Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?

Got 'Late Victorian Holocausts' from the library. One of the only Davis books I haven't read... should be working more on my actual work and school work, but alas, I'm too busy being absorbed by his prose. He really is the best and most accessible radical scholar around.

I finished Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb last night.

The main times when it dragged were the chapters devoted to the specific details of Soviet espionage. Contrary to novels, espionage in action is extremely boring and humdrum, unless you happen to be the spy, in which case it is just nerve-wracking. Thankfully, the book makes clear that the USSR would have succeeded in making nuclear weapons in any event and even the information they did get from spying all had to be carefully verified experimentally. Helpful as it was, it probably only accelerated the Soviet program by 18 to 24 months.

I was also glad to see Rhodes, the author, calling out Curtis Lemay as a dangerous warmonger, and giving just enough information about thermonuclear bombs to make their destructive capability both vivid and terrifying. Even one H-bomb exploding anywhere that's heavily populated would be a catastrophic event unparalleled in history.

However, the companion book to which this is a sequel, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is more compelling reading, in that it lends itself to a more unified and exciting narrative. It also covers a more fundamental shift in world history than the arms race and cold war covered by this book. Read it first, but read this one, too.

I read and liked the first one a couple of years back. Dark sun is on my list. Thanks.

I’m not back in the habit* of reading yet, but I’m reading The Children of Men (PD James). Had never read anything of hers before, but got this in a kindle sale or something at some point and I think I’d read something that mentions the book.

It’s quite different from the film (that’s good not bad). All the major elements are the same, but she has much more time and space to build the universe so all the bleak little atrocities that happen slowly drop in to fill in the background: the pet christenings, the destroyed playgrounds, the Quietus (which is extremely upsetting btw).

I have only been to Oxford for a few hours but you can feel the sense of place come through and it’s interesting to set it in a small dying city rather than London. (Also darkly funny that the only way Theo can get good housing in Oxford is by a cataclysmic global event).

Her prose is exactly the kind of thing I like; very spare and sharp, so I think i will continue reading. Any recommendations on where to go next are very welcome.

Have you read James Tiptree Jr.? Maybe start with novella "Slow Music," where she creeps up on and then along with the reader. It's in an exemplary collection, the aptly titled Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. If you want something British, but never science fiction, as far as I know, try Muriel Spark and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Wow, I thought the book of ChHildren of Men was a lot of ill-thought-through bollocks. The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music! The film, otoh, is brilliant.

Anything I read about the making of the hydrogen bomb always reinforces my opinion that Edward Teller was a monster who should have been suffocated at birth.

A good place to be when you finish The Power Broker and turn to Reaganland.

The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music!

he's a don at magdalen college?!

My general impression of Teller is that he was among the top eight or ten nuclear physicists available to work on the Manhattan Project and he was a valuable piece of the effort and contributed some core ideas to the H-bomb dsign. Otherwise he was a inchoate mess of a human being whose blend of egotism, ambition, cunning and paranoia found plentiful allies during the McCarthy era in DC who used him just as much as he used them. He ended his life a near-paraiah in the physics community and a hero to the "better dead than Red" cold warriors in the Pentagon and Congress.

_The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music!_


he's a don at magdalen college?!

I finished the Pliny biography by Daisy Dunn: some interesting material, haphazardly organized. Now I'm reading Weather by Jenny Offill, because my wife bought it and it was lying around the house. Rather charming and amusing. At 200 very small, generously spaced pages, its more of a novella, but that's ok by me. I guess maybe I should check out Dept of Speculation too.

reading Crashed by Adam Tooze

Read The Relutctant Fundamentalist over the weekend for a book club. It's...rubbish? lol at narrator describing the object of his affections as "more Paltrow than Spears".

I'm a little reassured to hear that judgment. That book has a good reputation but I feel it's somewhat cackhanded. The voice is very mannered, but I'm not convinced that the author is terrificially in control of this.

That's not to mention the strange irrelevance, as I recall, of the romance plot which isn't properly tied into the political story. Someone once told me that this was because the author had simply changed what the book was about between drafts.

David Thomson reaches a section on FILM STUDIES. Material on early film studies, in which he was somewhat involved, is engaging and interesting. He mixes it with the whole history of 1960s film. Again, naturally very interesting, with a few pages for instance on BLOW-UP. I also like his explicit bit to redeem the idea that films influence us.

