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

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.

― Piedie Gimbel, Sunday, March 5, 2023

Oh, I should have started with Mr. P.! But had already been swept away by takes on Invisible Cities. How I wish I could see it that way, those ways. I like the premise, explained up front: my sense of that is Marco Polo as a kind of mercantile and supposedly peripatetic (at least ramblin' talkwise) Scheherazade, trying to save his client (and perhaps his head) from conqueror's remorse. But way before the pipes are lit, and the conversations become what each one imagines that he says to the other, binaries start getting very apparent: this city is wonderful or at least presentable, this other city (behold!) is not, and o what do you think their relationship is. Answers increasingly fall flat---not always, but so often each point is either arguable, or debatable, on the money, or just a bit (sometimes just a hair) on the nose, page by page (most cities take up a page or less, though the best [in terms of art appreciation, or enjoyment, resonance of a deeper point, or a chuckle) tend to be maybe two pages, or much shorter: a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, an especially appealing word choice (must check some other authors translated by William Weaver).
The characters and the author eventually seem to tire of the trek as well, but cities do run down (and some of these are cities built on top of cities built on top of cities through the ages, though don't think he bothers to mention Troy). So that seems natural, but the end doesn't come soon enough---the second half did revive me more often, though making myself read another of these 160-odd pages each night became exhausting overall: in that sense, it was an unusually handy bedtime read.
On to Mr. Palomar! But not very soon (another binary, sure).