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

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.

For anyone interested in more about Camus and La Peste in some political context: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41648

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

It's still haunting me, too (ie his penis problems after reading that piece). 'Lake Success' is underrated though, it's come to mind many times since reading it and is very funny.

Yes, I know it's a biased perspective. I like the book, and have read it multiple times in both languages. But it's worth noting its omission of what happens in a city-wide plague to those who were there first.

Finished Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, which I liked in fits and starts. Two of the ugliest (and longest) sex scenes I've ever read, and some of the touristy bits bored me after a while. But the opening and (especially) the closing chapters are strong, and surprisingly sweet. I like that this gay novel ends with its hero, having struck out with his twunky student, cuddling with a dog.

I'm reading The Makioka Sisters, which is wonderful so far. I definitely want to get a bunch more Tanizaki books. The pages just flow by.

Mary Robinson book on Climate Justice
ex-Irish Head of State's introductory book on the subject. Ties in with her UN work in the area which sounds like it might be a tad white saviourish so hope it's being done well. I picked it up cos it wasa pristine copy for a Euro and I thought it might be ok. I wasn't sure it was the same Mary Robinson.
Now taken it into the bathroom to look at the introduction and wound up with it taking over current readig there from Cruel Britannia the book on torture in the UK since the 2nd World War.

Illuminations Walter benjamin
collection of various shorter written work by German Thinker. I read the piece on art in the age of mass production this morning . Interesting. Have been meaning to read him for ages and somehow never come across a cheap copy when I've had money at least. Think I need to keep an eye out still. This was a library copy.

How To Argue With A Racist Mick Rutherford
genealogist shows problems with race science.

for a sec I thought, "The Genesis guitarist writes about race science?"

"How to argue with a racist Genesis guitarist"

right adam and mick same name surely?
I don't think that's the important bit here.

so i wrote quite a long thing on what i've been reading as it's been a while since i posted. then somehow it deleted, fortunately for you all. so now i'm going to do a one line summary for each book:

Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche.

The Ring and the Book - Robert Browning
Often fantastic, often interminable playing around with historical and poetical perspective on a single event in 1698: fake news, epistemic kaleidescopes, browning on a tear.

Cogs and Monsters - Diane Coyle
Excellent assessment on the failures and perceived failures of economics and sifting the two, with specific focus on its terrible failures of diversity and tearing down of straw man arguments agains the value of economics.

All that Foundation Shit - Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a garbage writer, honestly the guy could not write for shit, and the Foundation series is facile as fuck, but as often with him, he did click on a central point of fascination: let's look at epochal history through a series of critical points, dramatised. Three-Body Problem is so much better but wouldn't exist without Asimov. (ok that was two sentences fuck you)

The Secret Life of Money - Tess Read and Dan Davies
V good primer on the practical models of businesses and money.

Virus: The Day of Resurrection - Sakyo Komatsu
no surprise this shit is a favourite of Hideo Kojima, with incredibly long slightly crazy and boring speeches about The World and Society - it's great fun to read this in the light of Covid, also *so much smoking i thought it was a plot device*.

The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and the Forty Years that Shook the World - Patrick Wyman
Really fucked me off with its BBC history documentary style of imaging stuff the writer couldn't know - it may even be good, and i guess i'll finish it at some point.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Thank god for open kitchens these days imo, but oftten very entertaining.

The Gunman - Jean-Patrick Manchette
He tried to get out but they dragged him back in: fascinated by trying to locate this French gun-for-hire novel in a specific year from its trappings of observed culture and will post more.

The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of the Churchill Pledge – Reread of a newly expanded edition, a wonderful insight into pastoral military and its influence on self-perceptions of Englishness.

Universal Methods of Design – Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington: methods for structuring insights into design methodologies. a very useful reference book - so many of them absolutely require people to be in the same space, and i wonder if distributed workforces will require new ways of executing this sort of process.

Max Weber: A Biography - Joachim Radkau
Biographer consumed by subject in a psychological way (haven't finished, because its lol hueg, but great intro imo)

Shibumi - Trevanian
Fascistic-sadistic-misogynistic anti-American ideology combined with highly detailed speleological element and enjoyable Basque independence plot line.

Deep Wheel Orcadia - Harry Josephine Giles
Science fiction poem in Orkney/Scottish dialect, about people on the edge of things, labour, their space station, resources, history, and is surprisingly successful and interesting - will post more.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy – Carl Shapiro and Hal R Varian
About the business economics of the internet, published in 1999 and full of wonderful ironies, like the discussion of the battle between Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta, that adds considerably to what is already a useful and interesting book.

