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

I've been wrestling with her for about five years. The Stein, William James, Wharton, Edmund Wilson, and Selma essays are clean, almost whittled; then she offers a sentence that knocks me flat with its perception.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 19 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I am very much enjoying. I guess I wasn't expecting Hardwick to rely on biography as much.

vineland
much more accessible than I assumed it would be

Gyac, I have always felt that there is some kind of 'protesting too much', or 'deliberate overcompensation' quality about the Covey character - a caricature of a doctrinaire socialist, in a play (allegedly socialist) by a socialist playwright; as though he is trying to re-balance the work by inserting a damaging caricature of the position with which he himself is associated.

I suppose as if I were to write a story featuring a dogmatic 'Corbynista' who went around singing 'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn' and attacking 'Kieth'.

Which I'm afraid I couldn't bring myself to do, even if I had the talent to write a story.

But there could, as you say, be other, more specific reasons for it.

Now starting What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 by Jospeh Roth, translated by Michael Hoffman. Have never read any Roth before but this looks like it'll be a nice introduction.

I've read a lot of Roth but not this. Thanks.

xp if you read the piece I linked (by a communist historian!) he outlines that O’Casey seemed to have an uneasy relationship with his own politics

Yes, now I see the whole article, it does look important. I didn't know of Prof Greaves' book.

I have a whole book of rather dry non-fictional writings by O'Casey that I have never got through. Much of it, as I recall, is his memoirs of the Citizen Army.

I must get round to reading O'Casey's RED ROSES FOR ME.

I once did a work-experience on a stage set for a production of Juno and the Paycock at the Bradford Playhouse (which incidentally is the building where the Labour Party was born). I remember the main set was a dirty stained walls room in a slum type setting and I can't remember much else. I did read a lot of the play at the time, but can't remember anything about it other than the style of dialect tbh. It was fun though, because seeing the set completed and lit up was a good moment. And for 3 days we had some pleasant afternoon drinking sessions in the theatre bar.

I like this story.

You just managed to avoid inserting a devastating attack on Kieth in the parenthesis.

it's pretty hard to link the namesake with Kieth, the former wanted a coalition of left-wing groups, not to kill them all!

The Blacker The Berry Wallace Thompson
Harlem Renaissance era novel about the misadventures of a snobbish young lady who was born too dark skinned for her own snobbery. She's tried University in LA then moves to Harlem NYC where she becomes a maid for an actress. She disdains dark skinned people despite being one and tries to avoid their company. Winds up in an affair with a very mixed race costume presser who danced with her when the actress she works for goes to a Harlem club with her (actress) brother and takes her along. Actress is a white woman playing a mulatto in an update of Carmen.
Anyway it's very readable if you can deal with race snobbery being a central theme. I think it reflects its times, was first published in 1929. I've had it sitting around as a library loan for way too long and thought I would eventually start it, Now read about 3/4s of it in a day or 2. Good book.

Nt Without Laughter Langston Hughes
I think this is about the only novel by the Harlem Renaissance poet. Got this out middle fo last year too I think and only just getting back to it last week .
this is about a family growing up in poverty in the South. The father is a travelling blues singer who just ups and leaves at one point, leaving a mother in bad health who is being looked after by her mother who does washing for all the white folks of the area. She also has to look after the couple's young son who is at the local school where all the black kids have to sit at the back of the class.
Writing is pretty good. I have picked up a collection of short stories by Hughes too that I need to read.

23 Things they Don't Tell YOu About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang
Critique of capitalism by UK based Korean Economist.
Told in short chapters in pretty anecdotal plus explanation style.
Picked this up a while back, started into it. Got sidetracked into something else. Found it again in my toilet reading pile and now going to try to finish before starting into

Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
which I was waiting to get as an interlibrary loan for most of last year then gave up and bought at the start of the year. Then had to finish up a load of books I'd had out of the library too .

