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

PKD: In this I incurred the absolute hate of [fellow SF writer] Joanna Russ who wrote me the nastiest letter I've ever received; at one point she said she usually offered to beat up people (she didn't use the word people) who expressed opinions such as this. I admit that this story amounts to special pleading, and I am sorry to offend those who disagree with me about abortion on demand... But for the pre-person's sake I am not sorry. I stand where I stand: "Hier steh Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," as Martin Luther is supposed to have said.

"Hier steh Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," as Martin Luther is supposed to have said.

Principled stand or not, going by the plot summary you linked to it's still a very dumb story.

It is you who are confused, Οὖτις

I just looked up the Le Guin-Aldiss beef and found this letter she wrote on being asked to supply a blurb for an anthology:

Dear Mr Radziewicz,

I can imagine myself blurbing a book in which Brian Aldiss, predictably, sneers at my work, because then I could preen myself on my magnanimity. But I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.

Yours truly,
(Signed)
Ursula K. Le Guin

A book on popular delusions written by mackay

Ah sorry wins my bad

First I’m knowing about any of these beeves tbh!

I put away that horror book for the time being and started BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller (I don’t normally do the yelling titles thing but this title seemed to call for it). I didn’t even know he’d written any novels, this is his last, lost apparently; it starts with a baby shooting its father and goes from there.

I was a big Aldiss fan until I read this stuff

I finished A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan last night, which was mostly pretty enjoyable but sort of lost me in the end when it suddenly indulged in some near-future speculative fiction stuff. I realized that my least favorite genre is precisely that: near-future speculation by literary fiction writers who are maybe not entirely aware of the present, especially when written a few years in the past. It's grating and rings false. Anyway, helps with bingo.

goon squad's ending is awful. turned me against the whole book

well i also hate the "rapist journalist with aggressive footnotes" chapter

The future bits are insanely bad, I’d really liked the book up until then but those last chapters are embarrassing and sort of highlighted some earlier embarrassingness that I’d been overlooking

Her book look at me had the same problem, it would occasionally lapse into bad speculative fiction, mainly at the end, and whenever it did it seemed really off the ball

I was delighted when I reached the unanticipated powerpoint section because it meant I was much closer to the end of the book than I had thought

Thanks, everybody. Makes me feel a bit better that I stopped reading much earlier on.

Yeah, the SF stuff is awful, really thin and un-thought-through

I'm a quarter of the way through the Aeneid and I think I can see its main problem: Aeneas has no character flaws to build a story around. He exhibits endless piety and prompt devotion to each and every kind of duty. But underneath that brave and handsome boy scout exterior there beats a heart of pure piety and devotion to duty. Yup. It's pious and dutiful turtles all the way down.

Speaking of "turtles all the way down", that Bertrand Russell anecdote shows up midway through Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, which I just finished. It's a pretty interesting book if you have a tolerance for philosophy. It reminds me of the book The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, which tried a similar trick of popularizing philosophical arguments for a non-specialist audience. Holt is good at clearly explaining the various arguments with a minimum of jargon, even if you may not always agree with his judgments on which is the more persuasive. For some reason, the book ends with a couple of chapters on the problem of consciousness, perhaps because it's another philosophical question of broad interest. Sometimes I feel like the philosophical mode of reasoning is trying to apply tools borrowed from math and logic to materials that are too shapeless to stand up to such precision, so by the end of the book I felt most sympathetic to the position taken by John Updike (in an interview given shortly before his death) that after considering all the arguments perhaps making a personal statement of faith is not a bad way to settle it.

Still a very long way to go in Mason's CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE, but I note something:

His narrative is, perhaps characteristically, flamboyant and exaggerated. He claims that neoliberalism totally remade the self; turned us all into homo economicus; then crashed in 2008 and left an utterly different world. The West now, he suggests, is like the USSR c.1991 -- a system has collapsed, people have seen through an ideology, the world is totally new.

