Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

Just saw on the other thread that you said you read the translation by Mike Mitchell.

Johann Grimmelhausen - Simplicissimus

I've been wanting to read this for a while. Maybe 2022 will be the year. Currently I'm reading Fog by Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Elena Barcia, an early Modernist Spanish novel first published in 1914. I'm a fan of his philosophical writings so giving the fiction a try.

xxxxpost what first got me interested in readingAlways Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, by Matthew Specktor
Tin House Books: his comments here about Dream Syndicate in context of early 80s L.A.:https://saveyourface.posthaven.com/the-dream-syndicate-live-1982-1983 And the link to his DS live comp still works; I just now used it again.

Specktor wrote the intro to the Eve Babitz collection I'm reading.

I’ve mentioned this before but if you want a book where Simplicissimus is both a recurring plot point and thematic touchstone (and many reasonably do not want that at all, fair) then perfect spy by John le carre is reet good.

i did end up rereading harriet the spy bc of the previous thread, and will at some point next year read the long secret, but i just wanted to say that i still am delighted by this book (which i read more than once as a kid but haven’t picked up since, and also i was obsessed with the nickelodeon adaptation, which is, iirc, more faithful than you’d expect) and that it’s got the worst goodreads page of all time

Ann Wroe: SIX FACETS OF LIGHT (2016).

Paul McCartney: THE LYRICS (2021).

I've never tasted an egg cream, I'm sorry to say.

Not missing much.

How do you like Eve Babitz so far?

Does anyone have book plans for 2022?

My main resolution is: more short books. I'm going to take a break from long fantasy series. That's been a lot of my reading during COVID. They've been really good distractions, and helped me avoid being online too much, but the sunk-cost of a long series can also feel like an obligation.

I’m also thinking that I want to read mainly non-fiction, specifically along the lines of memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters, stuff like that. I have Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water and Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie to kick things off.

While waiting for my dog at the vet— she's okay, seems like a UTI— I finished Warner's 'The Corner That Held Them' this morning. Great book, and the bits of wit that Chinaski mentions sneak up on the reader so that they're really quite hilarious. I admit that there were moments where I got my nuns confused, but I learned to care for some of them as characters nonetheless. I also loved Sir Ralph.

I have set myself up with a bunch of books taht I ordered from the library as inter library loans so have like 8 already set up to arrive at some point. Picked up 3 yesterday. A load of anti racism stuff plus on eof teh books by Noma Agrawal who was on one of teh teams in the Xmas University Challenge . I thought she might be the same person as wrote Sway but foun dout her work is more in explaining how buildings are built as popular science and so on.

Bought so many books over teh last year that I want to read like immediately and obviously can't. Cover a load of different subjects.
But next couple are probably goiing to be teh ones I got from my Brother for Xmas. The iNconvenient Indian by Thomas King and Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey Ostler which are both Native American history related.
Also Carl Sagan Demon haunted world, Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Started reading Gentlemen prefer Blondes by Anita Loos which was one of the library books
& the History of The White people By Nell Irvin panter which i got through the first chapter of this morning

Also got The iNvention of teh White Race by Theodore W Allen which i bought a couple of months back when verso was selling books at 1/3 off and had heard of possibly on here about 3 or 4 years ago.
So yeah got a stack of things i have planned to read and will hopefully get to reasonably soon .
& will probably pick up others as I go.

I finished Harriet the Spy last night (first read, no idea why I'd never read it before!) and will start The Corner That Held Them today. I read a lot of ADHD, PTSD, and vagus nerve/polyvagal theory books last year. Will be interesting to see what path my nonfiction reads follow in 2022.

> Does anyone have book plans for 2022?

Gibson's bridge trilogy in january
More Hardy in february, probably Mayor of Casterbridge
Start, at least, a long foreign thing in March, maybe Stalingrad?
April = Dickens
all four ali smith seasons books sometime

Plans: going to jump on the Harriet the Spy and The Corner that Held Them bandwagons, The Count of Monte Cristo, Rachel Cusk's new one, re-read The Dispossessed, one Dickens, one Henry James, one Edith Wharton, one Woolf. I'm going to try and buy more real (not e) books, if the rumours of a new local independent bookshop are true.

don quixote

plans as of now:

More Clark Coolidge, and I think that at some point, I want to try Anna Karenina, which I have not read.

