Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

CITY OF THIEVES (1983) was one of my favourite Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.

Finished part one (100pp) of NOSTROMO. Much scene-setting, a narrative mode of "and typically X would happen": "Don Pedro would be seen driving his donkey cart along the coast with the Senora", "it was said that Don Carlos was a man who knew a rifle as well as he knew a peseta", etc - the sort of thing you might expect for the first 5 pages, here massively distended.

My impression is that the rest of the novel may get more particularised in the narrative's present, whenever that is.

Conrad seems savvy about politics, and it's remarkable to think that he wrote with authority about Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. Perhaps no writer till then had had such range.

maybe melville? tho his authority is wildly fantastical (and more based round the pacific islands than asia): in any case, both spent decades at sea, is the key to this

I read two slim and deeply contrasting volumes:

"The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson" (1944) by Gerald Kersh could hardly be more of a man's book. being a series of barrack-room discussions about the titular Bill, who'd died or was dying trying to save lives in bombed buildings. The novel is really just a delineation of an ideal manhood at a very particular point in time and interesting in those terms, but I couldn't say I'd recommend it. Kersh is usually a bit nastier than this, but this one's a wartime morale-booster and suffers for it. It's absolutely filthy with racism, too though I'd guess that's society's racism rather than author being more racist than was normal at the time.

"Being Here is Everything" (2016) by by Marie Darrieussecq (tr. Penny Hueston 2017), which is a beautiful and melancholy life of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, drawing heavily from (apparently plentiful) documentary sources. Her story skips by in a few relatively simple strokes and is pretty good at laying out various obstacles and indignities suffered by Becker in her too-brief life. I think the book wants me to be more interested in Rilke than I am, and he looms large-ish, I guess at least in part because the documentary sources by and about him are certainly plentiful. It's good.

Maybe both of them are dong some idealising of gendered behaviours; the Kersh obviously is, I'm not sure about the Darrieussecq.

Hi!

Been reading this thread for a while - strangely enough from a room pretty much above Ellis Books as mentioned by Pinefox - and thought I'd join in.

I'm halfway through Jim Ottewill's Out of Space: How UK Cities Shaped Rave Culture. It's a pretty readable account of exactly what the title says. Nothing in it is particularly groundbreaking but as an overview of the last 40 years of UK club culture it is fine.

Two Dennis Cooper novels (Guide and I Wished) arrived in the post today so I'll make a start on them over the weekend.

Welcome! Thanks for mention of the Ottewill, think I'm about to read Peter Shapiro's dance history Turn The Beat Around, which includes late-50s discotheque scenes, new to me.

Amazon thinks I might be interested in Nathalie Léger's trilogy or sequence of books about Barbara Loden and other female media milestone figures, and I am---are they good?

City of Thieves is very gripping but I found it a little bothersome how much of the events in it are borrowed from Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, which is theoretically non-fiction but is probably 80% invented.

Turn the Bear Around is so so so good - maybe my favourite book about clubbing (alongside Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life). Enjoy!

It's pretty uncanny that an ILB poster should live above Ellis Books.

It's not the best bookshop I've ever been to, not the best stock, and probably not even as good as it was. Last time I couldn't even find anything to buy though I wanted to. But perhaps it's the most evocative bookshop I can think of, or the one for which I have most sentiment.

Many years ago, Mrs Ellis would always be in the backroom, always with Radio 4 on, and would usually give me a random discount, quite unasked for, whatever I was buying. It was as if she knew me, but she didn't.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi
The Devil in the Flesh, Raymond Radiguet
Manhood: A Journey From Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility, Michel Leiris

Easily the best three books I've read back-to-back. What a summer.

The best book shops smell like paper.

Turn the Bear Around is so so so good - maybe my favourite book about clubbing

Keen to read about the bear community's underappreciated contribution to the scene.

I have picked up Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 which just dropped in pback with a gr8 afterword interview with Jennifer Hodgson. V much looking forward to - Pond was such a treat.

Also Rookie, the new selected poems by Caroline Bird, is a hoot.

My request for Trust by Hernan Diaz was not filled, but I requested some other books including a novel by PKD called Man in the High Castle. I have Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown checked out to start next and just finished The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu-Byeong Mo, which ended with a scene of (surreal?) violence, which reminded me of the end of Parasite and which seems to be characteristic of popular contemporary Korean film these days. The book also has cultural references that I think I at least partially understand and which might carry some of the resonance of the book. I will have to find Trust somewhere else.

