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

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.

Aimless, anyone, what books about Buddhism do you recommend for beginners? Also Tao.

Chinaski, re Written Lives, can I recommend Fleur Jaeggy's THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, if you don't already know it.
https://www.ndbooks.com/book/these-possible-lives/

Don't know it, JM - thanks for the recommend.

In a similar vein, I also really like Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: http://rachelecohen.com/product/

Aimless, anyone, what books about Buddhism do you recommend for beginners? Also Tao.

When people ask me to recommend books for them I get very nervous. This applies universally, not just to Buddhism. I came at buddhism through Zen, via the strong curiosity I acquired after discovering the Tao-Teh-Ching. I have a very poor theoretical grounding and no regular practice, and understand the truth of Buddhist precepts only insofar as I have experienced them. I will say that my long solo wilderness hikes have taught me quite a bit about the workings of my mind and the unmade universe and what I've observed fits very well with both Taoist and Buddhist insights.

As I recall, quite a few books have been mentioned on the Buddhism thread. My advice is peck around at various titles until you find one congenial.

That Rachel Cohen looks really intriguing. Also reminds me of this extremely entertaining book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/30/craig-brown-101-improbable-encounters

That was fun, but hope the Cohen isn't very much like it. Thanks for the link, Aimless, and I'd been thinking of starting with the Tao too.

Ursula K LeGuin’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching is quite wonderful.

I finished Jane Eyre! I like the part where she lies down in a ditch and prays for death.

Family And Kinship In East London, Michael Young and Peter Willmott

I finished THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN.

I then read a quarter, so far, of a 1982 Penguin book called WHAT IS DUNGEONS & DRAGONS?

the age old question!

I finished 'This Book Will Save Your Life' by AM Homes two weeks ago. I don't have this often but I still think of the protagonist daily, kind of wishing him well (even though he -spoiler- prob died at the end). Very witty, funny book, and a tender critique on self-help and the quest for enlightenment/emptiness in today's world.

Just started 'Accordion Crimes' by E. Annie Proulx. Gritty!

I remember WHAT IS DUNGEONS & DRAGONS? fondly, having read it in the 1980s. Having said that, I'm sure it's probably not very good.

I'm midway through Javier Marias' A Heart So White. It's kind of bewildering - partly because of the digressive nature of the narrative and partly because of Marias' Jamesian clause-upon-clause-upon-clause style. The central character is a translator and is seemingly running from an event in the past so the narrative and stylistic choices matter but even so, the centre - that which around the narrative swirls - is obscured.

There's also the looming presence of Macbeth that goes beyond merely the title (it's from A2, S2, when Macbeth runs in with the daggers all flustered [who wouldn't be - you've just shanked the king and are doomed for all eternity] and Lady Macbeth is trying to snap him out of his guilt-ridden reverie: 'my hands are your colour but I shame/to wear a heart so white) and seems to be a commentary on agency and how culpable we are for actions that we're tangentially related or adjacent to - be it regicide, a translation, or some event that occurs before we are even born.

In his capsule biography on James in Written Lives, Marias writes: 'on the whole, he spoke as he wrote, which sometimes led to exasperating extremes... the simplest question addressed to a servant would take a minimum of three minutes to formulate, such was his linguistic punctiliousness and his horror of inexactitude or error.' That could be - with his translator's zeal for exactitude - the narrator of A Heart So White.

WHAT IS D&D? is written by three Etonian teens who, on the back cover photo and in the biographical note, do not make a good impression.

Yet the book is actually written with quite a lot of clarity and precision.

One thing that it generally makes me think is the arbitrariness and excessiveness of randomised decisions in D&D (or most RPGs) - the idea that you need to devise a dice table for any decision - when they also introduce mechanisms to slant the decisions to produce certain outcomes (eg: re character creation) ... which leads me to the conclusion, unthinkable within their terms: Why not just decide yourself what the numbers are going to be, based on your judgment of what's best for the game, rather than outsourcing it to the dice?

This principle needn't go all the way; there is space for both; but there is nonetheless an increasing absurdity in the attempt to formulate random-number-based rules for almost anything that happens. Put more simply, there are too many rules - you really shouldn't need most of them formalised in that way.

The book can be entertaining anyway, in delineating a whole underground temple complex and then narrating the party's adventure in it in fictional form, with D&D rules version of the narrative on the facing page.

Tbf, a number of more modern RPGs did go down that route of creating characters for a morevsatisfying narrative, rather than as random number collections.

Well I would say that any RPG can be adapted that way - I always used to wind up playing D&D with quite minimal reference to numbers. But this is a long time ago. And the problem that I eventually had was not enough players - literally ended up playing one on one, which could be surprisingly enjoyable but was very different from what the creators, or even the authors of WHAT IS D&D?, intended.

I understand the fascination of rulebooks, I still have a box or two of them in a cupboard. I like this stuff as artefacts in themselves, but I rarely found them truly relevant to actually playing the game.

Maybe eventually on this thread I will announce that I am rereading an old PGR rulebook from cover to cover.

I read "Yonnondio: From The Thirties" by Tillie Olsen - fizzes brilliantly with feminist and class anger, set in the Midwest in the 20s. I wouldn't have known anything about this if I hadn't been in the habit of picking up old Virago Modern Classics, so this is another Virago win.

The book has an interesting story: it was started in the thirties when Olsen was a young woman, then abandoned; in the 70s she reassembled it into the present form from various drafts, apparently taking care not to add a single word. The final novel remains unfinished but it's really tremendous.

I love that book

The virago edition I have is a double with tell me a riddle which is also great. Olsen’s book silences looks to be in line with the political statement of leaving yonnondio pointedly unfinished, as it’s all about the material conditions under which books can (or can’t) be written. Need to read it.

btw The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

First game of thrones book. It's going verrrry slow. Lol

Also ordered Tatum o'Neal's bio.

I finished Schiavone’s Spartacus. Though short, it is dense, as Schiavone subjects each fragment of the historical record to microscopic analysis, combining the often vague and contradictory pieces and re-interpreting them in light of his knowledge of the period to produce his best guess about what actually happened. Now I’m reading Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark.

Almost by accident I'm now (re)reading In My Own Way, Alan Watts.

He seems oblivious to the privilege in which he was raised. He even is convinced his family was of modest means, although he had a succession of nannies, attended an upper crust public school, his family occupied a high social position which allowed them to hobnob with people of great wealth, and from youth onward he fell into connoisseurship of art, food, wine and cigars as naturally as a fish swims in water. He barely understands why everyone does not choose to live as he does.