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

tore through Less than angels this weekend, which i'd picked based on the discussion upthread. really enjoyable, as alfred said it was three chuckles a page. this is the first i've read by pym and i'm definitely looking forward to reading others

I'm within a short chapter of finishing How to Create a Mind. When Kurzweil was discussing the subject matter in which he is expert, namely the application of mathematical models to the problem of natural language recognition and understanding, he was unassailable. His ideas about the similarities between his models and the basic structures of brain architecture in the neocortex were fascinating and very persuasive. Best part of the book, by far.

In the final third of the book he strays into such subjects as free will, the origins of consciousness, the rights of machines that can think, and a lot of similar semi-philosophical fodder. As you might expect from a person who has intensely devoted his life to successfully advancing AI programming, his grasp of these subjects is the equivalent of any bright person whose engagement with these subjects is casual. His thoughts on them would not be particularly impressive if he had contributed them to any of the ilx discussions around these same ideas. No better than the ilx average, I'd say.

He's thoroughly imbued with the ethos and self-aggrandizement of Silicon Valley. He really believes the Valley is creating a new superhumanity. He needs to get out more.

i want to know if he thinks natural language is solvable as a self-contained problem (i.e. without the ai having any other sensory inputs) but i don't want to read his book.

I finished Driss Chraibi's The Simple Past, an interesting book, but for me at least, a hard one to love. The author of the introduction to my edition cites Celine and Faulkner as two influences, neither an author I've read much of, so maybe I didn't have the background to appreciate this. The writing style seems to be deliberately evasive, elliptical, defiant, almost confrontational at times. He will string out a metaphor to the point of incomprehensibility and then make a joke out of it - at whose expense? one wonders. Yet there is a relatable emotional core and straightforward narrative to the book, the story of an angry adolescent and a dominating father, so it never goes completely off the rails. Perhaps the book is about the way language can be a form of armor for the vulnerable and dispossessed.

I have started reading The Human Factor, Graham Greene. Early on it has a somewhat similar feel to Le Carre.

i want to know if he thinks natural language is solvable as a self-contained problem (i.e. without the ai having any other sensory inputs)

This is never directly addressed, but in the coda he envisions humanity somehow or other imbuing the entire universe (yes, all those millions of galaxies) with that magical thing: Intelligence! His vision of what intelligence is, is somewhat vague and mostly seems to consist of eventually fitting everything that exists into neat, interconnected hierarchical categories, which activity seems to have a mystical power he never succeeds in condensing into words. Make of that what you will.

I love Greene, I should read more.

I don't have my usual access to books so just been reading from my gf's collection but I don't think she has any le Guin sadly, once books are easier to come by I will acquire some of her books

― COVID and the Gang (jim in vancouver), Thursday, April 16, 2020 5:15 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

found the left hand of darkness! will begin it in the bath later

read 'facing the wind' by julie salamon ~ picked it up cuz she wrote the excellent 'the devil's candy' reportage re: the bonfire of the vanities film.. facing the wind is quite wrought and emotional, its abt a man who essentially has a psychotic break and murders his whole family, attempts but does not kill himself, and later goes on to have a significant second act life.. the bk keeps a wholly nonjudgmental tone that worked for me well, i was kinda worried at the outset; would recommend

i'm reading dhalgren! it's a horrible idea

i love it so far though omg

I'm re-reading "The Plague" by Camus. A bit on the nose, I guess, but I last read it at least 20 years ago, and have only vague memories of it.

I got a copy of "The Plague" again recently as I really wanted to read it again. It's probably been 20 years since I last read it too. Critics tried to make out its an allegory about fascism but no its about a FUCKING PLAGUE...but I guess if you aren't living through a plague it's hard to remember how central it can be to the human experience.

At the moment I am reading Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat". 40 pages in and it's funny but some sort of story better develop cos right now it's "I'd love some wine, where can drink more?, the boys get wine, Pablo drinks a gallon of wine like hair growing on someone's forearm" etc etc

Tbf it is ALSO an allegory for fascism. Books can do more than one thing at a time.

