Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019/2020 reading thread

Aye, William and Henry were drafted but not held for service. Wilky fought as an officer, in a regiment composed mostly of black soldiers, including Frederick Douglass's two sons.

Winter:

Sadegh Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Petrarch in English
Pierre Michon - Small Lives

Into the cold with the intensities of Hedayat's novel. Maybe I shouldn't be impressed as I've read an awful lot of alienated fiction like this, but I am not going to sit here and pretend The Blind Owl isn't damn good for being published in 1937 because it is. The collection of English translations of Petrarch are best with its first ones (Wyatt and Henry Howard) and the later ones (Musa). Lots of so-so in between but an interesting project to mull over, i.e. how does a literary culture engage with x throughout the centuries. The problem is the Canzionere has always been good in bits and you need to be in synch with the curator's choices as well. Michon's Lives was his first published work and for the most part you wouldn't know as his style and what interested him arrived ready. I say most because one of the stories is a lot more biographical, there are half a dozen histories here that are told like few can. Its all tell, little on the tale, and how rare is it that you can say this?

i must read that Michon. Winter Mythologies and Abbots is one of the best things i’ve read in last few years.

Speaking of William James, Harvard, and the Civil War, that reminds me of Louis Menand's book The Metaphysical Club.

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Club-Story-Ideas-America/dp/0374199639

It's been a while since I read it but it talks about the beginnings of pragmatism in American philosophy in Cambridge, MA, against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

It's one of the better books based on the New Yorker ethos, and it's pungent about their beliefs in phrenology, eugenics, etc.

Yes, I remember it being a book of many interesting tangents, and interesting to see how respectable academic theories of the 19th century have often aged poorly.

So Henry James almost fought in the Civil War? I probably should have known this but what an extraordinary literary fact. He died in the middle of WWI, after all.

I don't have the book to hand but as I recall something like 350,000 were (initially) drafted but only 70,000 were held for service. Henry and William were drafted but not held. There's an interesting list of East Coast luminaries and whose children were drafted and who not; from memory, Oliver Wendell Holmes' son was but Emerson and Hawthorne's weren't.

Hello bookfriends <3

I started Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea...and then angrily put it aside after 200 pages. It drove me crazy - endless descriptions of rooms, clothes, food and barely a plot to speak of, plus a “mysterious” interlude every other chapter that are full of even more endless descriptions of things
I loved the Night Circus but this new one reads like a McSweeney’s parody version of her writing. The worst.

So as a palate cleanser i decided to finally attempt George Eliot’s Middlemarch - third of the way in and loving it! Get kinda bored with the town politics etc but everything else i love. I was surprised by how much of an immersive pageturner it is.

my wife had the same reaction to the morgenstern and middlemarch is her favorite book so u are on the right path probably

:D

Mary Shelley -Frankenstein - not what i was expecting, way more florid and overwrought and too many coincidences (presumably this was purposeful) still enjoyed it well enough.

Steph Cha - Your House Will Pay based on the real life killing of Latasha Harlins, has it's moments but i was generally unconvinced.

Georges Simenon - Maigret and the Murderer- liked it,
and am about 100 pages into his The Man Who Watched Trains Go By , rattling along nicely.

I read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising for the first time. I liked it - the landscape writing in particular and the way it totally nails the delirium and eldritch whack of the Christmas period - but I do wish I'd read it when I was in my early teens.

I still read it every December, if you were raised non-Christian there's simply nothing else out there that captures the magic of Christmas better.

^

Cynan Jones - Stillicide A future England has water on ration. There exist only paper flowers (because giving water to actual flowers is too expensive), and a plan is formed to tow in an iceberg. The iceberg will be docked, and for the dock to be built, hundreds of houses and local communities have been bulldozered. Rebels attack the water train that brings fresh water to the city with explosives, so it's highly secured by snipers. This is the 'plot', though it's mostly about a handful of individuals whose lives cross paths and are connected through this new reality. A sniper unable to perform because he knows his wife will die, an elderly couple on the coast that refuse to relocate for the towing trail, a nurse toying with the idea of infidelity, and an entomologist who discovers a dragon fly, something that could stop the whole iceberg plan in its tracks.

I've been vocal on this board with my praise for him, have yet to see anyone else here read him. His latest is a story collection that was originally conceived as a radio series, broadcast last summer by Radio4. Not heard is, but the book is, again, rather brilliant. His prose is so sparse, with so much space on the pages, every word carefully chosen (it seems), it makes for reading poetry in a way. Like slowly sipping away a fine cognac.

"He soon learns he is one of the Old Ones, a guardian and warrior for the Light. He learns that he must help find the four Things of Power for the Light in order to battle the forces of the Dark. The first of these Things of Power is the Circle of Six Signs. This book is the key book for the main character, Will Stanton. It is in this book that he collects the six signs which become the Circle of Signs, one of the Things of Power, by finding the additional five mandalas (he has been given one earlier) and uses the completed Circle to ward off the forces of the Dark."

