2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

I already believe the 14th amendment is the best thing America has ever done so that sounds appealing.

I just signed up for this course. In anticipation I'm reading Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography by David Reynolds. So far, excellent.

I'm listening to Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders on audiobook (a silby rec), and I'm enjoying it a lot, too. Good readers.

Recently, I finished Sy Montgomery's The Good Pig and Soul of an Octopus, both lovely and simple memoirs about the author's obsession with the titular animals.

For work, I'm steaming through a bunch of anthologies of by young American writers from culturally diverse backgrounds. Flying Lessons and Other Stories, by Ellen Oh, part of the #weneeddiversebooks movement had some good middle-grades pieces, and I'm working to get my hands on an advance copy of the same organization's new young adult anthology, 'Fresh Ink.' I also checked out of the library a half-dozen young adult anthologies by LGBTQ+ authors, but they're mostly fan-fic, and nearly all present queerness through either a deficit lens or in a way that is creepily erotic given the age of the intended audience.

I really enjoyed Soul of an Octopus. I must get The Good Pig. And an actual pet pig.

NYRB Classics one day sale right now from their web store. The more you buy the more you save.

I’m still reading Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

That NYRB sale is brilliant and I wish I lived in a country where the savings weren't more than destroyed by postage fees

Just finished reading John Darnelle's Universal Harvester (which was fantastic and puzzling and a proper joy) and now I'm reading Ben Myers' The Gallows Pole set among the Cragg Valley coin clipping gangs . It's good so far!

Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura. So far it seems like a treatise on Japanese aesthetics framed by a ghost story.

xp Have you read Wolf In White Van, dog latin? It's even better.

Seems like a genius move, if anything is.

Yeah I liked Wolf In White Van a lot!

I finished Light Years, which turned out to be not too skeevy after all. It was more of an homage to domesticity and dinner parties than a celebration of the phallus. In fact my main take-away from the book is that I should try to have more dinner parties. There were some things I didn't understand about the relationship between the central couple - they never have sex yet they also never fight - but perhaps we're not meant to understand it. The whole thing is bathed in this wonderfully elegiac burnished glow which probably inspired a lot of bad novels but somehow works beautifully here. If more people had read it, I'd think it might have had something to do with the decline in divorce rates that started a few years later. The sex is sexy but also kind of menacing, like the spread of the wife's father's cancer, eating away at the bubble of domestic bliss.

finished Light Years, which turned out to be not too skeevy after all. It was more of an homage to domesticity and dinner parties than a celebration of the phallus. In fact my main take-away from the book is that I should try to have more dinner parties

Shrewdly put.

Bloodlands, Snyder: maybe not the best thing for my mood these days. learned quite a bit, the timing of events and sense of location for things I'd only understood disparately. and the post war stalinist ethnic cleansing of the satellite states, I'd never read anything about that.

Ancillary Sword, Leckie: in the middle of this one. idk it's ok. her ideas are interesting but i don't think i like her as a writer. all of the tedious etiquette stuff plus the constant overlay of personal data, you're losing me a little bit.

Harry Potter. I managed to avoid this stuff totally until now. and you know what, they're... fine. they breeze right by. i get some of the same energy i got from d&d: a bunch of folklore and myth put together into a sort of coherent, inviting world. but the plots all rest on lying to or negligence toward children so the cheery nostalgia is lost on me tbh

Memoirs, US Grant: not far into this. pretty dry with occasional dad jokes.

the plots all rest on lying to or negligence toward children

Yes! There is definitely agree to which these novels lean heavily on the Idiot Plot: how much time is wasted with Harry, Hermione and Ron scrambling, usually at great personal risk, to solve some mystery that Dumbledore could have easily cleared up from the very beginning?

I'm currently reading Mackenzi Lee's The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue which, despite a bisexual protagonist and an 18th century setting, has a very Potter-ish makeup. It's a lot of fun.

solve some mystery that Dumbledore could have easily cleared up from the very beginning

In the world of Potter, the adults all seem determined to keep children in the dark about many highly important matters. This has the ring of truth to it for young readers.

