I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

Never read Concluding, for some reason, and it's a good reminder to pick it up. Henry Green is wonderful.

I ordered an omnibus of Living, Loving, and Party Going from the library a couple of days ago. Never read any of his before.

Concluding is his funniest book, several laffs per page.

It's funny. It also uses the word 'lied' a lot.

I finished the bio of Teddy Roosevelt's younger years (basically from childhood up to the eve of his second marriage) by David McCullough. That turn of the century period is one I always find fascinating. Close enough to feel relatable but distant enough to give a sense of the past as a strange country. Now I'm reading an ILB fave, "Dog of the South" by Charles Portis. First couple of chapters were outstanding.

Halfway through Things Fall Apart. It's a challenging read for its brutality, but the prose is crisp and sharp. I want to see where it goes.

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Taking it slowly; enjoying my brain being afire.

I Googled how to spell her name (I was right, fwiw) and saw it's being made into an Amazon series. Is nothing sacred?

I needed a quick, simple book, so I'm reading The Majestic Hotel, Georges Simenon. It's a 1940s Maigret novel. Standard issue fare, but soothing in the way all Maigret novels tend to be.

After reading the Maigret, I've now started Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It is set in the late 1840s among the minor English aristocracy and will eventually move the scene to Paris and the Commune of 1848, but hasn't, yet.

My strongest initial impression is how confidently and solidly she creates her main character's inner and outer life. Although she's describing an era that was already long past when it was written in the 1930s, the author's convictions carry such weight that her descriptions feel like final and unshakeable truths. In that respect it reminds me of Marilynne Robinson.

I discovered Warner in 2020. Lots of laughs.

I'm liking the hell out of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines/

Rereading The Leopard. In my 20's I was mostly impressed by the fatalism of a society that will not change no matter how many regimes come and go, and associating that with my own country. Now as I'm about to hit the big 40 I focus more on Don Fabrizio as a man, how this entropy dovetails nicely with his own mid life crisis and disillusion over his own life, how convinient these arguments are for him.

10 Myths About Israel Ilan Pappe
Israeli historian debunks some Israeli misinformation. Pretty interesting, maybe should be mandatory reading.
He cites Shlomo Sand's books as worth reading as I've seen others do.
Short book so should be a quick read.

Latest Xgau Sez answers questions about his (non-music) reading, incl. a Drabble I hadn't heard of---surprised that he found The Communist Manifesto rough sledding; Marx & Engels' combined journo skills sailed me right along. This is the free section:
https://robertchristgau.substack.com/p/xgau-sez-april-2024?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=17167&post_id=143674984&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6pvn1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Finished go tell it on the mountain. Really powerful and lyrical. Despite being a massive god hater I even found the two or three page transcribed sermon vivid and transporting. But to me the cruelty of their religion shone from every page and I couldn't help but see the ending as a kind of defeat. (I know it's semi autobiographical and aiui baldwin did later distance himself from the church.)

Now on to the magic mountain!

Did you mean to read two books with 'mountain' in the title?

read kawabata next

I did not plan it but when the opportunity presented itself I knew it had to be.

if i hadn't read them both already i'd do the booker prize winners the sea and the sea, the sea.

Followed by booker nominee C

Shirley Hazzard - The Great Fire

i did

The Old Man and the Sea
The Sea, The Sea
The Sea Wolf (jack london)

the first wiped the floor with the others tbh

Wittold Gombrowicz - Ferdeydurke
Yasunari Kawabata - The Rainbow

Both of these express anxieties in shifting sands, and in v different ways:

- Gombrowicz is fantastical, surrealist, anti-novelist.

- The Kawabata is conventional but his voice is something I love coming back to. Lamenting a past lost, though very ambivalent about the glorious (imperial) past.

I've read much more Kawabata but I just didn't quite care for Gombrowicz in a way my 18 yo self would've loved.

Incidentally, idk if England has ever produced a novelist like Kawabata. Both islands lost a lot in the last century (though England has never been humiliated like Japan was), but I've yet to read an English novelist that really plots the decline of the place in a cool and quiet manner though I have to wade through a lot of shit here (it's been done much more in UK music and film, I think)

actually, looking just now, kawabata's sound of the mountain is cheap at the moment. and it's not one of the 3 I've read.

just bought it.

I finished "Dog of the South" which was as wonderful and funny as everyone said it was. The best part of True Grit was the voice of Mattie Ross, the narrator. This book was even better because it focuses more on unique voices and less on plot.

I finished Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It did have a bit of humor from time to time, aimed at the habits and opinions of the petty aristocracy and pretensions of the Romantic movement in art, but on the whole it was full of serious intent. Perhaps more than was good for it. The main character never stopped analyzing her motives and taking her emotional temperature, or supplying a similar analysis for everyone around her.

The book makes some sturdy observations about the ambiguities and difficulties of revolutionary times and I took these to be Warner's primary interest in how she chose to construct the book. At the time of writing, the early 1930s, Warner was a committed member of the Communist Party. It was evident she had given deep thought to both the Communist theory of revolution and the real world developments in the Russia and her conclusions were far from cheerful.

