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

Started reading Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu. A novel written in the form of a screenplay, and a mordant commentary on the options available to Asians in film. Very readable so far.

The narrator's highest aspiration is to be "Kung Fu Guy."

Yu is a good writer

This is my first encounter with his work, but so far I agree.

Have you read Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture? That's Bomb as in The Bomb, A-Bomb, and its effect on culture, also trying for social change via arts, his experiences and others: published in 1968, so still in the thick of it while looking back and forward (or forth).

― dow, Monday, February 27, 2023 2:06 AM (sixteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not read it, no. I'm pretty sure the name came up elsewhere recently though. May have been in a bibliography . Will put it on my to read list but not sure when that will mean I get to it. Sounds like something I would be intereste4d in though.

Reading through O'Casey's PLOUGH & THE STARS once again, I'm inclined to agree with poster Gyac's previous statement that The Covey is a self-parody by the author. The description of the character when he appears probably fits this, for one thing - though O'Casey was over 10 years older than The Covey by the time of the Rising.

I am coming round to the sense that O'Casey does actually agree with what the character says, even though he presents it as a parody. In a letter to the press about the play, he says that he had personally heard 'Jim Connolly' say the same thing as The Covey.

"She complains of the Covey calling sentences of The Voice dope. Does she not understand that the Covey is a character part, and that he couldn’t possibly say anything else without making the character ridiculous? Even the Greeks wouldn't do this. And it doesn’t follow that an author agrees with everything his characters say. I happen to agree with this, however; but of these very words Jim Connolly himself said almost the same thing as the Covey."

Sean O'Casey, letter to the Irish Independent, 26th February 1926.

Vita Sackville-West - All Passion Spent
Rereading Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is a towering work.

O'Casey is a brave, big-hearted writer, with 'generous anger' as Orwell said of Dickens. Or just generosity, much of the time - as in his tributes to Yeats, despite his clash with Yeats over THE SILVER TASSIE; his judgment of Joyce as the greatest of all; his appreciation of Shaw, Synge and so on.

He is more learned than one might think: he has a remarkable range of knowledge of history and literature, internationally. He knows the Irish language and the Gaelic Ireland before the Normans, better than I had thought. He is a stirring, enjoyable, wry writer, a 'fighter' as he says of others like Yeats; especially against ecclesiastical power.

The question mark over O'Casey, for some at least, would be his support for the Stalinist USSR after others had renounced it. He wouldn't have been alone in that - Harriet Shaw Weaver, GBS?, Eric Hobsbawm. I don't yet know enough about this aspect of O'Casey to judge.

I'm now halfway through As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem. It's short. It's clever. It's silly. The effect is rather like a cross between sci-fi and a late 1980s rom-com.

ok i finished the thomas harris hannibal novels (i'm not reading hannibal rising bc hannibal was godawful)

amazing they were able to stripmine that horrible novel for two different visually astonishing and textually intricate adaptations (first half of the third season of the tv show and the largely disliked ridley scott movie (which i loooove))

As She Climbed Across the Table

a definition of "mild enthusiasm": this is the only book i've ever read entirely in a bookstore

My brother gave me Fortress of Solitude more than a year ago, I have yet to open it.

xxpost Brad I cosign w your previous favorable comments on Silence of The Lambs because it's centered by Clarice, whose relating to the girl victims, living and dead, is crucial to the case's resolution and the book's readability: her empathy can't be mine, or the author's, because we're too far from being like her or those girls, but it fuels a tracking device, a throughline of anxious concern, for lack of a better phrase---also, the reader can get attuned. as the veteran crime reporter->novelist is, by her own focus, as a professional as well as a young female from such a background (Hannibal zooms in on this too, taunting this little hick cop, but focused on her and the case, the puzzle, the ever-blurry perp
's traces of acting out; he [H.] of no interest otherwise).
That scene in the girl's house by the water, where Clarice is looking around her room, picking up the costume jewelry box, knowing where the secret button is on such a box, pushing it and finding the photos---

That scene is well-shot in the film. Demme's good.

aside from ratner's red dragon the adaptations are all superior to the original material. silence was def the best book, despite knowing what would happen i found it gripping and stressful

I took a long time to read AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE (1997) for the first time, even though it's practically Lethem's shortest novel. I can hardly explain that. I certainly couldn't have read it in a bookshop (unless I'd bought it and the bookshop had a café that was open all day).

