sure how completely incidentally. Conrad was a ship's captain dealing with the regime. Have heard he was more right wing than I would have liked, do hope he was disgusted by what he saw beyond it being a factor in a famous novel he wrote.

Good to hear about THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU - I was reading about it just recently and actually keen to read it.

I do like THE SECRET AGENT - a very cinematic / proto-Hitchcockian novel at times (never mind that Hitchcock literally adapted it)- with a great deal going on. Probably my favourite Conrad. I would certainly persevere with that.

Mine too. I'm also fond of Nostromo, which complicates the relations b/w natives and colonizers/imperialists.

Found The Secret Agent a slog too, until the last few chapters.

Conrad does tend to stomp into rooms with heavy boots.

hadn't realised that Conrad was born in what's now Ukraine so deeply topical like. Is anything being made of that right now.
I always though of him as Polish but the borders there had a major habit of changing over the centuries.

Yeah--Stanislaw Lem was born in Lyiv when it was in Poland (it's still only 40 miles from current border).

y’all have convinced me to persevere with the conrad! only about a third of the way through it so there’s hope for me yet. i had forgotten there was a hitchcock film of it —don’t think i ever saw that one.

Shirley Jackson The haunting Of Hill House
picked it up from a charity shop a while back and its been floating around for a while. I read teh first page a few months back and thought it was really something, descriptions of trees that seemed otherworldly. An opacity taht reminds me of Rowland S Howard's lyricism or something. THought yeah really need to read this then and then had a pile of books i was trying to get through.
Anyway, not feeling great earlier so I went an lay down thinking I'd get a lot further into a bell hooks book that I picked up yesterday and then wound up reading the first couple of chapters of this before getting to that. So the female protagonist has arrived at the house at the moment and nobody else has arrived yet. I'm enjoying her prose anyway.
So need to work out how to read this and several other things really rapidly.

I like her short fiction even better--and not just "The Lottery."

"Charles" is a gem.

I finished Willy Vlautin, DON'T SKIP OUT ON ME. The story of good people in a hard world ends sadly. A very plainly written book - deliberately I assume. A kind of ingenuous quality, so the style can simply relay the naive protagonist's earnest questions and rebukes to himself. Easy to read. I'd tend to recommend it.

Reading Conrad always puts me back in sixth form, having to slog through Heart of Darkness, and I find myself repeating those patterns of stuckness and boredom. Yes, we get it Joe, everything is black. Even The Secret Sharer, which is very short, felt black-hole-dense and inesacapable.

(I don't get that feeling with Henry James, depsite an equally unpleasant freshman-year experience of Roderick Hudson.)

I read Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan. It's a short novel, almost entirely lacking in ornamentation, and uses the microcosm of a tiny border village to show the horrors of partition. I read it straight after Patricia Lockwood, which might explain why the lack of ornamentation was so pronounced, but there's also something about Singh's purpose and subject matter that renders anything figurative unnecessary or even offensive. That said, Singh is I think known for the plainness of his style and, as an editor of local stories gathered after partition, was renowned for his austere editing style.

Also this week, I was walking in the Mendips and took a detour down to East Coker to see Eliot's memorial in the church. I read Four Quartets in the churchyard, alongside a row of almshouses there, and was taken this time by how, underneath the deep meditations on time and purpose, conservative and nationalistic it is - particularly Little Gidding. 'Eliot in deeply conservative' shocker isn't a great revelation I know, and that particular poem was written when he was literally watching London burn, but still.

Now reading, as part of my project not to read any more farty old JB Priestley, Bright Day by JB Priestley. It's written at a similar time to Four Quartets (published in 1946) and takes a similar path to An Inspector Calls in casting an eye back to the golden age immediately preceding WWI - this time taking Priestley's growing up in Bradford as its subject matter. It's much kinder to that generation than AIC, and the clear difference is how he gives free rein to his Jungian preoccupations, frequently referencing the unconscious, magic and - less overtly - the role of archetypes in our lives. It's a bit plodding, tbh.

man, I wish I'd attended a school where Roderick Hudson was on the reading list.

I could make the case for Heart of Darkness, like Wharton's The House of Mirth, as worst introduction to a major novelist's work.

er, sorry, Ethan Frome.

I think I did Heart of Darkness at A-level. Certainly no Wharton.

Worth reading Chinua Achebe on Heart Of Darkness.

Yup.

Edward Said too.

And Sven Lindqvist.

Just about almost nearly finished Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, would recommend it for fans of her other work or of vast sprawling contemplative literary historical dramas.

