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

Mike Davis: https://t.co/1eTlvRE8XD pic.twitter.com/HnqplqmDup

— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) September 2, 2022

JUst finished The 1619 Project which I should have read earlier and definitely faster.
Has been pretty good, has a very good tie in Podcast from teh time it was published too.
Wish the information contained could be osmosed out to a lot of people who would benefit from knowing it.
Treatment of Africans then Afro-Americans since the first group of enslaved was land which is where the date in the title comes from.
Precisely the information that should be circulated as a 101 beginner level attempt to understand US history not dismissed and vilified as Critical Race Theory which is a different very specific thing though it is based on some of this information being tapped into here I think.
One of several books in the area that I have read so I may have come across some of the information contained elsewhere . But this is put together in a very readable way as is Ibram X Kendi's 400 Souls which also uses a lot of different writers to contribute to its message.
THis was edited and partly written by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Read that Melissa Gira Grant tweet as saying Miles Davis. Miles visiting Chandler's grave next to his local Home Depot.

I finished DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. Brisk. Notable in depicting "ordinary worker who becomes a detective in the course of the story" - a bit like Lethem's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. I'd quite like to read the 2nd book to see what happens when the Rawlins character actually sets up as a private eye.

I then started Chester Himes' A RAGE IN HARLEM (1957). This is a bit deceptive. Detectives don't much feature in it so far. The author seems to have turned to crime writing almost as a money-making joke or experiment, not as his original vocation. And it is much more of a comic, caper novel than you might expect. I haven't actually read Raymond Queneau, but suspect that some of his books are like this.

I also glanced at Annie Ernaux's EXTERIORS - it was at a friend's house so I'm not reading it properly - and it seemed a relatively insightful bit of journalistic, reflective writing on things seen while on public transport. Would make a blog.

Finished ‘The Circular Gates’ and have decided that I will wait until trying another Michael Palmer book.

Currently re-reading ‘The White Stones’ for my Prynne book group and dipping in and out of Laura Riding’s collected in the mornings, and spending time with Mark Francis Johnson’s new ‘Doleful Hoo-Ha’ when I have spare moments otherwise

I finished The Summer Book. It consists of about two dozen vignettes featuring a grandmother in her mid-eighties and a granddaughter who appears to be about 8 years old, but it's not very clear just how old or young she is. All of the vignettes take place during summertime on a small island in the Finnish Gulf, occupied only by the two main characters and a father who is seldom invoked.

As with other Tove Jansson novels, it is sharply imagined and economically told. There is no plot and no apparent chronological order. Instead it is held together by continuity of tone, place and characters. What struck me most was how indeterminate the tone was. It seemed to me that Jansson was striving for a wholly unsentimental tone, but somehow the subtext kept nibbling around the edges of the romantic and sentimental, creating an unsettling cross-current. It's the sort of book that would repay multiple readings.

thanks Aimless, makes me want to read The Summer Book

The Need by Helen Phillips and Mostly Dead Things by Kristin Arnett were both interesting I thought

the red badge of courage by stephen crane: this one kind of washed over me. finished it because it was short but never really got into it.

five decembers by james kestrel. very highly rated new crime fiction/period thriller. great setting/premise. not a fan of the genre but i suspect a lot of people here would enjoy it.

heat 2 by michael mann and meg gardiner. if you like the movie heat then you will like this book.

drowned world by jg ballard. seemed extremely racist?

seeing like a state by james c. scott. wide ranging popular political anthropology (?) thing about the state's tendency to reductively manage and impose order on complex systems in a way that does them harm. bit of a slog, felt like i got the point early on, but an interesting idea.

raising raffi by keith gessen. good parenting/pandemic/nyc memoir.

master of the senate by robert caro. if you like the three previous volumes then you will like the fourth volume.

the life of the mind. diverting novel about adjunct teaching in the humanities, nyc, pregnancy etc. pretty good iirc.

james salter. light years. do people like this? i think it's my favorite thing i've read this year if you don't count aubrey-maturin seafaring tales.

I haven't read Light Years. I really like Salter's short fiction.

Yes. Light Years is really good, as is pretty much all of Salter.

raising raffi btw a good example of how different mainstream literarly/middlebrow books <em>look</em> in the US to the same market in the UK

US

https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1191-1/%7B23FEF674-AEAF-48BF-BF7E-CA595D7221CD%7DIMG100.JPG

UK

https://netgalley-covers.s3.amazonaws.com/cover265783-medium.png

see also rachel cusk's parenting memoir

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41qlwx1+r2L._SX305_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://media.loot.co.za/images/x400/221464696656179215.jpg

light years is indescribably pretty. if i like it can i pretty much pick up any of his other novels, or is it an outlier in some way?

