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

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.

and on a separate note again, looking at the ash my friend pointed out reminded me of the penetrating reported quote of Jonathan Swift: "I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top".

Never fails to stop me in my tracks whenever I remember it.

Ruth Ware’s thrillers. Breezy beach reads, recommended

Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor; thoroughly enjoyed it, perfect holiday read for me. It's like he's set himself the task of writing a Richard Ford-style thing where nothing really seems to happen over the course of a weekend for 260 pages.

I mentioned upthread that I read Francisco Cantu's 'Line Becomes a River,' which is an extended memoir-essay-primer on Mexican/US border policy written by a former CBP agent. I'm still thinking about it a week after finishing, and I've bought copies for two friends. It's a marvelous piece of writing, cleaving deeply to the human impact of the Obama-era border enforcement situation. (An afterward deals w/ Trump policies). Best thing I've read in a while.

I just finished Murakami's Killing Commendatore. It's bad, I think? Maybe? Lots of ideas that never coalesce and a handwavy 'oh, it's metaphors' cop-out made embarrassingly literal at the ending. (Seriously, the protagonist journeys to the land of metaphors). Next, onto the second book in the N.K. Jemisen broken earth trilogy.

10 IF $Murakami=fiction THEN bad
20 GOTO 10

I still like Murakami about 50% of the time.

I really enjoyed Milkman - though I’m not sure why the Fates wanted me to read the Synge, which was pretty meh.

Finished Man in the High Castle, which I'd been warned isn't one of Dick's best despite its reputation, and... I agree. The only other one I've read is Ubik, and it's no Ubik.

There are couple killer moments, like the gun battle in the office, and I'm definitely glad I picked it up, but I was mostly bored and had to force myself to get it finished. In a way I actually admired its perverse dedication to un-excitingness, but boy are the characters flat. I wish there'd been more about its most provocative conceit (that the Japanese won the war and were, it turns out, pretty good to live under) and less of the, er, Dickian-reality-collapsing-stuff, but... guess I'll check out Electric Sheep or Policeman instead next time.

For that last one, see the Literary Clusterfucks thread

Thanks for that. The Slate link was an interesting article. Just under half of the book read, so appreciated the spoilers to alleviate the "feels like a ---- is imminent" anxiety. Has a "To Kill a Mockingbird"-lite vibe that isn't unpleasant.

Ouch on Killing Commendatore. Been saving that and the last Carlos Ruiz Zafon for a while. That ending sounds like the Alan Wake video game, which killed a great atmosphere.

While out trekking last week I read The Garden Party, a short story collection by Katherine Mansfield. They were interesting enough, but not quite the sort of writing I most enjoy. She excelled at setting a tone and creating an atmosphere, but my overall impression was that they leaned heavily on descriptions and used dialogue very sparingly, so that they did much more telling than showing. The prose had a tendency to get 'poetic', but thankfully stopped short of 'annoyingly poetic'.

Now I am halfway through Girl in a Landscape, Jonathan Lethem. He writes clean fluent prose and can describe action clearly, which are weak points for many writers. He's also strong on imagination, but mediocre on character development, relying more on emphasizing a character's quirks than giving on them human depth.

Girl in Landscape is one of his best, ends strongly iirc

I've 50 pages before finding Angel, the funniest and most vivacious Elizabeth Taylor novel I've read.

After reading a good blurb in the Sunday Seattle Times for "The Shakespeare Requirement" by Julie Schumacher, first reading her prequel, "Dear Committee Members". Quick read, no LOLs yet, but grinning a lot: English prof writing recommendation letters, some of hyperbole, most carrying out the chore with witty, honest assessment of academic ability. Mixing in "The Rook" by Daniel O'Malley after that, to see if it's better than the Starz series.

Hi! I just wanted to say that I met the pinefox Saturday evening and he was divine! The only bad thing is that we got to hang for only an hour or so. But he was friendly and funny and we talked about The Wake (quivers), Middlemarch, the pound, and what I should read next. Lorrie Moore: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital it is!

I'm currently reading Marguerite Young: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), 1198 pages of Joycean tumble. It's a chore but an intermittently ecstatic one.

it really is.

I've 50 pages before finding /Angel/, the funniest and most vivacious Elizabeth Taylor novel I've read.

Kevin B's post is practically the best review I've ever had on ILX. How are we supposed to start an ILX feud with that kind of talk?

It was slightly entertaining to find that some highly educated Americans think that the UK is in the Eurozone and abandoned sterling years ago.

FROG HOSPITAL apart from being consistently brilliant is short - it's hard to think of a reason not to read it.

Our discussion did also lead me to consider that the coloured-pencil drafts of FINNEGANS WAKE look like the the NYC subway map, which Kevin said was a lot more difficult to interpret.

I finished up Nocilla Dream last night which I'd been reading in spurts. I sort of see what he was going for but I spread my reading out way too much to have the gestalt effect of it really hit me. The Nocilla Trilogy in the US is a boxed set from FSG so I have and presumably someday will read the other two.

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

i'm only about 80 pages in, but i am loving it. it's amazing how he is able to conjure genuinely horrific images (ie, a girl being integrated semi-permanently into a cemetery gate, which is also a glowing furnace) while being lol funny a page later. the bardo is a wonderful setting because it makes sense for these emotions and worlds to collide there.

I finished John Updike's RABBIT, RUN today. Brilliantly written; surprisingly dark in the end.

I have a stack of ponderous times that have been weighing on me for a while now. It's practically put me off of reading altogether. So I decided to track down some fantasy novels that might actually be FUN to read. Here's what's in my current lineup, I'm very excited!

A Darker Shade of Magic - Schwab
The Night Circus - Morgenstern
The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Swanick

I finished Girl in Landscape. No comments beyond what I've already said. Then I picked up The Mueller Report by the Office of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller regarding Russian interference with the 2016 US presidential campaign and related matters.

It is surprisingly well-written with a minimum of legalese and usually employs very exact wording to convey the least possible ambiguity. So far the many blocks of textual redactions in Part 1 make the pages fly by, since they may contain only a few dozen unredacted words. Because I kept up on the news reports during the investigation and after the release of the report, there has not yet been much new to me, but the report makes absolutely clear that Putin and the GRU materially assisted Trump and opposed Clinton, and the operation was quite large and successful.

Unusually I happen to have read GIRL IN LANDSCAPE 2 or 3 times. I think the first time its drifting nature frustrated me somewhat. The narrative is curiously slow and recursive. Yet when I looked at it very closely, I found the language richer than it appeared.

Specific details like the Archbuilders' speech and the John Wayne pastiche are also very good and enjoyable.

Re: Milkman: would love a book about the wee sisters.