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

now returning to the cusk outline trilogy with transit and already every sentence is like a fist exploding through my brain it's awesome

xp I think Emily St. John Mandel is almost always readable and quite likable as a writer if that makes sense; sometimes it's just nice to read a fairly talented writer who doesn't strike you as a terrible person. But the only book of hers that's made a lasting impression on me is Station Eleven, which I loved in a qualified way. I thought it was a bit slick and facile and could have done more with its characters, and yet I still found it quite beautiful and moving and I keep returning to it. One of those books where there are a lot of obvious criticisms to make, and yet the things that work about it work well enough for me that I don't mind the rest.

I feel about it a bit like I feel about the Jackson Browne song "Before the Deluge," which it resembles imo: I'm not a big Jackson Browne fan in general, and "Before the Deluge" has its cheesy moments, but then you get to "When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky," and all is forgiven.

Tend to agree with Lily Dale that that novel feels slick and facile. It felt immature and disappointingly shallow to me.

Can pandemic/disaster novels be less slick and facile to be accepted as science fiction, or are they being judged according to different criteria? There was another novel called Severance by Ling Ma. Does anyone have comparisons or comments on the genre (and what saves it or makes it worthwhile to read despite the immaturity)? Is science fiction obviously satire?

or intentionally

Rereading Père Goriot for the first time in 30 years.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 12, 2022

Père Goriot feels like a distant memory. I have recollections of reading it for a book club meeting in 1998, but haven't thought about it since

As ever with Balzac it's his way with bric-a-brac, the meanness of people, the attention to Restoration politics.

There are disaster novels like THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS which are interesting and thought-provoking, though possibly lacking in some qualities of other books.

STATION ELEVEN seems to be a different case because it seems to try to be literary in a way that much SF didn't use to do. I'm not sure that it entirely succeeds.

Ballard's disaster novels would be a different comparison.

I haven't read SEVERANCE.

Some great SF is satirical - Robert Sheckley for instance - but not all SF is satirical.

I started watching the tv series of Station Eleven it does seem a tad white liberal which is a shame cos it does have a pretty diverse cast.
I'm about 4 episodes in and watching a los=d of other things at the same time.
Found a cheap copy of the book which is sitting around teh flat somewhere. I read an interview in teh guardian with teh writer which made reading things by her sound positive. But I have a load of other things to read.

Currently getting further into that book on Soldaten which is really interesting and has a very scathing view of the run of teh mill soldiery from Germany in WWII. I was wondering what else was like this about other soldiers. Think Mark baker's books Nam and Cops may touch on some things with some similarity. & would think there may be more things from Vietnam talking about War crimes etc. Probably true of later wars that the US have been involved in. NO idea of other armed services around the World but don't think anybody in a situation like taht is 100% driven by a clear morality.
THis is good though, pretty difficult reading if you're remotely squeamish

1/3 through THE SPACE MERCHANTS. The first third is like Don Draper in the 23rd century - tremendous. Then suddenly it changes - he is kidnapped and wakes up having been given a new false identity. This is not so promising. Feels like the Don material had much further to run before being cut off.

There is an indigestible preciousness about Mandel's writing that seems like a very specifically Canadian MFA style to me (speaking as a sometime Canadian resident). It's this overreliance on whimsically poetic "good sentence writing" over the top of plastic characters and embarrassed plotting. As you read the book, you can imagine it being written by a smartly dressed young person in a coffee shop.

That said she wrote short time-travel story for Slate, that I remember really enjoying. It was also precious but satisfyingly well-plotted and less self-conscious.

Tend to agree with that assessment by poster Chuck Tatum.

the pinefox, you might like severance. it's thematically a little similar to jonathan lethem's the arrest, which you moderately liked iirc? but it's much better imo.

station eleven feels more obviously middle brow scifi melodrama (not sure what this means), like a realist cloud atlas?

also requested for check out which should be an alternative to purchased: Three Californias by Kim Stanley Robinson and a book by Kelsey Ronan (I think her debut novel)

I am intrigued by the NYT review of Simon Kuper's Chums and the persistence of class in the UK, which seems distinct compared to elsewhere in Europe, and this is not intended as a criticism, but a point of interest, perhaps worth saving, except for the cost

Poster Caek, yes, again I tend to agree with that view of S11. I think I like CLOUD ATLAS though!

i liked cloud atlas too! i don't think i mean it as an insult. more an attempt to characterize her goals/"target audience"?

