2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?

Here's this month's haul of newly read books.

I started reading "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age", indulging my inner nerd. I wish there was maybe a bit more about the technical side and maybe a bit less about nerd office politics, but I've got to hand it to Hiltzik for getting all these stories on paper.

Reading my first le Guin- The Left Hand of Darkness. I have no ide where this fits in her canon, but it's magnificent and I can already tell I need to read everything she's written. Is there a typical le Guin sentence? I've noticed a couple with a particular kind of music, almost over balancing themselves in the second half: 'The face that turned towards me, reddened and cratered by firelight and shadow, was as flat and cruel as the moon.'

Also hugely aware of Mieville as I'm reading. Something also to do with rhythm, but the names, too, the bustle of consonants.

It's pretty much at the heart of her canon: that and The Dispossessed are probably the purest expression of many of her concerns.

Yeah was gonna post that.
xp Intrigued by several of Alfred's hot takes: he even makes the Herbert Hoover bio sound exciting. I'm still wondering why To his delight, he saw the party that had uneasily accepted him as its head renounce, for the sake of electoral victory, the Progressivism it had disliked in him.

Yeah. I kind of always want to read every book Alfred posts about, he always make them sound so good.

máirtín ó cadhain, "the dirty dust"
grace paley, "collected stories"

I just read The Scarlet Letter for the first time. It's so good. More of a mythic and fantastical vibe than I was quite expecting.

I couldn’t get through that when I was supposed to read it in 11th grade; I thought it sucked. But I also didn’t have a shred of respect for that teacher.

Yeah. I kind of always want to read every book Alfred posts about, he always make them sound so good.

― Nashville #9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs),

aw thanks

Robert Chesley, Jerker
Stephen King, Joyland
Emily Mackay, Homogenic
various, All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages

"The Girl Beneath The Lion" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, which may be a valiant but flawed attempt by a male writer to do a female coming-of-age story but may be a load of old-perv nonsense.

"The Chameleon" by Samuel Fisher; I enjoyed this very much. It has a high-concept thing going on (the narrating character is a book that has the power to change itself into other books to observe the human lives around it) - there were times when I thought the novel struggled to carry the weight of the concept but in the end it was worth it, I think. There's one bit, involving a game of chess, which I thought made the whole enterprise worthwhile on its own.

"The Girl Beneath The Lion" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues

Ha, I just spent five minutes googling to find out whether this is 'Le lis de mer', which it is. Odd English title. Doesn't help that the Dutch title is 'The Love Night of Vanina', the edition I read first.

I'd say it's more a valiant but flawed attempt instead of old-perv nonsense, but my judgement can be clouded by the fact that he's a favorite of mine. I can't help but admire his languid, dreamy style, which hits all my right buttons.

I'm willing to bet someone like David Hamilton took a lot clues from and aspired to film like Pieyre de Mandiargues writes, but took it too far: all corny pervy stuff, no substance. Would love to hear what you think of the book!

Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich's mammoth oral history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Utterly compelling, totally devastating (one especially grim narrative at the centre of the book, wherein a young Jewish boy crawls out alive from a mass grave of incinerated bodies, instantly brought to mind Klimov's Come and See). Feel like reading some Wodehouse straight afterwards.

I wholly judged it by its cover when I first encountered it in a thrift store. Love this one:

https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1339059518l/15227442.jpg

xp

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/418DuX9k6PL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

This is what my copy looks like. Phwoar!

"The Se Lily", "Vanina's Night of Love", "The Girl Beneath The Lion". WTF?

I enjoyed it, I think for the same textural reasons as you, but couldn't help feeling like it was a bit of an old man's fantasy fest by the end. I'd have trouble recommending it to anyone without significant caveats.

Agreed. It's very much "of its time", to put it mildly.

Finished Maurice, and with that my project of going through E.M. Forster's novels. Might tackle the short stories, literary theory, biographies etc. later on. Reading Jeeves In The Offing while I decide.

https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388197724l/22448.jpg

The Neutral - Barthe, late lecture notes.

“Perhaps my reasons, just alibis?” <- i feel like this a lot.

Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich's mammoth oral history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Utterly compelling, totally devastating (one especially grim narrative at the centre of the book, wherein a young Jewish boy crawls out alive from a mass grave of incinerated bodies, instantly brought to mind Klimov's Come and See). Feel like reading some Wodehouse straight afterwards.

Yes, in this book many of the different interview subjects frequently break down in tears (so we're told - one of the things Alexievich does really well is to use just a few discrete textual interventions to convey the whole emotional terrain of the interview).

i read the michael finkel hermit book while on vacation ~ p good, knights general indifference to finkel is solid, i enjoy & relate to that 1 of the only? things he asks finkel for is for a video of finkel's bkshelves maybe i shd move into the woods idk

Read some Francoise Sagan short stories, which was a mistake. She's trying to hard to land on both "world-weary libertine" and "gosh, isn't this SHOCKING?!!" that she lands between the two with a loudly audible thud.

Was she any good at all after the first book?

Not on this evidence.

i love bonjour tristesse but i got the sense it was best to stop reading there

Ingeborg Bachmann - Malina.

blold meridian

That title would have made it more fun.

I started reading "Skylark" by Kosztolanyi. Very low-key, but a colorful depiction of small-town Hungarian life around the beginning of the 20th century.

Belated lol at blold meridian

I'm nearing the finish line with Emma. I will be glad to leave Emma Woodhouse and all her friends and enemies behind me. They are somewhat overstaying their welcome, so that their mental ticks and crochets are becoming both predictable and rather tedious.

