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

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.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight. One of those non fiction books that start out as one thing but then seem to meander wherever the author's fancy takes them. Begins with the 1966 Aberfan disaster - which I'd never read about in much detail before, absolutely horrifying. Talks about the premonitions various people, including one of the victims, had about it. Even as a non believer when I read about these things I feel the abyss of the unknown open up beneath me. Goes on to talk about the titular bureau, a feature & department in the evening standard, set up by a psychologist and journalist to investigate these things. Delves into the psychologist's life, digressions into kant, freud, helmholtz. Mostly well written except for when he describes entropy - "It is the cup of coffee which cooled when you drank it. It is the energy of the sun which lit yesterday. It is the leaves that fall from the tree. It is the empire that fell. It is the emails you didn't reply to." He doesn't go off like that too much though.

I like the sound of it but am tempted to read Knight’s shorter feature version in the New Yorker instead

Just finished The Journey to the East, Herman Hesse. I only made it through to the end because it is so short. Hesse writes as if he intended this book to be a sort of overview or culmination of his career. If so, it is awfully thin gruel. The main thing it accomplishes is to firmly establish how deeply Hesse was in thrall to German Romanticism and that German Romanticism was an incoherent mush of anti-intellectual idealism. For someone who wrote a famous book about the Buddha, if he'd ever had a clue about buddhism he'd forgotten it all by the time he wrote this.

xp lol fair. time short, books many.

Started Tom Crewe's debut novel The New Life, about John Addington Symonds and Haylock Hills' acquaintanceship leading up to the writing of their seminal Sexual Inversion.

there's another (fiction?) book about aberfan that i keep hearing about from various places....

A Terrible Kindness: The Bestselling Richard and Judy Book Club Pick. Jo Browning Wroe (99p - https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/a-terrible-kindness)

it's okay. about a young embalmer who volunteers to work on some aberfan victims and his life before and after. more about his relationship with his mother and his fear of having children with his wife.

the knight book was serialised on radio 4 and was an enjoyable listen iirc

Finished it, a very curious, almost astonishing read. The author doesn't come across at all like a credulous crackpot but all the premonitions and predictions are never treated with any scepticism - no suggestion that there's any foul play or trickery, no statistics brought to bear. And taken at face value they really strain at the bounds of what could be called coincidence - two people with twelve 'apparently' successful predictions in one year - that 'apparently' is pretty much as far as he goes in questioning it - including not only a plane crash but the number of casualties, a train crash and the train's destination, and the first man to die in space. I just don't know what to make of it all!

this sounds very like the classic charles fort mode: cheerfully listing the anomalies and never questioning them

pretty much - it's an entertaining mode and i enjoy the frisson it gives but ultimately i prefer a colder analysis, if only for my own sanity! and perhaps the author does lean slightly towards the woo, at one point he says he and his wife decided not to find out the sex of their baby after they saw three magpies ('for a girl') in the garden.

that's just good science

re: the prediction of the death of cosmonaut vladimir komarov, it was the first soviet manned mission in two years; he says the prediction was posted at 5.30pm on a sunday (how does he know? clearly not from a postmark) while komarov was in space, but news of the launch had been broadcast at 7am "by radio sweden" so "it is possible she knew there was a man in space". ok, telling us when it was broadcast by the bbc would be more helpful but perhaps that information is no longer available. still, she probably did know, take that one off the list of impossibles. sorry, there's probably a thread for this kind of thing.

The Soul of Black Folk by W.E.B. du Bois.
Have had this for a couple of years and think I've heard about it longer ago. So about time I actually got around to reading it not just seeing the author turn up in histories of Black America.
It was published in 1903 and I think the language use might just reflect that. It is a little florid or poetic or something. THink it's quite readable. He was a bit elitist or at least wanted to lift everybody of teh race up to a certain point rather than celebrate themselves. So thought a little too fitting around white supremacist policy possibly. I need to read a bit further into this to see how he combats that.

