2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?

..and, this isn't really the place for it, but reading about that mighty ash Yggdrassil, reminds me that my woodcutter friend who I saw at the weekend pointed out several ash to me, and said soon they will all be dead, and there will be no more ash in the UK, from ash dieback. Obviously there are many worse things to worry about, but the native ash is a distinctive and lovely tree and its complete disappearance i find obscurely sad.

and on a separate note again, looking at the ash my friend pointed out reminded me of the penetrating reported quote of Jonathan Swift: "I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top".

Never fails to stop me in my tracks whenever I remember it.

Ruth Ware’s thrillers. Breezy beach reads, recommended

Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor; thoroughly enjoyed it, perfect holiday read for me. It's like he's set himself the task of writing a Richard Ford-style thing where nothing really seems to happen over the course of a weekend for 260 pages.

I mentioned upthread that I read Francisco Cantu's 'Line Becomes a River,' which is an extended memoir-essay-primer on Mexican/US border policy written by a former CBP agent. I'm still thinking about it a week after finishing, and I've bought copies for two friends. It's a marvelous piece of writing, cleaving deeply to the human impact of the Obama-era border enforcement situation. (An afterward deals w/ Trump policies). Best thing I've read in a while.

I just finished Murakami's Killing Commendatore. It's bad, I think? Maybe? Lots of ideas that never coalesce and a handwavy 'oh, it's metaphors' cop-out made embarrassingly literal at the ending. (Seriously, the protagonist journeys to the land of metaphors). Next, onto the second book in the N.K. Jemisen broken earth trilogy.

10 IF $Murakami=fiction THEN bad
20 GOTO 10

I still like Murakami about 50% of the time.

I really enjoyed Milkman - though I’m not sure why the Fates wanted me to read the Synge, which was pretty meh.

Finished Man in the High Castle, which I'd been warned isn't one of Dick's best despite its reputation, and... I agree. The only other one I've read is Ubik, and it's no Ubik.

There are couple killer moments, like the gun battle in the office, and I'm definitely glad I picked it up, but I was mostly bored and had to force myself to get it finished. In a way I actually admired its perverse dedication to un-excitingness, but boy are the characters flat. I wish there'd been more about its most provocative conceit (that the Japanese won the war and were, it turns out, pretty good to live under) and less of the, er, Dickian-reality-collapsing-stuff, but... guess I'll check out Electric Sheep or Policeman instead next time.

For that last one, see the Literary Clusterfucks thread

Thanks for that. The Slate link was an interesting article. Just under half of the book read, so appreciated the spoilers to alleviate the "feels like a ---- is imminent" anxiety. Has a "To Kill a Mockingbird"-lite vibe that isn't unpleasant.

Ouch on Killing Commendatore. Been saving that and the last Carlos Ruiz Zafon for a while. That ending sounds like the Alan Wake video game, which killed a great atmosphere.

While out trekking last week I read The Garden Party, a short story collection by Katherine Mansfield. They were interesting enough, but not quite the sort of writing I most enjoy. She excelled at setting a tone and creating an atmosphere, but my overall impression was that they leaned heavily on descriptions and used dialogue very sparingly, so that they did much more telling than showing. The prose had a tendency to get 'poetic', but thankfully stopped short of 'annoyingly poetic'.

Now I am halfway through Girl in a Landscape, Jonathan Lethem. He writes clean fluent prose and can describe action clearly, which are weak points for many writers. He's also strong on imagination, but mediocre on character development, relying more on emphasizing a character's quirks than giving on them human depth.

Girl in Landscape is one of his best, ends strongly iirc

I've 50 pages before finding Angel, the funniest and most vivacious Elizabeth Taylor novel I've read.

After reading a good blurb in the Sunday Seattle Times for "The Shakespeare Requirement" by Julie Schumacher, first reading her prequel, "Dear Committee Members". Quick read, no LOLs yet, but grinning a lot: English prof writing recommendation letters, some of hyperbole, most carrying out the chore with witty, honest assessment of academic ability. Mixing in "The Rook" by Daniel O'Malley after that, to see if it's better than the Starz series.