I had thought that Austen would run through the entire book reserving the privilege of our knowing a character's interior thoughts solely to Emma, while showing the interior of all other characters solely through words and actions, but she's recently stepped outside that convention to rope in Mr. Knightley, Emma's beau ideal (a fact every alert reader figured out 300 pages ago, but Emma remains unaware of as yet at my currently attained stage in her progress toward the ultimate happiness of marriage. That end is so obviously unavoidable that it may as well be an accomplished fact even before she sees it coming.

Anyway, Austen's great strength is not concealing where the plot is trending, but her ability to frame the perfect phrase to describe her precise ideas down to the smallest fraction of a degree, and doing it as regularly as McDonald's spits out burgers. She's a perfect wonder in her ability to sustain that particular perfection over hundreds of pages. I can't think of another author who does it better, perhaps because I cannot read Flaubert in French.

Kosztolanyi is fucking awesome and there's one book by him in English I can't afford because no bugger will reprint it.

Which one's that, James?

I am reading Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebre - it's a tangled internal monologue and I'm finding it really slow going; when I remember to read it really fast and let my eyes skate over the sentences I'm enjoying it very much, when I slow down I'm getting tangled up and not achieving any greater understanding from the additional attention. But I keep forgetting to speed up!

wiki only lists three more books, one of which is available (Kornel Est which I own a copy of). That leaves:

Anna Edes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anna-Edes-Revived-Modern-Classic/dp/0811212556
Darker Muses: The Poet Nero: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darker-Muses-Poet-Dezso-Kosztolanyi/dp/9631328414

Yeah I have a copy of Anna Edes ( nice Quartet Encounters edition obv) and it’s great.

I'm fifty pages into The Pursuit of Love and finding it a little slight, or at least slighter than I expected. Quit or soldier on? It's short, I guess.

Darker Muses is the one I can't get. kornel Esti and Anna Edes are both wonderful.

Passing, Nella Larsen. Very impressive so far.

Excellent book, getting this deluxe edition later this year: http://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/passing

Outline by Rachel Cusk - not much happens, narrator goes to teach a writing workshop in greece, has a bunch of conversations, some one-sided with awful people, about relationships, writing, life, we hear some life experiences and anecdotes, and it's phenomenal.

Read Patricia Lockwood in the LRB on Cusk, ledge. Sounded rly interesting. Good to get ilb confirmation.

Speaking of life experiences and anecodtes, the Marguerite Duras selection of conversations/essays collected in Practicalities are fantastic and tearing me up a bit.

xxp

Emma, the character, annoyed me a bit by the end of my first read-through, but when I read the book again I recognised what everyone was saying about the intense complexity of details dovetailing, the formal and technical innovations of the book, and I appreciated it and its wit more, see it now as one of Austen's best and am always ready to re-read it.

In this season, though, Mrs. Eaton's rambling notes on strawberries always pop up in my head

The best fruit in England—every body's favourite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one's self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.

Patricia Lockwood has been a terrific find for the LRB. All you got from reading about Cusk before that was hysteria around what she was doing or the way she conducts her life. Lockwood makes her into something worth checking out.

I agree that "Outline" is phenomenal, although "Transit" is even better - a book I uncharacteristically re-read very soon after first finishing it. But Cusk breaks lots of rules of "good writing", particularly show don't tell, and it's easy to imagine that many readers won't like her at all.

I like the Lockwood review a lot, but there have been plenty of other positive reviews of Cusk's novels, including some heavyweight reviewers. I'm encouraged that she seems to think "Kudos" is of a piece with the first two, because the only other review I've read was by someone who liked the first two but thought "Kudos" was a falling off, or least too much more of the same. I look forward to reading it.

I saw a copy of Charles Mann's The Wizard & The Prophet at my public library, checked it out and have started reading it. Its subject is basically how humankind is going to deal with 10 billion people on earth in the not-so-distant future, or to put it another way, it asks how doomed are we?

In order not to look like any of several dozen other books that approach the same subject matter, he packs the material around two seminal scientists with opposing views. One was the godfather of the "reduce, reuse, shrink our footprint" rather ascetic approach. The other was primarily instrumental in the Green Revolution and solidly in the "science and ceaseless innovation will let us all prosper" camp.

Even before picking up the book, I know which camp I'm in. The earth is finite and a human population crash can be avoided only for so long and will be all the worse for having been postponed. But Mann is a very good researcher and finds especially interesting facts to decorate his books. He also writes clear readable prose. So, I'm in this book for as long as he can tell me new things, or old things in new ways.

Joao Gilberto Noll's Quiet Creature on the Corner is truly trippy, the author has to write a plot twist (its like some sort of ouliaipian constraint, or just wilful attention deficit), you end with so much chop and change at barely 100 pages that it feels like barely anything at all. Obviously not reading it in one sitting didn't help. Now onto Return to Region by Juan Benet and he is a writer to be discovered by, and surely to be re-issued one day. Maybe the Spanish civil war novel - although written in that Proustian block paras (with some ineteresting twists), whose effect is often to take it away from anything historical and specific to something else - its an experience very unique to the act of turning pages. I'll try and type up some more if I have it or to block quote something juicy from it.

On the poetry front I put down Durs Grunbein's Selected. Its kinda ok, just couldn't quite connect with it.

I finished “Skylark” which seemed rather low-key at first, but which by the end seemed instead well-paced and judiciously modulated. It’s a small gem of a book, in which minor yet colorful events are presented with such clarity that they achieve outsized resonance.

^^^^^^^^

JA Baker: The Peregrine -- basically, peregrines are excellent, which I can't argue with