Also wanting to get into Montaigne Complete Essays which I've meant to read for years and recently found out it was in local library so got last week .Plus books on Flamenco and Blues I got from a different library locally on the same day.
& Bought the Mark Lanegan book on having Covid and a Clinton Heylin book on songwriting and plagiarism and things which I picked up in Dublin last weekend

classical mechanics: the theoretical minimum by leonard susskind and george hrabovsky

i was a math major but never took any physics, something i occasionally regret. this slim book, part of a series based on a popular online course, has been a very nice read so far

23 Things they Don't Tell YOu About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang

if you like this (or maybe even moreso if you don't...) and are still curious about the east asian growth model (industrial policy, land reform, capital controls) after reading it, i can't recommend highly enough How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

cool, thanks

Finished the scary alien book by Clark Coolidge, now have “Scattered Brains” by Darrell Gray as my morning reading, and will certainly finish Purdy’s “The Nephew” before I fall asleep in the next day or two.

I'm slowly listening through the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, narrated to perfection by Stephen Fry. Just finished the Final Problem. Next up: The Hound of the Baskervilles.

i have seen about half a dozen adaptations of H of the Bs and it has yet to click for me. is it real, or imagined? dunno. maybe i should read the actual thing.

The real prob with H of the B is that Holmes disappears from the central section of the book, and his surprise return to the narrative is not in the least surprising.

The opening section of the Hammer adaptation is Terence Fisher and the crew at their best, a riot of colour and intensity that doesn't come at all from the Conan Doyle story.

I love Hound of The Baskervilles, easily my favourite Doyle, but of the hundreds of film & TV adaptations, I haven't seen a single one that rises above mediocrity.

I wrote this about it when I read it five years ago: https://centuriesofsound.com/2018/05/14/sir-arthur-conan-doyle-the-hound-of-the-baskervilles/

There's a Folio edition of THOTB with very pleasing Edward Bawden linocut illustrations that can be picked up for a tenner or so, I recommend it.

More Women Than Men, Ivy Compton-Burnette - Life in a girl's school, featuring homosexuality amongst two genders. Feels very much a play in being almost entirely dialogue; a lot of Wilde in its DNA, with all these witty aphorisms, but sometimes the sentences are so strangely built that I might as well be reading Shakespeare. The kind of book where when asked if she had a good trip, a character will not reply "yes" but "I'm afraid the ayes have it in that regard". Have to finish it by Thursday (book club selection) and so reading it in big chunks, which does get wearying; think I'd enjoy it more in small doses, where the overwhelming eagerness to be clever didn't stick out so much.

THOTB is much more enjoyable to read when you're familiar with Conan Doyle's comforting, comic prose style. It's a terrible choice as a "my first Sherlock Holmes book" because the plot is stupid.

Unrelatedly - I saw the Jeremy Brett "Golden Pince-Nez" on ITV4 last week. It's just terrible. I've never seen a Brett episode before, and I know he's supposed to be an acquired taste, but I was surprised how... bad and stagey he was.

Oh, I'm reading Kate Atkinson's "When Will There Be Good News", which starts with the usual family massacre and promises to be good fun.

I have been slowly slowly getting back into the rhythm of reading again post-pandemic, mainly because I have been going into the office and reclaiming some reading time on the bus.

I started by tackling some easier-to-read things like the classic run of Alan Garner from the 60s and some less-good stuff in that line ("The Giant Under the Snow" by John Gordon which has a few fab scenes, like when the kids are flying over Norwich but is mostly a bit pish and flat) ("Seaward" by Susan Cooper which has virtually none of the power of the Dark Is Rising); some detective-y thrillery things, Len Deighton (shock news! "Horse Underwater" is nowhere near as good as "The Ipcress File" and frankly neither is much good) and Simenon and the like. These things are distracting enough but I'll never really love them, which I understand is a failing on my part. I read my first Le Carre which was clearly very well written but I've already forgotten its plot and its title, it had spies and that.

Had a good haul in Foyles sale, for a quid each. "Spiritual Choreographies" by Carlos Labbe is a nebulous and non-linear affair which (roughly speaking) tells the story of a pop group / rock band. It references Felt - one of the characters only listens to Bach and Felt. What is it about Felt that seems to inspire people? I like them well enough but have never been able to hear it. "The Endless Summer" by Madame Neilsen, the story of a non-trad family through the 70s to roughly the present - Neilsen has a really impressive way of elaborate digression, pulling focus to different times and places in a way that I found a bit thrilling; I found a real emotional tug in understanding the fate of the handsome one, and the one who was never really a boy but didn't know it at first, and so on.

