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

I saw it last year. It's fine, I wouldn't call it memorable. The production I saw had a ska thing going on.

Type of comedy

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type of comedy???

Posted by mistake on the autumn thread

I finished the 2nd of Max Weber's vocation lectures in the NYRB translation Charisma and Disenchantment, the one on politics. Like the one on academic vocations, it had enough thought-provoking assertions to make it worth reading, some interesting theorizing on how modern political bureaucracies and political parties evolved from the class structure of monarchical society, although I'll admit it also put me to sleep a couple of times. Now I'm reading Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (60 cents on Kindle) which was mooted as timely reading in the NY Times book section.

Another gloomy connection to current events: Max Weber died suddenly in 1920 of the Spanish Flu, the year after this lecture was given.

I didn't recall that about Weber. I can see that he'd be good to read, if possibly stodgy.

I liked the Goldsmith play. I followed it last night by watching a terrific new KING LEAR on BBC4. It brought back things about the play, and suggested things I hadn't recalled. For instance the fact that Cordelia's French army is defeated at the end. The whole play was made more military: 'knights' were in UK military uniform.

I finished with Kiberd yesterday - Sheridan, Kavanagh, Irish critical history - and went back to Jennifer Egan's LOOK AT ME. 75% to go. Curious novel: rangy, digressive, unpredictable - I've read 130pp and genuinely can't see where it's going.

current reading pile (books i've recently started -- not books i own and haven't finished, which takes up bookshelves):

jean rhys - wide sargasso sea
plato - 5 short dialogues
tig notaro - i'm just a person audiobook -- not funny or particularly interesting; i might abandon it
emil ferris - my favorite thing is monsters
rafael bob-waksberg - someone who will love you in all your damaged glory
Richard Rhodes - The making of the atomic bomb -- wider look than i anticipated, for example, covering the history of antisemitism and the discovery of the electron. There are sections that are long strings of scientific epiphanies that really stir me up. Some of the history is in conflict with things I learned in Richard Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich (the reichstag fire, hitler's takeaway on the protocols of the elders of sion), which I think is a product of Rhodes's book being written over 30 years ago.

do people have balzac faves?

Sorry, haven't kept up with my lurking lately. :)

Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low are pretty good; If I find a particular character interesting, I'll consult the bibliography and see if that character appears elsewhere in La Comédie humaine and go from there (e.g. really enjoyed Peyrade and Corentin in A Harlot High and Low so went from there to A Murky Business, which is also worth reading). I know there's a recommended reading order out there on the net somewhere that's nowhere near how I have approached his work so far. :)

Also, just finished Accordion Crimes by Proulx and was checking in to see if anyone here rates her? I've had The Shipping News on the shelf for a few years but I've been hesitant to pick it up.

I'm reading The Process Genre, a hot-off-the-press monograph about labor on film. My dear friend who is in grad school is also reading it right now (and ahead of me) and productively arguing with it in a paper they're writing so I'm excited about that too.

I finished Barbara Pym's Less Than Angels, which rather slyly played against the conventions of the romance novel in the service of a comedy of manners. The English seem to lend themselves to sly comedies of manners. One might say they excel at it.

I need to give her another try. Two summers ago I read two of her slim novels, each a case of diminishing returns (prefer A Glass of Blessings over Excellent Women); it's as if she shrunk herself out of, if not existence, then feeling. Among what I call the Anglo-Irish miniaturists I'll take Elizabeths Taylor and Bowen.

Just ordered Less Than Angels.

alfred u should check out the book I mentioned above if u haven't killfiled me

Just finished Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn, well written, slow-moving, slightly cloying 'humanist' SF from 1954 that apparently was cited by Ursula K Le Guin as a formative favorite. The last third of the book describes a man-made viral pandemic overtaking New York in 1972 that has some amazing echoes of our current situation, only grimmer. One of Pringle's 100 Best SF Novels, and worthy of inclusion.

