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

only if you watch it tho

Good to know. I expect the novel will also be centered around the Prince and his circle, but at least his commentary won't be dubbed staccato.

one of the great extended scenes in film history!

is it an hour long slomo of a dog skin rug falling from a window?

I hope not, I liked the dogs!

Perry Anderson (hope Mark S will appreciate that reference) wrote that the novel THE LEOPARD is the greatest historical novel of mid-C20 Europe. I believe he called it 'a glittering jewel on a pile of trash', the trash being other historical fiction.

B-but what about The Bethrothed? Recent translation is good, I've read*. Maybe he meant relatively recent historical novels, not ones that are themselves historical/considered Classics.
*This is appealing, and not paywalled at the moment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/italys-great-historical-novel

Betrothed, yes (even though it sounds wrong)

I watched The Leopard, enthralled, for the third time last Memorial Day weekend.

Actually, the film deepens the novel.

Read Mansfield Park for the first time. A reactionary and humorless text. All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs Dickens would have had some fun with 40 years later.

There's a certain sad fatalism in The Leopard, relating to some half baked ideas of the "essence" of spirit of southern Italy and its incompatibility with modernity. Get a lot of that in Portuguese fiction as well. It's an insiduous and damaging worldview, but I'll admite quite seductive in fiction.

Guess that's relating what the people around Lampedusa were saying iirc. Proust does something similar in his portraits of both reporting some of these views and making it seem weak, like Anderson's quote, in the way that class of people have the confidence of making pronouncements with little to back it.

Read Waste by Eugene Marten over the weekend - a short and nasty account of a necrophile janitor working in a big office block. Shades of Dennis Cooper in it's affectlessness but not quite as good as any of the Cooper I've read so far.

Having seen it pop up in a few threads on this board, I grabbed Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn from the charity shop for a pound. I've only read The Ecstasy of Influence before and that was years ago. Looking forward to seeing what his fiction is like.

I think it's his best novel, though not his most ambitious. If you mean the whole book THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE I'm impressed. That's long - and contains loads of tremendous, fascinating material as well as some weaker.

I'm pretty certain I finished it, but it was a long time ago now - just seen they have it in my local library so will pick it up today to refresh myself.

Read Mansfield Park for the first time. A reactionary and humorless text. All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs Dickens would have had some fun with 40 years later.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek),

Curious -- is this your first Austen?

No I’ve read S&S and P&P. long time ago but I don’t remember them being so priggish and I’m pretty sure they had jokes.

I'm not sure which novel would be my least favorite Austen (I haven't read Northanger Abbey). I do remember liking Fanny Price.

I think it’s silly when people don’t like books because they don’t “like” the characters but she was a bit much!

i had some fun thinking of lady bertram as a reductio of the idea that once you've secured a husband you don't need to do anything - even talk, or think!

While still reading other things, on the train home I started, after decades of not reading it, on W.B. Yeats's verse (?) drama THE SHADOWY WATERS (1906, or did it take decades more of uncertain tweaking?). It's about a pirate ship in a strange ocean.

All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs

I think you may be missing the fact that Austen was writing gentle comedy, not romance. When you see that a character is a prig it was her intention. She wants you to see their folly for what it is, but also their humanity. That may not be strong enough sauce for you, but please don't think she admired prigs.

fwiw I greatly liked NORTHANGER ABBEY, tremendously metafictional and playful, full of resonant passages. (Sounds like an abbey.)

Aimless, that's why I asked caek about other Austen. No need to be condescending.

Prynne reading group continues apace— we’re in the late 90s now, so a bit more than halfway through the most recent edition of the collected.

I quit ‘Health Communism’ halfway through— just a terribly-written and poorly-edited book. Very art school Marxism-lite, a genre which I can take if compellingly written, but this is not. Hard pass!

Reading both a proper Coolidge book and taking a first pass on a manuscript of his that my press is going to publish, which is very exciting news— and it’s a cool manuscript, too!

I can't deal with Jane Austen either. I understand that this is probably a me problem. I read a lot of stuff from earlier & later in EngLit but that zone, I just don't care about any of the scenes or people she writes.

i am familiar with (and have enjoyed) the experience of reading a jane austen comedy. mansfield park doesn't aim to be a comedy afaict. it is certainly not, in practice, funny.

fwiw my response doesn't seem to be unsual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_Park#Literary_reception.

I'd like to apologize to caek for my ungenerous and entirely unwarranted response to his post about Mansfield Park.

I am almost done with Piranesi, by Susannah Clarke. It is perhaps somewhat slight, especially compared to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but god damn have I enjoyed it. It's bizarre in all the ways I appreciate. I didn't know anything about the historical Piranesi before reading this, and so didn't grasp at first the significance of the application of the name to the narrator.

