A halo of warmth in the darkness of the year: what are you reading spring 2023?

I’m halfway through Overstory now and it’s threatening to veer into love story schmaltz

Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, by David Maraniss

In this case, Path Lit by Lighting was an approximate translation of Thorpe's Indian name.

I finish Keith Waterhouse's THERE IS A HAPPY LAND (1957). It's all told by a small boy, in his own argot. Some of the children's speech rhythms and emphases (I don't mean the vocabulary) read oddly now. The story starts out seeming like it will be a sort of revelling in children's customs, but gradually grows darker. There is a suggestion of the danger that adults can pose. But the children themselves often seem to be the most dangerous and malicious characters. The book ends with poignancy and reflection. Waterhouse is very good on perceptions, thoughts, self-presentation, the ongoing negotiation within a conversation. He shows himself a shrewd, observant storyteller.

Finished Francis Davis The History Of The Blues which ends with some oh so white rumination on who is preserving the genre which I could have done without. Told the story in a readable way but could do without that .

Finished Joana Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing which I will probably need to reread regularly if i get the opportunity. So could do with a copy. Do hope other people read this one I have currently borrowed and it doesn't just languish in a basement in Rathmines.

Started On Savage Shores how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock,
her book telling the story of how from the first contact with Columbus at the turn of teh 15th/16th century which tends to be represented as Europe discovering a populated continent there had been traffic the other way too. Columbus came back to Spain with a few native individuals.
& the number grew over the next couple of centuries.
I'm in th introduction so far and she is talking about the population of Europe already being far more cosmopolitan than it has been represented since. Also what terms to refer to people from teh Americas with including the Aztecs which she's calling Aztec-Mexica so that people aren't totally confused by her dumping the traditional projected name used for teh alst few centuries.
Anyway seems to be a good book and I like the writing so far.
I've heard her interviewed on a few podcasts since hearing about this book a couple of months ago. Enjoyed what I heard.

Needed some light reading so am working my way through Strong Female Character by the stand up comedian Fern Brad, which is a memoir about her being diagnosed with autism in her 30s. Really enjoying it so far.

After that it'll be Mel Brooks' memoir. Anyone on here read that one?

I couldn’t find that I ever posted about reading The Stepford Wives but I loved it and have reread it about fifty times since. I saw Rosemary’s Baby in the kindle sale for 99p and bought it, read it in maybe three and a half hours.

Levin reminds me very much of Margaret Atwood in the way he identifies and recontextualises horrific misogyny. So in Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary begs her original doctor to see her urgently and sits and calmly tells him everything that has gone on. She thinks the doctor has left the room to call the hospital, but instead he’s called her husband, who comes to pick her up.

It’s something that is reported by many women; doctors often dismiss or ignore their symptoms, don’t trust them as adequately understanding their own bodies or feelings. From this Time article:

Women are more likely to be offered minor tranquilizers and antidepressants than analgesic pain medication. Women are less likely to be referred for further diagnostic investigations than men are. And women’s pain is much more likely to be seen as having an emotional or a psychological cause, rather than a bodily or biological one. Women are the predominant sufferers of chronic diseases that begin with pain. But before our pain is taken seriously as a symptom of a possible disease, it first has to be validated—and believed—by a medical professional. And this pervasive aura of distrust around women’s accounts of their pain has been enfolded into medical attitudes over centuries. The historical—and hysterical—idea that women’s excessive emotions have profound influences on their bodies, and vice versa, is impressed like a photographic negative beneath today’s image of the attention-seeking, hypochondriac female patient.

tpd is early iirc, and was out of print for a while - i had to pick up a second hand copy.

levin's big trick is to put the twist ending in the middle, spend the second half of the book living with the consequences.

my pick of his would be A Kiss Before Dying which does that masterfully.

Boys from Brazil, Sliver even, all worth reading

(i was wrong, This Perfect Day is between R's Baby and Stepford)

I bought A Kiss Before Dying as well

Always been curious about Perfect Day as it’s been lying around my parents house for a half century with this cover

Bono's SURRENDER reaches his work in the early 2000s on African debt and AIDS relief. This part of the book is not the most enjoyable.

