Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

Speaking of which, I now am going to be keeping a list in my planner, so that i won't spend several hours next New Year's Day hungover and trying to construct my list.

I'm finding this Penguin Classics abridged edition of Froissart's Chronicles to be quite pleasantly readable.

Kikuko Tsumura's There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job. It's pretty funny.

About 25 pages into Reza Negarestani's "Cyclonopedia," which I haven't read since I gave away my first copy more than five years ago or so. I had forgotten how totally batshit it is, but also how really stunningly insightful in certain ways, if one is into esoteric theory-fiction about Jihad, the war machine, and oil.

I'm starting off the year with Gallic Noir: Volume 1 an anthology of 3 short novels by Pascal Garnier. I've finished the first 2. They are pretty good noir. I actually wouldn't mind reading another volume of these.

i'm reading The Arrest right now.

the first line of the the chapter that describes the sudden social/environmental collapse after which the book is set feels very timely.

"Without warning, except every warning possible, it had come."

Morley, A Sound Mind

I started reading "The Only Good Indians" by Stephen Graham Jones. It's quite a treat so far, but it's getting a little too intense for me so i had to pause!

it's a contemporary native american ghost / horror story that's very funny and entertaining if that's your bag

I believe I am going to put aside the Negarestani for now— while it is as interesting as I remember it being, there's only so much Deleuzian "speculative theology" I can take at one time, and about 50 pages in, I'm ready for it to end. There's also something about the proliferation of numerological wingnuttery that's driving me up a wall. In any case, I like it a lot, but its rewards are diminishing, and I just received a delicious book order in the mail.

I finish John le Carré: CALL FOR THE DEAD aka THE DEADLY AFFAIR. It's excellent, brisk and detailed. A terrific introduction to this writer.

A reservation would be that occasionally JLC leaves his detailed workaday narration and gets into something else - eg: a peroration on 'the dream of the socialist system', 'the grand delusion of the Eastern bloc, which fuelled his fanaticism', etc. It's not that I think this reactionary, rather that it comes out as slightly gauche, overplayed, excessively abstract in relation to the level of the rest of the narrative. It may be that it seems hackneyed to me because JLC himself went on to make it such a feature.

i would very much agree with that assessment, pinefox. 'excellent, brisk and detailed' is a very good description of his early work and call for the dead in particular i think.

i'm rereading Lud-in-the-Mist, something I'd been meaning to do for a while, but prompted by and preparatory to a ledge question on the year-polls threads.

Also a Jen Calleja pamphlet on goblins, and Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy by Michael J Mazarr, on the Iraq War. Founded on a frankly indigestible base of American exceptionalism, but quickly proving fascinating on the process of decision making. I'm particularly interested in the second Iraq war as one of the key events at the beginning of this current period, which i will never stop calling 'this current conjuncture' despite irritating even myself with it.

Makes sense, relating it to resurgence of (even more broadly xenophobic) Klan after WWI, and rolling right through the Twenties, into the Depression-era heyday of Father Coughlin's populist fascism, other figures like Lindbergh.

200 pages into Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. It’s very absorbing, with lots of interesting footnotes regarding the various manuscripts that were revised depending on the official attitude towards Stalin, and the level of openness to criticism of Soviet leadership.

Currently about to finish Kimberly Alidio's once teeth bones coral. Took me a minute, but I finally picked it up and its sparse, quotidian method of composition finally clicked.

Jon Ronson - So you've been publicly shamed ... decent throughout, the Jonah Lehrer chapter being more critical of lehrer than I had heard. no real conclusion, much like the other Ronson book I read.
Charles Portis - Masters of Atlantis ... very good until the (thematic) fizzle out of the ending
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea ... gets too obfuscated for me, like eliding the wedding and revealing the sandi relationship very late on. still has a lot of good parts.

I read Don DeLillo's new novella, THE SILENCE (2020). It's pretty bad. I suspect that it may well be the worst thing DeLillo has ever published. It's barely even interesting enough to be self-parody. Possibly the most interesting thing about it is that it's printed in Courier font.

