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

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.

Finished Family & Kinship In East London. Some of the descriptions reminded me of My Brilliant Friend - the local neighbourhood as its own little world that inhabitants seldom step out of, the resentment towards those who receive too much education.

Han Kang's The Vegetarian now.

HUnger makes Me A Modern Girl Carrie Brownstein
memoir by Sleater-Kinney member. I hadn't know the name derivation for the band before.
& need to go back and listen to several of teh bands she mentions.
At the point I've read to she's moved to Olympia and got the band together with the guitarist of a band she used to be into.
Found this while I was looking for a book I needed to take back to the library. It's been in a pile beside the bed for a while, picked it up in a 2 for £5 sale in FOPP a while back.

coming near the end of Fear by Bob Woodward.
funny coming across trump reciting the Joe tex song about the Snake in the week after the Mueller report landed or partially landed.
Seems like somebody inadvertently warning a public about his own behaviour and still having part of the public supporting him.

nice, loved the veg. really weird and wild and fun (though also sad, i guess)

Was kinda dreading starting it, seemed too harrowing. Some of the italics stuff is indeed hardcore - I skipped over the part with the dog to some extent - but I'm comforted by how much of it is comedy of manners. The husband's complete bafflement at his wife's decision and her quiet, uncompromising resistance is pretty funny.

<i>Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl</i> is a pretty great book. Harrowing animal stuff in that one too :/

I finished Voyage in the Dark, a wonderful gut-punch of a novel. I’m looking forward to reading more Rhys. Next up I’m reading In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes.

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.

― Good cop, Babcock (Chinaski), Thursday, April 18, 2019 2:55 AM (one week ago) Bookmark

i enjoy Marias' style - as you note: the digression, the clauses upon clauses - but it seems to be present in all of his work (I've only read 3 of his books), and i can only deal with it once in a while.

Samuel Johnson - Rasselas
Ezra Furman - Transformer (33 1/3)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Olivia Manning: The Balkan trilogy -- this is brilliant

Sorry, could never get into Marías because of exactly that thing you describe

I read "Kitch - A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon" by Anthony Joseph and I thought it was brilliant. It's a series of little stories and anecdotes concerning Lord Kitchener in the (fictional) voices of people who'd come across him or knew him, never in Kitch's own voice (though you get him speaking, as reported by others) - apart from anything else it's a great way to deal with a tension between genius and 'scenius'.

The Way Of All Flesh by Samuel Butler and a BFI Ealing Revisited book now.

Spoilery thoughts on The Vegetarian:

Wow, that change of perspectives really hit me hard! When the book's voice was the asshole husband I really thought Yeong-hye's behaviour was a form of emancipation, of breaking out of the constrictive mold she had been put in. I still kinda thought that when the perspective changed to In-hye's husband, kinda expecting some magic realism development. Also, since In-hye had so far only been portrayed as another bully pressuring Yeong-hye, I really didn't take the adultery very seriously...and then it switches to In-hye and it's made very clear that, whatever pressures Yeong is under (patriarchal or otherwise), her behaviour is a symptom of the pain she's in, not a response or possible way out of it. Her husband's indifference as poisonous to it as In-hye's husband's fetischization of it (and of course, looong history of artists romanticizing mental illness). I felt suitably chastened, like I'd been complicit in the video artist's bullshit. This last third felt a lot like what I had imagined the whole book would be, just painful and hopeless...not sure I really got it entirely tho, will need a re-read (once I can handle it).

If you like painful and hopeless, try her The White Book (which is very good indeed)

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

Now that's one heck of a weird book

One of those things I read once in childhood/adolescence that I can only dimly recall the details of and probably didn't particularly get the point of.

I'm still slogging through In My Own Way, but hope to end it soon. It appears that Alan Watts only knew amazing, talented, perceptive, intelligent, artistic and enlightened people -- approximately 1000 of them -- and he gives each one of them a brief advertisement of his deep and undying esteem for them. These one-paragraph love letters account for the bulk of the book and they eventually become indistinguishable.

xp

Yeah, it is a strange one. One of those YA classics I'd never read, but remember seeing frequent reference to over the years. I'm guessing its allegorical weight makes has made it a favoured book to assign high school students; more than once while reading it, I thought of that After School Special with Bruce Davidson as the teacher who turns his students into Nazis (we actually did watch this in class when I was in high school).

TCM is airing the movie (directed by Keith Gordon!) later this month. I made the mistake of reading up on the cast while I was still reading the book, and after seeing that John Glover plays Brother Leon, I found it impossible to read the rest of the novel without Glover's voice in my head whenever that character speaks.

I'm guessing its allegorical weight makes has made it a favoured book to assign high school students

Allegory peaked in the early medieval period. It is rarely written at all these days and even more rarely written well. Who the hell thinks high school students would benefit from wrestling with the intricacies of an outmoded and mostly irrelevant genre? Just convincing them that reading literature in any form has some relevance or purpose in their lives is an uphill battle.

Read The Plains by Gerald Murnane when I had an hour or two to kill in a library last weekend. Sort of mesmerizing and boring at the same time, it kept me turning the pages even though I knew that essentially nothing was going to happen.

Just read this on Wikipedia, what a guy:

In June 2018 Murnane released a spoken word album, Words in Order [9]. The centrepiece is a 1600-word palindrome written by Murnane, which he recites over a minimalist musical score. He also performs works by Thomas Hardy, Dezső Kosztolányi, DEVO and Killdozer.

I know the guy who produced that album!

I've read both of Claudia Rankines two 'American Lyrics', 'Citizen' and 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely'. Both of them are amazing, but the world of 2004 really seems a long way away. Am also currently reading Buddenbrook, first Mann novel after reading Death in Venice many years ago. The portrait of Bendix Grünlich as emotionally abusive is pretty modern. Chilling.

Bought E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime from a charity shop because it was a Penguin Modern Classic and cost 50p. It's wonderful - how historical fiction should be written. Just finished The Book of Daniel, whicih is also great, but I didn't enjoy it as much.

Those are the only two Doctorows I've read, too, and had the same reaction. I loved Ragtime, so jumped straight onto Daniel and it cut my enthusiasm a bit. I have Billy Bathgate round here somewhere, need to get to that.

I loved Billy Bathgate when I was 13, but I haven’t read any Doctorow since.

I struggled a bit with Billy Bathgate at the time - something to do with seeing the bones beneath the skin. But it's grown in my imagination since and there are passages that come to me fairly often. I need to read Ragtime.

There's a film of Ragtime with a very late performance by James Cagney in. Haven't seen it in a couple of decades though.

On to Irene Handl's second novel, "The Gold Tip Pfitzer".

I read "Eileen" by Ottessa Moshfegh; I picked it up because someone was giving it away , though I'd liked (but not loved) "My Year of Rest and Relaxation". I liked (but did not love) Eileen. Like MYOR&R it is strong on the agonies of being a young woman, and strong on how those agonies can bend someone out of shape. I think there might be something technically interesting about how Moshfegh manipulates the speed of events in this one, nothing happens for aaaages and she just, just kept me hanging on, and then things quicken towards an end. I'm not critic enough to be able to tell you how that works, if it works.