Yeah, and kids investigating and uncovering what adults don't think they're ready to know is a children's literature wish-fulfillment standard, c.f. kid detectives and such.

I'm on a Barbara Pym kick

Where's good to start? I have No Fond Return of Love and Excellent Women, but haven't opened either

Excellent Women will do.

xxposts

Agreed that the lies of adults make both generic and emotional sense but the formula stops making much logical sense after a few HP books.

A colleague of mine is crazy about Pym, so I’ve been curious about her for a while. I think I’ll start with the gay themed one that Alfred wrote about on his blog.

To call it gay-themed is to suggest it's explicit. Like I wrote, if you're not paying full attention, it may slip past you.

i am reading james' twitter

working so much I have no chance to read : /

Finishing up Helen DeWitt's short story collection, then the new Rachel Cusk.

The DeWitt is an enigma at times in that I'm not always certain what she's trying to do with a story, but you definitely get the sense that there's some sort of specific conceptual motivation at play.

I interrupted my reading of Barchester Towers and took a detour through Kitchen Confidential. I needed something that would be fast and undemanding.

I can see why KC was very popular and made Bourdain into a celebrity. It has a lot of sensational stories, told with touches of Hunter S. Thompson's style, but also a very friendly and unassuming authorial voice throughout.

Soon, back to the vicars of Christ and their hijinks.

re-reading Pale Fire thx to Raymond jogging my memory

good stuff

I read a few things this month.

Further into Kusamakura - not a ghost story as it turns out, it's just the female character the protagonist fancies is very elusive.

The stuff on aesthetics is still interesting, though also a bit windbag-y. Very chauvinistic towards Western art (fair enough, we can take it) and also Chinese art (dodgier). Can't quite tell if Soseki means the protagonist to be an idiot or not - he's a young student, so I think he is supposed to be a bit pompous and naive, but you never know. Meiji era authors often split between adoration of Westerns forms/urges to "modernize" Japanese arts and letters and a (very understandable) backlash against that and militancy in valuing Japanese traditions.

Reading Elmore Leonard's The Switch. It's fun. I'm starting to think late 70s is my favourite era for Leonard. They're just as strong as the 80s/90s classics but tighter, shorter, more exciting, and after Swag he finally figures out to how to relax with the dialog thing.

Sōseki spent some time in the West, London specifically, and HATED IT: had the most miserable time

Haha! This is also true of Stefan Zweig and Portuguese realist novelist Eça de Queirós, off the top of my head.

I like it ok myself ftr.

Slays two. Found gassed. Thinks of cat.

Sure, it's no Maidenhead.

I'm reading Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. It's lovely for so many reasons: how dialogue reveals character, the furnishings, the gentle (and not so gentle) sneering, the sheer depth of self-loathing. I need to read everything she has written.

I didn't mention finishing Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. I found it oddly muddled in places (deliberate ambiguity of the narrative voice makes absolute sense in the circumstances, but still) but the last 100 pages, on the ice, are some of the most sublime I've read in the last few years.

Ben Myers' The Gallows Pole

Let me know how you like this - it's been sitting in my 'to-read' pile for months. I think I liked the cover?

I bought it because I really liked the cover tbh. But it's good. I haven't read George R R Martin, but it's written in a way that I would imagine is Martin-esque crossed with a folk-horror/Quietus/Ben Wheatley aesthetic. Lots of good descriptions of the Yorkshire Vales, very atmospheric. Strong characters and doses of ribald humour and creative swearing. I'm enjoying it so far. It's a surprisingly easy read too.

"I'm reading Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. It's lovely for so many reasons: how dialogue reveals character, the furnishings, the gentle (and not so gentle) sneering, the sheer depth of self-loathing. I need to read everything she has written."