This doesn't ring very true for me. To me, that financial crash was a big economic event, but it's not evident that it has fundamentally transformed the system in which I live. Most things are quite similar to before. Some specific bad things happened - like one that stays in my own mind, the end of Woolworths, or B&S some years later. (Both of those surely also belong to 'crisis of the high street' which is a different story again.) Some of the things that are different are because of other factors (like technological acceleration). Many things seem just to be getting 'even more neoliberal than before' - soccer, for instance, or universities, or aspects of transport. The more I think about it, the more Mason's account (asserting that neoliberalism has crashed) feels like wishful hot air.

I think a simple reason for the difference between my view and his is that he, I'll assume, understands the 2008 financial crash, and, even after reading him, I don't. My non-understanding encourages me to think it's not that important, or rather, it doesn't allow me to see how important it is.

imo, the 2008 crash affected the outlook and habits of a lot of individuals and households, but the structures of the financial system were carefully preserved and nourished back to strength by the central banks of the western governments and quite a few mega corporations were bailed out, so that most of the severe financial dislocations were felt almost entirely at the grassroots level, not among the power elites. Apart from the anger and cynicism this bred, which people like Trump have capitalized on, the people running the system seem to be wholly unchanged by the experience.

Aimless, that seems to me an excellent analysis and I agree!

Rather than *BHS*, in my post I symptomatically managed to invent the closure of B&S, and not even M&S.

Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World, Mark Kurlansky.

Chapter Four: Whence Came the Breading

Elizabeth Jolley's Vera Wright trilogy

Eight books of the Aeneid down and four to go. Virgil still has his lips firmly planted on Augustus' ass. I'm setting it aside for a week while I go camping. While camping I shall bring other reading material to amuse me.

Adolf Loos: Ornament and Crime -- very entertaining writing on aesthetics from a dead paedophile

I’m relieved that everyone else hates the ending of goon squad too

Loved Manhattan Beach though.

Knocked off The Sisters Brothers, also via library ebook, which both had a good ending and lived up to the hype implicit in its permanent position in the “northwest authors” display in the local bookstore.

I just finished A Separate Peace by John Knowles. My wife and the guy working at the bookstore both expressed surprise that I hadn't read it in high school. I was intrigued by the opening paragraphs and back jacket summary, and I figured that any book that's been in print for 70+ years must be ok at least. It was actually pretty good (surprise, surprise). Maybe the first half was better and the ending seemed a bit extreme (don't want to give any spoilers) but I guess it fits with the wartime atmosphere. Now I'm reading The Unforeseen by Dorothy Macardle, which someone on here recommended.

Whilst camping last week I read a bit more than half of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman.

I agree with the most basic premises of the book, for example that the vast majority of the activity we experience as 'mind' takes place in the pre-conscious, and the characteristic operation of most components of 'mind' is heuristic, rather than strictly logical, mathematical, or rational, or that people find statistical thinking difficult and alien and far prefer applying rapid heuristics over making calculations of Bayesian probabilities.

I do have a lot of trouble with his rhetoric. Sure, he is a psychologist by training, not a writer, but a surprisingly large percentage of his experiments are based on carefully crafted, brief scenarios that his subjects are then asked to evaluate, so that his apparent insensitivity to the finer points of rhetoric and how they affect the responses he gets is very annoying.

For someone whose major conclusions wholly accept, I'm finding him extremely irritating. He's always leaving out crucial information and offering conclusions only weakly supported by the evidence he chooses to present. It's meant to be a 'popularizing' book for the lay reader, but he was probably the wrong author for the project, attempting too much and not able to condense without creating lacunae.

Hours of travel time reading HOPSCOTCH.

I still don't like it.

Knocked off The Sisters Brothers, also via library ebook, which both had a good ending and lived up to the hype implicit in its permanent position in the “northwest authors” display in the local bookstore.

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), 17. juli 2019 04:20 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

The film is actually really, really good, and I usually dislike Audiard.

I've been reading some Danish authors, Harald Voetmann, Lone Aburas, Pernille Abd-el Dayem, Christina Hesselholdt (an absolutely brilliant book about Vivian Meyer, apparently the first in a trilogy, great stuff), and now I'm reading more Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Bought in East Anglia, no less, feels very appropriate. It's not quite as good as Austerlitz, though.

