2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?

Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States - my friend's first essay collection (out today!). Really great pieces on evangelical Christianity and how it operates in the U.S., the Midwest, etc.

― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, October 9, 2018 10:15 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ooh, gonna order this now.

<3 <3 <3

It's good to see you Brand Slipper! and if ilb can't be a place where people pop out to defend writers no one else cares about, then what's the point of it. that's interesting to know about his 'wild places' - i should dig it out. I am fascinated by the construction of landscape over time (well 'landscape' itself being a late construction) – nature is extraordinarily pliant to projections. and those projections are mainly bogus, often mendacious.

makes me v sympathetic to woof's suggested work of hate.

i did do a *very* controlled post on a piece of MacFarlane writing on the nature thread here. I seem to remember thinking 'i will try and be reasonable and even-handed here' despite going BOLLOCKS! internally when reading the article itself.

Just realised I have been confusing/conflating Robert McFarlane and Robert McCrum for years, and avoiding the former based on a dislike of a book by the latter.
Currently reading CHARLES BOVARY, COUNTRY DOCTOR, by Jean Amery, a NYRB rediscovery novel/essay defense of being a loyal loving loser.

Jordan, Elliot Bay Books pulled a copy for me right away so they must’ve been getting it in even without me asking, good luck to your friend.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk: short stories, historical vignettes, anecdotes, musings, loosely gathered around the two main themes of travel and, curiously, the effective preservation of body parts after death. From the quietly crushing true story of Angelo Soliman, the ex slave who rose to prominence in Austrian society - friend of the emperor and grand master of the masonic lodge - only to be stuffed and mounted in a museum on his death; to the somewhat flippant theory that English speakers are impoverished because they have no private language, everyone can understand them wherever they go. Reminded me a bit of WG Sebald. Maybe a bit long at 700 pages but easy to dip in and out of.

to the somewhat flippant theory that English speakers are impoverished because they have no private language, everyone can understand them wherever they go.

This is true! But then in London it doesn't matter what language you speak, someone on the bus will know what you're saying.

Good to hear, silby! We had a little party for her last night with the cover on a cake. :)

To the extent I am reading anything atm, I am reading The Stalin Front, Gert Ledig. It is a deep excursion into hell, as found in one small piece of the war between Stalin's and Hitler's armies, busily chewing one another to pieces with artillery, tanks, rockets and machine guns, as told through the intimate details of a few soldiers' experience, including the intimate experiences of a few corpses after their death.

being a loyal loving loser

Charles Bovary, c'est moi.

My reading is mostly for the other thread, but I did read the most recent Le Carre novel (in which Smiley is unmasked as a secret Remainer), and the wonderful Parts of a World.

Some Richard Matheson short stories, the effect overall being slightly blunted as you wait for each inevitable twist to drop in the last paragraph

I finished O Pioneers last night. That something sad would happen in the last third was obvious, but it made me sad anyway.

oh shit i just picked up o pioneers after trying and failing to get into gold fame citrus for the third time

cool I recommend it if you like Stardew Valley

Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success - not sure what I think yet. He sure does love a dumb protagonist.

his self hate is strong

manhattan beach - very trad, very enjoyable. a holiday book. more predictable than goon squad, but waaay more consistent

Now I'm reading The Hobbit for the first time because I guess I should

it's good imo

I finished The Stalin Front. The level of realism made it far grimmer than any war movie ever made. It was more relentless than All Quiet on the Western Front and conscientiously stripped the war of any trace of romance or glory. But the people involved are allowed their humanity, which makes the ceaseless violence all the more powerful.

If I have a lick of sense, I'll read some Wodehouse now. But I currently have a very wide selection on my shelves, so I'll think over my next choice a bit before I land on one.

ledig's Payback is also super grim, told from the POV of Allied bombers on a revenge raid against a German city. Good, though.

The bit in Stalin Front that most stuck with me was somebody's thoughts as they're trapped helplessly under rubble, never to be rescued.

Mr. Morrison, your comprehensive acquaintance with books of all persuasions continues to impress the hell out of me, even though impressing anyone seems to be the furthest thing from your mind. I salute you.

