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

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

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

― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table),

Mine too.

last of the month of short books is Nightmare Abbey but I'm not up enough on the source material to get any of the jokes. (i presume there are jokes)

Just reading up on By Night in Chile now and I should reread the first half again. I didn't realize the implications of the falconry during the visit to Europe.

xxxpost re Jacobs:
Also a good critique of her strengths and limitations---as an urban observer and philosopher, and as an influence on activists----in Marshall Berman's great All That Is Solid Melts Into Air---at least it's in the edition I read, published in the twilight of the Reagan years, when historian Berman looks back at Jacobs in context of the struggle with Robert Moses, neoliberal, neoconservative, and other urban real estate fever causes/symptoms (he's the ideal guide, starting with the Saint-Simonists' visions of building, and their influence on fan Goethe's Faust Part 2, Peter the Great's uilding of St. Petersburg (petri dish of modern art and revolution, eventually. and Berman tracks all that too), to Hausmann's realignment of Paris, reaction of that from Le Corbusier, critique of both by young Robert Moses, who started out as a benign idealist...Berman also chronicles Moses through longterm effect on Berman's native Bronx, among all the other increasingly bizarre "improvements" around NYC.)
Anyway, an amazing book, and he's sensitive to but firm with Jacobs, is our Prof Berman (I would have loved to audit his class, without risking his grading).

Thanks from me too for that book suggestion. I'm finishing up The Power Broker and I've thought about reading Jacobs.

I think power broker has dated a lot better than jacobs.

Thanks dow

I'm reading Diana Athill's Stet, a memoir of her time as a publisher and editor. Despite Athill being consistently good company, I found the early chapters fairly rote but the second half - concerned with particular writers - is proving more interesting. The chapter on Jean Rhys is actually pretty extraordinary so I'm glad I stuck with it.

Finished 'Of Better Scrap,' which is probably the most accessible of Prynne's recent output— as I think I've mentioned here before, he's probably put close to 500 pages worth of poems out in the past three years.

Now onto a chapbook from German innovative poet Ulf Stolterfoht, 'Nine Drugs'. Seems to be about drugs.

I finished the second novella in the 2 novella collection "Family & Borghesia" by Natalia Ginzburg. I might have slightly preferred the first one, but honestly could pipe these straight into my veins.

she's been my discovery of the year

I don't know how she does it. Seems she doesn't write like anybody else. It shouldn't work.

I discovered Rachel Kushner. The Strange Case of Rachel K didn't feel like an adequate distillation of her. No? Anyway, I missed The Flamethrowers in 2013 and will pick it up tomorrow.

Love that book. More novels should be set during the Years of Lead.

listening to Gary Shteyngart on Fresh Air, talking about new novel and cultural backstory----Our Country Friends is about eight friends riding out the COVID pandemic in the country home of a Russian-born American writer.Mostly immigrants, arts workers from NYC, now upstate. I like some of the comments, and the excerpt about the writer stressing over doing justice, somehow, to the beauty of "the stillness" up and out there. Is he good?

Talking about culture vulture "carpetbaggers" flooding Kingston etc., prices and scarcity of housing driving out locals---seems like "might" be effectively seriocomic, but certainly can't tell from Fresh Air marketplace of expert self-promotion, for so many arts workers.

He had a good piece in the New Yorker recently about a botched circumcision that came back to haunt him much later in life.

My circumcision came back to haunt me, too, but that's because I was circumcized yesterday.

i'm reading 'the price of salt, or carol' and it's a much more enjoyable reading experience than any i've had in a long time--not because of the book itself, but because i finally bought reading glasses, which i've needed for two years.

I have our country friends on my to read list. I liked super sad love story but I haven’t read anything he’s written since and I can’t promise even that’s aged well.

Two-thirds of the way through Camus's The Plague and I think I can completely dismiss the theory that it is an allegory for the Nazi occupation of Europe. My sense is that Camus wanted to use his personal experience of war and his deep interest in how those around him responded to that war, while purposely and strenuously avoiding writing a WWII novel. What seems to interest him most in this book is the psychology of individuals and a society thrown out of their normal habits into a situation where the ordinary habits of 'normal' life must suddenly adjust to an all-pervading sense of danger. iow, I think he deliberately chose to base his book within a city under quarantine with a raging plague in order to disentangle his insights from the particulars of WWII, so as to achieve a greater universality.

The next question is how well does he succeed, or put differently, are his insights valid? Since we're all living in plague times, I'd say he's remarkably successful in describing how his characters and his city in general respond to the bubonic/pneumonic plague (which is a different beast than covid19). Where I have noted discrepancies and inconsistencies, they are technical failures concerning details of no importance, similar to websites that compile lists of 'goofs' in films, like disappearing and reappearing props in the same scene. The psychology seems pretty reliably sound, even if they are sometimes obvious transpositions from wartime that don't quite fit into the plague scenario.

idk, he's pretty clear in the book about the plague being an allegory for something that we are all complicit in just by virtue of being here, which obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes. That seems to me to line up more with the occupation than with just general observations about wartime and the pervading feeling of danger.

for something that we are all complicit in just by virtue of being here, which obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes. Also describes the way I'm coming to think of the climate crisis. Acceptance is always easier, at some point (but not all).

obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes.

I can't quite agree with this summation. the narrator makes it clear that this he does not consider this as an obligation. for example he acknowledges that the journalist from France who wishes to escape the quarantined city in order to reconnect with his lover is entirely justified in attempting to evade the rules and get away. the narrator never frames the decision to combat the plague in moralistic terms of necessary responsibility or guilt by omission. all responses to it are treated as equally human.

It's true, Rieux and Tarrou take slightly different views of it; I was summarizing Tarrou's view, which is the most extreme one. But even Tarrou thinks people have a choice; it's just that doing or not doing something about the plague is baked into the choices you make. And the book recognizes that human connection and our responsibility to people we love are deeply important too; that's why Rieux can't judge Rambert for wanting to choose a relationship over fighting the plague.

yeah, escaping to be with your family sounds like a morally defensible position in occupied France too tbf

Illuminations Walter Benjamin
Mopping up of several shorter pieces that the German man of letters wrote. Quite enjoying it. Been meaning to read him for a while. This comes with a foreword by Hannah Arendt which is also quite interesting.

Cruel Britannia : A Secret History of Torture Ian Cobain
History of state sanctioned torture since the 2nd World War. Starts off quite amusingly with a very ill informed German spy walking into a British pub in the early morning looking to be served and ordering in a European accent. Seems a tad conspicuous really. But looking into the Cage and ts treatment of Fascist supporters. Enjoying this, it's sat in a pile for a few months.

Black Sci-Fi Short Stories
an anthology book I got as an interlibrary loan because it has a complete version of Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood included. I just read W.E.B. Du Bois The Comet which i thought had a different ending. Have read a couple of pages of the Hopkins which looks interesting and dates back to 1902. There are a few other entries that are very vintage too which is intriguing

There has been some decolonial theory honed in on The Plague in recent years, for obvious reasons. One of the most interesting things about that book is that nearly everyone involved is a European colonist, or descended from such.

While Camus's fictional Oran may be set in an unspecified location in North Africa, the reasons for this choice are mostly to create a sense of distance, isolation and dislocation. An author today might choose to set it in a space colony and essentially write the same book.

Distance, isolation, and dislocation of European settlers. No mention is made of the people who live there who aren't European settlers, except a small note in the book's beginning.