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

Sounds good!
Late Thanksgiving night got hooked on my aunt's copy of The Young Romantics, by Daisy Hay: group bio dynamics, how some of the best writing and worst interpersonal damage got done in small interlocking circles of friends, lovers, frenenimies, children, older siblings---all of these people v. young for most of the book---also their struggles in context of outside world, class strictures getting worse in reaction to revolutions and any public dissent/nonconformity---spooked by all the fucked-over girls and young women killing themselves---more publicly unspeakable behavior, of course---incl. via drownings and attempted drowning---making the later-seen-as-UR-Romantique end of classy rebel Percy seem that much more recklessly entitled, in my reading.

(later, of course as also tracked, his radicalism is played down for Victorians: he's this moody spirit, him and Keats, wandering alone, although old associates kept doing their bits for the cottage industries.)

gone back to reading Ibram X kendi Stamped From The Beginning.
Just read about the American Civil war and Lincoln's gradual movement towards recognising that ex-enslaved have a place in the US.
& the cynicism previous to that of the emancipation proclamation like it is only supposed to be effective where Lincoln has no power to enfoirce it and is supposed not to be in effect in the areas where he is going to need the votes of those who are enslaving people.
Gosh, like racism seems to have been an active part of the inconvenient parts of US history as well as the ones where it can be fobbed off by the wrong people being at fault.
I quite enjoy Kendi

Another Tuneless Racket Steven H Gardner
more of his pounk history. I've just been reading about Eddie & The Hot Rods who I was semi aware of but didn't know very well. They were doing stripped down r'n'r at the time things were taking off but didn't see themselves as punk. Enjpyoing this book, have the 2nd volume too. I thought the other 2 were alreaqdy out but they're yet to come. i was turned onto them by a review i Ugly Things and got the books pretty cheap which was great I think they went up in price almost imediately afterwards. Alkso got the first volume of the compiled fanzines of the writer.

East West Street Philippe Sands
I heard teh podcast thsi ties in with and thought it interesting and taht I needed to read teh book if i got the chancel. Found it cheap so getting teh chance to read it. Writing is similar to the presenting voice. Which works for me ok.
Tracing the history of a Nazi who i think was directly responsible for the death of his grandfather

Back to Coe's MR WILDER AND ME. He's still showing a tendency to telegraph too much. The story is interesting though. Don't know quite what's going to happen. And the portrait of Wilder and his collaborator Diamond, I enjoy. Coe could work harder, though, at describing people like William Holden - he doesn't bother doing it at all!

I forgot to mention above that I also read all of John Millington Synge's unpublished and unstaged plays and scenarios, in a scholarly edition from 1968.

Most substantial is the one-act play WHEN THE MOON HAS SET, which also once existed in a more dramatic two-act version. It's set in a Big House where one COLM comes back and woos the nun SISTER EILEEN away from her holy orders and into marriage with him. It also involves shades of the past in an Ibsenesque way. The play becomes increasingly preposterous and ends amid incredible sexism as SISTER EILEEN accepts her true destiny of marriage.

I think it has never been staged.

The edition also contains several scenarios for plays that never get beyond a summary of the idea. Another ludicrous play is LUASNAD, CAPA AND LAINE in which some ancient Spanish people who have discovered Ireland for the first time (but have Irish, not Spanish names) are swamped by a storm on the coast. The ludicrous thing is that the big leader LUASNAD turns in about one page from mourning his wife to wooing someone else's widow, then at the end the storm sweeps them away too. One of the most ridiculous playlets I've ever come across.

A couple of satirical sketches are better. One called DEAF MUTES FOR IRELAND is a satire of the Gaelic League that is almost in Flann O'Brien mode, and NATIONAL DRAMA: A FARCE also goes in that direction, but Synge isn't yet able to develop it.

All these works are from the 1890s and early 1900s.

