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

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.

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).

Thanks for this! It looks really good.

It’s sort of a sequel to the same author’s Playing at the World, which is a much longer and a bit drier history of the development of D&D, starting with chess and such. The best part of that book is him going through all these proto-RPGs that developed in the 15-20 years before the release of D&D that almost made the final leap.

Xp dow. Recent Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse! Recommendations for a first Henry Green book?

Oh yeah, Fosse, thanks for the reminder!
I first read a Green many years ago, that started with a boy and a girl having a conversation in a night club. Eventually the girl opened her mouth for the boy to look inside, and it was like another night club, or it *was* another night club. Think that was Doting? You prob can't go wrong wherever you start, but this year I went back to the posthumous collection Surviving, started with his good fun apprentice shorties, and then to his first novel, Blindness, written when he was 19-20, but with amazing empathy and insight re older characters--then more from Surviving in between chronology of novels---also his memoir,Pack My Bag, published when he was 34, because he thought he was going to be killed in WWII--have gotten as far as Caught and Loving, two of the three re life during that wartime, am a bit spooked about starting Back because I'm getting closer to the end of his novel-writing (although Surviving incl. subsequent pieces and commentaries by his son and grandson).

Loving is the Green to start with, HP.

I finished a re-read of Tan Lin's 'BlipSoak01' earlier this week— a booklength poem of "blips," or basically couplets that are often paratactic in nature but occasionally fall into a capitalist realism romantic lyric mode. He's one of the greats, IMHO, far too little known outside of certain writing circles.

Also finished Ellen Tifft's 'Complete Poems 1939-1990.' Tifft was a poet who grew up in some means and continued to live quite well throughout her life, but also managed to write some exceptional and strange poems while mostly spending time as a housewife and public writing workshop leader at the local public library in Elmira, NY. She was published nearly everywhere during her time, but was never connected to the poetry world in the same way as others, so is off the radar of many people. John Ashbery was a huge fan, however, and one can see why: her work is personal, referential, oblique, bewildering, and often very beautiful. It was a vanity-published book and is somewhat hard to find, but is worth every penny.,

josef kaplan - loser

H.P., you can also start with Nothing, a girls school novel with at least 10 caricatures done right.

flopson, hope you liked 'Loser.' his newest poems take some of the strategies from 'Loser' and elaborate upon them really astonishingly. his poems make me wince and laugh at the same time.

i’ve only read the first half of loser so far but i really enjoyed it. it’s very (darkly) funny!

I finished Marguerite Yourcenar's *Memoirs of Hadrian*. It's magnificent - as a concept, as a feat of sustained imagination, as an exercise in linguistic control. My edition has a series of meditations on the writing process, which are almost as good as the text. It's a series of nearly Bressonian reflections, where Yourcenar reveals her process - research, methodology, her fight to find the right voice; the meditations reach the height of aphorism in places. Dizzying.

That’s been in my queue forever, bumping it up

(Also wrt budo jeru upthread, I was eating fish taco’s at a place called Chinaski’s just last week!)

I now very much want tacos.

I've been resisting comparing it to Hilary Mantel because it seems too obvious, but I think it's fair to say that, like Mantel, Yourcenar utterly fell for her subject. She said that she found inspiration for the text in a letter from Flaubert where he wrote that 'just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone'; perhaps Flaubert's falling for Emma Bovary is as good an analogue.

I'm reading Something Wholesale, Eric Newby. Strictly speaking it's a memoir, but Newby is only interested in entertaining his audience rather than recounting matters of importance to him. His stories and descriptions pander cater to a particularly English nostalgia for their comfortable middle class way of life in the early part of the 20th century, when the Empire was spinning along and everyone knew their place. That nostalgia drives the book, although much of it centers on the immediate post-WWII decade, when the mechanisms of that bourgeois world were running down fast like an unwound clock.

Memoirs of Hadrian

This looks like something I would enjoy. I usually read at least a book per year about Ancient Rome.

I've never read fantasy, know nothing about the genre, have avoided even Lord of the Rings all this time (is that even fantasy? See, I know nothing). Anyhow, an acquaintance said I must read Brian Sanderson. Is this a terrible idea y/n

In other reading news, am very much enjoying Table for Two

is that even fantasy?

In my view Lord of the Rings (along with the Hobbit) invented many of the tropes of the modern-day 'fantasy' genre because when those books became enormously popular they spawned off a line of copycats which eventually codified the mainstream of the fantasy genre. But the roots of LOTR/Hobbit are in fairy tales and medieval allegory and Tolkien wouldn't have understood he was writing 'fantasy'.

