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

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.

After being recommended a book titled HEALTH COMMUNISM by several people, I’ve begun reading it. The authors host a popular podcast called Death Panel, but I know nothing about it since I don’t listen to podcasts.

It is interesting though slightly annoying in the way that many current books of sociology and theory are— the same points are made in a slightly different way to arrive at a similar conclusion. Truly beginning to think that there really is no contemporary theory in the US that’s worth a shit, but what’s new, we’re a nation of fools.

Deesha Philyaw - THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES

short stories with black american women at their centre. like it a lot. the 'peach cobbler' and the 'snowfall' stories in particular. and 'how to make love to a physicist' is p romantic and fun also.

Tove Jansson, A Winter Book. This is my first by her, I've never actually read any Moomin stories! (I hope to change that soon and read some to my daughter.) These are short stories that are more like memoirs - written in the first person, with a family that closely resembles Tove's own. So far the stories are all from the point of view of a child. Like the Claire Keegan book they're more vignettes than stories, unlike Keegan this is, so far, about a mostly happy and well-adjusted family.

If it's autobio - Jansson loved her dad a lot but well adjusted he wasn't. Perhaps this will out later on in the stories.

it's in the film iirc

it's guardedly autobio: set on a small island, the main characters tove's essentially beloved mum and her little niece and their funny and fractious relationship, plus her brother (father of the niece) now and then but less front-and-centre

her dad had died several years before the niece was born and doesn't feature even as a mention i don't think (but then nor does tove or several other members of this quite close if not vast family)

essentially shd go before tove's tho it works afterwards also lol

is that a different book? her dad's in this one, a sculptor, has a pet monkey, glimpses of an *artistic temperament* but nothing close to claire keegan levels of maladjustment yet.

oh lol yes sorry i'm thinking of "the summer book" (which exactly fits my description yes i can be trusted to be accurate always)

Read the new Richard Osman thriller. It's quite good, again. I have a sub-zero interest in his TV work but he's a fun thriller writer and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Currently on TREACLE WALKER which is very good, and knowing how short it is makes it easier to swallow Garner's usual opaque style.

Rereading parts of Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS. Put simply, 22 years on, it's quite a magnificent novel - immensely detailed, intricately structured, comic, often superb in its tracking of the small interactions between people.

Hip by John Leland
Looking at the people thought to be with it the most like.
He spends a full chapter on Bugs Bunny as trickster which I get to shortly.
Just looked at Bebop then the Beats. Cast a critical eye on some of the latter. & all those involved being miserable most of the time as impulse on their lives.
Quite interesting. Thought I'd try to spend time I'm off ill somewhat constructively. Got this out a while ago and have neglected more than I intended.
Now I'm getting into it I'm getting into it.

xpost

I remember the Denise chapter as the highlight, and could almost have been a standalone novella. Twenty years after reading it, the image of Chip shoving the frozen fish into his sweater has really stuck with me. It seems very emblematic of the devastating (but somehow still comic) low points many of us have in our lives.

cesar aira - the magician
bud smith - f250

Curious, Chuck Tatum, as 'The Generator' is generally the one I remember least, just because it's tucked so far into the novel and I've reread it least. But I agree, and like your idea of the sections being novellas. The novel is immensely detailed, cross-referenced, subtle, amusing.

Gaston Bachelard, THE POETICS OF SPACE. So far windily pretentious and not particularly convincing.

I finished John Fogerty's autobiography. There's a rough patch when he hands the reins over to his wife, Julie, and she starts talking about where she grew up. But even that choice ends up kinda working, because it gives us an outside perspective on John's difficult period of alcoholism. Now I'm back on fiction with The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe.

I've started Dilla Time, the recent bio about J Dilla, and it looks like it's going to be more ambitious than I thought. The author is really intent on making the case for Dilla radically altering ideas about time signatures and contextualizing him in music history.

I would like to have lived in the cottage in which Claire-Louise Bennett wrote Pond and to have had a bicycle during the summer but could probably have done without a disposable barbeque. I like how the cottage seems built into its surroundings.

Finished Treacle Walker (it's very short), an incredible piece of work for a human in their late eighties. The story is told in the usual Garner opaque-ese, so naturally Goodreads seems to hate it, but it's pretty easy to find the simple story between the lines -- although, having said that, apparently it's also about quantum physics so perhaps I understood nothing.

What's a good Henry James to read after Washington Square (loved), Aspern Papers (can't remember), Turn of the Screw (hated), and Roderick Hudson (hated)?

The American is my favourite of the easier going Jameses. I love Washington Sq and The Aspern Papers, don't care much for The Turn of the Screw, haven't read Roderick. Or you could always level up to Portrait of a Lady.

not sure about sequence but I loved The Beast in the Jungle

The Europeans is where I direct people when I want'em to see how witty Harry could be.

Washington Square too.

all the garners since i guess red shift have hand-wobble sorta-kinda been abt high-concept science -- as in weird takes on time and and how it gums up space -- but i have to say i'm not really finding any reviewer who buys into the "quantum physics" claim also going on to elucidate it in any useful way. aside from the epigraph quotation nothing jumps off the page, and for that to register that you have to look up who carlo rovelli is and what he means by "time is ignorance"

i wonder if a better way into garner's idea is that the tales in mythologies are a rival way of unravelling the perceptional stumbling block of time, just as science attempts to? the book isn't "about quantum physics", it's a way to end-run towards the cosmological state of affairs that quantum physics is also pointing to

i haven't listened to this podcast yet, maybe it gets there (i have read treacle walker and agree that it is immensely readable and typically but also pleasingly opaque

This, on Treacle Walker, is excellent, not least for Alan Garner's idea that folklore/fantasy writing is analogous to quantum physics, while realist fiction is Newtonian. I only *sort of* get that, but it doesn't matter as the episode is so full of attentive love for the work. https://t.co/AMKwx4h1SL

— Peter Ross (@PeterAlanRoss) November 11, 2021

there's a bunch of stuff you have to look up in fact (tho all of it is interesting)

Thanks for Jameses and Backlisted link! I forgot they'd done a whole podcast on TW. The Red Shift one was very good iirc.

This looks interesting (also haven't read): http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-critic-and-the-clue-tracking-alan-garners-treacle-walker/

but i have to say i'm not really finding any reviewer who buys into the "quantum physics" claim also going on to elucidate it in any useful way

hah yes absolutely, lots of "it's really about time... [then drops the subject]"

time seems like another one of those huge mysteries that can easily be observed and described, but defies explaination

Yeah, there are plenty of weird things about time in classical physics, before one even brings in quantum weirdness, as Arthur Eddington pointed out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

I read a section of Georges Perec's SPECIES OF SPACES / ESPECES D'ESPACES (1974 in the original). It was quite bad: just immense self-indulgence, doodling, writing anything down and producing almost zero insight. It was hard to justify its being published.

hah! you'd love Kev the Postman's Round About Town book then

time is a group hallucination innit

Time is the golden spike connecting the intercontinental railroad of the USA. Thus the table is the table, and the shot heard round the world. (But note that even Isaac Newton went on to other things, like alchemy: lead into gold etc.---people wanna take the scenic route, even going in the same direction---so: many approaches to/views of time, while the meter's running on interest, re: academic grants, publishing advances etc.)

I read a section of Georges Perec's SPECIES OF SPACES / ESPECES D'ESPACES (1974 in the original). It was quite bad: just immense self-indulgence, doodling, writing anything down and producing almost zero insight. It was hard to justify its being published.