The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

Fizzles, I have never read anything by Murnane before so effectively I am reading him in reverse. He's an unusual combination of utter subjectivity and remorseless precision. He's comparable to Proust in a way, but Proust used models from life and Murnane makes everything up out of his visual imagination.

The writing is very dry at first, but one acclimates. It's notable how Murnane never tries to interest the reader in the slightest. He simply assumes that the reader will keep on reading.

The frequent references to, e.g., pages A of file B of cabinet C of archive D were curious. Is Murnane were slightly autistic? But an autist could not have written that beautiful ending. He's an enigma.

Typo: remove "were"

I am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK (2009) - a volume of stories. So far the settings include both Africa and North America.

Fizzles, I have never read anything by Murnane before so effectively I am reading him in reverse. He's an unusual combination of utter subjectivity and remorseless precision. He's comparable to Proust in a way, but Proust used models from life and Murnane makes everything up out of his visual imagination.

The writing is very dry at first, but one acclimates. It's notable how Murnane never tries to interest the reader in the slightest. He simply assumes that the reader will keep on reading.

The frequent references to, e.g., pages A of file B of cabinet C of archive D were curious. Is Murnane were slightly autistic? But an autist could not have written that beautiful ending. He's an enigma.

Finished: Halldor Laxness - Independent People.

Now onto: Joy Williams - Harrow.

Seamus Heaney - Beowulf
Greil Marcus - Under the Red White and Blue

Am reading, for the very first time, obscure deep cut fantasy novel “The Fellowship of the Rings”. I will report back to you in case someone else wants to give it a try.

ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!

Seamus Heaney - Beowulf

New books take in a higher profit than books where you can easily pick up a nice used copy.

I've only just begun reading the NYRB reprint edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner that includes both a short novel and an even shorter novella featuring the same main character. The novel is Mr. Fortune's Maggot, while the novella is The Salutation. It was re-issued under the joint title Mr. Fortune. I haven't read far enough to get much of a fix on them.

fwiw, the headley is purportedly a very different translation than that of heaney et al

(i have not yet read it)

sounds like a good case for reading both translations

Patricia Waugh: HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES (1995)

Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee - I think it was his first novel, and perhaps semi-autobiographical. The first-person narrator has just described the self-discipline he practiced early in his career as a spy in completing daily registers or reports for his boss. The key was to write quickly following formal requirements without too much analysis or correction. This reminded me of the discipline cited by seasoned writers in setting aside time early in the day to write no matter what -- to get something down on paper for later revision, to practice a skill, and to let the act of writing clarify itself. The narrator also describes the art of being noticed enough but not more than required to be accepted without second thought.

Thanks to the Three Investigators discussion recently, I bought The Mystery of the Screaming Clock for a couple bucks used.

I must have read that long ago!

I have started rereading Samuel Beckett's NOVELLAS (so-called).

I am reading a collection of Don Paterson's aphorisms, having never read his poetry. They are quite funny.

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia. This is the first novel of Sciascia's that I've read, though I've also seen a film adaptation of another of his books (released as "Cadaveri Eccellenti"). Based on these two exposures to his work, it seems to me he occupies a distinctive niche within the taxonomy of detective fiction. His unique twist on the detective story is inseparable from the milieu of Sicily in which it take place, a place where it is generally accepted that it doesn't pay to stick one's nose in where it doesn't belong. The protagonist of To Each His Own is a professor of literature and a somewhat unworldly man, more comfortable with books than with the confusing motives and passions of the people living in his town. This being a detective story, a murder has taken place -- actually two murders -- and the professor gets drawn in, somewhat reluctantly, by his acquaintance with the victims (it's a small town) and his belief that the police are underestimating the import of a clue. His motive is not one of justice -- he doesn't seem to care very much if the murderer is caught -- but rather intellectual curiosity. An "obscure pride" prevents him from confiding in the police. There is an evocative passage: "At play in this obscure pride were the centuries of contempt that an oppressed people, an eternally vanquished people, had heaped on the law and all those who were its instruments; a conviction, still unquenched, held that the highest right and the truest justice, if one really cares about it, if one is not prepared to entrust its execution to fate or to God, can come only from the barrels of a gun." This view seems to fly in the face of the "conservative" streak that is supposed to run through detective fiction as a form.

That novel sounds good. I might enjoy it.

I continue with HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES.

The Haunting Of Hill House Shirley Jackson
playful liquid prose lightening the mood somewhat. Loving this writing.Mood created may be a bit weird for the subject matter but probably adds t the build. I've picked this up again after realising that Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race doesn't lend itself to short sharp bursts for a bog book.
I should be more familiar with her work. Think I will become so in the wake of this, hoping it as good. I also have a biography of her somewhere. Anyway enjoying this greatly.