Good Housekeeping Invalid Cookery Book – Florence B Jack
So. much. beef. tea. Fascinating to see such a different relation of food to sickness and health than we have now - a subject worth much more exploration.

Logic: A Complete Introduction – Siu-Fan Lee
Yeah great I should have learned logic at school, and to get the most out of this you probably need to apply it regularly, but doesn't hurt to practice a bit and this seems like a decent primer that takes you up to and includes basic propositional calculus.

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities – Jean Baudrillard
Love this, so easy to read, and I don't care whether it's *right* or not, which would anyway be an odd standard to apply, it's just great fun and yeah he's playing with some stuff that's clearly applicable today in a way that other people couldn't see

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon
All about being a c'nt at work, this is actually one of the better 'do things better in your company', like work with word documents which you give people time to read, rather than powerpoints. Doesn't cover gross exploitation and fundamental immorality of overall business model sorry.

oh did i do

Lydia and Maynard - the letters of Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, I did not. Charming and peculiar in many respects, with JMK shooting between epochal international conferences, and Lopokova dancing and irritating the Bloomsbury set and them both utterly charming each other with affection and intellect.

Awesome, that last looks most appealing of all thx.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche. Got this, it's great!

All that Foundation Shit - Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a garbage writer, honestly the guy could not write for shit, and the Foundation series is facile as fuck, but as often with him, he did click on a central point of fascination: let's look at epochal history through a series of critical points, dramatised. Three-Body Problem is so much better but wouldn't exist without Asimov. (ok that was two sentences fuck you) Also otm---although, having gotten The Foundation Trilogy as bonus for joining the Science Fiction Book Club, when I was 9, I''ve always been immune to his notorious prose, though always liked the spare or sparse approach (word is the forthcoming stream will be tarted up with aliens and mysticism and shit). Also always liked history as predictive sci-math-art, and how that went...Also poignant reveal of The Mule.

i read the schorske book earlier in the year & yes fascinating period. found the section on the architecture possibly the most interesting part despite having very little knowledge or interest in the subject generally.

currently reading norman douglas' old calabria describing his sometimes arduous but mostly leisurely traipse through southern italy in the early part of the last century.

I'm reading The Makioka Sisters, which is wonderful so far. I definitely want to get a bunch more Tanizaki books. The pages just flow by.

Try Some Prefer Nettles next, it's quite short with a lot to say about the westernization/modernization of Japan.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, another of those Greek classics retold by female characters, this one feels like it must have almost written itself. From the perspective of the treatment of woman it's harsher than Madeline Miller's Circe (maybe just because it's more realistic), but less lyrical and the slang ('eat shit', 'fuck's sake', 'gagging for it') does jar somewhat. In Circe Odysseus really does come across as both charming and cunning, not here (he's the one who uses the phrase 'gagging for it').

For whatever reason (idk my personality/sleeping four hours a night), I am all over the place atm and so’s my reading.

A couple of weeks ago a friend linked me this incredible essay about the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, which I’ve read on and off since I was a teenager but haven’t read at all since my late twenties. The essay was so great, it just totally got what the series is about and the moral core that’s wound throughout it like a vein, and I ended up buying not just the latest book but also the previous four books and I read them all in the past two weeks along with some of the older ones.

Based on this essay, I also bought the writer’s own White City which I picked up from a bookshop yesterday and will read in the next fortnight. The Guardian review says:

White City synthesises familiar forms into a whole: the rogue’s confession, the young man finding his way, the post-Celtic Tiger satire on puffed-up, self-perpetuating bullshit businesses. Our guide is 27-year-old Ben, son of a disgraced Dublin banker, languishing in rehab and writing an account of his wrong turns as therapy. He’s half-bookish, half-lazy, really just wants to write his terrible-sounding novel (“Decay: A Report”), and only gets a job when his father is charged with embezzling €600m from his bank and the money tap is turned off.

Ben encounters an old schoolfriend, Mullens, who seduces him into joining a dodgy property deal in Serbia via the promise of a few million euro and lashings of meaningless banter (“Shake it handy, and if you can’t shake it handy, shake it hard”). This leads to a certain amount of capering with a bunch of Serbs who are mostly portrayed as sinister: but the Irish characters are mostly stupid or corrupt, so there’s equality of insult.

