Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?

Otherwise, I'm reading a LOT of plays, because I'm teaching an American Playwrights class and need to brush up/reacquaint myself with my syllabus.

The Five Hallie Rubenhold
Feminist author tries to show the lives of teh 5 recognised victims of Jack The Ripper. Attempts to stop them being very limited entities who really only exist around the bloody deaths. Shows that their own lives were pretty messy in doing so. But they did need to have a reason to be in a run down area to meet their ends.
I'm not so hot on the speculation bits where she is saying 'she must have .....' which is a habit throughout the book.
Shame cos I enjoyed bits of this and did like the idea behind this. I may read some more by Rubenhold and see if that is a habit of hers elsewhere. NOt a trope that seems to fit too well in a history book. I thought she was a better writer from what I had heard prior to reading this. Oh well.

Alfred, what did you think of From a View to a Death? I think it’s prob my favourite of the pre-Dance novels. Unobtrusively tragic and damning at the end as well as being v funny generally.

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:27 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've only read one of those slim things, but this one's a hoot so far.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:38 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

sounds right!

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:45 PM (yesterday)

Maybe I should've guessed a key supporting character was a crossdresser.

I'm in one of those funks where I can't quite settle on a book so I'm going with it and re-reading a few bits and pieces.

John Suiter's *Poets on the Peaks*, is a gorgeous thing, tracing the history of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the pacific northwest, specifically their time working as fire lookouts in the Cascades. It's meticulously researched and photographed and further proof that I need more mountains in my life.

Colin Thubron's *In Siberia* is a bleakly beautiful travelogue through the then newly-opened Siberia. Thubron speaks Russian well and throws himself on the mercy of local people, ending up in unlikely places and situations.

Also reading Tarkovsky's *Sculpting in Time* and Seamus Heaney's *Seeing Things*.

Just to get my blood moving I picked up The Outfit a hard-boiled crime novel by Richard Stark. It's good crime noir, very sharp and tightly written action, but the middle section is sort of a medley of miscellaneous 'heist' stories which loosely tie in to the framing story, but don't add much unless you enjoy fantasizing about pulling off a robbery in the same way other people fantasize about winning the lottery. This is part of a series about a superman tough guy named Parker. I think the others in the series stay closer to Parker's adventures and may be a bit less of a tossed salad.

You might like the first Parker, The Hunter (basis of the excellent Lee Marvin flick Point Blank): here he's outta stir and back for revenge, standardly enough, but also, the author says that he doesn't know all that he wants, so things go in different directions---by Dirty Money, (which I think is the last one, but don't care,) he's clearly into the cool of heists as planned and must be into the chaos aspect as lived out, considering how many times he's been through this and put others through it. Some of the other characters are more engaging, I think, but he's an asshole worth watching, in my limited experience (this is # 24 in the series).

tables, what plays are you reading?!

I'm curious too.

In the past few days, I’ve re-read:

Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Curse of the Starving Class
Fences
Body Indian by Hanay Geiogamah
In the Blood by Parks
A Murder of Crows by Mac Wellman
The Ohio State Murders by Adrienne Kennedy

Need to do a few more re-reads but that’s about 2/3 of the semester, more or less.

Oh, I also read for the first time:

Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone

It’s a course on American Playwrights so had to limit myself somewhat, normally I do a big double-header with family, fading ways of life, and the force of self-destruction in The Cherry Orchard and Curse of the Starving Class.

Nahoko Uehashi - THE BEAST PLAYER

Japanese YA fantasy book. p good, will definitely read the sequel.

Various Authors - MARPLE

12 crime novelists have a go a writing a Miss Marple short story. Only found a couple compelling. Also way too many of them featured nephew Raymond.

My current book is Niki: The Story of a Dog, Tibor Déry. The author is Hungarian and the dog in view was clearly based on a particular dog he owned, though the human characters are lightly fictionalized. Compared to, say, My Dog Tulip Déry adopts a much more intellectualized approach than Ackerly's sentimentality. The dog's doggy nature occupies the center of the author's attention and interest while the humans occupy the margins of the story.

I finished reading THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORY.

What are your favorite recently published short stories?