Now reading: Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck. Anti-Nazi journal entries written between 1936 and 1944, in a NYRB edition. Praiseblurb on back by Frederic Raphael, it's that kind of book.

I don't think you'll find Less Than Angels ascending to the top of your favored Pym novels, Lord Sotosyn. It passes the time somewhat pleasantly. The main character may have been Pym, self-deprecated, which adds a minor side interest. But it fits well with the 'miniaturist' categorization.

alfred u should check out the book I mentioned above if u haven't killfiled me

― silby, Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The Process Genre?

Yah that one! I don’t know if you like reading contemporary academic work at all but you mentioned in some thread loving watching people work in movies and it’s a treatment of that.

I think in re Phantom Thread

Diary of a Man in Despair is excellent

Also, just finished Accordion Crimes by Proulx and was checking in to see if anyone here rates her? I've had The Shipping News on the shelf for a few years but I've been hesitant to pick it up.

― cwkiii, Tuesday, April 28, 2020 6:03 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I finished 'Accordion Crimes' in January this year. I really did enjoy it for the rawness, the ragged and unkempt people crowding it, pioneering to the USA to build up something akin to an existence from scratch... Slatternly characters is probably the best way to describe it, in both the sordid daily hustle of getting by, of unfortunate chance pounding you down, and in the bare-bones, knuckle-ready condition humaine knocking you about.

'The Shipping News' is way, way more polished a read, but very much worth it all the same.

I loved Shipping News and Postcards by Annie Proulx. They both had an emotional intelligence but, in my memory at least, they feel of their time? I have Accordion Crimes and must read it.

Yeah it's a good book, I like the way LBI described it. There is a grotesque, relentless black humor that I think helped to balance out the rawness and keep it from being like, The Jungle or whatever.

I tried to start The Savage Detectives last night and man, I don't know...does it get better? I remember some rough stretches in 2666 so I dunno, maybe I'll give it another chance. Put it down and picked up My Antonia instead. Will definitely get around to The Shipping News sooner than later, though.

love Cather.

I have O Pioneers by my bed and need to get around to it soon. Is My Antonia the best place to go next?

I'm struggling with The Door a little (Magda Szabó) mainly because of the claustrophobic nature of it and the sense of a world around it to which I have little access. I have been reading a little Hungarian history to try and make some sense of it. The door functions as a useful free floating metaphor, one reading of which is precisely this sense of being shut-out of the traumatic space of wider history.

Hart Crane - Complete
Geoffrey Hill - Complete
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Decolonising the Mind
Derek Walcott - What the Twilight Says

Alternating between essays and poetry. Decolonising.. and Walcott's essays are two sides of the same coin and really instructive to read alongside each other. Questions like - How do you write this stuff for a hungry (as in actually starving) audience? What is to do 'culture' in the Caribbean or Africa. Thiong'o dispense with English completely, he has a mother tongue and will now only write in it (the section where he is in jail thinking this out and writing his first novel in Gikuyu on toilet paper is great). Walcott doesn't have this choice but the questions keep flowing (halfway through as I type this post).

Crane's poetry doesn't do a lot for me on this re-read whereas I ripped through Hill (its up to the ealy 80s). The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy is something else.

I lost the plot with Hill in the '90s, but I pull his Complete off the shelf and reread the early poems marveling at the elisions and gnarled syntax, particularly "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy."

recent reading:

George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Rachel Cusk - Transit
Elmore Leonard - Split Images (in progress)
James McBride - Kill 'Em and Leave (in progress)
Jill Lepore - These Truths (in progress)

I want to read the third Cusk but the libraries are all closed, should have grabbed it before lockdown.

Can anyone recommend some authors/novels that are similar to Leonard. I've read a ton of his stuff and it's all good-to-great but I'd like to branch out. Charles Portis seems to be somewhat in the same vein but I've already read most of his major stuff.

I'd still really like to read THE MILL ON THE FLOSS.

evol j, how about Ross Macdonald?

evol j: George V. Higgins, for sure.

seconding Macdonald and Higgins

Richard Stark's Parker series would also fit the bill

cool, yeah I've heard all those names but haven't investigated any of 'em, that's a good start. I know Macdonald did Briarpatch that was recently turned into a show on USA or TNT or one of those type networks.

