Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

Have you read JAP's BLACK TICKETS, table? That was the book of hers that really set me alight - incredibly powerful, lightening-bolt short fictions. Everything of hers I read after that felt disappointingly conventional to me :(

I'm reading Anne Tyler's The Accidential Tourist - it's fine, not sure why it's so acclaimed. Quite startled to find a minor (male) character called Dana Scully, written 8 years before the X Files.

remind me to ask you something when you've done.

Have you read JAP's BLACK TICKETS, table? That was the book of hers that really set me alight - incredibly powerful, lightening-bolt short fictions. Everything of hers I read after that felt disappointingly conventional to me :(

― Piedie Gimbel, Monday, July 25, 2022 2:52 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ugh it's SO GOOD, nothing else compares. i've liked everything else i've read, but yeah, it's much more conventional literary fiction.

xxxpost The Accidental Tourist started well, but got too cute for me, but I may not have stayed with it long enough---did enjoy two of her earlier novels,Searching For Caleb and A Slipping-Down Life, esp. got a kick out of the barefoot boondocks indie singer's zen lyrics, like a pre-parody of early Michael Stipe (published in 1970). Also, Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is supposed to be one of her best, though I haven't read it. If you like her at all, check those out.

said singer is in A Slipping-Down Life.

I must have bought SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE almost 30 years ago, but I read it in two days. It's enjoyable, light, breezy. It perhaps has the structure of farce, in that the same four central characters keep rotating in and out of scenes:

"I went to the cottage to meet Myrtle. When I arrived I found Tom making tea. 'What on earth are you doing here?' I spluttered. 'I'm waiting for Steve', he calmly explained, offering me a prawn sandwich".

Every other scene is like this (which I invented): protagonist Joe Lunn goes somewhere to meet a character and another character turns up. There are only really these four major characters - though there are supporting characters: the schoolboys in the science class; another, imperious and bombastic teacher; an odd authority figure, Robert in Oxford. The pattern gets so repetitive that I did feel that even over a short novel, Cooper (not his real name) had stretched his material too far.

A major motif is the woman (Myrtle) who wants to marry the male protagonist (Joe) - and his resistance, and the endless back & forth, the tortuous winding-down of their relationship over this. She's sad, he's evasive. It's all too realistic, in a way. Again, it probably doesn't need stretching out this long, with so little variation. It makes me wonder, though: did this pattern, the woman seeking marriage and the evasive male, become more pervasive at this point? I think of LUCKY JIM, A KIND OF LOVING, BILLY LIAR. Was there something driving it - such as a possibility of new freedom for unmarried males who couldn't really have had it before, and would thus have settled for marriage?

The novel is curiously, gently metafictional - very casually referring to what it will and won't include as a novel. The last lines are "I reach for a clean new note-book. I pick up my pen". It's quite confounding how an old book can be so metafictional and so conventional and unchallenging.

now reading teenager by bud smith, off to a strong start

― flopson, Sunday, July 10, 2022 11:55 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this book is amazing and insane

Meta-fictional and unchallenging because the author was not sufficiently inspired or did not have the reserves of energy to try anything more? or incapable? or unaware?

No, it's just a light, breezy book, not terribly serious.

I've started another attempt on Joseph Conrad, NOSTROMO (1904), which I didn't make it through - two years ago?

The language doesn't seem as thickly difficult to me this time, though the description of place and cast is dense. I feel that the narration is somehow sly. Perhaps the tone is jaded; at least seasoned.

I'm quite interested, again, in how one major character (so far) is a devotee of Garibaldi's revolution. Indeed the place of Italians in South America seems a feature.

koogs at 2:19 25 Jul 22

remind me to ask you something when you've done.

(re: accidental tourist) go on then...

I warmed to it a little by the end, sort of reminded me of olive kitteridge - difficult person has glimmers of self awareness - with the sharp edges smoothed off. The leary family were amusing if scarcely credible. I wouldn't rush to read another but my wife has downloaded a whole bunch so I might, I might.

mention of Conrad's language reminds me that at one point in Lord Jim a character asks "do you find me mad with the funk?".

