2019 Winter: The What Are You Reading thread that came in from the cold

Starters the year with a couple of sharp Archipelago Press titles: Bacacay by Witold Gombrowicz and Love by Hanne Ørstavik. The former I don’t j ow how to talk about without being deeply tedious (something something warped short stories dipping far enough into the absurd to be fascinating and feel pointed something something). The latter I can’t really talk about without being spoilery but it’s really Norwegian and it’s really brilliant.

I just finished Stacie Williams' BIZARRO WORLDS.

Hi Fizzles, back in Sept. I pasted-reposted a Rolling SF etc conversation about Watts from way upthread: one James Morrison advises, "Start with Blindsight, then Freeze-Frame Revolution." Think he's also the mentioner of another good 'un set in the Blindsightverse. I've only read (and enjoyed!) a few anthologized stories. All of Watts' stories were posted on his site, free reads, but then he warned about bogus downloads being sold, might've removed them.

Love by Hanne Ørstavik is great and incredibly sad

Echopraxia is the Blindisght sequel, and you very much have to have read Blindsight first, ideally immediately beforehand, in order to remember what's going on.

Paul Schrader The Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer

I think I read that book before seeing any Ozu, and having a wrong impression that Ozu would be much less fun than he is.

For fun, I picked up a NYRB collection of stories by Conan Doyle, The Adventures and Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. In spirit and quality they are somewhere midway between Alexandre Dumas and "A Boy's Own Paper", but unquestionably fun.

Is there a particularly good story you'd recommend? Doyle meets Dumas sounds right in my comfort zone, but I've struggled with the Gerard stories when I've tried them in the past.

Virginia Woolf, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

You perhaps misunderstood my allusion to the "Boy's Own Paper" aspects of the stories. They lack all the nuance and deeper psychology of Dumas, instead delivering their adventurous derring-do along with some gentle comedy to deflate any chance the hero will be taken seriously. If I may invent a category for them, they are first rate throwaways.

xpost to dow - thanks for that. really must make an effort to keep up with that thread more.

also want to read Love by Hanne Ørstavik.

in the meantime The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard, trans. Mark Polizzotti. An enjoyably strange book: a novelistic history of the outbreak of the second world war. Its tone veers around a bit - some in the “gallic style” - cheerfully carefree judgments on people and the contents of their heads (reminiscent slightly of Paul Hazard in his excellent Crisis of the European Mind), occasionally careful reference to documentation, and novelistic gusto and verve with anecdote. but it has some moments of very high impact. the complicity of industry with nazi politicians as just the normal cost of doing business present in the opening scenes, a vivid contempt for the English aristocratic and political classes (Chamberlain collecting rent from Ribbentrop as he left his role as ambassador to go back to his new role as Foreign Minister in the Third Reich). The mixture of fatalism and helplessness of politics during these moments of great significance is conveyed extremely well.

i see it just got a bad review in the spectator as well so an additional gold star for that.

our man james gave it a good review

Alex in Numberland. Book on maths that I started last year then I think drifted away onto something else without getting very far into. Now getting much further into.
& I saw its sequel while i was in London. Finding it pretty interesting so far.

Broadway Babies Say Goodnight Mark Steyn
HIstory of musicals which i picked up from a charity shop last year, started then drifted off to other things and have again picked upa nd got further into. Just reading about Hammerstein.

Memphis 1968 Stuart Cosgrove's 2nd Book on Soul and cultural history.
Read the Detroit 67 last year and really enjoyed it. Now got one chapter into this and reading about james Carr etc.
Looks like it should be about as good.

yes, i’ve been rinsing out james’ 2018 list at the beginning of the year: there were a number of things, this last included, that i really wanted to read. and as expected they’ve all in some way hit the mark.

moominvalley in november

it has such a sad, strange vibe

I'm going to read a few of those from james' list too, I think: convenience store woman ; other minds ; love ; order of the day ; and, maybe, moon of the crusted snow

I would love to read a fraction of what Real ILB James reads, but I can't keep up any longer. Not saying, just saying.

Where what who is 'James' list'?

Reading Will Storr's Selfie. I should have known from the title but there's an interesting book in there, amongst all the pages of barely-hidden research, the fact that everyone he quotes is a 'Professor' (as if it's a badge of honour, or he's trying to justify the 'and now this' nature of the narrative) and the breathtaking amount of supposition. I'll probably persevere because, well, it's January.

Ben Myers' The Gallows Pole was excellent. Like The Proposition co-sung by a pissed David Peace.

in the meantime The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard,

I've since read another by him, Sorrow of the Earth, which is a similarly done look at the treatment of Native Americans in the early 20th Century, and the weird showbiz career of Sitting Bull in Buffalo Bill's circus. Not as good as The Order of the Day, because it shoehorns in a completely unrelated story at the end to try to hit an uplifting ending, but still very interesting.

xpost

it keeps resonating for me. it’s a really good book i think. almost like a series of dioramas, vividly painted, a flair for interpretational flourishes. i don’t think there’s a more powerful depiction of how these events, images, and great historical catastrophes emerge from and are present in the common run of things.

it’s v hard to believe this isn’t written with an eye to current events both in general aim and with specific references (hitler promising to build the largest bridge, the tallest building etc). normally i’m v wary of “relevance” and especially wary of the ww2 and current day neo-nazism, alt and far right analogies(continuity and reference, fine, ww2 and build up as analogue not). yet vuillard makes as convincing a case as i’ve seen by displaying in condensed form a set of understandings (social, intellectual, ideological, pragmatic, narratorial, emotional etc) about how history operates, which is v impressive.

