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

O.Nate: good summary. I think that book is quite outstanding in its outrageousness, the way it instals a voice right from the start and keeps going, burning through sacred cows, shibboleths, whatever other very mixed metaphors I can find ... The phrase "black comedy" would obviously be correct if "Black" wasn't such a keyword in other ways (cf the fascinating discussion very near the end of kinds of blackness, with Godard and Bjork, as I recall, in the final category!).

Reading about Joyce's PORTRAIT in the book THE STRONG SPIRIT.

Junichiro Tanizaki - The Makioka Sisters. Read almost everything by him except what is seen as his masterpiece - probably lazily so, as it happens to be his biggest book. Though I can see it. Four Sisters, two of whom need to get married. What Tanizaki does here is the quiet set of traumas bought upon by the situation and the people around it, the hierarchies they occupy. Two things it does well: 1) to shadow the odd event coming into this chamber (in this case WWII, where the Tanizaki's befriend a German family who go back to Germany just as the war is about to begin, who then send letters now and then) and the use of the telephone - there is a sorta comedic phase of what to/what not to say on the telephone, as oposed to a more formal manner - such as writing a letter, or actually having a face-to-face conversation. These are shifting formalities in the way of what actually happens: marriage as a way of arresting decline in status, marriage in the way of freedom to live in other ways, which are explored in many other novels.

William di Canzio - Alec, a novel about Maurice and Alec Scudder, the couple in E.M. Forster's Maurice.

I read The Makioka Sisters with delight about a decade ago. The 1984 film is a solid adaptation.

Heidegger - the question concerning technology and other essays.

I'm reading it, but am I understanding it? (no)

Just now took a look into Crowds and Power, which confused my totally unfair Random Read Test w excellent anecdote about yet another Roman Emperor I never heard off, *then* explaining it like he was too used to ramming Western Civ into hungover undergrads. Oh well, maybe I'll skip those parts. Are his memoirs good reading?

I loved The Sellout and find myself thinking about it often (the scene with the flooded bus comes to me at odd times).

I've been reading The Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie. It's an account of Diane Perry who became Tenzin Palmo, the first western female to become an ordained Buddhist nun. I'm quite a sucker for spiritual auto/biography, especially with extended accounts of retreat and enlightenment, but this is pretty hagiographic, with mythic elements often presented uncritically as fact.

I have a few pages of appendices etc to finish in Yeats, but I have already commenced Steven Connor: THE MADNESS OF KNOWLEDGE.

A dazzling discussion of the nature of how people feel about knowledge. I'm only about 5pp in to a 300pp book, and it's already said more than many 300pp books might do.

QUICKSAND is quite ... melodramatic?

I would say it was quite ... condensed. Larsen had a specific point she wanted to illustrate about the experience of middle class, educated, American women of mixed race and making her point required her protagonist to sample the spectrum of social niches available to her. That entailed a lot of scenery changes. Since the point was that none of these niches were happy or satisfying choices, it didn't take a lot of exposition to establish that and shuffle her into the next niche.

I'd say Larsen showed great subtlety in her explanations of the source of her protagonist's social discomforts and dissatisfaction, but by constantly whisking her away to new scenery so rapidly it reduced the stature of her main character and made her dilemma be as much about her own immaturity as about her social predicament.

Now I've started Highland Fling, Nancy Mitford's first novel. Not surprisingly, it shares a great deal in common with early Waugh, with just a slight nod in the direction of Wodehouse.

THe Guilty Feminist Deborah Franbces White
The book related to a podcast I listen to weekly. Starts with a history and overview of feminism tied in with the author having spent time in the Jehovah's Witness as a teen which left a lasting mark on her.
Been wanting to read this for a while and I think it gets its point across, may not be the best source on feminism but I think it gives some grounding. Enjoying it so far.

HOw to Rig An Election Nic Cheeseman
Book looking at how elections have been corrupted over time. Its just been talking about Kenya in the section I'm in .
INteresting.

Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities
1963 book on what makes a city work. I was watching a series on Planning For teh Post Pandemic City over the pandemic which had me thinking about town planning etc which this gives soe grounding for.
I saw a documentary on the writer last year which was interesting so finding this in the library was great. ONly got as far as the introduction so far but going to get into this .