Again, it's difficult, at present, to fathom the compositional principle, in terms of chapters and structure. I don't feel sure that DT was really paying attention to the basic architecture of his book - the simplest aspect of writing, you might think.

I finished reading A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN yet again. A simple observation is that this book is better to read concertedly, if not exactly fast, then in long sessions, not in pieces. Perhaps that's true of most novels.

More than before, I sense that the central character isn't necessarily a spokesperson for the author, but is a flawed figure among others. The observation is extremely primitive, but maybe I can make it sound mildly more sophisticated by saying that a Bakhtinian view is needed - that this novel should not be confused with SD's monologue, but is dialogic, relativising him amid a larger cast.

Specifically, it seems clearer to me than ever that his most engaging, simply nicest contemporary is Davin, by far the most nationalist. Which makes the book's scepticism of nationalism seem newly doubtful to me - with all the caveats anyone wants about any fiction taking a position on anything.

Along with my reading for classes I'm teaching and classes I'm taking, I must say that Late Victorian Holocausts truly is the most grim book in Davis' oeuvre. Infuriating and tragic, still I persist in getting through it because its subject is so important and details a history of which I previously knew only the vague sketches

I'm a little reassured to hear that judgment. That book has a good reputation but I feel it's somewhat cackhanded. The voice is very mannered, but I'm not convinced that the author is terrificially in control of this.

That's not to mention the strange irrelevance, as I recall, of the romance plot which isn't properly tied into the political story. Someone once told me that this was because the author had simply changed what the book was about between drafts.

The mannered voice feels like it could belong to an "Arabian" character in some old time adventure film, which might be a conscious choice but if so why?

A lot of the book seems like it's lecturing you on very basic misapprehensions on Islam/people from middle Eastern countries, which makes sense within the book as the narrator is presumably speaking to a not very enlightened member of the US military, but I already know that those don't correspond to the truth and I'm guessing the same holds for most people who'd pick up and read it.

The love story felt like it came straight out of an early 20th century novel, the tragic love interest suffering from a terrible illness. Mental as opposed to physical in this case, sure, but the arc was still the same as you'd encounter in novels by, like, Erich Maria Remarque.

Last night I started The Unforgiving Years, Victor Serge. I plan to alternate it with Uncle Fred in the Springtime, Wodehouse, as a leavening for the grimness of the Serge.

Daniel RF: I think you hit a couple of nails on the head here! The 'Arabian voice', indeed !!

Aimless, BTW LRB recently carried a Tariq Ali review of Serge.

In xpost Du Bois LoA omnibus edition of The Souls of Black Folk(1903), after (among other thing) very nuanced, even-handed history of the Freemen's Bureau and Booker T. Washington's influence---mixed blessings all around-- and his frequently moving, as always carefully detailed account of his first summer as a schoolteacher, deep in rural Tennessee---he travels the deReconstructed backside of Georgia, especially Dougherty County, in the Black Belt, experiencing population drain despite the vagrancy laws, though still busy; "the car-window sociologist" finds plenty of people to talk with and observe. But sometimes it's all about the places, which can be much more decimated than this, or more developed, even occasionally thriving (although "gaunt" is a frequent keyword, in my view). But somehow the notes he hits here keep coming back to me ,more than some overtly intense passages:

Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now--Shepherds', they call it---a great whitewashed barn of thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and sing. There is a schoolhouse here---a very airy, empty shed, but this is an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd's, and the schools from nothing to this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row rough unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfullest schoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodge-house two stories high, and not quite finished. Societies meet there---societies "to care for the sick and bury the dead"; and these societies grow and flourish.

Andrew Gibson: JAMES JOYCE. A short, stimulating, punchily written biography.

I'd actually recommend it to anyone looking for one short book to introduce them to Joyce.

Edna O'Brien wrote a punchy short one too for Penguin.

I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I feel like a curmudgeon but it was a bit silly and way too long.

Now reading Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond.

That's interesting, Chinaski. The length of KAVALIER / CLAY made it a bit of a struggle, though maybe likeable. The basic pastiche of old-time comics (via RADIO COMICS) is a high point, I'd think.

finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I feel like a curmudgeon but it was a bit silly and way too long.

