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

rest of 3BP is p different from the first 200 words

― flopson, Thursday, November 28, 2019 4:25 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

(´д｀)

I'm impressed James M. I'd like to read more long form work but i'm afraid the internet has broken my brain.

^truth bomb

i thought one of the jameses worked in a bookshop and slammed back multiple tomes per day

He made a tiny bookshop replica once but don’t think he works in it.

I did use to work in a bookshop, but not for a while. And having a 6yo daughter has actually slowed me down.

reading percival everett's 'erasure' which is v. good and also specifically shits on a bookshop (and possibly me) in which i worked at the time in question

I'm loving Robert Forster's "Grant & I" so far. Tender and funny.

Agreed.

Thirded, although I read it based on Alfred’s recommendation, so not sure if my vote will count.

I finished Middle England and am now reading Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying.

Dasa Drndic. Started with Doppleganger, now 100 pages into Belladonna. She is really something, this is what I want from books

Erasure is so much fun.

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" rn

just finished Gut by Giulia Enders, liked it a lot.

now alternating between Raymond E Feist Magician whilst at home, and Eric Ambler Epitaph for a Spy whilst at work.

I read Val McDermid's A Darker Domain which I picked out from this year's Harper Perennial Olive paperbacks (the theme this year is thrillers, striking red and black covers), didn't really think much of it honestly, not inclined to seek out more of her work in covers not designed to entrance bookstore-haunting hipsters. Going to finally read Ancillary Mercy now

ERASURE is an extraordinary book for sure - so many things going on in it.

I reread E.M. Forster's story 'The Obelisk'. Also extraordinary in its own little way!

still weaving through Machen, but picked up a copy of Priest's "Inverted World" (which I've been meaning to re-read for several years now) over the holiday.

don’t you mean for many miles now?

heh

My aunt wrote a powerful book about her experience of getting attacked with a hammer and coping with traumatic brain injuries. Beautifully-written and had me tearing up all the way through.

I'm also reading lots of hard sci-fi :)

wow

Late to the Simon Rich party. The Last Girlfriend on Earth, Ant Farm down. Free-Range Chickens, Hits & Misses, Spoiled Brats up soon, followed by whatever else I can find at the library, incl. both seasons of "Man Seeking Woman".

Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Caravaners and the Charles Barr book on Ealing.

I've bailed (temporarily, I think) from the Emerson biography. It's an extraordinarily immersive book but I feel a bit beleaguered - especially as I don't have the time to read anything else. I'm so unmoored I have no idea what to read next.

Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line

Shoot For the Moon, James Donovan’s book about the early years of manned spaceflight (leading up to the moon landing). Plenty of ground covered, much of it familiar to me through years of reading up on the space race and films/documentaries such as The Right Stuff and First Man and Apollo 11. Really good, and thrilling stuff. It’s 400-something pages long so some events are moved past somewhat swiftly but as a portrait of the interpersonal politics involving the main players and how the roles of astronauts shifted over time during the Mercury 7 era from being “spam in a can” to using their test pilot skills is of particular interest. I don’t know if it’s the definitive book on the subject as Michael Collins suggests in the main pull quote but it’s excellent. I always get bummed out reading about Gus Grissom, he seemed like a true dude.

picked up a copy of Priest's "Inverted World" (which I've been meaning to re-read for several years now) over the holiday.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, December 5, 2019 11:48 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

one of the best books I’ve ever been tipped off to on here

currently reading elif batuman ‘the possessed’ about doing a phd in Russian literature. making me crave Russian lit. also curious about other novels/memoirs about graduate school

hermann broch - the death of virgil

two months & a couple of weeks later, finally finished this (found myself having to put it aside after every twenty or so pages till the final section which really needed to be read in one ongoing flow), can't say i picked up on the underlying symphonic structure mentioned in arendt's intro but the arrival in brundisium and nightmarish journey to his last abode have stuck in my mind, also the night scene with the trio of vagabonds who almost seemed to have dropped in from an absurdist drama. now for the sleepwalkers.

Rereading Wolf Hall, because he, Cromwell, haunts my imagination

He, Cromwell !

I'm pulling up to the end of 1814 at around 1100 pp. into Henry Adams's history. I confess, I had no idea just how utterly bolloxed up the entire government of the USA was during that time or how close the union came to dissolving under the stress of the War of 1812, only this time the strong secessionist sentiment was from New England. Only 250 more pages to go!

Keeping track of which positions Monroe held got confusing too.

Agatha Christie: THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD.

Her only vaguely worthwhile book, and she nicked the central idea from Chekhov.

Geoff Dyer's Zona, about Stalker. I liked his jazz book and the novel Jeff In Venice but this was sort of a letdown. It has a slapdash quality that I think is meant to be charming but for stretches feels just lazy/hurried with meh digressions, and 200+ pp but he makes scant mention of Roadside Picnic.

In the early going that he boasts of not having seen The Wizard of Oz and claims he never will, which is just...weird? Later he claims that Stalker's wife turns into something "hideous" at the end of the film when she lights a cigarette, and professes to "hate all gestures associated with finding, lighting, and smoking a cigarette," which I can't begin to understand. I'm hard pressed offhand to think of a better set of gestures!

going to read 'brothers karamazov' over my winter break; picked it up at the bookstore today. reading 'the possessed' got me insanely pumped for it lol. got the pever & volokhonsky translation bc it was 3$ cheaper and 300 pages shorter than the david mcduff one, but was pleased to read some pretty nice reviews of it ex post

The Caravaners is very good - comedic novel about a militaristic Prussian gentleman and his wife traveling through the UK being baffled. Quite different in tone from the other Van Arnim I've read, which was more of an E.M. Forster thing.

Also racing through The Way Of All Flesh again for a podcast.

finished epitaph for a spy, not sure if i've ever read a novel with such a wholly useless/unimpressive protagonist. in the other Ambler's i've read the main character while completely out of their depth at least had a little something about themselves, in epitaph there's nothing, just totally ineffectual and hopeless. v relatable tbh.

In the early going that he boasts of not having seen The Wizard of Oz and claims he never will, which is just...weird?

― Suggest Banshee (Hadrian VIII), Wednesday, December 11, 2019 3:26 AM (eighteen hours ago)

i read dyer's book on d.h. lawrence a long time ago. it was good -- really enjoyable -- but i remember him spending a weird amount of time talking about all of the lawrence books he wasn't going to bother to read.

new thraed Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019 reading thread

Last night I started my first ever Eric Ambler novel, Judgment on Deltchev. It's set in the immediate post-WWII period in an unnamed Balkan country that seems loosely modeled on Bulgaria, but really is generic.

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?