I'm totally ignorant of this writer, who sounds very appealing:

Winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) wove Black folktales and narratives of African American life and history into a body of work that forever changed American children’s writing and made her its most honored writer.
Join Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and award-winning children’s book author and memoirist Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) for a conversation about Hamilton’s life and wildly inventive novels, newly collected in a Library of America volume edited by Hamilton biographer Julie K. Rubini.



Wednesday, October 6
6:00 – 7:00 pm ET

Register For Online Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virginia-hamilton-and-the-transformation-of-american-childrens-literature-registration-175570535197?aff=campaignmonitor

NOW AVAILABLE

Virginia Hamilton: Five Novels
Hardcover • 907 pages
List price: $35.00
Web Store price: $31.50
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“We are all so fortunate to have these wonderful and courageous novels to guide us.”—Nikki Giovanni

Virginia Hamilton: Five Novels
Zeely | The House of Dies Drear | The Planet of Junior Brown | M.C. Higgins, The Great | Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush

Edited by Julie K. Rubini

This Library of America volume collects five of Virginia Hamilton’s most beloved works, along with beautifully restored illustrations.

In Zeely (1967), Geeder Perry and her brother, Toeboy, go to their uncle’s farm for the summer and encounter a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Watutsi queen and a mysterious night traveler. In The House of Dies Drear (1968), Thomas Small and his family move to a forbidding former way station on the Underground Railroad—a house whose secrets Thomas must discover before it’s too late. Junior Brown, a 300-lb. musical prodigy, plays a silent piano in The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), while homeless friend Buddy draws on all his New York City wits to protect Junior’s disintegrating mind.

In the National Book Award–winning M. C. Higgins, The Great (1974), Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits atop a forty-foot pole on the side of Sarah’s Mountain and dreams of escape. Poised above his family’s home is a massive spoil heap from strip-mining that could come crashing down at any moment. Can he rescue his family and save his own future? And in Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), fifteen-year-old Tree’s life revolves around her ailing brother, Dab, until she sees cool, handsome Brother Rush, an enigmatic figure who may hold the key to unlocking her family’s troubled past.

just read The Road (had seen the film but was unprepared for the cannibalism) and am halfway through Things Fall Apart, which is like what i remember of The Famished Road but a quarter of the length so i might actually finish it.

(this month's theme: books less than 200 pages, trying to reduce the backlog)

Any recommendations, I'm after some short books myself (I've read Things Fall Apart). Currently 2/3 done with Ducks, Newburyport - I gave up about halfway through a year or so ago but I no longer no why as it's obviously extraordinary.

the things i have lined up are nothing special: another ed mcbain, some short stories that have been bundled in with kindle edition of American Gods, the rest of the Aeschylus i read a couple of months ago maybe, anything else i can find in my _todo shelf on the kobo. Jacob's Room perhaps. and i have at least 4 short story collections i'm part way through.

(november is female month (Small Isle...), december is dickens)

ledge and koogs:

for fiction, I've been on a Christa Wolf kick, her books "ACCIDENT" and "NO PLACE ON EARTH" are both extraodinary and short...I'm also re-reading (for the first time in a decade!) Maurice Blanchot's "Death Sentence," which is also very short and rather extraordinary in a totally different way.

i lost all ability to focus on reading for weeks at a time so it took me a while to finish sentimental education, which i got pretty bogged down in even though it's obviously a total masterpiece

i just started malina which i am already very taken with and am kinda breezing through, feels great

Ugh, Malina is SO good.

I'd never read Joy Williams! I'm three quarters through The Quick and the Dead.

xps thanks table! they sound good, annoyingly none of them are available as ebooks so I can't read them RIGHT NOW.

I've been reading "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker, an amiable, extremely low-key novel about a published poet who has been commissioned to write an introduction to a new poetry anthology but is suffering from a monumental case of writer's block and the lingering effects of a recent break-up.

lol that sounds both dope and extremely nicholson baker

There's a sequel to it, which I expect I'll read also.

I'm reading The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, which has many scholarly essays in it, and Misquoting Jesus by Bart E. Ehrman which is about textual analysis of the New Testament. I'm an atheist but I find this stuff fascinating. One early example from Ehrman is that the passage in John about the adulterous woman, the "let he who is without sin" one, was not by the original author, and that Jesus' response isn't actually a good interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.