I'm reading City of Nets by Otto Friedrich. If you'd given me a precis - a history of Hollywood in the 1940s, through vignettes of the likes of Louis Mayer, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Howard Hughes, Hedy Lamarr, alongside capsule biographies of the major films and writers - I'd have chewed your arm off to read it. But somehow the episodic style, with anecdote running into gossipy vignette, renders everything glassy and flat and I find I'm struggling for purchase. I'll persevere.

Just started Fatale, Jean-Patrick Manchette, in the NYRB reissue. Even after a few pages it's apparent that this crime noir will be somewhat ott. It's also another short one, under 100 pages.

haven't yet read any of them, but i've gotten the impression that all of manchette's crimes are ott

Yep

also: rad

Think so far I’ve only read The Prone Gunman tbh, although I bought a few others.

Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad
Annie Ernaux - A Woman's Story
Kenneth Irby - Catalpa

Currently reading Dasa Drndic's EEG and Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory.

zak m— Irby is one of my favorite poets, if you ever want to nerd out about him let me know— one of my prized books is a copy of one of his late chapbooks, warmly inscribed to Gerritt Lansing. I’ve even written a little about my favorite poems of his, from the short book To Max Douglas.

ah, cool, thanks, zak and tabes. I was going to ask for a poetry rec.

Alfred, unfortunately Irby’s best stuff is really only available in the enormous and pricey collected, but if you look around Abe or Bookfinder, his smaller press books and chaps are widely available and often pretty cheap (and also beautiful objects).

I adored Catalpa, but I'm probably not articulate enough to describe it. I read it as unapologetically musical and conversational. Observational and descriptive, where observational includes landscape, reading, history, introspection. 1970s California + Midwest, "age of explorers" colonial violence & hubris, family history, Coleman Hawkins... So it's referential, but doesn't read as a string of cherry-picked allusions (thinking about our internet era writing hatched in the shadow of wikipedia or whatever).

I sometimes find the big collections intimidating, and the original context feels meaningful -- I read it as an interlibrary loan, though, so I didn't have dig around.

Glad you liked it— it is one of my favorites of his. It’s a really quite arresting example of early eco-poetry that seamlessly moves from the literal soil to the glacial movements that caused that soil to be there to the colonial machinations that sullied that soil and so on. Few come close to it, imho.

Here’s an interesting squib about it from poet Andrew Schelling: https://jacket2.org/article/kenneth-irby-and-catalpa

Gwendoline Riley - Sick Notes
Sarah Bakewell - How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

I'm making good stries with Tess of the d'Urbervilles which is fine sentimental heroin VS rough social conditions / conventions. Summer surprised us with a shower of rain.

This year I also returned to Soseki (Kokoro), Vargas Llosa (The Green House), Sebald (Austerlitz). Also discovered with pleasure Laxness (Iceland's Bell), Schwob (Imaginary Lives), Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro). On the other hand, had little patience for Austen (Emma) and Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle), though I loved other of their books.

My face for the world to see - Alfred Hayes

Finished The Custom of the Country. As with The Age of Innocence I wasn't sure I was going to like this book about awful people but by the middle it had won me round; unlike with The Age of Innocence I cooled towards the end. Ralph is a great tragic hero, the part where she breaks up with him is outstanding, and that their son is at the crux of things adds an extra twist of the knife. But though Undine develops far beyond her initial similarity to Middlemarch's Rosamond, she remained too dislikeable and too central for me to really warm to the book as a whole, impressive though it is.

George V Higgins "Kennedy for the Defense". I've occasionally read that Leonard stole Higgins's shtick but it seems like they were contemporaries? This is fun but not nearly as good as Leonard's concurrent hot streak (e.g. The Switch, Stick, etc) and some of the dialogue goes on way too long.

Finished The Custom of the Country. As with The Age of Innocence I wasn't sure I was going to like this book about awful people but by the middle it had won me round; unlike with The Age of Innocence I cooled towards the end. Ralph is a great tragic hero, the part where she breaks up with him is outstanding, and that their son is at the crux of things adds an extra twist of the knife. But though Undine develops far beyond her initial similarity to Middlemarch's Rosamond, she remained too dislikeable and too central for me to really warm to the book as a whole, impressive though it is.

Wharton is the bomb.

That too.

Wharton occupies a slightly sweeter spot than Henry James in my esteem.

My present book is The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels. Nice to read exegesis on the Bible that frames things in terms that include history, culture and politics in addition to theology. It all makes much better sense when viewed in a more complete historical framework.

