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

I read a Psmith in my adolescence, which I undoubtedly enjoyed but don't recall much of

This is fundamentally a bad book but the combination of occasional passages of glorious writing plus the weirdness of reading such trenchant political analysis that turned out so wrong made me just interested enough to keep going.

(If you want this knackered 1st edition of RH, Fizzles, it’s yours.)

Guy De Maupassant Bel Ami
1885 novel about an ex-m,ilitary social climber in Paris in the late 19th century. 1975 translation which flows nicely.
Quite compelling read, I don't think I've read any of his novels before. I did read some of his short stories a few decades ago and not sure why I haven't gone back to read more.
I was surprised that de Maupassant was as late as he was, maybe the short stories I read were set a lot earlier. i thought he was early 19th century.

I'm still mired in a lack of ambition, so I'm rereading a Mary Renault historical novel, Funeral Games, covering the period immediately following the death of Alexander of Macedon. I first read her stuff back in the 1980s and this was the one I remember as being the least romanticized.

Have you read railroad histories? I hadn't thought to, but suddenly encountered several at the library today. Great subject (and today's Wall Street Journal delved into a massive gathering of the railroad tribes re radically re-making schedules---past the latest relaunch into bits of chaos).

I read a biography of James Hill, founder of the Northern Pacific railway, last year. It was quite interesting, if a bit too mythologizing. It painted Hill as being capable of almost anything, legal or illegal, to win a contest he wanted to win, which seems correct.

The age of railroad expansion in the USA is mostly about high finance, rampant bribery, and low trickery, but also is some of the most revealing history of how laissez faire capitalism works in action. It isn't quite as heroic as Ayn Rand envisioned it.

Henry and Charles Francis Adams' long essay about the Erie is worth disinterring.

Picked up City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davies. This edition from 2006 has a new preface, which is very good. Interesting to read some of the pre-crash observations:

The city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of the groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce. There was no mechanism to redistribute any share of additional city revenues to purposes other than infrastructure or Downtown renewal. There was no 'linkage', in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.

and

In The Valley, a so-called 'slow-growth movement' had suddenly coalesced out of the molecular agitation of hundreds of local homeowners' associations. Although many of the movement's concerns about declining environmental quality, traffic and density were entirely legitimate, 'slow growth' also had ugly racial and ethnic overtones of an Anglo gerontocracy selfishly defending its privileges against the job and housing needs of young Latino and Asian populations.

Of course, these things were known. The GFC didn't suddenly create the failures with which we're grappling of course, it was a consequence and an intensifier of them. But it's striking reading them here on the eve of that crisis.

I'd be interested to know how any LA people here, who have read the book, feel it's aged. or what has changed since its depiction.

I read "Spring" by Ali Smith. I liked it very much and I think the current quartet (of which this is the third) is a very interesting project. She seems to divide opinion though?

I also read " A Close Watch on the Trains" by Bohumil Hrabal, which is a little bastard of a novella sloshing around in the absurdity and brutality of the dying days of WWII, from the point of view of a junior member of staff on a provincial train station as the Germans retreat through Czechoslovakia.

(great film)

Yes, I think I have actually SEEN the film CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS.

On Sunday I finished PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE (Andy Beckett) at last. On balance, it's tremendous and utterly my kind of thing.

Next I will finish the Myles letters at last.

Reasonably happy to have managed to read these books on the side while mostly doing other things.

Richard White - The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
Amy Hempel - Reasons to Live

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

Some writing just isn't well-represented by brief quotes, and every sentence doesn't have to be and shouldn't be suitable for framing (otherwise things can get way over-ripe, like James Salter's lesser work).

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

― dow, Wednesday, April 10, 2019 7:26 PM (

James Woods' New Yorker review a couple weeks introduced me to her, so I started at the beginning. So far she's Lydia Davis -- terse, almost gnomic -- without the wit.

Magdalene Tulli: Flaw -- strange but beguiling; story seems to be set in a 1930s-ish Central European-ish place, told perhaps by (a) God, and the characters are halfway between real people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

Have you seen marwencol?

Woah, no... BUT I'M GUNNA!

