Are You There, God? What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?

finished north and south (thanks to lily dale for encouragement to persist). at times a little bit centrist in its politics (the unmoored "the right way is half way between the two 'extremes'" variety of centrism) but a good yarn nontheless. "darkshire" was a bit fucking much as a name though tbh!

now finishing up how to do nothing by jenny oddell which is already a little dated in places and the prose is very plodding and academic, but it's got a lot to say and i would recommend it (or at least chapter 1, which is available here https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb).

i already know how to do nothing

https://d2e111jq13me73.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/styles/share_link_image_large/public/screenshots/csm-movie/cvaokxq83fxpmhfdw5894rq510f.jpg

the ring and the book, which i have never read.

just read the first three lines and it’s such a delight to be back in the distinctive company of browning.

Do you see this Ring?
‘T is Rome-work, made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)


the opening interrogation, the sense of being accosted by someone in the street, sonic and intellectual spring and delight of “Castellani’s imitative craft”, unfurling a suggestive world of what i will call anachronistically “borgesian magic”, the sense of stumbling upon a hidden alley of history, opening into unexpected piazzas.

and also of course the slightly ludicrous such as the phrase

“sundry amazing busts”

which feels like a good love island line.

I've picked up The Ring and the Book twice in the last three years. I did read the Pope's monologue.

and the colour and interlingual sound effects of the last line here - “gl” being one of the loveliest italian sounds, softer than english makes it.

A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed web
When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
Now offered as a mat to save bare feet
(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost)
treading the chill scagliola bedward : then

and the glory of that “then”! and the typical household economy of the moan about cost, reminiscent of up at the villa down at the square, and the resonant simplicity of “when reds and blues were indeed red and blue” - a line that has lasted, for its perfect expression of the vividness of nostalgia.

I've picked up _The Ring and the Book_ twice in the last three years. I did read the Pope's monologue.

i should have glossed the previous excerpt - the narrator is browsing a second hand market in florence (as browning did when he found the original story that provided the framework for the ring and the book) so that “then” actually only leads on to more second hand items, but coming after the brief flight of fancy of “bedward” is a wonderful moment, the small imaginary vignettes that flit through your minds eye in the second hand market.

are you a fan of browning, alfred?

Mightily. "Andrea del Sarto" and "Love Among the Ruins" are two of my favorite 19th century poems.

ah god yes. absolutely that whole period of browning is perfect imo.

the sheer delight of reading words you have not read before by a poet you love.

trust browning to truffle out the legal papers of a three centuries old murder in a second hand market in rome, trust him to see the essential poetry of the case. trust him to offer it to tennyson and others as robert was dealing with the death of elizabeth and moving back to england. trust *them* not to take it up, trust browning to do it years later and really *foreground* the legal aspect in poetry.

<3 <3 <3

Having finished The 39 Steps in a second gulping, I'm now reading The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis, his memoir of the Cretan resistance to the Nazi occupation. It's very much a fragmented series of incidents, small and large, for it was never written for publication in the first place, but it gives a very clear picture of how the resistance operated. Mostly they starved, hid in caves, and lived by their wits.

i mean - sorry aimless xpost - he’s taken *a whole load* of legal documents* and turned them into poetry.

I remember enjoying The 39 Steps (I read it for a great college class called The Paternalistic Thriller), but a while back I tried to read another Buchan and it was so violently racist I put it in the burn box and vowed to never read anything more by him. I can't remember now which one it was.

Buchan was wholly, deeply, reliably gung-ho for the British colonial empire, to the extent he was named governor-general of Canada late in his life. A truckload of racism came along with that kind of jingoism and it definitely shows in his writing. In this case,aving been written in 1915, the main villains of 39 Steps were those nasty German Huns, so the racism was not front and center.

Some of us were discussing Greenmantle(wiki:...the second of five novels by John Buchan featuring the character of Richard Hannay, first published in 1916 by Hodder & Stoughton, London. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War, the other being Mr Standfast (1919); Hannay's first and best-known adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), is set in the period immediately preceding the war.) on another thread, which I can't remember the title of, but do recall it was quite a time-trip, beyond dated in some respects, but can pull you in--be sure to get an edition with lots of footnotes, though. One of the main characters may have been based on Buchan's schoolmate, or fellow alum, T.E. Lawrence--who may have something to do with the Wiki article's tie-in to lide, Anthony (2003). Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century.
But o man, there's all sorts of tie-ins, for instance:
Hilda von Einem, a powerful German operative in Turkey. She is a femme fatale who masterminds a plot to stir up a Muslim jihad against the Allies. She has been described as a "glamorous but merciless female agent"[1] and a "pale-blue-eyed northern goddess".[2] Rosie White suggests that von Einem is a "trope loosely based on Mata Hari" and that she represents a "decadent, oriental sexuality...Lewis Einstein's book Inside Constantinople: A Diplomatist's Diary During the Dardanelles Expedition, April to September, 1915 refers to a German woman agitating the Muslim population in Constantinople, in the mode of Hilda von Einem, so this element of the story may have some factual basis.

