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

Do you mean 'And'?

Does your last point mean: don't make it two separate sentences but one long sentence with 'and' in it?

A watershed had been reached in 1588−9, when a pamphlet war exploded in which scabrous publications under the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate (‘Martin Bash-bishop’) made noisy calls for the abolition of the episcopacy.

now it’s been a while since i’ve read any of the MM tracts but - feel like i’m going slightly mad here - “Marprelate” does not carry any of the insinuation that “bash-bishop” does, right? i mean my immediate response was excruciated laughter, but then i’m not a 17th century expert, so maybe it’s… intended?

Do you mean 'And'?

Does your last point mean: don't make it two separate sentences but one long sentence with 'and' in it?

“why are you reading this, fizzles?”

anton howes, who i think is pretty good, mentioned it approvingly.

I think you're neglecting the consideration that on your model, sentences could become very long, and on mine they could become shorter and more manageable.

There is a place for long sentences when necessary, but in general I think one should be aiming to minimise, not maximise length.

Thinking of the tonal difference that I intuitively feel between 'But' and And' here, I find myself thinking that 'And' can feel journalistic.

MANCHESTER UNITED boss Eric Ten Hag is planning a sensational swoop for England captain Harry Kane.

And Old Trafford chiefs have promised the Dutchman a sizeable war chest to land his target.

Whereas 'But' to my mind can usually be used for the purpose of relatively elegant logical development.

Baudelaire, to be sure, was a romantic, a poet of the halo and the swan, who might have been at home in one of Byron's narratives. But he was also a realist, an urban analyst who was the contemporary of Marx and the early Flaubert.

my model, such as it is, is vary short and long sentences. this writer’s model, such as it is, is fire sentences at you as from a mitrailleuse.

you’re pushing at an open door. i don’t know how many times i have to say i’m not against using and or but as sentence openers. just don’t overdo it.

fwiw le Carré's first two novels are, I'll have said here before, a delight - I wouldn't skip them!

― the pinefox, Sunday, June 4, 2023

ok, I will circle back to them!

just got a fit of the giggles thinking about the phrase “i’m going mar my prelate”. i’m supposed to be asleep ffs. early start.

also “fear about witchcraft was at its height”. “fear *of* witchcraft”.

i’m being picky, sure, (not on bishop basher - that’s egregious), but it’s v choppy. choppy and hamfisted. damn thing reads like a work email.

And/But he's got you reading and writing and thinking and writing some more about it. What more could a writer want, aside from money?

yo pinefox, this is even better:

Baudelaire, to be sure, was a romantic, a poet of the halo and the swan, who might have been at home in one of Byron's narratives. But (H)e was also a realist, an urban analyst who was the contemporary of Marx and the early Flaubert.

Damn!

And/But he's got you reading and writing and thinking and writing some more about it. What more could a writer want, aside from money?

Dow: I don't agree that your version is an improvement. I think it's an alteration, fine in itself but with a slightly different meaning from what I wrote.

Dow was an ILX poster. But he was also resistant to some aspects of the Internet.

Dow was an ILX poster. He was also resistant to some aspects of the Internet.

Both valid statements, but not the same.

I've started Sean O'Casey's 1942 play RED ROSES FOR ME.

And/But he's got you reading and writing and thinking and writing some more about it. What more could a writer want, aside from money?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nu6aGcDeAg

Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch
So far I've only reached the end of the first chapter. Interesting to read about discrepancies between how feudalism etc are taught and some of the reality. Like how much push back peasants had against their landlords supposed masters. I think things are somewhat simplified in school history :-) so interesting to see the version presented here.
I think this is something I have been meaning to read for a while. I have just recently listened to the Books On Fire series on the book which was interesting. They have a current series on the Dawn of Everything which I also need to read as I think I need to read the rest of Graeber.

How Europ0e Underdeveloped Africa Walter Rodney
his book on imbalance between continents and how the once advanced area of Africa got robbed and backburnered and colonised and all those shit things.
I just read a couple of paragraphs describing the arrival of my dad's tribe in East Africa from further North which si much later than I'd assumed. He's saying 16th century, not sure when I'd assumed but could have been as much as a thousand years earlier so I really need to read a history of the tribe.

Sara Ahmed The Feminist Killjoy's Handbook
Australian author looks into the stereotype that's associated with feminism and explores what positive could be morphed out of that. Very interesting book. I need to read more of her work, I read Living A Feminist Life a couple of years ago.

How To Read A Suit Lydia Edwards
The development of men's formal attire since the invention of the suit in the late 17th century, I think up to the end of the 20th.
A book I think I need a copy of that isn't borrowed from the library. Especially with there only being one copy in the system and at least one person waiting to get hold of this after me.
Great book anyway, got some nice photos of clothing and breakdown of the elements thereof.I think I'm also going to need to read her initial book in this miniseries How To Read A Dress. Think I need to be able to salivate over the pair of these books at my leisure though. & see what I can incorporate into my own designs.