Really enjoying that Cod book. Learned that the Basque got to Canada before the French and British, but didn't say anything and just started fishing there on the quiet. Early New England settler culture really shows you where Lovecraft came from, people putting codfish on family crests and doing weird rituals with them and stuff. And of course like all global commerce it intersects with the slave trade in all sorts of ways.

I do have some reservations though; the scope of the book is so large that it's questionable how deeply the author could go into all the different countries he's tackling. A lot of the stuff on Portugal is not factually incorrect but very weirdly put - someone is described as "the tyrant of the Azores" (which would be under Portuguese rule, so ultimate tyrant surely still the king?) and Portugal "merging" with Spain when what actually happened was Portugal lost a war and got conquered.

I think I've enjoyed all the Kurlansky books I've read so far. Salt was very interesting as was the Basque History of The World.
& he's now more recently branched into doing books on music or at least where music features largely.

The only Kurlansky book I've read is The Basque History of the World, and I thought it was excellent. What I've heard from my Basque friends is that, for someone not-Basque, he did as best a job as he possibly could at getting at what makes Basques 'tick' etc. I vastly prefer it to Paddy Woodworth's 'The Basque Country: A Cultural History', which contains grave generalizations and taking wild swings at the Basques, missing the target by miles. He doesn't 'get' them nearly as good as Kurlansky does.

I still have 'Cod' lying around, will pack it in my summer book bag.

Kurlansky's fiction collection, 'The White Man in the Tree', is very enjoyable.

I must be 2/3 through HOPSCOTCH, in terms of actual pages. They are taking over a mental asylum for some reason. No great logic apparent to this. All somewhat reminiscent of Pynchon.

And Paul Mason for light relief. It is somewhat bizarre how this book swings between specific accounts of US business people and politics, and the nature of knowledge and metaphysics over the past few millennia.

He may have bitten off a bit more souvlaki than he could chew.

it's not hard to see why it's his most well-known book, but it's not my favorite or his best imo.

tbc, I do like it, I just like other stuff of his more

I tried reading Hopscotch in college but I was too depressed & lazy to get very far. On the other hand, the very short story "The Continuity of Parks" is stellar.

anyway reading Mammother by Zachary Schomburg, the first novel by my fav contemporary poet. Surreal but not nonsensical, very moody and sad.

Cortazar works that are better than Hopscotch:

- Axolotl (short story, my favorite piece of his)
- Cronopios and Famas (this is his best imo)
- The Continuity of Parks (short story)
- Save Twilight (poetry collection)
- House Taken Over (short story)
- Around the Day in 80 Worlds (collection of short pieces)

i tried Anciallary Mercy after liking Justice and disliking Sword and... i couldn't get into it. after the 20th use of 'impassive' i just checked out.

i tried Black Leopard, Red Wolf and i couldn't really get into that either. something about the gratuity, idk.

i'm now giving Traitor Baru Cormorant a shot and it's ok but half hear it as someone giving me an elaborate narration of their last catan game or something. so i'm not doing well with well-reviewed sci-fantasy recently.

somewhere in there i read The Uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Wells) and A Sport and a Pastime (Salter) which were both amazing and terrifying in different ways. i mean, we're fucked, is how i break it down to an extent.

Fuzzy THinking Bart kosko
I've wanted to read something along these lines for a while. Came across a number of the people the author talks about in George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things some years ago. Got this from a charity shop a few weeks ago.
Pretty interesting anyway.

Cronopios and Famos is brilliant, I agree. Wasn't as enamored of what I've otherwise have read by him. I have Hopscotch on the shelf, should dive into it.

White house lawn, how unpredictable really.
Couldn't he just die , in extreme pain or something.

I have heard that 'Continuity of Parks' was good!

(Then again I have also heard that HOPSCOTCH is good)

It's reassuring to hear one or two people not think that HOPSCOTCH is great.

- Axolotl (short story, my favorite piece of his)

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, July 24, 2019 12:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^^^^^

Like that one a lot. Think he reads better in Spanish, tbh, but don’t have the stamina to read a doorstop like Rayuela/Hopscotch in the original and long ago became disillusioned with the well-known translator of it into English.