I'm starting off the new year with John Fogerty's autobiography, Fortunate Son. It probably helps to be a big Creedence fan, as I am, but I'd have to say the book is a page-turner. Fogerty is in take-no-prisoners mode. He seems to not be on good terms with almost anyone from the band's heyday, and he's not afraid to tell it like he sees it. I enjoy the hunting and fishing stories, but I do wonder how he's going to fill the second half of the book. The Creedence period went by in a flash - which is I guess true to how it actually happened.

just finished ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow’ by gabrielle zevin, about a trio of video game developers. interesting insights about gaming in there and characters who maks infuriating, and infuriatingly real, decisions

about 10% through marlon James’s ‘moon witch, spider king,’ which so far has his familiar mixture of elegantly constructed, free-flowing writing about just he most brutal violence you can imagine. feels easier to read than black leopard, red wolf, but the central character is less dynamic so far

James Kirchick - Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washingon
Amina Cain - A Horse at Night: On Writing
Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

xp There was a lot of music in a very few years. Hadn't changed the bandname until 68 and were falling apart by 71. 3 good lps in 69 so yeah over fast . Timeless music for many but one small part of a lived experience.

JUst catching up with Blood and Land which I was sent I think by mistake while I was looking for another book on Native Americans some time last summer. I think I still have about half of it to read. written by J. C. H. King, a British scholar.

just finished A history of the world in seven cheap things : a guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet by Raj Patel,
which was pretty good.

& before taht The Five by Hallie Rubenhold which was interesting but did have some writing quirks I wish the writer hadn't used. The idea that this character must have felt.... was something I thought was looked at as a bad writing trope. So shjame to see it here so frequently.
Otherwise the idea is pretty interesting, give the women best known as the victims of Jack The Ripper an existence beyond that by fleshing out their biographies.

Through The Language Glass Guy Deutscher
talking about how culture shapes language

o. nate, it's funny you're reading the Fogerty bio given today's news

Yeah, just noticed that news too. Right now I'm at the point in the book where he's deeply depressed over the whole Fantasy contract situation, so its nice to think that there will someday be a resolution.

I'm about to finish a long book of mid-80s poems by Coolidge. The more I read of him, the more I'm sort of wowed by how much he's done— from more concrete poetry to poems that are like thickets of clashing syntaxes to beautiful pastoral lyrics, the guy's kind of done it all. Really incredible.

Prynne group continues, but I've been busy with other reading this week so won't get to the week's book until right before our meeting tomorrow.

I've started reading Behrouz Boochani's NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS (2018). My understanding is that the author is Kurdish and was some kind of refugee, or perhaps other kind of migrant, in Australia, where he was locked up. I'm hesitant about saying this because I haven't read much yet. I'll find out more as I go. The book was written in the Farsi language, and translated into English. So far it describes being on a truck full of migrants, then a boat full of migrants, which is in danger of sinking.

The foreword by one Richard Flanagan states that this is a great book that has huge political import for what it says about how migrants are treated. Formally, the book is primarily prose but includes a large number of breaks into a kind of 'poetry', ie: language organised by line that expresses the situation already described by the prose. It is fair to say that in English, this poetry does not come across well. Possibly it does in its original language.

Funny talked about having watched a video of a refugee containment camp in the Australian outback in a conversation yesterday. Watched it in the first months of being in town in 98. It held a lot of Afghan refugees I think among others. There was a protest about conditions hence the film.
Hadn't thought about it in a while. So coincidence I think.

Antarctica, a short story collection by Claire Keegan. Most of the stories are very short (under 20 pages) and more like vignettes, focussed on scenes, situations, characters. Some of them build to a climax, some of the climaxes are cliffhangers - the first story is perhaps the most dramatic in this regard, also the least convincing. Most of the protagonists are women or girls, most from or in troubled, poor, or unconventional families. Simple writing, short sentences, the odd arresting image - 'the blustery trees made a carousel of shadow inside the kitchen'. It took me a while to warm to it but by the end I was finding them quite affecting, though there's nothing quite as gut-wrenching, thankfully, as Foster.

Finished Alexander Baron's With Hope, Farewell. Protagonist is a young man in 30's London, alienated from his Jewish background and eager to assimilate; he also dreams of becoming a pilot. Out of nowhere, WWII provides a solution to both problems - but of course he comes back psychologically damaged by the war, and meanwhile anti-semitism in London is on the rise again. Some great setpieces - a Jewish wedding with violence erupting in the nearby street, a huge riot which I think might be portraying the battle for Cable Street. Protagonist and his very pregnant wife get stuck in traffic on a bus while the crowds break police lines and chaos erupts, very scary read for anyone who's used to being stuck in a standstill on a bus at Dalston Junction.

ledge, I had a good experience reading Small Things Like These.