But an even bigger danger is sex, as a reporter we’ll call Chester found out. Chester doesn’t ride his bike as much as he used to because, about a year ago, he had a bad cycling accident after a romantic interlude. He was writing a story on topless dancers when he struck up a friendship with Lola. Maybe Lola fancied herself a Marilyn Monroe to his Arthur Miller. Who knows. All Chester knows is that one evening she called him up and said she was lying around in her bed at Trump Palace, and could he come over. He hopped on his bike and was there in fifteen minutes. They went at it for three hours. Then she said he had to leave because she lived with someone and the guy was coming home. Any minute.

Chester ran out of the building and jumped on his bike, but there was a problem. His legs were so shaky from having sex they started cramping up just as he was going down Murray Hill, and he crashed over the curb and slid across the pavement. “It really hurt,” he said. “When your skin is scraped off like that, it’s like a first-degree burn.” Luckily, his nipple did eventually grow back.

Yes!

The Silent Woman's still my favorite Malcolm.

I haven't read the Sex and the City columns, but I do like the book, which I think is basically columns strung together. I remember reading the line, "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and thinking, wow, this is a completely different voice from the show, and it's great.

Though actually the first season of the show is a lot closer in tone to the book than the rest of the show is, which is why I like it better. I wish they'd kept those cynical little parody interviews with random New Yorkers.

Yes I do mean the book that’s the columns- I specified cos the sort of disjointed flow is interesting to me and also iirc she’s since written a couple of tie-in novels more in line with the series which, no.

I think s1 is pretty similar plot wise but the casting and tone are still quite different. New York in the columns is scary, harsh and hard. Even when the show is cutting, it’s never as quite as harsh as

It was just three years ago Christmas that Carrie had been living in a studio apartment where an old lady had died two months before. Carrie had no money. A friend lent her a piece of foam for a bed. All she had was a mink coat and a Louis Vuitton suitcase, both of which were stolen when the apartment was inevitably robbed. But until then, she slept on the piece of foam with the fur coat over her, and she still went out every night. People liked her, and nobody asked questions. One night, she was invited to yet another party at someone’s grand Park Avenue apartment. She knew she didn’t really fit in, and it was always tempting to stuff your face on the free food, but you couldn’t do that. Instead, she met a man who had a name. He asked her to dinner, and she thought, Fuck you, all of you.

Oh yeah for sure. The show toned it way down, even in the first season. But it still had some of that bite, and I wish they'd kept it like that.

It's been a few years since I read the book so I don't remember the details that well, I just remember liking it a lot and being surprised by how much of an edge it had.

The Gossip Girl books are similar - clear-eyed, observant, funny, merciless - they’re the sort of books Harriet the Spy might have grown up to write. The series is more like Dynasty for teens, although like S&TC, it’s enjoyable in its own way.

(Also to tie it in with Janet Malcolm, who wrote a fun column in the New Yorker in praise of the GG books.)

I’d never read this column but have read some of the books, but you know when you start reading a thing and know you’re instantly going to love it?

As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store.” This is the exact type of black comedy that Cecily von Ziegesar, the author of the best-selling “Gossip Girl” novels for teen-age girls, excels in.

Oh also, I found a pdf of the Midwich Cuckoos on an old usb last night and I got three quarters of the way through it yesterday. Will finish tonight. Weirdly funny.

> The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

the new one's out now, Women Of Troy, which is less homer's Iliad and more euripedes' Troades from the reviews i've seen. but it sounds like you weren't that impressed by the previous one so...

currently reading 'Mary Barton', which is dickensian without any of the funny bits. (Hard Times is probably the closest dickins, but this is grimmer. manchester cotton mills in a down period, people starving)

Mary Barton was stern stuff. I haven't picked up another Gaskell.

i am halfway through. however, i did see the chapter titles which contain spoilers - "Not Guilty!"

North and South has a similar setting but fewer people going deaf and/or blind and/or dead, focus more on the romance / industrial iirc.

the only other stuff of hers i've read is her contributions to dickens' christmas editions of his magazines (which were mostly anonymous, at the time)

The Silent Woman is so great - something I'd like to read again. I'd say Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession probably edges it for me but both are amazing.

I'm reading Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. It's a collection of his columns for the Building Design magazine, where he undertook a series of visits to British cities - inspired by no less than JB Priestley - looking at the failures of the New Labour project and the scars left on the urban environment. I'd assumed I'd find this hard going because I lack any specialist knowledge of the subject, but Hatherley is great company and wears his learning lightly. He's naturally pretty scathing about the PFI wastelands he finds in the various cities (Southampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Nottingham etc) but there is a sense of it being locked in 2010 due to the 'end of capitalism' feel that permeates the text: everything is held in suspension post-2008 and there's an awful seesaw of hope/despair that from this vantage point feels oddly utopian. Also, because of the gazetteer nature of the visits to the cities, everything feels a bit rushed compared to the astonishing Southampton chapter - a city Hatherley knows best of all having grown up there.

