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

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?)

Hell yes!

The Libertine Louis Aragon
French surrealist book comprising of a series of vignettes. First one is a play in short scenes and snatches of dialogue about a Prince going to Russia. Preface is pretty interesting too.
I've had this out of the library for the last month and a half and not really looked ta it. Hopefully going to get through it rapidly since the individual stories are pretty short. I took a trip out to a satellite town of here and looked through their library and saw a number of titles that I want to read. Was already at the limits of amountof books i could take out or would have a couple of other titles I possibly also wouldn't have looked at properly.
Gt this with anthology of writing on racism by Martin Bulmer which has some really interesting excerpts in. What I read of that was good but been sidetracked by other books for the last while. & amassing a load more taht will hang over me for a while.

ric Yong An Immense World
Have had this sitting beside teh bed with the Introduction partially read for the last month. I think I just finished the introduction and got into the main part of teh book.
Book is about the world taht animal senses create that they live in.So far I've had a thought I had about Thomas Nagel's What iT's Like tO be a Bat confirmed or at least supported by Yong. In that a fleeting visit to a place where one was sensing things in the same way as a given animal does is far from the same thing as actually understanding the world as experienced as that animal. When we did this in Philosophy20 years ago I was thinking of the scene in the Sword in the Stone where the two wizards fleetingly jump from animal form to animal form in comparison . That the wizards would not be experiencing the world in the way their external form would suggest, I was thinking the difference between appearance and immersed experience was like an impermeable membrane one couldn't cross. I think the original author's idea of what it was like for Merlin and Walt to be experiencing what it was like to be an animal had a different understanding though. I don't think that would be right myself, one would be aware of one's double consciousness and fleeting visit etc.
Anyway great thought provoking book on the subject that already looks extremely promising and I haven't got far into it yet. Introduction was good in itself. I think I need to read his other book too, I Contain Multitudes the one on microbes.

Martin Hayes Shared Notes
Irish fiddler virtuoso memoir. So far I've got as far as him learning to play and joining his first band. Also heading outto a high school beyond teh county border .
Pretty great view of a rural childhood in Clare, I'm enjoying this. So would recommend it as well as his latest cd Peggy's Dream where he's put together pretty much a super group and put out a sublime set touching on jazz, possibly minimalism and traditional Irish folk.

Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Guyanan radical writer's book on history and development of the continent of Africa and how it was mishandled and diverted by Europe. I'm just starting the main book after reading the Introduction which looks into the writer's assassination and background and stuff.
But a book I've been waiting to read for a while. Took an age on order with the library system but never appeared so I bought it a few months back and have since been trying to get to it by reading the rest of books I'd started before it.
Anyway

Re: The Day of the Locust, I've never seen the film. The book was a quick read/listen, and while his prose was stellar I thought the ending was rushed. At the same time, it was suitably apocalyptic. I definitely want to see the film now.

I downloaded it earlier so have it to look forward to.

Tove Jansson: Work And Love, Tuula Karjalainen - Jansson biog by Finnish art historian, thus clearly written for a Finnish audience, not holding your hand over things like the Winter War, the Swedish-Finnish community or the art world of early 20th century Helsinki. Which is fine, I'd rather have stuff go over my head than feel spoken down to. Very early days in this yet, but very cool to see the focus so far on her youthful work as a painter and illustrator, moomins meriting little more than the stray mention so far (I'm sure they'll take over soon enough). Her father, an archetypal Terrible Man, was a sculptor, and the book directs you to where his works can be found (an advantage of this particular art, I guess - once you've got something in the public square inertia means it's likely to stay for a good while). Her mother was Finnland's first great postage stamp artist!

After finishing An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym I have a hard time understanding what her publisher could have been thinking by rejecting it in 1963. It had to wait for posthumous publication in 1982. It was well up to her standards and made me laugh out loud several times.

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's *A Time to Keep Silence*, a short book about various monasteries Fermor visited or stayed at in the 1950s. There's something unreal about Fermor. He lived a bizarre, extraordinary life. One brief section of his Wiki page reads:

He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute, and was among a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to the occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander, Major General Heinrich Kreipe.[14]

For all that, everything carries the taint of privilege; as such, this kind of asceticism though partly born of genuine curiosity can also feel performative. There's something so luxuriant about his prose at times, that I find myself snorting - wanting to tug a forelock in admiration but also wanting to toss the book aside. I'm here for the polyglot virtuosity, the specialist vocabularies, for the lone enraptured male loose in the bowels of a monastery meditating on the transience of life, but I don't know, it feels problematic.

