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

REBECCA

james's actual 1st novel is one seriously creepy piece of work, man grooming small child to be his perfect future wife.

I had to read Roderick Hudson at college and that put me off of James for most of my life. (Washington Square put me on again; Turn of the Screw then put me off, possibly permanently.)

o nate I had so much fun reading Nixonland, it will be a good companion to the coming fall of crazy US politics

I'm enjoying it so far, though I don't know if my enthusiasm will be able to keep up for another 600 pages of day-by-day, play-by-play commentary on every election cycle in the '60s. I wouldn't mind perhaps slightly less detail.

penelope fitzgerald

There are seven Bruno and Boots books now? I think last time I read them, there were only four. I always liked I Want to Go Home and Our Man Weston by GK.

Yeah, the series kept going until 1995! The strain on the formula was starting to show somewhat on the later books in the series, but the very last one, The Joke’s On Us, is pretty funny, even going so far as to deal with the fact that our boys are aging out of their role as pranksters as a new generation of kids (specifically, Boot’s little brother) are on their way in.

Just past halfway through Roderick Hudson. The most striking thing so far is the degree to which it minutely describes a culture of exquisite manners which was utterly snuffed out early in the 20th century. It also preserves a glimpse of the misshapen monsters hatched into that society by Byronic romanticism. Everyone is either repressed beneath a facade like an ornate snuffbox, or else flinging their emotional excrement about like angry monkeys. I am not sure how much of this effect was intended by James and how much is simply the product of my being the product of a society so unlike that which he observed.

James doesn't miss a thing; his light irony is one of the delights of his early style.

whoof Life of Johnson a bit of a slog, skipping ahead to the bits that are mostly just transcripts of conversation, cuz that stuff is pretty entertaining. Most eye-opening passage so far was Johnson (a royalist and a Tory!) making a studied and aggressive dismantling of slavery as immoral and then Boswell's "nope, gotta have slavery!" riposte

Burke opposed the growing empire.

I couldn't disagree more about TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

A magnificent masterpiece, a portrait of life, one of the greatest English works of art, in fact works of art period, that I know of from the last century.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, September 24, 2019 11:54 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

It has completely won me over and I now wholly agree. Marvelous, especially the second section ('Time Passes').

I've started in Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. I read a couple of letters before bedtime, and she's quickly becoming something of an imaginary friend who - in great detail, with wit and sprightly language - shares her travels and travails.

My problem with 'A Little Life' is that the synopsis makes it sound like it's gonna be about the 4 main characters but the author is clearly interested in only one of them and that happens to be the one I have least interest in.Still I slogged through to the end for some reason while not really liking it.

Just finished Stina Jackson's 'Silver Road' which is an impressively downbeat but not violent Nordic thriller with a oppressive momentum that I really dug.

That's about right, and it became disability porn ("Oh, goodie, let's see what other tragedy befalsl Jude today").

*befalls

Also last week a couple of Eric Ambler novels 'Mask of Dimitrios' and 'Cause for Alarm'. Enjoyed both.

Does anyone have any contemporary British satire recommendations? I’m in the mood for something biting and genuinely funny over knowing and sardonic.

How is To The Lighthouse progressing, LBI?

Great! In fact, I finished it already, as I mentioned above ("It has completely won me over and I now wholly agree. Marvelous, especially the second section ('Time Passes').") :-)

It was, of course, the second section I was talking about :) Completely surprised me when I read it.

I read Venedict Erofeevs 'Moscow to the End of the Line' for a second time, because I also watched a documentary about him. The translation isn't good, I think, it sounded much better in the film than what I read, but some of the scenes are scary dark.

Ah sorry, I missed that! Glad you enjoyed it. :) I think all of her books (that I’ve read) are profoundly memorable and have a way of colouring reflection itself ever after.

I really did enjoy it, a lot, and am glad I stuck with it! As I said, it was my first Woolf. Which one of her should I read next?