I've started Sean O'Casey's 1942 play RED ROSES FOR ME.

hell yes

with a slightly different meaning from what I wrote.

J Edgar, do you know the play? That's interesting.

Dow: roughly, yes. Just as it would be if 'but' appeared in the middle of a sentence rather than at the start of a second sentence.

Finished Valis by PKD. I'm not sure I've had my perception of a book turn on a dime so quickly - I disliked the first half, enjoyed it much more after the movie was introduced. Let's just say I feel for this guy's (five) ex-wives.

Started reading Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade based on xyzzzz's recommendation in the Winter thread. I'm only 10 pages in but the writing is so elegant and I'm loving it so far.

J Edgar, do you know the play? That's interesting.

I haven't looked at O'Casey since I was too young to understand him but my stepdad was a communist committed to the cause of a free Ireland -- I would try to read him & Behan & all the other stuff on the shelves, fancying myself very erudite & worldly. these sorts of biting-off-more-than-I-could-reasonably-chew moments in my development as a reader were pretty crucial for me

Started reading Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade based on xyzzzz's recommendation in the Winter thread. I'm only 10 pages in but the writing is so elegant and I'm loving it so far.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, 7 June 2023 bookmarkflaglink

ILB poster Tim H has gifted me a copy of his book of short stories. Will let you all know how that is in a month or so.

I listened to a podcast on Theodore Allen's The Invention Of The White Race earlier. A book I tried reading as a bog book last year but gave up om because I couldn't work out how to deal with the copious amount of endnotes which had link numbers peppering the text heavily. &it was actually important significant notes not just citations. So I either had to go and check them at around the time I passed the number or catch up on a few at the end of a page or something. Just not sure how you keep the flow going and you do need the background info.
I'm finding reading Caliban and The Witch very similar, not sure why I didn't mention that yesterday. Like great book I really need/want to read but need to navigate this almost every paragraph.Do I just need to read the book about twice once for sense and again for the context for the notes.

what is a bog book?

I am determined to get through War and Peace. I have to keep referring to the wikipedia page to remember all of the proper names, nicknames, alternate names, bestowed names and childhood names of each of the characters. It's very confounding but it's worth it

The war scenes get me down, but the intimate scenes between members of the 5 families and their relatives and friends and lovers make me want to continue

what is a bog book?

j/k
I believe it is what we might call in the US a Bathroom Book

I bought War and Peace new for $2.99 and it sat unread for at least a decade before I opened it. I found the experience of reading it engrossing even as I knew I wasn't retaining any more than 0.1% of it.
Bondarchuk's films are an excellent adaptation, even the philosophical bits, a lot better than the middlebrow synopsis I feared.

I'm currently reading "The Triumph of Christianity" by Bart Ehrman. Perhaps a bit repetitive and you feel like he is making an effort to spell things out carefully and clearly for a lay audience, but still I'm learning some new things about the first few centuries of Christianity and the Roman empire.

i read like two-thirds of war and peace last summer and it was fantastic but then i just . . . wanted to read something else

the good characters are *so* good and i love them but they have such flights of certainty like 'this is what i was meant to do all along!' and it's awkward because they're almost always wrong

Bog book is one to read on bog. So short periods of time and probably not full concentration. So totally wrong for some books particularly if they need you to keep looking at several paragraph long endnotes.
Endnotes denote scholarship and research not directly placed in narrative flow of main text. So both books mentioned massively researched. So need to be read with more concentration than some others and presumably need time dedicates specifically to them.

Bog= loo = jacks
Which is thankfully not shared so I can read without external interruption.

But some books just don't lend themselves as easily to some environments. I think both books I mentioned are widely read so somebody must have found a good way around continually stopping and starting their narrative flow. It really is at least one endnote number per paragraph, sometimes 2 or 3. In the Federici at least. I've yet to het back to Theodore Allen which I'm still planning to do.

Presumably must be a few other books with a similar endnote or end of chapter note set up. That people do overcome. Just seems like you do need to juggle trying to keep up with endnotes and flow of text or do people just get 2 copies so they can have notes open at same time as text?

Caliban is the one to read by Federici— I would just read through, Stevo.

I have not been reading with any concentration or energy, unfortunately, tho have finished a few books in the past month. The summer break often leaves me quite cash poor so I will have ample time to get to the piles that have accumulated over the school year. I am most looking forward to reading a few novels that have been sitting, as well as diving into William Carlos Williams’ ‘Paterson,’ which I have never read, somehow.

Nabokov - Speak, Memory. A memoir of his covering childhood, family, Russia, revolution, exile in Europe then stopping before he moves to the US. It's fine, lots of fine phrases and sentences. But its also quite boring, the man had these tastes for art that were kind of monotonous, his politics were boring liberal gruel. The one thing I liked a bit more was when he discovered his love of butterflies. But you also know that, were he to explore thi topic in several chapters it would be very taxonomy-heavy, he would kill the interest with unrelenting detail.

No exuberance here, none of Proust's wild flights. No love.

