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

Sorry, I was thinking of Sara Lownds. Really.

I finished Sergio Pitol's The Magician of Vienna (the last in the trilogy to be translated) - its effectively a brilliant, sometimes moving and disturbing (both go hand-in-hand), strangely put reading (Pitol was a reader, writer and translator who knew Russian, Polish, English) and travelling (got to do that as part of the Mexican diplomatic service) diary, that zig-zags from one point in his life to another. I can't remember ever encountering someone's passion for literature (which I find it to be a bit boring in comparison to a passion for music, say) in this way - to the detriment of other people (I think he has a wife, and maybe children, his grandmother was a passionate reader of Tolstoy). Here, for this person, books are his way of engaging with the world, of forming friendships - which then dissolve back to the writing desk where you are alone reading, writing or translating. Very little like it.

Wolfgang Hilbig's I is his way of processing the years of surveillance, collaboration and backstabbing within artistic circles in the former East Germany. I often think things like this are best collected via a non-fictional framework as no transformation takes place. This isn't true here, Hilbig is steeped in a Gothic mood spread over these labyrinthine sentences. I've spent much of this late spring day with it. Flipping between this and Joseph Wrinkler's Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. I loved the books of his I've read so far - and they are all very similar. Tableaux like descriptions of what can only be described as Dante-ian hell circles transplanted to the Austrain countryside. The difference is the 400 pages of it (as oposed to the usual 150 pages) so its another type of challenge.

I suppose you mean Joseph Winkler, who writes nightmarish stories about rural Austria.

Josef Winkler, sorry.

lol sorry yes, always make that mistake when I google him.

Here is an excerpt: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/01/selections-from-graveyard-of-bitter-oranges-the-torch/

Actually quite a few excerpts available, he is such a singular writer (at a stretch there are snatches of Genet crossed with something like Claude Simon): https://bodyliterature.com/2014/02/15/josef-winkler/

I am going to do the Boston Public Library challenge this summer. It is hokey, but I’m into it.

https://bpl.bibliocms.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/05/BPL-2018-ONE-MILLION-MINUTES_English_Bingo.pdf

I need recommendations for books

A) set in summer
B) audiobook (decent reader)

Reminder: it's getting on time for the quarterly WAYR change of season. think of your clever thread titles now and avoid the rush.

Magpie Murders is a good audiobook

Not everything in Numbers in the Dark completely works, but it's impressive how Calvino never repeats himself - it's almost like each story is also a different idea of what a story can be. It made me want to re-read "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" and to read some of his other stuff too. But looking over my shelves I realized I hadn't finished part 3 of "3 by Flannery O'Connor" so I think I'll read The Violent Bear it Away now.

Dag Solstad: Armand V -- this is wonderful, though the conceit of it being "footnotes" to another, unwritten text seems entirely redundant

can I elicit recommendations for short story collections that are child-appropriate (but not necessarily "for kids"?) whenever my 8 year old cousin sees me reading on my tablet she asks if she can read to me out loud. it's real cute but the other day it resulted in her reading Robert Caro to me for an hour :-/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00JTCJER0/

The best book of stories there ever was

Frances Burney: Evelina -- loving this, can exactly see why Jane Austen did too

Oh ho, saw that in the library recently---James, I keep meaning to ask, did you know that a lot of Margaret Millar is back in print now? Very copious omnibus editions, for inst, and attractive stand-alones too. Also a memoir, described as starting with cute stuff about birdwatching and proceeding in a natural way to classic California conflagration.

Ooh yes, I have all the omnibuses. Was worried for a while, as the last 2 vols kept getting postponed for month after month, but now I have them. Really enjoying all the ones I hadn't read.

Paul Celan - Complete Prose. Its only about 60 pages of a poet's prose. The above reads still go on but its the World Cup's fault!

I finished The Violent Bear it Away. I'm kind of bummed that I've already read both of O'Connor's novels and probably half of her published stories. I really enjoy her milieu of doomed hard-luck cases, drunk on fire and brimstone, adrift in a world of grifters, bums and - perhaps worst of all - concerned liberals.

I finished the Keegan book. It was an odd mixture of extremely high level strategic matters and descriptions of four particular sea battles, which included extremely low level details to the point of tedium. He is terrible at describing action so that it comes alive to the imagination, at least he was in this book (1988). Maybe he improved later on.

Not sure what direction I will go next.

I've started reading James Salter's Light Years. I guess he's one of the now-mildly-tarnished generation of 20th-century literary phallocrats, alongside Roth, Updike, Bellow etc. I'm only a few chapters in and the main character's already boinking his secretary. I'm not sure he's the one to interrogate his own privilege, but his writing has a lightness of touch and luminosity that are unusual.

Lucy R. Leppard - Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972

Salter's good. I liked his rock climbing novel too. No secretaries on the mountain.

xp Lippard, damn autocorrect

I'm reading Barbara Pym's Excellent Women for the first time.

Light Years told me some stuff about middle age that turned out to be right, the changing perspectives etc., but not the usual autumn leaves stuff. You'll see. Some of the obsessive sentence-writing took a lot of getting used to; was really intrigued by subsequent reading of his debut, The Hunters, based on his experience as Korean War pilot, the daily rounds, the tautness and bits of lyricism coming out only when absolutely necessary. Became required reading in some sectors of the Air Force. But think he revised it a bit? Would not want it to be more like Light Years, effective as that was, at best. There's a .pdf, but haven't checked it against my memory (the one I read is no longer in the library). A Sport and a Pastime is generally considered the peak of his lapidary (main) phase, I take it. There'a a long New Yorker piece about him, posted a few years before he died.

Haven't read Excellent Women yet, but Pym's The Sweet Dove Died told me some scary shit about middle age! Not all of it has turned out to be true so far, but

All of Salter I found great, except for his last novel, which was a bit tedious and unoriginal. But Hunters, Light Years, Solo Faces, A Sport... All excellent.

Xp yes, Pym is wnderful, though sometimes I just want to yell WHO CARES WHAT THE VICAR IS DOING???

^ a commendable and sensible impulse, especially if one will not unduly startle bystanders through its indulgence.

I always care what vicars are doing! Wodehouse taught me that.

Wodehouse vicars are almost always doing something mild-mannered and ineffectual.

If you don’t keep an eye on your vicar they might cut some crucial pages from their sermon the weekend of the big handicap.

Are you guys referring to The Great Sermon Handicap?

Oh wait sorry. Didn’t read previous post closely enough

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

Maybe just because he wasn't as widely read.

Here's a nice Jhumpa Lahiri tribute to "Light Years" that I just found: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/26/spellbound-2/

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

― Uncle Redd in the Zingtime (James Redd and the Blecchs),

Maybe because Salter kept his nose to the ground, concentrating on the failings of his male character instead of using it as a metaphor.

(that's how I remember Light Years)

I'm not sure those other guys deserve all the trouble they get either.

Yeah, not as widely read and not as self-regarding.

I read Patrimony by Philip Roth a few weeks ago, my first Roth book (thanks to Alfred for putting the idea in my head that this should be the first one I checked out). Roth in autobiographical mode, with his father as subject, sounded more inviting to me than any of the novels. I found it moving and, in places, startlingly intimate. The ending made me cry of course. I've lost a parent to cancer, so a lot of it resonated with that experience. Herman Roth is so much like one of my grandfathers that I wound up thinking just as much about what it was like losing him.

xp Evelina is hysterically funny and sharp, and pretty rough. There's real violence, sexual harassment, ogling men around every corner.

Yeah, there are a couple of scenes where she's alone, and drunken men in packs are coming up at her, and the menace is really well captured. For a comic novel it is amazingly good on the feeling of being powerless.

After a week of bloody naval warfare, for my next book I chose something where the battles are more sedate: Barchester Towers, A. Trollope, wherein High Church and Low Church clerics politely vie for social supremacy, unsheathing their well-manicured claws at one another, while the reader is invited to look on in fascinated amusement.

Cesare Pavese: The Beautiful Summer -- wonderful book, lovely cover, but Penguin also fail to give the translator's name and seem to have printed the actual pages on crappy old newsprint and then charged 8 quid for it

HALT! Are you aware that a summer reading thread has begun at 2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?, and if not, why not?