This is an aside, and I know it was messy and fractured and lots of the feeling is retroactive and rose-tinted, but christ do I miss that golden period of blogs and the sense of hope and unity that came with them.

line of the day, at least: "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and not just because I've known people like that.
mention of Mary Barton reminds me I'd been wondering about Lucy Barton's creator, Elizabeth Strout--local library has a ton of her books---descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered, Jean Staffordesue (though also remind me of a favorite line of greeting cards)---is she good?

Staffordesque duh sorry

Read Gilda Musa's 'Total Memory,' translated by my friendly acquaintance Nicole Trigg. Interesting stuff.

Now onto a friend's book of poetry, which I love but...well, he needs an editor. There's too much going on.

Might put that down and read either one of the newer Jalal Toufic books or Rabbih Alameddine's "KOOL AIDS" next.

I'm also facilitating a manuscript workshop at the moment, so I read two pretty fascinating manuscripts over the weekend.

descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered

Caustic and layered is an excellent description of Olive Kitteridge, both of those are good.

Mary Barton was stern stuff. I haven't picked up another Gaskell.

I think you would probably like Wives and Daughters a lot, actually.

Whoops, meant to italicize that first line - that was me quoting Alfred.

ha, that would make a good monthly reading theme alongside that turgenev I've been meaning to read

(turns out I've also read one of her collections, 'curious if true', including the Nurse's Story that's in every Victorian ghost anthology)

KOOLAIDS by Rabih Alameddine is absolutely incredible about 50 pages in, I think many here would appreciate it.

I like Gaskell a lot, but I'll happily acknowledge that all her books are flawed - except for Wives and Daughters, which is perfect except for the tiny minor detail of it not having a last chapter because its writer dropped dead a week or so too soon.

My cousin book club is reading The Catcher in the Rye so I'm re-reading it for the first time since I was twelve, and omg this is a great book; I really did not appreciate it properly as a kid.

Oh also, I found a pdf of the Midwich Cuckoos on an old usb last night and I got three quarters of the way through it yesterday. Will finish tonight. Weirdly funny.

Raymond Queneau Odile
Story about the narrator turning up in a rundown part of a French town and hanging with some ne'erdowells . Continuous thing covers 119 pages in teh version I have. i was looking for an obvious page break and couldn't find one. It has paragraphs but no gaps or chapters or anything. BUt it is pretty sublime, quite funny in places, surreal in others and pretty earthy thorughout.
Glad i got this from the library yesterday. Thought I might be overdoing it . have the full quota of books out with this.
just finished Walter Benjamin's Illuminations to get a new book I thought would come through on order and may turn up at the end of the week. Had looked up Queneau since i have wanted to read whatever translation of Le Chiendent since my mid teens when I saw Rowland S Howard had it in his Portrait of teh Artists as a Consumer in the NME in BIrthday Party Days. I did try reading The Bark Tree from the local library at teh time but didn't finish it. Current version is out as Witch Grass but I couldn't see either on tyhe library system but did see they had 3 things in teh local library which I presumably had not thought to look for when I was in there., THink I tend to go to music, politics, medicine, sci fi , classics and a few other things instead of looking through teh general fiction shelves.
Well got it now and enjoying it but possibly reading too many things at the same time.

Otherwise still reading the Mary Robinson book on Climate Justice and then going to finish off the book on Torture in the UK Cruel britannia and the other half of Adam Rutherford's book on Race. & Ibram X kendi's Stamped From The beginning and whatever Toni Morrison I started & Stephen Barker's books on punk and loads of other things.
JUst picked up the Smartest Guys In the Room and still have IBM In the Third Reich and several books on indigenous people in the Americas I started.

I seem to have been in a conversation recently where someone said something like "nobody should read THE CATCHER IN THE RYE after the age of 14" and people sagely, maturely agreed, though I didn't really.

I see that Lily Dale doesn't either.

catcher in the rye rules

A couple weeks ago I read a terrific Janet Malcolm essay which prodded me into giving Franny and Zooey a shot.

Iain Sinclair - The Last London

really fascinating, pretty dense and also I think, not having lived in London for 40 years, I am probably losing out on a lot of the context but still I like it

Just started Sebald's Rings of Saturn although I think it will be slow going if I reach for Wiki every time I come across a literary reference I don't recognise (most of them)

Catcher in the Rye is great and everyone shiting on about it being for a) teenagers or b) boys can be safely disregarded