Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?

Westminster Court is in Bayswater (which may mean something to London/UK residents).

I recently finished Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, a rather funny and poignant comedy of manners set among a group of elderly widows and widowers who are year-round residents at a shabby-genteel London hotel that functions as a retirement home. It seems that all residents come from a similar class stratum, though there is much policing of small gradations of propriety and manners between the residents, and much backbiting and tallying of minor slips. The main character, Mrs Palfrey, holds herself to a higher standard than the rest, at least in her own mind. After that, I read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. All three of the Cathers I've read have been solid entertainment.

Taylor and Cather are the right combination.

Digression alert! To pass an idle half hour I did some archaeology into the origins of ILB and thought I'd pass along that the first ever WAYR thread was initiated on ILB's inaugural day: Dec. 17, 2003. It was appropriately titled "What are you reading?" It accrued 83 posts in 64 days, ending on Feb 18, 2004. A duplicate thread titled "What are you reading?" was started on Feb 5, 2004. It accrued 146 posts before ending on March 16.

(I know I was both reading books and posting to ILB back then, but for some reason I didn't post to either WAYR thread.)

On that (also partly prompted by o.nate's post* and because I've thought about it before): it's a shame there isn't an easy way to search the whole 'what are you reading?' thread or database or whatever. I like reading what y'all think about books and searching within posts is a pain the arse.

*Mrs Palfrey is such a gently wise book. I think about it from time to time.

Reminds me of Updike's description of Stead's The Little Hotel. He thinks it's uneven, but as usual, goes an aptly detailed sense of narrative incl. well-paced and placed quotes, that his readers has a good chance to guess whether they might like (dislike, or only appreciate) the book, whatever his verdict. Which is sometimes a matter of tone; I think he just appreciates this one (but I'll check it out at some point) He ends with this:

Miss Stead, an outspoken left winger, enriches her perceptions of emotional dependence with a tactile sense of money as a pervasive, disagreeable glue that holds her heroines fast, in their little hotels of circumstance.

"though dying and penniless, is nonetheless consummately demanding and arrogant; and the Admiral, another decrepit Englishwoman, whoe insufferable manners induce persecution from the hotel servants. These servants, Italian and Swiss peasants in the main, and the touring artistes who perform at the neighboring night club....a Magic Mountain[like microcosm of Europe appears intended, though on a less Alpine scale

Sorry for the typos! Going by Updike's review, This book seems like it could be closer to Cather at her most acerbic, though maybe not as good, than anything "gently wise," though there is also some love in Christina's little hotel! Bad love, but still.

it's one of her slighter works (in every sense) but still worth a read. it was worked up & expanded from an earlier story that appears in her collected shorter fiction ocean of stories which i very much recommend.

Thanks! The original story might well be better, considering some other writers' work-ups.

But what I came back here to say before being reminded of that book, was that I've been struck by one more of Green's enviably succinct comparison of seemingly similar behavior across class lines:

Henry, now suitably trained and experienced, has moved up to management of his father's foundry, and goes with his cohorts to the annual company fete in Blackpool, the location they voted for. He asks an attractive, well-dressed young woman to dance, then is struck by "the corns of her right hand," yeah she's one of your foundry workers, Henry, duh. He hopes to have a little conversation as they dance--a few years earlier, still a teen and finally dancing because girls, he told one, trying to be distinctive, that he liked the chandelier. She: "How nice for the room."
But this one doesn't say anything, as he goes on about the band, the music, the food, the drink, the lighting, everybody having a good time. Finally the music stops, and she does speak: "No more, no more." Goes back to her chair.
Henry thinks this is really cool. After a lifetime of competitive chatter, he and his friends at Oxford (soon before he quit, or washed out), had come to the truly impressive sound of silence.
In Birmingham, and now in Blackpool, this young woman had no doubt heard quite a variety of male bullshit, with Henry's line of inane, generic patter available to young men of her own class as well, via movies and mags, with the smoov young gent, or better yet the cute clumsy wannabee, always good for another dance--until, and maybe she didn't know she'd had her fill 'til she met Henry, she has an honest gut reaction: "No more, no more."
He gets this, also in a gut way (as somebody who had also had his fill of many social expectations, or held out as long as possible, before throwing himself in)(also ended up as something of a hermit drunk).

that should have been ocean of story (singular). here's a review by the other antipodean stead from the lrb if you can get around the paywall.