Sorry, her surname is Gu and her given name is Byeong Mo.

keith ball - strange curves, counting rabbits, and other mathematical explorations

recreational math book intended for high school students. but fun for me to read, too. learned about ISBN codes last night

finished 'teenager' by bud smith. i don't know if everyone on ILB would like it (it contains some pretty gratuitous violence) but i really enjoyed it. is there a name for the microgenre of contemporary novel that contains atticus lish 'preparations for another life' and nico walker 'cherry' (and now this)? they all have this very similar prose style, a salt-of-the-earth narrator who speaks in short poetic homespun sentences that evoke a wide-eyed grandeur

Halfway through NOSTROMO. Quick observations:

Conrad maintains this curious mode of narrative in which a single scene is ongoing for many pages ('thus the salon continued that night at the Casa Gould') while he digresses away from it, in and out of it, via characters ('as for Don Jose, he had commanded many men on sea and land ...'). A combination of 'narrating the present' and a much more generalising, rangy approach to past time. I wondered if this had an analogue in Proust.

The character of Nostromo is fascinating. He is at once brilliant, competent, mysteriously talented - and naive, and swayed by his desire for recognition by others. His real name is Gian' Battista - he's an Italian, in South America. A foreigner: a Latin but not Hispanic. His name 'Nostromo' is in effect the name of the colonists: 'our man', 'the indispensable fellow!' it's repeatedly said - though it does also have the flavour of a heroic, mysterious name like Zorro. And he is also the Capataz of the Cargardores - the captain of the stevedores, effectively the Duke of the Dockers. So he's involved with organized labour in some way, though I think not in the unionised way we would recognise, and these labourers seem to be on the side of those in power - of 'law & order' anyway.

The question of which political side is more virtuous - those currently in power in the town, or others - is cloudy. The veteran Garibaldian seems to retain some virtue.

It's fascinating that every time Nostromo re-enters the novel he is reintroduced, as if he's a mysterious stranger. 'A rider was walking with his silver grey mare, lighting a cigar in the dark' - only a couple of sentences later does Conrad tell us it's Nostromo. And he reintroduces him with repeated epithets: 'the Genoan sailor'; 'looking like a Mediterranean sailor' - over and over, to a degree he doesn't do for other characters.

The atmosphere reminds me slightly of a Western - maybe even a Spaghetti Western.

A scene in which Nostromo and another character sail out into the dark sea at night (I'm still in the midst of it, no idea how it ends) is like a scene from SF or Gothic - a vision of eternity, the sublime, the void. A remarkable extremity of setting from Conrad. You could compare his novel in some ways to MIDDLEMARCH - a portrait of a town and its economy and characters (and maybe that's something that F.R. Leavis saw in it) - but Eliot, at least in that work, didn't take us to such extreme places.

Jean Giono's Melville, Josephine Wilkinson's Louis XIV: The Power and the Glory , and John Rechy's After the Blue Hour.

I just finished Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. It feels like an attempt to consolidate the strengths of Wolf in White Van but also to branch out in new directions. Both novels deal with traumatic events and their aftermath, and both follow the writing dictum to always know more about your characters than you reveal to the reader. In both cases Darnielle tantalizes with glimpses of something terrible but doles out the particulars in dribs and drabs to keep up the suspense. But in a way the real meat of the book is the more ordinary, day-to-day stuff that happens: the slow and incomplete process of healing, the guilt and shame experienced by the survivor, the necessity of repressing trauma. This book has a more elaborate structure and a larger cast of characters. In some ways it feels like a transitional novel.

Yeah---the transition, the reaching continues through Devil House, especially the last part, which I have misgivings about, especially the way it makes me rethink much of the novel up to that point. But yeah, the day-to=day process, there's even a character who seems like a genius of the quotidian, and certainly the evocation of time and place, of setting and what it does to lives lived then and there, is riveting (more focus on a single area than in UH, more like Wolf... in that sense, but more outdoors-indoors than that one)
I need to re-read both of those, but right now I have the hangnail impression that what he does best, fading in and out on people in the middle of something, is, aside from WIWV, overall less effective in the long fiction than in his best songs, also those of Dylan (esp. mid-60s) and Steely Dan: no matter how much space you leave in the novel, there are a lot of connections, framework at least, for all those pages of cold print---music doesn't have to do that.

