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

I finished Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945. Perhaps a bit dry at times, I think more could have done to bring the personalities and settings to life for the lay reader. I still found it pretty interesting though, and clearly a prodigious amount of research went into it. Now I'm reading Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt.

Let us know the summary of that one

Finished Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis, which was good and dealt in interesting arguments but in my reading opted not to outline much in the way of a truly concrete program, rather ending by turning over a lot of rocks.

finished the dorn: a rather prosaic portrayal of a pacific northwest logging town during the fifties centred on a small group surviving (just) on the occasional employment they can pick up on construction sites or odd job work for the local farmers who act as a sort of gimcrack gentry in the region

now i'm one chapter into omensetter's luck by william h gass

Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince -- biography of a gay, sometimes cross-dressing, warrior/spy/politician Ukraine-loving Habsburg prince who fought the Russians in WW1, then the Nazis, then the Soviets (and was executed by the latter)

Habsburgs at play:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-H5CCnU0AsTwpC.jpg

I finished Terry Eagleton HUMOUR last night.

In truth, not his best book - easy-going, not that rigorous or purposeful, though its chapter structure is ostensibly clear. The first few chapters are about theories of why we laugh - they're OK but recursive / repetitive. Then there is a history of 'humour' that slides far too much into 'good humour', C18 coffee houses etc - he keeps getting distracted from actually talking about the subject. The last chapter focuses on Trevor Griffiths' COMEDIANS, quite a good move, but gets rather distracted again from the earlier questions of what's funny, rather than what's emancipatory, ethical, etc.

Then he finally turns to carnival again, which is OK except is carnival actually funny? Then he says that Jesus Christ is carnivalesque so, very characteristically, gets to spend the last 3pp talking about the Bible. Probably not an obvious way to finish a book on humour.

The book contains some good jokes (mainly other people's) but TE's attempts to mimic Myles's 'Catechism of Cliché' are remarkably poor.

I also finished THE SHORT FICTION OF FLANN O'BRIEN.

Deceptively good / useful collection - in that I thought I had most of it already, but actually lots is first published here - including new translations from the Irish, and an SF story that FOB may or may not have written.

Familiar things like 'John Duffy's Brother' come across well. 'Drink & Time in Dublin' I had never read. Even his late unfinished novel SLATTERY'S SAGO SAGA has a degree of interest.

Today I started Julio Cortazar, HOPSCOTCH.

I feel like what I have heard about this novel is: it has a ludic structure, but that's a superficial afterthought, and you might as well just read it normally.

So I started on Chapter 1. Then a friend who loves the book told me he was starting again on ch73. So I read that and will go on to Ch2 and read it the HOPSCOTCH way after all.

Love Hopscotch. It’s primarily impressionistic. Read it however you want

Finished Sebalds Austerlitz. Could have kept on reading about forts and nocturamas and train stations for hundreds of pages more. The main plot was good as well.

I finished The Siege of Krishnapur last night. It remained gently satiric even as the bloodshed and extreme hardship of the siege is accurately rendered from the point of view of the English. The characters show amazing resilience and bravery, while at the same time each one is faintly ridiculous and beset by delusions so powerful they are able to sustain them in the face of continuous horrors, while equally blinding them and making fools of them. It's quite a feat of tightrope walking by the author.

Krishnapur is one of those In Every Charity Shop Ever Books, so I assumed it was bad or Under The Volcano-level unreadable. But that sounds interesting

Inner thread connection, the Karen Russell book of short stories has one from the PoV of Emma Bovary's greyhound. Favorite story was "The Gondoliers", about one of four sisters in a flooded Florida who ferry various people around using an evolved sense of echolocation.

Started on Paul Mason's CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE.

Easier and faster going than HOPSCOTCH. Maybe it's really like an extended run of PM New Statesman columns, with those short paragraphs and punchy assertions. Uncertain about the coherence. But only about 25pp in.

To get away from Britishers I am reading Ubik, Philip K. Dick.