Though she is rightfully acclaimed and translated into English, I doubt Dulce Maria Cardoso's second volume of essays is going to make it into the Anglosphere, so I'll just share one detail that cracked me up: when she was a teenager in 70's Lisbon, an older neighbour lent her a copy of "Rebecca", with the admonishment "read this so you don't end up marrying the first guy that comes along".

The myth of motherhood : an historical view of the maternal instinct Elizabeth Badinter,
have read teh introduction and first chapter. Looks interesting. I think it was a tiotle I was pointed to by Federici's Caliban and teh Witch.
Seems to read quite well and it is something I want to read.

Black and British : a forgotten history : fully revised and updated with a new chapter David Olusoga,
I enjoy Olusoga and this is one that I've been meaning to read for a while. Tracing the history back to where there is evidence. He has talked about presence of Black Roman Legionaries in the early CE years. Where I'm at in the book he is talking about John Blanke the Tudar court trumpeter after addressing early moves into slavery and pirating the Spanish slave trade.

Nellie Bly Around The World in 72 Days and other writings
late 19th century female stunt reporter who did a transglobal tour in the wake of Verne's Phineas Fogg at teh time the book was a new sensation and tried to beat his record. Her writings, journalistic pieces etc including her being shut up in a mental asylum to expose teh state of the institution.

The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein - I am turned off by the structural and thematic similarity to Last Resort, primarily the use of blackmail to stimulate page-turning and the preoccupation with (and supposed abnegation of the significance of) wealth in gentrified Brooklyn. The pace is frantic: I would have preferred to have arrived at choices (such as implied by the title) and action with more deliberation. Topical research seems to cover the surface and its vulnerable points.

(also ... presumption of either/or regarding the arts and sciences, and characterization as caricature based on related stereotypes ... extrovert or introvert ... and reinforcement of gender roles in marriage)

Peter Weiss - The aesthetics of Resistance (Vol.II)

Along with Nanni Balestrini's 'The Unseen' I can't think of a another novel that uses modernist writing to explore revolutionary politics. This novel was published in three vols, and completed before Weiss' death. It's set in the late 30s and this volume covers the start of WWII with the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression act, as the narrator watches and waits for a passage to safety as a refugee across Paris to Stockholm. There he meets Brecht and he become his researcher on a play about Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, a nobleman who headed a rebellion with peasants. The passages where he delves into medieval/peasant rebellion history as a read into the present day is one of the best things I have read this year (Things just don't go away, unless we all go away). Uwe Johnson, whose Anniversaries also used a more recent history to delve further back into the Nazi past, was also being published at the same time...an amazing time for German language prose that is finally making its way to English.

The 2nd part was finally translated ten years after the first. It can be read in a standalone way (I read the first part about five years ago), I reckon. Don't know when the 3rd part will be published. I hope not to wait as long.

I conclude BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL (2023).

Starting to enjoy this “I conclude” business, the P’Fox.

Today we had the final meeting of Prynne reading group (for now) because we finished the Poems. It took us a little more than a year, with some notable breaks— we didn’t meet at all this past summer, for example. All in all, a really compelling reading experience, and I am excited about our next venture— to read through as much Clark Coolidge as possible.

I should mention that I say “for now” because next year will see the release of Poems 2016-2024, a volume collecting the enormous amount of material Prynne has generated since 2016. It is 616 pages long— the current collected, which spans his career from the late 60s until 2015, is 676 pages long.

I am currently reading Ulf Stolterfoht (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) and Prynne’s Or Scissel, a delightful little book of rhyming lyrics from 2018.

I commence properly reading Luke Gibbons, JAMES JOYCE AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION (2023).

Best revelation to me so far is that Joyce was quite good friends with one Thomas W. Pugh, a socialist who had fought at Jacob's Biscuit Factory in 1916. Frankly I can't understand how I didn't know this already.

No spoilers here, but The Netanyahus: (Interminable Subtitle) certainly ends with a bang!