I then started on Jennifer Egan's MANHATTAN BEACH (2017).

I finished Froissart's Chronicles (abridged Penguin Classics edition, 470 pages). Perhaps the most interesting aspect was that the height of the Black Death plague years occurred within the time frame covered by the book, but Froissart mentions it only once in a single sentence. Admittedly, this book was an abridgement and Froissart was working from an earlier chronicle for that time period, not his own witnessing, but one mention that "a third of the people died"? Yikes!

His cavalier attitude becomes a bit more explicable in light of the complete contempt Froissart has for peasants. They only appear in his account because the Jacquerie in France and the Peasant's Revolt under Wat Tyler took place as he was writing his chronicle. The grievances of the peasants are dismissed as nonsense and their leaders as criminals. By way of contrast, Froissart apparently spent dozens of pages describing in detail every single combat that took place in one month long jousting tournament. In this edition they are abridged down to only about 8 or 9 pages worth. Oh, how he loved the nobility!

I began Diarmuid Hester's 'Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper,' and it's pretty absorbing, but Dennis is also a friend and a favorite author, so my bias is obvious

Are Sally Rooney's novels good? Thinking about trying the latest.

I suspect not!

But I'd quite like to find out for sure.

I liked Normal People fine. A quick read, too.

I preferred Conversations with Friends

I wanted to shout at the 'Normal People' to just bleedin' talk to each other.

Hsve you met teens??

Well the older they got the more exasperating it was.

I liked Normal People although the book barely contained a 'normal' person. (Maybe that's her point! Makes you think.)

There are a couple hundred posted about them on the bbc thread iirc

Covering McKellen: An Understudy’s Tale by David Weston is a slightly ludicrous vanity publishing book written by a prim and fussy old luvvie about a disastrous world tour of Lear, but it does contain this ludicrous anecdote about jeremy paxman:

Ian gives one of his finest performances to date, full of invention and spontaneity. After the show, I spot Jeremy Paxman waiting sheepishly among a group at the stage door to see Ian, like a small boy who’s about to meet Santa.

Friday May 18th

Ask Ian what Paxman thought about the production. Ian replies, acidly: “He said it was great fun.” Indeed, a strange comment to make on Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. Ian had only agreed to meet Paxman and his friends because Paxman had gone to the same Cambridge College, St Catharine’s, and had said that Lear was his favourite play.

great fun.

Thanks guys, I went to the library and checked out Normal People today, mostly to get out of the house, but also read a couple of favorable descriptions, but also that it's not quite as good as prev.---quotes to prove this seemed okay to me, out of context of course.

I would have started with the first, but second was all they had.

I'm reading a book of local Oregon history, Massacred for Gold, R. Gregory Nokes. It attempts to piece together as much as can be known long after the fact about a massacre of Chinese gold miners in an extremely remote spot in Hell's Canyon on the Snake River in 1887. Because the murderers were whites and the courts were essentially made up of their white neighbors in a very small community, this massacre was swept under the rug at the time.

So few verifiable facts have been preserved that a fair bit of the book is just laying the groundwork for understanding how racist the West was against Chinese, trying to get across how such a thing could have been covered up and excused by the "law-abiding" settlers who allowed the perpetrators to get off free.

Add: the number of miners killed was either 34 or 31, making it the biggest mass murder in Oregon history by a large margin.

MANHATTAN BEACH is readable, engaging, maybe rather like a film or a glossy TV series. The sense of period detail being plastered on can be strong, but I can't blame her, when period is a big part of the point.

Garth Greenwell's Cleanness.

Today's nugget from the Françoise Hardy autobio: she was super into Nick Drake and they hung out a few times but didn't talk much because of the language barrier.

so it's not true about love being the universal language?

Aimless, that book sounds very interesting.

so it's not true about love being the universal language?

The Stars down to Earth: The Stars down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture - Adorno

Pattern Recognition again, Gibson's last good book? Not SF, as such, but lots of contemporaneous references which dates it somewhat (she uses a phone card to make a call from a public phone box). Great turns of phrase (mirror-world for the tiny cultural differences between countries, children's crusade to describe Camden on a Sunday...).