*blushes*

FWIW, this list is pretty good overall: https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/100-must-reads/s-43415865
I can claim 33, so a way to go still

That link being 100 German Must-Reads in English Translation

I've read about a quarter of the writers if not the exact books. Gotta say I wasn't taken with it. Having one book by certain authors here is wrong for a start but if you are going to do that then its the wrong choice for Mann, Musil, Kafka, Roth, Bernhard, Keun (surely its Child of All Nations), Stamm. There are far too many titles from the last 25 years. Also there ought to be some poets (I mean inlcuding Brecht's poetry instead of one of his plays might have been better too). Josef Winkler is an omission.

Having said that I've spent a while googling a few bits. I'll chase that Tucholsky, and Ilse Aichinger's The Greater Hope sounds amazing.

Bah. Am supposed to be learning that language, and know incredibly little of the list. The Trial has got to be the <i> right </i/> Kafka, though? Unless the problem is the listmakers not believing in short stories. Or do they? I'm too ignorant to recognise any collections there.

I would've gone for a story collection (there is a volume that collects all the stories published in his lifetime) or Letters to Felice.

finished Solar Bones and have to say I pretty much unreservedly loved it.

being the idea that
my entire existence is these same thoughts, that each rolling idea, as it occurs now is wholly responsible for my
being here
like
something lost, a revenant who has returned to his house at some grey hour to find the place boarded up and abandoned

it is a review of the main character Marcus' life, of his place in the wider systems of family, of county, of civic structures, as political animal. an individual’s positioning in those structures. the latter part of the book is overtaken by an outbreak of a water born virus in what I assume is Galway, from which his wife becomes seriously ill (and as an image becomes one of patient suffering).

this is my wit's end
my post mortem aria
my engineer's lament

an attempt to divine (the word is correct, this is a religious book) the structures of existence and the universe (the 'solar bones' and damned if i can now find the point fairly early on where he uses the phrase). outwith this order and structure there is chaos and the void.

the Skype calls he makes with his children always conclude with a description of the break of the digital connection:

I will, ok
bye
bye
after which he seemed to reach towards me with his palm outstretched, fingers filling the screen for a darkening moment before it switched off and the line which connected us across the globe dissolved to a black portal, leaving me adrift for a moment, my mind still locked into the conversation we’d just had before I closed down the laptop, the sound of which drew the sitting room with its walls and pictures in around me in the darkness

a representation of the void behind another kind of infrastructure.

That void is also perceptible behind the engineering of physical structures. The inexplicable virus, which is couched in apocalyptic and Biblical terms by Marcus’ children, is a failure of engineering which seems to have no cause. It is implicitly related to a moment when in his role as county engineer Marcus refuses to sign off the foundations of a school which have been poured with three different types of concrete, as they will expand and contract at different rates in the fluctuation between hot and cold weather resulting in the structural failure of the school. He gets political pressure to change his mind and sign it off, which he withstands, but the inference is clear that minor political corruption has structural consequences.

There is a joke halfway through, told by his son, about which the oldest profession in the world is - the engineer claims it is his, as God hands over to him after His act of engineering heaven and earth out of the chaos, saying ‘there you go lads, you take over now’ and the politician says ‘who do you think caused the chaos?’

as I say, i pretty much enjoyed the book without reserve. on occasions the freewheeling biographical review can perhaps seem a little attenuated, so that you find yourself asking ‘to what end is this being put down' but it's the matter no matter how mundane is rarely if ever left unredeemed into the wider context of the book. and although i've emphasised the spiritual this is also very much a book that takes care to describe the every day and does it very well.

and in that depiction of the every day, it’s also about loss. His depictions of his love for and history with his family and his location are a description of what his absence will mean to those people. And by leaving it an absence – those people are never seen in their grief – it is more potent and powerful to consider the structures of love that we engineer, and which are critical fractured by the absence that death brings.

He’s great at momentary descriptions of the shifting light and moods of days spent in a house. That there is something wrong with the day he recognises but it’s never described in terms other than those days we all have where we can’t quite settle into them right. The grey light of thinly clouded days with watery sunshine behind the perfect light for a momentary return:

the light is awash with ghouls and ghosts and the meaning between this world and the next is so blurred we might easily find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the dead, the world fuller than at any other time of year

Generally his ability to span from the cosmic to the quotidian with stretching the tone or language, by using Mayo and this man’s loved, lived life as the space that thinking operates in one of the book's great successes.