I really hope more of his work gets translated.

should i read Third Reich by Bolaño?

Yes. The only work of serious literature that mentions the Judge Dredd role-llaying game.

Sorry, Chinaski, "James's list" is my blather here: http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2018/12/excellent-books-what-i-read-this-year.html

Giving Le Guin’s ‘Always Coming Home’ a second chance. I enjoyed it when I first tried to read it, but I got lost somewhere along the way.

Just a note that the very, very good HUMAN VOICES is a quid on kindle at the mo

Two books published by the Dorothy Project (the first two of theirs I've read, will definitely read more): "Wild Milk" by Sabrina Orah Mark and "Dan" by Joanna Ruocco. Both exist in dreamy (maybe kind of Pynchonny) worlds of ungraspable semi-reality to variously pointed effect, I took the point in each (at least in part) ot be patricarchy's slippery distortions.

Both are VG but of the two I'd pick "Wild Milk" as my favourite, partly because the instability seems to come from within the language of the stories. I have no idea about SOM's approach but I found myself speculating that she takes a story premise and does some kind of cut-up or word association on it and then allows that distortion to drive a new story. Consistently interesting and affecting.

Finished Selina Hastings bio of Rosamond Lehmann. Her life reads like a glossy soap: celebrated beauties (women and men), minor aristos, aesthetes, marriages, divorces, celebrity, multiple/often disastrous affairs, devastating bereavements, monstrous egotism, borderline looniness. Hastings does a good job of capturing it all for the general reader: it's a professional, properly researched bio that resists the temptation to sacrifice readability for scholarly heft and reads almost like popular fiction. All very enjoyable.

Following Chuck's recommendation I put Human Voices onto my Kindle although it cost £1.99 rather than a quid.

That biography sounds good !!

David Foster Wallace: 'E Unibus Pluram: Television & U.S. Fiction' (essay written 1990, published 1993; a different media age)

reading the vuillard.... 50 pages in, hmmmm not sure... it reads more like a (very opinionated) essay rather than fiction per se

JUst got Heavy Metalloid Music by Jesse locke been wanting to read it since I heard it existed.
IN depth history of Hamilton ONtario's Simply Saucer including post band bio of Edgar Breau the singer/guitarist and then the reunion /band reappearance since I'm not sure how many of original band are in the 2010s version.

I think it IS an opinionated essay rather than fiction, or maybe it's some other odd cross-genre exercise

yeah it’s a rum one. right at the beginning he talks about the descriptive opportunities fiction can afford, which he makes use of, but will also lean periodically on the presence of documentary research, without that doing much more than assuring you that such documents exist. eg its reference to Schischnigg’s memoirs means it’s quite difficult to discern what is directly taken from the memoirs and what is fictional imagination.

his moral judgments are straight out of the certainty of the high gallic style, of which i’m quite fond - shriving off the necessary caveats and sketched alternatives of historical uncertainty and leaving your main judgment forcefully asserted.

i’m happy with the blurrings. i think the selection of depicted events and the overall force and brevity make it feel like a highly insightful dream.

I finished All for Nothing by Kempowski. Overall I thought it was quite effective. Hopefully not to give away any spoilers, but it felt like one of those novels where 80% of the action happens in the last 20% of the pages. Despite the omnipresent air of menace, the stately atmospheric pace of the first part doesn't prepare you for the swift descent into brutality. As the carnage piles up, you almost feel like you've been ejected from a sophisticated art-house period piece and landed in some kind of Coen brothers' black comedy. However, even in the beginning sections, when the story seems to be drifting on revery (though it's never quite clear whose revery), the story does make steady progress in its sideways, crab-like fashion. It does leave you with plenty of food for thought, which is usually a mark of a good read. After that I read my self-help book for the year, Mindset by Carol Dweck. The book does have the advantage of having something worthwhile to say, but it just keeps saying it and saying it, though it is mercifully not a long book.

I couldn't handle anything serious, so I just read Why Not Catch-21?, Gary Dexter, a collection of 50 newspaper columns that discuss why different books were given their titles. It's literary trivia, but moderately interesting and of a suitably low-wattage that it could be read in a doctor's waiting room. Just what I wanted.

Currently reading second Boileau book, after the excellent She Who Was No More, namely Vertigo. Both have been turned into movies.

Still only 2/3 through rereading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

I can revere Woolf and trust that she is a magnificent artist, and what she tries to do in this novel is remarkable; eg spending pages in going beyond the human and trying to show how space and nature subsist over time without people in the picture.

