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

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.

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!

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 9:32 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've been running into this problem more and more these days. Tried reading Harsha Walia's "Border & Rule" over the summer, and I got three sections in and put it down because it wasn't telling me much that I didn't already know.

The Mountain Lion is great!

Yes, I've been enjoying it so far. The setting in an early 20th-century Western small town reminded me of Cather's Song of the Lark, but whereas the main character in that book is clearly destined for greater things, its not clear whether the two children in Stafford's book will even survive adolescence. At the beginning of the book, I was worried that having children as the main characters was going to make the book a bit twee. At first their eccentricities seem like the usual Wes Anderson terrain. But as the book progresses you realize that Stafford is not going to flinch from depicting the ugly and disturbing aspects of childhood and adolescence.

Good analogy.

NYRB just reissued Boston Adventure, her debut novel and long out of print. I tried reading it a decade ago and gave up; the edition's print was too small.

I'm reading "Mountain Lion" in the Library of America edition with all 3 of her novels. But I'm not sure I'll have to time to read the others before its due back at the library.

Started Biased by Jennifer Eberhardt this morning. Finding it a compelling read . Talking about confirmation bias and various other forms of unconscious biases. I think this wasa book on a couple of recommended lists I got from people, I think Angela Saini was one of the sources.
BUt yeah great book so far, may have heard teh author interviewed on podcasts last year too.

picked up some good books yesterday. Unfortunately didn't get Song OF Solomon by Toni Morrison cos the card machine was bust in the charity shop I was in and i haven't been carrying cash.

im reading a biography of john o'hara~

Once O'Hara found himself at a bar sitting beside a midget. Somehow they fell into a quarrel and O'Hara got ready to fight. Just then another midget materialized so there was one to his right and one to his left. Finding himself being grabbed from both sides, O'Hara pulled his shoulders back, hoping to throw off the midgets like a pair of gnats. But they pushed him and he fell on his back on the sawdust floor. The two midgets then jumped on him and begun to pummel him. The bartender broke up the fight and threw O'Hara out of the bar. O'Hara was astonished and outraged. Apart from the shame of the defeat, he knew that John Steinbeck was present and had seen the whole episode. By common unspoken consent, neither of them ever mentioned it afterwards.

Wow. I loved O'Hara in high school. As a summer "boy's trip" before I went to university, my dad and I went to Pottsville and did the John O'Hara walking tour and also toured the Yuengling factory, back before we knew the family were a bunch of bigots.

I never thought of an O'Hara walking tour! I too loved him in high school, or at least relished the lowdown on what adults wee up to, esp. in a small town like mine, also the City.
Boston Adventure is another you might think would be xpost twee, from the title, but noooo---what I remember of it is pretty awesome, esp. the injustice-collecting Mom. Don't recall The Catherine Wheel at all: her last novel, and some crits say a let-down, but there are those on ILB who've said it's really good, so I'll have to get back to it.

Anthony Doerr has a new one---is he good?
An appealing take on Laurie Colwin's food writing (picky realness, frequently but not always low budget) and fiction in The New Yorker, and how they dovetail, to the extent that her anxious, ever-aspiring characters tend to be into food and wine and talismanic objects, incl. their arrangement---some passing comparisons to domestic-social life in George Eliot novels etc.--is Colwin good?

Mishima - sun and steel

I read a book of Barry Lopez's essays About This Life, which was levitatingly beautiful in places but lacked the holistic focus of something like Arctic Dreams and drifted in places. One essay, about a community-run anagama (a Japanese-style wood kiln) in an forest in Oregon, was close to perfect and what Lopez does best: a mix of deep learning and precisely rendered close observation. It's online here: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Before+the+temple+of+fire%3A+in+the+Oregon+woods%2C+tending+the+art+of...-a020121815

Now reading Anthony Penrose's book about his mum The Lives of Lee Miller. Her story is obviously extraordinary and the photography included is beautiful but it's not the place to come for any kind of critical engagement whatsoever (and I'm probably a mug to expect it).

About to finish Joey Yearous-Algozin's 'A Feeling Called Heaven,' which harnesses the cadences of new age meditation records as a way to put forth some ideas about climate destabilization. Really interesting work.

Wm Goldman's Which Lie Did I Tell? is proving to be everything one could ask for in a book of Hollywood-insider anecdotes. It is quite amusing and nothing in it matters in the slightest to anyone not employed in Hollywood. My only remaining doubt is whether I can stick with all 400+ pages of three-to-eight paragraph anecdotes about film industry figures. That's a hell of a lot of amusing and inconsequential anecdotes to try to absorb.

I just read it for the first time in my forties, but was bowled over Harriet the Spy, and by how honest and funny and original it was.

xpost Both Goldman books are in my loo (next to the Tina Brown and Russell T Davies memoirs). They’re fantastic but I can’t imagine reading them straight through! Iirc “Lie” is the funnier, meaner book of the two, but more uneven.

