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

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.

Yeah I didn't think much of Krzhizhanovsky either. For some reason NYRB classics chose to put five books out by him.

xpost Grand Hotel the movie is good too: Garbo, young Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery (as a tycoon, not in a prole role), and a host of Euro-seeming character actors, refreshingly unfamiliar to me.

Just finished Dr. Wortle's School, the shortest Trollope I've ever read.

Looking forward to reading the new David Grann, but I feel like I need to wait until I have a trip so I can read it as a proper dad airport book.

Recently finished Gogol's Dead Souls, and it's really enjoyable. Sam Bankman-Fried must have taken Chichikov as his model, right?

Here's what I've read so far this year:

Mat Johnson - Pym
Stanislaw Lem - The Futurological Congress
Jonathan Lethem - The Arrest
Hernan Diaz - In the Distance
Katie Kitamura - Intimacies
George Saunders - A Swim in the Pond in the Rain
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Memory
Jordan Castro - The Novelist
Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe - Really the Blues
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

I'm about halfway through the Leena Krohn collection now. It's got a certain rhythm and obscurity that keep me reading.

I finished UP THE JUNCTION. I add that its vignettes could be reassembled in almost any order, and that it contains a series of line drawings by Susan Benson.

I'm reading a literary critical work: WYNDHAM LEWIS & MODERNISM (2004) by an academic critic called A. Gasiorek. It's very sharply written and well informed. Anyone wanting a short introduction to Lewis could start here.

Does anyone have any feelings about the best translation of Radetsky March?

I think Michael Hoffman takes quite a lot of liberties with his translation, but he seems to be a pithier writer than the other translator, Joachim Neugroschel.

Never read Neugroschel's translation of RM but I like some of his other translations.

Today I began Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book, a “literary supercut” novel that contains none of Comitta’s original work, just his arrangement of depictions of “nature” from other novels. Has been getting good press, and so far, it’s quite good if occasionally a little goofy.

After finishing A New World Begins I feel like I have a much better grasp of the arc of the French Revolution from the crises that led to Louis XVI calling the original États généraux in 1789 up to Bonaparte's coronation as emperor in 1804. Even allowing for the compression necessary to encompass all of it into 560 pages, it sounded exhausting.

I'm going to watch a movie tonight and wait until tomorrow to pick my next book.

Talking about NYRB's books that aren't all that, I have just finished Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy.
To its credit, it was bad enough that I immediately found the motivation to reread The Brothers Karamazov.

Lol I love Krudy.

Granted, he has phenomenal descriptions of seasons and time passing in his Hungarian countryside, his metaphors are wild and fun. The man-woman carnival on the other hand...

I can't remember it's been so long. I think the prose reads wonderfully well in English, all of these great descriptions of life in full colours. He is possibly like Joseph Roth -- in his relationship with a vanished past of Austro-Hungary -- but there aren't enough translations and most that are there aren't easy to find.

I'm struggling with The Traveller of the Century. It was pretty entertaining at first, and it's exceptionally clever, but the '18th century novel written in the 21st century' schtick is wearing thin after 400 pages, and though it's centered on a love story and has lots of theorising about love, it's very much a novel of the head, not of the heart.

Caliban and the Witch Sylvia federici
I have only read the introduction so far. Heard teh The Book ON Fire podcast breakdown over teh last few weeks so thought I'd read teh text. It's one of several I have on teh go though so hoping to get it done by end of month isnce there may be a queue.
I'm going to listen to that Podcast's series on David Graeber's The Dawn Of Everything after having had his book nn Debt recommended by Deforrest Brown last weekend. Or probably would have done so anyway. THink I need to read a few of graeber's have heard other podcasts talking about his posthumous one on Pirate Enlightenment too. Have his Bullshit Jobs around teh bed so will get to that soon hopefully.

Timeleess Adventures Brian J Robb
Thought I'd read a few things on the history of the show. having seen the series through a couple of times.
Pretty brief overview that tries to tie the stories depicted in the show into contemporary cultural events etc. Just about works I think. Talks about the usage of sets etc from historical drama being shot by the BBC and refers to the Victorian style including Jon Pertwee bringing in his grandfather's cape. Like it's visible that there is a style from that rough era late Victorian/early 20th century running through at least the first run of Doctors that should be visible to anybody who knew anything about the history of clothing. Victoriana and Edwardiana had a couple of revivals in the 60s and 70s which is also visible in the show at points.

Martin Hayes Shared Notes
Memoir by Irish fiddle player which came out last year. I've seen him play locally a few times and had heard about his famous pairing with Dennis Cahill much earlier. I think I need to pick up his current cd Peggy's Dream.
So far still in childhood where he is working on his dad's farm and absorbing the influence of people playing traditional music which his dad was also involved in.
Think I have too many thing son teh go at teh same time and maybe should be concentrating on a couple less. But do very much want to read this and like everything else i've picked up recently.

