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

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).

I also read a few more pages of Bono's SURRENDER: a tribute to Larry Mullen Jr. The book is written, or (as Mark S says) spoken to ghostwriters, with verve and spirit. So much so that it's 550 pages long and I'm still less than a third through it.

O'Casey, in his final essay on contemporary drama (c. about 1964), accuses it of lacking interest in nature and says 'They live in a silent spring'.

This made me think, did O'Casey invent the famous Rachel Carson phrase? No, her book was 1962 - well, did he take it from her? Conceivably. Or is it actually an older, familiar phrase? Or a mere coincidence that they used the same phrase for the same thing?

I have the same hesitations about Calvino.

That makes 3 of us!

Though I think I did warm to the actual city concepts in INVISIBLE CITIES.

the pinefox, a nice association with Keats:

The title Silent Spring was inspired by a line from the John Keats poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and evokes a ruined environment in which “the sedge is wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.”

and I admired The Baron in the Trees too.

See also This Be The Pocket Universe: Post Here When You Realize Or Are Reminded That An SF Title Is From The Canon Of English Poetry

I will finish O'Casey and Bono in due course, but for now I turn to rereading another great Irish Protestant - Elizabeth Bowen's debut THE LAST SEPTEMBER (1929).

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
It could be a parody, but the points of view of the two characters are surprisingly convincing. It is also amazing and wonderful that they are friends. I have been acquainted with the word kip. Lola is a character.

I don't get the feeling Rooney is writing a satire. It's nice to think their are still young people who make friends in college and then keep up an active written correspondence after they move away to different towns, but I'm not sure how common it is.

I started reading "Motherhood" by Sheila Heti, but I gave up on it around the halfway mark. It felt more like aimless ruminations than a novel, and the ongoing dialogue with the I Ching tended to sap what little momentum developed.

I have been acquainted with the word kip

Sergio Pitol - The Love Parade. Fans of Roberto Bolano (except it was written in the mid-to-late 80s, before RB ever got to writing the fiction he became famous for) could love this story of an academic/journalist type going in and around Mexican society to try to 'solve' the mystery around the violent events that took place during a party in 1942. Some of the digressions are wonderful. Anyway, this is the first of a trilogy so I don't know how it will turn out; the next couple are meant to come out over this year and next, so it might be best to get it all when it's out. I can't wait.

That sounds really intriguing.

I'm a Pitol fan but haven't gotten to Love Parade yet, am excited to do so when I get a chance.

having finished his dry as dust yet somehow hilarious autobiography, i'm starting on my first trollope novel barchester towers