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

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.’

Just finished UNDER THE NET. Rich, rangy, diverse, picaresque, full of life, full also of caricature and silliness. Sometimes it attains stillness, poignancy, reflectiveness also. An 'animal novel', with its pervasive dog, in the way that Lethem said about Dickens (or the way that Lethem tried to do with CHRONIC CITY). A notably London novel - the only scene to take place outside London is a trip to Paris, which is also beautifully drawn.

This is only the second Murdoch novel I've read. I doubt that I would ever like any other better than this one.

Would recommend all of Brennan's fiction. Really, really REALLY recommend it.

I also think Under the Net is the best Murdoch I've read, certainly the only one I unreservedly enjoyed.

Something like 20 years ago I read a W G Sebald book: "Vertigo". I didn't get on with it at all, and avoided reading him again until I came across a cheapish copy of "The Emigrants" in the run of Harvill editions that I kinda/sorta collect. I am not going to talk about Sebald, whose work I imagine you're all much more familiar with than I am, except to say that I think "The Emigrants" is absolutely amazing and I now have a sense of why people seem to rate him so highly.

I also read "This Wounded Island vol 2: Another England" by J W Bohm, the second volume of a serious-spoof psychogeographical project in which a fictional German academic tries to understand the UK by drifting around and contemplating the nondescript; I raved about vol 1 and this one's maybe even better, it pulls off the trick of being funny and a bit unsettling.

Jack Kelley's The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America , the new Saul Bellow bio, and a Louise Glück collection.

I've been reading John Keegan's The Face of Battle. It has its interesting moments, but I am not quite sure why its reputation is so lofty.

The THIS WOUNDED ISLAND book sounds quite interesting and distinctive.

I remember that I was reading THE EMIGRANTS when I wrote the song 'Please Don't Get Married (Without Asking Me)', around August 2000.

But I wouldn't want to imply that the one influenced the other.

I read "The Punishments of Hell" by Robert Desnos, which is a proto-surrealist stream of images (or load of old nonsense, if you prefer) which feels like a narrative but isn't really. It features many leading Dadaists, lots of dismemberment and disaster, quite a lot of spanking and also various perversity. It kind of reads like one of those Bosch paintings set in 1920s Paris. I'm happy to have read it but wouldn't necessarily recommend it (the Jahnn book I mentioned upthread from the same publisher is much more interesting and unsettling I think, and unsettling is my main measure of success for this kind of writing).

Finished my first book (that I began back in December) last night yay me

Back on Paul Beatty, THE SELLOUT (2015).

winding down w joyce carol oates 'what i lived for' its a great peppy personal one man & his demons type book, a classic tragedy, and up there w the best of her books ive read for sure

I am not going to talk about Sebald, whose work I imagine you're all much more familiar with than I am, except to say that I think "The Emigrants" is absolutely amazing and I now have a sense of why people seem to rate him so highly

go straight to the rings of saturn tim, it is imo even more amazing. vertigo is def his first and least successful attempt at the style he develops

Read Austerlitz last year for the first time, and it is also amazing

I just read So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, due to hearing it recommended on the Backlisted podcast, thought it was fantastic - spare, sad, plays with ideas of fiction and memoir in a way that feels like he’s trying to be as honest as possible with the reader.

Also read Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson which is one of the best books about music I’ve ever read.

The "expanded edition" of the Wilson that came out a few years ago has some worthwhile additions--including retrospective essays by at least two (former, in one case?) ILXors.