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

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.

Well-known? Not known to me. But fwiw I have actually felt that the translation was good - it does convey wordplay, fiddling with letters and sounds, and sometimes lyricism.

I feel that the problem, such as it is, lies beyond the translator.

Gregory Rabassa is well-known, yeah, although it’s all relative: you wouldn’t call him a household name but he did the English translations of a load of el boom stuff & Latin American lit mavens will know him. I’m reading one by him at the moment, the lizard’s tail by Luisa Valenzuela - I think it’s good but haven’t read the original obv. Curious about this disillusionment.

1) Liked Cortázar better when I read him in Spanish, and maybe some others as well, can’t remember
2) Read Rabassa’s (very slight) memoir
3)Saw him give a talk in my neighborhood in which he seemed to mostly repeat some lame jokes from 2)

I realize the above may not be an airtight case but...

I'm back reading the Aeneid. It has become drenched in gore, but the feats of arms Virgil vividly describes seem more mechanical than heroic. Not surprisingly, his lips have still not disengaged from Augustus's posterior.

I don't think I've heard anyone say anything nice about the Aeneid

i remember it being a bit like the Avengers

During the medieval period the Aeneid was the epitome of Homeric epic for an educated class that had no knowledge of or access to Homer's epics. They thought it was amazing stuff and couldn't praise it enough. I can see why, but knowing the originals rather spoils the flavor of the ersatz.

Starting to prep for my South Korea trip by reading The Story Of Hong Gildong

I know nothing about THE AENEID but didn't Seamus Heaney very late on produce a version of part of it, that people like?

I like the Aeneid, even the very hilarious part in Hades where it goes full Augusts propaganda. I've never read either Homeric epic in a verse version, though.

x-post. Yeah, Heaney did book 6, it was very good.

I've never really gotten into cortázar. have read rayuela and final del juego. think i like the short stories better but not enamored altogether

just remembering that there is a manic pixie dream girl in rayuela

Think Cortázar’s significant other -Carol? - was not an MPDG herself but he was aware of his predilection for such.

Chapter 133 of HOPSCOTCH, where character Traveler reads a bizarre encyclopedia or future plan for society, seems to me quite well done, imaginative, executed with dedication. It feels a lot like Borges's famous 'Chinese encyclopedia' but developed at great length. The translation conveys Cortazar's interest in specific wordings.

Hong Gildong was fun, kind of a Robin Hood tale where Robin also has wicked awesome magic powers. Could've done without the last third that just describes dude's life after he's become the ruler of an island realm, though.

Now it's on to At Dusk, Hwang Sok-yong.

Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies, his late sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. His powers aren't fully up to the task any more; it's mostly scenes of interrogation, and the end of the book comes too abruptly; but it's short, moves swiftly enough considering its elderly cast, and rounds out the earlier stories with portraits of Smiley and company before and after the events of those novels. His usual tone of disgruntled melancholy feels well-earned here.

I checked out a copy of Basque History of the World from the library and started to give it a whirl two nights ago. I will bring it with me on the weeklong camping trip I'll soon be leaving for, but I am not certain my interest in the plucky Basques drives down quite that deep. I'll bring several other fallback choices, too.

I read The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom. It's a novelistic companion piece to his Staring at the Sun book about his therapeutic explorations of how we deal with death and how best to live our lives. Yalom basically asks the question 'what if I could have Schopenhauer in one of my therapy groups?' and goes from there. It's clunky and Yalom isn't really a novelist but it's affecting and finds new ways of thinking about grumpy old Arthur.

Now reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I loved the wildness of Housekeeping very much; this is much more measured but it's got its hooks into me and is a good companion to the Yalom.

I hadn't recalled the MPDG element in HOPSCOTCH but rereading chapter 1, it's true - like an ur-text of the idea.

I finished the novel at midnight. As far as I can tell, the last two chapters are left bouncing back and forth infinitely. I didn't like the ending. I didn't really like the beginning or the middle either. But the earlier parts held more life and promise.

Meanwhile Paul Mason attacks Object Oriented Ontology, Bruno Latour, Rawlsian ethics, Utilitarianism, Althusser, Bergson and post-humanism, while saying he'd like to march under a banner with a randomly generated snowflake.

One of the most bonkers, scattergun books I've ever read - curiously similar in certain ways to Wyndham Lewis's hilarious epic polemic TIME & WESTERN MAN, which makes a very similar anti-vitalist, pro-stability case; something that PM doesn't seem to have considered, as that book (being by Lewis) is generally associated with the political Right.

Yet for all its theoretical daftness, I probably agree with most of PM's ultimate political conclusions.

I seem to be making a habit of reading recent booker winners. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) was everything the reviews said - daring, inventive, weird, compassionate, human - but also strangely slight; despite being 200+ pages it read like a short story. Milkman (2018) was more fulfilling.

Milkman was a thrill, deeply touching and hopeful

Olsson, The Weil Conjectures

The author's life as seen through the prism of the famous Weil siblings. Subjectivity index: 700 millianaïses.

Who will stand up for 62: A Model Kit?