Tortilla Flat is mostly a string of moderately amusing stories about some endearing lowlifes, because Steinbeck knew some endearing lowlifes in Monterrey and some amusing stories about them that he could fictionalize. It's only slightly racier than the Saturday Evening Post, but kind of endearing and amusing. People like that.

https://s.ecrater.com/stores/75577/4a27f8a55ecd2_75577b.jpg otm

I totally forgot about the "allegory of fascism" angle for reading "The Plague". I did notice however how much the shape and tone of the book is directly inspired by Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year", having just recently read that. He even uses a quote by Defoe as the book's epigraph. I'm about half way through it now, so my thoughts on "what it's all about" are still gestating.

it says a great deal no matter how you read it

it is about how humans think and act in dire circumstances where many basic social connections are broken, such as during a plague

or a fascism.

Intrigued by recent New Yorker piece re Kierkegaard, who produced a stream of unclassifiable books---hybrids of philosophy, autobiography, fiction, and sermon. Where should I start with this hybridization? I confess to being more interested in this process than the philosophical and religious elements (though Adam Kirsch presents those well enough, as far as I know, never having read SK).

But I mean what he does present seems clear as an overview of this length can be.

I have started reading The Human Factor, Graham Greene. Early on it has a somewhat similar feel to Le Carre.

If I were in an uncharitable frame of mind I'd say Le Carre's entire career is basically an attempt to ape Greene.

Yep.

I started Knut Hamsun's Mysteries

Ages ago when I read Mysteries I never could decide if its ultra-romanticism was satire or not. It was much too late in the century for unironic Byronism, but I found the tone was hard to gauge.

I finished The Human Factor. It was fine, although the women characters seemed created only to justify the actions of the male characters. About halfway through I began to get twinges that I'd read it before, but so long ago it had disappeared from any viable lingering memory. Probably before 1985.

To finish the evening I picked up Joseph and His Brothers and read two dozen pages, but I suspect its too big a commitment for me to pursue right now and I'll fall back to a shorter easier book tonight.

Most books are easier and shorter, so good range for hunting.
Haven't read many Greene novels (The Power and the Glory for school, but long ago, which may be why I don't remember it). Brighton Rock grabbed me, as a melding of what he called his "entertainments" and what he considered his more serious, spiritual (in)quests. Otherwise: 21 Stories, Collected Essays (mostly reviews/tripping on eccentrics and other beloveds of earlier Brit lit, with occasional references to Great Depression and early Battle of Britain in the world outside: pre-Covidtainment), and Graham Greene on Film: Collected Film Reviews 1935-40--think that's the version I read, def. minus the one that got him in trouble, where he accuses Shirley Temple's bosses of pimping her out on screen---but there's also The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews Essays Interviews & Film Stories, which I want to get, though I already know his fiction better via film. (Thought The Tenth Man, written for film but never produced, worked as a stand-alone thriller novel, though He thought The Third Man didn't; I haven't read that one). His memoir A Sort of Life lives up to its title. (He got some good material, and more thrills, from using his literary celebrity to get into places he wasn't supposed to go, like war zones.)(Here or elsewhere, he refers to himself in passing as "manic depressive," which seems plausible from an amateur's POV.)

"he thought," not "He."

to dow's recommendations I would add Our Man In Havana (short comical spy novel about a dude who gets recruited to provide info, just makes it all up - and then it starts happening...). Doctor Fisher Of Geneva is an uncharacteristically sour final novella for such a humanist author, almost nihilistic. The Captain & The Enemy is a strange one, too, centred very much on childhood trauma. Speaking of which...

def. minus the one that got him in trouble, where he accuses Shirley Temple's bosses of pimping her out on screen

Had an acquaintance post scandalized excerpts from that review and suggest Greene was basically a closeted paedophile. I think his aim was true but they do read pretty gross.