Hi! I just wanted to say that I met the pinefox Saturday evening and he was divine! The only bad thing is that we got to hang for only an hour or so. But he was friendly and funny and we talked about The Wake (quivers), Middlemarch, the pound, and what I should read next. Lorrie Moore: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital it is!

I'm currently reading Marguerite Young: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), 1198 pages of Joycean tumble. It's a chore but an intermittently ecstatic one.

it really is.

I've 50 pages before finding /Angel/, the funniest and most vivacious Elizabeth Taylor novel I've read.

Kevin B's post is practically the best review I've ever had on ILX. How are we supposed to start an ILX feud with that kind of talk?

It was slightly entertaining to find that some highly educated Americans think that the UK is in the Eurozone and abandoned sterling years ago.

FROG HOSPITAL apart from being consistently brilliant is short - it's hard to think of a reason not to read it.

Our discussion did also lead me to consider that the coloured-pencil drafts of FINNEGANS WAKE look like the the NYC subway map, which Kevin said was a lot more difficult to interpret.

I finished up Nocilla Dream last night which I'd been reading in spurts. I sort of see what he was going for but I spread my reading out way too much to have the gestalt effect of it really hit me. The Nocilla Trilogy in the US is a boxed set from FSG so I have and presumably someday will read the other two.

I seem to be making a habit of reading recent booker winners. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) was everything the reviews said - daring, inventive, weird, compassionate, human

i'm only about 80 pages in, but i am loving it. it's amazing how he is able to conjure genuinely horrific images (ie, a girl being integrated semi-permanently into a cemetery gate, which is also a glowing furnace) while being lol funny a page later. the bardo is a wonderful setting because it makes sense for these emotions and worlds to collide there.

I finished John Updike's RABBIT, RUN today. Brilliantly written; surprisingly dark in the end.

I have a stack of ponderous times that have been weighing on me for a while now. It's practically put me off of reading altogether. So I decided to track down some fantasy novels that might actually be FUN to read. Here's what's in my current lineup, I'm very excited!

A Darker Shade of Magic - Schwab
The Night Circus - Morgenstern
The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Swanick

I finished Girl in Landscape. No comments beyond what I've already said. Then I picked up The Mueller Report by the Office of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller regarding Russian interference with the 2016 US presidential campaign and related matters.

It is surprisingly well-written with a minimum of legalese and usually employs very exact wording to convey the least possible ambiguity. So far the many blocks of textual redactions in Part 1 make the pages fly by, since they may contain only a few dozen unredacted words. Because I kept up on the news reports during the investigation and after the release of the report, there has not yet been much new to me, but the report makes absolutely clear that Putin and the GRU materially assisted Trump and opposed Clinton, and the operation was quite large and successful.

Unusually I happen to have read GIRL IN LANDSCAPE 2 or 3 times. I think the first time its drifting nature frustrated me somewhat. The narrative is curiously slow and recursive. Yet when I looked at it very closely, I found the language richer than it appeared.

Specific details like the Archbuilders' speech and the John Wayne pastiche are also very good and enjoyable.

Re: Milkman: would love a book about the wee sisters.

Gosh yeah

Alexander MacLeod, Lagomorph

I liked that.

Finished the chapbook collection I was going through and moved on to Richard E Kim's The Martyred, the only modern Korean book that's a Penguin classic afaict. Was somewhat wary of it, as it's a Christian writer depicting the Korean War, but thirty pages in I feel I'm in safe hands: it deals with a military investigation into the execution of twelve priests by communist forces and the two mysterious survivors from that incident. It's quickly made apparent that there's more to the incident than the official narrative and a lot of resentments amongst survivors and church authorities. Kind of a mystery novel with lots of existential anguish thrown in. Dedicated to Albert Camus.

