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

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/

It looks long!

Today's REAGANLAND tidbit is a special video addition. pic.twitter.com/bnf4NHSeDh

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) May 28, 2020

I finished A Coffin for Dimitrios and for a light entertainment it was quite good. I would say that Eric Ambler went just a bit overboard in portraying the character of Mr. Peters as tendentious and tedious, to the point where he overshot the mark of simply indicating these traits so that Peters' several monologues were often so genuinely tedious and I was tempted to skip past them and miss the vital bits embedded in them. Otherwise, I applaud the book.

wuthering heights kicks ass

man given the size of that thing (reaganland) already I’m glad it’s not a hardback. i never read his third , wonder if I have time to get to that one before the new one is out

those are probably review copies. The retail version on amazon for pre order is hardback.

Wuthering Heights is an epic poem of hate. There's nothing like in prose or poetry in English lit.

*like it.

And "hate" and "love" come from the same place.

/Wuthering Heights/ is an epic poem of hate. There's nothing like in prose or poetry in English lit.

I've still never read any Faulkner. I guess I should do something about that before I get too old to care. I'm currently reading Submission by Michel Houellebecq. I've only read Elementary Particles before this. Kinda feels like he's coasting.

I'm now reading The Crock of Gold, James Stephens. This is an entertaining oddity from pre-WWI and the Celtic Revival. It's a long comic-philosophic fable, featuring leprechauns, fairies, the God Pan, a Philosopher, and a Thin Woman. It was popular enough to be reprinted often, but seems mostly forgotten now. I won't attempt to describe it.

Jonathan Swift - Tha Major Works
Victor Serge - Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Swift's Major works compilation are exhaustive in terms of the range of material -- poetry, correspondence to several pamphlets and 'A Tale of a Tub', all thoroughly annotated -- not a lot more to add to what I said TS Heavy Hitters: Powerhouses of Prose (knife-drawer edition): Jonathan Swift vs Mark Twain"">in this thread except I saved A Modest Proposal as one of the final pieces and it really has a bite, as the rich still eat us for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And so onto Serge's recollections of life as a militant, looking back to struggles fought in mainland Europe to his years in Russia (among Trotsky's Left Opposition), then his expulsion back to France and finally into Mexico just as the Nazis were hitting town. One aspect that is pretty much unique to this book is paragraph after paragraph that starts as a recollection of a person, their physical and psychological characteristics with a dashed narrative of their encounter, all ending with a "they died in a camp/committed suicide/were shot/disappeared/I don't know what happened to them/this almost certainly happened to them". Just pages of the stuff. As the last chapter says (almost as an apology) it was written on the run (he was almost always on the run), it shows and yet circumstances combine here in a really unique manner. Its almost a thriller (via Bolano's 2666)! The positive note at the end is something else. I may need to re-read, just to make sure I wasn't dreaming it.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev impressed the hell out of me last fall.

xxpost o.nate, if you ever do try Faulkner, maybe start with The Portable Faulkner: well-chosen set pieces from novels, along with many whole shorter things, in chronological order of the stories' settings, from early 1800s to 1950s. Chunky but handy, and certainly portable. (Also has some of the author's maps of where his characters live.)

Tulayev was written (or finished in Mexico) and I forgot to say that so much of the material in that novel obviosuly makes its way in The Memoirs..., a very good counterpart.

I've had my ups and downs with Faulkner - Light in August was tough but I reckon it wasn't my time for that...it did put me off him for years till I picked As I lay Dying last year so want to try Absalom, Absalom next.

I'd recommend Light in August or the interconnected story collection Go Down, Moses as a starting point, or even a straightforward narrative like The Unvanquished if you're feeling less frisky.

light in august was also where i was told to start fwiw. it certainly was *very* faulknery in the sense i understand the term.

The time shifts aren't disorienting for tyros like in TS&TF and Absalom, Absalom though.

my first attempt was the sound & the fury, which was suboptimal

Finally could not withhold The Mirror and the Light from myself any longer and dove in. I’m as intoxicated as ever. Hook line sinker etc.

IMPOSTURES by al Ḥarîri, translated by Michael Cooperson
-- Absolutely astonishing book--850 years old, collection of 50 stories about a wandering conman all written with various proto-Oulipan constraints (palindromes, anagrams, lipograms, etc), each of the 50 translated by Cooperson in a different way (Australian English, Singlish, Nigerian English, Patwa, Virgina Woolf, Jonathan Swift, Joyce, Kempe, Aphra Behn, etc etc) which is thematically suggested by the story.

Sold.

That sounds interesting.

I ought to try THE CROCK OF GOLD one day.

Only 80pp or so to go in LOOK AT ME. A lot goes on in this novel.

I read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. It's so perfectly edited - like an epic novel hiding in a slim volume (a bit like JL Carr's A Month in the Country). I liked it very much.

Now, in an absurd switch up, I'm reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I've not read any epic science fiction in for a good long while and am acutely aware of the politics of it and how much it feels like a big kid wanking over his drawings of inter-galactic genocide.

Like what others have said, As I Lay Dying seems like a decent place to start with Faulkner.

More than decent, it's one of his best, among those that I've read, with the balance of clarity and chance-taking narrative structure. Also could start with The Hamlet(my gateway), "The Bear," or "Old Man," with psychedelic special SFX which are historically appropriate, re the Great Flood of 1927. Yeah, xp Go Down Moses too.

Will keep promoting Cather over Hemingway as the American writer whom young male wannabes should emulate.

I'm pretty sure Hemingway's idol has been demoted to a decorative curiosity among the deities of young male wannabes. lord knows who they're all imitating these days, but I don't think Papa is in the running.

+1 for As I Lay Dying as a good entry point for Faulkner: it's not very long, the use of multiple points of view is classic, and the horror and comedy of rural poverty are turned up to 11

Absalom, Absalom! is better but denser and full of those half-page-long sentences that exhaust the patience of many readers

long ago I was a research drone for a professor preparing an annotated edition of Light in August and I remember he had a note explaining that

I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.

All the good recommendations for Faulkner have been noted - maybe starting with stories would be less intimidating for me. I finished Submission. It got better by the end, though still a bit patchy. I was impressed by the way Houellebecq was able to find a way to interweave his usual preoccupations (male status anxiety, lust, contempt for liberals, misogyny) into something topical and politically au courant. The parts where he attempts something like a traditional political thriller I think are the least successful. He's on firmer ground when he's in his ruminative anthropological mode, jumping smoothly from literary history to philosophy, gourmandise, and the taxonomy of social status.

Now, in an absurd switch up, I'm reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I've not read any epic science fiction in for a good long while and am acutely aware of the politics of it and how much it feels like a big kid wanking over his drawings of inter-galactic genocide.

wait so is that good or bad