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

Just finished Two Serious Ladies. I assume it's well-read by people on this board, but it's pretty much a perfect book and I highly recommend it if you haven't. It's right at the intersection of "completely original" and "blisteringly easy to read".

Speaking of M John Harrison, I was planning to have a second (or third) stab at Light next.

I love Light and Nova Swing (Empty Space a little less so)

Yeah, me too. I never got around to finishing the third one for some reason.

Gregg Hurwitz - Into the Fire. latest in the orphan x series. formulaic as hell but I enjoy them

Ann Napolitano - Dear Edward. fine.

Sam Lloyd - The Memory Wood. kidnapped child thriller. didn't really work for me.


Brent Weeks - The Black Prism. liked enough to start the second in the series.

currently reading Brent Weeks 'The Blinding Knife' and Olga Tokarczuk ' Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead'

Much as I'd like to enjoy The Way We Live Now, it's glacial pace is killing my interest. The characters gather in various combinations and talk or worry or are gratified or hopeful or scornful or thoughtless, about the exact same things as 150 pages ago.

No character has yet altered in any way; they all maintain the same static approach to their situations. This is somewhat realistic. Adults change character very little and change slowly. But with such static characters one must turn to the plot for movement and change, as events overtake the characters. This may happen in future chapters, but after 200 pages the plot is moving at the pace of a sleeping snail.

This book has quite literally put me to sleep many times now. It is time to cut my losses and put it aside. Sorry, Alfred, but even in the face of your much-trusted reassurances about this book's excellence, the idea of another 550 pages of this oppresses me.

I've gone back to SERIAL ENCOUNTERS, the book on Ulysses & the Little Review --

but also having another crack at William Empson, SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL. I'm afraid this isn't quite as fun or accessible as I'd have hoped. It moves along at times (ch1) in a baffling conversational way - often one sentence is almost unrelated to the previous one. Ch1 is a bizarre alternative to an Introduction, which doesn't introduce the theme at all. I really still don't know what Pastoral is, for Empson! Nor what the Sonnets or Henry IV have to do with it. Also, some of the book is about stuff that's just too obscure to me - 'Milton and Bentley', but I don't know who Bentley is.

I think I'll read properly the chapter on 'Marvell's Garden', The Beggar's Opera and Alice, and leave it at that.

But one remarkable passage in Ch1, on images of workers as 'myths' - literally anticipates Roland Barthes by over 20 years.

This book has quite literally put me to sleep many times now. It is time to cut my losses and put it aside. Sorry, Alfred, but even in the face of your much-trusted reassurances about this book's excellence, the idea of another 550 pages of this oppresses me.

Hm. Pace is one of the things for which I admire Trollope.

I have been reading a very enjoyable short story collection by Chavisa Woods, Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country; as well as a not-totally-unrelated work of nonfiction by Phil Neel, Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict.

bounced hard off of drive your plow over the bones of the dead (too-quirky narrator) and this is memorial device (trainspotting with post punk name drops, i'm good), rereading wolf hall in prep for new tome, super psyched. hilary mantel can really fuckin write

Last night I switched over to The Luck of the Bodkins, P. G. Wodehouse. In violent contrast to the Trollope, events overtake the characters and abolish their plans at the clip of about once each three pages. Verily, it gallops along!

I finished Devil's Knot, which contains a lot of solid reporting about the still-unsolved '90s West Memphis triple murder case, and particularly about the investigation and trial. It seems unbelievable that three convictions could have been obtained on the basis of evidence presented at trial. I guess juries are often inclined to give police and prosecutors the benefit of the doubt. Now I'm reading Normal People by Sally Rooney.

Andrei Makine: The Archipelago of Another Life -- Russian conscript soldiers doing atomic war prep in the 1950s, written in a slightly odd but not unpleasant C19th style

Finished climate-anxiety interior monologue Weather by Jenny Offill. Unlike some other stuff I’ve got going on bookwise it was both short and quick so I’m both satisfied to have finished a book and grumpy to have finished a new hardback so promptly but I guess that’s life.