Perhaps I should not be surprised, but having read most of the Mueller Report there was little information in it that had not already become public over the past two and a half years through other means, such as various trials, public indictments, plea statements, investigative journalism, and legal analyses of those publically available facts.

The key piece of the eventual report would have to be the decision by Mueller and his team not to make a prosecutorial finding of obstruction of justice, despite there being overwhelming evidence of repeated acts of obstruction, often substantiated by Trump himself, openly, during interviews, tweets and impromptu answers to reporters' shouted questions. His many acts of witness tampering alone ought to brand him as a hopelessly corrupt actor.

If any of you failed to keep up on the many strands of this shameful story, it's all there in clear, consecutive narrative and analysis. But if you did grab onto all the public revelations as they swept past, you can skip reading this. You know it all, except for a few, minor piquant details, such as the email quoted on p. 149.

There, according to the special counsel's office, at the moment that news reports arrived that Clinton had conceded to Trump, an unnamed person (whose identity is redacted) emailed Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, who was personally tasked by Putin to make high-level contacts with Trump's transition team ASAP.

The email read: "Putin has won."

I return to Seamus Heaney, ELECTRIC LIGHT. Different discipline and intensity of reading poetry, a good thing to get back to.

Though late Heaney isn't always so intense, and is usually too ready to blather about some old family friend that none of us have ever heard of. That's when he's not translating bits of the classics, a practice that has rarely meant anything to me, though it seems intensely interesting to him.

Nonetheless I take satisfaction from moving through the lines and looking closely for the points of interest. I wouldn't mind going back and reading / rereading the whole of Heaney.

All of this is prompted I suppose by the magnificent exhibition about him in Dublin.

The craft of a Heaney poem delights me so much that I almost always forgive the lack of inspiration in late Heaney.

I like the idea that there is craft in these poems.

But I don't think I can always see it.

And I don't think that's just a matter of craft being so good it's invisible.

Perhaps there is a Heaney thread where someone could show this in a real detailed example.

Seamus Heaney-Classic or Dud (RIP)

I've been doing the Women in Translation Month thing: what I read starts here:

#witmonth #womenintranslation book 1: HUMAN ACTS by HAN KANG (translated by DEBORAH SMITH): Excellent and incredibly grim novel about innocence vs the state. The section from the POV of a hastily cremated corpse is far from the bleakest bit. pic.twitter.com/lZAkPCMT8Q

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) August 1, 2019

Pasternak/Rilke/Tsvetaeva - Letters: Summer 1926. Some of the letters here are pretty great. Tsvetaeva especially who is has these strange, blunt rhythms to her prose. Rilke is dying and it sorta shows (in comparison to the correspondence to ohter people in his younger days) as time goes on and enthusiasm dims - and Pasternak I've never been especially convinced by, he is finding himself in the world. Its a valuable snapshot if you are interested in any of these people, and also how lonely people try to find each other - but also how sometimes that doesn't work. We all die off in the end.

Yukio Tsushima - Territory of Light.

I've been nearly a week w/o opening a book. I guess I needed a break. Looking to try on That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, Carlo Emilio Gadda. In his introduction Calvino likens it to Italy's equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses, in part due to the many Italian dialects Gadda very artfully employs. Then the translator's intro warns that the translation can't really capture any of that.

I've been on a nonfiction kick this summer. Also, these are all audiobooks.

Tenold - Everything You Love Will Burn
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism. The historical details about how fascism began were my first encounter with them, and too brief, so I bought a copy of Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich which I hope to get to soon.
Mike Myers - Canada. structured like a stand-up routine, with many of the canada facts at the beginning being set-up for later jokes in the personal segments.
Alexievich - The Unwomanly Face of War. not as good as the Chernobyl book, with many accounts that say almost identical things. interesting that one of the first accounts is of a horror story also included in the MASH finale, followed by accounts that dismantle the pieces of it.
also Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451. not what I expected. more about instant gratification in culture rather than censorship.

currently listening to David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest
halfway through reading Ted Chiang's Exhalation collection

W.G. Sebald - 'The Rings of Saturn'. Simply exquisite, of course. And speaking of: After tiptoeing around it for a long time, Sebald sealed the deal for me, I want to read Chateaubriand's 'Memoirs' next. Does anyone know what the best English translation/edition is? Is Anthony Kline's free translation as good as the NYRB version (the first 12 books irc?).