Also, I just finished Clark Coolidge's 'Melancolia,' a vanishingly scarce chapbook that a pal gave me as a gift, which is what has spurred on my desire to read more Coolidge. Last year, I read a collection of a few of his longer books, 'Solution Passage,' and it blew my mind but cashed me out on him for the year— 300+ pages of very dense poetry by one person, and a break is sometimes necessary. Ready to dive back in.

i don't care what anyone says, i think anna karenina is a good book.

i read it a couple of years ago and it might look long but it's 8 parts of about 100-150 pages each and was no trouble.

As soon as I finish the second two books of The Book of the New Sun series, I'll be starting Against the Day, which be take me the rest of the year I imagine.

JUst finished Jane Jacobs The Life And Death of Great American cities and think I will be looking out for more.
Wondering if i have missed copies of her work over the years without having noticed. I think I need to make an authors list for browsing charity shops.

is there a consensus on the best version of anna karenina to read?

starting the new year with one fiction and one non:
aimez-vous brahms? -- françoise sagan
the first four georges -- j. h. plumb

I've been distracted and lazy lately, so my progress on House of Mirth has been spotty and slow. It has enough melodrama to cater to the tastes and demands of a 1905 audience, but Wharton is so scrupulous about her characters and their motives that it has far more depth than is normal with such a plot. Also, unlike pure melodrama which always has a hero and heroine, the nearest approach to a decent human being in this book is an ancillary character.

Decided to start Mason & Dixon today. Let's see how that goes.

Realised last night that I had house of mirth and a couple of companions sitting on the table. Must read some this year.

Back to Brecht on Caesar.

Earthlings, Sayaka Murata - As in Convenience Store Woman, the protagonist of this is a woman confused and frustrated by society's insistence on trying to force her into a life trajectory, in terms of career advancement and marriage. But society is considerably more scarring here - the protagonist is subjected to emotional and sexual abuse - and fittingly her attempts to escape its clutches are far more radical. Things get really grotesque by the ending, which could be Murata reacting to CSW's international best seller status by going "oh yeah? well see if you can enjoy THIS", though of course there's also a long tradition of this kind of grotesquerie in Japanese literature (Tanezaki) and cinema (Takashi Miike could do the film version). A hell of a trip, either way.

Captains Of The Sands, Jorge Amado - Amado kept showing up in my end of year polls and considering that I've read almost no Brazilian literature I figured I should at least dip my toe into its biggest beast. These are chronicles of the lives of a group of homeless kid criminals in Bahia; considering it was written in 1937, I'm surprised by how hard edged and explicit it gets, totally in line with modern films on the subject like Pixote. As in that film, there are clear references to homosexuality, and while it is portrayed as a vice, it's just another one that the kids indulge in alongside purse snatching, knife fights, etc. and justified along the same "society is to blame" lines. It's pretty amusing/depressing that when the (well intentioned, inefficient) priest tries to get the kids to stop engaging in buggery on moral grounds they just laugh at him but when he changes tacks and says that it is "womanly and not worthy of a grown man" the leader immediately forbids it. Also always fascinated by the fluidity of religion in Brazil - some of the kids are catholic, some believe in African orishas, some combine the two integrating European saints into an African pantheon. I'm about two thirds in, right now a pandemic has hit Bahia (inescapable!), and it is described as an African god unleashing his wrath on the rich inhabitants of the city, but alas they are vaccinated, how could the god have known of that? And so the plague hits the shanty towns instead.

Janet Malcolm - In the Freud Archives.

i read clark coolidge's 'the crystal text' a couple of years ago which i liked a lot. i should read more. i have a copy of a book of his called 'space' that looks good

i got andrew durbin's 'skyland' for christmas and managed to read most of it at my in-laws while they watched rugby and then finished it the other day. very enjoyable little book - perhaps it has some of the issues in contemporary fiction that i usually don't care for - blankness of the protagonist and their relationship to place, history, nature - but this was breezy enough to get away with them and with just enough grit in there to offset some of its more indulgent sections (the basic plot is the protagonist goes to a remote greek island in search of a portrait - which might not exist - of hervé guibert)

i also got the duras collection 'me and other writing' which i've only dipped into, and don mee choi 'hardly war', which i haven't quite been in the mood for yet

i finished alison rumfitt's 'tell me i'm worthless' and i can't understand all the plaudits this is getting (i've seen people calling it a state of the nation novel about britain, or about england specifically - i mean, everyone knows england is terrible, i don't need to read a novel to tell me that, or at least i felt like this novel never got much beyond just telling me it's terrible). a lot of it seemed sloppily written and uneven, some appealing moments and some insight, but overall a miss for me

Coolidge is a GOAT as far as I'm concerned...

