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

The writing to me was candid, and the coverage made me aware of alternate worlds and new things to explore (including working with archival and historical materials ... xp).

Sounds appealing, but what book are you referring to?

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossesed
Domenico Starnone - Ties.

A really rare thing for me is to finish reading a book and think it was the right time. Most of the time its an 'oh just wish I had read Middlemarch ten years ago'. Le Guin and her imagination of a world organised along anarchist lines would not have had the same effect at 20 (when I was reading lots of SF) that it does today, when our politics has utterly crumbled to dust and the no one able is able to govern from the top.

I'll talk more about Ties in the Elena Ferrante thread.

Valdimar Ásmundsson, powers of darkness - this is the Icelandic “translation” of Dracula that was published just a few years after the original; almost a century passed before anyone realised it isn’t at all a translation in the usual sense but a completely rewritten novel, notably racier and bloodier than stoker’s, with added political intrigue - that’s the pitch anyway. The intro by the (re)translator is very keen to convince you that this version is somehow drawn from stoker’s notes for Dracula, making it semi-official, but the mystery of the artefact is the draw for me. Oh, there’s also a foreword by stoker himself… probably

Is it any good? It spends a LOT more time on harker at castle Dracula (as in, most of the book) and this stuff is quite good, especially the count’s extreme libertine rants, the blood cult and ghostly figures, none of which lead anywhere. The stuff in England (which weirdly ditches the epistolary mode in favour of standard 3rd person narrative) is disappointingly sketchy, the endgame across Europe absurdly truncated (& no renfield, fuck that). The most interesting change here is that while Dracula is mostly an unseen character in the second half of stoker’s novel, here he interacts with Mina & co. Interestingly the translation was done by committee, with the named translator really more of a project leader; it’s no doubt diligent but maybe missing the flair that would do justice to what halldór laxness apparently called one of the greatest works of Icelandic literature

~~~ok since writing the above I have read the Wikipedia entry and apparently it has since emerged that the Icelandic text is based on a previous Swedish translation, in which the second part is much longer? This is like borgesian soap opera

Also recently Frederic dard, bird in a cage - downbeat murder mystery I would never have solved in a million years, with an extra very dark wrinkle if I’m reading right

Izumi Suzuki, terminal boredom - seven sf stories by an author who acted in pink films (& was in throw away your books, rally in the streets!) & died by suicide aged like 36. I hope more of her stuff appears in English, I really enjoyed these. I’m not an expert in this genre by any means but I can see how it could be standard post pkd: drugs, identity, shifting reality, what if anomie but too much — but I felt the mood was v distinctive

+ Seamus Heaney Beowulf - this is where I learned Grendel isn’t a dragon

the izumi suzuki sounds intriguing. will put it on the list.

*correction - Twenty twenty is by Ellis Sharp, not Luke Ellis. Luke Ellis is someone I work with.

― Fizzles, Sunday, 30 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Had a look at a review and did laugh that someone had a go at a 'this is what I did in lockdown' type book.

https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/england/sharp/twenty-twenty/

*correction - Twenty twenty is by Ellis Sharp, not Luke Ellis. Luke Ellis is someone I work with.

― Fizzles, Sunday, 30 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Had a look at a review and did laugh that someone had a go at a 'this is what I did in lockdown' type book.

https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/england/sharp/twenty-twenty🕸/

It reminds me of Journey to the End of Night when Bardamu says "Every virtue has its own indecent literature". We need more of such indecency in virtuous English literary culture.

January hasn’t been a great month for me reading wise but I think that will improve.

The Brightest Star in the Sky - Marian Keyes

I can’t remember why I read this after having it on my shelf for ten years but it was one of the few of hers I’ve never read. It’s very very strange (my husband “how strange can a Marian Keyes book be?” “Chunks of ice falling off airplanes to kill rapists in the street strange”). For me, the conceit didn’t quite work and the characters weren’t quite there - with the exception of Maeve maybe - and I’m wondering if it’s because the slightly fantastical element is removed from her usual groundedness in her life experiences? Like, Rachel’s Holiday despite its cover is the furthest thing from fluff - it’s about addiction and the lies and hurt and pain caused by it! - whereas there was less to this than I wanted. Still, I liked reading it, but I wouldn’t reread it to death like all her other work.

Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami

I haven’t finished this yet. I really enjoyed the first part - the days in the apartment in Tokyo with her sister and niece and couldn’t stop reading that, but I’ve ground to a halt in part 2. Maybe because the subject matter is less interesting to me. I do need to come back and finish it though, because it’s been really good so far. Ofc with translated work you’re always wondering how much the translator’s perspective contributes to the voices of the characters, but I found the portrayals of poverty and sisterhood in part 1 really enthralling and I just need to come back and finish part 2.

Tokyo Girls Bravo - Kyoko Okazaki

I love Kyoko Okazaki a ridiculous amount??? Only two of her works are officially translated into English - this is one of the many French translations. I own a French translation of this but the version I’m reading is actually a scanlation done by a hobbyist - which I am incredibly grateful for. I got most of it through the French but the English fleshes out there stuff that was slightly ambiguous to me. Anyway, I love this a lot, it’s semi autobiographical with plenty of focus on the things that mattered to young Okazaki - fashion, new wave, Tokyo scenes - and her art style works really well here. When Tokyo is a focal point, it’s drawn slightly fantastically, with stars stamped in the sky like a child’s imagining. Her faces and expressions are drawn with the same sort of relaxed, nearly sloppy, flow she always uses, which contrasts nicely with the sharpness of her actual text, and the observations about people are as great as she always manages. I am always very fond of how she uses blank spaces to force a focal point, like someone abruptly punching the pause button on a tape recorder. I kept coming back to this particular piece:

https://i.postimg.cc/LX7McjGJ/708-B131-D-0-ABB-4646-81-CC-117-D05393-F58.jpg

Anyway no idea when I’ll finish it as it’s up to the scanlators but it’s great and I’m really enjoying it.

Ofc with translated work you’re always wondering how much the translator’s perspective contributes to the voices of the characters

There's a bit in here about the Osaka dialect and how the published translation doesn't really try and capture it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/11/breasts-and-eggs-by-mieko-kawakami-review-an-interrogation-of-the-female-condition

I read that and that seemed to gel with the tiny amount I know about it alright

Good book post, poster Gyac.

xp to gyac

yes Rachel's Holiday is really good and far more than the light funny quick read I was anticipating going in. tho it is still funny. sequel is out this month I think.

Ty pinefox!

Yeah Oscar, I am cautiously looking forward to that, but I’m never really sure about sequels so late after the original. But let’s wait and see I guess?

I finished Alasdair Gray's story 'Sir Thomas's Logopandocy'. The narrator explains his idea of a reformed language that would be perfect. He is, it seems, discreetly released from confinement and travels the world in the last pages. Some of these are almost unreadable fragments, like Dada poems. He winds up in a mysterious town like one of Calvino's invisible cities. Meanwhile discourse is interrupted by statements like HERE A GREAT PART OF THE MANUSCRIPT HAS BEEN ATE BY MICE.

I think I'm still missing something re: this story. I don't much see how the first part relates to the second and third. But I rather marvel at Gray's knowledge and his ability to persevere with such an elaborate, extended piece of historical pastiche. The ambition - historical, allegorical, textual - of this volume, UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is remarkable. I've one more long story to go. It's called 'M. Pollard's Prometheus'.

Walter Rodney The Groundings With My brothers
Short set of essays on Black Empowerment from teh late 60s looking at teh history of teh West Indies and Africa.
Pretty short and now bulked out a bit with commentaries. BUt I think this is the first Rodney I have read and hopefully will be far from the last. Do wish I could get a cheap copy of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, do have a request in for a copy as an interlibrary loan but it appears there is only one copy in teh system which isn't good. Would have thought he wasn't that obscure.

Audre lorde Zami A New spelling of my Name
Black lesbian feminist's memoir . I've just got to her leaving college cos she didn't get the grades she wanted for subjects she hadn't studied for and thought she had no capability for. Really nice memoir anyway, really shows where her thought comes from I think.