The Need is fantastic novel about a mother of a smart 4 year old and a toddler, both of whom are very needy and consume their mother every moment of every day.

There is also a dopplegänger story, about two mothers sharing the same children

The descriptions of what it is like to be a parent of children that age and of the moments of magic and also of despair that occur daily are memorable.

It started out as a horror story, turned into a psychological drama, and ended up as a story of redemption

caek, most of James C Scott’s books are similar to ‘Seeing Like a State”— the idea is interesting and arguments sincere and well-argued, but there’s something about his style that makes reading him a bit of a slog, always. maybe it’s the academic language, maybe just a weird quirk that i can’t figure out. his book “Against the Grain” is similar

Light years is indescribably pretty. if i like it can i pretty much pick up any of his other novels, or is it an outlier in some way?

His short fiction is characterized by an admirable economy of language that delivers an emotional gut punch.

Gets kinda lush later, at least some of the imagery does. His screenplay for Downhill Racer(1969) came across very well, with championship skiers in the wild blue yonder and daily grind, like his fliers in The Hunters. But the skiers get to enjoy themselves a bit more, in the Alps and the 60s.

Cassada also good. Believe it was a rewrite of his second published novel The Arm of Flesh and one of his flying books like The Hunters and not one of his relationship books. Oh yeah, his memoir Burning the Days is really good too. Haven’t gotten around to reading some of the last things published.

table, interesting! i found the prose itself very academic in the formal and literally boring sense. that's despite it being quite plain and accessible at the sentence level to someone like me with no experience reading serious humanities or theory. i certainly struggled over 500 pages. the same book written by a good non-fiction journalist and half the length would have been great.

thank you all for the salter thoughts.

A Quick Ting On Afrobeats, Christian Adofo - Was intrigued by a book on such a recent genre, and one I follow mostly via clicking on youtubes in its dedicated threads on here. First few chapters were an engaging read on growing up in the UK coming from Ghana and how Afrobeats helped the author embrace his heritage. It then turns into an attempt to map out the origins of the genre via Fela, burger highlife (a genre I'll confess I never heard of) and hip-life (and probably others, but that's where I stopped). The writing's very clumsy, could def have used an editor, and while Adofo's dilligence on interviewing artists is appreciated, he doesn't employ much skepticism in parsing their statements; there's a section on a guy who claims to have released "the first rap record" in 1973 and admitidely I haven't heard it but colour me skeptical that it's somehow more valid than Jamaican deejaying, scatting, the Last Poets or any of the other many pre-Sugarhill Gang things that exist. Also a big focus on how songs express cultural values, which I'm not against but it comes at the cost of little focus on the actual musical evolutions. Don't think I'll continue, tho I'm sure a younger, more obsessive music geek than myself could derive hours of enjoyment from checking out all the artists mentioned. Good that it exists.

I am reading Ubik and wondering about advertising and writing for copy and their effect on language in the 1950s and subsequently (cf. meme).

Reading Seven Gothic Tales. First time. Advise?

xpost a little more about Downhill Racer, from NYTimes review by Roger Greenspun (will have to check more of his)

Writing about the lead character David Chappellet, Greenspun observed, "His world is that international society of the well-exercised inarticulate where the good is known as 'really great,' and the bad is signified by silence. In appreciating that world, its pathos, its narcissism, its tensions, and its sufficient moments of glory, Downhill Racer succeeds with sometimes chilling efficiency."

Never came across it anywhere, so I doubt it.

Penelope Fitzgerald's short story collection The Means of Escape. I really like the three novels of hers I've read but these stories were far too slight and enigmatic. They're full of her typical dry humour but pushed almost to the point of snideness, and I didn't feel like there was any fondness for the characters beneath the surface.

Johannesburg Katrin Fridriksdottir Valkyrie
A look into the female role in Viking society. By one of the advisors to The Northman. I think I also heard her as a guest on Kate Lister's podcast Betwixt the Sheets
Pretty interesting. She is using sagas and things as source material.
Quite enjoying it anyway.

Augusto Boal Games For Actors and Non-Actors.
Theatre for the oppressed author's book on methodology for his theatre work. He is taking leads from people like Stanislavski to apply work based in the thought of Paolo Freire to a new medium.
Bought this a few years ago and about time I read it. Plus thete is a workshop based on it next week.

Autocorrect hitting me when I thought I was keeping an eye on it. Valkyrie author first name is Johanna.