Not A Nation Of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
her book on settler colonialism with a title refuting the one chosen by JFK for his book which set a paradigm of thought.
She's looked through the various minority ethnicities in the US and problems they have had to face.
I've had this as my loo book so it's probably taken me longer to read than it should have done but I think it's really good. Have meant to read this since it was released so glad to have got it mostly done.

Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of black Hollywood Donald Bogle
Very interesting book so far looking at teh very early days of Hollywood. I'm still in the 1920s at the moment and should be spending more time with this. It's an enjoyable read. So I'll probably need to follow it up with others by him.

I finished WYNDHAM LEWIS & MODERNISM. It's a short, sharp book. The writing is crisp and compact. The book is very philosophically knowledgeable - and it's about Lewis's political, and to a degree philosophical, thought, if anything more than his fiction.

Lewis has a bad name politically, especially among people who don't know much about his writing. He's actually a more interesting and elusive character than many people would think; in some ways a very substantial and challenging social thinker. Nonetheless I'd quite like to see a straight take-down of him by George Orwell, who I think would have been better able to cut through Lewis's facade of style and posture than any other contemporary.

Wasn’t Lewis a pretty notorious anti-semite?

Having finally seen the film I take Michael Wood's BELLE DE JOUR (2000) from the library. It starts by quoting singer Richie Havens.

How Racism Survived U.S. History David Roediger
exploration of race in U.S. History. Quite enjoying it , but do wish it had as bibliography.
Filling in more details of some events I'm already largely aware of. But does seem to be good to have this in one place in a shortish book,

400 Years of Fashion Natalie Rothstein
1999 reissue of a classic text on a V&A museum exhibition on fashion history in the UK. I thought i could pick up some more pointers on how things developed over time and I'm not sure this is the right book for that. I did find a book that i had meant to read for a while that is better on the process of how things actually developed so ordered that yesterday.
This is a collection of photos of pretty exquisite clothing though so I will see what i can pick up on and incorporate into my own designs as per usual.

I'm about to finish, at kingfish's rec, Cold War and Civil Rights. I'll start Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room today.

Currently alternating between two rather desultory experiences:

The Exhibitionist, Charlotte Mendelson - Book club pick. Family drama about a sculptor couple and their children. Father is an emotionally abusive and manipulative monster, rest of family brainwashed into putting his needs above their own. No subtelty in the writing whatsoever: father is unpleasant and pathetic in every way at all times, leaving you at a loss for why any of the other characters put up with him. It is mentioned that he can be disarmingly charming at times, but crucially this is told, not shown, so we get no feeling for it. I dunno, it just kinda feels like venting?

The Magic Box, Rob Young - Supposedly a history of the hauntological/folk horror-y aspects of British television, though it starts off by mentioning a bunch of big screen features - Village Of The Damned, The Damned, the Hammer Quatermass films. I'm a bit at a loss to what the book's mission statement is, outside of being a nostalgic trawl through 60's and 70's UK popcult that a certain type (me) enjoys. It doesn0t focus enough on the behind the scenes to get into the structural changes of those times, and while each artefact is given a cursory social history interpretation there doesn't seem to be any kind of overarching theory as to What It All Means either. Totally wrong on The Damned as well, suggesting that the bikers show that the film thinks the greatest threat is americanization, when the film makes it pretty explicit the hooligans are victims of the British establishment as much as the children are.

I read his Electric Eden and quite enjoyed it . It did seem to take off on some wild diversions including I think a longish fictional section. I was surprised by vehement negative reaction against it by some including Richard Morton Jack.
Haven't read anything else book form by him . He did edit the Wire for a while didn't he, or was it just write there?

Looking forward to reading RMJ's book on Nick Drake when I get a chance.

Young edited The Wire. His writing is just not my bag for reasons I forget now.

It's been about a year since my last Barbara Pym novel, so I'm back to get another dose of the vicars in the form of An Unsuitable Attachment.

Pym always manages to generate a goodly amount of wryly bemused comedy out of the scrupulous social hesitations and incessant trivial quandaries faced by the respectable mid-20th century English middle classes, but especially the women. And yes, I did just write a highly congested pile-up of adverbs and adjectives. I only did what had to be done.

This month's book club selection is So Brave, Young and Handsome, by Leif Enger. I'm about a third of the way through. As much as I want to dislike this book as a "fresh" take on the Western, I can't deny the pull of Enger's prose. It's utterly charming. Will report back as the story develops.