John D. MacDonald, pioneer of Florida noir, incl. early perspective on Big $ viral corruption & fertilizer, maybe start with The Empty Copper Sea. Maybe, so I'm told, Carl Hiassen is good in the same vein, later on. Richard Price, maybe especially Lush Life: police procedural on the gettin'-plush mesh and mosh of post-9/11 Lower East Side Giuliani York, Quality of Life Squad and all.

Briarpatch

I think that's a Ross Thomas book (and a good one)

also recommended by Ross Thomas: The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Will have to check that one--title reminds me of the plot of Dashiell Hammett's tasty Red Harvest, which some think was the basis of Yojimbo, although Kurosawa said he was more influenced by Hammett's The Glass Key.

Actually, both Thomas titles make me think of both Hammett plots.

I have been reading Glory, one of Nabokov's early (1932) novels, written in Russian while he was living in Germany. It's a cheap Fawcett paperback with a lurid cover that would be appropriate for a Harlequin Romance. This is one of the painstaking translations to English undertaken in tandem with his son.

For the first third of the book the language was so ripe and heavily laden with imagery that I kept thinking about the English phrase about 'over-egging the pudding'. That surfeit of language has eased off enough in the next third that it has finally settling into telling a story, more than overwhelming you with its heady linguistic perfume. The story itself is only moderately interesting, but it is keeping me engaged.

The introduction written by Nabokov for the 1971 new English translation is quite self-congratulatory and preening. He must have been, as the saying is, quite a piece of work.

B-b-but that's part of his charm!

Will have to check that one--title reminds me of the plot of Dashiell Hammett's tasty Red Harvest, which some think was the basis of Yojimbo, although Kurosawa said he was more influenced by Hammett's The Glass Key.

― dow, Wednesday, April 29, 2020 4:48 PM (three days ago)

Knocked out Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead in a few hours today. Fun sort of Borgesian-inflected crime story with an amiably fucked up detective and a detection-as-tao te ching quasimystic text everpresent.

Haven't read any Gran, but Infinite Blacktop is one I've had recommended to me and been meaning to read for a while.

xxxpost Thanks, James! I'll have to check that, never read Goldoni. wiki sez:By 1743, he had perfected his hybrid style of playwriting (combining the model of Molière with the strengths of Commedia dell'arte and his own wit and sincerity)... As with his comedies, Goldoni's opera buffa integrate elements of the Commedia dell'arte with recognisable local and middle-class realities. Incl. manipulation of local blood greed feuds, eh.

I finished A Journal of the Plague Year. Many parallels to our current situation. Interesting that our best countermeasure (social distancing) was quite well understood, and fairly rigorously practiced, even in 1665. Also interesting that government support and charity were seen as necessary to prevent a second tragedy of hunger from befalling the many people driven into unemployment by economic disruption. The book is occasionally repetitious but reads pretty easily for a novel that will turn 300 in 2022.

Now I've started The Simple Past by Driss Chraibi.

Aimless, thanks for the push: I relished every comma in Less Than Angels. More gently malicious than her other books, she inspired at least three chuckles (and sometimes an LOL moment) per page. My favorite set pieces: the impoverished Mark and Digby taking the older ladies out for lunch; and the anticipatory anxiety at Professor Mainwaring's over getting the rant. Mark and Digby should've starred in a series of novels. What a duo.

And I thought your admiration would be limited. Wrong again. *sigh*

It's possible I wasn't ready for her in in 2018. Like third albums, the third novel will often do.

*getting the grant

I agree heartily about the entire episode at Mainwaring's country house. It was razor sharp without being mean-spirited.

I finished Nabokov's Glory. It is only necessary for anyone out there who is a Nabokov completist. Otherwise, I thought it was the work of an obviously brilliant mind, still deeply entangled with juvenile ideas.