So far it is a pure shaggy dog story with some sci-fi/fantasy embellishments. I get the strong impression that Dick wrote his novels by launching at random into them, just trying to amuse himself as he went along. If he liked the result he kept going, piling up new characters and incidents for a while until finally he had to figure out how to tie them together and move them in some semi-coherent direction. There's a certain amount of the "and SUDDENLY a WITCH came in with BIG DOG" sort of story logic often employed by six-year-olds, but it is kind of fun, too.

Ubik is one of his best. It becomes sort of tragically horrific by the end.

His vision had a very strongly absurdist element, which easily morphs into a sense of the horrific and tragic.

my memory is that it definitely starts on an absurdist note, all those ridiculous clothing descriptions, "wubfur" etc

Yeah, I think UBIK is my favourite PKD book.

And there's an especially good reason for the absurdism in that one.

reading Philip Kerr’s “Prague Fatale”, which is one of his Bernie Gunther novels and thus far maintains the high quality control of the rest of the series. I’m glad he was able to sneak out a final novel with this character before he passed away; I’m trying to work my way through the novels at a good clip since I’d like to reread them all sooner rather than later, assuming the remainder of the books are at a similar level. I have no reason to expect they’re not.

UBIK certainly canonical as far as PKD goes.

I partly share the view that his novels can seem improvised, but in this instance it would seem that a larger vision is driving it all.

Hopping around a few chapters of HOPSCOTCH: I can see the general charm of the set-up (people idling in Paris) but at the moment the more I read, the less it wins me over. The philosophical digressions seem windy, the story isn't yet going anywhere. I start to wonder if it's a self-indulgent book like GRAVITY'S RAINBOW but less organized.

Yet, at times it does seem to press through at something real, with unusual honesty and directness.

Maybe it will come together. I have a long, long way to go. I think it needs more concerted reading, less the commuter reading that I am mainly giving it.

I've only read Ubik, loved it, but haven't figured out which one to read next. Probably Flow My Policeman Tears Thingy.

Tried Martian Timeslip but wasn't feeling it.

A Scanner Darkly or Dr. Bloodmoney would be my rec

Flow My Tears is p good and I know various people love it but it's a bit too one-dimensional/tied to a pretty basic premise imo

grab an omnibus of the short stories and plow through some of that, they usually get some bonkers idea across and don't overstay their welcome. or at least, so I recall from my teenagerhood when I did just that

Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch also a good one on a level with/similar vibe to Ubik imo

Yeah Three Stigmata is great for nonstop-rush mindfuck PKD, I lost count of the plot twists in that one. A Scanner Darkly is probably his best-written, most heartfelt book, very sad and often very funny. I didn’t quite vibe with Flow My Tears but lots of people love it.

Highly recommend the story “Faith of Our Fathers,” it has one of my favorite lines of villainous dialogue ever.

Henry Green - Doting
Agnès Poirier - Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50

I agree about PKD: I can't think of a novel of his that was altogether satisfying (but I have many many more to read), whereas the stories, in their own way, are.

As though, in a fairly basic and obvious way, he could hold things together over a short and not a longer stretch. Or as though some 'aesthetic' aspects, or maybe issues of depth, don't seem to matter in a story and do seem to in a novel.

Though that still feels over-simple now I think about it. But I do think the stories succeed more unequivocally than the novels.

SPQR

great

I partly share the view that his novels can seem improvised, but in this instance it would seem that a larger vision is driving it all.

I finished Ubik last night. While it does have a central plot 'device', probably inspired by his reading in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, most of the remaining pieces were completely heterogenous and unconnected to that central device.

To give one non-spoiler, minor detail that illustrates PKD's lack of method, the money in the book starts out as something called "poscreds", but very swiftly afterwards he has the characters doling out nickels and dimes, and later parts of the plot include paper bills. The poscreds don't go away entirely, but linger on in parallel, without any rhyme or reason how both forms of money relate to one another.

Different characters are introduced as clearly being important ones, including one prominent villain named Hollis. But by the end Hollis has been relegated to the dustbin as uninteresting and unimportant. A wholly new villain is promoted in his place at the last moment, but what that villain's new importance portends is left unresolved.

The ending is a cheap variant of "and it was all a dream, or was it?"

