Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

rex warner: the aerodrome (crumbling wwii era penguin which is probably going to fall to pieces by the time i'm finished)

Reading a Francoise Sagan novel (Sunlight on Cold Water) which is pretty hilarious in its 60s Frenchness. Gilles is an unfeasibly handsome journalist who has an apartment on the Left Bank where he lives with his girlfriend Eloise, a model for a fashion house. But he's filled with an unnameable ennui, and he's lost interest in life and even in sex with his girlfriend. He gets some pills from his doctor then goes off to see a former girlfriend, who is much older at 48, but luckily is still "physically superb". Unfortunately she's just off to see her 19 year old toy boy so is not up for sex, but she says she'll "send Veronique round". Veronique is "superb looking and one of the most versatile women I know. That'll take your mind off things". But Gilles, still suffering from his anomie, doesn't feel like sex with Veronique so he goes off to a jazz club where he gets into a fight with a colleague. Later, he goes to the country, where he beds a married woman, also physically superb. But still filled with anomie etc etc, he can't get it up. All this and I'm only on page 44!

Liked The Aerodrome. it keeps slipping out of print and then being rediscovered. Current UK edition has a weird lenticular cover thing going on.

Slow summer, so far:

Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Janet Malcolm - Reading Chekhov
Allen Ginsberg - Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems
Aime Cesaire - Return to my Native Land

Reading The Long Goodbye, which is even better than I was expecting, Roth's The Ghost Writer (as recommended on ILB), Tana French's Secret Place, and my usual summer treat to myself, a bunch of Star Trek novels - this year Peter David's New Frontier series.

I am glad to say the scientific content of The Undoing Project did pick up its pace in the latter part of the book, although as a long time observer of humans and their behavior, it is unclear to me why the work of these Nobel Laureates was deemed so startling. Their insights seem bland enough to me, but I guess what set them apart was their ability to design tests and gather data to substantiate what should have been fairly obvious to begin with.

I haven't read The Undoing Project, but if you're interested in more of the scientific content, you might like Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. On one level I agree that it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that humans are frequently irrational, however, in this book he goes into more depth on specific, repeatable, testable ways that people are prone to errors of logic and estimation. I thought it was fairly interesting, though not necessarily mind-blowing.

re the aerodrome, beneath the allegory of a quasi-fascist/technocratic takeover found the plot (& prose) oddly old fashioned like it could have been lifted straight from a nineteenth century sensation novel of familial intrigue ala wilkie collins. also read his earlier novel the professor, again about an attempted fascist coup d'état this time in an unnamed central european country. not very successful mix of farce & earnest warning about the precarious state of liberal democracy.

now reading blackout in gretley, a breezy jb priestley espionage thriller set in a grim northern industrial town.

i read the aerodrome a few months ago too. otm that it felt extremely old-fashioned, weirdly committed to an extremely neat and squared-away family-drama structure that in the end reduced to soap opera. but i found myself recommending it (w tiresome caveats) to more or less everybody i talk to; i've already given away my (weird lenticular) copy. rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist.

I finished A Lover's Discourse last night. I can plausibly claim to be still reading Moby-Dick and Alison Weir's The Wars of the Roses. Sometime soon I'm likely to open Dublin Murder Squad 3 and/or Neapolitan Novels 2

"rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist"

what is a work by a fascist that does this? I want to read such a thing.

Marinetti's manifestos!

You could also probably detect a latent fascism in more canonical conservative and reactionary writers who were contemporaneous with different kinds of fascism and whose works' emotional/sexual resonance can be said to express its appeal.

Read and enjoyed Bartleby and Co. and bought a copy of The Savage Detectives which is glaring at me from one of my shelves, so hopefully I will get around to it soon. I do enjoy how allusive Bolano and Vila Matas are as they've definitely exposed me to lots of Latin American novelists and poets whose work I don't think I would have necessarily otherwise found.

In addition to these, I'm also still reading Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence and I also began Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, as well, which I posted about on its own thread.

(speaking of fascists) rereading wyndham lewis's the vulgar streak: not one of his better works of fiction but i do remember it had some interesting things to say about class & the construction of self.

that priestley thriller was quite good and i liked that it had an explicitly leftist slant to it (seem to recall he was quite popular in the soviet bloc?) also probably the only one of his novels to inspire a nuggets era garage track

Great track, no lime, I'm listening again now---"the universe is permeated with the odor of kerosene" is the best opening line I've found in a while, and the song lives up to it.
DH Lawrence was something of a pagan folk metal fascist, wasn't he? Wouldn't have approved of Mussolini making the trains run on time.

what is a work by a fascist that does this? I want to read such a thing.