I enjoy Browning and quote fragments from him a few times in my next book.

Right now my morning reading is Saidiya Hartman's astonishing 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.'

I've gotten through the Prynne chapbooks, read a few other chaps from Lynn Xu, Rob Halpern, and Lara Durback, and am now flipping between two other books during the day. The first is Ara Shrinyan's 'Flag Mines,' a conceptual poetry work of language taken entirely from a CIA sourcebook describing different countries' flags. The other is a book-length poem by contemporary surrealist poet Carlos Lara, entitled 'The Green Record'

xp Thinking about it some more, I'm pretty sure it was Greenmantle I read for that class, not The Thirty-Nine Steps. I'm not sure which book made me cancel Buchan, but my guess is it was probably Prester John.

reading & nearly done w/ john o'hara's the ewings

never knew much abt o'hara, i read he came somewhat back into fashion due to mad men which makes some sense; this novel def feels outdated in ways but i dig its directness, it is also just v richly drawn in character and dialogue

all I know is Appointment in Samarra

In this case,aving been written in 1915, the main villains of 39 Steps were those nasty German Huns, so the racism was not front and center.

I agree that it isn't in the 39 Steps (though xenophobia is, which ain't much better), but if you read Greenmantle you get to see what Buchan's anti-German sentiments are REALLY about:

That is the weakness of the German. He has no gift for laying himself amongst different types of men. He is such a hard shell being that he cannot put out feelers to his kind. He may have plenty of brains, as Stumm had, but he had the poorest notion of psychology of any of God's creatures. In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises.

Found a copy of the Lillith trilogy by Octavia Butler in a charity shop yesterday. So started into that and read the first few chapters. I'm finding the prose pretty sublime in a way I remember noticing Hilary Mantel's was when i started Wolf Hall.
I think i heard a podcast on this a while back so wish I'd found her stuff earlier. think I will try to read a lot more of her, though somehow haven't read more Mantel despite having picked up several titles.

finished the Merle Haggard mY House Of Memories in order to get some more books out of the library. Quite enjoyed it but should have got to it much sooner. Think I had it out for a year or more.

REad the introduction to Mari Sandoz' Crazy Horse Strange Man of the Oglala.
Tnat is written by a current Sioux and goes into how accurate a portrayal of tribal customs etc she portrays.
Had read first couple of chapters of Cheyenne Autumn earlier in the week. now have a lot more time to read the recent borrowings in so not sure what I'm reading next.

am also in the middle of Michelle Alexander's The New jim Crow which is pretty great.

& Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life
recognising some situations that every marginalised person goes through.
THink it's an interesting read so hope I get through it soon. it's my loo book at the moment so I'm not giving it as much concentrated time as maybe I should.

xpost in one of his memoirs, Graham Greene said that, after World War I, he set out to write thrillers that went past/vs. Buchan's pro-Empire and associated bullshit.

Where there was just this implicit, unquestioning faith in Empire, at least publicly, and all the stuff that came from and with that.

Yeah, Greene is part of a tradition which also includes Le Carré and, according to some on this board, Ambler, that takes the espionage adventure aspect of Buchan and adds critique of the empire. The other approach, of course, culminated with James Bond (not my cup of tea).

In that same memoir (think it was A Sort of Life), Greene credited this guy with encouragement, by example, in a shared attitude, messing with conventions of genre and world view---note that they both wrote "literary novels" and what they called "entertainments":
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart HFRSE (30 September 1906 – 12 November 1994) was a Scottish novelist and academic. He is equally well known for the works of literary criticism and contemporary novels published under his real name and for the crime fiction published under the pseudonym of Michael Innes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._I._M._Stewart

Have never read him, but he earned his niche at least by influencing Greene.

I recently read the Natalia Ginzburg novella "Family" from the collection "Family and Borghesia". So far I've liked everything I've read by her. This novella reminded me a bit of Nikolai Leskov's stories, in the sense that it seems kind of pre-modern, almost like a folk-tale or something from a pre-literate oral tradition of story-telling. There's nothing starchy, conventional or old-fashioned about it. It reads like someone talking about some people that they knew and things that happened to them, in a very matter-of-fact tone, but somehow the emotional punch comes through in the gaps between what is said. Now I'm reading "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson.

I finished The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis. It's a book that demands you be interested in the bits and bobs of how the resistance operated in Crete during WWII, but I find Greek village culture interesting enough that I was up to meeting those demands.

