Are You There, God? What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?

I enjoy Browning and quote fragments from him a few times in my next book.

Right now my morning reading is Saidiya Hartman's astonishing 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.'

I've gotten through the Prynne chapbooks, read a few other chaps from Lynn Xu, Rob Halpern, and Lara Durback, and am now flipping between two other books during the day. The first is Ara Shrinyan's 'Flag Mines,' a conceptual poetry work of language taken entirely from a CIA sourcebook describing different countries' flags. The other is a book-length poem by contemporary surrealist poet Carlos Lara, entitled 'The Green Record'

xp Thinking about it some more, I'm pretty sure it was Greenmantle I read for that class, not The Thirty-Nine Steps. I'm not sure which book made me cancel Buchan, but my guess is it was probably Prester John.

reading & nearly done w/ john o'hara's the ewings

never knew much abt o'hara, i read he came somewhat back into fashion due to mad men which makes some sense; this novel def feels outdated in ways but i dig its directness, it is also just v richly drawn in character and dialogue

all I know is Appointment in Samarra

In this case,aving been written in 1915, the main villains of 39 Steps were those nasty German Huns, so the racism was not front and center.

I agree that it isn't in the 39 Steps (though xenophobia is, which ain't much better), but if you read Greenmantle you get to see what Buchan's anti-German sentiments are REALLY about:

That is the weakness of the German. He has no gift for laying himself amongst different types of men. He is such a hard shell being that he cannot put out feelers to his kind. He may have plenty of brains, as Stumm had, but he had the poorest notion of psychology of any of God's creatures. In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises.

Found a copy of the Lillith trilogy by Octavia Butler in a charity shop yesterday. So started into that and read the first few chapters. I'm finding the prose pretty sublime in a way I remember noticing Hilary Mantel's was when i started Wolf Hall.
I think i heard a podcast on this a while back so wish I'd found her stuff earlier. think I will try to read a lot more of her, though somehow haven't read more Mantel despite having picked up several titles.

finished the Merle Haggard mY House Of Memories in order to get some more books out of the library. Quite enjoyed it but should have got to it much sooner. Think I had it out for a year or more.

REad the introduction to Mari Sandoz' Crazy Horse Strange Man of the Oglala.
Tnat is written by a current Sioux and goes into how accurate a portrayal of tribal customs etc she portrays.
Had read first couple of chapters of Cheyenne Autumn earlier in the week. now have a lot more time to read the recent borrowings in so not sure what I'm reading next.

am also in the middle of Michelle Alexander's The New jim Crow which is pretty great.

& Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life
recognising some situations that every marginalised person goes through.
THink it's an interesting read so hope I get through it soon. it's my loo book at the moment so I'm not giving it as much concentrated time as maybe I should.

xpost in one of his memoirs, Graham Greene said that, after World War I, he set out to write thrillers that went past/vs. Buchan's pro-Empire and associated bullshit.

Where there was just this implicit, unquestioning faith in Empire, at least publicly, and all the stuff that came from and with that.

Yeah, Greene is part of a tradition which also includes Le Carré and, according to some on this board, Ambler, that takes the espionage adventure aspect of Buchan and adds critique of the empire. The other approach, of course, culminated with James Bond (not my cup of tea).

In that same memoir (think it was A Sort of Life), Greene credited this guy with encouragement, by example, in a shared attitude, messing with conventions of genre and world view---note that they both wrote "literary novels" and what they called "entertainments":
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart HFRSE (30 September 1906 – 12 November 1994) was a Scottish novelist and academic. He is equally well known for the works of literary criticism and contemporary novels published under his real name and for the crime fiction published under the pseudonym of Michael Innes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._I._M._Stewart

Have never read him, but he earned his niche at least by influencing Greene.

I recently read the Natalia Ginzburg novella "Family" from the collection "Family and Borghesia". So far I've liked everything I've read by her. This novella reminded me a bit of Nikolai Leskov's stories, in the sense that it seems kind of pre-modern, almost like a folk-tale or something from a pre-literate oral tradition of story-telling. There's nothing starchy, conventional or old-fashioned about it. It reads like someone talking about some people that they knew and things that happened to them, in a very matter-of-fact tone, but somehow the emotional punch comes through in the gaps between what is said. Now I'm reading "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson.

I finished The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis. It's a book that demands you be interested in the bits and bobs of how the resistance operated in Crete during WWII, but I find Greek village culture interesting enough that I was up to meeting those demands.