I don't know if he was a fascist but Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is often accused of glorifying fascism.

he was pretty much on the border where libertarians and fascists meet by the end

and incest . . . mongers

plus nipples going 'spung'

Three weeks of holidays in Japan gave me ample time to read
finished a few Eric ambler books, quite entertaining. Will def read some more if I happen upon them in the future.
Dave Hutchinson - Europe in autumn : picked it up based on someone recommending it here. Had a great time, was a bit surprised by the way it ends but am looking forward to read the rest. So thanks whoever it was that mentioned it here.
Don Winslow - the cartel : i really dislike the way it's written, but I kept reading anyways. Not very good tbh but it made me want to read a good non-fiction book about the war on drugs, Mexico the USA and cartels if anyone has a recommendation. My knowledge of all this is quite limited yet enough to recognize references in the novel to actual events and people and now I really want to read up in detail about this horrible situation.
Jerome K. Jerome - three men in a boat : read this quite quickly, was def good for a few laughs
Nakamura Fuminori - the thief : about a pickpocket in Tokyo. The fact I read it while in Tokyo made me enjoy it just a little bit more as I recognized the subway stations and places mentioned in here. The plot is not that great but I found the scenes where he described picking pockets quite thrilling.

I have raved about Dave Hutchinson, so I will take the credit

The Big Book of SF is very uneven, and incl. some too familiar---trying to balance it for noobs and old hands---but though I'm the latter, there are many I'd never heard of---didn't know WEB DuBoise wrote fiction, much less SF--and his vision goes well with the excellent Wells catastrophic panorama. Some better translations later on.
Aimless, have you read Oakley Hall's Westerns?

― dow, Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:42 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

W.E.B. Du Bois, that should be (respect).

― dow, Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:44 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm trying to think where the subject of Sci Fi by W.E.B. du Bois came up recently. Was it natalie Mitchell's interview in The Wire or something.
Don't think I'd heard about it before a couple of weeks ago.

but keep having the name Webby du Bois and his brother Shooby running through my head.

Think I have the Souls of Black Folk around somewhere still waiting to be read after at least a couple of years.

I just picked up a copy of Manahttan Transfer by JOhn Dos Passos yesterday and read the first chapter last night.

Susan Sontag On Photography is my bathroom book

& The No-Nonsense Guide to Fair Trade is currently my transport book but I think I'll finish it shortly. Then move on to Gunter Grasse's Tin Drum.

now reading blackout in gretley, a breezy jb priestley espionage thriller set in a grim northern industrial town.

― no lime tangier, Monday, July 31, 2017 8:52 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Does that relate at all to the Gonn track about not realising the protagonist is wearing sunglasses? Though I thought that Was Blackout OF Gretely

I missed the new thread!

Re-read House of Leaves, which I acknowledge is a mess, but even second time around it had a profound effect on me. It's the evocation of the uncanny, the limitless potential of the house (the book), the pathos of it. It seems to me to be a commentary on the limits of analysis and hermeneutics - of texts, of place, of the self - and also an exploration of depression and trauma. It's extraordinary and maddening. The Truant stuff annoyed me fist time, but I found it more affecting this time. Ach, I dunno.

Read my fist Maigret (...and the Killer) - will be reading more! Now reading Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is lovely. I thought I'd had my fill of the 'broken confessional finds solace in nature' narrative, but evidently not.

Oh, and I read Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Magnificent.

weirdly committed to an extremely neat and squared-away family-drama structure that in the end reduced to soap opera

For me this ruined an interesting book. An extremely old-fashioned world by itself wouldn't have. If memory serves the author implies in a forward that the traditional Englishness of the non-aerodrome world was a sort of parody, and he did lay it on pretty thick.

rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist

Pinter's Party Time does that too.

About 1050 pages into Alan Moore's Jerusalem, took a while to get through the cod-Joyce section. Obviously it's tremendously self-indulgent and overwritten but in a (mainly) easygoing, enjoyable sort of way. The dead kids time-travel adventure story that makes up the middle section is a blast.

Also reread Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver last weekend when I was in a shitty mood and hadn't been able to concentrate on anything, read it straight through in a couple hours, still riveting despite my familiarity and the fact that there's only the bare bones of a plot.

The True Deceiver is an astonishing little book

Reading Lydie Salvayre: Cry, Mother Spain -- fictionalised version of her parents' lives during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Interesting and entertaining, but also structurally a bit messy, and not sure that the characters ever break the 2D barrier

I've heard that Virginia Cowles' Looking For Trouble incl. some of the very best journalism to come out of the Spanish Civil War---true?

I've heard very good things about it too, but have never read it, sadly.

crawling my way thru Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens, I think I have like 70 pages left. Came out last year, my dad gave it to me to see what I thought because it was pumped up as another "millennial spokesman" novel. It's like Franzen meets Tao Lin. Also lots of incredibly obvious DFW worship and riffs that are straight out of Infinite Jest. But he's a good prose stylist, very lyrical, lots of really cool turns of phrase. I look forward to reading whatever he puts out next.

― flappy bird, Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:27 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im abt 1/3 of the way into this, liking it. the characters are v well realized, i can see it as a film i think

also recently finished o'neill's mourning becomes electra -- p great; not a ton of discussion of o'neill on ILB, i may start a dedicated thread~

I just returned from a camping trip, during which I read several books:

Three Tales, Flaubert. I liked A Simple Heart and The Legend of Julian Hospitator, but Herodias seemed much too overwrought, even if it makes a few shrewd observations.