Gérard de Nerval - Aurélia ou le rêve et la vie. (re-read)

AM Homes - Days of Awe. The first short stories collection of hers that I found mediocre and, at times, even tedious, while on the whole being a fan of her work. I feel like she's reached a point where she's starting to repeat herself - both thematically and structurally - in a way that feels lacklustre, on auto-pilot. The stories just aren't as good.

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. Solid collection that's nice to cherry-pick through with many work by authors previously unknown to me.

"Does anyone know what the best English translation/edition is? Is Anthony Kline's free translation as good as the NYRB version (the first 12 books irc?)."

Read the NYRB last year and its a selection from each of the books which I liked enough but I actually wanted to read the complete first few, with all its reflections of his younger years iirc.

I finally finished Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Would it be too corny to call it Byzantine? It's po-mo in a way that seems very late '90s. This and Infinite Jest were clearly cut from a similar cloth: the fascination with formal complexity for its own sake, meta-textuality, calling attention to its own artifice, lots of authorial wink wink nudge nudge. There is an emotional core to the book but it's buried under so many layers it struggles to breathe at times. I imagine a knowledge of Turkish political history would probably help a lot too. It's clearly an accomplished work, but I felt exhausted before I reached the end.

Now I'm reading Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla.

Thanks xyz! I'm the same in that I'd rather read the complete works, especially on his youth/young manhood.

Richard Ellmann -- Yeats: The Man and the Mask
James M. McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom

Rooney - Normal People. believe the hype!

i didn’t like Conversations with Friends but wifely like i have to give Normal People a chance

I found the two protagonists pretty insufferable.

LOL @ my phone autocorrecting ‘wifely’ in there xp

Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World by Mark Miodownik
author runs through a lot of the construction of objects in the every day world. Quite interesting.
Looks at things like the atomic bond in the construction of concrete and steel.

Patternalia Jude Stewart
Light book of musings on the history of various patterns. Worked its way to the top of my book pile so I've been dipping into it.

Pedagogy of Hope Palo Freire
follow up book revisiting the work he published in pedagogy of the oppressed a few decades later. Read the earlier book on a train the trainer course I took around this time last year. Seemed very sound and was apparently central to the philosophy of Brazilian education , unfortunately Bolsonaro has come in and overturned that. Regressive dickhead.
Found the book in the library yesterday, thought I'd had to get a library loan to get the earlier work. Must have been focused on getting the oppressed volume cos I missed this at the time.

Augusto Boal Theatre of the Oppressed
brazilian theatre writer whose ideas were behind Theatre for Change

Pere Ubu The Scrpbook
short book with a short history of the band up to 1982 in. Been dipping into this too.

I have read Ellmann's WBY biography.

I finished Heaney's ELECTRIC LIGHT - read the whole thing with audio of Heaney reading it. I now feel doubtful that I can or should read poetry any other way.

Started Muldoon's MAGGOT.

Still reading fantasy novel THE TROLLTOOTH WARS.

Ducks, Newburyport out in the USA and I've read the first 6 pages. Otherwise, Sheila Heti, Motherhood, which contains the line (in the context of a family tree viciously pruned by the Holocaust) "Family is scarce in our family" which was affecting enough that I had to put it down for the day.

how is the ellmann yeats book? i've owned the wilde book for about 10 years but somehow have never read it.

It's good if dated. It actually doesn't dwell on the poetry. I can see him holding his nose as Yeats spends thirty years plowing through Madame Blavatsky, seances, Noh, Lady Gregory, Irish peasant drama, and masks; he sorts out these phases with admirable clarity, though.