Bono makes a case for the importance of the AIDS treatment based on his travels in Africa. He also describes his negotiations with US politicians to try to secure funding. He is very favourable about Condoleeza Rice and re: G. W. Bush, emphasises that he created the biggest healthcare initiative ever.

I found this difficult to read because I do not like those people. Bono says nothing about the other things that they did which many people thought were bad.

Separately, I find myself thinking that Bono could put lots of energy and ingenuity into campaigning for medicine in Africa - and I cannot criticise that - but he would never campaign for eg: socialised health in the USA, which I believe would also be good for many people. In some sense, I think, the latter is 'too political' for him. It doesn't fit his view of politics as something that you have to transcend.

Meanwhile I have started Nell Dunn's UP THE JUNCTION (1963). I think my vague idea of this book was that it was a 'kitchen sink novel'. But it's really more a series of vignettes, which appear to be quasi-documentary rather than primarily fictional. It contains a lot of dialogue which is unattributed - like hearing the voices on a Free Cinema documentary. It contains some flashes of striking prose.

The book is not very long. It belongs to the category of 'books that I have owned for a long time that I would like to read rather than constantly leaving them unread while I acquire new books'.

I started reading the introduction of Ed Yong's An Immense World where he sets up a thought experiment or scenario where several different animals and a young woman are in a large room together. So he compares what their sense experience is likely to be. I enjoyed what I read so far but am in the middle of several other books so I left it there for now.
Book is about the experience of the world through what is understood of other animals' senses and what it tells us about the human experience. Have only come across him talking about the one imaginary woman so am assuming he is fully recognising neurodiversity.
I think it is getting good reviews and teh podcast appearances I've heard have been quite good.

Up The Junction turned into a BBC Ken Loach play that I think was reshown a couple of months ago and a film that has Dot Cotton from early years of Eastenders in . I noticed there were differences between the play and the film. Film may be truer to the book.
Film had a great Manfred Mann theme song.

I have the book or at least read it a long time ago, probably early 90s. So probably picked it up from one of the Dublin cheap booksellers.

I think play was reshown, I certainly saw it so am assuming it was on tv rather than downloaded.

I definitely want to read An Immense World. I'm currently taking a break from The Traveller of the Century to read Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel. So far seems to be a novel of characters, I generally prefer novels of plots but we'll see.

re up the junction: film is not in my opinion truer to the book

interesting maybe as a rare example of london-based kitchen sink (which tended to be a northern phenom)

"Dot Cotton from early years of Eastenders"

Think she was in late years also !

gyac, I've always been troubled by how well I thought the film of Rosemary's Baby depicts the things you mention - considering Polanski's own history, it felt to me like the sort of twisted compartmentalization of an abuser who has the intelligence and empathy to understand how gaslighting works and what effects it has on its victim while somehow still being able to indulge in it himself. now I'm wondering if I wasn't giving credit to Polanski that actually belongs to Levin.

pinefox, I think in addition to the things you mention it's worth being critical of the initiatives themselves, i.e. how much of the money actually goes where it should, how much profit is being made off the back of it, how much of this is PR and tax evasion, how much of it is top down "here Africans the white man has come to help you" as opposed to engaging with grass roots activists on the ground, etc.. of course I don't expect Bono himself to get into those issues.

The film version of Rosemary's Baby is famously faithful to the novel; iirc Polanski only omits a very minor subplot about Rosemary's sister.

xp I don't watch Eastenders so had assumed she would be long gone. It was funny seeing her as a teen in the late 60s film after seeing her in that though. I think Maureen Lipman is also in the film.

I used to go down to a clothing shop in Clapham in the mid 80s, bought a fringed suede jacket from there. Not really familiar with teh area otherwise. I think it was heavily gentrified since the book/play/film wasn't it?

A funny thing about Bono's account is that he keeps going to see Republican senators who say "why should we give money to these African countries - they're riddled with corruption?". And Bono says "Senator, I appreciate that, but we're working on good governance ..."

The reason I find this funny (not in a very happy way) is that I believe that the Republican party is responsible for massive corruption in the USA.

