Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?

it's okay. about a young embalmer who volunteers to work on some aberfan victims and his life before and after. more about his relationship with his mother and his fear of having children with his wife.

the knight book was serialised on radio 4 and was an enjoyable listen iirc

Finished it, a very curious, almost astonishing read. The author doesn't come across at all like a credulous crackpot but all the premonitions and predictions are never treated with any scepticism - no suggestion that there's any foul play or trickery, no statistics brought to bear. And taken at face value they really strain at the bounds of what could be called coincidence - two people with twelve 'apparently' successful predictions in one year - that 'apparently' is pretty much as far as he goes in questioning it - including not only a plane crash but the number of casualties, a train crash and the train's destination, and the first man to die in space. I just don't know what to make of it all!

this sounds very like the classic charles fort mode: cheerfully listing the anomalies and never questioning them

pretty much - it's an entertaining mode and i enjoy the frisson it gives but ultimately i prefer a colder analysis, if only for my own sanity! and perhaps the author does lean slightly towards the woo, at one point he says he and his wife decided not to find out the sex of their baby after they saw three magpies ('for a girl') in the garden.

that's just good science

re: the prediction of the death of cosmonaut vladimir komarov, it was the first soviet manned mission in two years; he says the prediction was posted at 5.30pm on a sunday (how does he know? clearly not from a postmark) while komarov was in space, but news of the launch had been broadcast at 7am "by radio sweden" so "it is possible she knew there was a man in space". ok, telling us when it was broadcast by the bbc would be more helpful but perhaps that information is no longer available. still, she probably did know, take that one off the list of impossibles. sorry, there's probably a thread for this kind of thing.

The Soul of Black Folk by W.E.B. du Bois.
Have had this for a couple of years and think I've heard about it longer ago. So about time I actually got around to reading it not just seeing the author turn up in histories of Black America.
It was published in 1903 and I think the language use might just reflect that. It is a little florid or poetic or something. THink it's quite readable. He was a bit elitist or at least wanted to lift everybody of teh race up to a certain point rather than celebrate themselves. So thought a little too fitting around white supremacist policy possibly. I need to read a bit further into this to see how he combats that.

He pushed against the Booker T. Washington emphasis on vocational training for (as Du Bois saw it) an essentially docile workforce, playing it as safe as possible with white capitalism. If you did have a blue collar job, if that was most feasible for you, OK, but that didn't have to mean signing out of your day job, signing in at the bar, church, or at home, keeping your mind always in one harness or another.

I started a book a couple of days ago, Barbarians to Angels, Peter Wells. I bailed out about a third of the way into it. It was a survey of European history during the so-called Dark Ages, roughly 425 BCE to 800 BCE, when the western Roman empire fell apart. Since very few texts emerged from this period that could be described as histories, chronicles, annals, or memoirs, the majority of the book was based on archeological finds. The main problem was that the material was not very illuminating on a human level. It was factual enough, but descriptions of the average height of skeletal remains and the dimensions of building foundations make for very bland reading. If that's your cup of tea, give it a go.

Finished these recently (1878/79):

Victor Cherbuliez- Jean Teterol's Idea (a peasant is kicked by a nobleman and becomes wealthy so he can come back and fuck with him)
Hector Malot- Nobody's Boy (Orphan is happy doing tricks with his dog for money until his family is found and they turn out to be thieves and grifters)
Paul Heyse- Tales from the German
Anthony Trollope- An Eye for an Eye (man becomes engaged to a lower class woman, but then his rich uncle takes him in and he decides he'd rather have the woman as a mistress)
Octave Feuillet- The Diary of a Woman (Woman tries to maintain the good name of her suicide friend)
Benito Perez Galdos- Marianela (A homely girl devotes herself to a brilliant young blind man, but when he regains his sight she dies rather than let him see her)

He was a bit elitist or at least wanted to lift everybody of teh race up to a certain point rather than celebrate themselves

Darryl Pinckney argues in a couple recent essays that Black politics has room for both Washington and DuBois.

xp I could see those all being separate plotlines in a single novel

lol

room for both Washington and DuBois. Yeah, that's why I said (as Du Bois saw it). He was a dynamic writer, and sometimes way ahead of the curve insight-wise, but hardly the last word on what should/could be done.
Aimless on Barbarians to Angels makes me think of Updike on Vico and Herder, a warmed-over but useful collection of lectures by Isaiah Berlin (who 'pulls many dusty name from the library of his mind"):

(Berlin) shows a power of creative assemblage mostly toward the end, when, in a piece of original speculation, Vico's relativism is linked to the forgotten disputes of sixteenth-century jurists as they sought to recover Roman law in its presumed purity from its medieval and Byzantine accretions..."The more faithfully the despised medieval accumulation was removed, the stranger the classical world appeared: if anything, it was the alleged monkish distortions that gave it such affinity to the ideas of later ages as it seemed to have." Here, in the researches of once heated controversy, lie the seeds of historical relativism; the scholars themselves, though without the generalizing power of a Vico, were brought to perceive that languages and institutions have "their beginnings, progress, corruption, end."