I'm still reading Hejinian's "Book of Thousand Eyes" before sleep, but last night finished a re-read of Blanchot's "Death Sentence," and this morning I cracked open my copy of Christa Wolf's "The Quest for Christa T.," her most famous book and one of hers that I've never read! One chapter in and I already know I'm going to love it.

I really liked The Anthologist and yup, it's full Nicholson Baker.

I'm reading William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. It's fun.

I finished Highland Fling. Pretty good for a first novel, mildly comical but nothing to get excited about.

Last night I got my feet wet in 42nd Parallel, the first part of the Dos Passos trilogy, U.S.A. This work was an obvious influence on writers as diverse as Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe, but I think I'll lay it aside for now. I have a library copy of the Library of America volume of Octavia Butler that includes Kindred and that seems more inviting at the moment than Dos Passos and his impressionistic kaleidoscopic style, which reads rather crudely to me, a century onward.

I got that LOA on Butler from the library a few months ago. Enjoy.

Starting Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others - partly in anticipation of a trip to Los Angeles. Any recommendations for contemporary-ish L.A. lit that isn’t, like, Bret Easton Ellis or Hollywood nostalgia?

starting on freedom by maggie nelson

First Love by Gwendolyn Riley. Halfway through — I always think books like this are going to be cringe and Thought Catalog-y, but it’s pretty good so far.

ghost wars - steve(?) coll
the Italian - Ann Radcliffe

Ed B, I am a big fan of the poet Sesshu Foster, who has written a lot about LA, though his novels tend to be speculative..the most recent being about a dirigible company and local uprisings in the near future.

This may be of interest solely to me here but I just finished The Naturalist On The River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates, from 1863. It’s the first book of natural history I’ve read through, that wasn’t by Peter Matthiessen. Overall quite readable for being a 150 year old science book although there is occasional colonialist bigotry.

The depiction of that environment though is so strikingly unique, it makes me so sad that I can never see what he saw. Of course he also had to eat a lot of really weird stuff which would be a deal-breaker for me. Quite a bit about mass slaughter of turtles too, that was not cool.

The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips which I picked up hoping, based on the blurb, that it would be more than just straightforward historical fiction (which I have nothing against, just not my cup of tea), and it was and I enjoyed it a great deal. Now on to Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez which is supposedly about gender bias in data but in fact seems to be a systematic description, explanation, and statistical breakdown of gender inequality across the world in every walk of life. Which is fine. (The book, not the inequality.)

Finished 'The Quest for Christa T.,' now onto poet Steve Zultanski's latest, entitled 'Relief.'

Having to rush read Crazy Horse by Mari Sandoz since i just found out that it has a hold on it. Library book which i got out a couple of months ago alongside her Cheyenne Autumn.
Do enjoy her writing I think. Just wish I didn't need to get through this at speed since it would be more comfortable to take more time.

Maybe take an extra day and pay the overdue fine?

contemporary-ish L.A. lit that isn’t, like, Bret Easton Ellis or Hollywood nostalgia

I think Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" fits the bill. Lots of LA atmosphere.

I've been trying to read where I can and today finished Caradog Prichard's One Moonlit Night. It's a slight novel, translated from Welsh and tells the story of a little lad growing up in a remote mining village during WWI (albeit the war is far off, a rumour). The chronology of the narrative isn't always clear and it's written in a mix of vernacular and a kind of hymnal, devotional voice of the land, which is immersive and dislocating at the same time. Obviously it's translated, but it reminded me a bit of Joyce (Dubliners, Portrait) and of Sunset Song in its rhythms and obsessions and it had a real emotional heft.

That sounds good!

I finished Zultanski's 'Relief,' and this morning sort of sped-read through Gabri3lle D4niels' 'Something Else Again.'

The latter was sent to me by a friend who published the US edition of the book, hoping I might write something nice about it on social media. I can't do so, because I don't think the book is very good, but I am going to try my best to write something even-handed nonetheless.

have just read g.b. edwards' the book of ebenezer le page, a rather idiosyncratic portrayal of island life on guernsey circa 1900-1970. very good.

now about to start on dorothy carrington's granite island: a portrait of corsica

Have got through like half of Crazy Horse so doing good time and did decide I might take some extra days. Its like 400+ pp.
Should have paced myself better but didn't really think I needed to until I saw it was wanted elsewhere.