The magic of Christmas?

[I would use a puzzled emojo there if I could]

I read The Testaments for a book club, was disappointed. It didn't add anything to The Handmaid's Tale, read more like a thriller (and a rather lazily plotted one), the villains were more cartoonish - conversely Aunt Lydia was somewhat humanised from a True Believer into a pragmatic and ruthless survivor.

The magic of Christmas? [I would use a puzzled emojo there if I could]

The book begins just before the Winter solstice and ends on Twelfth Night, and as the main character awakens as an Old One and is given a quest to complete, his happy rural childhood Christmas serves as the quotidian contrast to an epic pagan drama. Him struggling to navigate two different midwinters simultaneously resonated with me, as a kid from an areligious family that still celebrated Christmas. It still does... as a kid it was the difference between the communal Christian holiday my family was not part of and my own private magical season, now it's the struggle between the howling commercial gauntlet of modern Christmas and simply keeping a candle lit through it, getting a moment of peace with my remaining family. This book really captures that, and on top of that it's probably the most gentle epic I've ever read.

The book does gently contextualise the Christian elements of Christmas and place them in deep(er) time but it still has an implicit religiosity about it, I think. Which isn't a criticism at all.

The series overall is more explicitly pagan, but as you say, Cooper reads much more like two-way syncretism than, say, Phillip Pullman or C.S. Lewis. Midwinter is fixed and eternal and belongs to everyone, and Christmas has been hung off of it. But if the rector says God is what is fixed and eternal, the Old Ones won't press the issue (although they will wipe your memory of the conversation).

Seconding the STILLICIDE love, really well done

Finished The Doomed City. Five stars, god tier, would buy from this seller again. I don't often say this kind of stuff, because I think in 2020 genre entertainment complaining about not being taken seriously is not a good look, but this truly is a book whose standing I think would be much higher if it wasn't seen as a science fiction novel.

Now rereading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold for a book club.

I just finished “The Plotters,” by Un-Su Kim. It’s a contemporary thriller set in Seoul, and follows an assassin-for-hire, as he discovers he has a conscience. Reviews described it as darkly hilarious, but it wasn’t especially. Just prone to occasional wry asides? One of the blurbs on the back cover describe it as “Tarantino meets Camus,” which isn’t totally inapt. I think that maybe I don’t like contemporary thrillers

Finished /The Doomed City/. Five stars, god tier, would buy from this seller again. I don't often say this kind of stuff, because I think in 2020 genre entertainment complaining about not being taken seriously is not a good look, but this truly is a book whose standing I think would be much higher if it wasn't seen as a science fiction novel.

just read TS Eliot’s review of Monstre Gai and was amused by the parenthesis here:

As for his own philosophy (and theology - for i can’t accept his affirmation of the stupidity of Angels) he does make me think.

I'm reading the cheerful, romping The Painted Bird for the first in anticipation of the film.

the doomed city is so strange and powerful. it has correspondences with monstre gai by wyndham lewis i think - and the magnetic city of which the characters are denizens. but it’s also substantially different and rich in different ways - the social observations, the work that takes place in the city, the uncertainty of its metaphysical or indeed political status. i’m not sure i fully appreciated it at the time but it’s a book that’s really stayed with me and i’m going to return to it i think.

Will have to check out that Wyndham Lewis! It made me think of Kafka, Bulgakov and (in more genre fic terms) China Mieville. Was also reminded of Alfred Kubin's sole novel, which is very similar in that it is about an artificially constructed city that ppl volunteer to join and then all sorts of chaos breaks loose, but Kubin's vision feels shallow in comparison, flippantly nihilistic and only really interested in seeing people suffer. The Strugatskys put their characters through terrible stuff too but they clearly care about why humans are the way they are and how, perhaps, they could become better.

One thing the additional material in my edition of the book clarified for me is that while for much of the novel I had taken the protagonist to be a scathing portrait of what they hated about the country they were living in - the stalinist fanatic who becomes corrupt, bourgeois and elitist as he moves up the ranks - he is also a portrait of the authors themselves as they grew slowly disenchanted with the Great Experiment. So while it's easy to hate Andrei the narrative in many ways is him slowly shedding the certainties of youth, and the ending allows for the possibility that once those are gone he could possibly start over and do better.

First two books of 2020:
Magda Szabo - The Door (1987)
Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall (2018)

After a month of emotionless depression it's nice to know that I can still cry, as these both made me do. "The Door" highly recommended.