570 pages into Jerusalem and there's a Beanoesque troupe of ghost kids called the Dead Dead Gang spying on Oliver Cromwell.

enjoyed "the king at the edge of the world", historical spy novel set in elizabethan england/scotland. at no point does it rise to the literary genre level of le carre or hilary mantel, but it was a ripping yarn and you might like it if you like those two.

Arthur Miller Echoes Down The Corridor Essays 1944-2000
have had this sitting around ear teh bed for way too long. Probably out of the library for a year now and neglected it. Cos when i do pick it up and read any of it the writing is really good. Various things on the wake of WWII and the Democratic conference in 1968 and him growing up in Brooklyn and things. I really should have got through this and returned it a while back but now still got it to read through and it is pretty good. Hopefully have it finished by next week and can return it to have space to get something else i've ordered out.
I read his memoir Timebends a couple of decades ago and that was really good too.

Sway Pragya Agarwal
one of a few books about unconscious bias I'm half way through reading

i read both harriet the spy and the long secret several years ago on alfred's recommendation and adored them both. both harriet and beth ellen are wonderful characters. i dearly wish there were more louise fitzhugh books to read!

Has anyone ever read "Nobody's Family Is Going to Change"? It sounds quite different from her other books.

I finished "Divorcing" by Susan Taubes. A lovely, haunting book that skips around in time and occasionally into fantasy, but everything is held together by being about one person's experience and the strong emotions that are never far from the surface. The narrator seems to be inviting the reader to play armchair psychoanalyst, to explain why she seems unhappy and adrift. Its probably not a coincidence that her father is a trained Freudian who analyzes her childhood for her in real time as she's growing up. The book also touches on themes of feminism, the Holocaust, and the Jewish immigrant experience.

I’ve read about half his novels, but years ago. I remember really liking Pierrot Mon Ami, Saint Glinglin and The Sunday of Life, though tbh I can’t remember much about any of them. Of course you can’t go wrong with Zazie in the Metro.

As I say a lot of them are great fun as long as you’re alright with novels that just peter out.

― Tim, Thursday, 25 November 2021 14:56 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

read the sunday of life in the summer and had a great time - I liked the ending even tho yes it is kind of a non-ending

currently halfway thru amos tutuola my life in the bush of ghosts love it love it love it.

Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner.

I’ve only read Red Shift, but I thought it would be fun to go back and read all his books from the beginning, given they’re all short and there’s not many of them. Anyway - comparing Red Shift to Weirdstone is a bit like comparing Castafiore’s Emerald to Tintin in America. It’s strange reading Garner’s juvenilia when he seems like the sort of person who’s been seventy all his life. And it’s quite a slog - halfway through I was close to giving up - the long, boring sequence where the children escape from a series of caves reminded me of getting stuck in an isometric Spectrum game where every room looks like same. The second half is pacier and I adored the sudden ending. Also loved the bit where the up-until-then characterless Susan is suddenly, like, “you know what, fuck this, I’m out of here”. I think Garner is one of the only tolerable authors with no discernible sense of humour.

O. Nate: "Nobody's Family Is Going to Change" - I don't think I've actually read it, but the book was around when I was a child and the title has always stayed with me.

the moon of gomrath is streets better than weirdstone

I finished Rabih Alameddine's AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN this morning. A great book and character study, and also a surprisingly moving paean to the joys of reading. It made me want to read some of the longer novels I've never taken a stab at...Anna Karenina in 2022? Maybe.

Anyway, Alameddine is clearly a gifted writer, can recommend his books without reserve.

I read Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude. It's set in a boarding house in Henley-on-Thames in 1942, populated by the aged, the grotesque and the despairing, all struggling with nightly blackouts. Like Hangover Square, world events hover in the background but this is much more a miniature in its study of manners and etiquette - something like a companion to Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, albeit the central character in this is in her late 30s. It's grim and cruel and very funny in places.

Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek by Manu Saadia; was getting quite frustrated trying to understand how gold pressed latinum works in a world with replicators, so thought I'd dig out this book I got sent for supporting a podcast ages ago. Saadia starts by giving the history of the "no money in Star Trek" idea (started as a joke in the fourth film, enthusiastically embraced as canon by TNG, DS9 retcons all the references to it in the original series away) and then expounds on the ST universe having such unlimited resources that all goods and services end up at zero cost. This leads to the first conclusion of his that I can't really get with - he suggests scarce resources such as wine from Picard's vineyard or a spot at Sisko's restaurant also remain free because the Federation has eliminated consumerism; status is acheived through achievement, not posessions, and so demand won't ever outstrip supply. But this to me ignores that someone might want Picard's wine because they like the taste better than of any other wine in the galaxy, or that they might want a spot at Sisko's because they love the atmosphere or think he's the greatest cook. Status surely a big part of why ppl value scarce resources but not ALL of it?

Also reading An English Murder by Cyril Hare for book club which so far is very much hitting the spot.

Status surely a big part of why ppl value scarce resources but not ALL of it?

In one of Banks' post scarcity Culture books the AIs have a good old laugh about people reinventing money when a market develops around tickets for a once in a lifetime concert.

Nairn's London was magnificent - angry and sad and poetic and all those things. I'm desperate for a pint in the Grapes or Ye Old Mitre.

Reading Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight.

Garcia Marquez's Clandestine in Chile, his version of Miguel Littín’s secret return to Pinochet's Chile in the 1980s to film conditions.

Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her long-ass travelogue about Yugoslavia during the years entre les guerres.

Shirley Hazzard's dull The Evening of the Holiday.

Nobody's Family is Going to Change is not bad but not nearly as good as Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. Great title though.

Ain't I A Woman bell hooks
History of oppression of black women in the United States. From slavery through to her present day which is about 40 years ago. So through Jim Crow and white feminism and so on.
Quite good so far. I think I want to read a lot more of her so shame there seems to be very little in the Irish library system. This took a while to appear as an interlibrary loan.

Another Tuneless Racket Stephen H Gardner
Volume 1 of his history of Punk.
Just been reading about Blondie and The Saints which I think I already agreed with. Not sure to what extent I would have written off Parallel Lines due to the production and I thought it was widely thought of as a classic but do love the 1st 2 lps and haven't gone later. Wonder if he's seen the OGWT Live set from Glasgow where band is firing on all cylinders including the Scottish pipers playing Sunday Girl.

I finished A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. It became a bit less coy toward the end, when the depths of their physical suffering were too grave to paper over with self-deprecating wit.

Now I have begun to read an even more high-testosterone book by an English author, a novel called Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household. It is deeply engaged in a peculiarly English form of hero-mythologizing and the glorification of individual grit, to a degree that is almost pornographic, despite the narrator-hero relentlessly understating everything. What saves the book is how seriously it takes itself and the fact that it is remarkably well-written. And it's short, too, 180 pages.

You're right that it's ridiculous but I love Rogue Male. I'm not sure how far you are into the book but I know Dorset fairly well and have found myself looking for the key location a few times.

I'm within sight of the end of Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. What an extraordinary book.

Finished Carlos Lara's "Subconscious Colossus" and a chap from Jennifer Soong, flitted around between some things before settling on re-reading Genet's "The Criminal Child," which I haven't read in a very long time. I'd forgotten how much I love it.

finished The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino by Hiromi Kawasaki. the ten women recounting their time with the titular character each get a chapter, each of which read like short stories. the 2nd chapter relating to nishino's sister though not told by her was particularly moving.

The BBC version of Rogue Male, with Peter O' Toole, is a good gritty time, tho there is an unacceptable animal death in there.

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk. Nothing like the Outline trilogy, it's an almost Mr Bean-esque farce written in a near 18th century wordy and exacting style where lots of things happen for effect with no explanation or follow up. One spectacular moment where for no reason, after some build up the narrator says to the housekeeper who she's only just met "here's your coffee you cunt" but other than that it was a bit of a chore, and if it had been the first think I'd read by her it wouldn't have tempted me to more.

