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

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?

Ah thanks didn't read the title

lock thread...