425 BCE to 800 BCE

oops, correct that to CE, not BCE

I finished Fernanda Melchor's Paradais; it's fair to say that if you liked Hurricane Season, you'll like this -- it's even more gruesome, to the point of being lurid maybe, and her style, while it's developing more, it still very much a signature -- if you were put off by the style of HS, you won't find much to help you here. But her ruthlessness about how poverty and helplessness play out among people without anything to look forward to is rich. I'm a fan, even if I could hardly bear the ending.

Now onto Jazmina Berrera's Linea Nigra -- I'm making peace with living in this tide of memoirs, and she's a good writer, very much in the Euro-discursive-citation mode that Pitól uses, and Jergovic & a lot of Serbian/Croatian writers -- weaving things she's reading & has read into her story of her pregnancy & the earthquakes that happened while she was pregnant. For me her style takes some warming up to -- but as I say I'm making peace with memoirs, and 1/3 of the way through I've connected with her voice enough to think: yes, she's good. The pacing of that first section is really great.

I'm still reading the long refugee book NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS. It's not enjoyable, but it's fair to note that as the book has progressed, it has improved. The bad poetry has lessened, the prose has become somewhat sharper, and the book is making stronger observations, about the management of space in a carceral environment.

> Anthony Trollope- An Eye for an Eye

have been meaning to read some trollope for a while. and this sounds like a good start. also the intro suggests it was delayed because it's siilar to Gaskell's Ruth which got bad reviews. and the wikipedia page for that says it shares themes with The Scarlet Letter. so there's another 3 things to read...

If you do like An Eye For An Eye, try The Way We Live Now.

Trollope was so prolific in the 1870s--usually at least two big novels a year, plus travel writing about Australia and South Africa and a book about Hawthorne. I like almost everything I've read.

Anybody: good collections of book reviews??

I usually read A Long Trollope Novel a year. I usually recommend The Way We Live Now as a start.

I'm really liking Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings

Dow, I don’t know if you’re speaking toward collections of reviews by different authors, but a recent collection of both short form and long-form reviews and essays that I enjoyed is Robert Glück’s Communal Nude

(i looked up Trollope on the penguin website to see if they had a complete set of *ebooks* of the Penguin Classics Barsetshire novels but it looks like they don't do Barchester Towers, although they do as a Vintage Trollope, but only the Classics version will come with intro and notes. maddening.)

https://www.penguin.co.uk/search-results?q=trollope+towers&tab=books
four different versions. what is the point?

Dow, I don’t know if you’re speaking toward collections of reviews by different authors, but a recent collection of both short form and long-form reviews and essays that I enjoyed is Robert Glück’s Communal Nude

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table)

Iain Banks, The Quarry. Supposedly Banks didn't know he had cancer till the book was almost finished so it's curious that one of the main characters is dying of cancer, and largely uses his remaining time to fulminate about what a shitshow the world and the human race is. The narrator is a teenager with aspergers, a typical Banksian character. The rest of the cast are old uni friends of the cancer patient gathered for a last reunion, they're a pretty unlikeable bunch for the most part, there's supposedly a mystery about a lost videotape but it doesn't really come to anything. Overall, disappointing.

the only one i haven't read, i think. and the one about whisky.

my Culture rereads seem to have stalled at Excession

These are mostly older book reviews and longer essays, but the Dwight Macdonald collection Masscult and Midcult is pretty good.

Thanks for that---I've never read him, but came across promising mentions from back in the day: Marxist but not too reductive, right? Also convivial enough.

I've waded into Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman. Only 100 pages in and I've decided the best approach for me is not to get twisted up in trying to sort out its 'cast of thousands', but simply to read it as a series of sharply observed vignettes connected through a complex matrix of shared reality. I'll certainly miss many of the elements that Grossman intended his audience to understand, but that was always a given, since his audience was made up of his Soviet-era contemporaries who'd lived through the revolution, civil war, famine, purges, and a nightmarish world war mostly under Stalin.

Marxist but not too reductive, right? Also convivial enough.

Like many mid-20th century literary Marxists, the Marxism mostly serves the function of allowing him to ignore politics as a mostly solved problem and focus on more fruitful topics such as style and bitchy putdowns.

After owning it for years I started Gwendoline Riley's SICK NOTES because I was going to an event featuring her. The writing is surprisingly quite good, better than that in her debut (COLD WATER) as far as I can recall. ('Surprisingly' because that debut didn't leave me with a terrific impression.)

Thompson, Escape from Model Land
Bosch, "You Are Not Expected to Understand This"
Gosse, Gossip in a Library

I had to read Life and Fate (a slog, I thought) in grad school when it was impossible to find; now the NYRB has republished most of Grossman's fiction. I may give it another go.

I figure that by not concentrating on sorting out the multifarious relationships among all the characters I'll reduce the effort needed to read Life and Fate by about half.

I reread John Millington Synge's play THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD (1907).

