Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

I have misread her name is Bliss the entire time, and not noticed until you told me that. The book's probably called On Invisibility for all my brain is capable of telling at this point.

this is a pretty good interview possibly of interest to users of the i love books message board, cc table is the table. the thumbnail bio at the start! i had no idea!

https://thelandmag.com/the-land-interview-mike-davis-jeff-weiss/

Thanks caek!

I had to quit the Kay Jamison. It's probably a false correlation but it was giving me supremely fucked up dreams.

Picking through the essays in The Good Immigrant now.

There is some kind weird voyeuristic thing about that KRJ books so that makes sense.

i just finished brideshead revisited. perhaps you've heard of it? big thumbs up for that one.

now reading sisters by daisy johnson. that's new this year. i enjoyed her previous (first) book, everything under, which was shortlisted for the booker a couple of years back (controversially IIUC since it was kind of genre).

still slogging away at riddley walker. very funny but only managing a couple of pages at a time.

That's it I think, James Redd - it's a window into psychosis and presented so matter-of-factly that it's often too much to bear.

Speaking of which, I read Riddley Walker last year, holed in up on Anglesey in a howling gale. It was perfect and traumatic all at the same time.

I had a friend who was a psychologist who saw at a convention or two and had a little crush on her or something- too much!

Yeah, she's been in panel discussions, Q&As etc..also one-to-one interviews on BookTV etc: v. cogent, cuet, charming, but not tooo charming

But yeah she's got the real talk; stay braced.

If you continue to know someone who has been quite plausibly diagnosed as bipolar, and even if they're doing well, reading her books can be the kind of experience which Willie Nelson compares to "Seeing your mother-in-law drivin' over a cliff in a Cadillac you ain't paid for: a combination of 'Right On!' and 'O Shit!'" The books can seem like an implicitly mixed, necessary blessing. And kind of enjoyable sometimes, like some (no no, not all) necessary evil.

i finished wild seed and mind of my mind by octavia butler. both good, interesting, entertaining. started clay's ark but it's not grabbing me. time to move on to something and someone else. i'm having a hard time finding that something / someone though. i feel like something current. flipped through the new hari kunzru book but i'm not sold, i just don't want to read about the gestapo right now after having read sebald. if someone wants to recommend something very *now* / *21st century* but not facile and not necessarily fiction please do.

Riddley Walker gets a lot easier, I don't know if there's a learning curve or what but the fist 60 pages or so took me weeks or even months to get through, and then i finished it off in a couple of days.

I attempted CM Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta a couple of years ago. That one never gets easier, the language is ridiculous. There was something densely atmospheric about it that made me want to keep at it - the combination of faux-King James English and exotic landscape is pretty singular- but i gave up in the end.

Binging on middle grade fiction at the moment and it suits my mental age and reading ability much better.
Bunnicula is the best thing ever, I am completely obsessed and might even read it again before Halloween. I tried the second book in the series but it's not even remotely in that league.
From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E Franweiler is my 2nd fave so far.

Bunnicula is brilliant, so happy that I got my daughter hooked on that and the Moomins.

Map, you might enjoy Karen Russell and Kelly Link's 21st Century speculative fiction, for lack of a better term, their short stories are imaginative and a lot of fun. Also, Russell is an empath; Link is punk. Maybe start w KR's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, KL's Get In Trouble Karen Joy Fowler started with science fiction per se, with stories in Asimov's, novels harder to classify. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has grown offspring dealing with wtf & aftermath of Primatologist Dad's bringing a new little sister home from the lab---there have been nonfictional accounts of this kind of experiment accumulating over the years, as one of the main characters discovers.

KELLY LINK! KELLY LINK! https://www.eddostern.com/RISD/Stone-Animals-by-Kelly-Link.pdf

I love her.

Finished my Norma Cole binge. Finding it hard to read any non-fiction atm, so have started the new Buffy Cain chapbook. will probably try to move toward actually reading non-fiction again next, though i might have to put down the Mieville— while I admire his style, the dryness of it all is really making it more of slog than i anticipated...

but actually, this gets into a question i have for all of you.

Do you have a reading "practice," so to speak? Do you take notes? What about routines?

I try to read poetry in the morning, as a way of waking up my brain and reminding myself of myself.

If I have time during the remainder of the day, I try to read non-fiction or philosophy, but sometimes— and especially as of late— I've had a more difficult time doing so.

Then at night, I go for either fiction or poetry, usually the latter since it's so much more my wheelhouse.

Today, I have to grade some papers, record the lectures for next week (on Dorothy Allison and Jayne Anne Phillips!), then plan the reading that I'm giving tomorrow. It's raining heavily. Think I'm all set!