I like Andrew but think his writing is meh.

"i also got the duras collection 'me and other writing' which i've only dipped into"

This looks fantastic!

8 Detectives,Alex Pavesi. The premise being that in the 1930's a mathematician wrote a book of short stories hiding within them the simple rules that all crime stories follow. Then he disappeared. ffwd to the 1960's and an editor revisits them and thinks they contain clues to a real unsolved murder. the problem I'm having so far is that the short stories as revealed, and then critiqued as paired chapters seem unremarkable and mundane. So far they're all pretty crap, but I'm not sure if that is intentional or not and if the greater mystery will hold more interest. I will finish it, but for now someone has put in a request for one of my other library books so had to get cracking on that.

The Woman In The Purple Skirt, Natsuko Imamura. Now this is more like it, 50 pages in a and rattling along, have no idea where it's going, though presumably it's somewhere other than an remarkably odd case of stalking.

George Schuyler Black No More
Got this today because of a lack of communication with a librarian I was trying to get teo renew a couple of books I had rebewed too often to get renewed online.
I'd listened to a Backlisted on the book a few weeks back and ordered it as an interlibrary loan.
A satire on teh subject opf race by a maverick contemporary of the Harlem Renaissance . It has a basic premise that is inherently racist so has a transgressive nature of did he really go there and yes he did.
Actually set up seems to be a black ne'er do well gets stricken by a racist white woman who turns him down flat when he asks her to dance so he goes off and guinea pigs a new cosmetic technique where he becomes a caucasian.
I've read the first couple of chapters which are quite compelling, writing is pretty good.

bell hooks Sisters of teh Yam
Taking care fo oneself as part of an activist lifestyle.
Looking at the influences on a black female activist at the time>
I'm finding hooks to be a really interesting read. & keep wondering what I was doing at the time these things were coming out and if I knew anybdoy who was actually reading her at the time of release. 2005 I was getting involved in the ShellTosea campaign which was largely white outside of me. But I think this was not exactly an early book by her.
Finding I can read her pretty quickly but am trying to read as much of her as I can.

A Little Life has a new cover judging by the copies that arrived in store this week, and it is without doubt the worst cover I have ever seen whilst at the same time being an incredibly on the nose assessment of the novel therein.

just finished the long secret. beth ellen is the best character ever

and Mama Jenkins!

scene on the beach with the fried chicken + fanning herself with Bible

Finished House of Mirth, but have nothing to add to what I already said. I just started Blues, by John Hershey (who also wrote Hiroshima and A Bell For Adano). It consists of a series of dialogues about fishing and is transparently modeled upon Isaak Walton's Compleat Angler, right down to the highly artificial language of the interlocutors, who are named Fisherman and Stranger, instead of Piscator and Viator. The tone hovers between pleasantry and pedantry, but the latter tends to overpower the former. Luckily it is short and offers me a change from Yet Another Novel.

Wharton is an all-timer. I'm afraid to re-read it for fear of hyperventlating.

The back cover of my Penguin edition calls House of Mirth "a black comedy", which I think completely misreads it. Maybe someone thought the title was meant to convey that message to the reader. Wrong!

My current book is Paradise Reclaimed, Halldor Laxness, an author I've greatly enjoyed for the most part. So far this one features much drily humorous dialogue and definitely qualifies as a comic novel. However, this being Icelandic literature, there's bound to be a large measure of darkness interlaced with the humor.

Just finished the Anita Loos anthology of the 2 lorelei Lee /Dorothy books . Wasn't sure if I was gooing to go through Gentlemen Marry brunetes cos iI don't think it's as good as Blondes. Then had it in my hand in bed this morning so went through it.
They're bot pretty light reads but I do think they are pretty funny especially Blondes.
Would love to read teh memoirs even if tehy are like 40 years later, I think Loos has a lot of style.