Why I'm NO Longer Talking TO White People About Race Reni Eddo-Lodge
THis seems like avery logical covering of a loto finformation some of which I was already familiar with. Good place to start possibly if one wasn't that familiar with it. I am seeing some negative reviews of it on Goodreads etc which I now think may refelct on the reviewer more than teh book but Maybe that's to be expected.
Got like 2/3s of the way through this when I realised i need to get through Crazy Horse.
& got this when I was a similar length through the Guilty Feminist which is also good.

HOw To Rig An Election Cheeseman
INteresting book on corruption in politics. Finding this particularly so cos he's talking about Kenya quite a bit.
Looking also at how it is more authoritarian regimes taht have to go through teh process of pretending in this way. But maybe taht's already clear.
Anyway good charity shop find I think.

I finished Baker's The Anthologist, which seemed mainly an excuse for Baker to share his thoughts on poetry, and some quite funny riffs on the same.

For example, on Ashbery:

"He was born in 1927. He has won every poetry prize known to man or beast, and he was part of that whole ultracool inhuman unreal absurdist fluorescent world of the sixties and seventies in New York. Once he'd edited an art magazine, Art News. Even his name is coolly, absurdly, missing one of its Rs."

Or on poetry's lasting cultural value:

"One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly--maybe--and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. Some scholar will write, a thousand years from now: Surprisingly very little is known of Monica Mcgowan Johnson and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who wrote the 'hair bump' episode of Mary Tyler Moore. Or: Surprisingly little can be be gleaned from the available record about Maya Forbes and Peter Tolan, who had so much to do with the greatness of Larry Sanders.

And even so, I want to lie in bed and just read poems sometimes and not watch TV. Regardless of what will or won't perish."

Only about 40% of the way through Kindred, but I want to say how impressed I am by Butler's technical skills, how disciplined her imagination is, and how good her instincts are as a storyteller. In most hands this material would have been structured into a straight-up historical novel, but the whole time travel structure, as she uses it, greatly enhances the story. It took real insight to avoid the easier path.

Additionally, she very rightly doesn't attempt to explain the time travel; she just presents it as part of the story, imposes some 'rules' about how it will operate and gets on with the core of the storyline. The reader is drawn in and the questions of 'how' or 'why' drop aside naturally. Great story telling!

I'm in a covid funk and, feeling a bit better, randomly picked up Margin Released by JB Priestley, which has been by my bed for years now.

Priestley's at great pains to point out that it's not an autobiography and merely a memoir of writing but I felt I learnt a good deal about him from it all the same. He's a stuffy old bugger, socially conservative (if not politically: he's vocally anti-Tory in a few places, though he's also keen to point out he was never a member of a political party), prone to moralising and doom-mongering and clearly carried anxiety about his lack of critical standing to his grave. I'm a few characters from saying it, so: he comes across as a bluff old Yorkshireman: self-confident, resilient, wry. And, I found him good company in the end. The mid-section, where he doesn't write a war memoir, while writing a thoughtful war memoir, is full of barely-suppressed rage and portrays him as an able soldier and probably a good leader. He is adamant he had a lucky war and I suppose he did - to survive physically and mentally intact is a feat in itself.

He's interesting, if not too revealing, about Bennett, Wells and Shaw but the book does trail off in the final third, where he doesn't really say very much at all about the main chunk of his writing career. There was something there, between the lines, that I wanted to know about (his relationship with Jacquetta Hawkes; his fascination with time; his interest in and relationship with Jung - Priestley as mystic?) but it stays in his pocket. I'll have to go find it elsewhere.

Now reading Christopher Priest's The Affirmation which is, ah, odd.

how are you feeling, Chinaski?

Hey Alfred, thank you for asking. Better today, mercifully. I've been in bed for six days, my throat is still bad (hedgehog nesting on the lower eastside of my larynx) and I'm bone-tired, but so much better than earlier this week. I very much don't recommend it!

Zak M. and dogs, I think that McSweeney is at her best in the critical mode— her book, The Necropastoral, is really astonishingly cogent and well-thought through literary criticism. I have never found much in her poetry— it is, at its heart, "workshopcore," seemingly crafted for the exact environment that McSweeney was educated within and teaches within. It is not very interesting, to my mind, but I know that's a minority opinion.