These items are obvious weaknesses. As with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, I think the one strength that carries the book and gratifies the reader is the wild profusion of PKD's imagination. He starts so many wild hares running that he cannot keep track of them all and most of them go uncaptured and disappear, but when each one jumps out of the brush running there is a moment of exhilaration - and that brief exhilaration is repeated frequently enough to keep you breathless. That's a rare quality and it is worth finding.

pkd short stories are the best, but although his novels can be v uneven, i like the different pace of his world/problem building.

the hares is a really nice observation!

I think by the 70s he had largely mastered his problems w structure, he became much less prolific and more focused (also generally sadder. And more theological)

Like his last five or so books dont have nearly as many “hares”, in Aimless’s terms.

Yes agreed (on both posts). I prefer the hares, unrealised or not. The massive theological stuff is compelling but gloomy.

"History," Elsa Morante

Just read Yu Hua's "Cries in the Drizzle", enjoyed it, some of it was funny, I liked the infolding of time in the narration, I liked the sustained minor key.

I feel like the objections to PKD's shagginess are valid but irrelevant to me tbh. I'm not so bothered that every book has to be seamlessly clockwork.

The shagginess and uresolved plotlines in Ubik felt very deliberate and haunting to me!

At the very least, you have to credit PKD for finding the perfect story to shape around his "weaknesses" as a writer.

I agree, to me it's a feature not a bug

Started my summer with Juan Goytisolo's Count Julian which is the usual (if you know your way around Latin American literature) tale of fragmentary exile, and then moved onto Auerbach's Dante: Poet of a Secular World which is his account of Dante's achievement in the way in which he is able to gather reality, what makes him unique for his time and for all time, too. It helps if you've read his theories in Mimesis and I love his prose anyway.

Catching up on some of the TBR pile:
László Krasznahorkai, Satantango - pretty much an equal slog to the (7 hour) film version, but what a slog. Mud, beer, despair, everything you'd want from a prize-winning Hungarian novel. Apparently he's worked with Bela Tarr on most of his films, which figures.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy - as good as I remembered it from previous reading. Scratches my epic fantasy itch wholesale, thus saving me from having to plow through some 10-volume series by GRRM or whoever.
Brian Aldiss, some short story collection - the story that inspired Kubrick/Spielberg's AI is by far the best thing here. Not really one of the better new wave SF short story writers from this evidence, and the gender politics haven't dated too well (probably like every other (male) writer from the era tbf).
China Mieville, Embassytown - his sole SF novel I think? Linguistics feature heavily, which makes a nice change from most SF dealing with alien races (Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life excepted of course). Sometimes I think he has just too many ideas though, and also his style can get a bit ranting. I read it in my head in this kind of breathless splurge, it tires me out.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy

what about the other three?

The Poem of the Cid, as translated into prose by Rita Hamilton, from extensive notes provided by Janet Perry. It's in a bi-lingual edition, with the original (archaic) Spanish on the facing page, but I am unable to read the original and can only derive a few hints about the prosody by inspecting it.

Jorma kaukonen Been So Long
Hot Tuna have just been formed after 4 lps by JA. Thought he might explain the swap from.Spencer Dryden to Joey Covington but has said very little.
Very interesting so far. Hadn't really heard much about his background before.
Dad was in diplomatic service so he'd lived abroad in his youth.
Also is in a marriage he just seems to be stuck in.
Could do with something similar from Paul Kantner or Martyn Balintore. Don't think there is anything though.

Marty Balin not sure what they corrected to. Predictive text how fun.

Paul Mason very wayward and ambitious but does at least include a lot of talk about economics. The kind of thing I rarely understand and I'm not always sure I understand it here either.

I have read Ellmann's WBY biography.

I finished Heaney's ELECTRIC LIGHT - read the whole thing with audio of Heaney reading it. I now feel doubtful that I can or should read poetry any other way.

Started Muldoon's MAGGOT.

Still reading fantasy novel THE TROLLTOOTH WARS.

Ducks, Newburyport out in the USA and I've read the first 6 pages. Otherwise, Sheila Heti, Motherhood, which contains the line (in the context of a family tree viciously pruned by the Holocaust) "Family is scarce in our family" which was affecting enough that I had to put it down for the day.

how is the ellmann yeats book? i've owned the wilde book for about 10 years but somehow have never read it.

