Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019/2020 reading thread

Just reading some batches of short novels:

Linda Bostrom Knausgard - The Helios Disaster
Thomas Benhard - On the Mountain
Peter Handke - The Afternoon of a Writer
Franz Kafka - Letter to his Father
Anna Kavan - Sleep has his House
Natalia Ginzburg - Happiness, as Such

finished THE REVISIONARIES by a.r. moxon, which . . . not even sure what to say. enormous, rambling, meta. i quite liked it, and it easily kept me going through 600 pages, but i don't think i'd dare *recommend* it

it shares that distinction, among other things, with infinite jest

Finished part 1 of Bros K. The story so far: everyone is screaming.

Thanks to this thread, I checked out Thomas Benhard's Old Masters.

Finished CASTLE RACKRENT, plus Preface, Glossary, Notes, Appendix, Introduction, Note on the Text.

The Glossary is probably the highlight of all these: classic Irish fun, though the 1995 Introduction fancifully describes it as a patriarchal strategy of containment written by Edgeworth's father. The Introduction goes too wildly off-beam in those directions but does make a fair case for understanding the importance of the novel as a kind of allegory of the fate of the Anglo-Irish.

Started reading the copy of Crime and Punishment I bought a couple of years ago thinking I'd try something ther than constance garnet.
Enjoying it so far but have a few other things i want to read.

Castle Rackrent is a wild ride though I remember it now more for its form and innovations than the weight of its ideas.

What are the innovations?

That quotation is from a short story by Aldiss. Earth is being colonized by friendly aliens who are obsessed with minor 19th century writers. These aliens have psychic powers, and use them to force their literary tastes onto the culture and retroactively bring into existence more 19th century works, just as minor.

Sounds remarkable! So I suppose we weren't to take the quotation literally after all; perhaps the opposite.

I've put my Egan novel on the back burner and started on a novel I bought years ago: Zadie Smith's NW.

I've never got to it but every time I've flicked through it the text has looked impressive and innovative.

First two pages and it feels like the real deal.

I finished Blood and Thunder. It was well-researched in the way that is possible through books and manuscripts. Some attempt was made to reflect the perspective of the various tribes of Native Americans involved, but since that perspective is very meagerly represented in the written record, it was meagerly represented in this book, too. I missed it.

The thing this book did best was to give a sense of Carson as a highly unusual product of his age and experiences. To give one example of what I mean, he was a 'mountain man' and trapper in his youth, but a sober one. In an age obsessed by "Christian duty" he was apparently motivated far more by his sense of fairness, loyalty and justice than any conception of duty, Christian or otherwise.

I came to like him. Apparently, everyone who knew him did, too.

As someone who also read Parable for the first time recently, I'd be curious to hear whether you found anything that fits the bill.

I'm tempted to recommend Omar Al-Akkad's American War, which gave me similar feelings, but was less well-written (What isn't less well-written than Octavia Butler, though?!), to the point where it stopped holding my interest around the halfway mark. Been meaning to pick it back up though!

― handsome boy modelling software (bernard snowy), Friday, January 24, 2020 1:55 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

well, i picked up more butler and it's doing the trick! parable of the talents and bloodchild.

barnes and noble of all places had nice hardcovers of the two parables

I just read Bloodchild, been wanting to read the Parable books but Butler books just don't turn up at used bookstores around here (I got Bloodchild at B&N, actually)... "Amnesty" and "Speech Sounds" are amaaaaazing.

xxposts - i have Blood & Thunder in my stack of “to-reads” bc it looked interesting- will def check it out based on your review, Aimless!

About 2/3 of the way through Mrs Palfrey and - aside from Taylor's mastery of the subtle detail and the light she throws on the tiny hollows of misery that colour our days - the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers (which I suppose amounts to the same thing). Ludo is pretty rancid, Beth from A View of the Harbour is in perpetual torment thanks to her writing and Angel. Well, Angel.

The writer in Angel is so damn exuberant though. I can't dislike her.

Ach, I dunno. Exuberance is good but without an ounce of insight?

i’m not sure ludo is entirely rancid is he? iirc kingsley amis said it was an unusual portrait of a writer in fiction who is actually seen to do the work of writing. certainly he finds Mrs Palfrey picturesque or interesting subject matter.

agree with Alfred on Angel, she’s incredibly present and vivid - bursts off the page in her awkwardness and will.

both remarkable books. might have to revisit mrs palfrey.

I'm probably being a bit unfair to Ludo (I've not finished - he might turn out to save her from a rampaging bear). I get his loneliness lends him a kind of searchlight quality, sweeping for any sort of contact, but it's his relation to Mrs Palfrey, which is kind of vampiric: she becomes purely about material or sustenance for his habit. And his writerly eye is beautifully rendered (that thirst for detail) but it's still grubby as hell.

yes i think that’s fair. the whole novel is pretty unsparing of people and of time.

the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers

I mean, she WAS friends with Kingsley Amis, so fair enough.

Haha - very true!

Well, I was totally wrong about Ludo. There is quite literally no end to the shit I don't know.

I finished the book in the waiting room of a health centre; I was totally overwhelmed and had to hide my face. What a writer.

I reread parts of Lorrie Moore, A GATE AT THE STAIRS.

And continued with Morris Dickstein's 'The Critic & Society: 1900-1950', on Edmund Wilson et al.

I'm currently reading a recently released NYRB book: Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks. It's an odd duck. Kind of a cross between popular science, popular philosophy, a memoir, and an extended personal essay on the subject of human consciousness. I have yet to decide if he has anything new to say on this subject that is cogent or worthwhile, but his authorial voice is engaging enough to make him companionable, and that is worth much right there, so I read on.

