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

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.

(Title might be a warning.)

After finishing Reaganland and The Power Broker, I needed, uh, lighter fare. I'm reading David Thomson's Sleeping With Strangers (hi, pinefox!) and the LOA edition of Sherwood Anderson's short stories; he's an unacknowledged influence on Lydia Davis, I've realized.

Finished Emma Warren's Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre on audiobook. Was initially skeptical of a book about such a young scene (TRC was one of the main hubs of the London jazz scene), but it also doubles as manifesto in favour of youth clubs, social clubs, etc. in an era where those kinds of institutions are close to extinction. Lots of food for thought, and a melancholy listen while walking around a London that currently can afford no nightlife at all.

Warren and some of her subjects are quoted from the book, along with other TRC backstories, in Andy Thomas's 32-page booklet for Kaleidoscope, a really good Soul Jazz Records 2CD set that came out after everything shut down---it's a fine consolation prize. I'll have to find her book.

I finished David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

I've mentioned before that its structure is odd and sends it a little off-kilter. You could try to find a few other weaknesses in it: not enough on the very beginnings of cinema, or much of the silent era (no appearance at all for England's Cecil Hepworth). Perhaps less than it could do on the development of genre as a system. And little curiosity about international, non-Anglophone cinema after, say, 1980 - even though it's richly well-informed on many national cinemas (especially France and Italy) before that point. This last point, I think, also potentially undermines DT's characteristic pessimism about film - who says it's become worse in Japan, Iran or Brazil?

But it's a book no one else could have written; a narrative history enjoyable on every page; a pile of facts from which I've learned much; a prompt to watch more and more films; a personal vision, critique and elegy as usual. By the end, as he rises to new heights, it feels like a masterpiece, like one of the great books written about the arts. It feels like a last testament, a valediction - from someone who wasn't actually ready to sign off yet at all, and quickly wrote about six more books that I haven't begun to read yet.

i reread children of men prompted by gyac upthread and, while i don't agree with the criticism that theo is a cipher for pd james's own opinions about pop culture, the film is indeed better in every possible way. a hugely improved plot! interested to see that cuaron refused to read the book while he was revising the screenplay.

i also read on immunity by eula biss, which was beautiful and sensitive and funny and all that good stuff. it's not science writing, but it's better writing about science than i've read for a long time.

i am now reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39971023-white-kids which is pretty light going as a sociology text and in terms of jargon about spaces and problematizing and interrogation etc., which is good, but it's an intense read because we're reading it because it's decision time for my family and schools and honestly what a hugely fucked up situation. i'll probably post more about this and other books on the privilege thread i guess.

i have read 60 books so far this year. i read 33 books all of last year.

By way of contrast, my reading life was badly bogged down all spring. I have read 31 books so far this year, putting me on pace for a rather mediocre mid-40s number of books read by year's end.

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!

It's 24 years since I read Children of Men but even as a teenager this annoyed me about the narrator. Also I vividly remember a scene in which they lapse into a reverie brought about by an episode of Neighbours appearing on TV, including moaning about the theme tune. IIRC that didn't make the Cuaron adaptation.

The only lassitude I feel concerns my film watching. I've read about 35 books since March.

no childcare and no subway commute has robbed me of almost all my reading time. sometimes i can beat the toddler up and get 40 minutes in, and sometimes naptime and a lull in working-from-home coincide. i've finished fewer than 10 books since all this began. i don't know how you do it caek.

thank u to this thread for hipping me to olivia laing's crudo.

Audiobooks and a newborn.

And (v important): wireless earbuds.

I've read 20, which already beats my pathetic count from last year. My rate is increasing now that half my reading is trashy fantasy. I could get through fifteen fantasy books in the time it took to read War and Peace.

I’ve had a good reading year - I reckon I’m at about 50 books though I am v bad at judging this - with the exception of April and May, when I was locked down and thought I would read a shitload but in a weird version of “time enough at last” found myself unable to do anything except watch trash and shitpost on certain messaging apps. I started reading loads again as soon as I had no time to do it lol (also for some reason I now struggle to make myself watch anything after work - I just want to listen to music and do a bit of reading)

xps: crudo (and laing’s new one) are in my queue. I remember ilb was decidedly cool on the lonely city and I was determined to be into it; I did end up liking it but did feel it didn’t quite add up somehow

The Biss was the second consecutive book I read that cited the silent spring as a key reference point (the preceding book being the three body problem) and then it was added to my library’s ebook collection so I guess I have to read it soon

Wait, what new one?

it's an essay collection called funny weather. it has an attractive design.

I loved crudo. I didn’t love the lonely city as much. the personal bits were better than the art history and criticism. funny weather is in my queue.

Just added Eula biss’s new one “having and being had” (about capitalism apparently) to my queue too.

Goodreads is an unbelievably badly done website but it’s where I keep my list. Please add me I’m so lonely.

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/80167070-mike

I'm https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/55905-james

haha, not an Emily Brontë fan, caek?

Ha I think I posted about that here. Really lost my rag with that one.

I've followed you both!

I've given up on anything heavy and have picked up Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It's grim, and everyone involved is an arsehole of one kind or another, but it's kinda compelling.

Deleted my goodreads some months ago in a "fuck Bezos" fit and now I've got fomo :(

I have a gr account but I never use it and have never really got anything out of it, and I could def stand to have less bezos in my life so it seems a good place to start. I got a really basic bookshelf app to note what I’ve been reading (with a ui as bad as gr) and I’ve been occasionally posting pictures of books on Instagram (tho I am still needing an equivalent of ilxor neechy’s turntable Dennis the menace) which along with lurking & sometimes posting here is probably all the readerly social network I need

I used to keep a 'reading diary' that just listed a date and where I was when I read the book - I've got details going back to 1999. I use GoodReads for this now. It's a pretty ordinary site but it does a job.

goodreads is terrible site-wise, yes. navigating back from a page, on app or web, appears to do the entire previous (slow) request again. some of the alternate apps are better but i think the server-side code is a limiting factor.