I used to just read on public transport, in the Beforetimes. These days I alternate between reading prose and comics in the late afternoon and before bed.

I routinely alternate between binge-reading and avoiding books completely aside from the bare minimum for my work. The latter usually accompanies feelings of disgust towards academia and the hyperanalytic frame of mind It fosters, but I also go through periods where words strike me as the most unnecessary entities of all (cue Dave Gahan).

I also strive towards monogamy - hate that situation where I've got five different books on the go and feel like I'll never finish any of them.

Same here. I also wish I could abandon certain books more readily – those that 'fall from one's hands', as we say in French – but my completist instincts are too strong.

pom, I think that the disgust you talk about above is what really drove my decision to not get a PhD, tbh. Too many friends telling me that they hate reading and never have time for whimsy or reading "light" crap also helped.

I totally respect that tbh. I'm glad I went through with it in the end but part of that 'gladness' is just commitment to a sunk cost fallacy.

Should I bother with Seven Gothic Tales? The prose seems a bit much.

I read Dinesen when I was writing my thesis on Borges 17 lifetimes ago. I can't remember very much about it all except, as you say, that the prose was a bit much (I can do purple, I can do thickety but I don't know, it was a slog).

I find it increasingly difficult to read at home and always feel I should be doing something else. So, I only read in bed, usually non-fiction, particularly in term time.

She reminds me of the worst of Broch.

I think it's deliberately mannered? Not that that makes it any easier.

I read anecdotes of destiny, the one with “babette’s feast”, within the last few years & really enjoyed the style tho not many details have stuck

My reading habits aren't very fixed, but during quarantine I've often been reading philosophy during working hours on days when I have no work to do (philosophy feels like labour and so I feel less like I'm idling). Fantasy or sci-fi in the evening.

xps I wouldn’t like to be at all programmatic with my reading and I don’t have to so i don’t, I just read according to my whims and habits

I read on the bus to work, in the café at the weekend and increasingly during the evenings at home with music on since I never seem to feel like watching anything these days. Also I’d stopped reading in the break room at work cause I didn’t want to seem antisocial but am more willing to do it now that social distancing is mandatory, it feels like less of a faux pas when you have to sit at the other end of a long table.

I’m a terrible one for having a load of books on the go - usually for the sake of convenience, like I’ll start reading something on my tablet cause I forgot to put the book I’ve been reading in my bag, plus I’ll have a hardback book I only read in the evenings cause it’s literally impossible to carry around, and then I might also have an audiobook on the go, and a library hold becomes available so I start that... I have started reading a new book because the one I’m on is in a different part of the room and I can’t be arsed to go get it so pick up a closer one

Sorta relatedly, I just bought a fairly basic book stand thing in the hope of easing my neck problems and it is SO GOOD I’m honestly kind of annoyed I’ve gone 35 years without getting one of these, so I’m going to be reading a whole load of big hardbacks now just for the sheer novelty of it not feeling like torture lol. Currently making my way through Cynthia Ozick letters of intent, a 600pp career-spanning (and disappointingly typo-riddled) collection of her essays.

hard yes on Seven Gothic Tales, I reread it recently and it holds up beautifully

it helps to keep in mind that Blixen is a Dane writing English (very well indeed, but not exactly as a native speaker would) and also that almost all the stories are set in the early 19th century; both their style and subjects are of that period, but her irony lifts them above pastiche

Pretty good for a Baroness Karen

Map, you might enjoy Karen Russell and Kelly Link's 21st Century speculative fiction, for lack of a better term, their short stories are imaginative and a lot of fun. Also, Russell is an empath; Link is punk. Maybe start w KR's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, KL's Get In Trouble Karen Joy Fowler started with science fiction per se, with stories in Asimov's, novels harder to classify. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has grown offspring dealing with wtf & aftermath of Primatologist Dad's bringing a new little sister home from the lab---there have been nonfictional accounts of this kind of experiment accumulating over the years, as one of the main characters discovers.

― dow, Friday, October 16, 2020 3:39 AM (seventeen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

thanks for these, will investigate

Bunnicula is great and also makes an easy Halloween costume; bunny ears, fangs and some white vegetables and you're good to go.

Deflatormouse, have you read The Mouse and His Child?

From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E Franweiler is my 2nd fave so far.

this book is wonderful. even being forced to read it in fifth grade and take a quiz after literally every chapter couldn't ruin it for me.

love the mouse and his child (and the frances books) but haven't yet gotten around to any of hoban's later books.

