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

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.

xxp In the Gilead novels, black swan to black sheep to prodigal Jack goes from disruptive child-and-teenhood to disrupted adulthood of a kind, coming to take the specter of predestination into/the seed ov his late-blooming sense of self-regulation and self-torture. Kinda sucks for him, better for society, at least most of the time, as he gets older. So. whatever Robinson may say elsewhere, as an artist, she leaves us to our own thoughts re Calvinism, tracking Jack and those he affects.
I went straight from the whole New Sun tetraology to Elric, which seemed pretty dry by comparison, but it was probably too soon. Was very impressed by the former, but forgot virtually all of it long ago. Still want to read The Old Drift.

70 pages to go of TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980.

Though it's still not actually well written, I must admit that it has become more interesting as the plot has become more outlandish. A painter cutting off his hand, his gf suddenly having an affair with another major character, an unknown nephew turning up from another continent - the daft story is managing to hold the attention.

I finish it at last. It's been an effort.

There are some good ideas or signs of promise in this novel. The way that the text breaks off into titled sections that describe a scene or character, for instance, shows some inventiveness with form. The theme of synaesthesia remains the most original in it. But the writing at the end is often as poor as ever, and dangerously sentimental.

The Acknowledgements are very effusive, calling one person after another the most amazing and inspiring that the author has known. It's like what an English person's parody of an effusive American used to be like; like an Oscars speech. It makes me think: I wish one or two of these people could have helped to make this novel slightly better.

I went camping last week, taking two books to read.

One of them was a collection of "occasional pieces" by William Golding called The Hot Gates. I read about four of these pieces and gave up on it. It has all the marks of a book that was rushed out to capitalize on his Nobel Prize in 1983 (which was an ill-advised choice by the Nobel committee imo). A dud.

The other book was a sci-fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, Rocannon's World. Judged beside her best books, this one is rather pedestrian, with adventures falling thick and fast, but the characters are barely there and the connective tissue that binds it all together is rather weak. It does benefit from her disciplined imagination, which weaves together elements stolen borrowed from other cultures and times and transposes them onto other worlds with an overlay of super-advanced technology.

I'm now pretty far into reading A Death In The Family, which goes from the "Chambray"-like preface---not turning over in bed, but a nocturnal overview and slow track of Daddies with hoses on the front lawn, Mamas finishing up in the kitchen and sitting down on the front porches, kiddies screaming triumphantly out back and along the side yards, sidewalks, as the time traveler tunes back
waay back in to the locusts ov "Knoxville, Summer 1915" (set to music by Samuel Barber)---and then, somewhat like the later development of Swann's Way, proceeding through plausibly recollected interactions of the autobiographically-based child, Rufus (Agee's middle and family name) with other family members, and then to interpolated thoughts and deeds of the adults, alone and together, building to a long 24 hours, anticipating the possible, not unexpected death of one member, then the much less likely, but eventually confirmed death of another--the living room gradually filling up with news and adults and dynamics as the children sleep upstairs: this chapter isn't all that long, but I had to set the book aside for a couple of days, and catch my breath. The shifts of viewpoint reminded me a little of "As I Lay Dying" and some Delmore Schwartz stories, but I say that to talk myself down a little, find the banister as I go back in.

"Combray," sorry

I am reading The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes and it's great but it is STRESSING ME OUT; I've realized I'm really bad at reading stressful things these days.

I return to David Thomson: TRY TO TELL THE STORY. Increasingly I feel it's Thomson ... at his best? Well, maybe not quite his best, but on characteristic form: wry, droll, speculative confiding.

re-reading 'little, big' after nearly 30 years

not a lot actually happens, but it not-happens very pleasantly, perhaps even . . . eligiacally

is the holy roman empire reborn? difficult to say. at least we know that people with one eyebrow have special powers

people with one eyebrow have special powers

Ant Davis confirms this

I have The Expendable Man waiting for me at the library - you've not sold it to me, Lily Dale!

I'm midway through Altai by Wu Ming, a sequel of sorts to Q by Luther Blisset. The latter I remember as being a wild mix of historical fiction, political allegory, action and adventure, and conspiracy tinged spy thriller. This has the politics and history but so far none of the fun.

Thanks for persuading me to give the Agee a go, dow. I worried it would have clotted prose.

200 pages into Jerusalem. Every chapter is from a different perspective, I hope he circles back to known characters at some point - damn thing is a thousand pages, and Girl Woman Other pulled the trick of a character a chapter so well that this suffers a bit in comparison. I'm not signed up to the "only write about the experiences of ppl in yr own socio-cultural category" line of thinking, the act of writing fiction is after all about inhabiting someone else (main reason I never felt capable of it) but I can't deny that the chapters coming from the perspectives of working class white bohemian boomers feel very real and lived in and the chapters from the perspective of, say, a mixed race sex worker or a black man in the 19th century...less so.

i read sam riviere - dead souls, and oli hazzard - lorem ipsum

the riviere was great, felt like a big joke, and reminiscent of something i couldn't put my finger on (not really thomas bernhard whom several reviews have mentioned); the hazzard not so much, there were things to like in it, but i think 'never mention brexit in a novel' was correctly on elmore leonard's ten rules for writing

i also picked up blake butler's alice knott again, which i got to about halfway through some months ago, very beautiful book, one of those that you want to read slowly

Hi Alfred, there are a few clots and knots, bum notes, from time to time, but he doesn't try to justify them, as jazz musicians are sometimes encouraged to do (supposedly); he goes on to something else, incl, straight through and past the thing of overloading childhood's POV w an a adult adept's articulation---while tapping into inchoate early impressions and emotions, usually a justifiable effort here---one dream-to-nightmare bit I could live without--but he just keeps going: like I thought the night of adults dealing with the news of death would be followed with telling the children, but instead we go back to his being gaslighted by older boys, who have gotten bored and obscurely guilty, but have come up with "a new formula," to be revealed--meanwhile, Rufus has just met his mountain grandfather's grandmother (? started having 'em young, I reckon---premise is worth going with)

Thanks!