The language remains a delight. The basic character of the running joke, that Christy appeals to people because he's supposed to be a murderer, comes through strongly. Elements of farce and rather caricatural dynamics (Christy getting scared immediately after he's said something brave - rather like a Warner Bros cartoon character).

I continue to find the last private dialogue between Christy and Pegeen terribly beautiful, one of the greatest pages of romantic exchange I've ever read by any writer - notwithstanding what happens in the rest of the play.

i love 'species of spaces'. i think that i first heard about perec and 'life a user's manual' from ilx back in the early 2000s.

i've been reading some poetry, 'fall garment' by paul cunningham, some beautiful, curt images, but he sometimes employs a slightly flashy, trick ending to the poems that i don't like so much. also read a bit of 'run off sugar crystal lake' by logan berry just now (you can borrow it on archive.org as the press don't seem to post to the uk), which i am enjoying

i started reading 'solenoid' by mircea cartarescu, which has been getting some very positive reviews - it's long and i'm only about a quarter of the way into it, but i'm not completely sold. some of the descriptive writing feels a little sophomoric to me and the surrealist passages... i don't know, they don't completely come off. i'll persist with it though. there is one set piece near the beginning where the protagonist reads a long poem in public for the first time and it goes down very badly, that was excellent

i also read 'diego garcia' by natasha soobramanien and luke williams which i think has been posted about on one of these threads before. i didn't care much for the style and while some of the political content about the chagos islands was fine, i don't think it was well developed or integrated - the first time i read about what happened to the dogs on chagos i was appalled, the fourth or fifth time i read about it i was bored.

been going through 'bonding', short stories by maggie sciebert and i read 'gordon' by edith templeton, flicked through the new translation of the kafka diaries and i also got the dril tweets book

i like to blame my broken reading rhythms on the pandemic but much as i love reading grand, endless literary novels i've had trouble maintaining focus on any of them for most of my adult life, so this year i'm attempting to break the pattern by starting off with straight trash — the thomas harris hannibal books, inspired by my recent rewatch of the nbc hannibal. a few surprises: 1) i've read red dragon before but i wasn't aware that some of my favorite lines from the show are straight up harvested from it ("he bore screams like a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone"); 2) silence of the lambs, whatever its faults, is a marvel of sustained tension and atmosphere where it feels like nothing good will ever happen; 3) all of the great adaptations of these books are at least somewhat surreal and psychedelic, even manhunter feels like it's walking on the edge of unreality, but the books are extremely literal and have a proto-csi "forensic investigators doing their jobs just so well" quality (which made red dragon great raw material for mann tbh) except in isolated moments (the red dragon talking to dolarhyde, any description of buffalo bill's basement)

i'm on hannibal now and it opens with one of the most ridiculous and offensive drug war raid scenes i've ever encountered and i kinda hope it continues to be that stupid

Reading the newest Krasznahorkai, bc I am a parody of myself

just finished
Robert Thorogood - DEATH COMES TO MARLOW , unlikely people investigate a murder premise from the guy who created the death in paradise tv show. it was okay.
just started
Seishi Yokomizo - THE HONJIN MURDERS

Over a rare pint of bitter I went back to Declan Kiberd's perennial INVENTING IRELAND (1995) and at last properly read the chapter on Bernard Shaw's SAINT JOAN, which corresponds well enough to what I remember seeing on stage, and most of that on Yeats's THE WINDING STAIR, which doesn't correspond so well to what's great in that collection.

Just started Kristin Lavransdatter, 1100 pages of one woman's life in the 14th century \o/

I've been clicking through a netgalley advance of Ian Penman's book on Fassbinder. Some brilliant bits of course - IP is peerless at peering into old postcards, videotapes, fagpacket notes and discerning new constellations. But overall it feels adrift, frittering and noodling through airless, late night free associations through YouTube, wikipedia within a tomb-without-a-view lined with Benjamin, Cioran, Derrida usw. You don't expect coherence, but it feels like it runs out of steam, and the most vivid thread - Fassbinder's frenzy of industry recollected in IP's late-life sobriety and ambivalence - isn't really teased out enough...

I've never seen a Fassbinder film.

Doesn't like IP will help me change that.

Doesn't *sound like!

I do note that he made a BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ of some kind, which even I feel interested in.

You should seek it out, there’s a good chance you might like it and that will be your way in.

After a decade of failed attempts, I took a running jump at WOLF HALL and finally cracked it. It's impressive so far but "best book of the decade" as many of the inside blurbs claim seems like... pushing it.

I'm reading via the (excellent) audiobook and simultaneously reading Ian Rankin's LET IT BLEED in an old paperback. I've never read a Rankin before but it's almost exactly what I might expected it be like (i.e. highly readable but middle-of-the-road).

I read a graphic novel, THE NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE, which is an apocalyptic take on LOST, and I'm just here to tell you it's bad and don't bother.

Just started Kristin Lavransdatter, 1100 pages of one woman's life in the 14th century \o/

― ledge, Wednesday, 1 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

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