Anthony Doerr has a new one---is he good?

No idea. My wife bought "All the Light We Cannot See" a few years ago and it has sat unread on our shelves ever since.

The natural progression from boiling water to boiling water with something in it can hardly be avoided, and in most cases is heartily to be wished for. As a steady diet, plain water is inclined to make thin fare, and even saints, of which there are an unexpected number these days, will gladly agree that a few herbs and perhaps a carrot or two and maybe a bit of meagre bone on feast days can mightily improve the somewhat monotonous flavour of the hot liquid.

Soup, in other words, is good.

-"How To Cook A Wolf", MFK Fisher

started in a lonely place, totally astonishing writing

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.

Finished Prynne's "None Yet More Willing Told," now onto "Squeezed White Noise." One more Prynne book before I'll have read all of his output from the past 2.5 years or so, nearly 500 pages of poems.

I've been reading When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. These pieces straddle the line between historical fiction and nonfiction somewhat in the manner of Eric Vuillard's The Order of the Day or Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful, ie. stories about real people and real events but with imagined details added. The subjects of Labatut's book are scientists and mathematicians. He romanticizes the process of scientific discovery in a similar way to how Dyer romanticized the process of musical creation in jazz. It seems that it helps to be a bit crazy in order to glimpse the reality underneath the surface of things, and if you try to see too much you might actually lose your mind.

I finished Which Lie Did I Tell?, which in its final third swerved away from insider gossip into pure shop talk -- of deep interest to aspiring screenwriters, but to few other people.

Now I'm re-reading Albert Camus' The Plague, which I last read nearly 50 years ago, so it will be as new to me as if I'd never read it before.

Finished Prynne's 'Squeezed White Noise,' now onto his 'Of Better Scrap,' his longest book in recent memory. I begin facilitating a poetry manuscript workshop next week, so my time for pleasure reading will be significantly cut until mid-December, but I am hoping I can tackle a few things here and there...and also hoping I can finish the last of the Prynnes before that begins!

I read Soldiers of Salamis after comments on the Best Novels of 2001 (?) thread. It's a novel about a particular event towards the end of the Spanish Civil War and utilises a kind of Rashomon structure to explore the event and its implications. I found the first half kind of maddening, particularly the conceit of the struggling author and the deliberately overcoded unreliable narrator but the second half (final third, I guess) damn near broke me - and, of course, it made Cercas' structural choices all the more dazzling. What a stunning novel.

Now reading Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man.

Crews - Freud: The Making of an Illusion

Christ what an asshole

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (re-read)
Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

what'd you think of the Greenwell?

Only just started it, but his writing sure is lovely.

Pasnik, Grimley, and Kubo, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53616862e4b0faf27342e4b3/1535985495273-VZA687KNYTWSGE1ZFMTK/Brutal+corner.jpg?format=500w

Jane Jacobs The Death And Life of Great American Cities
I saw a talk on this American writer last year and possibly another one before. I knew enough to tie her into the film Motherless Brooklyn though I don't think she actually appears the baddy in that is based on her great nemesis anyway.
This book is her looking at what she believes works in terms of what I think would be categorised as Town Planning though it seems more organic here at the turn of the 60s.
I enjoy the writing style and find the points made pretty logical and straightforward once revealed.
Have wound up at a load of town planning related webinars over tyeh course of teh pandemic so finding this which may be a prevalent influence very interesting.

A Brief History of 7 Killings Marlon James
I think I am really getting too many really good books out at the same time so I've been neglecting this though had started with teh first several chapters a while back. Just read another couple.
The book shows the story of teh Bob marley shooting from teh perspective of a load of different characters who were around at the time so has a load of different voices. I think it's done really well so far.
I caught a webinar with teh writer last year so really should have read this earlier and now I have a load of books on the go at the same time. Also have his Black Leopard, Red Wolf sitting on a table here unlooked at.

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir Patrisse Khan-Cullors
Finding this a really good read, pretty scathing talk about her upbringing. Shge grew up with a one parent family though she was bright and wound up in very white schools where she seemed to be the only BIPOC student, she had to deal with police brutality directed at her brothers as she grew up. Had a mainly gentle older brother taken away to prison and returned as a near zombie because of over and mainly wrong medication for treating his bipolar condition.
I like the writing, it seems to be straight from teh heart though there does seem to be a ghost or co writer

Just finished By Night in Chile.

I didn't like it as much as the Bolaño epics, but it got better and better as it went along. I feel like I would appreciate it even more if I were Chilean or new more about the dictatorship. The house party had that Bolaño everyday creepiness.

love By Night in Chile, my favorite Bolaño, actually!

Steveolende, you'd probably be interested in taking a look at the numerous essays talking about the absolute destruction that Jacobs' philosophies have wrought on major urban landscapes. There are more strident and theory-driven reads out there, but here's a quick and loose primer on her oversights and mis-understandings: https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-jane-jacobs-got-wrong-about-cities