But WIWV is astonishing---still need to read Master of Reality.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to Devil House, will probably wait for the paperback, or see if it shows up at the library. I’d like to read Master of Reality too at some point. There is an emotional core to the writing that feels real and carries me through the more mechanical business. Tbh I’m not really that familiar with the music apart from a few songs.

Read both I Wished and Guide by Dennis Cooper over the past few days. I've read the George Miles cycle out of order but I'm not sure if that makes any difference to it at all. Especially as I've read and listened to enough interviews with Cooper over the years to understand his approach to the books a series and the role that George plays in his work.

I preferred I Wished which is, for him, a pretty spare novel. There's the usual Cooper obsessions but it felt a little less weary than Guide which is all out non-stop sex/murder/characters flatly saying "I'm so fucked up" all the time. Having read the bulk of his work now, I think I might actually like Cooper more as a figure than as a novelist.

Still, was interesting to read them both a few weeks after finishing a re-read of 1982, Janine.

Last night I started High Lonesome by Barry Hannah, the first collection of his I've picked up.

the order of the george miles cycle doesn’t matter yes, except that as a reader i saw guide as the total massing of all of the tropes he laid out in the previous books before they get exploded in period (guide is prob my least fave of the cycle, my faves are period and try)

annie ernaux - a girls story

I've been camping and hiking for a couple of weeks. I managed to read two books during that time, even though I was falling asleep almost as soon as dark fell. I read True Grit, Charles Portis and Maigret Mystified, Georges Simenon. There's really nothing much to say about either one.

Strange to say True Grit was the only Portis novel I hadn't yet read. I was mainly impressed by how exceptionally well-thought out the Coen brothers's film adaptation was. The Coens discarded the least cinematic and least important elements, but still managed to give the book a full and complete realization, much as John Huston did for The Maltese Falcon. The congruence between the book and film was nearly perfect.

They pulled off the same rare trick for their No Country adaptation IMO.

Now I am reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. My copy is a paperback tie-in promo for the Blade Runner 2049 film, so the cover prominently displays "Blade Runner" in bright red where the title normally would be, while doing as much as it can to hide the real title in a smaller point size and in pale gray. As for the book, I am finding it less interesting than what I've read of his other work, but it's suitably bizarre so it fits in well with his oeuvre.

my copy was a tie in for the original and was the same. my ebook copy i changed to have the Japanese cover, because i could.

https://i.redd.it/bnxp0a3xyocz.jpg

That is splendid, and the sheep's little smile makes it perfect---now looking at lots of pictures of sheep:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sheep&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiX8-S9w6v5AhWOj2oFHQArCDkQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1215&bih=567&dpr=1.13

still reading the Mother Of Invention by Katrine Marcal
still finding some interesting things in this but wish it was argued better instead of continually trying to hit the reader with the agenda in the way it is. Have said before would like to read a book on this subject which was argued better. Not so much beating one around teh head with it. I think there are subtler ways of doing that.

― Stevolende, Friday, 29 July 2022 08:55 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just started this and I see what you mean, she does keep on hammering the same points over and over. Also little annoyances keep jumping out at me - 'the first circle was probably drawn in the sand with a stick' orly? I'll keep reading though as the examples and stories are interesting enough.

Palaces For The People How TO Build A More Equal & United Society Eric Klinenberg
book looking at the importance of social infrastructure in society. I caught a webinar with the writer last week and ordered the book through interlibrary loan and it came through on Tuesday. For some reason it got issued to me but somehow not officially checked out , not sure how taht happened. I got home and it was still showing up as arrived. I forgot it was in my bag when i was in another library and the buzzer went off when I left. Took it in to check it out officially todayl.
Anyway, enjoying it . He covered a lot of what I've read in the talk last week but it is in more depth here. Talking about the importance of libraries as social hubs etc and the other dimensions tahn it just being a place for borrowing and reading books.
I found out after ordering it that I have a book he cowrote with Aziz Ansari called Modern Romance which I picked up a few weeks ago too.
I'm about 1/3rd of the way through this and enjoying it.

Michael Lewis The Fifth Risk
his look into the various strands of govt run agencies etc and why and how people took jobs there . Very interesting. Source book for Adam Conover's teh G Word where he looks into the same subject matter now, this book was triggered by trump coming to power without a transition group which was a break in tradition about how things were handed over. & I think has had a widespread consequence which is hopefully being overcome.