I'd felt unable to read a book, again, for a while. Yesterday I took LOOK AT ME out in the sun and shade and managed 60 pages, which was impressive by my standards. I'm now halfway through.

have just started frigyes karinthy's a journey around my skull. 50 pages in i'm enjoying his tone, very light and entertaining so far for something dealing with a brain tumour. as i've read a novel written by his son, ferenc karinthy, it led me to the conclusion they'd be the first father and son duo who i'd have read a book by. then again the only other such combination i could think of were the alexandre dumas père et fils and i've not read any by the fils.

the koran, the nj dawood translation, the content is presented chronologically instead of, as traditionally, from the longest shura to the shortest. the translation reads well.

i finished reading Doxology by Nell Zink and I've been reading Home: Social Essays by LeRoi Jones and also Margaret Bourke-White's autobiography Portrait Of Myself.

After fiddling around for a night with Henry James' The Ambassadors, whose prolixity turned out to be more than I could bear atm, I have gone the opposite direction and am reading A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler.

I found The Ambassadors less prolix and with cleaner architectural lines than the books published before and after it, but ymmv.

Page 333 of LOOK AT ME. Surprised how quickly I can get through this book with a little effort.

It's readable, I suppose, sometimes too mysterious (the terrorist-ish figure out of DeLillo) but sometimes manages to be funny almost like Lorrie Moore. It's certainly in some kind of zone of 1990s-mediated-world influence from DeLillo, maybe DFW, and very parallel with Franzen, but possibly has a different angle because written by a woman.

I can only assume that isn't Anita Brookner's Look At Me?! I'd love to see her take on DeLillo, fwiw.

I read Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries. I've read quite a lot of austere stuff recently so it was quite nice to have something with such loose and tumbling sentences. It's of its time, I think, and probably a little too folksy for me but it eventually won me over. It's superbly constructed, with a strange ventriloquised central voice, that adds a layer of complexity to an already unreliable narrative, and the final section, a meditation on finality and the closing down of consciousness, is really quite beautiful.

finished a journey around my skull last night. quite enjoyable overall, some entertaining parts - the crazy number of doctors he goes to see though most seem happy to discuss literature or science rather than diagnose him; all his friends sending him to see this or that expert, or dropping in to entertain him (and how he realises at a certain point that their laughs are all similar and strained, that they're forcing themselves to be happy around him, the condemned man); his swedish surgeon wondering who he is because what feels like half of hungary to him has contacted the clinic to know how the operation went.
the chapter where he describes his surgery is painful to read, as he is kept awake though it all ("improves chances by 25%" says his surgeon). it is tough not to wince when he describes the drill opening his skull, the sounds of the surgery going on etc.
the version i read includes a preface by the author, where he develops what led him to write this book and which could definitely have been written now: it finishes with him saying he'd read in a far right newspaper that he'd faked his illness and surgery just to get some free publicity and that he could have responded either by not saying a thing or by writing a whole volume.

Chinaski: this LOOK AT ME is by Jennifer Egan.

That Karinthy is wonderful. I wish more by him was available in English.

So I finished reading Camus's The Plague. My view is that it's not an allegory of fascism, though it's easy to see how people could read it that way, coming as it did right at the end of WWII, and inspired at least to some extent by Camus's personal experience in the French resistance. I would say that it depicts bravery under fire and a situation somewhat analogous to France under the German occupation, but it takes a stronger correspondence than that to qualify as an allegory in my view. I guess the situation is analogous to any situation in which people put themselves in harm's way to help others in need. I would say the book has an uplifting moral, creates a memorable atmosphere, and is masterfully crafted, but the heroic Dr. Rieux remains largely a cipher, lacking the human qualities, say, of the narrator of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, who gets "volunteered" for a dangerous plague duty, scrambles to get out of it as soon as possible, but lets himself off the hook by telling himself the duty would be ineffective anyway.

