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

It's good if dated. It actually doesn't dwell on the poetry. I can see him holding his nose as Yeats spends thirty years plowing through Madame Blavatsky, seances, Noh, Lady Gregory, Irish peasant drama, and masks; he sorts out these phases with admirable clarity, though.

I accept Yeats' greatness as a poet, for it is brilliantly evident in his poetry, but viewed simply as a person, he always looked to me like a godawful mess of fatuous immaturity and intellectual bad judgment.

if only Twitter had kept him honest

Hey, I began Ducks, Newburyport today as well. Really looking forward to seeing what crazy adventure that puma gets into, though at the moment it's been interrupted by some kind of rant.

The reason I began a new book is because I finished rereading Pynchon's Against the Day. I must have read the first part of it five-six times, but only the second time I made it all through. I took a break after part three, and only went back to it earlier this summer, reading parts four and five. I was surprised at how coherent it seemed, there's a good three-hundred page stretch where it's basically only Kit and Dally and Reef and Yashmeen and Cyprian. Almost like a little novel inside the novel. Then Frank returns, and the last part of it is as ever-shifting as at the beginning.

I finished Steve Jackson, THE TROLLTOOTH WARS.

I enjoyed this, even or especially with its rather ludicrous replication of material from the first 3 actual FFGs - I mean, whole scenes from THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN!

But it ends with a deux ex machina scene which is possibly also an allegory of role-playing, ie: the gods are like players, the books' characters are like PCs.

I start Henry James, THE ASPERN PAPERS, but it will probably take me a long time.

I'm about 85% through That Awful Mess in the Vis Merulana. It does exhibit the sort of comprehensive mastery of language, rising to an occasional full pipe-organ fugue and mixed with low buffoonery, somewhat reminiscent of James Joyce.

The other salient feature that jumps out at me is the author's apparent view of women as being objects both of great frightfulness and aching desirability, which conflicting emotions color the entire narrative so far, both overtly and latently. I conclude Gadda was not entirely a well man when it came to his relationship with women. It makes me hesitate to recommend the book without reservation.

I finished Ants Among Elephants. It was a fascinating look at life in some of the poorer and more oppressed corners of Indian society, from independence up until more recent times, told through the stories of a few generations of one untouchable family. The two main characters are an uncle of the author who was a radical Communist political organizer and the author's mother, who struggled against caste-ist and sexist oppression to complete her education and obtain a permanent position as a teacher. But intertwined with their stories are stories of many other relatives, acquaintances, and lots of interesting background material. The book has a Balzacian sweep, zooming in on intimate personal stories and then zooming out to sketch the political situation at large, all in a very engaged, clear style that is never pedantic or dry. Highly recommended.

Now I'm starting on Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth, which someone was giving away on their stoop. So far I've considered bailing out since I find Roth's sex writing to be neither sexy, funny nor all that interesting, but the book has such rave reviews I'll probably soldier on a bit to see if it improves.

Reading Hilaire Belloc’s book on Robespierre.

(Spoilers: He’s not as keen on him as I am)

Willem Elsschot: Soft-Soap -- a masterpiece of cynicism in an old 2nd-hand copy that unfortunately stinks of mould

J.P. Nettl - abridged version of his (originally two volume) biography of Rosa Luxemburg

i am starting on my first thomas bernhard by reading his last novel: extinction

previous to that i read david markson's wittgenstein's mistress

I am now reading The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald.

Finished Daniel O'Malley's "The Rook". Liked it better than the Starz series, which dilutes and changes the novel's world, characters and plot.

Now reading "Major Dudes / A Steely Dan Companion". A chronological selection of reviews and interviews. Learning some stuff, and surprised with how easily the deep cuts come to mind. Now on the solo years, before they got back together. Got me to pull out China Crisis' "Flaunt the Imperfection" for today's commute.

Next two in the stack are follow-ons to these. "Stiletto", sequel to "The Rook", and "Reelin' in the Years", a Steely Dan biography.