It's good if dated. It actually doesn't dwell on the poetry. I can see him holding his nose as Yeats spends thirty years plowing through Madame Blavatsky, seances, Noh, Lady Gregory, Irish peasant drama, and masks; he sorts out these phases with admirable clarity, though.

I accept Yeats' greatness as a poet, for it is brilliantly evident in his poetry, but viewed simply as a person, he always looked to me like a godawful mess of fatuous immaturity and intellectual bad judgment.

if only Twitter had kept him honest

Hey, I began Ducks, Newburyport today as well. Really looking forward to seeing what crazy adventure that puma gets into, though at the moment it's been interrupted by some kind of rant.

The reason I began a new book is because I finished rereading Pynchon's Against the Day. I must have read the first part of it five-six times, but only the second time I made it all through. I took a break after part three, and only went back to it earlier this summer, reading parts four and five. I was surprised at how coherent it seemed, there's a good three-hundred page stretch where it's basically only Kit and Dally and Reef and Yashmeen and Cyprian. Almost like a little novel inside the novel. Then Frank returns, and the last part of it is as ever-shifting as at the beginning.

I finished Steve Jackson, THE TROLLTOOTH WARS.

I enjoyed this, even or especially with its rather ludicrous replication of material from the first 3 actual FFGs - I mean, whole scenes from THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN!

But it ends with a deux ex machina scene which is possibly also an allegory of role-playing, ie: the gods are like players, the books' characters are like PCs.

I start Henry James, THE ASPERN PAPERS, but it will probably take me a long time.

I'm about 85% through That Awful Mess in the Vis Merulana. It does exhibit the sort of comprehensive mastery of language, rising to an occasional full pipe-organ fugue and mixed with low buffoonery, somewhat reminiscent of James Joyce.

The other salient feature that jumps out at me is the author's apparent view of women as being objects both of great frightfulness and aching desirability, which conflicting emotions color the entire narrative so far, both overtly and latently. I conclude Gadda was not entirely a well man when it came to his relationship with women. It makes me hesitate to recommend the book without reservation.

I finished Ants Among Elephants. It was a fascinating look at life in some of the poorer and more oppressed corners of Indian society, from independence up until more recent times, told through the stories of a few generations of one untouchable family. The two main characters are an uncle of the author who was a radical Communist political organizer and the author's mother, who struggled against caste-ist and sexist oppression to complete her education and obtain a permanent position as a teacher. But intertwined with their stories are stories of many other relatives, acquaintances, and lots of interesting background material. The book has a Balzacian sweep, zooming in on intimate personal stories and then zooming out to sketch the political situation at large, all in a very engaged, clear style that is never pedantic or dry. Highly recommended.

Now I'm starting on Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth, which someone was giving away on their stoop. So far I've considered bailing out since I find Roth's sex writing to be neither sexy, funny nor all that interesting, but the book has such rave reviews I'll probably soldier on a bit to see if it improves.

Reading Hilaire Belloc’s book on Robespierre.

(Spoilers: He’s not as keen on him as I am)

Willem Elsschot: Soft-Soap -- a masterpiece of cynicism in an old 2nd-hand copy that unfortunately stinks of mould

J.P. Nettl - abridged version of his (originally two volume) biography of Rosa Luxemburg

i am starting on my first thomas bernhard by reading his last novel: extinction

previous to that i read david markson's wittgenstein's mistress

I am now reading The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald.

Finished Daniel O'Malley's "The Rook". Liked it better than the Starz series, which dilutes and changes the novel's world, characters and plot.

Now reading "Major Dudes / A Steely Dan Companion". A chronological selection of reviews and interviews. Learning some stuff, and surprised with how easily the deep cuts come to mind. Now on the solo years, before they got back together. Got me to pull out China Crisis' "Flaunt the Imperfection" for today's commute.

Next two in the stack are follow-ons to these. "Stiletto", sequel to "The Rook", and "Reelin' in the Years", a Steely Dan biography.