Then something like this happens and I'm gliding along his sentences like a supplicant.

[The monasteries] emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blackberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant had been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

more of Ed Yong's An Immense World.
got through first chapter where he talks about smell and taste and how they are experienced and differentiated.
Really enjoying this . So yeah recommend it.
Think I'll definitely be looking to read his other one after this.
But maybe I shouldn't keep adding new books to my currently reading active pile.

to which I just added
Linda Nochlin Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists.
the book which is part of the birth of feminist art criticism. & If I had been more on top of things i mjight have got as part of an anthology of her work that I've seen is in the library system. NOt as yet sure if exactly the same edit of the main essay is in that though. So may well order that once I'm through here.
Have listened to a few podcasts on her and interviews with her in the run up to this arriving. Want to know more. Seemed to be a title that should have some interesting discussion behind. I think the one complaint i saw about this was that there was very little reflection on artists of colour in here. I did hear her bring up the lack of recognition of artists of other ethnicities in the interview though.
Oh well, looking forward to this.

Started another audiobook, Lampedusa by Steven Price. I really enjoyed By Gaslight. This is completely different; it's a novel about the last years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, when he was diagnosed with emphysema and began work on the book. Price was published as a poet before he started writing novels. His prose really sings, and his storytelling is quite intricate and recursive.

A Time to Keep Silence is a great book!

heinrich von kleist - michael kohlhaas

Martin Amis, THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ (1981). I won't read or reread it all.

Love Kleist's short stories, great stuff.

You have doubtless seen it, Chinaski, but if not the Archers' Ill Met by Moonlight is a pretty funny 1957 fabulation of PLF's time bamboozling Nazis on Crete, starring Dirk Bogarde in an implausible moustache.

I finished Tanizaki's The Maids, started Amis' The Information.

Kleist is one of my favourite short story writers ever. Michael Kohlhaas is a must as far as novellas go.

The translation on Archipelago collates all of these.

A Wreath for Udomo, Peter Abrahams. A fictionalised account of an African independence movement, written in 1956 before the first tropical african country gained independence. The prose is kind of middle of the road but it's engaging and an interesting glimpse into the optimism of that era.

Killers of the flower moon

Thanks for the heads up Piedie - my Powell and Pressburger knowledge stops at the Small Back Room so will have to check this one out.

my post about xp Killers of the Flower Moon on the True Crime thread started w impression that it was a kind of slo-mo, long game, Oklahoma hill country version of the Oklahoma City Black Wall Street Massacre, but more "rational" in a way because making money from murder, with the cultural x class corruption---mostly local, but extending as far as Washington when nec., also entwined with the class-racial etc layers of curruption already there, entwined with interests in other parts of the nation and other nations---not really that rational, not nec so prudent, the longer the process, the legal ramifications, and and the author's research go on. For one example, as soon as someone thought to compare local and other death rates of that era, obvious disparities were found. And many deaths, not necessarily related to anyone's known financial gain, to any other motivation, were never investigated very thoroughly, if at all.

That's back in the day, but eventually the author meets descendants of the victims (and, in some cases, their killers), still conducting their own research.

meaning descendants of victims *and* of their killers

cultural x class corruption---mostly local, but extending as far as Washington when nec.

Although, at least in the first reading, I sometimes felt like the author's process of investigating the evil process, following the blood money and emerging madness, felt like the chain of whites, incl the notorious J. Edgar and his investigators, reliable and otherwise, could overshadow the Indians, including ones (usually "mixed")who had actually achieved some standing in the visible, ostensible means of governance beyond tribal councils. But in the concluding section, when the author gets to know xpost descendants, points of view, also questions, expand quite a bit.

I'm reading Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg. She writes about memories of her family and their circle of acquaintances, but her handling of the material is a bit peculiar. For one thing, she is usually peripheral to the incident she is relating. It feels more like a novel about how families create an internal identity, but a novel that was subjected to the discipline of only using personal memories of her own family. I'm enjoying it.

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by matthew campbell and kit chellel sounded appealing when it was reviewed in the LRB a couple of months back and indeed it was. vaguelly le carre esque in themes and settings, but non-fiction and more plodding in style. perhaps could have been a long new yorker article (or, presumably as it will be, a movie) rather than an entire book, but if you like this kind of stuff then it works at book length.

