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

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?

Is The Weil Conjectures good? Can't tell from your description.

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.

but i should add v entertaining and enjoyable. and stimulating.

Is The Weil Conjectures good? Can't tell from your description.

The author had a brief fascination with mathematics in college before becoming a fiction writer and mother. She also had a certain fascination with Simone Weil as the representative of an ideal, as some young women used to. The book is partly a reflection on her past self and partly an impressionistic collection of biographical anecdotes about the Weils (in the present tense, with no quotation marks, as separated chunks of text). Simone was an iconic figure of the postwar era, now less well known (in the author's judgment). Andre was a giant of 20th century mathematics and unknown outside it. The author's consciousness is not enough of a binding agent to hold the book together, but she is able to consider the two Weils proportionately, which other writers do not. The book is short and vindicated more by its plain historical matter than by its thick subjectivity.

So is that a measured thumbs up, alimosina? Because that book seems sort of in my wheelhouse, although I am somewhat skeptical of some of the positive reviews I may have just read.

being sceptical of positive reviews is such a great pleasure and a useful heuristic. *this person likes it but in a way that suggests i will not*

I didn't regret reading the book. The author's efforts to understand her younger self were not arresting, but her distillation of both of the intransigent Weils' lives into a series of luminous details was worth the time.

Thanks. I was thinking if you really liked it a lot you would have posted about it on the other thread.

Am I the only one who really likes that poem about Simone Weil by Thai Sweet Chilli SensationsRowan Williams?

Thanks, alimosina. i might give it a go. Interested in both the Weils (and know bugger-all about Andre Weil)