A quick read: Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers. An airplane read I got as a free ebook. The first Lord Peter Wimsey book (and the first one I have read). It's entertaining, zips right along, and I am not sure whether I have it all figured out or have gone completely down the wrong track. Invested enough to see it through to the end.

I finished the David Lodge book I was reading. Deaf Sentence. I would read him again. I wonder if I would like his crit. I don't think I've read any.

I started to read The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. From 2013. It's about a factory. And some of the people who work there.

i have The Factory in the Todo list, waiting for a Japanese month. bought it because i liked the cover 8)

Xpost “the art of fiction” is very readable iirc. With lodge, the drier the cover, the better the book imo

Finished Peter Fryer Staying Power
which I'd meant to read for a while. Pretty scathing look at black presence in Britain in terms of racism etc. Good read though

reading
George Clinton Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?
which is a pretty fantastic memoir by the head of the Parliafunkadelicment thang. Great looks into the bands histories etc
written in a readable style not sure how much is him cos he's with a cowriter. But recommended

Thumbnail for The hundred years' war on Palestine : a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance

Rashid Khalidi The hundred years' war on Palestine : a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance
Palestinian author looks back at a century of attack on what was historically Palestine. His family has been involved in a lot of the history in some way, normally supporting Palestine. Very interesting book but scathing and depressing. There's a major queue for it in the Irish library system which I finally got to the top of and have thing 2/3s read. Recommended.

John Donne - Sermons

Anybody read Wellness? Just borrowed it from the library.

Ferit Edgu - The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales

You can read about it here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-wounded-age-and-eastern-tales

The interesting thing besides the subject matter of a state subjugation of its people is the formuts written in: which is these bunch of prose poems that do alternate between looking more like poems and then looking like prose pieces at other times, a push-pull between the forms as the violence of the situation, and the beauty of its surroundings, is related

finished The Factory which i am now pitching to Netflix as "Area X meets Kafka in Japan". we'll see if they bite.

now reading The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee. non-fiction book about Christopher Columbus's bastard son's quest to build the most comprehensive library on earth. including prints, posters, and pamphlets. dude was nuts.

Took a break from The Magic Mountain to read Henry Green's Loving. I kind of admired it more than I loved it. It took a while to get to grips with the elliptical dialogue but it's clearly a masterpiece of dramatic irony, culminating in the various shenanigans about the lost ring. And the humour is drier than a sun-bleached skeleton in death valley - excellently done but I can't say it raised more than a sly grin. But that last line! What a joker. I'm certainly not put off reading more of his, maybe my appreciation will develop.

Somewhat disappointed it didn't really fulfil the promise of the conversation that inspired it :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_(novel)

I think that its in line with my experience. I connected with some of Green's novels more than others while finding everything he wrote accomplished and very fine.

Trying to get Strangest Genius on the stained glass windows of Harry Clarke finished after not paying it attention for too long. Book by Lucy Costigan with a lot of photos of the windows in.
I do like Harry Clarke, he seems influenced by Aubrey Beardsley while adding in his own elements.
Oversized book which has contributed to it not being paid as much attention. But seeing the images now a lot of it is pretty breathtaking.

Rashid Khalidi 100 Years War On Palestine
really good book on the oppression of Palestine since the end of WWI when the Ottoman Empire lost control of it and I think a bit before that but book came out in 2020.
Author's family and he himself have been involved in various roles throughout. I wondered if my Dad knew him cos his dad was in the UN and lived in the same New York suburb but it appears to have been a few years earlier than I know my dad was there.
Very good book.

I'm almost done with Wellness, this season's The Corrections and Rabbit novel: one of those The Way We Live Now books that 50 years hence Nathan Hill hopes will show Americans what we cared about in the 2010s.

There's always some damaged, usually older character, occasionally brought forward, in all the Greem novels I've read so far, and that's life, that's what all the people say, along with the humor and sex and gossip and booze---in Loving, the old butler is dying for a start, then the slick guy takes his place, but has his own health or psychosomatic detours, bad vibrations, despite the arrow ov sexnluv, also Doll the daughter-in-law's sex quandary, some desperation on his gf's friend-colleague's part, and the alky older lady-in-service---but the most emotionally involving ones I've read so far are Blindness, Living, Caught, and the memoir/testifyiin' Pack My Bag.

we've been talking about henry green on here for 20 years. that's kinda cool.

I finished Pragmatism. I would be interested to read more contemporary reactions. From today’s perspective many of the ideas are commonplace: That there is no capital T absolute and universal Truth. That truth is a process. That my truth and your truth may prove to be incommensurable. Etc. I guess that’s because James’s views won out, at least in American popular consciousness, and not because he was stating the obvious.

I wonder what Henry thought about that. Did he acknowledge his own subjectivity, or think of himself as uncovering the ultimate Truth? Both?