I checked a copy of Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright, out my public library and read about 20 pages last night. He almost lost me right away by citing the plot of The Matrix, especially the goddamn red pill/blue pill scene, as a way of understanding some of the essential message of Buddhism. Fuck that, I thought. But I did read on and may continue it tonight. Past that, I can't say.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism, but rather believes it is nothing more than exotic nonsense. iow, an audience of Dawkins acolytes. Maybe that describes most of his circle of acquaintance, since he describes himself as an evolutionary psychologist, which is a field wholly entwined with sociobiology. I guess for these reasons alone, the book may have a sort of freak appeal as a glimpse into such a mind.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism
I assume, based on your screenname and other evidence, that this is not the case with you.

That is correct.

I'm reading "The Sioux", one of two novels by Irene Handl (at this point USians might want to do some googling)... and it's quite a thing, like a sort of louche campy Ivy Compton-Burnett... maybe? Anyway, talking of googling, I came across a tweet by Matthew Sweet (not that one) asking whether anyone had read it - to which he got a reply from Tanita Tikaram(!) saying she had a signed copy, dedicated to Sir Malcolm Sargent, and a reply from Robin Askwith(!!) who has a copy given to him by Doris Hare (I did advise you to google) signed by Irene Handl and her dog.

Metal Mickey Irene Handl???

The very same.

^^ Whoever invented language is currently doing that rubby hands thing, saying, *finally, they got there*.

Tanita Tikaram was on the Book Shambles blog and was surprisingly interesting and well read.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, April 2, 2019 3:08 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks so much for mentioning this, I tore through like 3/4ths of this over this past weekend and was delighted to learn that the editor followed this up with a box set of novels in the same vein for Library of America which I'm going to have to get now probably.

Thanks so much for mentioning this, I tore through like 3/4ths of this over this past weekend and was delighted to learn that the editor followed this up with a box set of novels in the same vein for Library of America which I'm going to have to get now probably.

You're welcome! Didn't know about the novels, will have to check these out! I'm almost finished and have to say the general level of quality in this anthology seems very high - a few of the stories at the beginning seemed to rely too much on their twists, is the biggest complaint I can muster. I don't read a lot of crime fiction, tbh - it's pretty much just Simenon and Donald Westlake for me.

Picked up Wolfgang Hilbig's The Females, another 100 or so hallucinatory pages depicting a man not in control of anything in his life except what he can put down on the page, and in that the control is absolute. Onto Jose Saramago's All the Names with its accumulation of the tiniest grain of detail over paragraphs that go on for pages. Both books have this plot in the form of a quest for a woman (or a group of women in Hilbig's case), but at some point there is nothing as mundane as plot, writing with little narrative direction, and seemingly more important things to say and talk about, only so much of which can be transmitted.

Its totally my jam.

Report from the middle of Why Buddhism Is True: he is good at simplifying Buddhist thought and putting it into frames that a novice western mind can grasp more readily. On the minus side, he has the maddening habit of assuming that evolutionary psychology ('EP') has the authority of "science", consisting of MRIs, experimental data, and doctors with degrees who form its theories, and therefore when its theories overlap with Buddhist thought, it is "science" that is the ascendant authority, which then validates Buddhism. He also keeps trying to tweak Buddhism so it will better fit evolutionary psychology, as if any deviation from the doctrines of EP represent minor flaws in Buddhism which need correction from or reconciliation with EP.

Buddhism is validated by the personal, living experience of Buddhists, as they live out its precepts. No further validation is asked or needed.

listened to a very good old RTE radio documentary about the last 149 days in the life of JG Farrell, who had moved to West Cork. Starts with an extraordinary eyewitness account of his death. Then explores and interviews the small network of relations (locals, visitors) that existed during that period for Farrell. You get a quite powerful blurred image of the days emerging from those interviews, a sense of the uncertainty at the perception of recollection and how much anyone can be said to be known, and the somewhat uncertain building of a life of isolation.

strongly recommend it if you have time.

the rte strand that it’s taken from, recommended by darragh cos of a chester beatty library episode, is often very good. the one on herring fishing recently springs to mind.

as for reading, been travelling a bit and continuing slowly with city of quartz, which i’m enjoying, and a James M recommendation for a long flight - Ascent by Jed Mercurio. Story of a deadly russian flying ace, fighting covertly in the Korean War and then later at the North Pole. don’t know where it’s going but it’s skilled in depictions of g-force dogfights, the competition of the pilots and the abstracted psychology of the main character.