It's a very strange book. In an afterword the author makes it quite clear that the story was based on a presumably true anecdote, heard directly from Harold Bloom shortly before he died. He stresses that he altered many elements to fit the dictates of storytelling and to protect still-living participants, but he makes it equally plain that he stuck very closely to the original 'true' anecdote when describing the characters and actions of the Netanyahu family, whose arrival dominates the second half of the book. Even allowing for ample comic exaggeration, what he writes about them is jaw-dropping.

Behind the amazing circus-like atmosphere of the Netanyahu's antics, as described in the novel, Joshua Cohen touches frequently on the conundrums he perceives in being jewish in the post-WW2 world. It's rather like a person who has had a wisdom tooth pulled will compulsively send their tongue exploring the empty socket, even when it is sore to the touch. He arrives at no conclusions on that subject, but you can tell it is a tender spot, and ultimately that is where the real value of the novel resides, not in the clowning of the Netanyahus. Though I did enjoy their getting clowned.

I loved The Netanyahus. That description is perfect.

The Sum Of Us Heather Mcghee
I heard a load of podcasts that either had the author guesting or mentioned the book around the time this came out early in the pandemic.
It's the one that raised the point of the attempt to integrate swimming pools in the late 50s leading to white councils shutting them down rather than integrate them. It goes onto look at other instances of the zero sum game that this thought is based around.
Interesting book and I'm glad i finally got to read it. I think I just came across it in another book I copied the bibliography from recently and hoping that things it mentions are going to get read by me in the near future. Alongside the rest of my TBR list.

From the Plantation To The Ghetto August Meier & Elliot Bundwick
1970 published Black History book.
Interesting since its about 40 years plus earlier than most of the ones I've read but seems pretty well informed. I think there's been more research done since but this does seem pretty worth it.
First chapter looked back at W.E.B. du Bois and some West African culture.

Elizabeth Badinter The Myth of Motherhood.
Feminist history of the idea of the maternal instinct. First chapter looked back at the Patriarchy after introduction looked back at tradition of wet nursing in France focusing on 18th century. I heard a podcast talking about similar few weeks ago.
Anyway pretty interesting. Translation reads pretty well.

I read Helen Graham, THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION (2005).

A useful book that gave me facts and chronology that I am afraid I did not previously have.

The story can also be quite harrowingly grim to read.

The author has a somewhat culturalist approach, talking of the war as a clash of identities and cultures. She uses the term 'culture wars', a term extremely common now but not much used in the UK in 2005. I must assume that she was drawing on its use in the US in the 1990s.

A point that emerges, which may be familiar, is the culpability of Western democracies, notably the UK, in appeasing Spanish fascism both during, and well after, the war.

I finished Diane Athill's Don't Look At Me Like That, about being sexually active in midcentury England. I guess I try one of her memoirs, also re-published by NYRB.

I have that checked out! I finished Greek Lessons by Han Kang (I think she is a poet who succeeds as a novelist) and started A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. I fear that this gate will enter as a barrier for a toddler.

The recent elections in Spain made me wonder about the legacy of Franco. It was interesting when that was how identity was factored (as opposed to how it might be now).

I hope it is about more than that.

I am not sure what culturalist means (i.e., what would go into determining culture and political allegiances). I think identity and ideology were based on class in the UK and in Europe and then in the US also on social issues -- sometimes masking differences across race and ethnicity -- that in the UK and in Europe could be perceived as surrogates for their determinants.

In this instance, it would mean something like: a historian focusing on cultural facts and factors as causes, rather than eg: economic facts, or military history, or high politics, or something else.

(I think you mean what determines everyday experience; I think this could vary over time and perhaps once favoring communism or fascism meant as much and was as everyday as being for abortion or immigration or Brexit or against. I haven't read the book and couldn't tell much from this: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-spanish-civil-war-a-very-short-introduction-9780192803771)

This month's book club selection is Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead. This is the second of his we've read (the first being The Nickel Boys). He's an extraordinarily capable writer. The protagonist of this one is the owner of a furniture store in Harlem in the late 50s/early 60. Whitehead uses this character to explore a number of dimensions of Black life while (largely) avoiding reducing the other characters to stereotypes, and there are times when the prose really sings.