Not sure what to pick up next. I dabbled around in The Anatomy of Melancholy for a bit before bed, but it isn't the sort of book one reads cover to cover.

It had to happen sometime. I started reading Across the Street, a Simenon I checked out of the library and it was... bad. The first purely unreadable Simenon title I've encountered so far.

I next turned to The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson, a book of essays largely revolving around her admiration for the thought and writings of John Calvin. She is a careful thinker and writer, but these are a bit formless, in that she does not just propose a thesis and develop it, but allows her thoughts to follow themselves without requiring them to follow a linear development. Kind of nice to read someone worth listening to who is coming from that perspective.

Ginzberg has been my big discovery, o. nate

liked Robinson's Housekeeping but still haven't read Gilead

recently read Gore Vidal's Julian, which was an interesting account of the savagery of the 2nd Century struggle between Hellenism and Christianity

thought Rumaan Aman's Leave the World Behind was interesting

Julian is one of Vidal's good novels.

I'm coming up on the home stretch of Milenko Jergovic's Kin.. It is utterly extraordinary,.

I read Hugh Kenner's essay 'Joyce's *Portrait* Reconsidered' (1965).

Brilliant, insightful, incisive. Quite early in making strong links between Joyce and Wilde.

But also wilful and excessive in pursuing certain motifs (an Aristotelian idea of potentialities missed), and a very odd way of talking about 'Dublin' as though it's a universal thing, ie: meaning 'the city you can't escape from'. This is unhelpful: if he wants to talk about an abstract concept he should do that, if Dublin then he should do that, with more thought about what was *actually* happening in Dublin at this time and all the people who *didn't* feel a need to escape from it, but rather sought to transform it.

I next turned to The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson, a book of essays largely revolving around her admiration for the thought and writings of John Calvin

I love Gilead but I have less than zero interest in it as a text on Calvinism so I'm guessing these would not be for me.

I'm guessing these would not be for me.

You might be pleasantly surprised. This is not, as you might think, a paean to the stern, dour face of puritanism and predestination. But I won't try to speak for her.

I needed something familiar and propulsive so I'm re-reading London Orbital by Iain Sinclair. I made my peace with him being an obscurantist and a charlatan years ago (I'm sure he'd find it a compliment) and I still get a thrill from the way he navigates places and libraries and the way he builds scenes out of shards of photography and memory. His prose style is something too as he has unashamedly absorbed the benzedrine Beat rhythms and achieves an incantatory rush that I find intoxicating (but I can totally see why others find him ridiculous). I'm wary of reading him before bed as I find I need a brain sluice or his style invades my dreams.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. I read a third in one evening and thought was good edgy fun, if not exactly wise then interesting and somewhat thoughtful. Last night I read another third and thought it was narcissistic nonsense. Who knows what tonight will bring!

Read to the end of Dawn the first book in Octavia Butler's Lillith's Brood omnibus .
Quite enjoying it , do like the writing there's really something delicious about it. I have seen some people say this is the one book by her they like the least so wonder what order to read her in as I intend to read her more Just so happened that this was the first book of hers i actually noticed being on local charity shop shelves so wonder if I have just missed things before. I found Toni Morrison'[s Beloved in the same charity shop last weekend after having just been back to another shop I'd seen it in a couple of months ago. & got Lovecraft Country from there last week too. So left wondering if I just haven't been as aware of some writers work being in front of me as I scan shelves as I would like. Still stuck with the thing of continually wanting more books so having loads on the go and also loads in my waiting to be read piles. Which maybe isn't the best way of organising things.
Anyway glad I've discovered Ocatavia Butkler now.

Mari Sandoz Cheyenee Autumn
HIstoric trek of Cheyenne group to attempt to return to traditional lands from a shoddy reservation that they had just been fobbed off with having been told they could always go back to the traditional lands if they didn't like teh new place. It's told as a novel, I'm not sure if that is the writing style she stuck with elsewhere. I also have her Crazy Horse out at the moment though i have only read the introduction.
Do enjoy the writing style. More than i thought I might even. She was writing in the middle of the 20th century and isn't actually from an Indian background though it appears there were Indian people around as she did grow up so she grew up with some knowledge of the culture.
Which means she has more sympathy towards the people than a lot of Americans at the time would have had. Good book .

Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket Volume One
Book on punk by an American writer that I bought some months ago and was lying by the bed. I think this was what I was reading before i got heavily into reading anti racism work. It was reviewed in Ugly THings a couple of issues ago. Very interesting. He's just going through what Punk means and how it was covered in the press etc. What was going on musically immediately beforehand. & not liking the purist year zero attitude to music that some scribes had and tried to pass on at the time since it wasn't true of the papers that were covering things. Also not liking the way that 'selling out' was such a big deal and fueled criticism of the Clash among others.
Also the way that people who were not in the punk meccas experienced the music primarily on record since there were not major punk gigs happening everywhere at the time.
Interesting insight anyway and good to have another punk overview from a different perspective. I think this is original enough that it is not just another book on the subject per se.

coming to the end of Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life which I think is great.

"The Haunting of Hill House" was an enjoyable read. The premise of young strangers being thrown together for a short stay in the country reminded me of summer camp, though this is a camp organized by a professor with an interest in the supernatural and a novel theory of cursed architecture. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a house can be so badly designed that staying in it can be a threat to one's mental wellbeing. The mood starts off with jollity as the awkward childlike loner Eleanor falls hard for the gregarious, too-cool-for-school Theodora (aka Theo, who the book hints, may be a lesbian), and the characters laugh off the creepy aspects of the house in a manner that won't be unfamiliar to anyone who's watched an episode of Scooby Doo. But the relationship blows hot and cold, as Eleanor needs more constancy than the flighty Theo can provide, and the goings on in the house get harder to explain from a strictly architectural standpoint. Soon the professor's wife appears to provide some needed comic relief, but we are already beginning to doubt whether the third-person limited POV is strictly reliable, and perhaps some things we thought we saw were only in a character's mind? It seems that these ambiguities and their disorienting effect on the reader are part of the show. By the end, we've no doubt that something weird has happened, but whether the explanation is supernatural or only strictly psychological would be fodder for book club debates. The queasy feeling of slipping into madness though is resonant and memorable.

otm

I think Theo is quite forcefully coded as queer, and that part of the relationship drama is about Eleanor developing feelings for the male investigator. But I might be remembering the film more on that second count.

I finished Blood Meridian and liked it quite a bit. Better than The Road at least. Both books left me with a queasy feeling.

I have Book of the New Sun, which I might start, but I've never read any of the Elric books and thought I might grab a couple of those.

I got a library card and started reading The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, a sweeping magical-realist epic of colonialism & its afterlives on the Zambezi River.

i recently finished Dawn by Octavia Butler too. I don't know much else about her stuff beyond a graphic novelisaiton of Kindred, but I did really enjoy it. There are some genuinely icky bits to it.

xxp In the Gilead novels, black swan to black sheep to prodigal Jack goes from disruptive child-and-teenhood to disrupted adulthood of a kind, coming to take the specter of predestination into/the seed ov his late-blooming sense of self-regulation and self-torture. Kinda sucks for him, better for society, at least most of the time, as he gets older. So. whatever Robinson may say elsewhere, as an artist, she leaves us to our own thoughts re Calvinism, tracking Jack and those he affects.
I went straight from the whole New Sun tetraology to Elric, which seemed pretty dry by comparison, but it was probably too soon. Was very impressed by the former, but forgot virtually all of it long ago. Still want to read The Old Drift.

70 pages to go of TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980.

Though it's still not actually well written, I must admit that it has become more interesting as the plot has become more outlandish. A painter cutting off his hand, his gf suddenly having an affair with another major character, an unknown nephew turning up from another continent - the daft story is managing to hold the attention.

I finish it at last. It's been an effort.

There are some good ideas or signs of promise in this novel. The way that the text breaks off into titled sections that describe a scene or character, for instance, shows some inventiveness with form. The theme of synaesthesia remains the most original in it. But the writing at the end is often as poor as ever, and dangerously sentimental.

The Acknowledgements are very effusive, calling one person after another the most amazing and inspiring that the author has known. It's like what an English person's parody of an effusive American used to be like; like an Oscars speech. It makes me think: I wish one or two of these people could have helped to make this novel slightly better.

I went camping last week, taking two books to read.

One of them was a collection of "occasional pieces" by William Golding called The Hot Gates. I read about four of these pieces and gave up on it. It has all the marks of a book that was rushed out to capitalize on his Nobel Prize in 1983 (which was an ill-advised choice by the Nobel committee imo). A dud.