Started reading Lovecraft Country and got a few chapters in.

Aklso started into Beloved by Toni Morrison

& the Peter Principle the original book that the phenomenon of people getting promoted to the point if their incompetence got its name from .

Coming to the end of Sara Ahmed's living A Feminist Life

& started Paul Ortiz's African American & LatinX People's HIstory Of the US

& its hot so I'm not reading as much as I was

Just finished reading "Remains of the Day" by Ishiguro. It's a very clever book. The way Ishiguro has the narration proceed simultaneously on two levels (the narrator himself who is seemingly oblivious to or at least deeply alienated from his own feelings, and the subtext of what is really going on, which is artfully revealed to the reader) is done so naturally and seamlessly that any attempt to describe it fails to do it justice. The effectiveness of this literary parlor trick depends on the seeming artlessness of the narration. So the style is allowed to be rather starchy, which is fine, but can grow tiresome at novel length. Perhaps it would've been more effective as a novella.

Git through th e big story in LOecraft Country and now the one about Letitia's house. Interesting to see what they've changed for the tv series. Not sure what the Ruby story is as yet seemed to be more fleshed out in the tv series and I don't remember teh brother Marvin being in the show.
I think they integrated teh big story more into having things happening before and around it didn't they?

Anyway good read and i must get around to reading some of the actual black Lovecraft influenced writing.

Want to add a little to what I said a week ago: xxp In the Gilead novels, black swan to black sheep to prodigal Jack goes from disruptive child-and-teenhood to disrupted adulthood of a kind, coming to take the specter of predestination into/the seed ov his late-blooming sense of self-regulation and self-torture. Kinda sucks for him, better for society, at least most of the time, as he gets older. So. whatever Robinson may say elsewhere, as an artist, she leaves us to our own thoughts re Calvinism, tracking Jack and those he affects.I Calvinism may be considered to keep a lid on Jack (who is still a walking caution sign to all), but the pressure of said lid keeps the ontology bubbling, sometimes rising---he can't really live in submission or comformity to snything but his own nature, but in response to the world, now that he's tuned into some of it, no longer just kicking it away, having made his selection of stolen settlement; that's no longer good enough.

O.Nate: I like THE REMAINS OF THE DAY and I don't feel that it's too long. KI's later novel THE UNCONSOLED really is long - about 500pp - and I did feel that about it! But I have read REMAINS several times and I never felt it outstayed its welcome.

I read THE LOST LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN, a book containing many letters to FO'B from famous people.

Then on to Declan Kiberd's first book SYNGE & THE IRISH LANGUAGE (1979 but second edition 1993). What's certain about this book is that it's the most scholarly, solid research that this celebrated critic has ever done. Nothing else I've seen by him compares.

It's not that the book is so long, just that the meticulous, occasionally stilted prose style had a tendency to make me groggy. I guess a calming, soporific effect is part of what a butler's speech should strive for, but it became difficult for me to read very much in one sitting. I was thinking perhaps a bit more shorter work would have less of that issue, but it might just be my own idiosyncratic response. Lots of people seem to find the style of the book hypnotic and beautiful in its way.

remains of the day is perfect imo.

i found the unconsoled very heavy going at the time (as documented in this parish), but it's difficult to think of a book i've thought more about in the past year+ since i've read it.

At last I've started reading a book I've wanted to read for years: W.J. McCormack's FOOL OF THE FAMILY, a life of John Millington Synge.

I like to read books properly and cover to cover, but I'm afraid that won't be the case here. More strategic reading and dipping. But I enjoy it.

The young Synge in Paris was interested in anarchist groups. I'm interested to find out more about how his socialism developed.

Otter Country: In Search of the Wild Otter by Miriam Darlington. I guess it's a pretty good but not mind blowing nature book but the romantic naive foolish part of me wanted to give it to those who want to build more coal fired power stations and nuclear weapons and say 'here's what you're missing'. Could've done with slightly better editing, a couple of repeated sentences and a few too many references to steaming cups of tea.

The only KI I've read is the novellas of Nocturnes, which, despite the classy title, is fairly scruffy, and with a good variety of voices and settings---no Unreliable Narrators that I recall, and I think at least most of the stories are third-person, refreshingly enough (*maybe* one first-person, but he seemed okay: unobtrusive, duh)

Oh meant to say the title comes from the stories being about how music finds its way into-through lives and vice versa

Or anyway each novella has something to do with music.

I read Through A Scanner Darkly, which was oddly beautiful but christ, bleak as all hell. Dick's afterword is pretty shattering.

Now reading more genre fiction: Richard Stark's The Hunter.

Finished Lovecraft Country lkast night and enjoyed i. May need to rewatch the tv series again now that I've read teh source. But am aware of teh differences or at least mos o fthem. Would be interested i further adventures in both.

Started Beloved by Toni Morrison this morning and read the first chapter. Quite delicious prose.

finished Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist life and started reading Paul ortiz's An African American and LatinX People's History of the United States. I hope this is as good as his wife's book from the series. Wound up at a book club discussion of that indigenous olume last Sunday which was interesting.

Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, from New Directions. Just absolutely outstanding stuff.

I'm enjoying the biography of Synge more than I've enjoyed a book in a long time.