Not sure what to pick up next. I dabbled around in The Anatomy of Melancholy for a bit before bed, but it isn't the sort of book one reads cover to cover.

It had to happen sometime. I started reading Across the Street, a Simenon I checked out of the library and it was... bad. The first purely unreadable Simenon title I've encountered so far.

I next turned to The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson, a book of essays largely revolving around her admiration for the thought and writings of John Calvin. She is a careful thinker and writer, but these are a bit formless, in that she does not just propose a thesis and develop it, but allows her thoughts to follow themselves without requiring them to follow a linear development. Kind of nice to read someone worth listening to who is coming from that perspective.

Ginzberg has been my big discovery, o. nate

liked Robinson's Housekeeping but still haven't read Gilead

recently read Gore Vidal's Julian, which was an interesting account of the savagery of the 2nd Century struggle between Hellenism and Christianity

thought Rumaan Aman's Leave the World Behind was interesting

Julian is one of Vidal's good novels.

I'm coming up on the home stretch of Milenko Jergovic's Kin.. It is utterly extraordinary,.

I read Hugh Kenner's essay 'Joyce's *Portrait* Reconsidered' (1965).

Brilliant, insightful, incisive. Quite early in making strong links between Joyce and Wilde.

But also wilful and excessive in pursuing certain motifs (an Aristotelian idea of potentialities missed), and a very odd way of talking about 'Dublin' as though it's a universal thing, ie: meaning 'the city you can't escape from'. This is unhelpful: if he wants to talk about an abstract concept he should do that, if Dublin then he should do that, with more thought about what was *actually* happening in Dublin at this time and all the people who *didn't* feel a need to escape from it, but rather sought to transform it.

I next turned to The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson, a book of essays largely revolving around her admiration for the thought and writings of John Calvin

I love Gilead but I have less than zero interest in it as a text on Calvinism so I'm guessing these would not be for me.

I'm guessing these would not be for me.

You might be pleasantly surprised. This is not, as you might think, a paean to the stern, dour face of puritanism and predestination. But I won't try to speak for her.

I needed something familiar and propulsive so I'm re-reading London Orbital by Iain Sinclair. I made my peace with him being an obscurantist and a charlatan years ago (I'm sure he'd find it a compliment) and I still get a thrill from the way he navigates places and libraries and the way he builds scenes out of shards of photography and memory. His prose style is something too as he has unashamedly absorbed the benzedrine Beat rhythms and achieves an incantatory rush that I find intoxicating (but I can totally see why others find him ridiculous). I'm wary of reading him before bed as I find I need a brain sluice or his style invades my dreams.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. I read a third in one evening and thought was good edgy fun, if not exactly wise then interesting and somewhat thoughtful. Last night I read another third and thought it was narcissistic nonsense. Who knows what tonight will bring!

Read to the end of Dawn the first book in Octavia Butler's Lillith's Brood omnibus .
Quite enjoying it , do like the writing there's really something delicious about it. I have seen some people say this is the one book by her they like the least so wonder what order to read her in as I intend to read her more Just so happened that this was the first book of hers i actually noticed being on local charity shop shelves so wonder if I have just missed things before. I found Toni Morrison'[s Beloved in the same charity shop last weekend after having just been back to another shop I'd seen it in a couple of months ago. & got Lovecraft Country from there last week too. So left wondering if I just haven't been as aware of some writers work being in front of me as I scan shelves as I would like. Still stuck with the thing of continually wanting more books so having loads on the go and also loads in my waiting to be read piles. Which maybe isn't the best way of organising things.
Anyway glad I've discovered Ocatavia Butkler now.

Mari Sandoz Cheyenee Autumn
HIstoric trek of Cheyenne group to attempt to return to traditional lands from a shoddy reservation that they had just been fobbed off with having been told they could always go back to the traditional lands if they didn't like teh new place. It's told as a novel, I'm not sure if that is the writing style she stuck with elsewhere. I also have her Crazy Horse out at the moment though i have only read the introduction.
Do enjoy the writing style. More than i thought I might even. She was writing in the middle of the 20th century and isn't actually from an Indian background though it appears there were Indian people around as she did grow up so she grew up with some knowledge of the culture.
Which means she has more sympathy towards the people than a lot of Americans at the time would have had. Good book .

Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket Volume One
Book on punk by an American writer that I bought some months ago and was lying by the bed. I think this was what I was reading before i got heavily into reading anti racism work. It was reviewed in Ugly THings a couple of issues ago. Very interesting. He's just going through what Punk means and how it was covered in the press etc. What was going on musically immediately beforehand. & not liking the purist year zero attitude to music that some scribes had and tried to pass on at the time since it wasn't true of the papers that were covering things. Also not liking the way that 'selling out' was such a big deal and fueled criticism of the Clash among others.
Also the way that people who were not in the punk meccas experienced the music primarily on record since there were not major punk gigs happening everywhere at the time.
Interesting insight anyway and good to have another punk overview from a different perspective. I think this is original enough that it is not just another book on the subject per se.

coming to the end of Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life which I think is great.