Lydia Davis' Essays One. I've never read any of her stories before, but I loved this. Plenty of exceptional essays about writers and writing, delving into the detail about what makes certain writing effective. The only ones that left me a little cold were the ones about visual artists, but that is probably more to do with my own lack of knowledge and interest in that particular area. One of those essay collections that has made me want to read everything from her, every writer she writes about, and also gave me more confidence in writing myself.

Also just finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which immediately goes on to my list of all-time favourites. I'd previously read Housekeeping which I thought was just OK, and an essay collection of hers which I liked but don't have a particularly strong memory of, besides her Calvinism. I'm a sucker for novels that are bold enough to spend their entire length basically just exploring what it is to live a good life and be a good person, and how one might handle the trials that life will throw your way. There was also something profoundly hopeful in this novel that I needed in my life right now, as I feel increasing anxiety about the way the world is going. Its constant recognition of the small beauties in every day life, the value it places on a small but dignified life, the constant wonder at the fact that we even exist at all, the inevitability of all things passing...it's easy to wallow in dread, but this pulled me out of it, at least for a little while.

I own three Robinson essay collections, and she struck me as ideal airport reading: I remember little about her essays except a carapace of erudition. Two exceptions: her Moses piece and one about Calvin, whom she thinks we've mistakenly dismissed as a, well, Calvinist.

This may well have been written already but a study of, say, Updike and Robinson and how different writers explore/wear their Calvinism would be interesting. As someone who pretty aggressively renounced Calvinism, Robert Louis Stevenson would be an interesting counterpoint.

Or Anne Brontë,

YOU may rejoice to think yourselves secure;
You may be grateful for the gift divine–
That grace unsought, which made your black hearts pure,
And fits your earth-born souls in Heaven to shine.

But, is it sweet to look around, and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness
Which they deserved, at least, as much as you,–
Their faults not greater, nor their virtues less?

...

That even the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies;
And, when their dreadful doom is past,
To life and light arise.

Robinson tried saving Calvinism from the dustbin, actually.

I don't know if it's been anthologized yet, but Robinson's piece last year about the Puritans was quite interesting to me:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/which-way-city-hill/

I recently finished Barack Obama's book Dreams from my Father, which I enjoyed. I'd heard it was actually a "good book" and not just in the "good book for a politician" sort of way. It was actually written well before he first ran for office. Of course it's more interesting to read it now, knowing what happened later, but I do think I would have enjoyed it even if it was written by someone less famous. It deals with a lot of potentially controversial topics about race and identity in a way that manages to be both frank and disarming. To oversimplify a bit, a major theme is how does a young man learn to be a black man in America, who has grown up attending a predominantly white, upper-middle-class school in Hawaii, without a black role model at home. Other themes deal with what it's like growing up with an absent father, a young man's education in political organizing, and some intriguing though brief glimpses of Indonesia and Kenya.

Now I'm reading The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen.

i never got around to dreams from my father -- it did sound interesting. i've actually held off on reading any of the obama bios that have come out because i wanted to get to that one first.

first book of the year for me is jill by philip larkin. it's a nice read so far -- his prose reminds me a lot of his poetry, brisk and filled with rather melancholy observations.

abanana - that's an intense start to 2020! I really liked both of those - I've seen criticism that Ghost Wall wimps out at the end, but I'm sort of glad it does. The Door resonated weirdly with an experience I had years ago in an old job, and really hit me hard.

I am bogged down in NORTHANGER ABBEY - need to crack on for a few hours and get it over with.

I've started the year with a bunch of poetry collections:

Christopher Marlowe - The Complete Poems and Translations
Omar Khayyam - The Rubayat
Alexander Pope - Selected
Osip Mandelstam - Selected
Anne Carson - If not, Winter
Fernando Pessoa - Poems in English

The Carson is its own thing, I think, a terrific collection of fragments - surely one of the great achievements in translation in the last 20 years. There is an alchemy at work here. Pope's Selected and Marlowe really bring it, especially with translations (of Homer and Lucan respectively, although I also loved Pope's own poetry which has quite a range from his Eloise to Abelard to Essay on Criticism, lots of learning on display). Mandelstam is my thing, always, no matter who translates it - and David McDuff's selection from his career is good curation. The whole thing has a flow, he makes Mandelstam over again and again, you just drink it in. Khayyam's poetry/games/philosophy is funny and, must be said, one for the wine drinker. Pessoa's poems originally written in English aren't that good (how does he order words holds its own fascination) however I like seeing how everything that he has ever written about comes out in this weird form.

Moving along in Bros K in very short fits so far, an odd and intimidating and disorienting book.

One of the few grad school papers I can still read was a study of jingoism and country houses framed by Pope's Essay to Dr. Arbuthnot

first book of the year for me is jill by philip larkin. it's a nice read so far -- his prose reminds me a lot of his poetry, brisk and filled with rather melancholy observations.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

Larkin is such a sharp novelist! Seek A Girl in Winter.