Re: Toxicon, it functions similarly to Prageeta Sharma's book about the sudden death of her husband, in my mind— both are important books, but I don't find either of them interesting-qua-poetry or convincing as books about loss, but that is probably more a function of the ultimately subjective experience of immense grief than anything else, so I don't say much about either.

I've been trying for months to read the fairly recent Kipling biography If, by Christopher Benfey, and I think I'm just going to have to give up. It started out ok, with the young Kipling, just arrived in America, tracking down Mark Twain's house and managing to talk his way in. But now I'm at the bit where the author talks about Kipling's friendship with Wolcott Balestier, and it's written in this awful suggestive wink-wink-nudge-nudge way that never actually says Wolcott was gay or argues in so many words that Kipling was involved with him romantically, but instead says stuff like this:

Pale as fine porcelain and impossibly slender, Balestier resembled nothing so much as a graceful Meissen figurine, illuminated by candlelight.

If there had been an understanding between Kipling and Carrie...the couple had kept it a secret even from their closest friends. Was there a long-simmering romance, hidden to all? Or had Wolcott Balestier, dying in Dresden, exacted a deathbed promise from his sister to marry his best friend?

(For the record, I've got no objection to the idea of Kipling being gay or bi, though I think the most compelling evidence for his having romantic (not necessarily sexual) feelings toward men is in his writing rather than his biography, and I don't think there's sufficient evidence to say for sure what those feelings added up to. But I dislike the contortions writers go through to hide a lack of evidence for their assertions, and I really dislike it when those contortions feel like the writer elbowing me in the ribs.)

I also dislike that particular contortional style of certain biographers, Lily Dale. I've even found myself reading fewer biographies as a result!

Those two quotes would make me want to throw the book across the room, shouting imprecations.

Currently reading the new Gary Shteyngart (fun), and the Brothers Karamozov for the first time. Other than that, here's what I read this year, a lot of escapism but definitely some good & enjoyable stuff in there:

Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire
Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Barrett Edward Swanson - Lost in Summerland (Essays)
Lorrie Moore - Bark
Patricia Lockwood - Nobody Is Talking About This
Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench
John le Carre - Little Drummer Girl
Rachel Cusk - Second Place
Meghan O’Gieblyn - God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Patricia Lockwood - Priestdaddy
Robin Kelley - Thelonious Monk: The Life & Times of an American Original*
Lauren Groff - Matrix
Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Claire Vaye Watkins - I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
Ayad Akhtar - American Dervish

Do we have a thread for 2021's reading lists yet? I still need to transfer from my planner to a document on the computer. I know it's longer than it's ever been, I think.

Do we have a thread for 2021's reading lists yet?

We do now. What did you read in 2021?

Thank you, Aimless!

eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think?

Aren't the current wave of machine learning AIs typically considered as black boxes because the link between input and output is by its very nature entirely opaque? And maybe hyperdimensionality refers to the fact they process hundreds of billions of parameters? Haven't read the book so feel free to ignore me.

a friend ran a supercomputer in australia of multiple nodes that was wired up not as a grid, or a cube, but as a hypercube. i can imagine a neural net similary connected, or moreso.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDycRoR9VY

_eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think?_

Aren't the current wave of machine learning AIs typically considered as black boxes because the link between input and output is by its very nature entirely opaque? And maybe hyperdimensionality refers to the fact they process hundreds of billions of parameters? Haven't read the book so feel free to ignore me.

lol what i’m trying to say with a v fuzzy head is that i’m not clear the extent to which they’re using “artistic licence” or not. my first impression was “quite a lot” with a caveat about it how much it mattered. but your comments are making me go back and re-evaluate!

Unintepretability/opacity are not givens in machine learning but they’re pretty common problems that take work to overcome and may be in practice insoluble problems.

Pretty much every interesting model describes data in a space with more than three dimensions, ie is “hyperdimensional”.

Whether those observations of facts support the (metaphorical?) deployment of those terms in criticism I don’t know. Hyperdimensionality is extremely mundane in the technical sense, so I’m very skeptical about that being a load bearing term in critical theoretical discussions.