It's a long time since I read it, but Angel is pretty untypical Taylor. It's a kind of pastiche (a sardonic take on a certain type of "womens' fiction)", whereas most of her work is solidly in the realist tradition. I like it less than the best of her more characteristic stuff but for some people it's her best work; if you're one of those the rest might be something of a disappointment.

I finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, volume 3 of 4 of Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Novels". I started Brideshead Revisited. The first 30 pages have totally sold me, I love Sebastian Flyte already.

the first section of BR is by far the best iirc, steep drop off after Sebastian (who, yeah)

Maigret On Holiday and so am I.

Shirley Collins All In The Downs.
She's in London and already introduced to the library at cecil Sharpe house while working as a waitress/counterstaff at the cafe upstairs at the Troubadour and doing solo spots in the folk club downstairs.
Nice book as was America Over the Water.

Maigret and the Informer: Closet crims build up lavish bourgeois overlays of custom and properties, but/and eventually just have to kill/be killed, disrupting the routines of others, incl. cops, but that's also customary, so of course we have Maigret pulled from his bed and table and even city, but I shall say no more tonight (click).

I'm about 3/4 done with Barchester Towers. It has an impressively nuanced grip on the role of communication and miscommunication in human affairs and happiness. But perhaps even more impressive is the good nature and generosity with which the author views the failings and foibles of all his characters, even those who play the role of villains. Trollope has a similar penetration into human nature as Jane Austen did, while being less acerbic, less witty, but warmer in his sympathy.

Some of his contemporaneous fans found The Way We Live Now too dark and disturbing. I thought it was great. Justice is a fairly rare form of good nature and generosity in this our life.

Justice, justice you shall pursue

I spent 2011-2016 reading a Trollope novel every semester. I never read BT -- I read every one of the Palliser books. They're shallow but deep, if that makes sense. They're Balzac novels w/out the interest in character. Boy, do they understand politics, power, and money.

TWWLN got interest in character as well as understanding p, p, and m. Haven't read any of his others yet. (They're all long as fuck apparently, and now I'm stuck in the 20th Century.)

Reading Henrik Pontoppidans Lucky Per. One of the best Danish novels I've ever read, a complete joy through and through. Very French in style. Highly recommended!

Also reading R K Narayans retelling of the Ramayana, and Octavio Paz' Labyrinth of Solitude.

It's a long time since I read it, but Angel is pretty untypical Taylor. It's a kind of pastiche (a sardonic take on a certain type of "womens' fiction)", whereas most of her work is solidly in the realist tradition. I like it less than the best of her more characteristic stuff but for some people it's her best work; if you're one of those the rest might be something of a disappointment.

It's not really a pastiche. Angel is an author of a particular kind of 'women's fiction' for sure, but her portrayal is a serious one. She's a study of embattled optimism, hiding from modernity.

Not sure if I'm completely remembering, but I think in an NYTimes interview around the publication he said that the next book was already finished, but the third one wasn't. Ah, here we go:

"Now he is rejuvenated, though there remains more work to do. Before it can be published, the second volume of “The Book of Dust” requires what he calls “carpentry.” The structure needs to be sawed up and reassembled, the sentences sanded smooth. The third book then needs to find its way out of his head and onto his two-holed paper. He warned there would be a delay, just as there was before the last volume of “His Dark Materials.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/magazine/philip-pullman-returns-to-his-fantasy-world.html

new shteyngart

there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

I finished CHRONIC CITY again.

[SPOILERS re: Belle Sauvage]

The thing that really bothered me was the total lack of follow-up to the implied sexual assault of a major character right near the end - for a book that was so deliberate, and that took into account the more commonplace work that was foisted on the female characters, it seemed really off.

I’ve had Patrick O’Brien’s Master & Commander on my shelf for a few years. I did not suspect that the wholly delightful first chapter would be followed by 400+ pages of impenetrable naval architecture porn, inc. long discussions of the relative merits of grommets to pulleys in sail maintenance. I’ve read easier pages of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I still dug it though. Has anyone read the sequels? Do they get any more plotty and less, er, shippy?