Finding The Mother Tree Suzanne Simard
book on the intercommunication between trees by way of fungi. I thought it was going to be less autobiographical/memoir than it has turned out to be but may jsuty be helping establish c9ontext as to how and why the author knows what she does. Quite enjoying it anyway.
Wondering to what extent the market determines how much the author is in the book. I think other books I have read on similar subjects have been less personal/subjective. may be a reaction to the lack of possibility of fully objective perspective.
Pretty disgusted by the directives of teh Canadian Forestry services that she is talking about doing her early research work with. Seem overly destructive and she has talked about destroying very old growth forest which is sad and won't be replaced.
This has been very white perspectived too, not hearing anything about indigenous perspectives on treatment of woodland so far so hope that comes in later.

Insurgent Empire Priyamavada Gopal
book on the last century and a half of the British Empire and the role of indigenous and other colonised peoples in its demise.
I somehj9ow missed how recent the book was for a while , then became aware that the writer was referencing Brexit having happened. Book came out in 2019.
I thijnk it's pretty good and shouldn't have taken me as long to get to as it has done. I started it and then several others after doing so so its taken me several months to get through when I should have concentrated on it. I think it was a rewarding read when i did finally get to it.

Pat Barker - The Women of Troy

xpost o.nate, I think Joanie Loves Chachi mentioned Sciascia as a fave over on Crime Fiction, S/D, where there may be some more discussion of his work by now.

Good old thread, hadn't thought of it in a while.

I've picked up A Promised Land by Obama again and am determined to finish it on this trip. I left Native Speaker unfinished but was near the end.

As I'm reading about the public reaction to TARP and thinking back to how the perceived slowness of the recovery from the 2008 recession may have affected economic policies in response to the pandemic and the current problem of inflation, I'm wondering if being cautious may have been partially right and thinking how difficult it must be to calibrate an appropriate response to economic crises.

The Famished Road. The tale of growing up poor in Nigeria is very effective, I'm not so into the fantastical elements.

that stares at me from the bookshelf, bought the year it was released, unfinished and likely to stay that way 8(

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia.

I've read a fair bit of Sciascia -- when I first found him it was a used copy but a couple of years later Granta put a ton of his stuff back in print. There's really no-one like him in crime fiction, incredibly good writer who prefers ambiguity to resolve, really worth reading

I would say those bks are not like any Anglo detective fiction. One of a kind.

I've finished with Patricia Waugh, HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES - albeit having skipped some sections on religion and metaphysics in literature.

I can't help thinking that this book would be more useful and incisive if she'd structured it more intuitively and simply: a chapter on 1960s, one on 1970s, one on 1980s. Instead the thematic chapters go back and cover the same ground as each other. She trades in long lists of phenomena, and in generalisations, and doesn't dig into specific 'material conditions', 'institutions of literature' or just local contexts that much. Reading a given literary text she will often use a phrase from another text by the same writer, which I recognise but which a novice reader need not - unnecessary confusion here. Her reading of Philip Larkin is sadly ungenerous and evasive; she's better on some others like Martin Amis.

An oddity of the book to my mind now is its regular reference to 'Planners' as a (perhaps malign) post-war social phenomenon, when many of us now might feel that society needs more, not less, planning. A more concrete version of this is the remarkable frequency with which she uses 'welfare state' as a negative, saying things like 'the welfare state's planners had failed to account for the spiritual' or 'the play savaged welfare-state compromises and conservative myths alike'. I think that welfare states have been a good thing, a historic achievement for humanity, secured largely through the efforts of labour movements (sometimes via their labour parties), and with various background conditions like WWII and the USSR. Welfare states, in general, make people's lives better and more bearable. If you think you don't like welfare states, wait to see how much you like not having them. Casually dismissing them as a flawed, tired phenomenon that writers can see through is crass and misleading. This can't be specific to Waugh, so it must be that she is actually reflecting a rather longer and broader tendency to be complacent and impatient about welfare states, one that I, plainly, think was unwise.

I'm sorry I can't find more positive to say about this book. Its main problem really, put at its simplest, is that it's too abstract.

I would say those bks are not like any Anglo detective fiction. One of a kind.

Yes, though also I'd point out distrust of official authority and general cynicism regarding laws, norms, etc. runs through Italian postwar culture (it's why it rules).

Just picked up Robert Aickman The Unsettled Dust in the library in a Faber Finds edition. Anyone read it? I've read his We Are For the Dark collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard, which I liked.

The opening page of first story reads slightly heavy handedly, but he's a skilled writer. Not sure I can justify taking it out with my book pile as it is at the moment, but then sometimes those are the best books to read, right?

been an Aickman fan most of my life and Faber (and NYRB) doing a great service by putting his stuff back into print; unlike the true acolytes I don't devour everything and only know "Ravissane" from Unsettled Dust. His heavy-handedness is part of the deal but when you're in the mood for him nothing else will satisfy

that said I suspect him of fascist sympathies

Joan, what's a good Sciascia to start with?

I'd recommend To Each His Own as the best of Sciascia and it's entirely accessible, as opposed to recondite or difficult.

