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

i read minor feelings by cathy park hong which i thought was great, but i'm white btw. apparently they're adapting it as a tv series, which seems bananas. table: do serious poetry people like her?

i also read hail mary by andy weir (who did the martian). it was well-executed trash.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

The Sorrows of Young Werther. Christ what an asshole.

I started watching the film by Max ophuls but the sound was atrocious. So I gave up , did seem a tad sanctimonious.

The Mandarins Simone De Beauvoir
Her novel loosely based on the intellectual circle in paris in the immediate wake of WWII and over teh next 5 years. She did claim it was not a roam a clef at one point . But interesting anyway.
Have had this kicking around for way too long drifting around my front room so glad to be getting into it.

Angela Saini INferior
reread this book on science and Gender imbalance. Enjoyed and was drinking way less than when i first read it last Xmas .
Looking forward to her book on the patriarchy whenever that lands.

How To Rig an Election Nic Cheeseman, Brian Klaas
book on political intrigue I picked up a couple of months ago. Looks interesting.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

This sounds like the Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. Great book.

The Sorrows of Young Werther. Christ what an asshole.

Agreed, really didn't enjoy reading this dude's livejournal.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

This sounds like the Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. Great book.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, September 22, 2021 5:52 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was it. Many thanks.

i read minor feelings by cathy park hong which i thought was great, but i'm white btw. apparently they're adapting it as a tv series, which seems bananas. table: do serious poetry people like her?

Many of my Asian poet friends (and Asian non-poet friends, tbh) take serious issue with some of Minor Feelings. Since I'm not Asian, I don't really feel comfortable explaining those issues, but let's just say that they're present.

As far as her own poetry is concerned, her book Dance Dance Revolution is interesting to me, but much of her poetry is what poets call "workshop-core"— that is, the poems seem written for a specific audience to teach specific types of innovative writing techniques. In that way, they're valuable, but qua books of poems, they're kind of "meh."

She also hasn't put out a book of poems in nearly a decade. Before Minor Feelings came out, she was probably most well-known in poetry circles for this absolutely damning takedown of the white supremacist gatekeepers of the avant-garde circa 2013-2014: https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde

ty

Really, really enjoying this (my first Menard) but realizing that given my pace and its size, a three week library loan isn't gonna be enough to finish it.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374722913

I guess I've aged into a 10-15 pages per day reader for stuff like this. It's just so rich, like a dark chocolate cake.

I see Menand in the link, but was primed to expect ... a vast new work by Pierre Menard.

Sorry about that

Ha, was hoping for the same thing!

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.