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

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!

Have you read any Christopher Priest before, Chinaski?

Have you read any Christopher Priest before, Chinaski?

I read Inverted World a long time ago but don't remember much about it. This is deliberately dislocating, but also has that icy affectlessness I associate with Ballard. It also reminds me of Red Shift by Alan Garner, with its stiff jump cuts and narrative games. It's unsettling but (mostly) in a good way.

That sounds about right, although I still haven't read Red Shift.

Driss Chaibi - The Simple Past
J. Rodolfo Wilcock - The Temple of Iconoclasts

The Simple Past has these angry moods, mostly directed at the father but its just a generally anxious mood that's conjured up. Willcock's book is better than anything the lppl around Borges have ever come up with. Its a fake encyclopedia of scientists, philosophers and makers of a could've been modern world, and I haven't read this much joy in making shit up for a long time.

I got the Chaibi over the summer on a whim but haven't read it; would you say you liked it?

Yeah it's really good though it took me a little while to tune into the voice at first.

Thanks, yeah I think that's what's been keeping me, and a novel is an "investment" in a way that sometimes seems preventive...maybe over the holidays before the year's end.

I'm reading Ruskin for the first time -- the political writing.

MFK Fisher, How To Cook A Wolf. A delight so far.

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)

Huh. Saw a staging of An Inspector Calls once and it felt super explicitly socialist.

I'm a chapter away from the end of Crazy Horse Stange Man of teh Lakptas by Mari Sandoz. Been interesting. I think I will try to read afew more by her.

Finished How tO Rig An election by Cheeseman and Raas. So now have a better idea of what to look out for in authoritarian regimes looking to cover up just how authoritarian they are.

Started a book on Class, Caste and stuff which I've had lying around too long.

I've been reading Stafford's "The Mountain Lion", which I associate as an ILB fave, since I've seen it mentioned a few times.

Read Prynne's "Enchanter's Nightshade" and "Efflux Reference," two chapbooks of his from the past year or so. Will certainly read more Prynne this year than any other author, and all of it has been published since 2019! The man is prolific to say the least.

The Mountain Lion is great!

I finished Kindred last night. Butler accomplished no small feat here, vividly showing many distinct strands that were involved in the reality of slavery in the USA, by making each one visible in itself, while showing how deeply entangled they all were.

My library hold on Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman, came in, along with the sequel to Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman, called Which Lie Did I Tell. Now I'll read one, then the other, or both at once. Hard to say.

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)

Huh. Saw a staging of An Inspector Calls once and it felt super explicitly socialist.

It does seem odd, given his obvious and professed socialist leanings and his involvement with CND and the foundation of the welfare state etc. He professedly disliked the bureaucratic nature of politics and probably pissed too many people off to be useful in any organisational sense.

I admired Christoper Priest's The Affirmation without ever really enjoying it.

To be a bit SPOLIERY about it... It involves a narrator who, in the writing of his autobiography, seems to experience a psychotic break. During that break, he imagines he wins a lotterie (sic), the prize for which is a procedure that effectively grants the winner immortality. However, the procedure means total amnesia, so the winner writes an autobiography from which to 're-learn' oneself after the procedure is over. The two narratives sort of spiral around one another and it ends up being a little like China Mieville's The City and The City, with one reality transposed over the other. It's clever, but I found it maddening. Which may well have been Priest's point.

The not spoilery version: I wondered if the book is really about the writer's life; the act of creation and the over-identifying with the art form - sort of like Flaubert falling in love with Emma Bovary and then some. Weirdly, a quote from the JB Priestley book I read the day before seems to explain it quite well (I didn't realise I needed a priest; turned out I needed two):

One curious by-product of fiction, for those who write it, is worth mentioning. To imagine intensely is to add to experience. We remember scenes we wrote long after we have forgotten our daily life at that time. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we were not there, except in imagination. When we begin a novel, which is what most of us do only when we have run out of excuses for not beginning it, we are hesitant and have no confidence in ourselves, probably writing the opening paragraph over and over again. We are like small children who creep up to the sea, put a toe in, then scamper to safety. But once we are writing steadily we return in the morning to the dark road, the brilliant crowded room, the ship among the flying fish, whatever scene we left the night before, and in five minutes the sustained fable seems to be life, while all the life surrounding us is as thin and flickering as a dream. Then, years afterwards, as we wander among our memories, we are standing on that dark road again, we are looking down on that brilliant crowded room, leaning over the rail of the upper deck we watch the flying fish once more. Our experience has been enlarged and enriched by the inventions of our trade. Nobody looking at us could guess all that we have seen and known. We have lived more lives than one.

Priest at his best creates, how to say this, multiple levels of reality, where in the beginning one is supposed to be the “real”world, the other clearly fictional and fantastical but eventually the two get tangled up like the DNA strands of an old telephone cord and one can’t pick them apart again. It’s amazing how many times he pulled this trick off, although I haven’t kept up with his latest

30 pages left in malina, the greatest book ever written by anybody. gonna start in a lonely place right after that :)

Oh hell yes, glad you like Malina, Brad. I finished it right before a therapy session a few years ago and really bored my poor shrink to tears just rambling about it lol

That's the elbowing I needed.

Brad, you'll dig IALP.

I tried reading Reign of Terror last night, but it kept telling me about awful, depressing events that I had observed as a contemporary and remembered well. The subtitle promised that it would explain how all this happened, but it mainly boiled down to horrible people like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in positions of power in a greedy nation that has a multitude of racists and easily manipulated, miseducated fools. This is not a revelation.

Onward I go, to Goldman's Hollywood insider gossip!

I finished The Magician, Colm Toibin's novel about Thomas Mann. Not as revelatory as The Master, but a sharp peek at the nexus of European cosmpolitan intellectuals and the FDR White House. I keep forgetting that (a) Mann's two oldest children were gay and lesbian (b) EriKa Mann married W.H. Auden.

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.