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

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.

The recent film of Lost Illusions was very good, made me want to read the book.

Can't resist saying "la crystallisa-tion..." like Jean Claude Brialy on this Serge number

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSUvZ372Vm8

🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0cAWxZzF4E

I finish THE LAND OF SPICES, again. You could say that the formality and austerity of this novel makes its repressed emotion the more poignant.

I read half a chapter of Bono's SURRENDER in which he outlines certain political views. On Northern Ireland, relatively consensual. But saying that he hung out at 10 Downing Street drinking wine with Tony Blair (who drank little) *after* the Iraq War isn't a great look, to my mind. He reports Larry Mullen Jr's uncompromising view that Blair is a war criminal. That rather increases my respect for the drummer.

I'm reading Nick Tosches' biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, *Hellfire*. As ever, Tosches romanticises the idea of the artist as some kind of voyager, bringing back the 'work' from the foul soup of the collective cultural Id (a process in which he is very much entwined, naturally, and why he comes across as over-identifying with the, uh, seedier elements of his subjects' lives). It totally comes at you running off the page though; and his register - Faulknerian, broadly; southern Gothic, more precisely - is perfect for telling Lewis' tale.

Pere Goriot is a book very much worth reading, although it takes old Goriot a comically long time to die.

The Western Lands is probably as close as Burroughs got to autumnal; the Western Lands themselves are the world of the dead. He wrote a few things after that but it's really the closer to his writing career.

That sounds quite good, Chinaski.

I have started reading Dermot Healy's novel SUDDEN TIMES (1999). So far it is, I believe, narrated by a drifting labourer from Sligo.

I started my first Kenzaburō Ōe novel.

The Western Lands is probably as close as Burroughs got to autumnal

That's an interesting take. Trying to think of novels that I would characterize as "autumnal". I guess you mean anticipating one's mortality, striking a valedictory note, something like that? It does seem to have a lot about death in it, but Burroughs as a writer seems to have always been somewhat obsessed with death. Certainly there is still plenty in it that is provocatively juvenile - gross-out jokes in deliberate bad taste, fascination with all things creepy and gory - and it doesn't feel like Burroughs has mellowed much. The book is not very coherent - it's hard to say why all of this material was chosen as the basis of this particular book - other than these are themes that strike a chord with the author. Burrough's antecedents seem to be writers like H.P. Lovecraft who followed the muse of their own creepy fascinations, which fortunately for them, turned out to be, if not universal, at least prevalent enough in the wider world to gain them a devoted following.

Sweet Dreams Dylan Jones
Oral history of the New Romantics. Took this out thinking I would kill some time over Xmas. Only now getting half way through it. It's pretty long but pretty interesting since it covers way more than the Blitz scene. Gives a lot of background, traces things back to the mid 70s and also looks into magazines etc of the time.
So quite enjoying it.

Not Without Laughter Langston Hughes
Harlem Renaissance connected writer better known for his poetry also wrote some prose which is quite good.
This is about a family just getting by in recently integrated America in the early years of the 20th century. Still pretty far from egalitarian this is focusing on a black family led by women because the men are elsewhere.
I'm getting towards teh end of the book and Sandy the boy who is one of the central characters has just received a letter saying his dad is off to Europe to fight in the war.
Enjoying it . Need to read The Ways of Whitefolks the collection of short stories I picked up a few weeks ago.

Walter Rodney Decolonial Marxism
Been waiting for this fort a while . So need to get it read . Cos it is the only copy in the Irish library system which is really bad.
Set of essays by the Guyanan writer.

I finished Out of the Flames. It starts as a biography of a sixteenth century intellectual and scholar, who began life in Spain as Miguel Seves, but is best known as Michael Severtus. From there it becomes more and more discursive, ranging around in the history of printing, the Reformation, John Calvin's reign in Geneva, medicine, Unitarianism and rare book collecting.

Somehow or other it manages to weave all these threads together and keep the narrative generally fresh and interesting through most of the book. It bogs down a bit toward the end as it moves further from the figure of Servetus and loses some of its depth and focus. Still, it was engaging and informative, which is what it set out to accomplish. Recommended, if the subject matter sounds like something you might be curious about.

Some xposts, but I don’t really think that Burroughs was going for coherence, seems a weird metric to hold him to— he was, despite his renown in the popular press, an experimental writer looking to critique a puritanical and morally bankrupt society, partly by reveling in that very abjection.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s much to admire in Burroughs despite the occasional sense of disorientation. Sometimes the disorientation may contribute to the effect. I don’t necessarily consider him a moral guide though he does take some strong stands in the book. For example: Christianity bad; no-kill animal shelters good.