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

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.

I'm reading the final book of stories from Deborah Eisenberg's Collected Stories: Twilight of the Superheroes. I'd been saving that one, but now that she has a new volume out, I don't have to feel bad about finishing it.

I like Bruce's BORN TO RUN book a lot.

I also feel that I should read Steve Bruce's books.

Also Lenny Bruce's autobio, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People.

I finished The Gate of Angels. It had Fitzgerald's characteristic excellence. The story, characters, and prose avoided every kind of cliché and staleness and all were drawn with sure, strong strokes. It even had the tiniest whiff of a ghost story about it, though without insisting. Never insisting. Lastly, in its own indirect and understated way, it was highly feminist and class conscious. A fine book.

I read Municipal Dreams, which is a history of council housing in the UK. It made me angrier and better-informed.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Today I finished How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti which, like all good books, is about women.

(And other things, like the struggles of art and Judaism)

still plowing through vol 3 of Callow's Orson Welles bio ("One Man Band") and Oriana Fallaci's "If the Sun Dies", plus occasionally dipping back into some Ballard and Moorcock short story collections

The Dead Girls, by Jorge Ibargüengoitia: surely an influence on the most gruelling part of 2666. The back cover and the intro by Colm Toibin both describe this book as hilarious, which is wildly innaccurate (not a criticism--it's not TRYING to be hilarious).

I got "If the Sun Dies" and keep not getting round to it. How is it?

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, so now I know where one Ilxor got their screen name...

Coincidentally, I also finished a Fitzgerald novel: At Freddie's, the only one I hadn't read and a minor disappointment.

I got "If the Sun Dies" and keep not getting round to it. How is it?

I am only 75 pages in but I love it. She's a remarkable writer in the right place at the right time.

Anthony Powell - Afternoon Men
Dezso Kosztolanyi - Anna Edes
Anthony Powell - Venusberg
Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

Alternating between the usual (mostly) European/Latin American fiction I read and starting on a few English novels written white, mostly Tory sorts. In these early Anthony Powell novels the comedy really hits, and the dialogue is so good. Afternoon Men has a streak of anti-semitism running through it and both of these books have this deeper tragedy on the relations between men and women that wouldn't be out of place at all today.

I need to give Powell another try after a fruitless summer reading the entire A Dance sequence.

The early novels are short so worth a go at tuning into his worldview. A lot of the comedy is really sharp, actually (I'll need to re-read some of the Perry Anderson essay but I think he undersells this?) I want to finish a couple of his short books before getting to that sequence - maybe next year.

xp Seems like you gave Powell an extensive workout already, so I see no 'need' to go back to him unless it is, in fact, a misnamed 'want' to go back.

vintage aimless

I remember The Gate of Angels being clever further in, but otherwise about all that stuck was the lovely exhilarating opening scene of bicycle action. Should probably go back. That was some great bicycling.

recently read some v. appealing descriptions of short stories and novellas in three new stand-alone Andre Dubus collections. I like that he was an early fan of Chekov (also Hemingway and his own instructor, Richard Yates). Also that he was apparently not a stylist in the-then dominant Carveresque key, and was a deep diver into big messy family situations and resulting inner conundrums of friends and relations. Also saw Part I of The Woman In White on PBS, and thinking I need to check out Wilkie Collins too: seems to have the observant foregrounding of gender codes (def incl. legal) that I associate Trollope at his best, plus melodrama x class-anxious, striving young characters re Dickens---also a detective.