<Whooshing sound from previous posts>

I started to read Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them. It's set in the 14th century, in a remote Norfolkian nunnery; I got about 30 pages in and a derelict, posing as a priest, was hallucinating as he died of the black death and I thought 'do I need this?' and decided no I don't.

Huh, now I want to read it.

She's fantastic and I will go back to it, it just felt a bit on the nose as it were.

Yeah, I think I just have a thing for books set in religious, cloistered communities.

Have you read Frost in May by Antonia White? That's a stunning little book.

Nope! Another added to the Abe list.

The corner that held them is great. Wonderful bunch of women to spend a half century with. Highly recommended.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s quite similar to matrix by Lauren groff, which I’m half way through right now, but the corner that held them’s focus is more prosaic/domestic, eg how will they fix the roof, etc.

ooh, and that's what i like best— the stuff about hay and rooftops and long hard winters

This tweet is how it ended up on my reading list

I'm reading the book, “The Corner that Held Them,” which is about a bunch of nuns at an abby over decades during the plague in the 14th century, and it's just a lot of little episodes, so I've started to treat it like Twitter and think “time to check in on my nuns.”

— Paul Ford (@ftrain) April 19, 2020

Oh I've got to read that!

Unintepretability/opacity are not givens in machine learning but they’re pretty common problems that take work to overcome and may be in practice insoluble problems.

Pretty much every interesting model describes data in a space with more than three dimensions, ie is “hyperdimensional”.

Whether those observations of facts support the (metaphorical?) deployment of those terms in criticism I don’t know. Hyperdimensionality is extremely mundane in the technical sense, so I’m very skeptical about that being a load bearing term in critical theoretical discussions.

The one time I abandon a book and now I can *feel* those nuns lining up to be all like 'so you don't care about our roof eh?'.

Got another 2 added to the about to read list since my Xmas present arrived from my brother.
THe iNconvenient Indian by Thomas King
& Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey ostler.
Both books on the treatment of Native Americans over the 19th & 20th centuries probably a littel more on each end too.

Have had tehm gboth pretty heavily recommended so, great to get them.

I'm thinking of a spectrum from "nuns" to "sexy nuns" with The Corner That Held Them on one end, Benedetta on the other, and Lauren Groff's Matrix right in the center.

If I receive some of the books I'm expecting to receive for the holidays, then I'll be quite busy for a while.

A new comet has been spotted in the skies over ILB, thanks to dow:

Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

that’s interesting table - i found that ‘toxicon…’ transcended its subject matter. i kind of went into it with some trepidation because of the circumstances of its writing, but i found a lot more than that in it. i liked its intensity and knottiness. weirdly i’m less keen on joyelle mcsweeney’s critical work, i like the necropastoral book but i didn’t get much out of her old blog, the gurlesque etc

Lolly Willowes (O052) - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (R)
The Card - Arnold Bennett
Shift - Hugh Howey
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Dark Entries - Robert Aickman (+)
Seeds Of Time - John Wyndham
Slade House - David Mitchell (+)
The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo
The Man Who Was Thursday - G K Chesterton
Autumn - Ali Smith
Bleak House - Charles Dickens (R)
Ramble Book - Adam Buxton
XX - Ryan Hughes
The Old Man And The Sea - Earnest Hemingway (+)
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
Inverted World - Christopher Priest
The Story Of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
One Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes
Amber Fury - Natalie Haynes
Alcestis - Euripides
Agamemnon - Aeschylus
Death’s End - Cixin Liu
Children Of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
Driftglass - Sam Delany
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
24 Jigsaw - Ed McBain
The Monarch Of The Glen - Neil Gaiman
Black Dog - Neil Gaiman
Body In The Library - Agatha Christie
An Event In Autumn - Mankell
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) - Thomas Hardy (+)
The Castle Of Otranto - Horace Walpole
O009 Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
1848 Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
Small Island - Andrea Levy
Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler (R) (+)
The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
Anna Of The Five Towns - Arnold Bennett (+)
Slaughterhouse V - Kurt Vonnegut (R)
Sketches By Boz - Charles Dickens

(R) = reread
(+) = favourites, probably

(that's 40+, helped by skipping the usual long foreign novel in spring and reading a bunch of sub-200 page things in october)

wrong thread, dipshit

dogs, yeah, I guess that I was unmoved by the knottiness of Toxicon— it felt forced and unsurprising, plodding.