Hermann Burger - Brenner

This is a novel but there is very little dialogue, its more like a set of recollections of the narrator's life (based on the author, this was published in the late 80s, it was set to be a quartet of books but he only completed one hundred more pages of the 2nd book before he died by his own hand) set to the page. It avoids being Proust -- as it lacks the panorama-like views, and there aren't any developed characters bar the author's inner monologue -- and it also avoids being Bernhard as it has a very resigned mood without the anger and humour. Its someone writing at the very nervous edge of their life.

What it does get across is that post-industrial, central European, rich society. One of business, cars, lush-ness - he plays the son of a family of cigar makers, and the book is full of digressions on the cigar (as much as Melville talks about whales) - contrasting it with a poverty of spirit, of nervous wrecks at the end of their lives, but one of which is transmitted in that cool style. But mastering prose doesn't mean you've mastered your life. In the end you do run out of pages.

One of the best things I'll read all year but I wouldn't recommend it unless you heard about it from somewhere else.

"Being Here is Everything" (2016) by by Marie Darrieussecq (tr. Penny Hueston 2017), which is a beautiful and melancholy life of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, drawing heavily from (apparently plentiful) documentary sources. Her story skips by in a few relatively simple strokes and is pretty good at laying out various obstacles and indignities suffered by Becker in her too-brief life. I think the book wants me to be more interested in Rilke than I am, and he looms large-ish, I guess at least in part because the documentary sources by and about him are certainly plentiful. It's good.

― Tim, Friday, 29 July 2022 bookmarkflaglink

She is great. I really like The Phantom Husband, heard of that book and will try and pick it up sometime.

I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It thoughtfully addresses the moral problems it posed, but the morality which had relevance in this world was fairly commonplace and that which dealt with novelties like humanlike androids had little relevance outside of the imaginary confines of the story. On the other hand, it didn't need to be profound for it to be entertaining and that was enough for me.

I've been reading "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Its a longish, continuous work of prose fiction so I guess it meets the definition of a novel, though it has only the very loosest notion of plot. More a loosely connected sequence of reveries. It has a blurb from Elizabeth Hardwick on the back cover, and if anything it reminds me a bit of her novel, "Sleepless Nights". There are some very lovely passages in the Stephen Mitchell translation.

Noted both of those (was already interested in the Hardwick, after reading New Yorker profile, but this association is a good reminder). Thanks.

Where we stand:class matters Bell Hooks,
still working through whatever of bell hooks books i can get my hands on . This has been on request for months buit sitting i a warehouse connected to a library elsewhere in teh county. I was told a few months back taht it would eventually get to me and finally had to get somebody rung so it could actually make its way to me.
So I'm halfway through it and its bell talking about her poor upbringing and class in America. So quite memoir based but tying in to comment on societal structure.
I'm enjoying it anyway.

Nikki Sixx The Heroin Diaries
a recent acquisition of a book I have seen around for a few years. Quite interesting and scathing, watching somebody's heroin addicted dodgy behaviour being noted by himself , now with commentary from those he was hanging around with. That means band members, family and friends 20 years later.
Found it cheap and it was something I thought might be an interesting read. Now seeing what his musical tastes were so obviously Motley Crue must be a band worth checking out, yeah?

The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra - He is a good writer, and it will be a pleasure to read the rest of his books. I am only partially through the first story (cursory reaction: need to think about characteristics of totalitarian regimes vs. "free" societies in science fiction or social satire; short stories should probably be read through without a break).

I'm starting into Black Wings Has My Angel, Elliot Chaze.

Always been curious about that one.

It certainly starts out strongly.

I love Black Wings Has My Angel!

yeah great book

Just finished, and loved, Tehanu. It seems like one of the greatest ever examples of a book that's deliberately, perversely, in opposition to what its readers might have expected -- but that turns out to be the perfect approach.

Yes, high five!

Currently reading Alan Garner's Red Shift, I can see why it's so acclaimed but it's not quite working for me. Tom in particular is, well, quite annoying. Yes he's only a teenager and has every right to be but that doesn't make it easier to read.

I finished Joseph Conrad's NOSTROMO (1904) - a remarkable, rich novel, which becomes exciting.

I started James Rebanks, ENGLISH PASTORAL (2020) - a non-fictional book about sustainable farming.

I seem to have been reading Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake for as long as it would take to build a crumbling Gothic castle.

Gavin Lambert's The Goodbye People.