Been reading several books at the same time like reada chapter or 2 put the book down read a chapter or 2 and then change over again.
Spending a coupl eof hours before I go to sleep and again when I wake. Maybe lie down in the middle of the day cos I've been feeling lousy for weeks, did just get a negative covid test this weekend.

Also still reading Cruel Britannina by Ian Cobain
history of Torture in teh Uk since teh 2nd world war. Now on renidtion and outsourcing.
Quite interesting, might read some more on the subject

The History of The White People Nell Irvin Painter
Black female author traces the idea of race back to the classical world and follows it up to th epresent day. So farr I think I'm still in Rome./ Interesting to hear this week's Media-Eval podcast to hear that there is a supposedly somewaht popular rumour that the Roman Empi9re was invented by the church in the 15th centyury. This weeks episode showed teh flaws in this idea , kind of interesting to have it so destroyed i guess.
But thsi book by Painter is really interesting.

Back To Black Kehinde Andrews
One of his earlier books that he wrote New Age of Empire asa bit of a prequel to.
Currently reading about Pana Africanism and the West Indies.

Black No more George Schuyler
Satirical work by 30s black author about a process taht allows black to become white and what the ensuing chaos would be. p[retty transgressive i guess, Definitely funny.

Of One Blood Pauline Hopkins
early 20th century science/speculative fiction by black female writer positing the discovery of a high tec black civilisation that has lain underground for centuries. Like a proto Wakanda .
Part of a great anthology of Black Science Fiction that has a lot of early stuff as well as much more recent. Wil grab this if i get a chance to get my own copy. One of teh Flame Tree Collection anthologies.

The iNconvenient Indian THomas King
Canadian novelist looks into the relationshgip between settler colonial power and teh indigenous peoples that were there when they originally arrived,. He's looked at teh way that the indigenous are represented in various media. I had no idea that Will Rogers was an Indian just one taht didn't look the way that White society wanted to look at Indians, while tehy did seem to be happy to have him portray a cowboy.
It's a good read and one i had recommended in a few places.

Finished Prynne's collection of wisdom, "Apophthegms," and today will finish Kate Soper's 'Post-Growth Living,' with which I have some serious issues, but is provocative and interesting nonetheless. Also dipped my toe into Frank Kuenstler's "LENS," a vanishingly rare book that is dense and playful and which I don't think I'll ever really "finish," since its structure sort of defies easy front-to-back reading

Fave scene in Long Secret was at the nightclub, when Harriet’s mum discovers the ex-girlfriend isn’t quite the foe she imagined. Also HTS having “the worst goodreads page of all time” as mentioned is very otm but

Ignore my but

I finished Bertolt Brecht's THE BUSINESS AFFAIRS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR.

A historical novel, written c. late 1930s, about Caesar's rise to power in Ancient Rome. It's only about 2/3 finished with BB's notes indicating what else it would have said (a bit like reading Fitzgerald's for THE LAST TYCOON). The work is very incongruous in a way, that BB in flight from fascism should devote so much time to such a detailed account of an ancient period. Yet, as the editor is keen to say, one assumes that it had contemporary resonance with him - not that one can see direct parallels with the Third Reich in the novel as it stands.

The formal construction of the novel is noteworthy. It's framed by a biographer, 20 or 30 years later, researching Caesar's life -- so, a kind of CITIZEN KANE approach, which you might also liken to Conrad (embedded narrators). A couple of interviewees reminisce about Caesar, but most of the narrative comes from the biographer's reading of the diaries of a slave who was also somehow senior in Caesar's household. I suppose this resembles, say ... the discovery and inclusion of the diaries in THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY - and there must be innumerable other such cases where a document is embedded in this way.

The slave's narrative is curious, almost literally queer, as it contains much angst over his relations with his male lovers. The only extensive treatment of homosexuality in the whole of Brecht? - and treated totally matter-of-factly.