Bridget Christie A Book For Her
Found this in a charity shop last week after having looked at it online a few months ago. Have enjoyed some of her standup before and panel show appearances.
So, just read the preface and first chapter of this and found it quite funny.
Surreal and realist and scatological (flatus is a word I've rarely heard on its own) and intelligent and childish and things.
Seem to be some overlap with some comedy of Stewart Lee who I think she's married to, so wonder if this reflects conversation topics between them.
Well enjoying it so far but I am reading a stack of books at teh same time.

Peter Barry Beginning Theory
coming to the end of the book in the beginning series dealing with Literary and Cultural theory. Think I may be looking into picking up some more of these if they turn up in charity shops. Possibly including later incarnations of this book since this is like 10 years old right now.
Interesting to see outlines of the forms of theory. Not sure how much of this I'm going to remember permanently. But good grounding I think. Will try to read some fo the books cited too.

Nelson Algren Never Come Morning
Book about various people of Polish American extraction etc living in Chicago in around teh turn of teh 40s. Algren apparently had some trouble with censorship at teh time. Nice gritty work though.
Mainly deals with a bunch of youth . One of whom is currently in a jail cell.

Imperium in Imperio Sutton Griggs
Turn of the 20th century speculative fiction about a brilliant black student and his activity post graduation. trying to work out how to describe this further without giving spoilers. Other than to refer to his rivalry with his onetime classmate.
THis was one of teh longer entries in the Black Science Fiction anthology put out by Flame Tree Publishing last year. I mainly got this for Pauline Hopkins book Of One Blood. Incidentally I've just heard she has a large entry in the new book Linernotes For A Revolution by Daphne Brooks. She was talking about that and other people she was writing about in the interview she did with Love Is The Message
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kWmdOjUGRdbdF22gBTdKT?si=526bb2e4a6304304
I managed to read almost all of this book over the last few months apart from Blake, or The Huts of America by Martin R. Delany which I think I'm going to skip since i need to return a book to get one I have on order out. May be something i will regret but it is late 19th century largely written in phonetic versions of imperfect English from enslaved characters and also is apparently not complete since no copies of the magazine that the concluding chapter was in could be found.
The rest is pretty good though and hopefully this being published will lead to more people looking into the area. & I hope a copy of this will turn up in a charity shop somewhere I can find it.

Mande Music Eric Charry
Ethnonusicologist's book on music from the Northwest of Africa . very good and deeply recommended.
I'm mainly reading through the Appendixes cos I've finsihed the main body of the text. Also need to write down the music and books cited

I finished The English Teacher. I must note that it is unusual among Narayan's books I've read in that the plot incorporates some strongly polemical elements, most prominently his beliefs about an afterlife. He tries to dispel one's doubts about his version of life after death simply by creating fictions that require them to be true. It's obvious he is sincere in his beliefs and means well.

On a whim, started The Martian, which has been sitting in my Kindle library forever. So far, it's . . . interesting, but plodding. Not sure how you can make the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars dull, but Weir is doing his level best. Not having seen the film, I have no idea how this comes out, and I'm willing to stick with it to see, but it's not exactly drawing me in.

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer L. Eberhardt - eye opening as these things usually are, entirely US centric unlike say Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez (not a criticism, just an observation). Leans very heavily on 'we took two dozen students and made them look at images of professional athletes and criminals while running on a treadmill and eating a sandwich' type research which, knowing about the replicability crisis in psychology, does make me slightly sceptical, unfairly or not. But also plenty of other statistical data, and hugely depressing stories of police racism and brutality, many of which were new to me, and other problems like innocent people systematically compelled into plea bargaining.

Also had one weird section where she describes going into a near panic attack when her husband hires a car on a caribbean island where - gasp - they drive on the other side of the road.

I read that a few months ago and thought it quite good. Seems to be being cited a lot since.
I then went and listened through a number of podcasts where she was guesting.
I think she is pretty interesting.
Also read Sway by Pragya Argawal and Corruptible by Brian Klaas around the same time. Thought they were all pretty good.
Will have a look at Invisible Women if I get teh chance.

I think that's my favourite of this genre, statistically heavy (not complicated, just lots of paragraphs with 'x% of women in y% of countries spend z% of their time doing v') but the most eye opening in terms of varieties of bias you might never have thought of before - e.g. gritting roads not pavements in winter prioritises commuters (typically male) not pedestrians and carers (more typically female); one study where they gritted pavements first found more savings from reduced pedestrian accidents than the extra cost.

gritting roads not pavements assume you mean gravel roads or any way something like that vs. pavements ok, but then what does they gritted pavements mean? Changing from pavement to gritted?

maybe you call it salt - putting stuff on the road (or pavement (i.e. sidewalk)) when it's icy to prevent or ameliorate ice & subsequent skidding & accidents.

