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

The Anubis Gates
Jean Renoir book on Pierre Renoir

That would be Pierre-Auguste Renoir, his painter pops.

Finally started on Bad Blood. Hurrah

I read "The Living Are Few, The Dead Many" by Hans Henny Jahnn - really good and convincingly unnerving. the back of the book says (something to the effect that) it's halfway between German gothic and German expressionist, and I have no reason to doubt that.

Then I re-read Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book about "Let's Talk about Love" by Celine Dion, which is maybe even better than I remember it, a (the?) genuine classic of self-consciously anti-rockist music criticism.

Really need to read that Wilson book

Reading Fools' Parade, by Davis Grubb, author of The Night of the Hunter: the first 52 pages of this 1969 mass-market paperback, densely packed w detail and tiny type, is newly released ex-cons on a train, taking them away from Glory, a Depression-era prison town, also hometown to the youngest, but the Big Guard has told him not to come back, and also, "I'll see you after sundown." Mattie, by far the oldest (and after 47 years of prison work, with an already famously-infamously large check in his breast pocket) fears that it is so, that his handcarved eye's vision of young Jimmy Jesus jumping the train and heading back, with Mattie and the others forced to follow, cannot be turned off or blinked, despite all the sense-talking and reassurances in the world of twilight.
So far, good use of Faulknerian purple prosody in pulp mode, but maybe better-paced than WF himself did this kind of thing, with backstory and other flights reeling back into moment-to-moment shifting tensions of character development afoot and underfoot, in train drone, vibration and momentum: "Still is still moving to me," as Willie Nelson muses.

Also: "The shit you can't take back, " currently my personal definition of noir.

imo, the Thompson book would have been better without trying to bolster its credibility by reference to clinical psychiatric literature. The story and character were strong enough to compel belief on their own terms. Thompson's choice to switch his writing style in the last few pages to something more terse and confused was an unfortunate blemish, too. Even though it was obvious what he was attempting through that stylistic choice, he would have been better off sticking to the style he'd established for the previous 240 pages; the impact of the ending would have been greater.

Otherwise, an excellent crime noir novel.

I finished "Invitation to the Waltz" by Rosamond Lehmann. By about half-way through I thought I wasn't going to like it. Popular romantic fiction, somewhat sentimental, the more aristocratic characters embarrassingly idealised, the naive heroine learning to be suspicious of the manipulative, dishonest, undeserving poor. But the second half (a description of the heroine's first ball) is a sustained triumph, brilliantly observed, empathetic and full of original touches. Also beautifully written.

Now re-reading Henry Green's "Concluding", my favourite of his novels.

Mine too.

Trollope - Framley Parsonage
Zachary Leader - The Life of Saul Bellow
Louis Gluck - Ararat

Still slowly progressing with UNDER THE NET.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, Katrine Marçal. Really good on how Adam Smith's worldview was influenced by Newtonian physics, the Chicago school of economic's attempts to justify women doing housework from an economic pov is sad lols, as to be expected. Mostly she rails against the construct of the Economic Man, pointing out how absurd it is to look at humans as rational actors. Some of the studies cited feel a bit too close to the Freakanomics stuff she decries but overall very interesting.

Suddenly half way through aforementioned Fools' Parade---amazing how the purple haze prose throws up roadblocks to pull-push me through, accruing momentum every stealthy-squirrelly second (or at least paragraph). Grubb must have a stop-watch down in there somewhere.

Beginning to hate Bad Blood. It's interesting. Yet I am already looking forward to next book, ie Falling Angel.

I am re-reading one of Patrick O'Brien's nautical novels, The Mauritius Command, on account of my mind recently being reduced to the consistency of chewing gum. These Aubrey/Maturin novels are somewhat corny, but they're packed with amazing tidbits of historical research. O'Brien clearly had fun writing them.

I’m reading pinocchio in venice, a real robocop of a novel

Part Mann.
Part Collodi.
All Coover.

Vita Sackville-West: Grand Canyon -- still not sure if I'll finish this, but every time I'm about to give up it gets interesting again. Written in 1942, set in world where the UK made a peace deal with the Nazis and basically let them have Europe. The book takes place in a hotel by the Grand Canyon full of European and British refugees. But it also has long, airless stretches of tedious conversation that feel like stuff from a third-rate Victorian novel.

hm, better you than me

Exactly what I was thinking! Please let us know how it turns out, okay?

'twixt land and sea, being 3 novellas by joseph conrad.

UNDER THE NET growing on me -- as it nears halfway, it gets into some lovely material about London, c.1950, which is very period (bombsites) yet also just recognizable now (Holborn Viaduct, St Paul's Cathedral). Loads about Cheapside pubs. Tim H should read this but probably already has.

I should, and I have not.

I read "Europe In Sepia", a collection of essays about immigration and culture and other stuff, by Dubravka Ugresic (an Amsterdam-based Croat). It was very good.

Yeah, Under The Net is a lot of fun.

The Vita Sackville-West got weirder. Everybody died in a bomb blast at the halfway point, but didn't know they were dead. So it became an entirely different sort of unsatisfactory book. Would not recommend this at all. Though I gave enjoyed other novels by her.

Sounds like PKD's UBIK !

Which is curious as of course PKD also wrote an alternate-outcome-WWII novel, not long before that.

In both cases he did it waaaaaaay better. And unlike in UBIK, VS-W straight off tells the reader everybody has died the moment it happens.

What did she write that's good? Seems, even from this description, as if there *might* be something I'd like.

All Passion Spent, Seducers in Ecuador, and No Signposts in the Sea were all good. Still haven't read The Edwardians, which is supposed to be her big one.

Having some trouble getting into Black Leopard Red Wolf (audiobook version) mainly because there's just so much cracking of skulls, grabbing of balls, fish swimming in vaginas and evil uncles that, especially as it is somewhat cartoonishly read by Dion Graham, it kind of topples into self-parody. Does itl work better in print? I really want to give this a fair shot, not least since it's the most hyped release in a while.

That's more or less what put me off a brief history of seven killings so I think I'll be skipping this one.

Hmmm. I guess it's not all about Graham then.

I didn't really get on with Saviano's Gomorrah. I get his garrulous, immersive style and why he chose it but the luridness wore me down and I'm not sure to what end.

Started Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona - my first of hers. The narrative voice is wonderful.

The carl wilson book on bad taste. So excited!

The whole concept of 'taste' having a hierarchy is very weird.

Yeah, I totally agree. (One thing my best friend and I completely disagree. She's a total snob. I of course "recommended" dan brown to her. Haha)

The hierarchical thing seems like it has always been about class distinctions and nothing more. Authors and artists themselves sometimes buy into that kind of thinking, but the best artists rarely do because it is nearly impossible to make real art out of such flimsy material as 'having good taste'.

Jane Gardam is wonderful, chinaski. You'll be hooked.

After that, maybe try Old Filth.

I feel hooked already - gentle and ingratiating but with an undertone of menace. Old Filth on the list, cheers.

With half-term coming I decided to fill my 'great American novel' whole (like it needs filling) with the last of the Bascombe novels. What's the opinion of Ford around here? I found him stultifying at first (putdownable, if I'm being an arse) but both the Sportswriter and Independence Day have mushroomed in my imagination.

Giving Edwardian apocalypse fiction a go with M.P. Shiel and The Purple Cloud.

xp hole, not whole ffs

I enjoyed the collection of Maeve Brennan's short pieces for the New Yorker, The Long-Winded Lady. It's a fairly restrictive formula, but I found them compulsively readable. They usually consist of something that Brennan observes while walking around or dining alone in a restaurant in Greenwich Village or Midtown Manhattan. If she ever dined with another person, you won't hear about it in this book. The gorilla in the room of course is loneliness, though she never lets on or mentions that emotion. Instead she captures a tiny slice of life, often an overheard conversation that reveals something of the character of the stranger she is overhearing, though as a rule, you never quite hear enough to figure out what's going on. There's something very soothing in the regular reappearance of her favorite restaurants and hotels, places that would probably nowadays be classified as shabby chic - genteel, sophisticated but not as a rule terribly glamorous - though in one story she happens upon a movie scene being filmed in a Midtown hotel lobby where she often takes her afternoon coffee, and Julie Andrews makes a brief but memorable cameo.

Maeve Brennan is a wonderful writer with a very odd life. She ended up mad and institutionalised, sometimes convinced she was married to James Joyce.

Ugh, that can't have been much of a fantasy solace, seems like. The Wikipedia article is quite a read: she was very social early on in America, and some think she inspired Breakfast at Tiffany's; Albee was a big fan too. Says her fiction is very different from The Long-Winded Lady pieces, incl. stories of a marriage over the years: In the final Derdon story, "The Drowned Man", Rose has died and Hubert has to pretend that he is overwhelmed with grief for his dead wife, "... she was gone, she had been good, and he wished he could miss her." Also a novella,very belatedly discovered, first published in 2000,
---yet another bleak, somehow appealing description here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeve_Brennan But I'll prob start w TLWL.

Warlock by Oakley Hall

hamsun - pan
buchner - lenz
keller - green henry

I’m reading Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, interesting by Sianne Ngai, a critical look at the subtitular aesthetics and their utility for reading the artworks of late capitalism/the postwar period.

All I know of Brennan comes from this review:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n17/joanne-oleary/what-makes-a-waif

which incidentally I don't actually like much and includes the preposterous sentence:

It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made all other countries seem strange.’