David Toop's Sinister Resonance. I'm only partway in, but Toop pulls a bit of an Of Grammatology trick here, arguing (against Berger) for the primacy of hearing over seeing as the primary mode of sensual awareness and orientation. His style is open enough that this doesn't come across as provocative as such - it's more suggestive than anything.

(PR might also be my favourite book cover as well, the english hardback edition. and i bought it in a shop visible on the map on the front)

https://sciencefictionbookart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/pattern.jpg

Part 2 of in search of lost time

(Just remembered another tiny detail in PR that ages it but that is very evocative - he mentions the wooden escalators at Camden tube)

I've begun The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville.

Finished Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, started The Aleph.

Borges or the twitter mystic?

I've begun The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville.

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Thursday, January 14, 2021

It's got its longeurs, but whatta guy.

I nabbed a free copy of Lincoln in the Bardo and started it last night. It seems to me rather too self-concious about telling its story unconventionally, so that people will know instantly that this book is Experimental and therefore Important, but it did manage to not grate on me, yet.

after a couple of months of mostly adventure/spy/thriller/detective/mystery novels am now reading the old grove press jarry selected works... just about to start on the exploits & opinions of dr faustroll, pataphysician which i did read a few years back in a separate edition, but a revisit in this case is no bad thing.

This has doubtless been linked everywhere already, but enjoyed this on wanhuskgate: https://www.the-fence.com/online-only/from-husk-til-dawn

In particular this tickled me

Elsewhere, there are dissenting voices, to be found. Ben Northman, the 56-year-old author of England is Piss and The Skipton Goblin, has no time for trendy movements. ‘We don’t have autofiction in Barnsley,’ he told me. ‘Folk round these parts want granite-hard muscular fiction, about witches building dry stone walls.

finished try, the third novel in dennis cooper's george miles cycle, last night. it's my favorite so far i think? even though it didn't really have the meta dimensions of frisk or uncut misery of closer. it was kind of a straight up love story, albeit embroidered by the most nihilistic depravity like ever—and it's a love story between a bi dude (who is earnest and beautiful and pretty thoroughly fucked up by all of the sexual abuse his parents and relatives visit upon him) and a straight dude (who can barely move from the depths of his heroin addiction) no less! hopeless ppl feeling profound tenderness for each other... i wanted to cry every other page

it's also uhhh so funny. i feel very weird reading dennis cooper bc he is capable of making me laugh at the most awful, evil shit, i.e. my favorite line in the book, delivered from the main character to one of his dads:

“If you loved me . . .”—Ziggy slugs—“. . . you wouldn’t rim me while I’m crying.”

it is fun to read the goodreads reviews that totally don't get it, or think that it's celebrating the abuses it documents

I gave up on Lincoln in the Bardo last night.

As far as I read, the qualities of his imagined version of the bardo was the most interesting feature of the book and by 100 pages in, that particular feature was fixed and its continuing interest was exhausted. As befits ghosts trapped in the bardo, all the characters are unhappy and tormented by some aspect of their earthly life which they obsess about endlessly. This tends to make each character very sketchy and one-note, which Saunders seems to understand, because he keeps multiplying them.

All this was very keenly imagined and depicted. My difficulty was that such characters became extremely tedious company, no matter how many of them I was introduced to. I just couldn't stick to it. NB: Many ILBers enjoyed this book, so take this opinion as personal to me.

I think Piedie Gimbel's link is good.

‘I think it’s generational jealousy really,’ said Moneyshire when asked about Carol Oates’ comments. ‘The typical reader of Oates’s time, the olden days, was probably wealthy, had a lot of time on their hands, maybe had a few slaves and could devote a lot of time to big complicated books. Whereas now, because of the internet, we don’t have to spend hours evoking trauma. We can just write the word ‘trauma’ on a page of spotless creamy paper, with a grainy black and white image of some twigs or a bruised leg – and that really does the same job.’