I am usually a one book at a time kind of person but am currently enjoying Mephisto's Waltz by Sergio Pitol, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter by Rosemary Walkdrop (these two represent the other half of my four for £4 Foyles find) and On Overgrown Paths by Knut Hamsun, billed on the back cover as KH's apologia for being publicly in favour of the nazi occupation of
Norway - a third of the way in he is mostly achieving a kind of befuddled indignation but he's under house arrest and not allowed to read the newspapers that are starting to contain news of what actually happened during the occupation. I look forward to the apologia. Interesting in the context of the current Telegraph / Today Programme manufactured freakout about cancel culture.

Waldrop, that says.

"giant under the snow" terriifed me as a kid (imagining being menaced by squeaky men made of leather as i waited for the bus!) but yes the plot is a but of a succession of more or less scary episodes which he doesn't tie together very well. his follow-up ("the house on the brink") scared me even more tbh and is i feel more effectively relentless

i never got on so well w/susan cooper but i didn't read her till much later

The Puffin cover for Giant Under the Snow is all-time tho

https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Maitland-Gordon-Giant-Under-the-Snow.jpg

jonquil bill and arf

Yeah that was the edition I picked up for 50p and was v excited to do so. I was a bit hard on it, the descriptive passages concerning Norwich / Norfolk are good, especially in terms of crumbling bits of English cities in the 60s / 70s (v Elidor, of course).

vineland
much more accessible than I assumed it would be

It's probably his most accessible book. It's probably his biggest disappointment, coming after GR. On reread, it wasn't bad, but still very light in comparison.

i like vineland more on every reread, and GR less tbh

I have an inordinate fondness for Inherent Vice, which has both the SoCal hippie vibe I dig and some truly beautiful passages.

antony maitland art on the Giant btw

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=antony+maitland+illustrator&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images

ooh nice, i like his work for leon garfield a lot and never made the connection

Soden, Jeoffry, The Poet's Cat
Podhoretz, Ex-Friends

I didn't know that Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist, is the son of Lucien Carr, who was in the social circle of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac in New York in the 1940s. Lucien Carr, who was not the best mind of his generation, killed a man who had been infatuated with him and who had been stalking him, and dumped the body in the river. Kerouac helped him conceal evidence. Lucien Carr did time but Kerouac didn't.

Sudjic, Norman Foster

He had a life-long antipathy to the use of capital letters, suggesting that if only Germans had been less partial to their pomposity, they might have resisted fascism more readily.

Graves dismissively suggested that he would rather practise law than be forced to build architecture like Foster's. In response, Foster remarked that post-modernism should be understood as a game to be played in private, by consenting adults.

I quite enjoyed The Alienist. I had no idea about Caleb's parental connection to the Beats and crime.

"Mephisto's Waltz by Sergio Pitol"

Can I borrow sometime?

Had always read about the Carr murder/homicide as response to repeated sexual harassment, but this skillfully delves into documented complexities: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/27/the-queer-crime-that-launched-the-beats/

Near the end, the author says, What actually prompted Carr’s stabbing in Riverside Park that August remains a mystery. But this account of adjustments made likely fits well into his book,Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall.

When Carr died, I read that he became a longtime AP editor, known for his advice to get a good draft and then delete the first graf---which has worked for me sometimes, seeing my original opener as a crutch.

(Delvings incl. how this murder and related matters figured in writing of Kerouac, solo and with Burroughs, also Ginsberg and Gore Vidal.)

app to xyzzz___: sure!

xp, not app.

xp, not app.

xp, not app.

xp, not app.

I am good at internet

I've seen that happen twice in the past few days, to posts by presumably different ilxors (both on ilm, I think).

Twice before this.

I found Mephisto's Waltz good but sometimes hard going; I strongly recommend going forward to the Trilogy of Memory if you find Pitól's manner even a little engaging. The whole trilogy is utterly marvelous.

I finished A Brief Histoy of Seven Killings by Marlon James, the Booker Prize winner from Jamaica in 2015. I listened to it. It was narrated by multiple actors, but many of them were really hard to understand. I liked it but I'm not sure I really understood the essence of it.

The audiobook of Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is great, and I'm enjoying listening to Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize