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

This essay wonders how the American lit scene would've been different if John Williams and Yvor Winters had had their way

I enjoyed this essay and I guess I'm fairly firmly in the Whitman imitative form camp, even if that does feel a bit like revealing a grubby secret. I've been thinking about Williams a bit and while it's clear he's practising an austere, detached (anti-Emersonian?) form, I wonder how the sections below function. These epiphanies appear in his books and often seem to be nexus points, around which the rest of the text arranges itself (I wonder if epiphany is the right word. There are more epiphany without insight or simple affective flares that shine briefly and die once more). Are they evidence of a kind of Emersonian unconscious?

Once, late after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness. The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicately and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything-the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars-seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself. With a curiously reluctant relief he again snapped on his desk lamp. He gathered a book and a few papers, went out of the office, walked through the darkened corridors and let himself out of the wide double doors at the back of Jesse Hall. He walked slowly home, aware of each footstep crunching with muffled loudness in the dry snow.

Think your speculations are on the right track---With a curiously reluctant relief Yes!

I started Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. Pretty readable so far. I guess it's kind of brave of her to write plainly about what it's like being around someone who's morbidly obese (and not always in a wholly sympathetic way). Can't decide whether or not it's in poor taste, but she's pretty good at making her characters come to life and move through the situations she's set up for them, even if some of the characterizations are a bit facile.

yeah chinaski that's very much my impression as well

Lionel Shriver is obsessed with the weight of her characters.

Just bought a beautiful Penguin Deluxe Edition of the Tale of Genji, hopefully it's gonna be my this year's obsession like the Story of the Stone was last year

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)