My brother and I got obsessed w/Hoban's books and read our way through most of them a few years ago. They're a mixed bag, but I think Riddley Walker and Turtle Diary are great. I also liked Pilgerman, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, The Medusa Frequency, and Kleinzeit, but how much you like those depends on how much tolerance you have for Hoban's particular brand of obsessive weirdness. (He's a bit like Philip K. Dick in that he has a few preoccupations that he returns to again and again, but instead of everything being about God, drugs and pottery, there's a recurring thing about the head of Orpheus, and another one about a Kraken, and a few others that are equally strange.)

Bunnicula is great and also makes an easy Halloween costume; bunny ears, fangs and some white vegetables and you're good to go.

― Lily Dale, Friday, October 16, 2020 5:40 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg LOVE IT!!! <3

I found a play version of this which calls for Harold and Chester to be played by actors in plain clothes, with only the occasional reminders in the dialog that they're animals which I think is so great, really spot on- they are effectively human characters. And Bunnicula is a stuffed toy.

I haven't read much of Hoban's kid lit. Riddley Walker was given to me by this girl in high school who I had a little platonic crush on. I'd mentioned to her that I was looking for stuff with unusual language, so she loaned me her favorite book. But I really struggled to make headway, I was embarrassed for her to know how long it was taking me so I returned it to her, fibbed about my progress and got my own copy. She was a couple of years older, kind of aloof and wrote such brilliant stuff. I was a little intimidated. So she says, "wow you finished it already?? it took me six months!!"

Around that same time I was over at a friend's house and happened to notice Hoban's name on a couple of his old kids' books, I think I found them kinda disappointing. Am I missing out?

Mixed up Files is wonderful, yeah. The children are a bit like Bunnicula's animals in that they don't seem to realize they're children. They have very adult personalities.

Also, Russell is an empath

What does this mean (this is not a trolling question, it's just I have only ever heard that term used, in SF books, as being likje a telepath but with emotions)?

I finished Pale Horse, Pale Rider last night. All three of the stories were fine pieces of work, but the final one from which the book takes its title was pretty goddamned amazing!

James, as my wife uses the term empath, it seems to apply to people whose empathy for the feelings of others rises to a level where it consistently interferes with their ability to stay grounded in their own feelings and not become overloaded with trying to soothe everyone else's fears, anxieties, griefs or worries. They have a hard time understanding and maintaining personal boundaries.

G.K. Chesterton - The Best of Father Brown
Adelbert Von Chamisso - Peter Schlemihl

Following on from Borges earlier in the month I went onto read these sets of fantastical-type tales. Think I'll get another selection of Father Borwn, lots I quite liked even if I couldn't keep the stories going in my head. Detective Fiction is just a very different mode for me.

I finished Pale Horse, Pale Rider last night. All three of the stories were fine pieces of work, but the final one from which the book takes its title was pretty goddamned amazing!

James, as my wife uses the term empath, it seems to apply to people whose empathy for the feelings of others rises to a level where it consistently interferes with their ability to stay grounded in their own feelings and not become overloaded with trying to soothe everyone else's fears, anxieties, griefs or worries. They have a hard time understanding and maintaining personal boundaries.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless),

She's fantastic, Porter is. I reread the title story at the start of the pandemic. Her Collected Stories is one of my touchstones.t

Ah, thanks, aimless, that makes sense.

Began The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins last night. Back on my non-fiction as a result-- engaging writing about a geopolitical moment of which I only know the basics.

I finished TE's essay on Cork and went on to his essay 'Home & Away'.

The level of obscure reading and learning in these two essays is staggering.

I meant it pretty close to the SF sense that James first mentioned: her narration tends to omniscience, but in a goood way--come along if you can, and you probably can (emotions don't interfere with narrative drive through layers of clarity, not in any stories I've read)(haven't checked the novel).

And speaking of clarity, Aimless, I meant "punk" in the attitudinal sense associated with a tag first applied, often as a compliment, by rock music writers to certain acts, especially bands, or groups, in the 1970s. Not in the older sense(s), such as most if not all definitions of "gunsel."

Sorry, too much coffee this morning, too much time with words this weekend (lost in productivity, now there's a word).

As of last night I am officially reading one of Dawn Powell's earliest novels, Dance Night, published in 1930. It has introduced so many different characters in the first few dozen pages that it seems destined to be a 'portrait of a small town' novel, rather than tracking a couple of main characters through their personal trials.

Nothing wrong with that, as long as I can actively keep all the names attached to the correct storylines in my memory. If I let several nights elapse between readings that can become unduly burdensome.