Yes I enjoyed that one as well, she calls it a novel here - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/20/claire-keegan-i-think-something-needs-to-be-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be - but in terms of story it's scarcely more incident-packed than some of her shorter ones, still it's good to be able to spend a bit more time in one of her worlds.

there's an interesting bit in that article about what small things like these is 'about', and her lack of judgement on the magdalene sisters. i did feel in some of her short stories a rather casual attitude towards real incidents or issues - one story features, indirectly, fred west, two others have characters using the 'n' word.

It's clear what her protagonist thinks.

yes her characters are not quite so forgiving!

xpost to Fizzles - I think your characterization of Claire-Louise Bennett's writing is apt, and your previous post makes me want to read Gerald Murnane. (attrition without dullness or numbing, where the focus is on the restlessness for the pressure applied)

Has anyone read Megan Giddings? Her novel The Women Could Fly is on sale for $2.99. The blurb compares her to Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler.

was reading something else this morning that compared something to Atwood and Butler. oh, it was Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Yukito Ayatsuji - THE DECAGON HOUSE MURDERS

Japanese and-then-there-were-none ish crime thriller. group gathered on an island are part of a university mystery writing club and all take the name of a famous author - poe, agatha ,ellroy etc are bumped off one by one. liked it a lot and didnt feel the solution was a cheat or anything.

pinefox's mention of xpost one Richard Flanagan reminded me that I'd meant to read The Narrow Road To The Deep North, probably his best-known novel outside of Australia, and Man Booker winner: based partly on what Flanagan's father told him about being a POW in World War II, partly on a doctor who cooperated and negotiated with the Japanese for the sake of his fellow prisoners, acclaimed as a national hero after the war.
wiki quotes the author of Schindler's List:

The Australian novelist Thomas Keneally wrote the book was "...a grand examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh and, above all, of how hard it is to live after survival."

Flanagan is also an essayist, activist, and investigative journalist.
I'd like to read his "Parish-Fed Bastards": A History of the Politics of the Unemployed in Britain, 1884–1939 and Notes on Exodus, about the Syrian refugee camps he visited in several countries, also backstory.

Sorry, Keneally's book was titled Schindler's Ark; Spielberg changed it for the movie.

I managed to get back to Bono's memoir SURRENDER a little. I'm 75pp in, Bono is 18, and there are still almost 500 pages to go.

The book is very readable, but tends to fall into staccato writing when it wants to make a point.
Like this.
When you realise that your father is the singer you'll never be.
That's where a rock & roll singer comes from.
Maybe.

That style doesn't give me great confidence in Bono as a writer. On the whole I think he's a great talker, but not really a writer, and a bold thinker about big ideas, but not a deep thinker or, still less, an analytical thinker. He's often self-deprecating, which is unsurprising - part of the scenario is that he has reached a point where he can afford to be self-deprecating, and laughing at himself is a form of success.

The beginning of U2 is rather disappointingly washed over - there isn't enough on how they go from being rank amateurs playing in a kitchen for the first time, to being able to play a gig and ask for a record deal. It's a long way from the former to the latter. Why not tell us about their first actual gig? Oddly Bono doesn't, though his memory for many things seems highly acute.

I'd also like more material on the Dublin of the 1960s and 1970s, as a material and cultural place.

One thing that the book reminds me, which others will already have known or remembered, is how U2 were rather culturally unusual in 1970s Ireland - in that The Edge was Welsh, Clayton was English, and Mullen may, as far as I can tell, have been the only standard Irish Catholic type. Bono's mother was Protestant and raised him as such, and he has relatives with, arguably, Protestant names, including a brother Norman whom I'd entirely forgotten existed. His wife Alison was a Protestant also.