The globetrotting episode (hey, now we're in the South Pole or whatever!) played like creative writing exercises.

finished Anna Karenina, in which anna karenina was a minor character.

have been reading it a book or two a month (8 total) since march and part 8 was a bit of a let down so it feels like a disappointment overall, sadly, even though i enjoyed it for the most part and didn't find it as difficult as imagined (long != difficult). it was the P&V translation.

I'm being harsh on Kavalier and Clay. I loved the first 100 pages and laughed out loud numerous times - I just ran out of steam. I think my patience for a garrulous shaggy dog story has thinned.

I don't think the South Pole part of K&C works at all.

But I read it on a plane as I was moving to New York in my early twenties, a few months after my cousin Tommy died, and I got to the part where Joe's brother Thomas dies and just sobbed and sobbed in my airplane seat. I didn't see it coming at all. And I don't cry at books, at least not full-on real crying. So I'll always think of it as a flawed but very powerful book, but I don't really know how it would have affected me at another time.

This was the phase in Chabon's novel writing when he included a well-drawn gay relationship.

I liked The Yiddish Policemen's Union, his alt-universe procedural.

I lived in Sitka for a year so that one was super trippy to read. The street names are the same but the real Sitka is so very tiny that it's kind of impossible and mind-bending to picture it as a huge city.

I finished Weather, it's short enough to read in a few sittings. That kind of aphoristic/telegraphic style runs the risk of veering into deep-thoughts/daily-affirmations territory but done well can be plenty enjoyable to read. I cut my teeth on Vonnegut and his style of short blurb-length mini-chapters.

Now I'm reading Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, which is quite different in style.

i liked weather, but i preferred dept of speculation.

Finally started Hillary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light — between the language & the characters & the air of fond conspiratorial knowingness between Cromwell & the reader it’s like a warm bath

tbh I have no objectivity about this series at all, I just love the world & the characters so much

Aimless, BTW LRB recently carried a Tariq Ali review of Serge.

I took this as my main reading book on a camping trip, where I would read it in a tent using a headlamp before dousing the light and sleeping each night.

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through it now and it has been some tough sledding, both because of the subject matter and because Serge is fitting his prose style to the violence and extremity of his characters' situations and emotions. The ratio of simple sentences to highly tortured and opaque ones is roughly 1:10, or so it feels to me. Still, his prose is fitting and original and a worthwhile attempt to express what seems an inexpressible madness. This not a book to 'like' or even admire. It is more a book to endure and then be grateful it can be endured.

I will continue and finish it.

I read Thomson on THE GODFATHER, which I've never seen. It seems to be the single biggest canonical gap in my film viewing.

Virginia Woolf - Diary (Vol. 2) 1920-24

Although I have my ups and downs with her fiction I find her wriitng in this, more 'relaxed' setting, to be often superb, probably at her best. The odd portrait, a sketched party with its multiple conversations, her worried relationships with Katherine Mansfield (who dies young and is thought about over and over in different entries is a strong highlight) and Eliot (whom she is scared of at times but says she is over that feeling). And of course her ups and downs with her own writing -- she will complete the first draft of Dalloway by 1924 -- and readings, with her loathing of Ulysses (on a first perhaps only read, her shutting down of herself to the book is interesting), her admiration-mixed-with-fear of Proust as far as livings writers, to writers such as James (really nice one page set of impressions of Wings of a Dove) to Greek writers. You get an impression of that sort of old, liberal politics, but mostly quiet on the events of the day. Post-war life gets the odd mention however building a life, the writing, a way to live off it (her love-hate relationship with journalism and reviewing), the social set - all feature more prominently.

I agree -- in the same Cheever's journal contains his freshest, sharpest prose. I reveled in the way she "built up" the material for what eventually becomes The Waves.

I've never read Cheever but I shall look out for that. In my head I was attmpting to contrast with Kafka and Musil's Diaries, but its been too long since I've read these. Both similarly sketch away, the work never stops.

Another Diary I should read is Victor Serge's, recently translated and discussed in the LRB essay that the pinefox refers to.