Henry James: Search and Destroy

I'm on the third book (Death's End) of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. Really enjoying the series, even if there are some parts that urge me to reach for the salt and take a large pinch

I gave up on that after book 1 as the aliens, when revealed, turned out to be really dull. Do they get more interesting?

I dunno, they haven't arrived yet

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXpost Hi Aimless, if you come across the Katherine Mansfield collection unhelpfully titled Stories, with a not particularly helpful intro by KM biographer Jeffrey Meyers----it's a Vintage Classic, and a good demonstation of how her writing developed over the years, incl. acquiring and repurposing and sometimes discarding manners and influences, but always with a drive that seemed to come from experience, as a girl and young woman and less young woman in New Zealand and Europe. Not always at her best here, but plenty of momentum.
Good quote from omg Elizabeth Bowen:
We to her the prosperity of the 'free' story: she untrammeled it from conventions and, still more, gained for it a prestige till then unthought of. How much ground Katherine Mansfield broke for her successors may not be realized. Her imagination kindled unlikely matter; she was to alter for good and all our idea of what goes to make a story.

We owe to her, that should have been. As a prodigious teenager, Bowen was checking in while Mansfield was checking out, and the inspiration to her personally might have been particularly strong.

I spent last December plowing through three Bowen novels, The Death of the Heart the best among them.

Cool. Need to do that, I've only read the dynamic doorstop Collected Stories.

Please Look After Mother, Shin Kyung-sook. The titular mother disappears on a trip to Seoul; novel follows the various family members as they process their guilt over having neglected her. Written almost entirely in the second person. It's got that good family guilt a la Tokyo Story, and a certain sparseness that I encounter a lot in....South East Asian? (struggling to find a non-offensive word for something I've found in Chinese, Korean and Japanese fiction...post-confucian?) writing. I'm probably making it seem like a bit of a chore but actually it's quite the page-turner!

That sounds good, I'm gonna check it out.

reading two books I found on the street:
I Claudius (Graves)
Annihilation (Vandermeer)

I read a bunch of stuff over the summer - a list that makes me look well parochial. Ho hum.

Alan Moore - V for Vendetta. The concept is enough to make it a classic but it's stretched out pretty thin by the end.

Robin Ince - I'm A Joke and So Are You. I find Ince kind of annoying but this is gently wise and funny enough to mitigate the worst of his excesses.

Caryl Lewis - Martha, Jack & Shanco. I went to Anglesey so wanted to read some Welsh-language literature. This aims for a Steinbeckian universalism but doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions. The nature writing was beautiful.

Richard King - The Lark Ascending. This should have been my *thing* - activism, music and landscape - but it never quite, well, took flight.

Robert Macfarlane - Landmarks. I fell out with Macfarlane around the time of The Old Ways but, compared to the above, the existential nature of Macfarlane's commitment mattered again. Beautiful.

Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker. As a reading experience, I found it tough but my brain has been like a huge resonating chamber since I put it down.

Keiron Pym - Jumpin' Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock and Roll Underworld. This was the *one*. During an obsessive pursuit (to use Richard Holmes' phrase) of his quarry across the world and down the toilet of London's 60s underworld, Pym ravels and unravels the riddle of Litvinoff and with it the history of the Jewish East End, the Krays, the Chelsea set, Performance. Litvinoff comes across as manic, inventive, borrowed from death.

I finished The Beginning of Spring last night. It was a very fine novel and a pleasure to read. More so than any of the authors I read, Fitzgerald achieves her effects so subtly and organically that it is impossible for me to put my finger on the artifice that supports her art. She is economical of details, but there is no sense of sparsity or strain. She frequently chooses the precise word needed to carry an exact meaning, but her prose is never fussy. Her characters emerge clearly and well-formed, and do not seem overdone or underdone. I stand in awe of her excellence and cannot explain it.

btw, the autumnal equinox is almost upon us. A new thread of books, mists and mellow fruitfulness shall soon be in order.

I'm now reading another novel by Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia. This one is To Each His Own.

The next 'What Are You Reading' thread here:

2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

Check out ILB's exciting all-new lineup for Fall!