I finished the Natalia Ginzburg book, which maintained its course to the end, but its interest diffused for me as the characters' lives (all of them real people) diverged from Ginzburg's life and the details became more sparse or distantly observed. I'm happy to have read it, but was happy to lay it aside by the end.

After this I read Jar City, a detective fiction by an Icelandic author, Arnaldur Indridason. It fulfilled all the requirements of the genre and was entirely satisfactory, even a bit ambitious and venturesome, but nothing that would challenge any of the conventions its readers would expect it to deliver.

I'm leaning toward my next book being a re-read but haven't settled on anything yet.

I liked Jar City fine but at some point soon after maxed out on Skandinavischen Krimis.

Finished Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book after nearly a month’s effort of reading it only as I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee.

It is a novel without human characters, a book about nature composed entirely of purloined and rearranged descriptions of nature from other books. It took Comitta about nine years to write, and it shows— it’s a deft and dense book in the Oulipian tradition that I truly enjoyed.

Keith Ridgway - A Shock.

As we finish Spring I am reading a book by a living writer. I found him through twitter (Keith is from Dublin but lives in London, and actually South London, which I'm delighted about as this is my part of town and what I know).

'A Shock', then, is a series of interconnected stories of people living their lives in this part of London. They are drinking, living in with housemates, writing emails and texts, having sex, thinking thoughts, reading, working, talking about all sorts, and trying to live as best they are able. Bizarre to read a book that speaks to personally specific experiences. It's all just really well done.

Great book to start the summer.

Ginzburg was my Great 2021 Discovery, thanks to NROB. I don't know which novel you read, Aimless, but I suggest giving Happiness, As Such and Valentino a try.

xyzz -- I also didn't care for Speak, Memory.

I read *Hawthorn and Child* by Keith Ridgway about a decade ago and loved it. I've lost a lot of the detail but remember it was a detective novel that was more elision than plot and very emotionally affecting. There's a running theme associated with the Formula One driver Tom Pryce that has 100% stayed with me. It was a lot like Gordon Burn iirr. Good stuff.

I finished James Woods' *How Fiction Works*. Woods knows his subject inside out clearly and is a good close reader but trying to write a short and 'popular' work of literary criticism is a hell of a task to set oneself.

I enjoyed the range of references, the early chapters on (broadly) the history of the novel, the aforementioned close reading - particularly the stuff on Balzac, Woolf & Lawrence. There's a bit where he compares four 'fire' metaphors (from Hardy, Bellow, Lawrence and Norman Rush) and I would have loved more of the same.

What I struggled with: the book is organised into 123 paragraphs and these fall into what feels like a random selection of chapters: Flaubert gets two; the others are a loose confection of 'Detail' 'Language' & things like 'Truth, Convention & Realism' - all of which gives the feeling of Wood eventually asking the publisher 'will this do?'.

I loved War & Peace so much that I'm reading Karenina now

it's really good. i should read it again. i never read war and peace. my mother raves about it. as others do, i've heard

I’ve gotten about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through War and Peace. The war scenes in Schöngrabern and Austerlitz so far are somewhat interesting. Pierre Bezukhov, who I guess is the protagonist, seems like a drip to me. I've been liking the story of Nikolai Rostov. He is a hussar and the beloved eldest son on the Rostov family. He comes home from war and his 15 year old cousin Sonya Rostova is in love with him, and Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov, who is his "friend" - and who is cold and psychopathic - ruins Rostov by luring him into an outrageous debt in a card game that is fixed, in revenge after Dolokhov is rejected by Sonya in a proposal of marriage

you are completely wrong

always good to know

This is embarrassing. I just realized I've been thinking Michael Wood and James Wood are the same person. Who'd have thought there would be 2 English literary critics with such similar names.

In other news, I just finished "Triumph of Christianity" by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is balanced and humble, which is a good trait in a historian dealing with controversial topics for which the historical record is limited. He seems to provide a good overview of where the scholarship is, although perhaps for a topic like this, a dash of unrestrained speculation would not always be unwelcome. I think it would perhaps take a different and more speculative book, and one more focused on human psychology, to provide a satisfying answer to the question of how Christianity grew so quickly and so steadily for so many years.

Now I'm reading a biography of William James by Robert Richardson.

Reading The Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington, about UFOs. So far pretty much a potted history of the subject and the major sightings, pushing the idea that most or all of the more extraordinary ones were deliberate fakes by the cia or the nsa or the air force or the navy, either to confuse and misdirect the soviets, or one of the other rival agencies, or the american public - the motivations or purposes aren't entirely clear and it seems a little weird that these agencies would spend so much time and money on what seems like, basically, a lot of dicking around - but probably less weird than the other explanation: not so much that we've been visited, but that the visitors themselves enjoy a good deal of dicking around.

o.nate: MW was born 1936, I think 1965. A similarity is that they both migrated to the US and became rather transatlantic figures.

They are both talented and knowledgeable, but MW has greater range including film and more philosophy. MW is much funnier and defter than JW, who has a more moralising or solemn aspect.