The Waves is mad and wonderful, but probably still Mrs. Dalloway. It’s one of those books that provides context to a hundred other things that followed.

Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando, which I'm happy has gotten more attention in the last thirty years from queer theorists and gender study people. It's her most purely entertaining book, fun as hell.

the waves whips ass but i think i love orlando the most

The less Woolf dealt with the concreteness of people and instead dealt with identities interacting with history, the more human her novels were. That's why it took so long for her to find a voice.

Very good that you came to like the novel, LBI.

The simple and reliable advice would be: Mrs Dalloway next.

I would not go for a later one like The Waves yet.

But you could enjoy an earlier one, eg The Voyage Out or, arguably more accomplished and important: Jacob's Room.

I reread Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss'.

VW said KM's was the only writing of which she had ever been jealous.

Thank you all for the recommendations, Mrs. Dalloway it is! I'll save The Waves for later.

Meanwhile I cannot stress enough the sheer joy I get from reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters (Gutenberg link here.

The opening section of Mrs. Dalloway as she goes flower shopping is kind of mindblowing.

Offhand I can't think of a more masterful free-indirect narrative, keeping so many balls in the air while moving a character from A to B to C

The Sandcastle, Iris Murdoch.

I’ve just finished Robertson Davies’ The Manticore, years after reading the first part of the Deptford Trilogy - Fifth Business. I don’t know why I waited so long. I’ll start on World Of Wonders shortly.

I’m reading the Colombian writer Tomas Gonzalez’ In The Beginning Was The Sea, about a pair of mildly obnoxious big-city types setting up on a remote island off the Caribbean coast and failing miserably, at the moment.

After finishing Roderick Hudson, I went back to read the highly prolix Introduction for it that James wrote late in life, for his collected works edition. He accurately places his finger upon the novel's greatest weaknesses, which was nice to see for he confirmed my own impressions.

In a nutshell, one critical character, Mary Garland, is wholly unrealized and unsatisfactory, but as soon as the character of Christina Light appears, she takes over driving the plot and the novel picks up a tremendous head of steam. Toward the end, when Christina disappears for several installments, the story sags at once and becomes fairly lifeless again. It also contains a handful of interesting subsidiary characters.

This novel has to us an unrepressed homoeroticism.

Sorry, Alfred, but I truly failed to detect this aspect of the story and to the extent it exists, I don't think "unrepressed" could possibly be the right word to apply to it.

It's okay if you don't. Rowland and I forgive you.

Haven't been reading anything for a while for... reasons, but forced myself back to it on the back of the last herne hill FAP (thanks Tim).

Attrib. by Eley Williams. Williams has enormous fun with the sound and look of language, and the heft of words and their relation to perception and memory. Normally I'm a little wary of the poeticisation of prose, but I don't think that's what's happening here. It reminds me more of Robert Louis Stevenson's approach to sentence construction, where he recommends an awareness of the patterns of sound across sentences. Love and loss are specifically realised through this prism of language and thought, which makes their representation more elliptical than more conventional representations of those emotions, but more pointed, more tender, with a bursting sense of things felt but not directly expressed so that, to quote Isaac Rosenberg, they are 'understandable but still ungraspable'.

I've started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt. I hardly need to say that it prompts a great many thoughts about present day events.

Reading The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial by Maggie Nelson, recommended by my girlfriend. It's pretty incredible, though also very very dark.

I read that recently too! I agree, it's fantastic. I felt a bit ambivalent reading it and was glad when she starts formulating about her own right (or perceived lack of) to be telling the story, but that some things just need to be told irrespective of response or moral ambiguity. I love the way she manipulates time in her books and rounds back to earlier themes within themes.

I'd really recommend reading The Argonauts afterwards too if you've not read it.