The overall effect is 'revisionist', turning a great man into a more sceptically observed figure - primarily by emphasising 'business', seeing everything in terms of finance. Politics, law, military, empire, all here are financialised. Yet it doesn't exactly debunk Caesar entirely, rather showing him to be an operator, an extraordinarily fluid, chameleon figure who can alternate between high politics, demagogic rhetoric to please a rebellious crowd, or a military campaign. He's an immensely talented politician, I suppose. I was reminded of Tony Blair. He's not necessarily diminished by the narrative (depending how big he was to start with), but is seen in very material and contingent settings.

There is an argument that the book overlaps slightly with Walter Benjamin's thought of the time, eg: his use of the image of the Roman Triumph (procession) in his 1940 Theses - the Triumph is also a key theme in the later pages of this book.

Interesting. From my reading of Roman history I'd say Julius Caesar saw no difference between the political, military and financial aspects of his career. He would have viewed all of them as thoroughly intertwined and equally necessary components in his personal pursuit of power.

Captains Of The Sands, Jorge Amado

This sounds pretty interesting. I'll check it out.

Since my last update I finished "The Friend" by Sigrid Nunez. I thought the beginning and ending were strong, but in the middle it kind of drifts. The middle section is a bit like Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist" in terms of lack of plot motion, but somehow it doesn't feel as free-flowing and natural. The ending is a nice little formal twist that causes you to reinterpret everything up to that point. After that book, I read "Fog" by Miguel de Unamuno. Most of the book is kind of a romantic farce/philosophical joke, with an older, wealthy, educated, but comically naive anti-hero falling for a rather more shrewd young piano teacher. The book's sense of humor reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut. The ending brings Unamuno's more morbid preoccupations to the fore in a somewhat jarring but memorable way. I've started off 2022 by attacking the longest book in my to-read pile: "Living in the End Times" by Slavoj Zizek. So far, so good.

Seems most likely
Of course the other option here is that the neighbour had her Goodreads linked to her Facebook and was posting status updates until someone noticed and had a word but it was just bad timing on your wife’s part.
Happiest!
She's visiting her secret love and won't be back for a while?
So no more need for books!

There is definitely not a "x viewed your profile" function on Goodreads. More to the point, what's the big deal with alien erotica? Not like it's a Left Behind novel, a Jordan Peterson book, or the complete works of Jeffrey Archer.

Yeah it could've been a lot lot worse. Now to take a sip of morning coffee, Google alien erotica and see what comes up.

Doris Day, classic or dud?

I've started walking further afield in London and have picked from the shelf Geoffrey Fletcher's THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS (1962, but seems to have been revised a bit later?). It contains drawings by the author, and a rolling discourse about London in a style that's now gone - as is a great deal of what Fletcher mentions. Indeed very little that he's specifically mentioned is familiar to me at all, even in areas I know - except The Roundhouse. He's rather obsessed with music halls.

Have you seen the film, the pinefox? Can be accused of poverty porn in places, but there's some astonishing footage in there and a lot of narrator James Mason looking awkwardly at the camera.

I think I haven't seen it. I seem to recall hearing that the film was very different from the book and shared little more than a title. Unsure.

i think there is a thing that suggests people to add on goodreads, neighbor was probably recommended to add your wife which made her think "oh no i wonder if people can see this" and then realized her profile was public

It certainly has a lot of footage of old music halls!

Any Flanagan and Allen action?

alas no, just ghostly choruses intoning music hall chants in abandoned buildings.

Any Flanagan and alien action?

lollllll

Read Torrey Peters' "Detransition, Baby," and also some chapbooks for an upcoming piece.

I recommend the Peters, though I found its ending a bit sudden for my tastes. I have a feeling that she's writing the sequel right now.

Any Flanagan and alien action?

The first time I read Herodotus I often found the long preliminary lead-up to Darius's invasion of Hellas to be tedious and confusing. This time I can see the structure he employed much better, and I am not nearly as confused by how it all connects, but the density of proper names for places and peoples who have sunk into obscurity over the millennia makes it slow going. Just processing a single sentence that may reference three or four distinct geographic features, cities, gods, peoples and personages by totally archaic and abandoned names can take multiple readings.

Aside from that, it's an amazing treasury of facts, myths, tall tales, and crazy cross-cultural misunderstandings that will generate arguments among historians forever.

Hey, all you reading people!!! LOOK at this brand new WAYR thread:

Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022