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

Two I just started:

Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor. Slow-motion-breakdown-of-civilization stuff intrigues me after the year we've all just had, so I jumped on this when I saw it mentioned in a Bookforum essay. First Lessing I've ever read. It's... odd.

Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human bondage in the early modern Atlantic world. A quite dry but interesting looking history of 17th-century English attitudes towards slavery, and attitudes towards non-European races, as those two attitudes were in the process of becoming welded together in the single idea of the plantation economy.

White Fragility.
Have read first few chapters and recognise what's being talked about.
Wonder if there will be a point after the thought processes talked about here cease to be widespread.
Got from library and have on loan for a guaranteed 6 months which seems weird.
But an extended return date for other books I have out automatically extended a few days ago and this has early December listed. I checked library website to see if it picked up that earlier extension and no its longer.

Read a lot of scattered poetry this week, including some John Weiners and Jack Spicer, as well as two new-ish JH Prynne chapbooks.

Started "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. I was assigned in once for a college humanities course once but only skimmed it, for the most part, and bounced off the long and winding sentences. God knows how I managed to say anything intelligent-sounding about it in the discussion section. Still not an easy read, but managing to digest most of it this time around.

Forging ahead to Bloomsday.

― the pinefox
Have you ever taken the Bloomsday tour? I'd like to, if it's good.

Which also provides a good reminder that a summer 'what are you reading' thread is in order.

I needed something propulsive and comforting, so I'm on what is becoming my biennial re-reading of Jonathan Raban's Coasting. Raban is best when he's running from something (which is most of the time) and here he's trying and failing to escape the gravitational field of the UK as he spends four years orbiting the main islands in his boat. Like lots of boys of his generation, there's a sense that Raban is always dealing with the trauma of boarding school and the boat becomes a little like an extension of that milieu - down to the library he assembles the and gross figurehead of Thatcher he puts up in the galley.

I'd forgotten that he meets Paul Theroux halfway round. Theroux is writing his own 'what's Britain really like?' book (The Kingdom By the Sea) and it's a weird and intense meeting, neither wanting to reveal too much. (I forget if Theroux mentions Raban in his book. I'd assume not.) There's a also a cute meeting with Larkin in Hull.

Anyway, I always come for the descriptions of the sea and the dreams of escape; there are few who do those better than Raban.

We discussed TO THE LIGHTHOUSE here a year or two ago, but I'll just repeat the view, both my own and fairly standard, that it's a magnificent masterpiece.

I don't know if there is one 'Bloomsday Tour' but I have extensively visited the Dublin locations of Ulysses, on Bloomsday and other days.

I've heard of that book before, Chinaski - it sounds remarkable, especially the Larkin episode which I didn't know about.

We have a summer thread now, thanks to dow:

Buffalo Moon, What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?