Howard Zinn A People's History of the United States
Been meaning to read this for a while, certainly since i read Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the same. She had worked as a researcher on this and he had said he couldn't really tackle indigenous people of teh area as much as she suggested because it wasn't an area he was well versed in. So she should write a book on the subject herself, she eventually did and it is really worth reading.
THis is pretty good, leftist history looking at things like racism from the start of the white population in the area. I heard one of the black comedians on My Momma Told me talking about not havi8ng read all of this recently as though it was an expectation that one would have done but certainly couldn't be expected of him. So not sure how well known this is. I'm enjoying it.
Currently I'm at the end of the 18th century and the declaration of independence has been made. I'm making some headway but I'm also reading several other books at the same time. Trying to get several of them that I've renewed multiple times finished by the next due date on the 25th while also having just started a full time course.
Need to read this for its won sake though and enjoying what I'm reading.

Vine Deloria God iS Red
Book by indigenous American author on beliefs of his people and other tribes and misrepresentation of those beliefs in popular thought.
I was seeing him and this book referenced in a few things i read at the beginning of the year. I'm finding it at least semi enlightening , possibly would be more so if I hadn't read Thomas king and others having overlapping thought and some of that has referenced him anyway.
BUt pretty great book. He also got Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz involved in native affairs when he got her included in a tribal case he was involved with, as I heard her say in an interview i heard with her last month.
Enjoying this too.

I've started Ian Littlewood, THE LITERATURE STUDENT'S SURVIVAL KIT (2006).

It's not what it sounds like.

The Zinn book was required reading on almost every course I did at UC Santa Cruz (natch) but man it’s a dry book, I found, I wish it wasn’t written in plodding Silmarillion style

Obviously it is righteous and good and has opened the mind of millions et cetera – I just wish it was better written

Finished a number of poetry books, including the extraordinary 'Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me' by Choi Seungja, a pretty wild South Korean feminist poet. (It was co-translated by Cathy Park Hong and Won-Chung Kim).

Also finished Wanda Coleman's 'Heavy Daughter Blues' and Chika Sagawa's 'Selected' (translated by Sawako Nakayasu). Seems I have been on a radical and abject feminist poetics tour, something that wasn't really planned but just happened. It's been great.

I've also been keeping up with my Prynne reading group, which has been nice.

There are some great stories in Aickman's *The Unsettled Dust*. The title story is one of his best, I think and features some of his key obsessions. The Cicerones is one of his most (MR) 'Jamesian', albeit the reek of violence is much stronger in Aickman. The Stains is just all-time - like some 70s sitcom turned inside out and left in a cellar for 20 years to curdle.

Many xps

Yeah, I've not read The Unsettled Dust but all those Faber collections tend to have at least a couple of his all-time bangers - 'The trains', 'The swords', 'The hospice', 'Into the wood'.

Recently I read some weird fiction by Walter de la Mare and L. P. Hartley and realized Aickman's style and methods aren't as unique as I'd assumed. He still rocks, ofc.

Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me is great! Reminded by her mention here, I just read the 2022 Wanda Coleman Complete American Sonnets collection. These were originally published across a couple books and it's great to encounter them together, the cumulative effect heightens their power. Other recent reads include Joy Williams' newish Harrow (this mostly disappointed me) and Max Aub's Field of Honour. Also Stacy Szymaszek's The Pasolini Book and Pasolini's Roman Poems collection with which The Pasolini Book was written in conversation. Currently reading The Judy Grahn Reader and Garielle Lutz's grammar book The Gotham Grammarian.

yes Walter de la Mare is central to the MR James to Aickman through line. WdlM’s uncanny writing is wonderful. Some of my favourite short stories.

zak m, glad someone else has read Seungja! Stacy is great, tho I admit that I've never had a taste for her poems— the essays in The Pasolini Book are more what I found interesting, but I also got my copy for next to nothing since Golias also published my second book.

Judy Grahn is extraordinary, a few years ago I saw her give a reading of "A Woman is Talking to Death" and she nearly fainted 3/4ths of the way through— her partner came up and finished the rest. It was stunning.

(for interested parties, it's long but whew one of the best poems of the past 50 years imho: https://poets.org/poem/woman-talking-death)

I read that last year - from a link you posted, table. One of those I immediately passed on to a bunch of people. Think about it often.

I'm still rereading Beckett - outstanding in familiar ways, though I also think that people forget the extent of the ... what might now be called 'queer' or 'pansexual' elements (not sure what Beckett would have called them, probably nothing).

Started on the essays in F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE CRACK-UP (just a collection). Evocative, useful, yet they also make me slightly suspicious. Is Fitzgerald on the Jazz Age more reliable than ... Christopher Hitchens or (aargh) David Aaronovitch on the 1970s, or John Harris on the 1990s? More elegant, but can still come over as glib. Basically a kind of quality weekend journalism. Unsure how much rigour is in these essays, or how much interest in testing his own memories against recorded fact or the fact of other different experiences.

Then I, after many years, started John Wain's HURRY ON DOWN (1953). It's very droll already: I should have read it decades ago. The cover drawing on this old orange Penguin is by ...

LEN DEIGHTON.