One of the better pieces of writing (p.58):

Everything I still love about Larry's playing was present then - the primal power of the tom-toms, the boot in the stomach of the kick drum, the snap and slap of the snare drum as it bounced off windows and walls. It was a beautiful violence modulated by the shining gold and silver armor of the cymbals, oddly orchestral, filling out frequencies. This indoor thunder, I thought, will bring the whole house down.

the skinny i got from insiders in the ghost-writing community is that yes it's bono's words and sentences and passages as spoken to a transcriber -- but possibly *not* his overall organisation (tho of course he will have signed off on and approved it) (which tbf not all subjects of the process bother to do lol)

Bono’s dad was Catholic iirc and did bring him to Mass on occasion. It can’t have mattered that much to his father, though, because normally if you’re Catholic and marry someone who isn’t, the premarital courses make you promise to raise your children Catholic.

(Though that only applies if you have a Catholic marriage which I’m guessing the parents didn’t?)

Anyway, there are other Protestant celebrities, famously Graham Norton, who spoke about how difficult this was, so it’s not that unusual, especially in Dublin which is always more diverse anyway.

Read Sebastian Castillo’s “Not I,” an Oulipian exercise in grammar and English usage— each chapter consists of 25 sentences, each individual sentence containing one of the 25 most common words in the English language. There are 24 chapters, two dedicated to each of the twelve commonly accepted verb tenses in the English language.

It is very funny and clever without seeming corny or a mere yuk-fest. There are some quite tragic and poignant moments, too!

Sebastian is probably best known for his Twitter presence— “bartlebytaco” on that platform. He is very funny.

Started Vigdis Hjorth’s ‘Will and Testament.’ Thirty pages in and absolutely hooked, who knew a book about inheritances and psychosexual family drama could be so entrancing.

I much enjoyed Niki: The Story of a Dog, Tibor Déry. Not a lot of Hungarian literature finds its way into English in a widely available form like this NYRB edition, but the few that do are usually remarkably good.

Hjorth book very good, read 170 pages in one sitting, pausing only to post my previous post.

(The prominent side is Halldór Laxness and what he conveys to writers or readers. Is the other side represented? Why was it tangled with a story about money?)

Glad I am getting into HJ KIng's Blood and Sand and thinkiing it shouldn't have been left sitting around for ages.
It is pretty interesting. & I really should have got into Survivng Genocide by Jeffrey OStler soon after receiving it at the start of teh year.
& a few other books on Native American relate dhistory I picked up last year.

Finally got a copy of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa after waiting ages for it through Interlibrary loan. But not started it yet really. Want to get into it so may be next bathroom book after

Guy Deutscher's ThrouGh The Language Glass in which he is looking at the idea of Linguistic Relativity and trying to show positive aspects of a a t5heory he doesn't like much. Interesting book and i think I need to read further into the subject. I did think language did alter teh way one perceived the world around one. THings outside one's immediate experience being to some degree fictions one needs to filter into one's comprehension and therefore one's impressions possibly being didtorted in the process. Or never fully being able to know a thing in itself and one's interpretation being shaped by the language used in description/attempt to process .

En Cyclo Pedia Johan Tell
book on bikes by a Swedish writer which I found in a really cheap charity shop among some other great titles including Phillip Sandes' Ratline which I've wanted to get for ages. Need to read this and East West Street though.
But th ebike book is a good one, a series of short articles set out alphabetically telling anecodtal stories about the writer's experience cycling etc.

I'm currently re-reading The Hill of Kronos, Peter Levi. This book is one of those love letters to Greece from English authors that punctuated the mid-20th century, similar to various works by Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Laurence Durrell and others. This one came a bit late to the party, in 1981 and much of it concerns the 'first as tragedy, then as farce' reign of the Greek junta of colonels that was contemporaneous with the first term of Nixon/Kissinger in the USA. As far as I can see, nobody writes love letters to Greece any more. Sad.

I've started the year rereading The Fellowship of The Ring. It was worth it if only because the construction is so different from the film. The oppressive atmosphere, nostalgia for a golden age, and divide between the races are more pronounced. The descriptions can be sparse and a bit of a slog but they alternate with good dialogue and a good sense of place (Bree, Moria, Lothlorien). The book keeps a good pace even though it grows progressively heavy and gloomy.

End of a golden age is my transition to the early 17th century Chinese play The Peach Blossom Fan. I learnt about NYRB last year and I'm following ILB's lead. Looks great so far, and easier than Dream of the Red Chamber.

Perhaps GLASS ONION is a 'love letter to Greece' for our times.

One of the better pieces of writing (p.58):

I hope that's not as good as it gets, it's dreadful.