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

if you want female take on the Iliad then The Silence of the Girls is cheap on amz or kobo today. i think the other two are perhaps better but maybe only because i read this last.

(pat barker has a sequel out in what is a strangely crowded market)

I'm a fan of Pat Barker's Regeneration so that's worth a punt, cheers!

My interests have naturally led me to somewhere I should really have gone long ago: R.F. Foster's vast biography of W.B. Yeats, on my shelves for years.

Its size looks forbidding, but it's remarkably easy to dip into. Not intellectually demanding, mostly just a lot of gossip - who WBY has fallen out or in with in a given month.

Doubtful that I'll manage a whole consecutive reading of it, though.

Yeats will likely have to wait, as my father has just lent me John le Carré's THE PIGEON TUNNEL, which I have him for his birthday. 40 pages in, and the anecdotal storytelling is inviting from the start. The comparison with Thomson's memoir will be hard to resist.

[*which I GAVE him for his birthday]

trying to see if calibre would generate me a decent list but i just got a csv dump with the books and the columns in no particular order, which needs more work

anyway, cr Sketches By Boz, the 18th of the 18(?) penguin classics Dickens that they redid the covers of in 2009(?) to be based on engravings from the originals. it's good earliest thing, and is short sketches and stories, that only a completist would care about, really. the most famous one might be his description of Seven Dials. (i think there are 3 more that didn't get new covers, his journalism)

also worth noting is that penguin classics have had a bit of a redesign and the stripe is now wider, the penguin bigger and has lost its orange border and doesn't match the old style. luckily i managed to find a copy matching the other 17 so i don't have an odd one at the end.

last month was One Thousand Ships and Amber Fury by Natalie Haynes, the first a retelling of the iliad from the perspective of all the females, and the second about a classics teacher in Edinburgh. after that it was a couple of things mentioned by said classics teacher, aclestis by Euripides and agamemnon by aeschylus, both of which are short.

Summerwater, Sarah Moss - heavily hyped in the LRB and elsewhere (here, maybe?). Middle class tourists spend a miserable time in cabins at a Scottish loch during a torrential downpour. Occasionally very funny, but perhaps a bit too invested in its mission as a State Of The Nation novel. Could also be that I'm just not quite British or middle aged enough yet to fully understand. Does that thing where every chapter is from a different perspective - third book I've read this year to do this, the others being Girl Woman Other and Jerusalem.

Paranormality Why We See What Isn't There Professor RIchard Wiseman
book sceptical of the supernatural that sees some benefits deriving from the study of the subject.
Or taht is to say why people understand what is presented to them as being paranormal or supernatural in the way that they do.
So far I've read the first chapter which is on Fortune Telling so talks about Cold Reading . Also goes into things like The Amazing Randi who wasa stage conjuror and illusionist who had a mission to expose all teh fake use of the supernatural, like fake mediums etc. I t6hink he also regularly beheaded Alice Cooper onstage.
I guess a lot of this is going to be pretty straightforward debunking of false belief in ways that I have come across before. I think I picked it up for that reason and it being a one stop shop for a lot of this. BUt does seem to be presented coherently in a semi interesting manner.

Cheyenne Autumn Mari Sandoz
back to this . May be reading too many things at teh same time. BUt am enjoying her writing. Should have been aware of it much earlier.
Historical novel from a marginalised area. I am trying to educate myself on the actuality of the Indian in America. THis book turned up mentioned in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States when I hadn't expected it to be. I thought it was as whi8te saviour as the movie turned out to be. So glad i found out it isn't really. She does have some nice turns of phrase and insights into motivations etc.
Worth reading her stuff i think.

I don’t think I hyped summerwater but I read it and thought it was … ok. Probably better than her first.