I've started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt. I hardly need to say that it prompts a great many thoughts about present day events.

must be in the air, you're like the third person I know to have read this in the past year

still slogging my way through Life of Johnson, but also picked up the following (both short fiction collections) in the meantime:

Brian Aldiss "Canopy of Time"
Joanna Russ "The Hidden Side of the Moon"

also apparently Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" is waiting for me at the library

Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 2000s was one of those watershed moments; it sent me into an Arendt frenzy for the better part of a year. On Revolution was an even bigger influence on my political development.

yeah I've never read On Revolution, that's on my list

Wow Rebecca is really somethin’ else.

Finished the poetry chapter of Baldick's THE MODERN MOVEMENT. Useful and accurate on Georgians and Auden generation. In general the book is something of a polemic against overstating the centrality of modernism, as such, to the era -- and it's thus quite useful and informative. Now on the chapter about modern drama, which says that modernism didn't arrive on the UK stage till the 1950s.

About 30pp to go in THE GOLDEN BOWL.

I read Autumn by Ali Smith. By its very nature (written quickly; including currents of news and world events), it's a ragged, propulsive thing - for good and ill. The central relationship is well rendered but it felt like a well-trodden path (aspects of Sophie's World and the Little Prince) and the framing device of exploring Pauline Boty's Pop Art isn't entirely successful. Smith's writing sings, though and I'll definitely carry on with the series.

Been a bloody difficult year, reading-wise, to such an extent that I am trying to get that muscle in the brain that can absorb words again. I have a pile of mostly short-ish fiction to help, here is the first batch for the autumn. No time to talk about it and I can't bear to do ratings so I'll just post them in like a cunt lol. But I have a feeling I am connecting...words...they are good again.

Noemi Lefbvre - Self-Portrait in Blue
Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
Colette - Gigi and The Cat
Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Elizabeth Hardwick - Sleepless Nights
Kingsley Amis - Ending Up
Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies
Marie Darrieussecq - My Phantom Husband

Jacques Camatte - This World We Must Leave and Other Essays

really into reading about left communism lately, this is a delightfully loony former bordigist's 70s turn away from marxism and towards some of anti-capitalist primitivism

I'm reading Sleepless Nights right now!

Kingsley Amis - Ending Up

The last four pages = wow

such a happy ending

read it again recently. extraordinarily compressed, technically skilful book. the writing is at the very highest level.

The last of my autumn reading:

Ursula LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Alicia Kopf - Brother in Ice
Halldor Laxness - The Fish Can Sing

Just finished Brent Weeks The Way of Shadows and am onto the sequel Shadow's Edge. Also about a quarter into Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which is a lot more florid than I was expecting.

I liked Ali Smith’s Autumn, with its decentering of time and focus on Pauline Boty, a fantastic artist

It's been fascinating reading Ali Smith doing this hyper-topical litfic thing - the last in the quartet is due out in July and goodness knows how she's going to keep it feeling up-to-date, it feels like we've had at least three very distinct eras in the UK in the last six months.

(On the subject of Pauline Boty, UK people might like to watch Ken Russell's 60s doc on four british pop artists which is up on player for now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00drs8y/monitor-pop-goes-the-easel but you should be warned that there is Peter Blake content.)

Gerard Manley Hopkins - Poems and Prose
Gottfried Benn - Poems and Prose

Benn's essays make him out to be just an appalling individual: the man who keeps quiet and goes about his work, disregarding what is going on outside in the way he waves away at Nazism (not quite working outright with the regime but just keeping his head down the whole time), and finding the eugenicism more than a bit ok. Writes away after all is said and done as if nothing has happened, collecting prizes and acclaim.

Then I turned to his poems and they are often great. The usual riddle.

The Hopkins poems and journals are a marvel tho'. Nature and god find an intensity in a set of poems that were written by this...jesuit priest? No bohemians around. The Geoffrey Hill lecture on the one poem (Monumentality and bidding) is a good companion to read this with.

we have Spring 2020 'What Are You Reading?' thread now. we're right up with times:

"And sport no more seen / On the darkening green" -- What are you reading SPRING 2020?

Ah thanks didn't read the title

lock thread...