I like what I've read of The Common Reader-First Series, which is online here and there: don't always agree with her readings, but pos or neg they catch me up in excitement of reading and thinking and writing, reporting from the front or whichever lines.
Any of yall read The Discomfort of Evening? Been wondering about it---this just in from LRB:
The incredible debut novel from Dutch poet and dairy farmer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison, has won the International Booker Prize 2020!

Rijneveld and Hutchison discuss this startling work of fiction with poet and translator Sophie Collins on our blog.https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2020/6/my-imagination-takes-me-there-marieke-lucas-rijneveld-and-michele-hutchison-interviewed-by-sophie-collins?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200827%20Bookshop%20Newsletter&utm_content=20200827%20Bookshop%20Newsletter+CID_1557a904eae7a923a5c12539360ead26&utm_source=Bookshop%20email&utm_term=Read%20more%20here

(sic will butcher you for that link lol)

I've read it a couple of years ago, in Dutch obv. Not read the LRB piece yet, but did read an interview w/ her and Hutchison in a Dutch paper a couple of weeks ago, about how they went about translating it. When I read the book I already thought it'd be a mean feat, with so much quintessentially Dutch things in there. But apparently they got it right.

Still surprised it won the Booker, but kudos to her. I enjoyed the book and the imagination, something sorely lacking from Dutch novels nowadays imo.

I've kind of accepted that I'm in a reading slump. It's doubly painful because the summer holidays are when I normally catch up. There's shit going on at home and obviously shit going on out [there. Kind of hoping that returning to the madness of school will kick things off but not holding out much hope.

Ugh, tell me about it

I near the end of Thomson's book. I admire the energy he keeps finding to kickstart it.

Just finished a re-read of Dambudzo Marechera's 'House of Hunger.' I can see why it's the more lauded of his novels, notwithstanding the rarity of 'Black Sunlight,' but I personally believe it is the lesser of the two-- less deranged, more explicitly political and thus more obvious, and I'd venture to say the writing is a bit more juvenile, which makes sense as he wrote it when he was younger. Still highly recommended, love him and all his work tbh!

Reading: Jeff Vandermeer - Annihilation. Pleasantly easy to read but also extremely well written. I saw the Netflix film a while back and was slightly underwhelmed, but the text really shows what a difficult and good job they made of it.

Listening: Just started John Crowley's AEgypt. I struggle with Crowley. I've started both Little, Big and Engine Summer. The first was impenetrable, the second maybe a little easier on the brain. He has a strange rhythm to his writing which I find exhausting; and listening to AEgypt on Audible is no less of a task to follow. His paragraphs are rooms with many doors and no matter how much I rewind, I still have trouble following the free associative subject matter - one minute he's describing angels in a scrying glass, the next a clergy-boy, then a bus journey through a mythical America, an internal monologue about wish-fulfilment, a meeting with a shepherd - and that's just the first hour of this massive great book. I admire Crowley's imagination, but he certainly isn't spoon-feeding me here.

I've only read shorter things, in collections now out of print, but Novelties and Souvenirs is all the shorties (and some not so short), as of 2004, anyway. Amazon's Look Inside for print edition will even let you access some whole stories via titles in table of contents, and the Kindle version provides a bunch of previews. I don't remember ever having much problem with the ones I read, but could be we're in similar strata of spacey density.
I recently came across "The Reason For The Visit" for the first time, in Interfaces, a 1980 anthology edited by Virginia Kidd and Ursula K. Le Guin: somehow he indicates right off that his guest is Virginia Woolf, although he never drops the name (eventually says, "I can't remember if I ever got to the lighthouse," which isn't a euphemism: he's just strung out on her letters, diaries, essays, and I've been there). Her English manners just get more lovely, and he feels her disappointment in him. Oh, this has happened before, in attempted demonstrations of social changes to time travelers Dr. Johnson and "to Max Beerbohm I'd insisted that I would be considered well-dressed---even something of a dandy---wearing an old, yellowing tropical suit and a vulgarian's Hawaiian shirt. But those visitors were figments, really. This visit was hers, and she asked the questions, and I was shy."

Oh yeah, there's also a 2019 round-up of stories, And Go Like This, and Reading Backwards: Essays and Reviews, 2008-2018, which might or might not provide illuminating gateways to his brain, hmmm.