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

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.

My wife just recently read When You Reach Me to our son, and she said that I would probably like it.

It’s excellent – minituarism for kids, even! And a pretty good all-ages read

I would strongly recommend reading as little as possible about it first, though

I would like to read it at some point. I think they took it back to the library. I finished Alexievich's Last Witnesses and am now reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk.

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

I just finished it -- doesn't come together, or at least the ending doesn't play.

I just finished it -- doesn't come together, or at least the ending doesn't play.

no, agreed. been a while since i read it but istr it’s overall one of her weaker ones and that though I enjoyed weaving of emotions throughout the book the resolution wasn’t satisfactory (in fact i remember being disappointed - that it had squandered the emotional density that had been built up which promised a bit more).

I read Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, P.G. Wodehouse. It lacked some of the snap and wit of the best Wodehouse and always kept well within the customary well-worn tropes. But then it was roughly his 70th (and final) novel and he was over 90 years old, so perhaps a bit of fatigue is understandable in this case.

Just finished "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" by Karen Russell, last of hers I hadn't read, and my favorite. She comes up with great odd short story ideas, and populates them with little details that make them easily believable. Now reading "Where the Crawdads Sing", per sis' suggestion.

For that last one, see the Literary Clusterfucks thread

Vampires In The Lemon Grove is great, integrates genre tropes into literary fiction in a non-cringy way.

Making my way through those New Korean Writers chapbooks:

Demons, Kang Hwagil - Weird Fiction depicting the life of an elementary school teacher who's moved to the backwoods. Lots of stuff about rural pettiness and ppl not believing women. Strong feminist subtext. I'm sure there's some myths and traditions that tie into the supernatural aspect of the story that went over my head. Really enjoyed this.
Divorce, Kim Soom - Rather less metaphorical in its feminism. A poet about to get divorced ponders on how that procedure has affected women in her and her parent's generations. Pretty harsh stuff.
Milena, Milena, Ecstastic, Bae Suah- Sorta deadpan, Kafkaesque story. There's some potential in the protagonist's fastidious habits and the weird film he's working on, but mostly this was a bit too cutesy for me.
Old Wrestler, Jeon Sungtae - A former celebrity goes back to his old village for a ceremony honoring him; the protagonist is also losing his memory to a degenerative disease. A really affecting part is when he smells the smell of onions and it takes him back to his childhood, only to be told that the region only started planting them after he left. Quite heartbreaking.
Left's Right, Right's Left, Han Yujoo - Self conciously experimental story of someone's thought process as they are being choked to death. Lots of repitition. Quite good.

Bought Macdonald’s Fantastes and Lilith in a charity shop today - has anyone read any of his stuff? It was a mostly random pick from the Scottish Lit section...

I finished Mammother by Zachary Schomburg over the weekend and last night I started Crudo by Olivia Laing, which so far seems to be right in my wheelhouse

Revisiting some old scribbles on pastoral, still love this quotation from sixth century cleric Gildas' The Ruin of Britain:

I shall not enumerate the devilish monstrosities of my land, numerous almost as those that plagued Egypt, some of which we can see today, stark as ever, inside or outside deserted city walls: outlines still ugly, faces still grim. I shall not name the mountains and hills and rivers, once so pernicious, now useful for human needs, on which, in those days, a blind people heaped divine honours.

Gildas - The Ruin of Britain and Other Documents ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom not that Michael Winterbottom.

starting David Lindsay's "Voyage to Arcturus"

..and, this isn't really the place for it, but reading about that mighty ash Yggdrassil, reminds me that my woodcutter friend who I saw at the weekend pointed out several ash to me, and said soon they will all be dead, and there will be no more ash in the UK, from ash dieback. Obviously there are many worse things to worry about, but the native ash is a distinctive and lovely tree and its complete disappearance i find obscurely sad.