Just read The Fourth Island by Sarah Tolmie, which I saw recommended on Reddit, of all places. A novella about a fourth Aran Island, existing out of time and hidden from almost everyone, on which lost and despairing people occasionally wash up and find themselves fixed in certain ways. It’s written in a kind of fragmented folktale style, skipping backwards and forwards in different characters’ lives. I thought it was quite lovely.

That sounds quite good!

My experience with Lincoln in the Bardo is that is gets more fluid and readable later on - it really starts by throwing the format and eccentricities at you but coheres much more in the second half.

I finished Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, which is a book I appreciated, and then Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This, which a lot of people here are talking about, also a good example of "starts by throwing the format and eccentricities at you but coheres much more in the second half."

Currently reading: Kelly Link - Get Into Trouble.

Cleanness was uneven, as a series of anecdotes might be. The first couple were the best.

Brad, Guide and Period are....uh...probably the most insane of the Miles cycle. That line you posted is one of my favorites, too, lol.

Autofiction can be fine, imho... I was taught by two of the main members of the New Narrative school, so I have some bias, yes. But a lot of more mainstream autofiction seems a little lazy and/or suspect, and the oversaturation of the market with that type of stuff is a real thing.

Also, I fucking hate Gore Vidal, even before I read that quote for the first time today. Ghastly misogynist shite.

you have more of a talent for hating than I do

Might very well be true.

Regarding your experience with LitB, I will honestly say that I think Saunders is a masterful short story writer, and a pretty middling to mediocre novelist. And that's okay!

(As in, I also didn't care for LitB, thought it was a novella-length book that he stretched out interminably)

i'm half way through shuggie bain. so far it's been a mixture of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5VaPQflLq0

and comic scenes that are about as funny as a bbc1 comedy for old people, and extremely light and superficial melodrama. i understand it gets better, so i'm going to stick with it, but staggered it won so many prizes tbh.

Regarding your experience with LitB, I will honestly say that I think Saunders is a masterful short story writer, and a pretty middling to mediocre novelist. And that's okay!

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, March 19, 2021 10:33 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

fundamentally agree with this even though i enjoyed bardo more than expected (likely bc i went in with low expectations)

it DOES feel like an overextended novella

Brad, Guide and Period are....uh...probably the most insane of the Miles cycle. That line you posted is one of my favorites, too, lol.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, March 19, 2021 10:13 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

two people have suggested that period will be my favorite and i'm so excited to get to it

Period is the most like The Sluts, if you've read any other Cooper. Very much about the lines between online sociality and fantasy vs/ the "real world"

Having one of those weekends, so rather than sleeping away the day I found myself rereading The Mystery of Mercy Close (Marian Keyes). I’ve actually read this before, probably about a year after it came out, but had only meant to dip into it today and instead ended up rereading the whole thing with barely a pause.

I think her stuff is very unfairly maligned, mainly by people who’ve never read her and mainly because of the marketing, cos her subjects are dark. There’s addiction (Rachel’s Holiday), bereavement (Anybody Out There?), all the classics. But even the lightest books are tinged heavily with darkness, as the author has experienced these things herself and writes them too.

TMOMC is about depression - something the author talked about a lot - but it’s also as the title says, a mystery. Not just the titular one in the plot but the things that our narrator Helen, a misanthropic post-crash private detective struggling through the ruins of her life - has going on in the background. Why won’t her former best friend speak to her anymore, what happened with her and sleazebag Jay, why has she ended up homeless?

So I really enjoyed it and all its wonderfully detailed characters on reread, particularly the overachieving sister (been there) and the fussy, overinvolved mammy (been there too), but most of all the long slow tightening as Keyes unravels the plot and as Helen falls apart. Even the tertiary characters in this have life and vigour and the short sharp sentences that sometimes fade into spiralling vague thoughts exactly mirror Helen’s personality at different times. Sometimes it is brisk, sometimes it is slow (but not very often, the whole thing takes place over a week with sparingly used flashbacks). Truly a great way to spend a grey Saturday morning/evening.

Also, it’s March, shouldn’t we have a spring thread?

yes. great idea!

Done and dusted.

Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books