Henry James: Search and Destroy

I'm on the third book (Death's End) of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. Really enjoying the series, even if there are some parts that urge me to reach for the salt and take a large pinch

I gave up on that after book 1 as the aliens, when revealed, turned out to be really dull. Do they get more interesting?

I dunno, they haven't arrived yet

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXpost Hi Aimless, if you come across the Katherine Mansfield collection unhelpfully titled Stories, with a not particularly helpful intro by KM biographer Jeffrey Meyers----it's a Vintage Classic, and a good demonstation of how her writing developed over the years, incl. acquiring and repurposing and sometimes discarding manners and influences, but always with a drive that seemed to come from experience, as a girl and young woman and less young woman in New Zealand and Europe. Not always at her best here, but plenty of momentum.
Good quote from omg Elizabeth Bowen:
We to her the prosperity of the 'free' story: she untrammeled it from conventions and, still more, gained for it a prestige till then unthought of. How much ground Katherine Mansfield broke for her successors may not be realized. Her imagination kindled unlikely matter; she was to alter for good and all our idea of what goes to make a story.

We owe to her, that should have been. As a prodigious teenager, Bowen was checking in while Mansfield was checking out, and the inspiration to her personally might have been particularly strong.

I spent last December plowing through three Bowen novels, The Death of the Heart the best among them.

Cool. Need to do that, I've only read the dynamic doorstop Collected Stories.

Please Look After Mother, Shin Kyung-sook. The titular mother disappears on a trip to Seoul; novel follows the various family members as they process their guilt over having neglected her. Written almost entirely in the second person. It's got that good family guilt a la Tokyo Story, and a certain sparseness that I encounter a lot in....South East Asian? (struggling to find a non-offensive word for something I've found in Chinese, Korean and Japanese fiction...post-confucian?) writing. I'm probably making it seem like a bit of a chore but actually it's quite the page-turner!

That sounds good, I'm gonna check it out.

reading two books I found on the street:
I Claudius (Graves)
Annihilation (Vandermeer)

I read a bunch of stuff over the summer - a list that makes me look well parochial. Ho hum.

Alan Moore - V for Vendetta. The concept is enough to make it a classic but it's stretched out pretty thin by the end.

Robin Ince - I'm A Joke and So Are You. I find Ince kind of annoying but this is gently wise and funny enough to mitigate the worst of his excesses.

Caryl Lewis - Martha, Jack & Shanco. I went to Anglesey so wanted to read some Welsh-language literature. This aims for a Steinbeckian universalism but doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions. The nature writing was beautiful.

Richard King - The Lark Ascending. This should have been my *thing* - activism, music and landscape - but it never quite, well, took flight.

Robert Macfarlane - Landmarks. I fell out with Macfarlane around the time of The Old Ways but, compared to the above, the existential nature of Macfarlane's commitment mattered again. Beautiful.

Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker. As a reading experience, I found it tough but my brain has been like a huge resonating chamber since I put it down.

Keiron Pym - Jumpin' Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock and Roll Underworld. This was the *one*. During an obsessive pursuit (to use Richard Holmes' phrase) of his quarry across the world and down the toilet of London's 60s underworld, Pym ravels and unravels the riddle of Litvinoff and with it the history of the Jewish East End, the Krays, the Chelsea set, Performance. Litvinoff comes across as manic, inventive, borrowed from death.

I finished The Beginning of Spring last night. It was a very fine novel and a pleasure to read. More so than any of the authors I read, Fitzgerald achieves her effects so subtly and organically that it is impossible for me to put my finger on the artifice that supports her art. She is economical of details, but there is no sense of sparsity or strain. She frequently chooses the precise word needed to carry an exact meaning, but her prose is never fussy. Her characters emerge clearly and well-formed, and do not seem overdone or underdone. I stand in awe of her excellence and cannot explain it.

btw, the autumnal equinox is almost upon us. A new thread of books, mists and mellow fruitfulness shall soon be in order.

I'm now reading another novel by Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia. This one is To Each His Own.

The next 'What Are You Reading' thread here:

2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

Check out ILB's exciting all-new lineup for Fall!