Or in fewer words, de-icing.

I've been reading Ian Sansom, THE NORFOLK MYSTERY (2013), either side of a trip to Norfolk. The first volume in his series about 1930s popular writer Swanton Morley, it has the advantage of showing how the narrator first meets Morley and giving a lot of introductory material, etc - interesting to come at this having already read a later volume.

The Spanish Civil War background is stronger though fighting for the International Brigades is presented as a bad thing and a murderous folly. There is a curious political aspect to these books which seems to me a bit more reactionary than I had expected.

The book is if anything funnier than THE SUSSEX MURDER (which wasn't really about a murder), with some super set-piece dialogues in which Morley takes on an authority figure. In this book he is constantly reciting Latin phrases. I have no idea what any of them mean. Fortunately he usually then translates them, but not always. Sansom seems to have cut down the Latin later in the series, perhaps realising that most of us haven't a clue what it says.

I was standing at a University of East Anglia bus stop the other day and saw a bus headed for Swanton Morley, which was the first moment I was aware of the source of the character's name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanton_Morley

I just finished one of Ursula K. Le Guin's early novels, Planet of Exile. My relationship with her books is hard to explain, in that I find them well-written, evocative of the worlds they describe, thoughtful, carefully constructed, but not sterile. In short, I think they are good.

But I find I have to space my readings of her books well apart, because there is something about them which feels so consistently the same that I need to let the previous one fade out of memory or it feels like a repeat of the same book. I'm at a loss to say exactly what it is about her books that prompts this feeling. I just recognize its existence and can't locate the cause. So I wait a year or two between books.

About to start The Ides of March, Thornton Wilder's fictional autobiography of Julius Caesar. Because Our Town overshadows everything else, Wilder remains an unfairly neglected novelist.

Yeah, The New Yorker had an in-depth profile of him several years ago, with appealing takes on lesser-known works---what have you liked by him?

(Or in fewer words, de-icing. Should have gotten this from "winter," sorry.)

He understood American hucksterism. Try Heaven's My Destination and The Eighth Day, both released in paperback in the last two decades.

Rafia Zakaria The Upstairs Wife
book about family life in early 70s Pakistan. I think its like a family memoir . Mainly about life after partition and things. Quite interesting. I had enjoyed her book on White Feminism so wanted to read more. Would enjoy reading her book on The Veil too, but couldn't find it in the library system.

Salsa Sue Steward
erudite well written book on the South American music style(s). I've just begun it so she's talking about the history of how slavery was managed in Cuba which ceased to be as mixed as possible because counterproductive. Turned out that trying to prevent people from being with people of their own background to prevent attempts at uprising meant they felt really isolated and didn't work to their best. (Interesting like does that indicate they were like human and therefore maybe shouldn't be enslaved?) so the enslaved were regrouped along tribal lines or similar and given some access to music making and things. Helps make the work force a more productive one. & ensuing from this traditions were developed which later on become the basis of the popular sound.
Well looks like its a good book . Think I have seen it before so not sure why I haven't had it and read it._

In this book he is constantly reciting Latin phrases. I have no idea what any of them mean. Fortunately he usually then translates them, but not always. Sansom seems to have cut down the Latin later in the series, perhaps realising that most of us haven't a clue what it says.

I remember this happening a lot when I was reading Poe - not just latin either, but also French, Spanish, maybe German? Not entirely sure whether he assumed everyone reading would know these languages or whether he was just showing off.

But depending on Sansom's audience, most of his readers might have indeed understood latin? Was reminded by reading Molesworth that Latin used to be a basic element of a public school education.

Reading the first volume of James Kaplan's Sinatra biography. Front cover blurbs by the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal, as if to tell me that I must be a cunt if I'm interested in reading about Sinatra.

To clarify: Ian Sansom is a living writer and this book is from 2013, so it's not a matter of a historic readership.

Perhaps many of Poe's readers did indeed know multiple languages.

ah ok sorry didn't realise it was contemporary

Thought people did this as way of showing off their erudition or at least mock erudition. It was definitely done quite often back in the day.

I guess it can be done now as a way of harkening back to that old tradition.

Take a look at The Recognitions, for example. First two things you see are a quote in Latin and a quote in German from Faust.