Thanks again. Seems like on ILM several readers have reported finding Electric Eden useful for info and recharging enthusiasm, living up to this, apparently:

“Rob Young's ambitious Electric Eden presents a flip side to the well-known story of the evolution of electric rock in Britain in the 1960s, a story of the rediscovery of England's native folk music in the early 20th century by the likes of William Morris and Cecil Sharp, who went from town to town recording and notating the music that would hold great sway with those musicians who became associated with England's less loud, more earthy music--the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Davy Graham, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, and many others would each deploy traditional folk music to their own ends in various recombinant ways, writing new songs laced with the idealism of the exploding sixties youth culture, while paying homage to the spirit and traditions of old. Eventually the tide of this music swelled to inspire some of the most influential names in electric rock, from the Beatles and Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. Thoroughly researched and well written, this book uncovers the secret history of British popular music in the sixties and beyond. Highly recommended.” ―Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth

I liked *Electric Eden*, though I think I felt like Daniel does about *The Magic Box*: it's a fantastic work of archaeology but the archival instinct is so all-consuming, it ultimately outruns itself. Or, less politely, it goes on a bit. I've just discovered the long-ass review I wrote about it, which, well, goes on a bit: https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/book-reviews/the-history-of-british-music-rob-youngs-electric-eden-36400

I finished David Toop's *Sinister Resonance*, which I enjoyed a great deal. It's a book that attempts to locate the uncanny nature of sound - its immaterial nature, its ephemerality, its placelessness. It's an impossible project, but one that allows Toop to explore a range of mediums: paintings, novels, sculpture, autobiographical sketches, but, oddly, barely any music at all. Central texts are *Moby Dick*, lots of MR James, Joyce, Woolf and Proust, and, unsurprisingly, lots of Beckett. He also looks at the implied sound in the Dutch masters, particularly Nicholaes Maes. There are some great passages where he's simply sitting in his back garden in the dark, listening to the sound of snails nibbling his hostas.

I think it was somewhere on here that a link was made between him and Iain Sinclair and that's a good shout. There's something in the way they navigate the library that is completely alien to me (someone once said the same of Foucault), and, like the Young books discussed above, there is a sense that it was only a deadline that stopped Toop, not any attempt at a unifying principle. Ultimately, like Sinclair, I could read him all day, and would happily re-read the book from the start.

Excellent--- and I can see from your Young take, more than ever, that I'm going to have to read the damn book at some point(as well as Toop's)---and you end with the questions that your descriptions led me toward--as far as the possibility of a visionary pushing past-through nostalgia and intimations x certainty of a fraught future (we know the environmental factors as well or better than we care to, but not how and when things will shake out, though the timeline keeps bumping forward in latest projections), since this is ILB, I'll mention a writer who sure tries, if with mixed results, having his own struggles with nostalgia, and that is Kim Stanley Robinson.

I hope that Young cites Richard Thompson as a folk-rock songwriter who has never dealt much in nostalgia, except his occasionally overt conservative-reactionary tendencies could be a form of that, although never really "It used to be better dammit," more just disgust or sere vibe/sound, then on to something else. Occasional roots-work-outs are mainly for fun now, the scenic route to that (with a little mental cosplay if ye like).

Thompson does build from the lyrical-lurid arterial trees of many ancient sources, pop artistry before pop (like Harry Smith turns into liner notes' tabloid headlines drawn from the musical contents of his Smithsonian Anthology). RT's "Beeswing" effectively (whatever his conscious intention) comments on the possible consequences of this kind of appetite, incl. on male collector-questlovers, as the waltzing wild child, now seen as increasingly self-destructive, keeps telling the earnest ex-bf narrator, "You wouldn't have me any other way." (perhaps Thompson does relate this to his own interests, having since used the song's title for that his memoir of youth, which he's said involves not-always-the-right-decisions).

On the negative, reactionary side, when he was offended by Sting's rain forest advocacy, this son of a London cop songfully sneered at the son of a Newcastle area milkman for being a "little Geordie" who didn't know his place (also by being much more $uccessful than Thompson, while rarely being as much an artist: white trash with money)---I wonder if Young's book deals with classism and related matters?

I finish Bono's memoir SURRENDER. It's long, eloquent, wry, warm, informative, amusing, perhaps sometimes wise. If you like Bono, it's the book you might have hoped Bono could write. Its weaknesses are a) a tendency sometimes to lift off toward generality, b) the 'centrist' blandness of its political statements and outlooks, which I've commented on extensively before.