Cold Comfort Farm

i read meg forajter 'interrogating the eye' - great new poetry collection. i can't quite match the pyrotechnics of the people who blurbed the book - olivia cronk, joyelle mcsweeney, jay bessemer - but it does do what they say it does, which is to look at the gaze, the body, writing, in a way that feels contemporary, and it's much more tender than those blurbs suggest

also 'deceit' by yuri felsen, published in 1930 but only translated into english this year and put out by prototype. felsen was apparently described as the "russian proust" by his contemporaries... maybe! the book is very intense, written in the form of a diary and a quite self-conscious one (lots of passages about writing the diary, how the writing relates to the real experience it's describing etc). i don't know that that is proustian exactly, but he does have that deep, sumptuous engagement with emotion, action, conventions

'bonsai' by alejandro zambra, a very short meta love story (meta in the sense that he write say something like, "they had a friend called jorge, or perhaps it was tomas... let's say it was jorge." that kind of thing

helen dewitt's new one, 'the english understand wool', which i think has already been discussed here. i remember years ago reading a story, never published, by someone i knew in which the protagonist has an altercation with someone, they almost get hit by someone on a bike, something like that, and in the story the protagonist pulls the cyclist off their bike and beats him up. clearly this - the part before the cyclist was beaten up - was a real incident that had happened to the writer and they were writing out what they wished they could have done. the dewitt book is like that, but good

I recently read "Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History" by Simon Winder. It's a long book, 400+ pages, and covers German history from roughly the end of the Roman empire up to the eve of Hitler's rise. Although it roughly follows a chronological order, it's structured around personal stories by the author about his visits to Germany and travel stories about interesting places to visit there. This makes it rather less stuffy and formal than a typical history book. The author is determined to strike a whimsical tone and although sometimes the humor feels a bit strained (like a speaker at an accounting convention who has been instructed to leaven his material with jokes, however distantly related the subject), it also sometimes finds its mark, especially when he throws moderation to the winds and takes his axe to a sacred cow. Clearly the author is very knowledgeable on his subject, and the sociohistorical analysis to me felt both wise and refreshingly opinionated.

Pat Conroy is the wrong name for that character in Ubik. It is not dangerous enough and it is too white. She should look like M4r13 Ch4rl0t*23 P1n3t*21.

She should be how one might imagine R4ch3l C(-90sk. I apologize for not seeing beyond the surface, but I figure that is what names are for.

The character's name is Pat (Patricia) Conley.

I finished Chester Himes' A RAGE IN HARLEM, which had taken me a week - longer than usual of late. As noted before, it was much more light-hearted or at least comedic than expected - a 'caper' is the word. It also includes extreme violence on a proto-Tarantino sort of level. As the book goes on, Himes seems to include more local knowledge about Harlem, lots of specific places, though I get the impression he didn't even know Harlem so well, and I wonder if, writing from Paris, he was actually doing this from books or documents -- a bit like (but also unlike, as Joyce did remember) Joyce in Paris on Dublin. Or this might be over-thinking a book that doesn't feel like a hugely serious creation.

Heat 2, which has short chapters but seems very long. The story is playing itself out as a new Mann film in my head, so I’m loving it

xpost - I stand corrected and apologize for those idiotic posts.

Was intrigued by PKD naming one of his characters after the author of The Great Santini etc., and can totally see R4ch3l C(-90sk in that context as well.

Twice removed of course, via the imaginations of youn and myself, appropriately enough for PKD's ontological concerns w process and procedure.

Reading some new smaller things I got in the mail, including an amazing document for any fans of country music and/or concrete poetry:

Constraint based dismantling of two plus decades worth of hit contemporary country lyrics by Texas born & raised, Coleman Edward Dues. By isolating phrases/words/letters & then grafting them to electrical schematics, these concrete & minimal poetry inspired pieces unpeel & expose varying levels of artifice, even as they somewhat hilariously manage to embody a sense of the author's place & persona.

WHAT FOLLOWS HAS BEEN COLLAGED FROM EVERY BILLBOARD NUMBER ONE COUNTRY SONG OF THE YEAR FROM THE YEAR OF MY BIRTH (1996) TO THE MOST RECENT YEAR AVAILABLE (2019). I INDICATE THE TITLE AND DATE OF THE SOURCE SONG FOR EACH SCHEMA IN THE TOP LEFT-HAND CORNER OF EACH PAGE.

Robert Hare Without Conscience
One of the books by the Canadian Forensic Psychologist who devised the Psychopathy Check list which is what Jon Ronson refers to as the Psychopath Test in his own book on the subject. I met the author 20 years ago at a talk he gave to the PsychSoc at the local university when I was studying there. He was pretty good that night. THis book is pretty good too but it really shouldn't have taken me 20 years to get around to reading it.
Interlibrary loan getting way too many of those right now and need to get through a few and return them since I'm letting things buiild up too much. Keep ordering books when I do booksearches and suddenly a backlog is coming through.

