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

The first time I read it I was tetchy about what I thought were the tenuous connections between Gwendolyn and Deronda.

I got it the second time.

And in my Gentile reckoning she rendered the Jewish rituals with great sympathy.

You could definitely criticise the number of fortuitous occurrences, though if you did you'd never be able to read any Dickens.

When the needs of the story conflict with the need for probability, the story should always win.

I've always wanted to read some Margery Allingham, and picked up "Traitor's Purse" at a secondhand without reading the back cover - so glad I did, it's fantastic.

Written during the war, it's a totally weird genre-crossover - part whodunnit, part amnesia story, part Hitchockian man-on-the-run caper, part uncanny English ghost want story, wrapped around a goofy but plausible conspiracy plot. It's basically a Doctor Who regeneration episode minus the sci-fi bits.

It's fun! Would say more but wouldn't want to spoil.

I've started reading Frazer's The Golden Bough, in the OUP one-volume abridgment. Kind of cool that he wrote this huge book (which was eventually expanded to 12 volumes) because he wanted to understand a painting of Turner's.

I discovered Elizabeth Bowen!

What took you so long?

That Margery Allingham sounds ace Chuck, straight to my goodreads want to read pile!

I am reading my first Barbara Pym novel, Excellent Women. So far, she seems like an author who wastes little time in rambling digressions or reaching for 'effects', instead she keeps her attention squarely on exposition and development, with great economy of means. I like that immensely.

Eliot's psychological landscaping---incl. gender and class, natch---provide the hinge or stepping stone between Austen and V.Woolf; for me, they're the Big Three---but her plot twists can seem very conveeenient, not really a prob but keeping her further from protomodernism than say Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy--no not really a prob but duly noted every time and putting a little more distance than would already be there. (Well the ending of The Mill on the Floss bothered even some reviewers of her time, and certainly suggests class-out-the-ass heartplucking 1940s Hollywood treatment---p. sure Austen never bothered with anything any where near this shit.)
Allingham take v. appealing!
The only Pym I've read is The Sweet Dove Died, funny-scary as hell re desperate delusions going deeper in middle age, "the bottom of the bottomless lake," as Prine puts it.

i want to relate a story, or really a finding i guess, and i don't really know where to put it, but since people interested in books frequent this thread it seemed like a reasonable place.

i've been listing books online for a bookstore in a small town since april. the collection of books i've been listing belonged to a lawyer in d3nver named j0hn hutch1ns. apparently the amount of books in this man's basement upon his death was pretty extreme. going through the small sample of his collection represented by 30+ boxes of books my boss hauled, i'm struck that his collecting habits were compulsive and not very discriminating, although there are a few items of value and interest scattered throughout. he mainly collected history -- american, military, western + mining history in other countries. he seemed very into a sort of triumphal mainstream view of history represented by occasionally brilliant but mostly second-rate white male historians erecting tomes in service of the status quo. he wrote a few pieces for local colorado history organization the d3nver w3st3rners. he served in the military in his youth and there are books related to military history, uniforms, flags and seals that give me the impression of an older man playing army men through books. he also seemed to be religious.

anyway, i picked a book out of the box, "love stories of famous virginians," and found a letter laid in at the rear. i'm going to transcribe it, with some google-proofing.

J0hn--

I'm too miserable to sleep, so I'm writing this -- I don't know if 1) you'll read it or 2) if you'll care -- probably not -- since anything I think or feel is my fault because I'm crazy -- but I need to do something, so I'm writing this.

So tell me, how do I live, knowing that any time you get really angry with me -- and it I never knew when that will be -- that you will 1) blame me for the loss of all your hopes and dreams and 2) tell me that I am a rotten wife -- that I have failed to support you, ruined your career, your dreams and your life. I do not agree with your assessment -- but what matters is that you believe it -- so tell me, since I have ruined your life and am a terrible rotten failure as a wife -- why should I live? how can I live under that burden? That burden is more than the weight of the world -- more than the weight of the universe -- but I can't kill myself because that is against God's law and because it would have a terrible impact on 4dam -- so I can't live and I can't die -- what can I do?