Clarice Lispector - Too much of Life (Complete Chronicles). There is over 700 pages of her columns (mostly written for the main Rio paper Journal do Brasil), mostly from the early 70s (in the afterword her son claims she was sacked from the job due to antisemitism). Clarice Lispector's writing is borne out of a pure knack for it. She started early; I don't know if she was massively well read but what she had was a knack for putting words together that can really pierce into you. She is a bit like a spiritualist in her outlook in the way she goes within and is able to access all things that to us is like a blob, but she is able to make sense of it -- both to her and her readers. In her 'novels' (she is often bored by the form and her books were never exactly novels anyway) that concentration yields often strange, beguiling works that have been mistaken for the modernism of Joyce or Beckett but there was nothing like that kind of program as such. The most interesting stuff as far as the linking these pieces to her novels goes are the relationships with her maids, but otherwise the outside world doesn't get into her works.

In these newspaper pieces however, she is very much aware of readers, and what it is to be writing for a public that will read a page of hers over a coffee. She is often interviewing a singer, a painter, or going to a party with a fellow writer. At the time there was a dictatorship in Brazil, and student protests, so she sided with them in simple solidarity. There is lots here if you are interested in Brazilian culture of that period. Unfortunately the writing here isn't as good as when she uses the page to go within and find something that no one else could. So as a collection its very up and down. For anyone who is a fan is a must but its not a keeper. It probably needs selection, a bit of curation, if you wanted to get pissy about its worth or whatever. Which I don't really want to. If you like what she does you have to read this.

al-Hariri - Impostures. Just near the end of this medieval Arabic work. 50 'Impostures' (in short 5-10 pages), within, where the hero Abu Zayd (and as the title implies) is a confidence trickster who uses his cunning to get out of a 'situation'. Usually by talking his way out of it. The approach for this translation is unique as each of them are translated in a chosen style of English. It could be based on an Anglo writer -- from Austen to Gertrude Stein to Chaucer to someone obscure like Margery Kempe (the last Imposture describes the narrator's supposed change of ways to leading a more ethical life, so Kempe is seen as a fit -- or it could a particular Anglo dialect (so there's Maori English to Caribbean, just many many 'dialects', if you like). If you wanted a short compilation of styles of English this could function as the book for you. But as book of tales to enjoy I am not sure this helps in establishing a fluency. In some ways its trying to play with the conumdrum of translation where accuracy can often impinge on the flow of the target language, so how about imitations? Except that having to go from one style of English to the next is quite jarring on this read. I wonder if you could have a re-telling in one way instead. Anyway, I reckon this is a pretty important book (as far as these things go), in terms of showcasing the approach and getting an Arabic writer -- who sounds unclassifiable -- out there.

What's the best place to start with her? Story collections, novels, nonfiction--like the columns etc--or does she have memoirs presented as such?

The Passion According to G.H.

Overstory has its flaws I guess but it really has opened up the world of trees to me

I finish Michael Wood's BELLE DE JOUR (2000). Brisk, pacy, improvisational in tone, dry, providing some very close readings of film at time, drawing on much learning. MW constantly refers to European art films I've never seen. If you like the film this book is very worthwhile. But not to be read till you've seen the film.

Listening to an audiobook of The Day of the Locust. It's a cracking read, not least because of the reader. I'm a sucker for tales of old decadent Hollywood, and this is the ur-text.

day of the locust feat.homer simpson

Yes, Homer Simpson, the poor slob.

Kincaid, Brian W. Aldiss
Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man
Threadgill, Easily Slip into Another World

I bought Day Of The Locust thinking it was Day Of The Triffids and got very confused.

I know there's at least one film of it that I saw years ago. NOt sure if i read the book or have a copy lying around the flat somewhere. Did hear it was pretty good though.

also have a copy of Otto Friedrich's City of Nets which is about Hollywood in the 40s. Thought I would get to that faster have heard that is really good too. More non-fiction but I think it should relate. Though it may be showing teh town a couple of decades later.

actually more the next decade than a couple of decades later. I was thinking Locust was 20s for some reason.

Day of the Locusts was on tptv in the uk quite a bit at the start of the year

donald sutherland plays homer s -- which for a long while convinced me that groening derived the omnipresent cast in a simpsons character's eyes from sutherland's

except the life in hell characters always already had this same cast so i guess it's a convergent evolution (which is even weirder tbh)

Riku Onda - THE AOSAWA MURDERS. beguiling and fascinating murder mystery with intriguing structure. unfortunately i was completely baffled by the ending in that I don't really understand what happened or whodunnit. perhaps that was the point but give me an agatha christie any day. still at least I enjoyed 280 of the 312 pages.

(did we have a 'spoilers please' thread where we get people to tell us what happened in things we didn't understand? or did i imagine it / mean to start one and not get around to it?)