I ordered Hernán Diaz's In the Distance as a surprise gift for a friend who is the most avid reader I know (whereas I am the most avid book-buyer I know); we read it at the same time and were both very impressed. Gave my copy dad last time I saw him, and it sounds like he's hooked. Anybody here read it?

I'm now reading two very strange experimental novels: Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, which I read at the start of college a dozen years ago, lent to a friend (who read it multiple times and loved it!) and finally had returned to me this past year; and Slater Orchard by Darcie Dennigan, brought out last year by University of Alabama Press, which I was lucky enough to find in the used section of a book store where the cashier likes me and gave me a discount.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is annoying me, and I don't know whether I will have the patience to see it through to the end. Slater Orchard is captivating, and its evocation of life's terrified persistence in the wake of industrial catastrophe feels timely ("I no longer wish for a face mask. A mask is a mockery. The poison is everywhere. When I lie down in the cab of the dumpster truck the engine is running. The fumes fill the cab. I open my mouth. Poison is a drink. I open my mouth and poison runs down my throat. [...] I open my mouth. Poison is a drink. But the word orchard is always also in my mouth. The poison runs down my throat. Orchard stays in my mouth.")

I read John Berger's Ways of Seeing and it wasn't what I was expecting at all! Short version: it should be taught in schools.

Berger's bibliography is dizzying: where does one start?

I had trouble getting through the first essay. It's structured like a logical argument but a lot of the connective tissue is missing. I don't know why he used that Franz Hals essay for his example of mystification -- I guess it ignores the Marxist materialism of class structure, but I'd say taking into account the "fashion of the times", such as wearing hats tipped, is not mystification. I wasn't convinced that the painting was critical of the subjects.

The PORTRAITS and LANDSCAPES collections are full of lovely things.

currently reading The Corner That Held Them (NYRB). occasionally extremely funny, but mostly a bit of a slog.

i meant to read 30 books this year. i've read 37 so far. lol pandemic.

the ones i liked:

distant mirror: the calamitous 14 century by barbara tuchman. what a world!

this america: the case for the nation by jill lepore (long essay that i guess was cut from her "these truths" single volume history of the united states). makes a "Liberal" tactical case for redefining and promoting "nationalism" quite well. these truths is better IMO.

a single man by isherwood. very good on the british experience of los angeles. who else does that? geoff dyer?

say nothing: true history of murder in northern ireland by patrick radden keefe. mixture of an unsolved murder podcast (gross) and a good introductory history of the IRA for an american audience.

dept of speculation by jenny offil. i loved reading this but i can't remember much about it.

before the storm: barry goldwater and the unmaking of the american consensus by rick perlstein. not quite as interesting as nixonland, but i'm reading all his stuff in preparation for reaganland.

cities of the plain by cormac mccarthy. the best of the trilogy IMO. magical ending.

the spy and the traitor by ben macintyre. oleg gordievsky's exfiltration story. i posted about it on the TTSS thread.

uncanny valley by anna weiner. very smart look at silicon valley. as everyone has said, the indirect references to companies ("the social network everyone hates", etc). are maddening.

remains of the day. i also read never let me go and much preferred remains.

crudo by olivia laing.

west by carys davies

the most infuriating books i have read this year so far are wuthering heights (eastenders but everyone has TB) and light in august (just awful prose). i guess they're "better" than some of the books i liked but i hated reading them so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

you finished 25 books you didn't like???

s/the ones i liked:/the ones i rated highest.

i kind of regret finishing light in august and wuthering heights but the other books were all fine and worth reading and even worth recommending.

i didn't keep track of which ones i quit. probably about 5? most of those were terrible award winning scifi that was actually YA trash.

Lol Wuthering Heights sounds really appealing.

Started on David Roach's Masters Of British Comic Art

shiiit there's a reaganland coming?

Yup, out in August

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rick-perlstein/reaganland/