The CIA's role in this corruption as the US and USSR used much of Africa for proxy wars also worth pointing out (though I grant this would not get republican senators onside).

I tried to get at this months ago, and perhaps caused some damage to my standing here, but will say what I meant then: Bono is a fucking idiot.

Mary Renault - Funeral Rites
Isabel Wilkerson - Caste
Glyn Maxwell - The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995

entirely agreed :)

xpost

xp re Bongo
I assumed that was well known.
Is anybody stanning for him?
Do hope his days as an automatic talking head are over or at least numbered.

Do remember walking behind him on Temple Bar and realising what a little man he was, not to be sizist or anything. But does make you wonder if the napoleon complex is a thing.

the beginning of the gentrification of clapham is literally what "up the junction" is about (nell dunn moving there from fashionable chelsea in the late 50s)

Mary Renault - Funeral Rites

Funeral Games, innit?

yep

I finished *Stepping Stones* the series of interviews with Seamus Heaney. It's 600 pages long and became oddly hypnotic the further along I got. Despite the Nobel prize, I don't think I'd fully metabolised his standing as a cultural figure (ignorance or provincialism, on my part?). Friends with Lowell and Bishop, Hughes and Brodsky; professorships at Harvard and Oxford; reading at Milosz's funeral. Still, there is a moment, after his stroke, when Clinton comes calling to his hospital bed, that the size of his achievement really dawned on me. I don't know why it should have been that when the work is right *there* but, somehow, the work operates - continues to work - on a different level. It's so thrumming and sinuous that *book* doesn't quite feel like the right word. Artefact, probably.

Now reading David Toop's *Sinister Resonance*. Even for Toop, this is episodic, fractured and abstract. The main threads of it are meditations on paintings and sculptures; the uncanny silences held within the frames, the subjects - particularly of Vermeer, di Chirico, Nicolaes Maes and Juan Muñoz. There are the usual excursions into place, artefacts and hypnagogia though, and he always makes me want to go back to the art - in whatever form it takes.

I took another break from the French Revolution and read The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. No need to comment. It's a classic.

Only time for dissertation reading at the moment, but David Aitchison's The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism is a good read for anyone who is interested in any part of that title.

Meanwhile I have started Nell Dunn's UP THE JUNCTION (1963). I think my vague idea of this book was that it was a 'kitchen sink novel'. But it's really more a series of vignettes, which appear to be quasi-documentary rather than primarily fictional. It contains a lot of dialogue which is unattributed - like hearing the voices on a Free Cinema documentary. It contains some flashes of striking prose.

The book is not very long.

mark s says rare bit of London kitchen sink, pinefox's take makes it seem not dreary, maybe the more textured, restless shades of grey.

The 2 adaptations, Ken Loach play and 68 film with manfred Mann soundtrack are both pretty good. I think BBC had the play on a few months back.
& if the title pun isn't clear it's set in Clapham near the junction and there is a slang term Up The Junction which I thought was about being pregnant but may be more widely similar to up shit creek.

I thought the book was quite good but it has been a long time since I read it. Mark S was saying it was an outsiders view of teh area since teh writer had come from what had been a posher area and was relating her experiences in this place. It was just becoming a place that people were in teh process of gentrifying after I think it had been run down for a while. I think that had been a process in London for a while, to simplify area has cheap rents and somewhat decent property in bad repair so people on a budget move in do up the place they move into and word gets out so other people think its a fashionable area to live in so it gets a different reputation. I think that continues in a cycle until the population of a town becomes too high for it to do so. Possibly until rents are too high for people to be able to move around at all too.
But I think Clapham went from being a pretty working class place to a far less so one.

