The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

i think all the novels are a long slog in places

(hound maybe least so?)

Truth is, I haven't even read THE SIGN OF FOUR yet!

I have read SCARLET and would say: it's not long at all, but - as previously discussed with Mark S, and agreed by Rzepka - it has a preposterous proportionately long Mormon interlude which has basically nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, which is not ideal for a ... Sherlock Holmes novel.

Rzepka actually states that this bad fictional structure is directly drawn from Gaboriau's Lecoq mystery, THE HONOUR OF THE NAME (unknown to me, but incidentally J-F Lyotard ends his most famous essay with that phrase).

well like A Study In Scarlet, the first crime and Holmes parts are the best and the “here is a long explanatory narrative set in our former territories and dominions” less so. that said the whole victorian attitude to the mormons is kind of fascinating.

Baskervilles remains the best imo as it has the least of this and Dartmoor is a brilliant setting, also used in the excellent Silver Blaze of. it’s surprisingly underused as a literary landscape - its laureate Eden Philpotts aside, who needs to go on the “authors no one reads any more” thread), Sign of Four is v enjoyable as they race around London, and ASS (sorry) introduces Holmes, so all good.

that first para referring to The Sign of Four. (consistently referred to as The sign of the four in the text)

Confusing divergence that!

apologies! comes from lazily/inattentively posting on my phone

Silver Blaze is so good.

Fizzles, though I do often find your posts quite difficult, in this particular instance I was just remarking that it's an odd divergence that people variously refer to THE SIGN OF FOUR and THE SIGN OF THE FOUR. Think this may actually have been a US / UK publishing divergence.

I would now like to go back and read many more of these stories. Though there seems only to have been 3 years of them in the first instance.

there is a considerable decline in quality after Conan Doyle brings him back.

I thought I had read all of the stories, but I have read the plot summary of "Silver Blaze" and for the life of me I don't remember it.

Speaking of John Watson, there is an amusing exchange at the beginning of The Sign of Four, where Holmes is being insufferably pompous and Watson is entirely correct. Holmes' response is pathetic:

“There is no great mystery in this matter,” he said, taking the cup of tea which I had poured out for him; “the facts appear to admit of only one explanation.”
“What! you have solved it already?”
....
"I have just found, on consulting the back files of the Times, that Major Sholto, of Upper Norwood, late of the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry, died upon the twenty-eighth of April, 1882.”
“I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.”
“No? You surprise me. Look at it in this way, then. Captain Morstan disappears. The only person in London whom he could have visited is Major Sholto. Major Sholto denies having heard that he was in London. Four years later Sholto dies. Within a week of his death Captain Morstan’s daughter receives a valuable present, which is repeated from year to year and now culminates in a letter which describes her as a wronged woman. What wrong can it refer to except this deprivation of her father? And why should the presents begin immediately after Sholto’s death unless it is that Sholto‘s heir knows something of the mystery and desires to make compensation? Have you any alternative theory which will meet the facts?”
“But what a strange compensation! And how strangely made! Why, too, should he write a letter now, rather than six years ago? Again, the letter speaks of giving her justice. What justice can she have? It is too much to suppose that her father is still alive. There is no other injustice in her case that you know of.”
“There are difficulties; there are certainly difficulties,” said Sherlock Holmes pensively;
Damn straight there are difficulties, and Watson is entirely correct to point out that Holmes is overreaching by saying he'd pretty much cleared up the mystery, in fact the mysterious bit of the mystery remains entirely. His response really is very silly, and Watson is correct to point out elsewhere Holmes' vanity.

There's also this interesting exchange at the beginning of A Case of Identity

“My dear fellow.” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. “
“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”

Holmes here is in an enjoyably baroque and fantastical strain, and suggests he does see something magical in it all - the *outre results* of life. Watson, who is often accused of romanticism by Holmes, is enjoyably brusque in response, and again there's a lot to be said for his view.

I mentioned RLS's New Arabian Nights upthread and I really should emphasise how much of an influence they had on literary London (like Sherlock Holmes they were serialised in a London periodical). They are well worth reading. Conan Doyle was a big fan - The Pavilion on the Links (seven years before A Study in Scarlet) was one of his favourite short stories. They set the template for anything being possible in London, and the visits 'low disreputable corners and suburbia', ie beyond Camberwell. Both Machen (in his very bad, very good The Three Impostors) and Conan Doyle take its geography and cadences. The idea that the stories that emanate from the commonplace are more fantastical than those that emanate from the upper classes is here too.

This

>>> “My dear fellow.” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”
<<<

is extremely good material.

1: the first statement about rooftops directly resembles something that Dickens wrote in DOMBEY AND SON.

2: the second, on 'realism', takes you towards that Wildean territory of, say, life not living up to art. James Joyce said related things - that journalism was about the exceptions, fiction about the norm, or something.

"most stale and unprofitable"

also sounds like Hamlet?

i think it's prob a deliberate reference on the part of holmes.

and yes it immediately struck me as an important section, probably something that was playing out in CD's mind. how to frame his dramas, out of what material to make them, how close to watson's view, how close to holmes'.

we read the speckled band in middle school (age 10ish). that feels like a solid intro to conan doyle for kids.

Dickens, admittedly making a different point from Doyle:

Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a mole potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker!

In his very namedroppy autobio Conan Doyle talks about having tea with Wilde before the unpleasantness, and states something like "cannot believe the writer of such beautiful fiction could be all bad". Mind you, he is militant about trying to say a good word about everyone he meets, unless they're disgusting German soldiers of course.

Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler.

Thanks for the Dickens quote, pinefox! Where is that from? I sympathize with the frustration in that, more evident than (though also detectable in) Holmes' flight of fancy---was already thinking that newspaper accounts aren't necessarily any more reliable, and maybe moreso back then, with xpost bald accounts (which *might* be something for bored newspapermen, to push agains, concocting Jack The Ripper, at least as correspondent x super-serial kiler).
Doyle seems to set Holmes and Watson as a balancing act, based on aspects of his own personality or persona, but I think he may have been closer to Holmes, in terms of outside thinking that's sometimes more pie-eyed than magpie---ACD the adamant believer in fairies etc---but as an artist he knew he needed Watson in there.

and maybe less (reliable) back then, I meant.

Re-reading some of xpost The End of the Affair deepens the impression that you don't have to be a Christian, or engage in willing suspension of disbelief (in that, though as I said I do want to keep believing that Greene is a good writer), to find your attention span humming like a sympathetic string along this increasingly stress-tested, already scorched homeland Commons ov forked paths (core characters are neighbors and/or family, others easily find them).

It's DOMBEY & SON.

Colson Whitehead, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2016).

I greatly enjoyed Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and would gladly read his other works.

Heinrich Heine - Travel Pictures
Bei Dao - City Gate, Open Up

Typed a short post about these in the Prose works by Poets thread.

Autumn
Winter
Spring
Summer

all by ali Smith. enjoyed them but probably the first one most, and that was a reread. nice mix of politics and literature and art mentions in them but I'm not sure they'd hold up in 20 years without notes on what exactly was happening at the time because they are kind of specific

(that said, the mentions of COVID in detention centres aligned perfectly with the news of diphtheria in detention centres so maybe not)

this was followed by Mother Of Invention where i was hoping for more examples than just the 3. but i kind of agree with her main point, that we can't basically ignore 50% of the population

and rounded the month off with the last 80% of Pandora's Jar which i enjoyed more when i had some idea of the stories beforehand (ie pretty much all of them bar Phaedra).

I finished "The Blunderer" by Patricia Highsmith, an entertaining and effective crime noir novel, although I thought the first half was brilliant, and the second half merely good. Highsmith is especially entertaining on the social behavior of the mid-century American upper middle class, and its impossible to put the book down as she sets the trap that will ensnare the comfortable Long Island lawyer protagonist. As the focus shifts a bit to the less interesting immigrant bookseller and ambitious detective characters, and as the plot becomes more predictable, the excitement flags a bit, but still overall an effective and impressively nihilistic thriller.

I greatly enjoyed Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and would gladly read his other works.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux),

same

Be Boy Buzz bell hooks
Classic existential work on the potential involved with being a child self defined as male. Very short read.
Like slam poetry or something but anyway quite profound for the economy of verbiage.

Here's what I read this year, a mix of genre stuff, new fiction, and binging on Didion (who I had never actually read before). And Karamazov, which I loved. Also really liked the Kate Folk and Joshua Cohen books.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
Stanislaw Lem - The Star Diaries
Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
Ben H. Winters - The Last Policeman
Ben H. Winters - Countdown City
Ben H. Winters - World of Trouble
Jennifer Egan - The Candy House
Joan Didion - Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Joan Didion - The White Album
Kate Folk - Out There
Emily Mackay - Bjork - Homogenic (33 ⅓)
Joan Didion - After Henry
Joshua Cohen - The Netanyahus
Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Joan Didion - South and West

Currently reading Marcel Theroux's 'The Sorceror of Pyongyang', which I have high hopes for, and going back to the last hundred pages of that long Thelonious Monk bio.

Any suggestions for the next Russian classic to read next year that's as enjoyable as Karamazov?

Dostoevsky's Demons is great if you haven't read that. The Idiot is good as well.

I greatly enjoyed Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov when I read it recently. Don't let the title fool you, there are some novellas in there too.

Anna Karenin is great

the new George Saunders “A Swim In A Pond In The Rain” is basically a book version of his Russian short story course and it’s great. the short stories themselves are included in full (Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev)

i’m not a huge fan of Saunders’ own stories so it was a nice surprise

Oh, I didn't realize that's what it was. I was debating about reading the new book of his stories so this might be the perfect thing.

Yeah, wanna check that. The only Didion full-lengths I've read are Where I Was From (dig pasttense) and The Year of Magical Thinking, both amazing.
Re Whitehead, don't sleep on Zone One, as commented on upthread.

I haven't been keeping up on new Colson Whitehead very well, but I'm still fond of The Intuitionist / Sag Harbor / Zone One.

I greatly enjoyed _Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov_ when I read it recently. Don't let the title fool you, there are some novellas in there too.

I really liked The Nickel Boys, too— was surprised. My dad gave me the new one for my birthday, the only present he gave me which didn’t go in a little free library.

I have been reading some books I purchased on a recent California trip, including a full length as well as a chap from Norma Cole. Also finished a first read of the annotated version of Prynne’s ‘The Oval Window,’ which was an interesting experience— not sure I wanted it, to be honest. Annotations kind of ruin the poems?!?

Anyway, this morning I decided to take a break from the old folks and began Joshua Wilkerson’s trilogy of short books about malls, contagion, and the sacred, ‘Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream.’ Nothing groundbreaking so far, but some interesting connections being made between the “terra nullius” ideology of Manifest Destiny and the development and death of mall culture in the US.

Harmony Holiday on My Pinup, Hilton Als's "conflicted love letter to Prince," which sounds like a must-read---Als can make it work for a whole book if anybody can:
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2904/hilton-als-s-conflicted-love-letter-to-prince-25154

My reading life took a big crash over the past eight weeks. I've been slowly making my way through Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler and I'm about 3/4 through it. It's very grim, deliberately so.

My basic take is that both this and the previous book, Parable of the Sower, form a kind of "how to" manual for BIPOC on surviving the complete social collapse of the USA into chaos, lawlessness and fascist tyranny. In service to this goal Butler chose to depict every form of brutality, torture and social violence she could imagine arising, so as to suggest the best manner of surviving them, both physically and emotionally.

But, damn, it is just a relentless horror show and she walks just as close to bleak hopelessness as was consistent with her deeper purpose of pointing a way through such all-encompassing darkness.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot. Happy Holidays everyone!

I started Leena Krohn's Collected Fiction Part 1: The Novels, having bought it on sale from Google Books several years ago. So far, I think it's lost something in translation.

Harmony Holiday on _My Pinup_, Hilton Als's "conflicted love letter to Prince," which sounds like a must-read---Als can make it work for a whole book if anybody can:
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2904/hilton-als-s-conflicted-love-letter-to-prince-25154🕸🕸

No Ye here, pretty sure, although I only skimmed parts that weren't descriptions of the book itself. Which seemed good: this is not one of those "reviews" that mostly show off the alleged reviewer's own expertise re the subject of the book.

I finished Colson Whitehead, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2016). It looks long but is quite quick to read.

It is a historical novel about US slaves in the 19th century, and especially some who run away from a Georgia plantation and escape, seeing South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee then Indiana. The protagonist is a woman, Cora, who believes that her mother Mabel ran away and escaped in the past. To some extent the novel reprises what are probably quite standard depictions of slavery, plantation life and escape. I feel that this has probably been done before, not to say that Whitehead doesn't do it quite well.

Whitehead has a big innovation, though, in making the metaphorical 'underground railroad' into a real railroad; literalising a figure of speech I suppose. The best things in the book are the descriptions of the railroad. Whitehead has a strong sense that the stations are each different, like a different world, and indeed the above-named states are too. Although in some way this is a realistic (but alternate-history) novel, it also has a fantastical flavour, in the way that SC, NC, TN, IN, each feel like a new realm - a Bakhtinian chronotope, a Foucauldian heterotopia? Maybe like the different chappter-worlds of Cavino's WINTER'S NIGHT, or Lethem's AMNESIA MOON. (Reading background on Whitehead I came to think that he resembles Lethem more than most authors do.)

The writing is more pedestrian than I might have expected - or just more clear, more plain-speaking. CW often writes things like "She could smell the sweet scent of freedom" or "she could still feel the pull of the chains that held her back" and I think, this will be ironised, and it isn't really - he is just happy to deal in these familiar, fairly uncomplicated ideas and figures of speech. I can't complain that the book stays quite simple and straight-talking; maybe more books should. CW does sometimes drift into something more sentimental, like a weaker aspect of Toni Morrison - "He was a sweet-loving man with a sweet smile and he said he would always do the best for their children ..." Maybe CW is deliberate in including the simplicity and positivity. Or maybe he gets lazy at times as a writer.

The novel has an unusual structural feature in alternating chapters named for places with chapters named for characters (like Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING, say, but this novel is 3rd person), but the odd thing is how these characters turn up. Two, 'Ethel' and 'Caesar', turn up after those characters have already died, and they don't add that much to what we already knew. On the other hand the last one 'Mabel', on the mother's fate, does add considerable dramatic irony in that the mother's outcome is not what every other character had been assuming.

I think my hunch is that CW is interesting because he is an ambitious, speculative-fiction writer, grounded in SF and so on, and so he brings that outlook to writing historical fiction. A bit like, once again, Lethem brought a superhero convention to writing the recent-history fiction of THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.

Whitehead tends to alternate a speculative novel with flat characters with a more psychological novel with round characters. haven't read Harlem Shuffle yet, but Nickel Boys is a beautiful piece of writing. For my money, it's much better than Underground Railroad. I also really recommend Sag Harbor.

I have started Marianne Wiggins' Properties of Thirst. I studied writing with her in the early 90s, and absolutely love her work. This one, which takes place in mid-20th-century Southern California, may be her best. It's all the more remarkable because she suffered a stroke in the middle of it and completed it with the help of her daughter. Highly recommended.

I'm reading The Gate, Natsume Soseki in the NYRB edition. I'm not very far along yet, but I will note here that in his Introduction, Pico Iyer spent at least ten pages finding as many ways as possible to say that in this novel and in Japanese lit generally, "it's the notes they don't play, man".

I read Mark Epstein's *Thoughts With A Thinker*. Epstein is a psychoanalyst by profession but has also spent many years practising Buddhist meditation; the book stands at the confluence of the two disciplines, looking at how the two complement one another.

Epstein's core thesis is that psychoanalysis only goes so far in the healing process: it can bring repressed material into the light but ultimately takes for granted the Buddha's greatest insight: the illusion of a coherent and reified self. Epstein argues that psychoanalysis reinforces narcissistic structures; guided and rigorous meditation can break these structures down.

It's the first book I've read that really integrates meditation practice into everyday life in a way that feels achievable and purposeful. And he's lucid about psychoanalysis and its shortcomings.