I finished The Riddle of the Sands. I needn't have feared it as overly war-centered and bloody. I'd estimate more than 80% of the narrative was taken up with discussions of small craft seamanship and navigation. Even the dastardly German plot to invade England was nowhere near immanence, but rather was proceeding at a slow pace requiring uncounted further years of preparation. Not one drop of blood was shed in this book. If you love small craft seamanship, this book will be your nirvana. Otherwise, be advised.

depicting Germans as dastardly then acquiring real guns from them to help in 1916 oh well.

A Short History of 7 Killings Marlon James
The multivoiced novel about the events concerning the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976. It's done like an oral history or rather a collection of different accounts of the time surrounding the real life event. I just got up to the end of the section set in teh year of the hit. I need to read up on what happened to the actual group of gunmen.
This is very welldone and i should have really concentrated on it more a few months ago before I got into the continual stream of interlibrary loans I'm trying to keep up with. Think I will be trying to read more of his work.

Groundings With My brothers Walter Rodney
short set of articles by Rodney on the history of Africa initially done as notes for a history course he was teaching.
I just ordered his book on the Russian revolution.

Bessie Chris Albertson

I made a brief run at The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth. It is written almost exclusively in the omniscient voice and the past tense. It is full of keen observation of the characters and their actions, but it is unleavened by other voices; only about 1% of the writing is devoted to dialogue between the characters. Instead Roth gives us descriptions summarizing their interactions. The dominating use of the past tense adds an elegiac tone, but robs everything of immediacy. That kind of relentless objectivity allows for exceptional levels of nuance but it makes for very dense reading. I'm postponing this one for another time.

a lot of people want to look at every single thing through a manichean moral lens. figure out which guy is the good guy and which guy is the bad guy. not me though. to be the king of deals you have to be a master of nuance. comfortable with grey areas

— Richie Deals (@allahliker) February 3, 2022

That kind of relentless objectivity allows for exceptional levels of nuance but it makes for very dense reading.

Yes! Felt similar. Also why I (temporarily) (probably) gave up The Corner That Held Them.

i'm reading season of migration to the north based on glowing recommendations here and it's astounding.

I've given up on both the Radetzky March and The Corner that Held them, too. I found myself drifting.

I'm reading Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This. I don't think it's doing me much good in terms of my general grasp of reality right now but it's very funny in places and her figurative language frequently pulls me up short.

I retreated into the world of 'science lite' in the form of a book called The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean. It's a grab bag of science-and-scientists anecdotes centered very loosely around the Periodic Table of the Elements. While it does contain some history and some almost 'hard' science that I hadn't encountered before, the overall effect is like listening to Everyone's Favorite High School Science Teacher, who spends the entire class time 'making science fun', while ignoring the textbook, in the hope that the dullest kids in the class will pick up a smattering of science instead of tuning them out. Luckily for me, I can walk out of class for a break when I feel like it.

Bullet Train
by Kōtarō Isaka

Nanao, nicknamed Lady Bird—the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world”—boards a bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka with one simple task: grab a suitcase and get off at the next stop. Unbeknownst to him, the deadly duo Tangerine and Lemon are also after the very same suitcase—and they are not the only dangerous passengers onboard. Satoshi, “the Prince,” with the looks of an innocent schoolboy and the mind of a viciously cunning psychopath, is also in the mix and has history with some of the others. Risk fuels him as does a good philosophical debate . . . like, is killing really wrong? Chasing the Prince is another assassin with a score to settle for the time the Prince casually pushed a young boy off of a roof, leaving him comatose.

When the five assassins discover they are all on the same train, they realize their missions are not as unrelated as they first appear.

A massive bestseller in Japan, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller that fizzes with an incredible energy and surprising humor as its complex net of double-crosses and twists unwind. Award-winning author Kotaro Isaka takes readers on a tension packed journey as the bullet train hurtles toward its final destination. Who will make it off the train alive—and what awaits them at the last stop?

I've only just started it, but so far it seems to be a cracking read.

