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

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

I think I enjoyed the correspondence sections of BW,WAY more than the relationships, especially towards the end. She’s so astute at describing the intersubjective spaces between groups of friends and acquaintances, less good at resolving soapy plots

I finished The Vet's Daughter. It stuck it's foot into the territory of the gothic novel, but managed to avoid the sorts of overdone language and over the top plot elements that generally keep me away from gothic novels. I enjoyed it.

I've begun reading a non-fic book centered on Michael Servetus,and the 'heretical' book he wrote in the mid-sixteenth century which was so thoroughly hunted down and burned that it became the rarest book in the world. Servetus was also burned at the stake for writing it.

It's titled Out of the Flames, Nancy and Lawrence Goldstone. It seems to be very well-researched and the prose delivers its load of factual information smoothly and transparently.

I finished the beloved Mating yesterday. More indebted to Bellow than I realized: discursions into philosophy, socialism, the expediency of travel, and so on. I'm not sure the last third worked.

I think about *Mating* often. I think it over-reached itself in the final third but I was glad for it. It's one of those books I remember as much for where I was when I read it. (I read it in Porlock, in a house with a conservatory looking out over the Bristol Channel. Ftr, no one interrupted me while I was reading.)

Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion
Fun novel about the manhunt for the two 'regicides' of Charles I who escaped to New England.

Auke Hulst, The Mitsukoshi Consolation Baby Company
In Dutch, there's no English translation yet.
Overlong at 600 pages, but a great read about a writer who mourns the loss of his aborted daughter by buying a robot girl in Tokyo. In the novel-within-the-novel the writer's alter ego tries to deal with his grief by going back in time to prevent the abortion from happening.

I just started Thirst by Amélie Nothomb, in which Jesus tells the story of his final days.

I think it over-reached itself in the final third but I was glad for it

well put

I read Elizabeth Bowen's THE LAST SEPTEMBER (1929) for maybe the third time. It's very good. One brief description of it could be something like: You know how they say "Jane Austen wrote these comedies of social manners while the Napoleonic Wars raged in the background"? Well, here the war keeps coming into the foreground. (I'll leave aside the possibility that someone will say that Austen was in fact very engaged with the wars.)

Bowen is often stylistically close to Woolf, must have learned from her. But she also does other things that Woolf doesn't do: stark, strange, perverse descriptions, reaching for unexpected words, making the reader work to imagine a place or sight. Her prose can be remarkable. And it moves in and out from that modernist mode to the comedy of manners stuff where aristocrats are talking at cross purposes. Almost literally every page contains fascinating writing or ideas.

It's extraordinary how strongly Bowen makes politics (ie: the violence of the War of Independence) figure in the novel, while the novel is ostensibly focused on other things (cf the coming of age of protagonist Lois). You can hardly imagine an English equivalent. (Maybe if there were a Woolf novel where women's suffrage campaigns were constantly going on, rather than a distant background factor.) The novel seems remarkably perceptive, or honest, or informative, about the Anglo-Irish (especially the gentry or Ascendancy element). I feel, again, that it's a major achievement: one of the key Irish novels of the century, to say the least.

Yeah, it's as if she accepted a mission to flesh out Mrs. Dalloway's dinner parties thirty years later.

Finished a few chaps and more Prynne, of course, and am now dialing between a book of Prynne and Douglas Oliver’s letters and slowly reading Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.

Got a couple of biographies on the go (Ray Connolly's Elvis one, and Janet Malcolm's book on Sylvia Plath) and dipping in and out of David Thomson's very enjoyable 'Have You Seen?' - A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films.

That Malcolm book was one of the best things I’ve read in years. Please let us know how you get on!

It's wonderful! The New Yorker practically published the whole thing in '93. I spent an afternoon photocopying it at the uni library lol

pinefox, I'll seize the opportunity to once again hype catnip doorstop The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen: it's been republished with different covers and intros over the years (the one I read has gold letters on royal blue, with a dumbo intro by I forget who), but I assume the stories are the same. They start in the 1900s, when she was a teen, already unmistakably herself, if more exuberant about it, maybe---and proceed on into the late 60s, a few years before her death. Mostly in England, some on the Continent, a few in Ireland.
She was Anglo-Irish, and one reason for writing so much and lecture-reading tours and other activities was the upkeep of Bowen Court, but the Irish-setting stories are as committed to rigorous truth-telling as her others(incl.compassion and satire and whatever else she comes away with: a sense of justice).
Some effects come from her interest in movies: one of the more obvious examples is a story where the camera keeps going around the edge of a pond, revisiting different points of view, 'til it's time for everybody to leave the park and go back to blackout in WWII London.
(Way way before that, "Dead Maybelle" is the great-grandmother of Greil Marcus's Dead Elvis.)

ILB keeps encouraging me to read her novels, but I still haven't started.

Stendhal - Love. A curious book from the novelist, detailing in several short pieces the contours of love. Part II is like a tour of how love is thought and carried out in several parts of the world (mostly the rest of Europe but the US and 'Arabia' have chapters).

The main point of interest ended up at the way he was attempting to theorise the whole business of it, which bought both Proust (a few remarks on the concept of habit) and Barthes to mind.

I seem to recall he talked about the process of contemplating one’s object of desire through something that he called “crystallization” iirc (in English translation at least), some kind of idea of focusing on a flaw à la a diamond or a grain of sand in an oyster forming a pearl.

I've started reading "The Western Lands" by William S. Burroughs. The other Burroughs I've read are "Naked Lunch" and "Junkie". This seems closer to the "Naked Lunch" end of the scale.

Poster Dow, I own the Bowen COLLECTED STORIES and have never read it, somehow perpetually putting it off. I imagine it's about as good as people say it is.

I'm rereading Kate O'Brien's THE LAND OF SPICES (1941), a novel about a senior Roman Catholic nun running a convent school in Limerick in the 1900s.

Said nun, Helen Archer, is English, and grew up in Brussels. She represents a 'continental European' idea of the church: sophisticated and detached. Meanwhile, the Irish branch is pressured to be closer to Irish nationalism. 'Mother' Helen has various relations with the other nuns beneath her, and with a range of schoolgirls, some of whom could be in an old schoolgirl story (squabbling over a game of rounders, snobbish about their backgrounds, etc). One younger girl, Anna Murphy, is the other main protagonist: a bit of a prodigy and also virtuous.

The novel is elegantly and precisely written, rather than beautiful. It doesn't really seek aesthetic or poetic quality. It has more of the 'functional elegance' of the Catholic world and discourse it depicts. But like 'Mother' Helen it has a sort of generous heart hidden beneath its austere appearance. I'm quite fond of it, though its slowness and subject matter are quite far from current trends.

have you read J.F. Powers?

balzac's deputy of arcis; left unfinished at death, late style perhaps? piling intrigues on top of intrigues, old figures coming out of the wood work all over the place, never really anchoring on any character for much of the book. having a great time

Poster Alfred: I have not read that writer.

I would like to read Balzac. A task I must get to.

"I seem to recall he talked about the process of contemplating one’s object of desire through something that he called “crystallization” iirc"

Yes. I took it as trying to write about love as process, to strip the stuff that can't be written out of it. I can see what Proust (or Barthes) might have taken out from this.

it's a marvellous project to dive into, that only gets richer. little other fiction i find as satisfying at this point. black sheep would be my pick of the longer novels; the vicar of tours of the shorter.

xp that is

Lost Illusions or Pere Goriot are good places to start.