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

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

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.

― A is for (Aimless)

Not true in creative writing depts

Christ on a cracker! do creative writing students still use typewriters w/ carbon paper, too?

My impression is that most of the Hemingwayism in creative writing departments is fourth-hand.

I've been reading Richard Ford's The Sportswriter and dear lord it is insufferable.

I took a break to read Mike Royko's Boss, an account of Richard Daley's life running up to the Democratic Convention and the shooting of Fred Hampton, and it was ... refreshing

Though getting to the section on the riots after MLK Jr's death did bring on a feeling of dread.

According to this thread I started Jennifer Egan's LOOK AT ME in early April. I finished it today - about 517pp. Not a good speed.

A long novel; engaging, sometimes well written and alert; perhaps somehow a little youthful in its interest in fashion models, NYC nightclubs, teenagers, even a private detective (I wonder very slightly if Egan introduced the detective because she was impressed by Lethem's, which she definitely was in 1999 - but this book was probably planned well before that).

The novel runs two or three parallel threads and somewhat unites them by the end. It includes a kind of premonition of social media or rather of 'influencers' or whatever people on YouTube do nowadays. (An evident link with the last chapter of GOON SQUAD which was speculative fiction about social media influence.) Such premonitions are usually, I suppose, a hostage to fortune, but here how much the premonition, written in the late 1990s, gets right is more interesting than what it doesn't.

There is a great deal of DeLillo here - New York; ideas of image and simulation; and especially, a terrorist who wants to destroy 'the conspiracy' of America. But the writing isn't much like DeLillo - it's warmer and more down to earth. At moments, to my surprise, the humour can even approach the zing of Lorrie Moore.

Overall I think it's creditable.

I finished The Crock of Gold last night. It has many fine moments, but the author had a tendency to take off about once every 50 pages into a page or two of high-flown nonsense masquerading as ecstatic wisdom. When it managed to stay closer to the ground it was often quite clever in a pleasant way. Be warned: it contains much confusion about the 'true' natures of men and women, as if people were archetypes, and not human.

I read another delight of a Pym novel, The Sweet Dove Died. Not as sharp as the last, but I relished the portrait of a young gay man on the make (about whom she's quite explicit in showing him in sexual scenarios).

I just finished the quiet american. Very good!

Finished Egan's short story collection, Emerald City - also lots of stories about models and kids and gap year holidays. Kind of middle-of-the-road but lots of incidental pleasures. I still think Manhattan Beach is her best book by a long distance.

I picked up some Pym's to support my local bookstore: Glass of Blessings, Less Than Angels, Jane & Prudence, and Quartet in Autumn, plus another Dumas telephone book translated by Robin Buss, The Women's War.

Also just finished The Secret Commonwealth - it's probably Pullman's sloppiest book, with a lot of generic blockbuster writing and no visible editing, but very enjoyable - it's a lot more fun than "Amber Spyglass".

Ford seems pretty insufferable himself

Just before bed on Sunday, I cracked open the new translation of Michael Kohlhaas that New Directions brought out this year, which has become unexpectedly timely.

I don't have my copy of the Penguin Kleist volume handy to compare the translations, but there were several baffling choices just in the first few pages (including a confusing mixing of direct speech in quotation marks and narrated speech without quotes in the span of a single paragraph). No introduction or other editorial content, so no way to know whether there was, e.g., a deliberate choice to use awkward English in places for faithfulness to un-idiomatic German... These are just minor annoyances, they don't detract much from such an obviously great work, and I look forward to flying through the remaining ~100 pages once my boss stops asking me to work late.

Read some nice pieces on Kleist as a result of that new volume even though I'm not getting it (v happy with the edition on Archipelago)

Started Arthur & George, Julian Barnes last night. Seems OK so far, but slightly bland.

Kleist's short stories are great great stuff. Dude was seriously deranged, tho it doesn't seem to show much in his fiction iirc.

Now reading "Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy" by Ben Sonnenberg.

Arthur & George has picked up steam, and the story has grown compelling enough to keep me reading ahead, but there's something about the mannerisms of it that I don't enjoy that I have not yet put my finger on.

My Father and Myself - JR Ackerley. Stunning, can't recommend this one too highly. Fantastic on what it was like to be gay in Edwardian London, on trench warfare in WW1, and above all an intriguing detective story about the author's father and his double life.

All Ackerley is excellent

something about the mannerisms of it that I don't enjoy that I have not yet put my finger on

all Barnes is this for me

Side question - can anyone recommend a good 2ndhand online bookshop in the Uk that’s not amazon?

I just use bookfinder.com and then go straight to the vendor if I can.

Got quite a few through hive.co.uk

Chuck, yes I can: Undercover Books.

http://undercoverbooks.co.uk/

If you make contact directly they should be very responsive. Good people.

Thank you!

I went to Undercover Books last year. Fantastic stock - prices on the high side.

That's really interesting to hear, WF. Didn't know that about the prices - it's all relative of course ... I know that like many places, they have a lot of much more valuable stock that's online only.

But I love browsing the stock and I'm keen to support that business, especially during this period, so I hope that Chuck is able to take a look there for what he wants.

I'll take a look too.

Jane Austen - Manfield Park.

Finished it last night and its the second novel (or author) I can think of (the other being Moby Dick) where I avoided it for barely digested reasons (Moby Dick is just about whaling! Austen more for the discourse around her, beginning with those BBC adaptations in the 90s). Once you get into her voice and mode (I had a good couple of hours with the first few pages, it can be hard to get into whereas MD was a gas! Just this miraculous transformation of arcane material in this hot language!) I was finding it ok though irritating (I didn't like the people or the world in it very much) until Fanny grew up and the question of her being **in or out** became a thing (it was there from the beginning of course). It helped that by coincidence I watched Losey's The Go-Between as its a similar set-up - and then also looking at the BLM protests, their focus on a world that began around here.