Peter Smith – An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems
I'm really enjoying working through this. It's quite accessible, and has a nice way of frequently pausing to sketch out the path ahead in increasing detail as more of the groundwork is developed.

Ascent: i said above that i wasn’t sure where it was going because it had just shifted from aerial dogfights in the Korean War to the Arctic and I assumed the clues that the protagonist was on a trajectory to space flight were wrong.

in fact in sum and having now finished it this is a book that turns the notion of the character “arc” into a series of cosmically ascending movements, from the basements of stalingrad to the moon.

a lovely moment late on pictures the story in reverse - falling from the korean sky like a comet or angel to the basements of Stalingrad.

the physical atmospheric conditions of each of these are a substantial part of the matter of the book: the freezing, the role of gravity and g force, liquid and vapour. it’s also a piece of counterfactual or rather invisible history. hidden rather than alternate.

it’s very good, and quite unusual.

just to add to the “invisible history” thing. at no stage is this conjectured fictional character allowed by the politics and administration of his situation, to exist, and in fact it is this that allows him to become achieve a piece of history that didn’t happen.

i’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

tana french's "the witch elm." she is such a good prose stylist.

really looking forward to reading that!

took a break from war & peace to read "at freddies" (which turned out to be my favourite PF so far) and headed straight into "innocence"

Yay, Fizzles, glad you liked Ascent. Hidden history is exactly right. I was so enamoured of that book, and wanted to see what Mercurio did next --and then it turned out to be a very long novel about JFK :(

Which latter was not good.

There was some discussion of Ascent on this thread: DSKY-DSKY Him Sad: Official ILB Thread For The Heroic Age of Manned Spaceflight

Yall had me thinking of James Salter's maiden voyage, The Hunters, and in fact Geoff Dyer makes the same connection here (I read this after some of Salter's more lapidary-to-lush works, and was struck by the tension in flight, all the observations and impressions and input that the pilot and his colleagues have to balance)(the most concise expression of his talents hell yes)
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/03/29/the-hunters
Salter tweaked it later, so the most findable version may or may not be the best.
Then again, a review of the second edition is reassuring:
The revisions made by the author for this new edition seem minimal. A graceful chapter concerning a weekend leave in Tokyo, rendered too rapturously in the original, is toned down and improved. Some passages from Cleve’s letters are reduced here in their ambition, making the protagonist less the budding writer and more an ordinary Joe. (Salter also fought and flew along the Yalu, and the novel is full of autobiographical atmosphere.) Thanks Mark Greif!
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/then-and-now-1999-2/

amos tutola - palm wine drinkard

GREAT BOOK

I read "Chaos and Night" by Henri de Motherlant and I thought it was really very boring indeed.

I thought "Chaos and Night" would be a bit like Celine. I was wrong.

Haha yes I thought something similar.

(I am hoping someone comes on here to rep for "Chaos and Night" and tell me what I've missed.)

I've been reading Colm Toibin's Homage to Barcelona which I'm sort of waiting to take flight and re-reading Javier Marias' Written Lives, which is a series of virtually fictionalised capsule biographies. I say fictionalised as they're so elliptical and carefully chosen that they might as well be fiction (no less powerful - and gossipy - for all that). I'd forgotten how anti-Joyce he is and just how candid the excerpts from the letters to Nora are. Yikes.

I've got Marias' Heart So White lined up next.

Don’t know which thread to put this on, but there is a feature up on The NY Times in which they list their favorite 50 memoirs of the past 50 years or so. Lots of things added to my wishlist.

I went and did it. There is now a Summer 2019 WAYR thread. Please inspect it carefully for damage inflicted during transport before taking delivery.

www link: 2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?