Now I want to read a Mr.Bean novelisation.

there's a bit about early cusk in this new yorker piece https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel

One way to measure the gifts of a writer, particularly a prolific one like Cusk, who has published twelve books in twenty-four years, is by the distance between her early work and that of her maturity. Cusk made her début in 1993, at the age of twenty-six, with “Saving Agnes,” a down-from-Oxford bildungsroman about a grandiose, tormented girl finding her way in London, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her subsequent novels include “The Country Life,” a parody of a gothic romance between a bratty invalid and his au pair, written in the ornate syntax of a Victorian moralizer; “In the Fold,” set in a bohemian manor house rife with sexual and dynastic intrigue; and “Arlington Park,” interlocking stories of suburban anomie. The chaste prose of her current trilogy seems almost like a reproach to the self-conscious virtuosity that preceded it. Before she wrote “Outline,” Cusk was a wickedly clever stylist, who fired off aphorisms like a French court diarist and made up the sort of metaphors—“cauliflower-haired old ladies”; the “floury haze” of a dry summer—that you flag in the margin. A woman’s gray teeth are “a bouquet of tombstones.” But Cusk sometimes bared her own teeth: her power to dazzle and to condemn.

Cusk judges several of her early books harshly: they were, she said, “bedevilled by a lack of benevolence.” By the time she published “The Bradshaw Variations,” in her early forties, that devil was behind her. Like its predecessors, but more humanely, the novel tells a conventional story of family rivalries and marital ennui (particularly wifely ennui). In retrospect, however, it was the end of a line. The Bradshaws’ real malaise, which wasn’t clear to Cusk yet, is the tyranny of conventional stories: the fates and the characters that we inherit, and to which we surrender our desires, along with our lives in the moment. Cusk was about to upend the plot of her own life—to break up her family, then to lose her house and her bearings. The ensuing turmoil would force her to question an old core principle of the writer’s vocation, to presume authority, and of woman’s vocation, to sacrifice herself for others.

(article also good value for her offering contemptuous descriptions of her family which the fact checkers are forced to check.)

Fascinating interview, thanks. I've been interested in her memoirs but not sure now if getting that close to her won't taint my view of her fiction.

Flew through 'The Criminal Child,' but I skipped the intro etc.

Last night, after drunkenly celebrating it as an object in the world, I began parts of my friend Mark's new book of poems, 'POOR FRIDGE.' I think I'll probably return to that tonight.

xp my wife read "a life's work" and said it was wonderful and is giving it as a gift to three of her parent-of-young-kids friends this christmas. i do plan to read that.

I finished Rogue Male and it was both good and batshit crazy. As noted in my first post about it, the fact that it takes itself completely seriously paradoxically saves it from its batshit craziness.

I've now moved on to Treason By the Book, Jonathan Spence, a recounting of a conspiracy in Qing Dynasty China, formed by failed candidates for the civil service. The author also wrote The Memory Palace of Mateo Ricci and a bunch of other books centered in Chinese history.

Recently I finished "The Caesar's Palace Coup" by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes. This is a business case study type of book, going deep into the weeds on a mammoth private equity LBO and bankruptcy restructuring case. Only recommended if you have an interest in the subject matter.

Anyone read Hazzard's The Transit of Venus? It's a novel at an almost absurd pitch of exaltation, "literary" to a fault but with lapidary asides on every page. A heady thing, and I think I loved it.

No, but you’ve got me intrigued once again. Damn you, Lord Sotosyn!

completed compton mackenzie's absolutley abysmal yet entertainingly barmy 800 page novel of late victorian childhood, edwardian adolescence & pre-wwi early manhood sinister street

now revisiting ford madox ford's the good soldier

Rather in between books, I have returned to Lorrie Moore's essay collection SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE as a stop-gap.