Don't answer. I can't take any more. I'm just going to do my best to wipe my memory and wipe my emotions. I'm sorry you ruined your life by marrying me. Feel free to rectify that mistake an way you see fit.

phew!! i was definitely under the impression that this dude was a real dusty dick. i hope the wife left him but i don't think she ever did.

a request to the book collectors of ilx: don't be like this asshole and treat your wife like shit, and don't collect boring, bad books if you can help it.

I read three Pym novels within a week in July and she struck me as the least, ah, fulsome of the Anglo-Irish miniaturists. The gestures in her books I can barely remember.

Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy-

Many times when I praise Hardy as one of my nine or ten favorite novelists I get serious wtf looks. I have to keep explaining, "Have you read one of his major novels? They're weird as fuck."

her plot twists can seem very conveeenient, not really a prob but keeping her further from protomodernism than say Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy

Hardy is the king of the conveeenient plot twist, no?

Also, what's a good Hardy that isn't Tess, Casterbridge, Madding Crowd or Jude?

The Return of the Native and The Woodlander. I've tried Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Every twenty years a publisher attempts to reactivate interest in those minor novels.

The Woodlanders rather

Hardy is the king of the conveeenient plot twist, well yeah, but he wants you to suffer with Jude The Obscure, Jude The Obscene, Obs The June Moon---sorry, that Thurber piece keeps coming back---or anyway keep your head down (and keep reading) and don't show any interest (just keep reading)---wheras Eliot is cute with it, even when it's a sick sad world scene, maybe nudge-nudge invitation to take it as send-up of Victorian conventions, or at least exploitation, because a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

When Ford Madox Ford moved to the country, he wrote about meeting a grocer who found Hardy's books crucial for understanding or at least standing his life out there.

Thos Hardy anecdotes:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DttKs6GU4AAwuS3.jpg

Iirc Two on a Tower is nothing but plot twists - was released as a serial first and has almost laughable cliff hangers ever few chapters.

There’s a literal cliffhanger in a pair of blue eyes!

My high school English teacher was friend's with Thomas Hardy's gardener (!), who - spoiler alert - said that Hardy was a miserable bastard.

There's a story I read somewhere of a younger writer going to visit Hardy and the entire time being spent on an extended tour of the local countryside, having the locations of various pets' deaths pointed out.

Virginia Woolf records in her diary a charming visit to the old man (who kept writing exemplary poetry into his late eighties).

When, in the summer of 1923, the Price of Wales (later and after his abdication the Duke of Windsor) was about to pay his annual visit to the Duchy of Cornwall, someone at Court suggested to him that he should, on his way, visit Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, his home in Dorchester...

A Luncheon (by Max Beerbohm)

Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,
Albeit to see you I'm unglad
And your face is fraught with a deathly shyness
Bleaching what pink it may have had.
Come in, come in, Your Royal Highness.

Beautiful weather? -- Sir, that's true,
Though the farmers are casting rueful looks
At tilth's and pasture's dearth of spryness. --
Yes, Sir, I've read several books. --
A little more chicken, Your Royal Highness?

Lift latch, step out, your car is there,
To bear you hence from this antient vale.
We are both of us aged by our strange brief nighness,
But each of us lives to tell the tale.
Farewell, farewell, your Royal Highness.

-- Jacobus Gerhardus Riewald

Yes. and the dour Male presence, though not omnipresent (thank Christ for V. Woolf and others, also for Molly Bloom etc), is a hallmark of modernism, which is one reason I think of him as proto (also I was taught to think that way, in a 70s course, Modern British Fiction).

Today I learned that if you talk about Fanny Burney on Twitter, a bot comes along and gently chides you, asking you to refer to her as Frances.

Am reading Wolfgang Hilbig's THE FEMALES, which is as jolly and calm as you'd expect.