Currently revolving between the following and reading a few stories/chapters a day:

David G. Hartwell (ed.) – Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder
Patricia A. McKillip – Harrowing the Dragon
M. R. James - Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories
Edgar Allan Poe - Complete Stories and Poems
Stanley Cavell – The World Viewed

Finished Pohl / Kornlbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS. SF, satire (with lots of terrific inversions very casually relayed: the ad-man who can't bear to read a book unless it has adverts in it; the President who has no power in DC), and also a kind of hard-boiled thriller; industrial espionage. The text of my pulpy copy is often botched, but the writing is more punchy than Asimov, more controlled than Dick. Feels like a key book. Such a thriller that I'm surprised if it's never been adapted to the screen.

I'd like to read Pohl's memoir next: THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS.

That book is good, thought they were thinking of reissuing it, they meaning his family. He used to have a blog too, The Way The Future Blogs, that had lots of good stuff on it, but it's gone off the internet now because of..something. Maybe for the new book.

I met both him and Asimov. Pohl seemed really nice, a little reserved, almost seemed depressed compared to all the other loudmouths in the airport hotel at the sf convention. Asimov I had met a few years earlier when I won some kind of prize for some BS I wrote. prompting my English teacher or the Board of Ed or some other organization to send me to the related event. I asked him for an autograph and handed him my Junior High School graduation autograph book and he signed it but in no other way acknowledged me or looked it me. I guess I wasn't in the class of fan who could give him a Hugo Award or anything else he might want from a fan.

My friend met Ray Bradbury once which is probably a much better story, but not my story, so not sure whether to type it in.

You met Asimov, and Pohl? That's super!

I met Brian Aldiss! - which is good but still maybe not quite the same.

aldiss >>> asimov

^this

Do you have an aldiss anecdote for us, the pinefox?

Since you ask ... just about. It was an SF convention. I hung about with a woman I knew who was studying SF. I talked to Aldiss with her, soaking up his fame, his aura, the fact that I was in his presence for a few minutes ... (did I get him to sign something? I don't think I did) and he more than once said to me, in front of her, something like "You want to keep hold of her" and "Take care of her". I suppose he thought we were a couple - the kind of impression that is generically understandable, but she was probably much too glamorous for me. I was mildly embarrassed on her behalf, perhaps mildly flattered on mine.

(I don't think the SF lady was bothered one way or another by this brief faux pas, she already had a bf who was much more impressive than me.)

I wish I had taken a copy of NON-STOP or TRILLION YEAR SPREE along!

I think Aldiss said a few other things actually, I should see if I made any notes.

Now I think of it, I seem to remember people queueing up to have books signed by Aldiss and rather than handing him eg: one new book to be signed (as is quite normal), they'd have brought a box of 12 old books by him and required him to sign them all.

Feel like I've seen that at various signings. A question of etiquette.

James Redd, it's a pity you couldn't turn up to Asimov with the complete works of Isaac Asimov and ask him to sign them all. Two hours in: "A commentary on the Old Testament, volume 3 ... best wishes, Isaac Asimov".

Ha, exactly! Maybe I could have saved time by just bringing Opus 100, 200, 300,... etc. and a few Lucky Starr (as Paul French) books.

following my completion of a glastonbury romance (two thumbs up) have just done a reread of wyndham lewis's the childermass in anticipation of finally getting around to the later two books of the human age sequence. very much a book of two parts: the opening section provides an impressive visual description of a post-world war purgatorial wasteland where time and space are not as they were on earth... followed by the near interminable second part featuring the heavenly (or hellish) presiding judge-punch-bailiff figure spouting discoursing at length with various antagonistic interlocutors on lewis's then current preoccupations (bits of which i vaguely recall from the long ago read the art of being ruled, the revolutionary simpleton essay & time and western man) which makes up the bulk of the work.

Now I think of it, I seem to remember people queueing up to have books signed by Aldiss and rather than handing him eg: one new book to be signed (as is quite normal), they'd have brought a box of 12 old books by him and required him to sign them all.

Feel like I've seen that at various signings. A question of etiquette.

James Redd, it's a pity you couldn't turn up to Asimov with the complete works of Isaac Asimov and ask him to sign them all. Two hours in: "A commentary on the Old Testament, volume 3 ... best wishes, Isaac Asimov".

the journalist by harry mathews

i found out about mathews (the american guy in oulipo) after reading georges perec last year. it's pretty hard to find his novels, but i finally came across a dalkey archives edition of this one at city lights in san francisco. only a couple dozen pages in but it's very funny so far