I read Silverview, John LeCarre. It was his last complete novel, and might be his shortest at just over 200 pages of generously large print. It took me a couple of sittings - maybe 3½ hours - and I am not a speedy reader. As befits so good a craftsman, it was very competently put together, but in comparison with his many other novels, it was fairly slight. His distaste for recent UK governments and politics was an unstated theme.

I picked up the Sisman biography of Le Carre nicely cheap in a pretty new looking copy in a charity shop last week. NOt really looked at it so far. BUt hope to get it read.

I read Transit by Anna Seghers. I saw the movie previously and found it not particularly interesting, so I probably never would've read the novel if I hadn't been on a trip away from home with nothing else to read but my wife's Kindle which had this novel on it. I'm very glad I did, because the novel is much better than the movie. I don't know why film-makers try to make movies of novels that depend so much on a unique authorial voice. It almost never translates well. The novel on the other hand was very engaging. The narrator is a strange person and its hard to get a handle on his motivations but somehow his actions manage to seem believable, and the action manages to be somewhat Kafkaesque and dreamlike without completely tossing realism overboard. Maybe this is a hasty judgment but I would say it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with Camus's The Plague in the annals of occupation-inspired lit.

The Crazy Iris and other Tales of the Atomic Aftermath, edited by Kenzaburo Oe - Got this decades ago when I was reading a lot of Japanese authors in preparation for a trip to Nippon. Never got around to it, partially of course due to the very grim subject matter. But with Oppenheimer opening so much discourse on here and elsewhere, I felt its time had come - I think with these kinds of tragedies it's very easy to start from a point of "yes yes of course it was terrible we all agree" and then move on to the Philosopher King part of the debate on whether it was justifiable/inevitable without fully digesting exactly how it felt to the people caught up in it, and that's quite dangerous. Kinda like the information in the media that an atrocity has happened doesn't do much to public opinion but pictures do.

Anyway: most of the authors collected, though not all, were actual witnesses to the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings. What comes across above all is the immense strangeness of the event - no one living through it had the slightest notion of what had just happened, ppl unsure of where to flee to, fears of incoming bombings continuing. Small groups of local doctors and nurses totally at a loss as to how to treat the people that need their help. Taken as a whole, the stories also give a strong context for life around that time: the before (a young schoolkid on his way to the mine that the Imperial Japanese regime had ordered his class to work in) and the after (Hiroshima survivors living in basically slum housing many months after the bomb was dropped destroying their homes).

I return to Luke Gibbons, JAMES JOYCE AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION. It talks about montage and is rather a montage of ideas and quotations itself.

Finishing summer with: Miquel de Palol - The Garden of Seven Twilights. Issued on Dalkey Archive, one of a batch of new books from them since the guy who ran it died. A third of the way in. Having this as a book in translation is just about the only thing it has in common with Dalkey of the past. Basically a group of people gather gather in a complex outside a destroyed Barcelona (world shattered by war and conflict) and tell each other stories. So far, so much of an update of Boccaccio but the narrative skill and imagination is nowhere near as strong. It does lots of stories within stories but I think it sacrifices doing one of them well for doing 2 or 3 badly. Very quantity over quality. Its very snappily easy to read (Noveau Roman it isn't); Palol was a poet but concision is lacking, a lot of poets don't do prose narrative but they can do something else with prose. Not quite there at the moment.

There are 500 pages left which I could easily finish in a week or so but so what?

Lorrie Moore has outdone herself with the characterization of Sarah Brink and the Keltjin family. I can't help but love them all. Maybe this is not a good thing and not a marker of good writing, but how enjoyable it is.

xxxp, Daniel. have you read John Hersey's Hiroshima? based on interviews with survivors, it tracks their movements, in alternating third-person narratives, just before the blast and soon after, through the city built around a confluence of six rivers---well, one interviewee was swivelling around in her office chair, about to ask another worker something at the moment of the blast, was trapped in rubble for a long time--but later the German priest makes his way to the hospital, meets her, they have a conversation---I want to read the second edition, when Hersey follows up with more interviews and research.
He says in this first one that Japanese physicists deduced what had happened fairly quickly, from international professional scuttlebutt, despite Manhattan Project security (there was some awareness that Americans and others were working toward a thermonuclear weaoon, like that science fiction story that earned author Clive Cartmill a visit from the FBI), and news reports added more evidence, which the Japanese physicists contextualized clearly enough for public consumption, while the US Gov was still not doing that so much. Hersey's book made a whole issue of The New Yorker, edited very quietly.

