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

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)

Also there's Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up!

You do?

Ha, thanks. I sat in on a course with Karen Uhlenbeck for a little bit once. Did we discuss recent Freeman Dyson book on the other thread already?

Never mind, found your comments here: Redshifted In Memphis: Thread for a discussion of books about science or its history aimed at a general audience but not playing to the crowd

Finishing At Dusk. It strikes me that the protagonists - the millenial with vague artistic aspirations working herself to death in dead-end jobs and the boomer architect pining for the sense of community he felt during his youth in the slums, slowly realising how complicit he's been in gentrifying away that community - could be from pretty much anywhere in the "developed" world. It's strong, heartbreaking stuff, very much recommended. Kenzaburo Oe is a fan.

I got this selection of New Voices Korea texts that I saw an ad for in the LRB. Slim little volumes. Hopefully some of them will be less devastating than this Hwang Sok-yong, but I'm not holding my breath.

I also am reading MILKMAN (though still haven't finished CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE).

Summer has been mostly bad not good - just not enough time to read shit.

I finished the first part (of four) of Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries and right now its tone is kinda unlike much I've seen in German Literature (or anywhere else). There are snatches of warmth for people and life -- despite what it brings -- which I am still grappling in this story (each chapter is a day in 1968) of what is at heart a conversation between mother and young daughter, where the former recounts her young years in Nazi Germany to the latter, growing up in New York in the shadow of the ongoing war in Vietnam. I have a lukewarm liking for it, and I want to spend all my time wrestling with it except I am busy till the end of the month. So in the meantime I am finishing Abdellatif Laabi's Bottom of the Jar, an account of a childhood in Morocco with a few poetic turns that aren't quite landing and also aren't enough for you to turn away from either. Finally Wolfgang Hilbig's novella The Tidings of the Trees which is of course great, the guy's sentences are great. When you like you like.

I finished Dorothy MacArdle's The Unforeseen, which I had purchased in the Forgotten Books reprint edition, which is basically just a facsimile of the original first edition in a generic green paperback cover. A good print job and nice quality trade paperback binding though. It was an interesting and slightly odd book, because it deals with spooky occurrences (mainly prevision) as a realistic possibility. I don't know if Macardle herself took them seriously as a possibility, but the book does. It reminded me of Gustav Meyrink's The Golem in that way, though that's an even weirder book. Apart from that, the book is a well-written Gothic thriller/romance set mainly in the hills of Ireland just outside Dublin between the World Wars, and the main characters are educated upper-middle class people, though some of the interesting parts of the book also deal with itinerant tinkers who camp out on their property for a time, in a practice which seems unique to Ireland (not sure if it still occurs).

Now I'm reading Svetlana Alexievich's Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of WWII. It was written in Russian in 1985 but apparently has just been translated into English. It's quite powerful stuff, hard to read at times, mostly stories of atrocities witnessed by children at first hand, but with judicious editing that makes them flow almost like fairy tales, I guess like the old bloody fairy tales of pre-modern times, with the German soldiers taking the role of the evil trolls or goblins. I was reminded a bit of The Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel. Hard to put down.

Milkman just freaked me out by mentioning Playboy of the Western World, when Synge was an answer in the Times crossword today. So I guess I’m reading that next.

Reading the Playboy next? It'll only take you a couple of hours.

I don't think I have yet reached the MILKMAN reference to it. Something to look forward to.

I finished CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE around midnight. I didn't even expect it to end - I turned the page and I was on the last page. Paul Mason winds up talking about writing on Bondi Beach, somewhat losing his thread, not for the first time.

A curious book - is it really a whole book at all? A compendium of articles and talks posing as a unitary book? His last section offers a series of 'reflexes' for radicals today. One is 'never give in', but the substance is mainly about secessionist movements and why they scare neoliberalism. The next is called 'Live the anti-fascist life', but his main example of doing this is a soldier friend of George Orwell's who literally went out and shot lots of people. Fascinating and moving account, but not an obvious practical model for people today.

It's something of a mess, a scrapbook, a spontaneous farrago. Yet (I will say one last time) when it comes down to it, I agree almost entirely with every basic political message and conclusion it has to offer.

moving on to Jenny O'Dell's "How to Do Nothing" and "Black Elk Speaks", plus this Kate Wilhelm short story collections that has one of the most atrocious 80s covers ever
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fbooks%2F1287017096i%2F890465._UY630_SR1200%2C630_.jpg&f=1

Some of it is great some of it is trite, but it's always well-written, she is a great prose stylist. Never thought I would be praising short fiction originally published in Redbook but here we are.

I spent last week camping and hiking, but also managed to read several short books.

The first was The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, a strange little novella by Thomas Mann. It was not apparent from the edition I read how much of this "legend" was invented or reworked by Mann, but it was pretty clearly based on a pre-existing story. To give a hint at its strangeness, it revolves around two friends who decapitate themselves, and with the aid of a goddess are revitalized, but with their bodies attached to one another's heads.

Next, I read Not to Disturb, Muriel Spark, another novella, from the early 1970s. It felt like the treatment for a film script, very compact in its descriptions and dialogue and very dramatic in its premise, but ultimately it felt insufficiently human, in ways that her earlier books never do, and its satire was a bit too forced to seem realistic, but neither was it quite farcical enough to float blissfully free of reality. Still, not a bad book, just far from her best.

Lastly, I read Maigret Has Scruples, Georges Simenon. As with many of the Maigret novels, the real excellence of it is not in the imaginary crime or its solution, but in the creation of a wholly comfortable and fully inhabited world with apparently minimal effort on the part of author or reader.

I shall now return to The Basque History of the World and finish it.

Finished MILKMAN. In the end I felt it was about as good as people say. Something of a black comic masterpiece.

Just read "When You Reach Me", a Newberry-winning kids book from 2009, after Jia Tolentino mentioned in the NYT By The Book section. It's terrific, easy to read in <3hrs, and would def recommend if you liked "Holes"

Also just finished "The Beginning of Spring" on my Penelope Fitzgerald sprint which is amazing as usual, without being anything like one of her other books, as usual.

That’s the Russian one?

with the poor bear :(

The bear scene is amazing

I'm reading another British miniaturist: Elizabeth Taylor. I finished A View of the Harbour, have started A Wreath of Roses.

Taylor is fabulous. I think A View of the Harbour is the best of those I've read but can recommend Angel, too. Miniaturist is a good way to describe her, albeit the inner landscapes of the lives she portrays are vast. I have A Wreath of Roses somewhere.

I read John Higgs's Watling Street. It's a bit of a mess to be honest. It wants to be a Bryson-esque travelogue, with some more immersive almost Iain Sinclair like meditations on place (another interview with Alan Moore, about Northampton!) but doesn't commit to either. It's full of historical and cultural generalisations that made my teeth itch and it's got a Brexit framing narrative that hasn't been properly considered and consequently feels tacked on.

And I'm getting old and tetchy but what happened to editors? At a macro-level, this could have done with some architectural work and at a micro-level, there are some weird decisions with bits of text that read like placeholders that someone simply forgot to take out.