Nostromo is dense but worth it. LJ's the Conrad I can't penetrate.

re accidental tourist. not sure it's a question with an answer, maybe something i don't understand about humans, or this human specifically. spoiler tags...

in the penultimate chapter he goes back to his wife. in the final chapter he goes back to muriel. why would you?

anyway, i'd recommend the film, the two leads pretty much nail the characters. i saw it almost by accident - i bought season pass for local 'cinema in the town hall' thing in hemel because there were 3 films in the season i wanted to see and it was cheaper to buy a ticket for everything. fried green tomatoes, crossing delancy, accidental tourist i think were the extra films i saw, all of a kind, really. ironically i can't remember the films i specifically wanted to see...

seeing the film prompted buying the book and the book led to quite a few more although i do confuse them somewhat. A Slipping Down Life is a standout. and i remember the one with the puppet theatre. Morgan's Passing i have, Ladder of Years. Tin Can Tree. The Clock Winder of the more recent books (spoiler - contains no actual clock winding). more.

Damn, Teenager looks fantastic.

why would you?

do you mean his general indecision or why he would go back to muriel specifically? dissertations could probably be written on the choices he makes, or has made for him, but it's pretty clear about why he makes his final decision.

my question is... is it mayson or maykon?

yeah final decision is the more obvious of the two, it's the chicane i think i have the problem with, the *two* changes of mind.

and a hard c iirc

For even more Tyler, also take a look at xpost Searching For Caleb, and I guess Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, the one I haven't read that rode a surge of acclaim.

Not exactly a "what are you reading" but: I somehow missed Hernan Diaz on the Tin House podcast this month discussing Trust (a book I loved, and can't wait to re-read)

I just requested that yesterday and am looking forward to it. Now reading Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, which is very cosmopolitan (meaning multinational, not chic or whatever else). It seems strange that the EU and the International Criminal Court are in Belgium and the Netherlands. Perhaps they seem neutral and are too homely and small for grand ambitions. Or their perch on the edge of the continent ...

I read Philip K. Dick's first novel, SOLAR LOTTERY (1955).

Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond

Currently reading City of Thieves, by David Benioff. A story set in Leningrad during the siege. So far so good. Benioff took a lot of heat as one of the writers, directors and showrunners of Game of Thrones, but this novel zings along.

Finished Ben Shephard After Daybreak the Liberation of Belsen 1945 which was really good and very infoprmative.

Started Michael Lewis The Fifth Risk which I picked up in a charity shop earlier this week.
It's his look into how the US government works and the source book for Adam Conover's series the G Word. Watched that a few weeks ago.
Not got very far into it so far but looks promising.

still reading the Mother Of Invention by Katrine Marcal
still finding some interesting things in this but wish it was argued better instead of continually trying to hit the reader with the agenda in the way it is. Have said before would like to read a book on this subject which was argued better. Not so much beating one around teh head with it. I think there are subtler ways of doing that.

CITY OF THIEVES (1983) was one of my favourite Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.

Finished part one (100pp) of NOSTROMO. Much scene-setting, a narrative mode of "and typically X would happen": "Don Pedro would be seen driving his donkey cart along the coast with the Senora", "it was said that Don Carlos was a man who knew a rifle as well as he knew a peseta", etc - the sort of thing you might expect for the first 5 pages, here massively distended.

My impression is that the rest of the novel may get more particularised in the narrative's present, whenever that is.

Conrad seems savvy about politics, and it's remarkable to think that he wrote with authority about Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. Perhaps no writer till then had had such range.

maybe melville? tho his authority is wildly fantastical (and more based round the pacific islands than asia): in any case, both spent decades at sea, is the key to this

I read two slim and deeply contrasting volumes:

"The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson" (1944) by Gerald Kersh could hardly be more of a man's book. being a series of barrack-room discussions about the titular Bill, who'd died or was dying trying to save lives in bombed buildings. The novel is really just a delineation of an ideal manhood at a very particular point in time and interesting in those terms, but I couldn't say I'd recommend it. Kersh is usually a bit nastier than this, but this one's a wartime morale-booster and suffers for it. It's absolutely filthy with racism, too though I'd guess that's society's racism rather than author being more racist than was normal at the time.