Susanna *

I loved Piranesi. I listened to the audiobook read by Chiwetel Ejiofor. It was beautiful

History of the Hanged David Anderson
History of the Mau mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s.
Some turns of phrase have had me wondering if the author is fully decolonised. Though I guess the idea fo end of empire may be something that would be in the air of the time. Just does strike me that the author may be a bit too white to have a perfect perspective on the subject.

Animal Land Margaret Blount
a survey of the appearances of animals in fantasy books. Written in 1974 so possibly a bit dated. She has some interesting points of view cropping up in passing that do make me want to learn more about the author.
I think this was in the bibliography of something but can't see what. Either taht or turned up in comment in a podcast. Was it one of teh books being read by hosts or guest on Backlisted or something.

Tim Lawrence Love Saves the Day
I'm finding this pretty interesting so finding it a pain that I keep semi dozing off while reading it. THink I'm doing a lot of early morning or late night reading but trying to get through this.
I think I'm in 1977 at the moment, the Record Pool that David Mancuso set up has just falen apart and been replaced.
Anyway, finding it a bit frustrating cos i do want to get through this and somebody else has it on order so it needs to go back next week. Ho hum.

I am now reading at least four different books because I started rereading Raymond Carver's WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE (1981), in a Harvill edition no less.

It's been a very long time and I remember the outcomes of none of the stories. I like the stories. I like the skewed dialogue (closer to DeLillo than people might think) and quite appreciate how Carver repeatedly generates weirdness, incongruity, in seemingly normal settings.

Carver writes a lot about drinking and alcoholism. I even find this a bit of a limitation. As though he was not a 'great writer who writes about drinking', as I'd like to think, but 'great alcoholic writer whose book is mostly about alcoholism'.

The story 'The Bath' is the one about a cake being made for a boy who is then sent into a coma in hospital. I believe it featured in the film SHORT CUTS. The ending, where the mother receives a telephone call, seemed to be ambiguous: was it from the hospital or the baker? But today I realised that it was from the hospital, the call would be from her husband. So really it has to be the baker. Which would make it a more black-comic ending, less a potentially tragic one.

never thought about that!

can't believe no one's posted this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BATPzXjmV_s

16 years or so on from reading The Bath for the first time - or "A Small, Good Thing" as it was called in Cathedral - and I'm still in love with the lack of the word 'on' in that opening line:

"Saturday afternoon the mother drove to the bakery in the shopping centre."

Making my way through The Ecstasy of Influence and largely enjoying it.

I do, however, have The Recognitions by Gaddis waiting for me at the library so might have to make a start on that pronto. I've never read any Gaddis (outside of an interview or two) so not sure what to expect.

Years ago I read the versions of those Carver stories before his editor ruthlessly chopped them up. The Bath in particular I remember being much less cryptic but also far richer (and it ends similar to the adaptation in Short Cuts). I should compare them again some time.

The version titled "A Small Good Thing"

So is there a book that contains early, pre-editor drafts of these stories?

They are in the Library of America collection of his complete stories. My memory is bad, I think A Small Good Thing is the only one I actually read, and that's included in Cathedral. However, I do remember his editor Gordon Lish took a lot of credit for shaping the work of Carver as we know it, and that the editing process was excruciating for Carver.

I started Richard Holmes' Coleridge bio because he's the Romantic poet I'm meh about besides "Frost at Midnight" and a couple other things. So far it's splendid, especially the footnotes.

From memory, Pinefox, Beginners contains the pre-Lish versions of some of the most famous stories

I've read both volumes of that Coleridge biography. Magnificent. I read them before taking a long walk across the Quantocks and while it didn't really make me any more of a fan of Coleridge's poetry (Mariner, excepted), it certainly illuminated his whole intellectual project.

from my initial research it looks like one of the best of its kind

Holmes's Doctor Johnson and Mr Savage is one of my v favourite non-fiction books.

Not to be confused with the British military historian Richard Holmes.

Footsteps, his book of capsule biographies disguised as a book about the perils and thrills of writing biographies, is also brilliant.

Shelley: The Pursuit is one of those books I've bought at some point and have lost in the depths of my house, or blindly thrown out in a purge.

The meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth has a John-meets-Paul air of suspense.

Re the pinefox’s point about Carver being an alcoholic who writes about drinking, he was in recovery while he wrote most of his most famous stories, so your perception is on point— but i also think he was a great writer. I love teaching “Cathedral,” always becomes a really amazing discussion of toxic masculinity, grace, and redemption.

Chris L, thanks very much for mentioning the LOA Carver Collected Stories---Looks like it might be a unique kind of anthology:

In gathering all of Carver's stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America's Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish's editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.

Not that the uncut would nec. be better, but I'd love to compare, and might learn something more about the process (there always is more, lorb knows).

Agree. I know, in the vaguest terms, about Lish's alleged role, but to be able properly to compare texts sounds like a good scholarly task.