BUT I am still doubtful about her tendency, often when doing that very thing, to go for a 'grand style' which is, maybe one could say, too 'Victorian' or 'Romantic'. She falls back a lot into dodgy (especially personifying) metaphors of eg 'And now night donned his cloak and swept all about him', which seem below the level of the best of what she is trying to do.

completed the complete saki & now onto hg well's tono-bungay which (thus far) promises to be a victorian era lower middle class bildungsroman

Finished TO THE LIGHTHOUSE again.

Yes, I have had my vision.

I'm now reading an old Penguin Classics title, Lives of Saints. The specific saints are St. Brendan, St. Cuthbert, and St. Wilfred. Miracles abound. The glory of the Lord shines in all things. The usual stuff.

Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (1808)
Bill Konigsberg, Openly Straight (2013)
Bill Konigsberg, Honestly Ben (2017)

Gregory Benford: The Berlin Project -- very weird unsatisfying alternative-history novel about the Manhattan Project in which Benford's Mary Sue hero, his real-life father-in-law Karl Cohen, gets to save the world, minimises geniuses like Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi, gets to tell off and outsmart Heisenberg and Groves, etc, and is fawned over by people like Rommel. Very odd. Like an incredibly ambitious present for his wife that somehow got published for a wide audience by mistake.

I tell you, reading Benford writing sex scenes between his father- and mother-in-law is very peculiar. Did not need soixante-neuf introduced in that context.

On book two of the Neapolitan Novels, at lunch my bartender asked me what it was about and I said it was a bildungsroman about two women in Naples. She said if I came in next week she would bring me a copy of her favorite book to read, and showed me the tattoo associated with it. The cheering of Saints fans made her inaudible so I don't know what book it is. I suppose I should bring her a book too?

Once I finish the Ferrante novels (which are a pleasure to read) I am going to find more Barbara Comyns to read, she is great.

recommend who was changed and who was dead

Not that it isn't brilliant, but I did think there were a lot of unnecessarily bad sentences in To The Lighthouse, or parts where a slight lack of clarity made me have to stop and check who was being referred to. I dunno if that's intentional but I remember thinking that along the way as a general impression. I loved it though.

Reading John McGahern's Collected Stories at the moment. I've read some dour Irish stories in my time but the world he paints really is grim. V good stories though. Just finished Wendy Erskine's Sweet Home - also short stories. All set in Belfast, one of the better modern collections I've read of late.

For the Eric Vuillard readers, he responded to criticism in the NYRB about his approach to writing history--I uploaded it here:
https://www.scribd.com/document/397893674/Pages-From-2019-02-07-the-New-York-Review-of-Books

Looking at the Wikipedia list of Comyns novels, it appears I've read the four dating from before the sixties and the four dating from after the sixties but none of the four from the sixties. I have enjoyed them all, I think maybe I liked The Vet's Daughter best.

I started The Power Broker a few days ago so I'll see y'all in a few months.

I finished People in the Room by Norah Lange last month, and thought it was astounding. An Argentinian avant-garde portrait of a fracturing mind.

Yeah it’s great isn’t it? It’s stayed in my head in the months since I read it, too.

Who I am reading now: this sounds like an interesting life...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2JBFBDVAAAmzJU.jpg

I’m reading Jane Eyre, guess what it’s good

SO good

great book

Have managed to get Archduke Eduard von Habsburg, great-great-grandson of Emperor Franz Joseph, to tell my wife on twitter to let me buy more Austro-Hungarian books.

Many Hungarian novels...

So little Hungarian time

There are still Archdukes?

I'm reading Jane Eyre too!

i'm not (it is good though)

i did read that Eleanor Oliphant book after a good review on Front Row. it has sold >1m copies but there's not a single mention of it on ilx. having finished it i am not really surprised. not much to recommend it.

40% of the way through Monte Cristo but am reading one volume a month and alternating it with other things.

I'm rereading Wuthering Heights!

(I read JE, WH and Agnes Grey in the same month, all great although WH was too long)

Back to Andy Beckett, PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE. Very readable yet so long that it's taking me ages.

A Voice Through A Cloud by Denton Welch, my first of his. All about the piping high gorgeousness of his prose. I kept thinking “English Thomas Wolfe” but god knows I haven’t read Wolfe these thirty years so the comparison is probably bollocksy.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Mosfegh, it’s good, maybe not as good as I’d been led to expect but that’s hardly the book’s fault. I thought I was going to read a kind of Miss Mundane gets into NYC scrapes, which I suppose I did, but the scrapes are much more sombre than the capers with gangsters I (for some reason) had imagined. Nominated for the Wellcome Prize as I understand it, presumably on the basis of it dealing with mental illness and addiction to prescription drugs?

Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis, super-brief and fantastically sharp piece on what capital does to us, mainly in terms of what capital does to our bodies. Our minds too, but critically our bodies. This nearly had me crying tears of rage on the 63 bus, I think it’s likely the best book I’ve read this year so far. It’s just so fucking fierce, just when you think it’s going to fail to be fierce.

The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading? (www)

The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading? (non-www)