The fanfic is all shippy

You don't need to understand much, if any, of the nautical jargoning to read the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien. Just skate past it and you won't lose a thing.

All that shippy stuff mostly gives you a sense of how complex a sailing ship was and how important it was for the crew to 'know the ropes'. The characters who spend a lot of time gabbing about this nautical minutiae have worked on ships for the great majority of their lives, and by contrast, know almost nothing about life on land. They are just as lost and "at sea" when ashore as the landsmen are when aboard ship.

If you read many of the novels, you'll start to see many of the same jokes reappear multiple times, but that, too, is probably authentic. Old jokes get handed down in small isolated communities, just as playground games get passed down by children.

The Fire and the Fury Michael Wolff
Funny that people with both the male and female versions of this name were causing the White House discomfort at roughly the same time.
I just got around to reading this when the Bob Woodward book came out. Wondering what of the books on the current regime are still worth reading.
Also saw Active Measures this week which was good.

Philip Roth - "Portnoy's Complaint"

A few pages in and I feel this is going to be a lot more Freudian than the other Roth books I've read

lol well you aren’t wrong

Getting into Howards End (someone was talking Forster upthread I think) and it’s remarkable so far. It’s impossible for me to read the Miss Schlegels as other than Jewish, which may yet turn out to be contrary to the text but no matter. Seems like it will be an instructive contrast to Brideshead Revisited, in some ways. Nice to read something of this ilk with no barons in it (so far)

I don't think they're supposed to be Jewish, just German - but I don't remember anything in particular in the novel that would state clearly they're not.

Certainly they could be German liberal aesthetes and be gentiles but as a descendant of German Jewish liberal aesthetes I’m predisposed to read that type as a Jewish one

Joseph Lelyveld. Move your shadow: South Africa, black and white. Picked this up in a box of books on the pavement on the walk to work on Wednesday morning. Good appalled account of apartheid South Africa written in the early 80s by the NYT correspondent who had been expelled from South Africa in the 60s after a year by the South African government for his reporting and allowed back in 1980, staying for 3 years.

is it worth continuing with the trilogy if i wasn’t totally blown away by Three Body Problem?

I finished Troilus and Criseyde last night. It was a confusing work for a modern reader, because nothing added up to an integral whole. Chaucer took an older story and reworked it, but he failed to rework it into a shape that was satisfying, because he kept elements of the story that glaringly didn't fit with the direction he wanted to take it.

The result was kind of a mess. He spent the first four books making the two main characters fit the mold of chivalric romance, then in the fifth book they fail entirely to live up to the ideals they have lengthily and poetically declared they believed with all their hearts and souls. I can't begin to count how often they invoked their willingness to die for love, then when push comes to shove, Criseyde changes her mind in the most perfunctory way imaginable and takes another lover. Afterwards, Troilus, the paragon of princely virtue declares he will seek honorable death in battle to satisfy his vows of perfect service to love, but as the story peters out, Chaucer mentions briefly in passing that he failed both to die or to get his revenge on his rival.

One is left with a parable of courtly love that conflicts with itself and an author who shrugs and sidesteps the glaring issues no reader can fail to notice. This dangling conclusion is not meant as irony or as cynicism; it is just a problem Chaucer doesn't know how to resolve, so he punts.

chaucer sonned by an aimless in epic poem beef

T & C doesn't seem like something I'd be interested in, but I appreciate your take, Aimless. Cheers for sticking with it even though you found it confusing.