Really liked that book while having it underline waaaaaaay to many of my own anxieties.

W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants: I liked the first two stories a lot. Short and mysterious. The third was a bit flabby. The fourth was too much, dealing the most directly with the Holocaust and being the most generic because of it.

Mike Reiss's Springfield Confidential: It's clear that he wasn't one of the geniuses behind the series. So many stabs at humor fail in this book.

John Bellairs's The House with a Clock in its Walls: OK children's lit. I liked the odd details that aren't followed up on -- the best being the Fusebox Dwarf who says Dreeb! who is only in a single paragraph.

Currently on Rafael Bob-Waksberg's short story collection, which the onion avclub put on their list of 2019's best books. The first story, comparing dating to a snake in a can prank, is perfect. The next few aren't as good.

Empson was proving so frustrating that I went back to ... Michael Wood on Empson. Bedtime / comfort reading.

I just finished reading Jean Stafford's 'The Mountain Lion.' I'd never read anything by her before. In fact, I don't think I knew she existed until last week. It's both highly judgmental and critical of judgment. Unsure how I feel overall – there's a lot going against it: exaggerated racism, deeply-ingrained sexism, uncritical (?) mid-century classism, exaltation in self-harm, a cynical narrator. However, it's totally unlike anything else I've read. It's about a sickly, strange, and ugly brother and sister from Covina, California, who spend summers at an uncle's ranch in Colorado. The sickliness, strangeness and ugliness of the children is integral of the book, and the brother's burgeoning masculinity begins to subsume it, while it becomes a critical flaw in the sister's development of a feminine self. It's told over the course of fiveish years in odd intervals - a summer here, an evening there, a few years in a sentence - and it ends in a stagey act of violence.

Has anybody else read it?

I haven’t but have wanted to and have seen it praised in the archives.

Alfred and I are for it: I read it as building empathy or at least sympathy and concern for an obnoxious protagonist, without excuses, just something the size and shaping of justice. Also I liked Boston Adventure, and he may like The Collected Stories, which he's mentioned reading (I've barely started, but seems fine).

You're prob right about the ending. Overall kind of reminds me of a secular Flannery O'Connor.

Def. in your face, I mean.

donald barthelme 60 stories. extremely my shit

Yes, I did like The Mountain Lion. She got the Library of America treatment, which she deserves. I haven't read her third novel and my local and uni library systems don't carry it.

Does it feature a mountain lion?

finished 'drive your plow....' liked it a lot bar the boring horoscope stuff. really funny and I particularly enjoyed Czech republic as utopia.

Flann O'Brien: The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman
The temptation to skip ahead to see the war-crime-level pun that each of these stories is reverse-engineered from is incredibly strong.

Finished The Stand and it runs out of steam towards the end but it’s still pretty great!

Now reading Oryx and Crake. Crake unnerves me and I really like her prose as usual, and if I ever find a non-linear story I dislike it’ll be a shock. Brutal details all over the place, it’s easy to read because of the prose and being intriguing but it’s not something I’d choose to read again in a hurry, if you get me.

I've read a lot of Atwood but I've never tried any of her sci-fi/speculative fiction books yet

I feel so bourgeois, but I'm diving into the nominees for last years International Booker prize. The winner, Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharti, is pretty good, a chronicle of three generations of mostly women in Oman, really good at capturing a sort of rupture in their lives (they talk about having slaves, while also discussing getting educated in London at the same time, and the next generation seems caught between worlds). Have also begun The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, which is so much my jam. A long meandering book about the writer himself delving into the murder of Colombian politician Jorge Gaitan in 1948, it's almost Sebald'ian in it's mixture of history and personal observations. Absolutely love it.

I've read a lot of Atwood but I've never tried any of her sci-fi/speculative fiction books yet

Atwood is awful. Prefer LeGuin for didactic sociopolitical sf.