"Being Here is Everything" (2016) by by Marie Darrieussecq (tr. Penny Hueston 2017), which is a beautiful and melancholy life of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, drawing heavily from (apparently plentiful) documentary sources. Her story skips by in a few relatively simple strokes and is pretty good at laying out various obstacles and indignities suffered by Becker in her too-brief life. I think the book wants me to be more interested in Rilke than I am, and he looms large-ish, I guess at least in part because the documentary sources by and about him are certainly plentiful. It's good.

Maybe both of them are dong some idealising of gendered behaviours; the Kersh obviously is, I'm not sure about the Darrieussecq.

Hi!

Been reading this thread for a while - strangely enough from a room pretty much above Ellis Books as mentioned by Pinefox - and thought I'd join in.

I'm halfway through Jim Ottewill's Out of Space: How UK Cities Shaped Rave Culture. It's a pretty readable account of exactly what the title says. Nothing in it is particularly groundbreaking but as an overview of the last 40 years of UK club culture it is fine.

Two Dennis Cooper novels (Guide and I Wished) arrived in the post today so I'll make a start on them over the weekend.

Welcome! Thanks for mention of the Ottewill, think I'm about to read Peter Shapiro's dance history Turn The Beat Around, which includes late-50s discotheque scenes, new to me.

Amazon thinks I might be interested in Nathalie Léger's trilogy or sequence of books about Barbara Loden and other female media milestone figures, and I am---are they good?

City of Thieves is very gripping but I found it a little bothersome how much of the events in it are borrowed from Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, which is theoretically non-fiction but is probably 80% invented.

Turn the Bear Around is so so so good - maybe my favourite book about clubbing (alongside Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life). Enjoy!

It's pretty uncanny that an ILB poster should live above Ellis Books.

It's not the best bookshop I've ever been to, not the best stock, and probably not even as good as it was. Last time I couldn't even find anything to buy though I wanted to. But perhaps it's the most evocative bookshop I can think of, or the one for which I have most sentiment.

Many years ago, Mrs Ellis would always be in the backroom, always with Radio 4 on, and would usually give me a random discount, quite unasked for, whatever I was buying. It was as if she knew me, but she didn't.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi
The Devil in the Flesh, Raymond Radiguet
Manhood: A Journey From Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility, Michel Leiris

Easily the best three books I've read back-to-back. What a summer.

The best book shops smell like paper.

Turn the Bear Around is so so so good - maybe my favourite book about clubbing

Keen to read about the bear community's underappreciated contribution to the scene.

I have picked up Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 which just dropped in pback with a gr8 afterword interview with Jennifer Hodgson. V much looking forward to - Pond was such a treat.

Also Rookie, the new selected poems by Caroline Bird, is a hoot.

My request for Trust by Hernan Diaz was not filled, but I requested some other books including a novel by PKD called Man in the High Castle. I have Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown checked out to start next and just finished The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu-Byeong Mo, which ended with a scene of (surreal?) violence, which reminded me of the end of Parasite and which seems to be characteristic of popular contemporary Korean film these days. The book also has cultural references that I think I at least partially understand and which might carry some of the resonance of the book. I will have to find Trust somewhere else.

Sorry, her surname is Gu and her given name is Byeong Mo.

keith ball - strange curves, counting rabbits, and other mathematical explorations

recreational math book intended for high school students. but fun for me to read, too. learned about ISBN codes last night

finished 'teenager' by bud smith. i don't know if everyone on ILB would like it (it contains some pretty gratuitous violence) but i really enjoyed it. is there a name for the microgenre of contemporary novel that contains atticus lish 'preparations for another life' and nico walker 'cherry' (and now this)? they all have this very similar prose style, a salt-of-the-earth narrator who speaks in short poetic homespun sentences that evoke a wide-eyed grandeur

Halfway through NOSTROMO. Quick observations:

Conrad maintains this curious mode of narrative in which a single scene is ongoing for many pages ('thus the salon continued that night at the Casa Gould') while he digresses away from it, in and out of it, via characters ('as for Don Jose, he had commanded many men on sea and land ...'). A combination of 'narrating the present' and a much more generalising, rangy approach to past time. I wondered if this had an analogue in Proust.