I finished "Time of Gifts" by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the first half of the story of his walk across Europe as a young man in the 1930s. It's an amazing adventure in many ways. He was 19 years old, alone, on foot, with only about 4 British pounds per month to live on, being mailed ahead by a friend to consulates in the cities where he planned to stop. Its hard to imagine in this age where even in the remotest small towns there is probably an internet connection how truly on his own he was. However it was also an age of a much different standard of hospitality for travelers. Apparently there was a German custom (law?) where you would be given a coupon for free lodging for a night in just about any town or village by applying with the burgomaster upon arrival. He often relied on that. However, he also had an astonishing ability to parlay chance encounters into incredibly generous invitations, and so he ended up spending a lot of the trip staying in the castles of the minor nobility or wealthy families of British expatriates, now somewhat reduced in means in the aftermath of the Great War, but still quite willing to put up a charming, flamboyant young man with a gift for languages and a fierce curiosity about European history and culture. The thing that made the book a bit heavy going at times for me was the density of technical terms of Central European dress, art, architecture, etc. and the thicket of obscure historical allusions. Leigh Fermor is given to conveying his sense of wonder as a young man by these scintillating and extremely learned passages (artificially aided, one suspects, by the many years of study intervening between the experience and the telling), which I mostly skimmed rather than looking up the unfamiliar terms.

Good report o. nate, sounds a very interesting subject - those isolated towns and the older model of hospitality, perhaps a relic of many centuries past.

I love the bit in that one where he gets hammered in Munich and loses his notebook.

accidentally read 2 horny books in a row during summer vacation

portnoy's complaint - philip roth i just laughed and laughed all throughout this one. the part where he goes to visit his wasp gf's parents in idaho and compares them to his own family had me dying. my family on my mother's side is jewish, dad's WASP, and even though i'm like 4 generations younger than roth it was spot on. first thing i've read by him, instantly picked up sabbath's theater at a used bookshop when i got back into town. feel hooked in a fun way

darryl - jackie ess picked this up because everyone on twitter was raving about it. ime things i get recommended from twitter are often bad, but this was excellent. great pervy short comic novel. a 40-year old man living in western oregon undergoes a sexual awakening, emerging stumblingly from a (somewhat reluctant) "cuck" addicted to ghb into an idiosyncratic queer-trans-poly love triangle. even though the author is trans, and the secondary characters include lesbians, bdsmers, gangbangers and transwomen, the book takes places almost exclusively outside the 'queer scene' and darryl's characterization is utterly convincingly suburban-middlebrow. and yet it's not played for satire at all. i quickly found myself, kind of in love with darryl? in awe of evenhandedness, his gentleness, almost buddhist capacity to take things in stride. the prose reminded me of elect mr robinson for a better world by donald antrim in the way it plays with a 'naive' or simplistic character's voice narrating dark or x-rated subject material. i can't stop thinking about it, want everyone to read it

sabbath's theater is great, you will love it i think

darryl sounds good i will check it out

One of Them by Musa Okwonga, an Eton college memoir. A series of snapshots rather than a day to day chronicle it nevertheless gives an insight into being one of the few black students at Eton as well as more generally growing up black in the UK, and how Eton perpetuates privilege and inequality. Pretty good at putting the boot into members of the current government though it never names names, even BJ with his 'fact free bluster, preening confidence and amoral swagger' is just 'the current prime minister'.

Finished Summerwater. Ending is pointless, and she can't write from a child's pov for shit. Still, some chapters were very funny.

I only ever call BJ 'the current UK PM'.

Though I sometimes add words like 'disgusting' and 'foul'.

I've known Jackie for almost a decade, 'Darryl' is indeed brilliant, and her next book is promising to be equally wild and excellent.

Also important to note that a main plot point in Darryl is directly referencing Dennis Cooper's 'The Sluts.'

I've known Jackie for almost a decade, 'Darryl' is indeed brilliant, and her next book is promising to be equally wild and excellent.

― heyy nineteen, that's john belushi (the table is the table), Tuesday, August 10, 2021 3:44 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

so so so stoked for it

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym - recent LRB article on her and, true to form, within the first couple chapters we have a spinster, a priest and an anthropologist.