The Public Image, Muriel Spark. This was located right in the center of Spark's strengths. It is not as praised as her other work and my only thought as to why would be that perhaps her audience was not interested in the subject of celebrity.

Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald. This is filled with affectionate humor and is clearly centered around memories concerning the wartime BBC that she felt warmly toward. It does not dive as deeply into human nature as The Bookshop or The Blue Flower, but it's very enjoyable.

Loved the atmosphere conjured up by Human Voices

The period called The Phony War, after Dunkirk and before the Battle of Britain, must have felt about as surreal as she depicts it.

I read The Drifter by Nick Petrie and it was EXCELLENT. Crime novel with Jack Reacher-esque antihero suffering from PTSD. I have the second one too and i'm looking forward to it. Even Lee Child is a fan.

Started The Mote In God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. a CLASSIC that i have never read. Famously, Heinlein said it was the finest SF novel he had ever read. i got the sequel that they wrote 20 years later as well.

I've loved every book by Fitzgerald except The Blue Flower, and even that one is pretty good.

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers, my first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery (the title is a campanology reference). Has a great foreword by the author: "From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God."

I've been reading in Seven Viking Romances, a Penguin anthology of old Icelandic lit that clearly has a fantasy-romance element. A Viking romance is nothing like a Harlequin romance. Women play very peripheral roles, while swords and death play a very central role.

Baba Dunja’s Last Love
Lincoln in the Bardo
Krazy: A Life in Black and White
The Sympathizer

Francois Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile. The critical verdict on these seems to stretch from 'works of precocious genius' to 'juvenilia of a writer of significant but unfulfilled promise'. There's plenty of evidence to support both views. I ended up on the fence but the books were short, enjoyable and easy to read.

Elizabeth Jane Howard: The Long View. Early Howard, quite different from the Cazalet novels, the only other books of hers I've read. Her strengths remain pretty constant while the weaknesses change: The Cazalet books sometimes rely on popular fiction tropes to fill the gaps in inspiration; the less inspired bits in The Long View aim at something more self-consciously literary and not all of it comes off. But she's a brilliant psychologist and overall I thought this was pretty magnificent. I've just started The Sea Change, another early one.

Ben Ratliff: The Jazz Ear. Discussions with jazz greats while listening to their choice of music. You'd have to have an interest in jazz to care about it of course but I thought it was pretty great. Lots of unexpected insights. Ratliff's idea that playing some recordings will get musicians to open up works really well.

the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media benjamin

I'm reading Paul McGrath's autobio

Holiday reading:

Moriarty, Kim Newman. Revisionist take on Holmes from the baddie's pov but also League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen-like mash-up of all sorts of 19th century genre and literary fiction characters, mostly handled quite reverentially. Lots of silly winks in the chapter titles ("The Hound Of The D'Ubervilles"). I can imagine some people really hating this but I found it clever and funny.
An aborted stab at Léo Henry, Le Diable Est Au Piano", about Corto Maltese meeting Blaise Cendrars in Brazil. Couldn't get with it - maybe 2edgy4me and possibly somewhat racially suspect in its glee for the squalor of the favela, but it's just as likely my beach-addled head wasn't in for something quite this demanding and not in my native tongue, so I went for...
O Espelho Que Foge, Giovanni Papini. Originally picked this up as part of a beautiful Portuguese re-edition of Borge's Library Of Babel project (it has an intro by the man); short stories by a 19th century Italian decadentist, highly influenced by Poe and itself anticipating magical realism and Weird fiction in many ways. Got a bit samey reading one story after the other on a flight, but I do highly recommend this guy - melancholic, poetic, world weary in a way that's evocative of half-abandoned villages in the middle of Summer. Quite spooky, too.

Now I'm reading At The Existencialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell. She does an extremley good job making some of the more difficult philosophers accessible - which immediatley makes me suspicious, both out of fear that she's being reductionist/dumbing stuff down and (perhaps sadly moreso) because of Tall Poppy Syndrome making me feel that what I SHOULD do is struggle with the original texts and learn to understand them instead. But what the hell, the chances that I'll ever decide to tackle Heidegger are pretty slim at this point and it's dumb to be angry at someone for giving me knowledge.

Oh, also Julian Barnes - The Sense Of An Ending, which started out strong but had a crazy melodramatic conclusion that made it difficult for me to take it seriously.

The film is quite good, btw.

Finished Chehkov's Letters and a collection of Olav Hauge's poetry.

I haven't updated this lately, have I? Good things I've read off the top of my proverbial include a couple of Par Lagerqvists ("Herod and Mariamne" and "Barrabas"), "White Tears" by Hari Kunzru, "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews and Damon Krukowski's "The New Analog" about what's changed in moving to a digital world, especially in respect of music and communication. I read "Attrib." by Eley Williams again and I will never stop recommending it.