What are the innovations?

― the pinefox, Monday, 27 January 2020 11:18 (four days ago)

As an early historical novel, and the perspective of the narrator

I just started reading Mike McCormack's odd sci-fi novella "Notes from a coma". John McGahern meets PKD!

John Douglas and Olshaker - Mindhunter (1995). First book fail of my year. Douglas is one of the links in the chain that created the "genius serial killer" character in the 90s. In this book he doesn't recount any dialog from the interviews, and doesn't seem to have a sturdy methodology. The Anna Torv character in the TV show exists to point out the most obvious problems about his work.

Ginzburg - The Cheese and the Worms (1976). A deep dive into the life and times of a 15th century peasant who was burned at the stake for heresy. His hypothesis that the title metaphor came from an "oral tradition" is weak, and he admits it in one of the intros. Still quite interesting. I want to read his earlier book on the cult who battled witches while sleeping.

currently reading Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) for a book club. He can set up a story well enough to be interesting, but his characters are paper thin. I suspect it's just misery lit tourism -- an "American Dirt" for Afghanistan. (He left there when he was 11.)

I think Life is Meals is turning out to be more suitable for snacking than as a main course, so along with the occasional nibble I’ve embarked on The Odyssey in the Fagles translation. I enjoyed his Iliad last year.

in this thread we stan Emily Wilson's Odyssey

I'm reading the first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography - To the Is-Land. I have a complicated relationship with NZ in that I went there for six weeks some 20 years ago and - this sounds trite as fuck but it's true - had a kind of epiphany - something like growing my eyes again. I've always thought if I go back, it'll be for good. Also, My sister has recently moved to NZ so this feels like one way of re-learning the lie of the land or something.

Anyway, irrelevant autobiographical sketch aside, I'm enjoying this. I'm always vaguely suspicious of richly detailed early memories, if only because my own recollections of my early years are basically non-existent, but this is told with such close-to detail and vigour it's hard not to be beguiled. She grew up in a railway family, so had a largely itinerant childhood, moving with the work around the South Island of the 1920s and 30s. There's no real hint as yet of the melancholy that would consume her but it's at the edge of things.

All of this is qualified by the frontispiece, really:

From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.

Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks

I really enjoyed this, while not being convinced that Riccardo Manzotti's theories make much sense or are even very meaningful.

That Mike McCormack PKD-esque volume does sound unusual and interesting.

I continue with NW.

in this thread we stan Emily Wilson's Odyssey

That one looks interesting. If I ever read it again I might try it. Fagles’ language seems to have a bit more grandeur which suits the heroic mood.

Needed an easy read so I picked up Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which turns out to be absolutely terrific, with a Wodehousian density of (good) jokes. Roxane Gay on Goodreads complains about its thinness and over-jokiness, which seems like a classic Goodreads point-missing

Social media indicates Roxane Gay seems like a classic misser of points.

I finished Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness a couple of nights ago. I most enjoyed it when he was pointing out how inadequate and incoherent existing theories of consciousness are. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I came away less than impressed with his highly unspecific explanations of his own preferred theory, as devised by his Italian acquaintance.

My own conclusion is that for millennia humans have been accumulating vast amounts of well-observed data about how human consciousness behaves when it manifests itself in human activity, and how it appears internally as self-reported by acute self-observers. Very few novel discoveries are still being added to this body of knowledge. It's not 'sexy' like neuroscience.

Attempting to describe human behavior from the bottom up and from the inside out by correlating each thought or action with brain activity at the molecular level seems to me to be a fool's errand, if only because consciousness only accounts for a small fraction of brain activity. Most brain activity doesn't correlate to anything that can be described in terms other than neurons undergoing changes in their chemical states. The activity happens. One may presume it has consequences, but it happens in a black box and it seldom manifests as consciousness.

But the above post is just a playful dab at the subject. ILX made a bigger collective stab at it in this thread.

If you’re looking to read more on the subject, The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers is worth spending time with.

More than halfway into the new William Gibson, and I'm enjoying it more than the Peripheral... it has the advantage of not having throw you in the deep end like the Peripheral does, since it revisits the same concepts and many characters. Seems to make the narrative more enjoyable, although I'm not sure I'd say there's a lot more going on. Just more coherent.

Unfortunately most of what's important in the new Gibson happens offscreen, so the characters basically run around for a while and then go home again. It's enjoyable enough, but a bit underwhelming.

finished larkin's "jill" last week. really enjoyed this one -- larkin is such a great, observant, funny writer even in prose. it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).

almost done with charles bowden's "blue desert" (arizona writer, sort of poetic/hard-boiled -- finding it a little less good than i'd hoped but it's short at least), then thinking of tackling jonathan schell's "the fate of the earth," which i picked up at an antique store. also rereading lee-ditko spider-man right before bed, for the first time in many years.

everyone has me killfiled, don't they?

not me. bro

On a William Carlos Williams kick after reading Reed Whittemore's bio.

xxp not only do i not have you killfiled, i'm trying to keep up with your damn twitter thread

As mentioned at FAP yesterday, I finished Richard King's The Lark Ascending. Sort of a primer for the UK's changing relationship towards the countryside through the 20th century - ramblers, kinder scouts, eco-fascists, hippies, new age travellers, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp - through the lens of music, so Vaughn Williams, Ralph McTell, Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, but also less obvious selections, Eno, Ultramarine, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Stan Tracey. King is quite a lyrical writer. There's a concert to accompany the book at the Barbican in March.

Now onto Sally Rooney's Normal People

it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).

Cool! Let me know if you do.