A massive bestseller in Japan, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller that fizzes with an incredible energy

I'm not sure that quoting publisher's blurbs at length is quite in the spirit of I Love Books. Blurbs are more to be avoided, like the piles of dog shit that festoon a city sidewalk. I want to hear what you think of the book.

Someone open a window in ILB already

Done. While I'm up, anything else you'd like?

Reading Grossman's Life and Fate. My father-in-law's favorite book, decided I should read while he's still around to talk about it. Other than the challenge of tracking all the patronymics, diminutives, etc., really enjoying it.

Love The Radetzky March.

Done. While I'm up, anything else you'd like?

If that is your desire, you may whistle up the wind.

Plenty of that when you’re around.

Joseph Roth rules.

I want to hear what you think of the book.

As soon as I've read enough to form an opinion beyond the one-sentence impression I gave at the end, I'd be glad to share it.

Not sure whether that is a publisher's blurb per se--I just copied off of Goodreads. But, I understand the point you are making.

I didn’t mind it, I like reading descriptions of stuff I’ve never heard of because I can go off and read elsewhere about if it’s something I’m interested in.

I will go back to Roth for sure. I need a good block of time to read fiction. Which is to say, it was me, not Joseph.

Eh, the Lockwood is good but something in there is making me think of Martin Amis. I will articulate this badly but I think it's the war against cliche 'here comes a metaphor and by god I'm going to make it new' aspect of it. I absolutely appreciate it's in service of a wider point about digital culture and the affected, viral nature of the always online voice but I can't shake it now I've thought it.

This poster will eviscerate itself in t-minus 10 minutes.

Not sure what a quoted squib about a book, written by someone who might have an idea of what the book is about or "doing," is against the spirit of the thread, but maybe that's because I find blurbs to be an interesting literary form. Either way, we're talking about books or quoting other people writing about books. Who cares?

xp I almost agree except that there's something deeply surreal and idiosyncratic about Lockwood's metaphors that makes them seem less affected, more a product of seeing the world at a very peculiar slant. Usually with writers like that I figure out the trick after a little while and can generate metaphors in their style almost automatically; with Lockwood I can't.

Count me in on the "blurbs are fine" side. Well maybe not if you're reading Great Expectations, but a Japanese thriller that most ppl on this thread haven't heard of yet? It's fine.

I finished Alasdair Gray's collection UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY (c.1983, 1997).

The long story 'M. Pollard's Prometheus' was another remarkable work, containing a complete, miniature allegory about the nature of power, government, oppression, liberation. This story is also, I suppose, contained and criticised by the frame story in which the beloved woman, a radical and feminist, rejects the allegory. It's a sad, bleak little work but once again shows how extraordinarily ambitious Gray could be, and how learned he was.

The book ends with further very short stories, and a postscript which turns into a critical essay - characteristic Gray again, letting his book be invaded by another author (who is not actually Gray in disguise) - which, on close reading, is perceptive and convincing. It even takes in the paratextual material and images around the edges of the book. I went back and looked at the map of Scotland at the front, full of the scribbled names of Scottish authors, and finally saw that at the bottom right was 'Mistress Spark in Rome'.

A remarkable book. I should have read it long ago.

I went on to read some of THE METHUEN DRAMA BOOK OF PLAYS BY BLACK BRITISH WRITERS (2011), edited by Lynette Goddard.

Mustapha Matura's play WELCOME HOME JACKO (1979) is quite disturbing in its depiction of violence and abusive behaviour. Now on to Jackie Kay's CHIAROSCURO (1986) which is more peaceful, also much less naturalistic and more stylised, and describes Black lesbian life in England. The original production starred Bernadine Evaristo, with music from Gail Ann Dorsey !!

Unable to sleep last night I returned to Adam Mars-Jones' essay collection BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS. It has the odd feature of very short paragraphs (often one sentence or two), probably a legacy of appearing in newspapers but actually disconcerting to the reader of a book. Someone as attuned to form as AM-J should surely have noticed this, might have altered it?