I have read it probably 3 times. I think it's excellent. Aimless's description is sound, though he doesn't mention that it's also a 'campus novel', and has a few other rogue elements.

Finished Hardwick's essays last night. Her field really comes across as the 19th century, for sure (she berates the young in '69 for not giving Zola and Trollope a go). How that strand goes into the 20th century (Thomas Wolfe, West), basically the American fiction that isn't that kind of encyclopedic stuff that is loved on ilx (the line on Pynchon, where she concedes the ambition but hey who could possibly love this more than "Dead Souls"...could've gone trolly when this was put to the reader in '76, but by and large she stays in her lane.) Or Faulkner. You know she has read it all but the essays that got to me were the ones on Melville and the appreciation of Jude the Obscure, specifically the women in it. Her passion for Henry James. She doesn't do foreign fiction but oddly there is a piece on Brazil, (her essay on the country are reviews of both "Rebellion in the Backlands" and "Tristes Tropiques"). Her piece on prose as written by poets (in a review of Bishop's collection of prose) is different from Sontag's take and yet has its own distinct character.

And she loves her friends. Mary McCarthy gets two write-ups. She kinda has a distaste for the practice of almost all biography (bar Boswell, which I have a copy of and will read later in the year). So the review of another acquaintance's (Edmund Wilson) biog writes itself.

Lots of little things like this throughout. Raced through it.

Another dimension here is that for a short time she covered some politics (Watts, King, Chicago in '68). It sorta goes into the 70s but she then stops, pretty much. This also goes into a piece on film (covering Kramer's Ice and Warhol's Trash, what a pairing lol) (tell me you don't watch filmin the weirdest of ways and this is the kind of thing that comes out top). She is hitting on something where she talks about the reluctance of promising (in italics in the text) young people to have children. And that's pretty much the last we hear on matters other than fiction. In the end this stuff feels a bit out of place but it's good to see it all here.

Picked up Aug 9 - Fog by Kathryn Scanlan for a pound in my local Oxfam yesterday. It's a very short selection of edited sections from an 86 year old's diary she bought in an estate auction. A quiet, charming, sad little book that I spent a very nice half hour with. Not as good as Kick the Latch which is her recent – and very, very good – sort-of-novel about horse riding/training, but still glad I bought it.

Inspired by this thread I borrowed Interior Chinatown from the library and am 100 pages in and thoroughly enjoying it. m

Hardwick's short critical bio of Melville I also recommend.

In Thomas Wolfe, West, who's West?

Nathanael West?

Rebecca West?

Nathaniel

Rock, of the Westies

Think I read all novels of Wolfe in high school and don't remember a word; read all novels of West later (after the drug years) and remember him pretty well---might check that Library of America collection inc. shorter works etc: good? Also, is Wolfe worth another (sober except for caffeine) shot---?

Nathaniel West, that is (Rebecca was not American and I think of her more as nonfiction writer so didn't occur to me that Hardwick might've included her w Wolfe).

Wolfe had the very American trait of doing everything to excess. He figured that if something was worth mentioning it was worthy of being described at full length and the description should be embroidered and spotlighted and given a fanfare. For most contemporary readers it gets very tiresome.

Speeding through the Louise Penny series of Inspector Gamache books, after catching Three Pines on Amazon Prime. Reading out of sequence due to library availability. On the 15th book, _A Better Man_, now. Love that each book, although dropping familiar character bits for continuity, works up the mystery and side plots in different ways, so it doesn't seem stale. At the core of the series is an optimism about humanity that I find very, very refreshing.

gogol/pynchon is a perceptive comparison regardless of the judgment tbh

It is.

I'm now reading another short novel, The Vet's Daughter, Barbara Comyns. In just 30 pages, using simple language delivered by a young and very naive narrator, she's established an atmosphere of menace and cruelty that you know will lead to a very dark outcome.