Though I’m not sure if what I didn’t enjoy most were the descriptions of his life as a county engineer.

I'm in the final 13th book of Confessions. Books 10-12 were a bit of rough sledding. The autobiography proper takes up the first 9 books, ending shortly after Augustine's conversion, as he's preparing to sail back to North Africa, when his mother - the mother who's faithful prayers on behalf of Augustine's soul have finally received their happy reward - suddenly takes ill and dies. Book 10 turns in a more metaphysical direction, as Augustine interrogates the nature of mind and memory. He carefully deduces how the mind is unlike a physical/material object. He's clearly pretty well-read in philosophy, and his reasoning requires careful parsing at times to follow his train of thought. This mode continues into Book 11 as the preoccupation with memory transitions into an exploration of the nature of time itself. Reading this chapter I had the distinct impression that we don't have any more idea of what time essentially is than Augustine did in his day. He's interesting on how neither the future or the past could be said to exist, and how the present, when we zero in on it, must be vanishingly evanescent. Book 12 turns in a more hermeneutical direction with an exploration of how to understand the first few verses of Genesis, about the moment of creation, and the mystery of the Trinity. This is all rather heady stuff, and in Book 13 Augustine finally turns in a more common devotional mode of prayer and supplication, humbly acknowledging his human limitations and looking forward to the day when he (and all believers) will see God face to face and know directly what is now only dimly perceived. That sort of anti-intellectual move is familiar in Christian literature, the idea that reason can only take you so far and faith needs to make the final leap, but it feels like less of a cop-out after having wrestled with difficult questions over the past hundred plus pages.

the Confessions is probably my favorite book, but I rarely venture beyond Book 9.

I am reading The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald. It is non-violent. So far.

christina stead's the people with the dogs

After a bunch of false starts with various things, I have settled into The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson as a good shocktober read.

still plugging my way through moby dick. i think i'm gonna start reading something else in the meantime, as I still have hundreds of pages left, and those pages are DENSE.

Moby-Dick is good imo

yeah, i don't plan on dropping it, i like it a lot. i'm just thinking about reading something concurrently as a counter-weight, perhaps something non-fiction

tbh i feel the counterweight to moby dick is fiction rather’n non fiction.

was thinking the bruce auto-bio, but yeah i get your meaning

oh yeah that’ll do!

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=steve+bruce+autobiography&client=safari&hl=en&prmd=nisv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjiv52T7YveAhWRecAKHfaFC-4Q_AUIECgC&biw=375&bih=553#imgrc=gCewMhZseCdfXM

fuck id forgotten about his thrillers.

https://thesetpieces.com/features/sweeper-steve-bruce-review/

sounds a bit like lanchester in fact.

Another is Bruce’s construction of his own maddeningly specific network of fictional clubs. It’s called the Bruniverse (by me) and it’s a world very much like our own, excepting his decision to mangle the names of those clubs with which he has been connected, as well as an increasingly large, seemingly randomly smattering of others. It’s like a pound-shop Westeros, only made up entirely of places you imagine voted for Brexit despite being largely dependent on EU funding.

that last quote is a bit snide. but the general review is enormous fun.

the bruce springsteen auto-bio i meant ha

finally reading something after a long long dry spell -- outline by rachel cusk. it's likely somewhat due to the rush of reading something self-reflective after not having read anything for months but it's turning me toward attaching a form to the last few messy years of my life, which is nice. the right book at a fertile time.

love it when that happens. when a book does that.

Kind of weird but also likeable that a book like Outline is gathering a sort of 'everybody reads it' status given that the premise of Creative Writing tutor meets rich people while being divorced should be the least interesting and most typical lit-scene navelgazy thing ever. I guess it's that it's stuff about the need for relationships/what 'purpose' they serve that makes it more universal than it should be? I feel like I should hold it in contempt, but actually found it great.

50p charity shop find : Nell Dunn's Up The Junction. Wonderful stuff so far.