The other book was a sci-fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, Rocannon's World. Judged beside her best books, this one is rather pedestrian, with adventures falling thick and fast, but the characters are barely there and the connective tissue that binds it all together is rather weak. It does benefit from her disciplined imagination, which weaves together elements stolen borrowed from other cultures and times and transposes them onto other worlds with an overlay of super-advanced technology.

I'm now pretty far into reading A Death In The Family, which goes from the "Chambray"-like preface---not turning over in bed, but a nocturnal overview and slow track of Daddies with hoses on the front lawn, Mamas finishing up in the kitchen and sitting down on the front porches, kiddies screaming triumphantly out back and along the side yards, sidewalks, as the time traveler tunes back
waay back in to the locusts ov "Knoxville, Summer 1915" (set to music by Samuel Barber)---and then, somewhat like the later development of Swann's Way, proceeding through plausibly recollected interactions of the autobiographically-based child, Rufus (Agee's middle and family name) with other family members, and then to interpolated thoughts and deeds of the adults, alone and together, building to a long 24 hours, anticipating the possible, not unexpected death of one member, then the much less likely, but eventually confirmed death of another--the living room gradually filling up with news and adults and dynamics as the children sleep upstairs: this chapter isn't all that long, but I had to set the book aside for a couple of days, and catch my breath. The shifts of viewpoint reminded me a little of "As I Lay Dying" and some Delmore Schwartz stories, but I say that to talk myself down a little, find the banister as I go back in.

"Combray," sorry

I am reading The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes and it's great but it is STRESSING ME OUT; I've realized I'm really bad at reading stressful things these days.

I return to David Thomson: TRY TO TELL THE STORY. Increasingly I feel it's Thomson ... at his best? Well, maybe not quite his best, but on characteristic form: wry, droll, speculative confiding.

re-reading 'little, big' after nearly 30 years

not a lot actually happens, but it not-happens very pleasantly, perhaps even . . . eligiacally

is the holy roman empire reborn? difficult to say. at least we know that people with one eyebrow have special powers

people with one eyebrow have special powers

Ant Davis confirms this

I have The Expendable Man waiting for me at the library - you've not sold it to me, Lily Dale!

I'm midway through Altai by Wu Ming, a sequel of sorts to Q by Luther Blisset. The latter I remember as being a wild mix of historical fiction, political allegory, action and adventure, and conspiracy tinged spy thriller. This has the politics and history but so far none of the fun.

Thanks for persuading me to give the Agee a go, dow. I worried it would have clotted prose.

200 pages into Jerusalem. Every chapter is from a different perspective, I hope he circles back to known characters at some point - damn thing is a thousand pages, and Girl Woman Other pulled the trick of a character a chapter so well that this suffers a bit in comparison. I'm not signed up to the "only write about the experiences of ppl in yr own socio-cultural category" line of thinking, the act of writing fiction is after all about inhabiting someone else (main reason I never felt capable of it) but I can't deny that the chapters coming from the perspectives of working class white bohemian boomers feel very real and lived in and the chapters from the perspective of, say, a mixed race sex worker or a black man in the 19th century...less so.

i read sam riviere - dead souls, and oli hazzard - lorem ipsum

the riviere was great, felt like a big joke, and reminiscent of something i couldn't put my finger on (not really thomas bernhard whom several reviews have mentioned); the hazzard not so much, there were things to like in it, but i think 'never mention brexit in a novel' was correctly on elmore leonard's ten rules for writing

i also picked up blake butler's alice knott again, which i got to about halfway through some months ago, very beautiful book, one of those that you want to read slowly

Hi Alfred, there are a few clots and knots, bum notes, from time to time, but he doesn't try to justify them, as jazz musicians are sometimes encouraged to do (supposedly); he goes on to something else, incl, straight through and past the thing of overloading childhood's POV w an a adult adept's articulation---while tapping into inchoate early impressions and emotions, usually a justifiable effort here---one dream-to-nightmare bit I could live without--but he just keeps going: like I thought the night of adults dealing with the news of death would be followed with telling the children, but instead we go back to his being gaslighted by older boys, who have gotten bored and obscurely guilty, but have come up with "a new formula," to be revealed--meanwhile, Rufus has just met his mountain grandfather's grandmother (? started having 'em young, I reckon---premise is worth going with)

Thanks!