I read Comyns' The Juniper Tree, graced with one of the better wtf endings I've read.

The Vet's Daughter is excellent. Is there a parrot or am I misremembering?

The parrot is there. It laughs.

I finished N.K. Jemisin, described on the SF thread.

I read more O'Casey reviews. He likes Shaw and Gregory, other Protestants. He points out how poorly Gregory's memory and legacy was served by the Free State which, it seems, promptly demolished her house. As it happens someone else recently told me they'd gone to Coole and found the house vanished and how sad it was.

One review of GBS reports what sounds a eugenic scheme to exterminate people who are weak and unproductive. I'm not surprised that GBS would come out with such things as provocations, or whatever. I'm more surprised that O'Casey seems to endorse it. I feel that I'm missing something; that O'Casey is being thoroughly ironic, or something. This was 1934, so O'Casey was already 54; he wouldn't exactly have qualified for one of the young and strong to be spared extermination for long. It's puzzling and troubling.

I just read The Winter of our Discontent for the office book club and absolutely loved it.

I read that as a a teen and even now, decades later, the ending sentence still pops up in my mind every now and then and I get choked up.

Sorry gyac I had to put "Score!" down - not because I wasn't enjoying it (I think it's glorious) but I'm going to save it for a sunny holiday (if I ever have one again).

It reminds me a bit of Dumas, everything is ladled on so thick it should be collapse under its own weight of ridiculousness - but it's hard to put down. Very sound, unpredictable plotting; the villains are hissable but still great company; cleanly written and lots of good jokes - a good novel. How does it stand amongst the Cooper ouevre?

Also, I picked up the NYRB edition Warlock at the library - I don't know if I'll read it, but if I pick up a book and feel the need to read the first few pages without stopping, I'll take it home and see. Also trying to give Song of Solomon another go.

It’s pretty solid! It’s a later one in this series so it’s full of references to and has characters appear from earlier books. Where did you leave off? Would be happy to rec any others if you are interested, but would need more specifics of what you’d like?

I got about 200 pages in. I have a toddler and my reading gets done in dribs and drabs, so I’m saving it for a holiday when I can binge it in a couple days. In ten years, possibly.

I filled in some of the character blanks with my distant memory of the Riders miniseries. I guess that’s the big one to start with?

James Cahill's first novel Tiepolo Blue, is about a 43 year old professor of art history who spent his entire adult life in Peterhouse College at Cambridge. His life then completely disintegrates when he's pushed into (and gradually embraces) the world outside of academics. The book is comprised of passages of academic decorum and interesting descriptions of classical and rococo art interspersed with wild scenes of transgression and ultimate degradation. It is supremely weird but is very readable

I go on with Sean O'Casey's essays. Fortunately no other essay has hinted at the crazy eugenics mentioned in the one essay on GBS. On the contrar, elsewhere O'Casey speaks up boldly for making the most of life, accepting our animal nature, enjoying birds and flowers. He mostly comes across as someone with good, generous values, albeit perhaps a bombastic polemicist. He's knowledgeable, certainly about history and literature.

In a remarkable late (final?) essay he attacks the Theatre of the Absurd including David Rudkin (who would later write PENDA'S FEN), Harold Pinter and others.

In earlier essays he is in 'reply to my critics' mode. Repeatedly, critics, priests and bishops condemn his work, and he rises to the challenge, issuing a pedantically detailed response which trashes their critical statements. It's spirited.

I'm reading and loving Calvino's Mr Palomar. Though I greatly enjoyed The Baron in Trees many years ago, and though should be very much up my strada, I always found Invisible Cities and If... a bit too... ethereal?... in their fabulism for me. This is wonderful though - minutely observed and ruminated episodes of everyday life, like a droll companion to Ponge or a phenomenological M Hulot. Particularly liked the horny tortoises and querelous blackbirds.

I read The Ice Palace. I can see how it might be numinous and captivating, but the magic didn't really work on me unfortunately. Nothing I would say against it really, though under all the poetic mysteriousness it is a rather simple story.

After more O'Casey essays I started on his play, WITHIN THE GATES (1934).