But what a writer he can be - his review of Gore Vidal is devastating, one of those performances with lines to rank alongside Vidal's or Capote's own. And he has a tremendous doggedness about matters of fact and logic that helps him in eg: his dedicated, detailed reading of a random gay detective novel as a sign of gay culture in the 1980s. He swerves through all this in clipped elegant style

I suppose that the whole collection is a legacy of a moment when 'gay' meant something slightly different, more prominent and controversial: when there was barely LGBT, let alone LGBTQIA+ or whatever name one now finds most accurate.

despite everyone saying it's very good, it looks like The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is going to be very good. Removing teleology/whig approaches to economics and history, and looking at developments

I can't actually start it yet until I've got other things out of the way (new year, new rules), but there were a couple of great things in the first few pages I flicked through.

I did a v cackhanded edge round Braudel's use of 'Man' in his introduction to The Mediterranean in the Age of Phillip II upthread. My usual approach is in this order:

• 'Man' meaning 'humankind' was standard in English-language writing pretty much since the Enlightenment, and while it's good it's being retired, there's no point asterisking every use of it.
• However, how Braudel/Braudel's translator (what is the original french?) uses it here is quite awkward. The first 'man and his relationship to nature' is fine in the standard 'humankind' transfer, but his second use is unhappy: "history, one might say, on the scale not of man, but of individual men". Its all but imperceptible adjacency to the first use, an all-but seamless Man-as-humankind = man-as-significant-men is poisonous. Or to put it another way, the connotation/denotation blurring isn't helpful.

as I say it was clunky though.

ANYWAY

The Mushroom at the End of the World has a lovely exuberant formulation in its introduction:

Ever since the Englightenment, Western pilosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentonality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human.

Several things have happened to undermine this division of labor. First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings. Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others. Third, women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man. Our riotous presence undermines the moral intentionality of Man's Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature.

The time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles. Without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back
to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality.

the phrase 'interspecies entanglements' also threw me back to the passages in Social Contagion - the section on the economic and biological relation of human capitalist structures and Nature was part of the reason i picked this book up.

The focus for the short chapters that follow is the Matsutake mushroom, with a distinctive smell associated with autumn in Japan, and the author quotes this lovely fragment:

The sound of a temple bell is heard in the cedar forest at dusk,
The autumn aroma drifts on the roads below.

Akemi Tachibana (1812-1868)

One of the key questions the book looks to answer, via its central theme of mushrooms, is 'How might capitalism look without assuming progress? It might look patchy: the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital.'

I finished Jackie Kay's 1986 play CHIAROSCURO, about Black lesbians in Britain.

Continuing with Adam Mars-Jones' essays, I reflect again on how the place of 'gay culture' or 'gay identity' has changed. And with it, gay style or deportment. AM-J's prose (from the 1980s & 1990s) can often be catty and camp, with great skill and humour. Few critics are more entertaining. But this in turn made me wonder how far camp had been diminished as a necessary gay style since then. Camp still has a strong association with gay men (if not women) - for sure. But it seems more an option, less compulsory, than it did.

AM-J at his most amusing:

What is art? That's a big question. Let's discuss that another day. What is a critic? That's much more tractable. Here's where we scale down from philosophy to ethics. We can settle that now if you like.

Argh, I cannot unsee that actually quite otm Amis/Lockwood connection

Do I even want to scroll up and so what that is about?

Too late.

Angela Davis Autobiography
Somehow taken me 20 years to start reading this deeply. I think It may have been started when I got it about 3 houses ago. I know it's been sitting on a shelf for as long as teh unit has been there I think. May have meant to start it before it went up there.
Now wondering why it took so long and why I didn't get into it when I got it. May have needed me to have read other stuff before I really contextualised it. Really don't know.,
Anyway Angela has been arrested while trying to get away after a gun she bought had been used to kill a couple of people or used in an escape attempt which wound up with that result. & she is in prison being kept in isolation after having been initially put in to the psych unit.
have been meaning to read this for a while so glad i'm now getting into it. I think the writing is good so wish i had read it when i got it.