The second edition was researched and published in the 80s, I think. The science fiction story reflected some awareness that was around, at least on mid-40s geek fringes (as well as among those with security clearances).

Kenan Malik Not So Black And White.
Quite interesting. Summarises history of race I've read elsewhere. Reasonably well written.vast bibliography to point me to further reading.

dow, I have not, sounds interesting. According to this anthology there's actually a lot of published testimonials from victims, tho who knows how many have been translated.

I read Alex Kazemi’s New Millennium Boyz, couldn’t put it down, really.

It poses some interesting challenges for readers, as it pretty aptly documents the attitudes, patois, and behaviors of suburban white teenage boys in the US around the turn of the millennium. That is to say: the book contains a lot of misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and violence.

I escaped the sort of environment that the book documents by the time it really mattered, but my middle school years were reflected back at me through the book. (Fwiw, I was basically “taken out” of the school system because I was being mercilessly bullied for a number of reasons). It does an equally good job of depicting Y2K culture, from PBS (which the kids call “Parents BullShitting”) to popular music to the rise of the internet and early online video culture.

And I think that part of its point is that mainstream handwringing over what is happening to a certain class and race of young men is largely bullshit, not because young men aren’t in crisis, but because the handwringing does little to change the culture of how young men are raised in USAmerican society. The book suggests, through its action, that the hollow center of the culture, its banality and stupidity, builds and allows for hollow and broken young men to perpetuate the social ills I mention above.

Whether it needed to utilize the moves that it does is certainly up for debate, but it gets at some things about my own experience growing up that I found illuminating.

One of them, perhaps the question that the book asks in the end, is whether the then-new hypervisibility, self-as-brand, and lack of privacy actually makes us more invisible to ourselves and those around us. Still a potent, if perennial, question.

I am about 3/4 of the way through Harlem Shuffle. It's very well-written. Some passages are just gorgeous. However, if I'm comparing it to his last novel (which, tbf, won the Pulitzer), it seems a little . . . the words that come to mind are "light" and "directionless." It's more of a caper than anything weightier. I suppose it's unfair to expect every book from a writer to be as impactful as his or her best work.

finished Mishima's "The Sound of Waves" last night, going to dig back into Chateaubriand's memoirs, which i made it about 1/3 of the way through last winter.

ton of things, especially some more recent stuff (fiction and non-fiction), that i need to get from the library soon; just a question of making the push to put it all on hold at my local branch.

this thread both inspires and overwhelms me on the reading front

I'm a few pages from finishing The Last Grain Race, Eric Newby, about his time spent as an apprentice deck hand, aged 18, on a four-masted sailing ship, circling the globe from Belfast to South Australia, picking up a load of wheat, and returning with it to England in 1938-39. It was written in the mid-1950s and is somewhat more ironic than the usual wooden-ships-and-iron-men genre (note: the ship was steel-hulled).

It shares some characteristics with Two Years Before the Mast in that Newby is a public school product interpreting life in the lower reached of the working class. Except where it diverges into long explanations about the ship's rigging and other technical details, it is readable and amusing enough. But Newby is not Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London. Even though he is clear enough about the low pay, back-breaking work, bad food, and mortal dangers of the job, he has no real interest in the class system. Basically, he is just slumming.

The Matrix by Lauren Groff. Nun lit (see also The Corner That Held Them), at the halfway point it almost dips its toe into fantasy or magical realism but it mostly seems to want to stay on the straight and narrow.

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman. Birkbeck College is mentioned as a path to advancement for a minor character, a clerk at Imperial Foods owned by Mr. Khan who is married briefly to the protagonist and comes to live in London for a new life. I've read a few novels by Rachman and in his writing think I detect the discipline (and limits) of his having previously written for a news publication, which I read somewhere while reading his first novel and so may not be entirely objective. (Separately, I am wondering how UCL fits within the system.)

It's strange to think that Lorrie Moore is a responsible adult now and writes about bands that I knew. I like getting to know obliquely the cross section of America that she writes about and her experience in it. I am gladthat the protagonist was able to hold her own when she did and I especially liked the parts about her cutting loose when she was adrift.