Oddly I heard, once, that that book was disappointing and didn't live up to expectations.

Is it, in fact, good?

It’s very good indeed, indeed

Thanks for the notice about the Batbara Pym LRB article, which I hadn't seen. It's a good read, perceptive, and entertainingly snooty even when wrong (to say "there is no challenge to male power" in Pym's novels is an unfathomably terrible reading). The Nazi stuff was a bit of a shocker, but I guess it makes the Wodehouse comparisons more apt.

tao lin leave society. enjoying it, though i would absolutely hate to encounter tao lin in the wild as he is obsessively pilled on literally every bit of homeopathic, natural medicine bullshit going

I continue with Foster's Yeats, covering the years c.1900-1909 or so.

WBY seems obnoxious, but can also be terrifically quotable. But even better are his many enemies and critics, who keep serving up superbly aimed malicious descriptions of him.

Looking for easy familiarity, I just re-read Desolation Island, Patrick O'Brian. It delivered. Now I am reading A Coffin for King Charles, C.V. Wedgewood, in a cheap paperback Time-Life books reissue. It might be considered as a companion piece to her bio of Cromwell I read a few years back.

She presents the events and personalities surrounding the trial and execution of Charles I quite clearly. Remarkably, she gives the so-called Levelers a quite sympathetic treatment, but they lacked the power to push even one of their reforms past the small landed gentry and bourgeoisie who controlled the Army and the "Rump" Parliament, so they soon are pushed to the margins of the action.

I tried “master and commander” again recently and I still enjoy the character stuff, and still get utterly lost at the “hoist the mainsail” business, especially when there is absolutely acres of it.

A quick peek through the later volumes suggests there’s less shipping technical manual stuff, is that accurate?

Finished Camille Roy's 'Honey Mine,' great collection of prose from the underground experimental lesbian writer.

Now trying to figure out what next.

Finished Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn which was pretty good. Better than i had assumed before seeing mention in Roxanne Du8nbar Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States. Very well written I think with some nice turns of phrase. Very bleak though.
& not very well represented by the John Ford movie that borrows the title.
I have her Crazy Horse to read yet which ought to be good. It had a good introduction by a contemporary Navajo writer which says it is . That was good in itself.

Paulo Friere Pedagogy Of the Hope Reliving: Pedagogy Of The Oppressed
The writer of teh book on a more egalitarian education system revisits it a few decades later and goes over the process by which it was written.
My one problem with this so far is that there are a LOAD of endnotes which are all pretty long. Very interesting but very long and giving a lot of background on the context of the text . So I need to work out teh best way of reading both. If i should just read several notes ahead then read teh text so I keep the momentum of the text or vice versa. Almost need 2 books and 2 sets of eyes or something.
But yeah really interesting so far.
But reading either him or Boal who was heavily influenced by him just triggers me to wondering why I gave the local Theatre For change group any of my time since they seem to have very little to do with what they supposedly represent. Seem to have watered things down massively and filtered things through a heavily white understanding. Like they did the direct opposite of what they were supposed to and also seem to have taken the role of teacher in the direct opposite direction than these writers thought hinges on.

Paranormality Why We See What Isn't There Professor RIchard Wiseman
decent popular science type book looking at what can be learnt about the human condition from its responses to fake supernatural and spiritual scams. Why people believe things, what the processes being engaged with are etc etc.
I've come across a lot of this stuff elsewhere but it is a convenient one stop book containing a lot of what is involved.

I've mainly read genre fiction this summer:

Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Don Winslow - The Cartel
Richard Stark - The Hunter
Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Currently reading Rudiger Safranski's intellectual biography of Nietzsche (very slowly) and Antonia White's Frost in May. The latter - an autobiographical coming of age story, set in a Catholic convent - is extraordinary and so exact and psychologically acute that it reads like an icily precise horror story in places.