So many good songs and good performances

Ha, sorry, meant that for the Pete Shelley thread

Hardy wrote tons of good lyrics imo

Ha, exactly

Here's the Hardy/pets anecdote: it was EM Forster:

"T. H. showed me the graves of his pets, all overgrown with ivy, their names on the head stones. Such a dolorous muddle. ‘This is Snowbell––she was run over by a train. . . . this is Pella, the same thing happened to her. . . . this is Kitkin, she was cut clean in two, clean in two––’ ‘How is it that so many of your cats have been run over, Mr Hardy? Is the railway near?’––‘Not at all near, not at all near––I don’t know how it is. But of course we have only buried here those pets whose bodies were recovered. Many were never seen again.’ I could scarcely keep grave––it was so like a caricature of his own novels or poems."

Too bad I changed my screen name moments ago, you just gave me another one.

Reading a few bits of stuff with proper words and sentences as I am mostly reading a technical book these days:

Violette Leduc - La Batarde. Her memoir, points to a lot of the autofiction you see bandied about.

Sir Thomas Wyatt - Complete

Lewis Hyde, COMMON AS AIR

Still on Anna Karenina lol
Also: Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (which just by happenstance made reference to the next on the list)
Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish
Ted Hughes, Crow

I'm still reading The Golden Bough. If there was an even more abbreviated edition, I would probably go for that. If there's any more contemporary author it reminds me a bit of, it would be William Vollmann, in the exhaustive piling up of facts to suggest the faint outlines of a numinous pattern.

I finished Excellent Women, Barbara Pym, last night. It is a beautifully observed and well-formed book. It legitimately rates as a comic novel, but only because the narrator maintains a slightly sardonic view of herself and those she becomes involved with. There is the hint of a smile in most of what is related, but it is tempered by her barely acknowledged distress at living a self-consciously narrow, faintly absurd life.

Now I am reading The Saga of the Volsungs in the Penguin edition translated by Jesse Byock. Reading at least one Icelandic saga each year seems to have become a tradition with me. This may be my second one of 2018. I may have read Sagas of the Warrior Poets already in 2018. I'd have to check.

Excellent Women was by far the best Pym novel I read last summer, most of which had diminishing returns. I agree with that review.

I enjoy Pym, but sometimes I want to scream that I really do not care what the new vicar is up to.

blimey

I have never not cared what the new vicar is up to. What could be more important?

I do care what the vicar is up to, but Wodehouse and Fitzgerald did it better.

Finished Sodom and Gomorrah (re-read) and will take a break from Proust.

Also Noonday (Pat Barker), the London-in-the-Blitz set conclusion to her artists-and-war Life Class trilogy. I suspect if this had been a first novel Barker would have been advised to go away and substantially rework it. Repetition, unnecessary little gobbets of not-quite-there fine writing, poor technical control. And yet I found it enjoyable. It's the 7th or 8th of hers I've read so she obviously has something that keeps me coming back, although I'm not sure I could easily describe what it is.

Now reading Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker which has started well.

I finished Saga of the Volsungs. Its main interest for me were the most primitive parts of it, which were a dim reflection of some very old Teutonic myths, retold in an era that barely recalled and no longer understood them.

Afterward, I picked up Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and read about the first 25 pages. Compared to the terseness of the Volsung saga, Krull is baroquely elaborate. I'll probably stick with it, but it is early days, and I've never managed to be on good terms with Herr Mann in the past.

I enjoyed an earlier book in that Barker trilofy, can't remember which one, but was annoyed by one anachronism: people in WW1 using the word "robot", which wasn't coined by Karel Capek until 1920. I am aware this is a very niche complaint.

Afterward, I picked up Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and read about the first 25 pages. Compared to the terseness of the Volsung saga, Krull is baroquely elaborate. I'll probably stick with it, but it is early days, and I've never managed to be on good terms with Herr Mann in the past.

― A is for (Aimless)

You made the best choice. A decidedly un-pompous book.

Flex Krull! The bit with the military service panel is wonderful, like the whole thing. There's also a German TV adaptation kicking around with a really great lead actor and a stapled-on ending where he flies away in a hot air balloon triumphally.

Weststruckness/Gharbzadegi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad