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

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.

I finished Colin MacInnes' ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS (1959).

Mostly I find this a remarkable work: charming, energetic, perceptive, and, above all, propelled by an idiolect, a rhythm and diction of its own. In this particular regard I realised it was a great precursor, unacknowledged I think, to Amis's MONEY. An example is that any given person can be called a 'product', so if the narrator meets, say, a ticket inspector, he can call him 'the inspector product'. This particular rhythm is also one that I sometimes use myself in ordinary communication.

The book has a kind of covert emotional seriousness in the way the narrator is lovelorn over 'Crepe Suzette' despite not acknowledging this when she's first introduced (and he then walks away from her quite readily at the end) and the role of the ailing father with whom the narrator has a fond relation. I sense that THE CATCHER IN THE RYE may be a precursor here; I suppose my sense is that the older author presents the hip alienated youth but also the mature emotional picture that the youth can't quite see.

In its last section the book has a different seriousness in its portrait of 'race riots' in Notting Hill. You could say that the novel is remarkably enlightened and far-sighted. But I also feel that it becomes too earnest here, as the cool narrator gets heavily involved in his multicultural ethical project. Part of my sense would again be that the hand of the older, more socially concerned author is showing, a bit too clearly, behind the youthful narrator.

The good things about the book make it remarkable, significant and well worth knowing.

Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through? Thanks to corrs unplugged for the suggestion. Warm, empathic, thoughtful, conversational. Quite didactic which is fine, great even, I'd like to know if any of her other novels are more plot heavy though, I was in the mood for a good yarn when I started this one. I'll find out either way as I'm definitely reading more by her.

Robert Galbraith - THE INK BLACK HEART
still like the characters well enough, the plot was okay, not sure about the incel stuff. But by God she needs an editor tho I guess she's too successful for that. 1011 pages for any novel let alone a crime novel is preposterous.

Currently switching between the following:

Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard - Richard Brody; a director who never made a film I love (I prefer Rivette, Rohmer, Marker, usually Varda), and a writer whose opinions I often find silly. Yet this is compelling so far and written with an impressive command.
The Philosophy of Modern Song - Bob Dylan. Put this down a couple of weeks ago and haven't been eager to return tbh. I enjoy Bob in full trickster mode but the tricks are getting wearisome.
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow. I've had a copy for over 20 years but felt like now was a good time to dig in. Good-to-great.

ledge, glad to hear you like it, I also highly recommend The Friend

and The Last of Her Kind, but that's a somewhat dense read in comparison (riyl Ferrante)

Two friends recommended Sigrid Nunez, which was probably quite nice of them. I read the LRB review of, I think, THE FRIEND (one with a dog?).

One of the (real life) friends sent two screenshots from the book and they were both poor. They read like a low quality 'personal essay' making sonorous but actually not particularly convincing statements about writing. But perhaps this was just a character voice within the novel and something that Nunez was manipulating, not something she took seriously. I won't know unless I read the book.

Finished (among other things) Jacob Kahn’s ‘Mine Eclogue,’ the first full book of poems from a Bay Area poet. Enjoyed myself, Kahn has a delightful quality of including mundane details of his own existence into poems that are often abstract or based in deep, lyrical passages.

Now I’m onto David Larsen’s ‘Zeroes Were Hollow.’ Better known for his translations of Arabic poetry and prose, Larsen is also an astonishing poet in English, utilizing parataxis in a way that doesn’t seem ham-handed but is really driven by an openness to form and association. Love this book.

Rereading Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE (2018). I likely repeat myself here. The novel is interestingly organised in sections named after places, and in sometimes very short chapters. It deliberately takes on a massive topicality, with cultural references that might feel very oudated in, say, 2028. The novel carries a good sense of place, inland CA; clearly part of its project. It's also keen on animals and an 'animal theorist' type could write about it. So could an 'anthropocene' type.

The novel very much raises that old controversial chestnut, 'male writer writing female character' and its pros and cons. I think that the creation of the protagonist Phoebe is in some ways excellent and impressive, and JL gives her a witty, riffing voice that is sometimes like pastiche Lorrie Moore. Yet I still find I have the same problem with this that I did on first reading: he makes her too sexualised, ie: too obsessed with sex. Thinking about sex is one thing; feeling an actual need for it, while on a complex mission to perform another urgent task unrelated to it, is another. I think this overemphasis is a result of a) the author expressing his own feeling and b) overcompensation for the risk of writing a desexualised, prim female character.

pinefox, you might also like MacInnes's previous City of Spades, set in 1957 London, tracking black and white kids, immigration, low-budget subculture, weed as a link---I liked it better than Absolute Beginners because the narrator of that seemed as earnest all though as you found him toward the end: oversold as a cleaned-up Holden Caulfield (who is nothing if not a real-seeming teen boy, who smokes too much, talks too much, has zits and omg a range of other problems/conditions). But I read those a longgg time ago, might be wrong. Still, I think I was led to City... by Simon Frith's favorable mention, so it might be worth a shot, esp. since you liked most of the other book.

still reading the xpost Dylan book, as I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? It's a bit frustrating occasionally, but I still haven't gotten tired of it.

poster Dow, is that book separate from ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS or part of a trilogy of some kind?

I'm not DOW but I can tell you that the London Trilogy consists of:

City of Spades
Absolute Beginners
Mr Love and Justice

I wonder whether, if I were to read them again, AB would still be my favourite?

Thanks Tim - and is the trilogy officially connected, with the same characters, or just a set of 3 books that he wrote that all featured London?

Three books all featuring London and addressing similar themes and whatnot but without shared characters as I recall.

I finished rereading THE FERAL DETECTIVE, strongly feeling again the verdict above: that the novel is bizarrely over-sexualised, despite being very good in many ways. The female narrator is also presented as obsessed with the approval and favours of the titular character. I have a suspicion that this is Lethem deliberately trying to write 'how women approach relationships', ie: an idea (true, false or otherwise) that they are keen to take possession of partners, lock them in to relationships, show them off to others, etc. I'm not sure that this rings true for the specific situation described in the novel. I don't find the character's motives, desires and actions altogether plausible.

Feeling very unwell, I then read something easy: the PARIS REVIEW interviews with Peter Carey and Stephen King. Carey was more politically critical and anti-colonial than I expected. King was unbuttoned and entertaining, attacking Kubrick's film of THE SHINING and firing back very strongly at Shirley Hazzard for putting him down. He seems to have lived an extraordinarily productive life as a writer. One of the funny things here is him talking about making money from books and saying 'well, I only make a quarter of what Danielle Steel or John Grisham make' - ie: he's in a different realm of popularity and money from most authors.

Ending the year on a cheery note with Derek Raymond's He Died with His Eyes Open and The Whites by Richard Price.

I am really struggling with Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which is a puzzle as it’s a very short book, and written in basic sentences that an average eight-year-old could understand. Nonetheless, I’m finding it very boring.

I did have the radical idea (at least for me) that I could stop reading it and pick up something more enjoyable. Once I might try that instead of bending to my usual anxiety about sunken costs.

I am really struggling with Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which is a puzzle as it’s a very short book, and written in basic sentences that an average eight-year-old could understand. Nonetheless, I’m finding it very boring.

I did have the radical idea (at least for me) that I could stop reading it and pick up something more enjoyable. Once I might try that instead of bending to my usual anxiety about sunken costs.