I still enjoy the character stuff, and still get utterly lost at the “hoist the mainsail” business

For the 99% of his readers who are not avid nautical historians and eat up that stuff, it's sufficient just to glide past the technical terms, taking them in at the most general level. It's enough to know he's talking about a mast or a sail or some place on the ship that's either on deck or below deck. O'Brian always gives the general reader enough hints about such things to pick up what they need to know not to get lost. Just don't be intimidated by the unfamiliar jargon. In a way, you are meant to be bewildered by how technically complex those ships were. Once you're comfortable with that, it all smooths out.

Paul Halter - The Seventh Hypothesis (1991)
Masako Togawa - The Master Key (1962)

two translated mysteries.

Halter's is heavy on the puzzle element -- when one murder starts to get boring, another one happens. There is a very enjoyable chapter where two old theatre queens keep one-upping each other when discussing which one is a murderer. All of the other characters are blanks.

Togawa's is one of those mindfucks where weird and apparently unrelated things keep happening, followed by around 4 pages of explanation. Quite entertaining, with grotesque characters.

I've been dabbling lately, mostly reading some of Mark Twain's short works from a collection of his sketches, speeches, essays, etc. It's about time to move to something meatier. I'll figure it out tonight. There are a lot of good candidates at hand.

I got Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman from the library and devoured it in a day. It was very good, and I've recommended it to several friends and am looking forward to reading Muraka's other recently translated novel, Earthlings.

Sorta-spoilers: I thought it was pretty dang obvious that Keiko falls somewhere on the autism spectrum, even if she is never labeled or diagnosed as such in the course of the book. I mention that because there seems to be a sharp divide in the reviews I've seen, between A) people who read it as a realistic and warm-hearted portrayal of a person with autism doing her best to navigate a maze of confusing social pressures and expectations, and B) people who think that the book is some sort of broad satire "about" capitalist alienation and that we are not meant to identify or sympathize with Keiko.

I read it two years ago and definitely agree with your assessment.

Reading Open Doors, Leonardo Sciascia. It's more a novella than a novel. So far it is quite slow-paced and contemplative compared with his other works I've read, with a knotty prose style that the translator seems to have struggled to bring over into English. It's in a volume with several other short works of his which I may or may not also read.

Finished Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire.
Have had it out for way too long but it was in a pile on my bed last week so I finally got to it. Seeing somebody has a request out on it. So hope that hasn't dated back too long it kept getting teh loan extended thanks to lockdowns etc.
Anyway did enjoy it but it did have me thinking about abuses of the basic teaching method that I've come across locally.
Glad I've heard about his intentions and what shaped him coming to the processes he wrote about and had further developed through experience.

Inferior Angela Saini
I read this when i was drinking a lot over Xmas last year so think I need to get a clearer reading. Do love her writing and presenting.
It's her book on gender imbalance and the non objectivity of scie3ntific practise that lead to it getting so valorised and so on.

Read "Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened" by Bruce Andrews, a showcase of earlier work from a prolific period in the mid to late 70s. He's a piece of work, apparently, but I find the opacity and resultant associative freedom inherent in his poems to be rather lovely.

Today read Daniel Owens' "Celingak-Celinguk," and Indonesian word which means "look left, look right (in the context of being in a strange place)." It's a translingual book of poems written in both English and Indonesian, with translations on opposing pages. Really interesting work.

I've been reading "The Satires of Juvenal" in the Rolfe Humphries translation from Indiana University Press. I think this is probably the funniest work of classical literature I've yet read, which is some accomplishment. The slangy, anachronistic translation by Humphries is vivid and immediate (he uses anachronistic translations at times to make obscure ancient references more understandable to the reader). Humphries's sense of humor can be illustrated by this Wikipedia anecdote:

Humphries may be best remembered for a notorious literary prank. Asked to contribute a piece to Poetry in 1939, he penned 39 lines containing an acrostic. The first letters of each line spelled out the message: "Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass." The editor printed an apology and Humphries was banned from the publication. The ban was lifted in 1941.