"The High Window", which is (I'm glad to find out) much closer to The Long Goodbye than to The Big Sleep

Reading my friend's book, POOR FRIDGE, and then also finished another friend's latest chapbook. Will finish POOR FRIDGE in the next day or two...also got some orders today, so will have some more fun things to read over the coming holiday

Starting to read Prior Convictions, the justified and ancient collected short stories of RIP Dave Hickey. one of the first is about a 90-year-old man sitting in a bathtub in his big Victorian house on the plains. His voluptuous nurse is lying dead by the tub, which he can't get out of, because legs and shoulder don't work. His son lives in, but left this morning on a business trip. Eventually, the water gets cold, so he drains it, dozes, but the empty tub rubs on his bony old bod, so he refills. He tries not to look at and think of the nurse, but is troubled in several ways, and he also recalls many things from his past, stirred up also by dreams streaming through the big house (with the screens of routines removed, the memory tapes really get going: relatable) Very visual narrative, though succintly so, published ca. 1969, apparently, and somewhat pre-figuring early Terence Malick.
Visuals (and some conversations)are suddenly in-your-face superkitsch panorama ov Texas Fraternity Row, in "The Passion of Saint Darrell," but it's lovely to this Jesus-seeking vagabond variant of Seymour Glass: looks hideous to put it like that, but not glimpses, flashes, stakes, aces and 0s in the hole, from Life of the Saint, with gaps inviting speculation, fan fiction pipe dreams maybe---

Somehow I don't think I'm going to get used to Hickey pulling the rug out/all around the room, but rides are mostly good bumpy so far---Willie: "It was fun, in a strange kinda way."

Finished bell hooks and bought a stack of new stuff from charity shops.

So need to work out what to prioritise.

Mario Levrero - The Luminous Novel

500 pages worth of 'diaries' detailing the construction of a non-completed novel. The last 100 pages are some chapters of that shot-at-birth novel. Levrero makes it like he is just typing his day-to-day exitence for 20 pages a day (like Knausgaard) but the material is more worked over, and then you get to see a slightly different voice as that stuff is somewhat transformed into a beginning of a novel. There is some misogyny that feels a bit forced, and I'm thinking that he does this to give the novel a more distinct voice to his diary voice, and its a flaw. However the diaries are often really great, a mixture of dreams, meta discourse on the novel he has been given a grant to write, novels he is reading (very interesting on Somerset Maugham), writing about his one true love and their relationship but also newer matter you don't see in diaries -- stuff like internet addiction (this is from the 2000s so you get a discourse on the early internet), anxieties over the change in climate (the heat in the Uruguayan summer and its effect on mental and physical health), lots on mental health (he does yoga, gets his gf to go to therapy). I wouldn't exactly recommend it yet there are things in it that aren't anywhere else, in quite this way.

Sounds good!
OMG xpost Hickey now pre-channeling Gilead, still ca. '69 or so---I promise not to live-blog story by story (maybe)

re Family and Friends

Elena Lazic
@elazic
Wow. Brookner’s acerbic view of human nature never feels exaggerated, but the scale here makes her brutally perceptive remarks seem more grounded. Characters are shaped both by crucial moments, and by habits they mindlessly slip into over time. Brutal and a perverse joy to read. True?

Finished Mark Francis Johnson's 'Poor Fridge,' without a doubt his best and most devastating book of poems yet. Now onto his 'Treatise on Luck,' which is an earlier and much more wildly experimental work. He's a poet who's built a world for his poetry to inhabit, but which we never get a full view of— instead, we're treated to glimpses, suggestions, and hints that we're in a future world very much like our own, but with a lot more water, as well as strange, baroque class relations...as well as a fair amount of 19th c. British poetry. Really weird, really interesting poet... and I'm not just saying that because he's a friend.

Bertolt Brecht: THE BUSINESS AFFAIRS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR.

Would anyone like to recommend a book for me to give my sister? Looking for a female author published in 2020 or 2021. Her tastes skew dark, sardonic humor. Orphans, tragedy and art are areas of interest.

i haven't read a nicola barker since 2007's darkmans but she roughly fits that rubric (and i am sovereign came out in 2019)

plus there's an a.m.homes short story collection from 2018 (which i also haven't read lol): days of awe