I finished Slaves of Solitude. It was good. It reminded me a bit of Skylark (another NYRB reissue) in the way it's psychological acuity and careful rendering of aspects of small town life made it relatable to a modern reader, though admittedly 1940s England is already a bit closer to modern times than Belle Epoque Hungary. The rendering of civilian life during the long days before Normandy as stretches of anxious dreariness punctuated by the odd boozy bacchanalia seemed believable. And its portrayal of the boarding house boor, Mr. Thwaites, was devastatingly acute, even though the author's deployment of much felicitous prose to take down an annoying dunderhead did seem a bit like a bazooka being aimed at a gnat.

I finished Thomas Browne's Religio-Medici, and as a perfect follow to Burton's Anatomy..., just as a fireworks display of language and learning, anchored by a deep well of faith in a god, which in their hands its a complex figure. Burton and Browne are companions in the best sense and you realise what pub talk as prose could be.

Lawrence Goldstone - Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903

I could not disagree more re: Chaucer's Troilus, which to me seems pretty clearly Chaucer's multi-angled comment on the future fate of all such starcrossed-lovers tales

Currently reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Love it! I tried it once before but gave up early...really glad I tried again. You can see the way she perfected her style with Wolf Hall etc later...all the building blocks are there. Also love the way she has written the various women.

Debating whether to pursue another fictional French Revolutionary novel afterwards, or a meatier non-fiction instead. Def want to stay in this arena though.
Maybe that Marie Antoinette book by Antonia Fraser?
We’ll see.

I just finished Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855 btw and it was fucking great. I loved Europeana and didn't really understand Case Closed entirely but 1855 is just terrific - clever and biting and fun and dark. I'm glad Dalkey has this guy, wanna read everything he writes

I'm now digging into Crashed, Adam Tooze.

I'm taking some time out of town and Crashed is too massive and unwieldy to bring with me, so I'll probably start and maybe finish another book before I can get back to it.

Violette Leduc: The Lady and the Little Fox Fur -- another really good Penguin European Writers book with a lovely cover and hideous paper stock

I keep meaning to talk about stuff I’m reading, but never get around to it. Anyway, started to reread ‘Seibi There Below’ by Krasznahorkai, and reminded how much I loved it. The writing is gorgeous.

Should be Seiobo

Vile Bodiesm Evelyn Waugh. It's funny! Was taken with this passage:

"Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings. He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food, of the greasy horror of fried fish and the deeply moving smell that came from it; of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and the dullness of buns...He planned dinners of enchanting aromatic foods that should be carried under the nose, snuffed and thrown to the dogs...endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy."

T. Singer by Dag Solstad, in which a fellow hamstrung by self-consciousness lives his life. The book does its Dag Solstad thing, which is to say I loved it. I think he's probably my favourite living writer at the moment.

I have also been reading Dag Solstad. His Armand V, which I finished last night. This one has very light games played with narrative although apart from that it isn't that different to his other books and what they work over in all its European white-male neurosis in a tragic-comic mode with an awareness of priviledge. Both he and Thomas Bernhard have a lot in common although there are some key differences - in Bernhard, whose central figures like to berate you with truths - although they hate themselves for never standing outside of it. They are very much post-war and dealing with something like the fall out from the politics of the 60s and 70s, but then Solstad also engages with the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, and Western imperialism too -- something Bernhard never got to do as he died in the late 80s. Both write with a really addictive rhtyhm to their sentences (although Bernhard has that trademark density of his). Its quite a novel to be reading today -- as we drive toward what feels like the end of certain projects -- the EU, NATO, etc. as the kind of consensus fractures and we march toward what nobody knows.

Other than that its poetry via a couple of key NYRB issues:

Poems of the Late T'Ang
Proensa An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry

The first set fo translations is by Welsh sinologist A.C.Graham who seems to, in his introduction, attempting to bridge a gap between a conception of Chinese culture and poetry somewhere between Ezra Pound and William Empson. I often wanted to engage a bit more with ancient Chinese poetry but I never found a starter volume. Till now. The notes are good - when I can understand them, and I feel that I can go on a learning curve now. No such problems with Troubadour poetry although I have only started on Proensa I've read a couple of vols in the past. This one is translated by Paul Blackburn (who had a corerspondence with Pound) and there's a quote in the back from Richard Sieburth (translator of, among many things, courtly love poetry and an editor of the Faber Selected poetry of Ezra Pound) so join the dots.