"The Haunting of Hill House" was an enjoyable read. The premise of young strangers being thrown together for a short stay in the country reminded me of summer camp, though this is a camp organized by a professor with an interest in the supernatural and a novel theory of cursed architecture. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a house can be so badly designed that staying in it can be a threat to one's mental wellbeing. The mood starts off with jollity as the awkward childlike loner Eleanor falls hard for the gregarious, too-cool-for-school Theodora (aka Theo, who the book hints, may be a lesbian), and the characters laugh off the creepy aspects of the house in a manner that won't be unfamiliar to anyone who's watched an episode of Scooby Doo. But the relationship blows hot and cold, as Eleanor needs more constancy than the flighty Theo can provide, and the goings on in the house get harder to explain from a strictly architectural standpoint. Soon the professor's wife appears to provide some needed comic relief, but we are already beginning to doubt whether the third-person limited POV is strictly reliable, and perhaps some things we thought we saw were only in a character's mind? It seems that these ambiguities and their disorienting effect on the reader are part of the show. By the end, we've no doubt that something weird has happened, but whether the explanation is supernatural or only strictly psychological would be fodder for book club debates. The queasy feeling of slipping into madness though is resonant and memorable.

otm

I think Theo is quite forcefully coded as queer, and that part of the relationship drama is about Eleanor developing feelings for the male investigator. But I might be remembering the film more on that second count.

I finished Blood Meridian and liked it quite a bit. Better than The Road at least. Both books left me with a queasy feeling.

I have Book of the New Sun, which I might start, but I've never read any of the Elric books and thought I might grab a couple of those.

I got a library card and started reading The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, a sweeping magical-realist epic of colonialism & its afterlives on the Zambezi River.

i recently finished Dawn by Octavia Butler too. I don't know much else about her stuff beyond a graphic novelisaiton of Kindred, but I did really enjoy it. There are some genuinely icky bits to it.

Like a new album by one of these guys.

Here Comes Everybody James Fearnley
Memoir by Pogues and Nipple Erectors member. Hope i didn't already have this,k definitely don't remember having read it if I did. I think i8t was around in various places at cut price a few years ago. Like in the 2 for £5 in FOPP and i think in HMV .
Finding it quite compelling at the moment, he's been brought into the Nipple Erectors on guitar then been fired by the bassist when he's asked if he can subsitute for her on a recording opportunity offered by Paul Weller when she's too heavily pregnant to play bass. He's apparently still involved with Shane Macgowan who he's hung out with during his Nips tenure cos Shane's trying to talk him into wearng Gladiator gear on a project he's talking about putting together. From which it appears the Pogues may have been suggested thanks to connections to music being talked about Irish music resembling Arabic which is like Aegean which would have been the music in the Roman Project thingy, or so it would appear.
Enjoying it anyway.
& missed seeing the Pogues despite having heard of their existence pretty early on and meaning to go and see them in Hope & Anchor etc days & buying records off Shane when he worked in that record shop behind Virgin.

I've been distracted by the Muhammad Ali documentary lately, but I finished re-reading Hons and Rebels last night. Very satisfying book.

NB: The equinox arrived. Summer has fleeted. This thread may be put to bed now and a new edition commenced. I'll think about it later today, but please feel free to forestall me by starting one yourself. I'd thank you for it.

Et, voila: Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

Thank you.

the mezzanine by nicholson baker - first read 20 years ago. has not aged well but very good at what it does.

the kingdoms by natasha pulley - alt history (what if napoleon had won). dreadful.

the new sally rooney - not as good as the other two. much less interested in reading her opinions in epistolary than teenage soap opera.

amazon unbound - overly sympathetic look at bezos/amazon since ~2010 (there's a part 1 from 90s-2010, but i haven't read it). despite being overly sympathetic, it's crazy how bad they are for the world when you see it laid out. amoral criminality notwithstanding, some interesting business operations stuff (i work in tech).

a thousand ships by natalie haynes - i read madeline miller last year and this is follow-up from that. enjoyed it!

stubborn archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler - short debut from young brazilian british writer set in london/sao paolo. nothing really happens and i liked it a lot.

looking glass war - minor le carre. not his best obviously. very straightforward plot. i thought i'd like that, because i find some of his plots borderline incomprehensible. it turns out i like being baffled, and this one in particular felt very slight.

whoops lock thread, will repost on the other one.