May also depend on people being able to afford to actually buy the place they're doing up rather than improving things for a 3rd party landlord etc.
Also aware that over last 100 years other populations have been added into the mix to greater degree. probably more recently here where mass Eastern European and African immigration suddenly massively increased in the early 2000s though there are areas of Dublin and elsewhere that had been concentrated points of immigrant living for much much longer.
Europe did have a lot of further afield immigrants for hundreds of years but population in UK and elsewhere increased massively in the 20th century I think. Cosmopolitan population just hadn't been depicted as such until pretty recently, though I did notice that French films of the early 20th century did seem to have one black minor part or extra much more than English ones did. I watched a whole load of European films in a short time a couple of years ago.

my copy wd have been my mum's or my dad's, a classic pan paperback with this (excellent, somewhat misleading) cover:

https://i0.wp.com/maryrizza.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/upthejunction1j.jpg

Ken Loach play has at least one ton up boy in, which would fit in with the fashion of the girl on teh cover.
As would teh semi bohemian ness of the author moving into an area like that possibly.
Look is somewhat hip, somewhat sassy, from the era isn't it, without being mod or something.

Thanks yall! Seems to be current cover of trade pb---similar looking girl on other cover variants I'm seeing, wonder if this one is the author? Good pic anyway

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61gL1ATxTxL.jpg

it's the original cover image from the 1963 hardback first edn and yes, i think it is her

(judging by other photos she enjoys an unexpected hat)

I have the Pan edition that Mark S shows.

As mentioned, the book is quite unusual in not being much of a novel, but more a set of documentary vignettes. It's short, so it wouldn't cost you much time to try reading it if interested.

Mark S was shrewd in suggesting that wealthy Nell Dunn's move to Clapham was the start of gentrification, but I add that in this book she is not transplanting a fancy middle-class lifestyle to a poor area (and thus changing it). Quite the opposite. She's (at least in the text, if not in real life) 'going native' like Orwell in his documentary books, making herself like one of the local women as much as possible - doing the work they do in their workplaces, going to their pubs and chip shops. I haven't quite yet discerned, from the book, the aim of this, unless it's simply to generate material to write about.

Thanks---yeah, looks like it might be her on that cover, since same woman on these covers of The Muse: a memoir of love at first sight and Talking With Women---several books here; what else is good? https://www.amazon.com/stores/Nell-Dunn/author/B001K8EHY6?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
I'm guessing UTJ is a good place to start.

talking with women is p good iirc, proto-feminist interviews from the mid-60s (content self-explanatory)

reading dad lit in my capacity as a dad this month:

the wager by david grann (as excerpted in the new yorker https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-wager-david-grann-book-excerpt). this is a pretty good adventure story page turner. it aspires to be a cut above by talking about empire and colonialism, but the treatment there is so glib it adds little. i would recommend endurance by alfred lansing before this. good father's day gift if your dad likes master and commander.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands by timothy snyder. iirc i picked up this up shortly after the war in ukraine started, as it was regularly recommended to provide context for that. i learned a lot. it is, as they say, a good synthesis of a huge topic (of which ukraine's history is only part). i am not an expert, but i did find myself as little uncomfortable with one of the goals of the book, which is to compare hitler and stalin. that's a worthwhile goal if taken seriously, but in practice it sometimes (not always) ended up feeling he was ranking genocides like nate silver. good father's day book if your dad likes stalingrad.

Making my way through Penman's Fassbinder book. Lots to like, lots to not like so much.

I only know the screen version, but, in addition to the treatment of xpost Rosemary by her husband and doctor, who didn't even need to be witting accomplices of the Satanists, just in the classic tradition of husbands & doctors---seeingRosemary's Baby resonated on levels just now surfacing in my mind, re manipulation of the young, with females given their own special treatment, by fancy older people ov huge secret enthusiasms. I'm thinking Cold War etc. incl. what Trump later called the Deep State, although no need (beyond alibis) for that with him; he's his own worst enemy. Also what some post-Boomers now call the Gerontocracy: I've read that by 1972, the average American was 23 years old, herded by marketing studies also, well-developed by then.

fancy older people ov huge secret enthusiasms

I finished Grand Hotel, it was really good. It did start out like a carousel of rather unappealing characters but they were all treated sympathetically by Baum and their stories were expertly intertwined. Now on to Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - I'm so far not finding it quite the winning sibling of kafka and borges that it's trumpeted as. Most of the stories are about literary life - writing, getting published (or not), criticism - and though it's done with a surreal aspect and as a way of criticising soviet repression I'm not really into that kind of ouroborosity. And overall it doesn't have the broad psychological appeal of kafka or borges' pure genius.