The character of Nostromo is fascinating. He is at once brilliant, competent, mysteriously talented - and naive, and swayed by his desire for recognition by others. His real name is Gian' Battista - he's an Italian, in South America. A foreigner: a Latin but not Hispanic. His name 'Nostromo' is in effect the name of the colonists: 'our man', 'the indispensable fellow!' it's repeatedly said - though it does also have the flavour of a heroic, mysterious name like Zorro. And he is also the Capataz of the Cargardores - the captain of the stevedores, effectively the Duke of the Dockers. So he's involved with organized labour in some way, though I think not in the unionised way we would recognise, and these labourers seem to be on the side of those in power - of 'law & order' anyway.

The question of which political side is more virtuous - those currently in power in the town, or others - is cloudy. The veteran Garibaldian seems to retain some virtue.

It's fascinating that every time Nostromo re-enters the novel he is reintroduced, as if he's a mysterious stranger. 'A rider was walking with his silver grey mare, lighting a cigar in the dark' - only a couple of sentences later does Conrad tell us it's Nostromo. And he reintroduces him with repeated epithets: 'the Genoan sailor'; 'looking like a Mediterranean sailor' - over and over, to a degree he doesn't do for other characters.

The atmosphere reminds me slightly of a Western - maybe even a Spaghetti Western.

A scene in which Nostromo and another character sail out into the dark sea at night (I'm still in the midst of it, no idea how it ends) is like a scene from SF or Gothic - a vision of eternity, the sublime, the void. A remarkable extremity of setting from Conrad. You could compare his novel in some ways to MIDDLEMARCH - a portrait of a town and its economy and characters (and maybe that's something that F.R. Leavis saw in it) - but Eliot, at least in that work, didn't take us to such extreme places.

Jean Giono's Melville, Josephine Wilkinson's Louis XIV: The Power and the Glory , and John Rechy's After the Blue Hour.

I just finished Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. It feels like an attempt to consolidate the strengths of Wolf in White Van but also to branch out in new directions. Both novels deal with traumatic events and their aftermath, and both follow the writing dictum to always know more about your characters than you reveal to the reader. In both cases Darnielle tantalizes with glimpses of something terrible but doles out the particulars in dribs and drabs to keep up the suspense. But in a way the real meat of the book is the more ordinary, day-to-day stuff that happens: the slow and incomplete process of healing, the guilt and shame experienced by the survivor, the necessity of repressing trauma. This book has a more elaborate structure and a larger cast of characters. In some ways it feels like a transitional novel.

Yeah---the transition, the reaching continues through Devil House, especially the last part, which I have misgivings about, especially the way it makes me rethink much of the novel up to that point. But yeah, the day-to=day process, there's even a character who seems like a genius of the quotidian, and certainly the evocation of time and place, of setting and what it does to lives lived then and there, is riveting (more focus on a single area than in UH, more like Wolf... in that sense, but more outdoors-indoors than that one)
I need to re-read both of those, but right now I have the hangnail impression that what he does best, fading in and out on people in the middle of something, is, aside from WIWV, overall less effective in the long fiction than in his best songs, also those of Dylan (esp. mid-60s) and Steely Dan: no matter how much space you leave in the novel, there are a lot of connections, framework at least, for all those pages of cold print---music doesn't have to do that.

But WIWV is astonishing---still need to read Master of Reality.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to Devil House, will probably wait for the paperback, or see if it shows up at the library. I’d like to read Master of Reality too at some point. There is an emotional core to the writing that feels real and carries me through the more mechanical business. Tbh I’m not really that familiar with the music apart from a few songs.