Last night I read the first half of Rum Punch, Elmore Leonard, the novel that supplied the source material for the movie Jackie Brown. Leonard is bad at writing human characters but great at plot, action, and interesting details of criminality. It moves along quickly. Ill probably finish it tonight.

just finished Bukowski's POST OFFICE (and have learned for the first time the meaning of ilxor Chinaski's handle -- hi there)

going back to Lloyd Bradley's BASS CULTURE, which i made a good dent in earlier this year but lost steam.

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman's White Rural Rage has become a best-seller and deserves it.

Hey Budo. Glad to be sat at the bar with ye. With the now-canon caveat that Bradley is wrong about dancehall and beyond, I love Bass Culture.

I started Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. I'll see you in about six months.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Just been reading about racist riots in Cardiff and Liverpool in the wake of WWI. Also tied into black seMen being laid off in favour of white to great degree.
So again pretty scathing

Chronicle of Guayaki Indians Pierre Clastres
Ethnologist writes about South American Indian tribe in early 60s .

V. S. Pritchett - A Cab at the Door

A terrific little book, detailing the author's somewhat chaotic early years.

The end of Things Fall Apart was bleak as hell. Any thoughts on the two subsequent novels?

Prichett's stories and Turgenev bio are wonderful

I love A Cab at the Door. like you say Alfred his stories are wonderful. language and writing of great style, managing tension, amusement, swiftly achieved and insightful character portraits. that he’s able to craft these feels like virtuousity but it doesn’t look like virtuousity.

With A Cab at the Door you feel all of that but there’s a certain relaxed brio and humour - it doesn’t need the same tensile self supporting structure of a short story. This is his life and he relishes the pattern of characters and behaviour and the world it gave him.

A great English writer. Possibly not all that visible these days? Though surely right at the front of great english short story writers.

Septology had been sitting on my bedside table this whole year, with just the last book to read. Typical case of me not wanting to finish something great. Totally absorbed in the world of Asles. The first book contains what I thought was a very funny scene of a man pushing a woman on a swing. When it returns to it in the 7th, it’s no longer funny, it’s truthful and beautiful. The final pages of this are a knock out. Absolute pleasure spending 700 pages in this world, wish it never ended.

Complications by Atul Gawande was a good intro to the human world of surgery

i have finished all the Hardy novels, the last two being Desperate Remedies and Hand Of Ethelberta, and started on The Time Torn Man, the Hardy biography by Tomalin, which, happily, starts by talking a lot about the two i've just read.

I'm midway through The Magic Mountain. It's moderately amusing, often thought provoking, clearly very intelligent and (questionable translation notwithstanding) marvellously written. But it's not giving me any *feels*, it's not a world I would say it's an absolute pleasure to spend time in.

That's next on my list! I really fubbed it not reading it while I was in Davos a couple years ago

i have finished all the Hardy novels

lol for a split second i read this as all the hardy boys novels

I started "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking" by William James, based on a series of public lectures he gave in Boston and at Columbia University in 1906-7. Roughly 500 people attended the series of Boston lectures, and about 1000 in NYC, and the book was popular, but it caught a lot of flak from philosophers for being written in down-to-earth layman language.

I finished:

Elric of Melnibone
Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate
Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf

I'm now reading The Elusive Shift, which is a recent book about the development of conflicting play cultures in roleplaying games in the wake of the release of Dungeons & Dragons. Really great book so far. Fascinating how debates in the hobby the last 20 years go right back to the earliest days (and before that even).

The only "minor" Hardy I've read is Two in a Tower. Which should I go with next? The Trumpet-Major?

what're you calling major? Tess, Jude, Mayor, Madding, Native?

then I'd put, in no real order
Greenwood, Woodlanders, Blue Eyes, Tower, Trumpet

but they are all much of a muchness. pick a cheap one, or a short one.

Septology had been sitting on my bedside table this whole year, with just the last book to read. Typical case of me not wanting to finish something great. Totally absorbed in the world of Asles. The first book contains what I thought was a very funny scene of a man pushing a woman on a swing. When it returns to it in the 7th, it’s no longer funny, it’s truthful and beautiful. The final pages of this are a knock out. Absolute pleasure spending 700 pages in this world, wish it never ended.

― H.P, Wednesday, April 24

they are all much of a muchness

haven't encountered that one since my mom died. enjoyed it greatly. thanks!

Thomas Hardy - Search and Destroy <= dedicated hardy thread

I'd call The Woodlanders major.

Last night I tried out You Don't Love Me, Yet, Jonathan Lethem. Not sure I'll continue with it. It's kinda bad. It feels like something left over from his early apprentice years and when his publisher wanted a followup to his big hits Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, he pulled it out of the drawer, polished it up the best he could, and submitted it.

One reason I suspect it is old work he necromanced is that, although it was published in 2007, it casually mentions that one character drives a Datsun - a brand name that was changed to Nissan in 1986. Nothing else tries to situate it deliberately in the 1980s, just this lone anachronism. Weird for a 2007 novel.

I read another 40 pages of You Don't Love Me Yet tonight, decided it was just bad writing and tossed it overboard without a single pang of loss.