He pushed against the Booker T. Washington emphasis on vocational training for (as Du Bois saw it) an essentially docile workforce, playing it as safe as possible with white capitalism. If you did have a blue collar job, if that was most feasible for you, OK, but that didn't have to mean signing out of your day job, signing in at the bar, church, or at home, keeping your mind always in one harness or another.

I started a book a couple of days ago, Barbarians to Angels, Peter Wells. I bailed out about a third of the way into it. It was a survey of European history during the so-called Dark Ages, roughly 425 BCE to 800 BCE, when the western Roman empire fell apart. Since very few texts emerged from this period that could be described as histories, chronicles, annals, or memoirs, the majority of the book was based on archeological finds. The main problem was that the material was not very illuminating on a human level. It was factual enough, but descriptions of the average height of skeletal remains and the dimensions of building foundations make for very bland reading. If that's your cup of tea, give it a go.

Finished these recently (1878/79):

Victor Cherbuliez- Jean Teterol's Idea (a peasant is kicked by a nobleman and becomes wealthy so he can come back and fuck with him)
Hector Malot- Nobody's Boy (Orphan is happy doing tricks with his dog for money until his family is found and they turn out to be thieves and grifters)
Paul Heyse- Tales from the German
Anthony Trollope- An Eye for an Eye (man becomes engaged to a lower class woman, but then his rich uncle takes him in and he decides he'd rather have the woman as a mistress)
Octave Feuillet- The Diary of a Woman (Woman tries to maintain the good name of her suicide friend)
Benito Perez Galdos- Marianela (A homely girl devotes herself to a brilliant young blind man, but when he regains his sight she dies rather than let him see her)

He was a bit elitist or at least wanted to lift everybody of teh race up to a certain point rather than celebrate themselves

Darryl Pinckney argues in a couple recent essays that Black politics has room for both Washington and DuBois.

xp I could see those all being separate plotlines in a single novel

lol

room for both Washington and DuBois. Yeah, that's why I said (as Du Bois saw it). He was a dynamic writer, and sometimes way ahead of the curve insight-wise, but hardly the last word on what should/could be done.
Aimless on Barbarians to Angels makes me think of Updike on Vico and Herder, a warmed-over but useful collection of lectures by Isaiah Berlin (who 'pulls many dusty name from the library of his mind"):

(Berlin) shows a power of creative assemblage mostly toward the end, when, in a piece of original speculation, Vico's relativism is linked to the forgotten disputes of sixteenth-century jurists as they sought to recover Roman law in its presumed purity from its medieval and Byzantine accretions..."The more faithfully the despised medieval accumulation was removed, the stranger the classical world appeared: if anything, it was the alleged monkish distortions that gave it such affinity to the ideas of later ages as it seemed to have." Here, in the researches of once heated controversy, lie the seeds of historical relativism; the scholars themselves, though without the generalizing power of a Vico, were brought to perceive that languages and institutions have "their beginnings, progress, corruption, end."

425 BCE to 800 BCE

oops, correct that to CE, not BCE

I finished Fernanda Melchor's Paradais; it's fair to say that if you liked Hurricane Season, you'll like this -- it's even more gruesome, to the point of being lurid maybe, and her style, while it's developing more, it still very much a signature -- if you were put off by the style of HS, you won't find much to help you here. But her ruthlessness about how poverty and helplessness play out among people without anything to look forward to is rich. I'm a fan, even if I could hardly bear the ending.

Now onto Jazmina Berrera's Linea Nigra -- I'm making peace with living in this tide of memoirs, and she's a good writer, very much in the Euro-discursive-citation mode that Pitól uses, and Jergovic & a lot of Serbian/Croatian writers -- weaving things she's reading & has read into her story of her pregnancy & the earthquakes that happened while she was pregnant. For me her style takes some warming up to -- but as I say I'm making peace with memoirs, and 1/3 of the way through I've connected with her voice enough to think: yes, she's good. The pacing of that first section is really great.

I'm still reading the long refugee book NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS. It's not enjoyable, but it's fair to note that as the book has progressed, it has improved. The bad poetry has lessened, the prose has become somewhat sharper, and the book is making stronger observations, about the management of space in a carceral environment.