Finding the Mother Tree Sue Simard
Book on intercoennection of forests as communication networks etc. Like a non verbal community with signals fro chemicals etc spreading messages about activity in the vicinity. Mycelium, chemicals and a few other methods. Interesting anyway;. Talks about some ideas i've come across elsewhere. I'm just reading the author talking through family history in relation to the Canadian forest she learnt from.

Astral weeks : a secret history of 1968 Ryan H. Walsh
book on musical activity in Boston in 1968 as Van Morrison devises his classic lp and a few other bands work through things.
So far read the first chapter and then checked out the band teh Bead Game that the young guitar prodigy he hired went onto once discarded.

Augusto Boal Games for Actors and Non-Actors
book on the methodology on the Theatre of the oppressed. Bought it a few years ago, now trying to get it read by end of the week when there is a workshop based on it.

Insurgent empire : anticolonial resistance and British dissent Priyamvada Gopal,
book on rise of native revolt to empire over late 19th century and 20th century. Very interesting, I get qu8ite into it when I can concentrate on it. So need to get away with overloading how many books i have out.
Need to get it finished by the 21st so not sure that is gooing to happen.
Anyway good recommendation in response to some comments i made on decolonisation in a webinar last year.

I hesitate to bring this up because I feel a bit of a scold but was there any discourse about the class implications in the portrayal of country folk in Cold Comfort Farm? Or is it understood that it's deliberate caricature/from the 1930's so who cares/a comedic riff on earlier similar portrayals (from I guess Hardy, whom I haven't read much?).

I started Gerald Griffin, THE COLLEGIANS (1829): a long Irish novel from pre-Victorian and pre-Dickens times. I gather that it was popular. It was also, I believe, later adapted by Dion Boucicault.

The narration flows quite well, though it's garrulous and is very happy to digress into local speech and folklore at any time. Many words are italicised as if to emphasise how the Irish speaker is saying them. It is somewhat metafictional in the casual way that a lot of old fiction was; chapter titles are called things like 'In which a tale becomes probably too long for the reader's patience'. There is an element of withheld information, suspense, dots deliberately not being joined up yet, which also says something about authorial craft and the sense of how a prose narrative is to be pieced together and how a reader can be manipulated or left waiting.

People often talk about BLEAK HOUSE or THE MOONSTONE, or Poe, as key early crime novels, but this one is actually marketed as a crime novel in a modern reprint series. I daresay it lacks a detective. I'm only 1/4 through.

True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, again. I only realized I'd read it after starting, but I think there has been enough time in between for the reading to be different.

Just finished Diary of a Void by Em Yagi, which reminded me of the containment of Happy Hour by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, and The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang. The latter has various stereotypes about Asians that are encountered with varying intensity depending upon locale and to which I feel increasingly vulnerable as I seem to shrink and age and become an easy target. It was a page-turning week.

Also, the essays be Carlo Rovelli in There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness.

Emi, not Em.

by, not be. Sorry for the typos. I need a copy editor.

Nevada, by Imogen Binnie. A third-person narrative, although it feels like first person, about a transgender woman living in New York, trying to understand what it means for her to be trans and struggling to stay engaged with life. I had some trepidation based on the Goodreads reviews, but so far it's well-written and engaging.

I recently finished The Outward Urge by John Wyndham. Originally published in 1959, later editions (including the one I read) add a last chapter which was originally published as a separate story. The novel imagines the gradual expansion of human exploration into space with chapters set at 50 year intervals, starting in a space station orbiting Earth and ending with mining trips to the asteroid belts. All feature descendants of the hero of the initial story (set in 1994). The central conceit of the novel, perhaps a bit old-fashioned, is that there is something like a natural aristocracy of space explorers, whose intelligence and high-minded idealism runs in their blood. This is good old hard sci-fi, interested in teasing out the logical implications of the physical challenges posed by space and the outlines of possible future technologies. There is some unresolved tension between the largely unquestioned patriotism and sense of duty depicted among the ranks of cosmic adventurers, and the grim account given of the effects of nationalism and the "space race" on the planet.

I recently finished Farley Mowat's The Boat Who Wouldn't Float, which tries very hard and mostly succeeds in being a comic light entertainment, in spite of several incidents where Mowat was obviously in extreme peril of dying. After the success of his more lighthearted books, such as The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, it's obvious he and his publisher felt the need to follow up with what his audience wanted and expected and carefully guarded against letting the serious side of the material show through. Mowat delivers. He was an excellent storyteller.

Now I'm nearly done with Camus' The Outsider, as translated by Stuart Gilbert and published by Penguin. My copy is old enough that the price on the cover is in shillings and pence. I found the pivotal scene of the murder rather unconvincing, in spite of Camus selling his description of that event as hard as he possibly could. However, in the end, my skepticism about the realism of that description hasn't detracted from the book's overall impact, so it's kind of moot.