Essay = Epistle

I am bogged down in NORTHANGER ABBEY

I just read it over the weekend! Did you make it to book two yet? I get sidetracked so much reading Austen because I look up a lot of words and then spin off into linguistic reveries. I was so happy to see her refer to someone's address as a "direction" in Northanger Abbey, for example.

Cognate to the Spanish “dirección” = address!

that's why I was delighted! the Spanish always seemed like such an exotic word to me, but... no!

THe Mike Heron memoir You Know What You Could Be: Tuning into the 1960s
which was part of the 2 for £5 deal in FOPP.
He's just got as far as meeting Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson who were playing the folk club he's appearing at. He started off asa rock'n'roller but there was no platform for anybody doing original material in that area at the time.
INteresting so far so looking forward to reading the rest of this.

The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs Tristan Gooley
just coming to the end of this, not sure how much of it I'll retain next time I walk through nature.
BUt some interesting observations that it would be good to learn.

Keith Morris My Damage
turned up in the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop so I grabbed it.
Got as far as him getting bored with Black Flag, leaving forming the Circle jerks and releasing Group Sex.
Also being housemate with jeffrey lee pierce and him leaving cos he's in love with Texacala.
Enjoying this too, knew little about him beyond him being in Black Flag and teh Circle Jerks whose material I don't know very well. Then being in a few bands later on that I know the names of but am not sure I've heard.

One of the many good things about Northanger Abbey is Isabella's overuse of 'amazingly', which I'm tempted to appropriate now and then.

"I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly"

finished The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By enjoyed it a lot mostly because it was so funny which was not what i was expecting given that the blurb was about how this was Simenon's attempt at a big serious novel instead of another Maigret, but i found Kees Popinga hilarious.

started Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad which i had avoided up until now 'cos i hated the title, but i really like it so far.

Finished NORTHANGER ABBEY yesterday.

As a text it has historical interest - lots of variant spellings; 'surprise' is usually (or always?) spelled 'surprize'; it uses words in ways we wouldn't, as has been noticed above. A very odd feature to modern eyes: it uses quotation marks around 3rd-person descriptions of speech, rather than just around the words characters say. You can, I would think, see fictional technique still being improvised here.

At times I found the story tiresome, too fixated on trivia (is it respectable for a man and a woman to ride in the same carriage? :O). On the other hand the obsession with money, legacies, dowries etc becomes really hard-headed by the end, sort of superseding the claims of romance.

I like the Bath material because I like Bath. And I think there is some really sharp social observation, comedy and satire. Isabella the greatest creation here - her 'amazingly', cited above, is prescient, as she seems to me a very modern, current figure, one who enthuses to X about how much she loves them, then neglects them; the kind of person who would now comment on every friend's social media post 'OMG love you you are AMAZING'. Austen really gets at something here. I thought Isabella might be redeemed by the end, but no.

Then there is the Gothic element, and the metafictional element, together. This is very strong - a novel partially predicated on a commentary on an extant genre and examples of it, playing off the protagonist's reading of these texts and how they affect her expectations (such preposterous scenes in the abbey where she keeps thinking that spooky things are happening!), and also often addressing the reader with talk of what we expect of a heroine. This whole aspect is cranked up really heavily in the last chapter or so, where the narrator refers to herself in the 1st person a lot. It's almost as metafictional a novel as I've read outside AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, and perhaps confirms the suspicion that C20 sorts of fictional self-consciousness are in a tradition with this earlier form of it.

Lots of interest, but I think it's a book to read quite fast, not get stuck on as I did.

I wanted to move on to Jennifer Egan's THE KEEP because I hear it's also a Gothic parody. But I don't have it so I've started on another Egan: LOOK AT ME (2001). I'm impressed so far.

A very odd feature to modern eyes: it uses quotation marks around 3rd-person descriptions of speech

If you go back another couple of hundred years you begin to see all kinds of bespoke approaches to handling dialog in text - reading contemporary transcripts of witch trials from the 17th century (which is going about as far back from Austen's time as Austen is to us) they would enclose speech in quotes but also switch all the pronouns to third person, which really throws you until you get used to it (not to mention the free-form spelling, where people aren't even troubled to spell a word the same way consistently within a single text).

Austen uses uncontracted forms of tag questions in a way modern English speakers don't ("this attic is amazingly gloomy, is not it?" vs "isn't it?" or "is it not?"). But what I wonder is if Austen is employing them in a marked way or not... was that just the usual form tag questions took in conversation during her time, or was she employing those uncontracted forms as an affect for the purposes of characterization (the way we might have a character today say "it's hot out today, is it not?" vs "isn't it?")?