Re-reading Derek Walcott's The Arkansas Traveler and just started The Sellout.

started hugo wilcken's the reflection and hoping it becomes a bit more than wow this narrator is *really* unreliable

In the home stretch of Ha Jin's Waiting, but slowing down my reading, resisting the tide, even though I know it's time, it's time---so much quiet momentum, the characters are so fluid within their constraints, their circumstances, their logic: lightning in a bottle, across the decades, that is.

During my short beach vacation, I started reading Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson (Freeman Dyson's son). Now I am halfway through it and must decide whether to set it down and pick up Crashed where I left off, or finish the Dyson before I return to Tooze's book.

Is it bad, or just overwhelming?

I'm reading the Confessions of Augustine in the new Sarah Ruden translation. The translation is great: jazzy, punchy, and thoroughly unstuffy. The work itself can be repetitive at times and elusive at others, rather like a stream of consciousness, despite the overt devotional character of the work, I do picture Augustine indulging in a tipple while leisurely dictating this to an amanuensis, but at times it snaps into focus and you feel like a bit of historical vertigo as you catch a personal glimpse down through the centuries.

The Unforeseen by Dorothy Macardle. A woman, Virgilia, staying in isolation in a cottage in the Wicklow mountains, realises she's developing second sight. Her daughter, Nan, is trying to decide whether she's in love with Perry, a dick, or should be dedicating herself to her art. There's a combination of building dread, confined hysteria, and uncertainty, within a lovingly depicted Wicklow countryside and its bird life, which is striking. In fact one of the successes of this book is how Virgilia's visions and the nature surrounding her are seen to participate in each other.

As the main characters attempt to come to decisions about their futures you are shown them probing the future in different ways, whether it is the predictive force of hereditary traits, a sense of unease, being able to visualise yourself in alternative futures successfully or common sense. The way these interact and compare with the dangerous certainty of second sight is well done.

It has a terribly glib resolution though, which squanders the building unease. The scientific seriousness with which the male characters take everything makes this feel, as an introduction also suggests, that this is doubling up as an assault on scepticism about second sight and paranormal things generally. The overall lingering message – that which is unforeseen is sometimes the most important thing, in our previsions and attempts to make decisions based on a perception of the future – is a decent one.

And the shadow of the war sits within this book (published 1945, set summer 1938), with so that the decisions the characters are trying to make are laced with a presentiment of death:

'And, you see, for our generation, life is not going to be a summer holiday. What we've got to find out is whether we shall want one another when things are frightening and terrible.'

It's written in what I would call an Edwardian fashion - that is to say it's pretty stately, but i quite like that mode of writing, which is well done here at least, and which made this perfect reading while convalescing, and the descriptions of Wicklow and Dublin Bay made me wish I were there rather than blowing my nose in London.

also started forbidden line by paul stanbridge. in many ways it looks like the sort of thing i should like - a mixed plate of history, pseudo-religion and the arcane, - but it’s written in that facetious, garrulous style that seems like its intended to be described as pynchonian but which also seems to be the congenital style of a category of well-educated young male tyro, and to be lacking in any sort of constraint that might make it interesting.

am ambivalent. will continue with it for a bit.

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Same.

Robert Harris's enjoyably sprightly SELLING HITLER, about the fake Hitler diaries, is lots of fun

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Hey, it’s fall

so it is.

Oh yeah, basis of the Ray Milland movie The Uninvited (made during WWII, I think). Never watched the whole thing, but have seen it compared to Val Lewton signature films re (post-Turn of the Screw?) supernatural as lens/prism of character development.

I just started 2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?. Feel free to commandeer the throw pillows and stretch out on the sofa.