Normal People was good. Rooney is a talent to watch. One of the two central characters is described as carrying a worn copy of a James Salter novel on a trans-Europe backpacking trip, and there is something Salteresque about this winding tale of an on-again/off-again, friends-with-benefits relationship - partly in the way that the central relationship preserves a core of inscrutability. We're never quite sure why it is star-crossed, though there are some plausible hints. Rooney's prose has a pleasing suppleness and lyrical quality. Now I'm reading Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky, a quirky Weimar-era German novel.

Remember the name! Sally Rooney!

I've read the two Rooney novels in the last month. Conversations with Friends seemed the more original novel but she's on to something limning relationships that novelists often overlook.

Cesar Aira - The Seamstress and the Wind

This is an author I wanted to read for a while. Aira has the kind of rhythm of someone who can let his imagination zig-zag all over the place and yet remain sorta contained. He has written 60+ books and its a bit like a thrashy Borges*, it doesn't look like there is a lot of re-working (which could imply a lack of care but I would need to read more to see what the deal is here). Its a short, fast read with little to no intensity. I could either read a dozen of these over a week, really gorge in it but to what benefit (beyond a little pleasure from turning over pages fast) I do not know. Not that I read for any kind of benefit, but that question came up while reading this.

* I hate saying this because there is very little like Borges. I could not back it rn.

Yeah, he doesn't rewrite or edit or reread what he's written, for better or worse.

The idea of a trashy Borges is very appealing, and he claimed that's what he was going for in "The Rose-Colored Corner "( as I think D Gi translated it). maybe others too, I haven't read 'em all (though obv. he reveled in some ripping tales of ripe imagery)

he central relationship preserves a core of inscrutability. We're never quite sure why it is star-crossed, though there are some plausible hints.

she's on to something limning relationships that novelists often overlook. Yeah, been there, but not in books, will have to check that out.

Does it feature a mountain lion? No, but it's got a Catherine Wheel. Don't remember much about reading it in the 80s (after James Wolcott's revelatory profile in Harper's----much later, he said that piece had gotten more of a sustained positive response than any other). Don't recall what he said about The Catherine Wheel (her last novel), but seems to be considered not as strong the first two. I'll bet it's worth a read after all her other stuff, at least (still need to get A Mother In History, her McCall's Magazine interviews with Marguerite Oswald, later published as an apparently rip-and-read paperback, judging by excerpts. It's out there).

found a copy of Maryse Condé's Windward Heights, a Caribbean re-framing of Wuthering Heights, so I went ahead and picked up the Bronte novel and I'm gonna read them bang bang

Then you have to read A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura. Absolutely wonderful Japanese take on WH.

"The idea of a trashy Borges is very appealing"

Sounds a lot like the start of a Michael Wood sentence.

Finished Clare Hutton, SERIAL ENCOUNTERS: ULYSSES & THE LITTLE REVIEW.

Not as exciting as Ulysses and the cyclops

A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura

thanks for the recommendation! this looks very good.

has anyone in here read Richard Powers' The Overstory? I've never read anything of his but I've been seeing it mentioned all over the place lately.

I bought it because I quite like Richard Powers and liked that he got the Pulitzer, but I've only read the first part, then I borrowed it to my then-girlfriend who likes reading about trees. The first part was great and I really want to delve back into it.

my wife and one of our best friends both super-loved it and advised me not to read it since I don't need any more climate-change-anxiety

richard powers is really bad at characters and plot but he's kinda good at ideas and vibe. the opening "story" of the overstory has the most overblown dumbass chekovs gun thing i've seen in forever.

galatea 2.2 and plowing the dark were both interesting but again he writes human beings on an isaac asimov level

I'm reading Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt. He writes well and covers a lot of territory. Much of it I was already familiar with through my interest in the classics, but he adds details and presents a very lively picture of the people and history involved, so it remains interesting even while on familiar ground.

Postscript: His thesis that the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura was the decisive event in the creation of modern secular science is rather silly, but it gives him an excuse to write the book, and for readers to read it, so I forgive him.