I finished the Sciascia novellas a couple nights ago. The second and third were more conventional than the first one I described, then the fourth and final one was a cross between a recap of the history of a particular trial in 1913 and a running commentary on the judicial process and its flaws. All in all an interesting collection of short pieces. Not essential reading, but worth the time spent.

I'm reading "Leave the World Behind" by Rumaan Alam. I've been trying to make better use of my local public library, and I read a review of this that made it sound interesting. So far its been moderately interesting. I'm waiting to see if it gets better.

Rockin the Bronx Larry Kirwan
NOvelk about an Irish youth heading to New York to try to fetch his girlfriend home and starting a band with her tenant.
I picked this up thinking it was a memoir , now not sure to what extent this is pure fiction and what is based on his own history.
Enjoying it anyway.

The Mandarins Simone De Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher etc's novel about the avant garde set in Paris in the wake of the 2nd World War.
Bought thsi a while back and its just kicked around in my front room for way too long. I think I saw it refered to recently so meant to get into reading it and now finding it pretty readable.
Probably should have read everything I bought at teh time i bought it though. But glad i've got to it.

Inferior Angela Saini
British science writer's book on Gender imbalance and how science has been used to perpetuate it. Views science as far from as objective as it makes itself out to be because of the agenda of those practising it.
I read this over Xmas but I think I was drinking a lot at the time so may not have taken it in as much as i could have.
I really like her writing and presentation on various media. I need to read her first book on scienc ein India Geek nation also looking forward to the next book on the Patriarchy whenever that appears.

finished Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire a few days ago.
Enjoyed reading about the process by which he arrived at developing the though and writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed. & what the conno00tations on the understanding should be.
Took me way too long to get around to reading this. I think I had kept renewing it prior to the first lockdown and then had it continually extended automatically because of that. NOt sure what put me off, I found it an easy read when i did finally get to it. & i found out as I was getting through it that somebody had a request out on it so hope they hadn't been waiting too long.

Stamped From The Beginning Ibram X Kendi
History of Racist ideas in Us History. Told in 7 sections each one related to a figure from trhe given time.
I enjoy Ibram X kendi's writing and his podcast.
I find learning the history quit enlightening. Want to get the rest of what he wrote including the compendium he edited . Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

I tried to read Love's Work, Gillian Rose, managed to reach the halfway point and will not read another word of it. I picked it up because another ILBer spoke highly of it. I wish I could speak highly of it, but I can't. A book that I recently read noted that "nothing reveals a person like their book". In this case, the author's self-revelation did not lead to my admiration. It would take a much longer post to explain why this was so and I don't have the heart for that harsh and dismal task.

Jon Savage's crisply written and well-researched Teens, about the development of youth culture from the late 19th century through 1945.

Also: Molly Keane's delicious Good Behaviour (thanks, NYRB classics!).

"Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles" by rosecrans baldwin. very mediocre essays about los angeles. he explicitly states in the introduction that he's not concerned with whether people have said this stuff before, which, well, yes, i can see that.

piranesi by susanna clarke. this was a lot of fun! i recommend it!

the fisherman by john langan. the first half of this was great. incredibly weird. and the framing device(s) are very effective. but when it starts getting into the magical bullshit it's boring.

bury the chains by adam hochschild. history of the british abolition movement. presented as a ripping yarn which that arch/sarcastic way people right about georgian britain, which doesn't really fit the subject.

a paradise built in hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by rebecca solnit. this is unbelievably rambling and rarely on topic, but when it was on topic it was good.

now reading spencer ackerman's "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump", which is a right good laugh so far.

"Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles" by rosecrans baldwin. very mediocre essays about los angeles. he explicitly states in the introduction that he's not concerned with whether people have said this stuff before, which, well, yes, i can see that.

yeah this book was bad!! shame cause the cover/design is good

I mean it’s not like he says anything … wrong per se. It’s just very bad.

it felt like and probably is repurposed magazine articles cut up into prose poems

Yeah the fact that he refers to “reporting” seems like kind of a tell that his goal was to gather quotes and observations and concatenate them.