American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I'm not in any way looking forward to the nolan oppenheimer movie, but i do drive past a huge billboard every day and it finally prompted me to read the canonical doorstop biography of him. pretty good! at the risk of stating the obvious, the guy who built the atom bomb was an interesting and in many ways awful person. if a book about that sounds interesting then you will like this.

i started reading the new cormac mccarthy duology right after this without knowing that it's (afaict) a fictional retelling (?) of the (incredibly fucked up irl) life of oppenheimer's kids (daughter took her own life, son ended up a carpenter in NM). i need a break from oppenheimer though, so i'll read those another time.

In the almost ultimate case of "finally reading books I've owned for many years", I at last start on John Braine's ROOM AT THE TOP.

It's surprisingly well-written and moves along quite fast.

I read Amy Key's ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE - an essay-memoir, sparked by her love of Joni Mitchell's Blue, exploring how to live a life without romantic love (AK is in her 40s and hasn't had a partner since her early 20s). Really timely, powerful book, and, among other things, a great work of experiential music criticism - managing to talk about how songs and albums linger in our lives as models, goals, goads to frame our desires and regrets, without ever seeming to reduce them to the kind of prosaic lists-as-autobiography endemic to a lot of blokeish music writing. At the heart of the book is her relationship with the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden - he adored her, but they became friends with benefits (the benefits being cooking, drinking and reading together). It describes quite graphically RL's messy demise and how alcohol-related illness ravaged him mentally and physically. I knew RL a little, and this bit made me feel uncomfortable and wonder how legitimate it is to write this way about friends who have died, can't consent etc. AK is full of awe and praise for RL as a poet, teacher, mentor and friend but also describes the awful squalor of his final months. Personally think I might have been too squeamish to include...

Now reading I'M A FAN by Sheena Patel - really gripping, novel about a woman spiralling into paranoid obsession via stalking a bloke she's sleeping with, his wife and his other gf, via their Instagram stories. Maps the psychodynamics of fandom onto broader social/cultural/post-colonial relations in a way that feels really provocative and suggestive rather than didactic. Feel like I need to go for a long walk without my phone after every chapter though.

Gregor von Rezzori - The Death of my Brother Abel. Stopped this halfway through, just didn't want another 300 pages of a 'failed' novel.

I liked the span of it (from end of Austro-Hungary, to the annexation of Austria, to the polo playing set of the late 60s), but the narrator who writes screenplays but wanted to be a proper novelist gets a bit tiresome. He should've embraced it, and written for TV.

Recently read:

Philip Roth - American Pastoral - really enjoyed this. The frame narrative is interesting, it just glides into the main portion of the book being imagined by the narrator (Zuckerman) based on very little "real" information about the Swede, and then never returns to the frame.

Kelly Link - White Cat, Black Dog - very enjoyable and well-exected folk tale rewrites.

Nick Harkaway - Titanium Noir - tight and pulpy sci-fi detective story set in a world where some rich people have access to an immortality drug that also makes them physically larger and less human with every dose.

Michael Broers - Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled

Philip Roth - American Pastoral - really enjoyed this. The frame narrative is interesting, it just glides into the main portion of the book being imagined by the narrator (Zuckerman) based on very little "real" information about the Swede, and then never returns to the frame.

― Random Restaurateur (Jordan), Wednesday, May 31, 2023

I really loved this book. It starts out like a modern retelling of The Book of Job, about a successful unwavering man who loses everything but who still doesn't lose his faith

except that by the end of this story he concludes that everyone he knows may have a veneer of respectability but that they engage in subversive behaviors, and that he cannot understand the truth about anyone based upon their conduct.

Just finished Mixed Up Files of Basil Frankweiler, which was fun but no Harriet the Spy.

And I’m about 150 pages into Lonesome Dove, which I’m loving even while the length (800 more pages to go!) gives me the jitters

it's been 30 years since i read lonesome dove and the first thing i remember about it is that everybody wants a 'poke'

last month was

stone blind - Medusa's story

women of Troy - modern retelling of life after the second fall of troy

two different translations of Seneca's version of the above

Stephen Fry's Troy, which is the story of troy up to the second sacking. which i enjoyed more than i thought i would given the writer. it's obviously a favourite subject of his.

this month (and probably next) is about 10 sf books from the todo list, all about 250 pages long, picked at random. first up, and the last one i bought, rendezvous with rama

Local library is down to two Roths, counting Everyman, in their discards/donations shop--last one in the stacks: Exit Ghost. Are those good? Kind of attracted/repulsed by skimming, but more the former so far.

how was stone blind? i liked a thousand ships.