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

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.

* should have said: JW 1965.

That is interesting about UFOs.

I finish Sean O'Casey's RED ROSES FOR ME (1942). I like it more than WITHIN THE GATES. It describes the build-up to a strike ('sthrike') and battle with police. I had thought maybe this was about the 1913 lockout, but it doesn't really seem to be. At one point it seems like it might be about the 1916 Rising, but it can't be. I think rather it's a more generalised idea of insurrection. Some of this is labour-based, as you would expect from O'Casey, but the rhetoric also becomes very nationalist and republican. Ultimately it's oddly like an inversion of eg THE PLOUGH & THE STARS where insurrection is criticised. Here it's heroic, the one thing you don't expect from O'Casey!

A good deal of the play also involves infighting and / or cooperation between Catholics and Protestants. There is also a quite appealing scene by the Liffey where the colours of sunset transfigure people and Dublin becomes a momentary utopia dreaming of a better future.

War and Peace was one of my first projects when the pandemic started -- took a week to finish. Tolstoy's one of the few writers who can switch from the cosmic in one paragraph to capturing a human nuance in another.

one other thing about the mirage men, i hope i'm not losing it but i find the multitude of names near impossible to follow. e.g. we hear about a sighting by pilot kenneth arnold, who gets employed by sf magazine editor ray palmer to investigate more sightings, in particular one by harold dahl, who tells his story to fred crisman, arnold then gets visited by two air force agents, frank brown and william davidson, decides to call in the help of another pilot e.j. smith... after a few pages of this, when they're all reduced to surnames only, i'm reeling. plus all the acronyms of security agencies and ufo groups, as well as the usual there's atic, apro, csi, afosi, dia...

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

I dunno, much of the history of the CIA in the 20th century seemed to be dicking around - financing abstract art, trying to off Castro with an exploding cigar, etc.

yes coppola's heart of darkness quote springs to mind, adding in 'too few morals' for good measure.

heart of darkness lol, apocalypse now ofc

Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, like your average Le Carré novel, shows 40 years of dicking around.

what if a mole but outer space

I Am Not Ashamed, the lurid, ghostwritten tell-all by troubled 50s actress Barbara Payton. Accidentally reads like a rare mid-century noir written from a female POV.

I Am Not Ashamed, the lurid, ghostwritten tell-all by troubled 50s actress Barbara Payton. Accidentally reads like a rare mid-century noir written from a female POV.

Who was the ghost?

Maybe it wasn't accidental, to have that kind of pulp appeal.

time to catch up on my recent and no not-so-recent reading:

Into the Woods and The Likeness – Tana French

The first two volumes in the Dublin Murder Squad series. Although, as French says in the acknowledgments to the second novel, 'In some places, where the story seemed to require it, I’ve taken liberties with facts (Ireland doesn’t, for example, have a Murder squad)'. Yes, yes, i think it's fair to say that's taking a bit of a liberty, Tana.

These are enjoyable, in fact compelling, to an extent that slightly surprised me. There is in both, but especially the latter, a central near-supernatural element that unravels the minds of the individual detectives, so that they are doing battle not just with a crime and its causes but with their perception of the crime and its scene, of their place in it, of their potential contribution to its causes. They are *implicated*. Their heads get fucked. It puts you on edge as a reader. It's effective.

French manages dialogue and scene building very well indeed. It was a touch and go thing with the initial introductory paragraphs of both, which are quite mannered, but that's got past almost immediately. Apart from a truly dreadful concluding 'action' scene in *The Likeness*, the writing is very accomplished and impressive.

I haven't read the others in the series, apparently not as good, but I might give at least one of them a go.

xxp gossip columnist/pulp writer Leo Guild. I meant "accidental" more as a tell-all so vivid that it crosses over into the world of pulp/noir.

Essays:

The Frontiers of Meaning, Three Informal Lectures on Music – Charles Rosen
Almost magical essay construction and writing. Compare it to the broken footed english civil war history i quote above itt - the quality of the writing is connected to the quality of the thought, or its expression anyway. Poor style cripples difficult or complicated expression and thinking. Charles Rosen's essays are almost delicate in the selection of their elements, the examples, the points of argument, but retain throughout a good humour, resilient and appropriate to talking about art and the attendant arguments and difficulties over differences in taste and performance. As I'm not a musicologist (although can read music), the light but very clear deployment of musical analysis and reading of scores was much appreciated.

The second of these for instance, How to Become Immortal, describe the process by which reputation is constructed from the initial cultural experience of eg Beethoven, and turned over time to Immortality. Rosen's central contention is that 'canonic status is accorded to works not by posterity, or at least not by a posterity as distant in time as is sometimes thought'. He shows why he thinks that and the mechanisms and cultural processes by which immortality is constructed.

The first, The Frontiers of Nonsense, describes the process of initially resisting that which we do not understand, that friction ultimately driving us to try and understand and ultimately love - what are the boundaries of this process.

These are sophisticated essays, light and substantial at the same time, with clear musicological examples and full of anecdote, historical knowledge, and insight. They're also amusing, with pithy aperçus (a phrase that i want to spoonerise immediately now i've written it) and anecdotes:

...Charles Lamb, who in 1821, six years before Beethoven's death, wrote an essay against the appreciation of music entitled "A Chapter on Ears." He has, he says, no ear for music: ".. *sentimentally* I am disposed to harmony. But *organically* I am incapable of a tune." Operas and oratorios are bad enough, he remarks, but even worse are "those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called..." Listening to pure instrumental music for Lamb ("empty instrumental music," as he terms it) was like reading a book that was all punctuation...

or the wise

... we have trouble enough revising our own standards of criticism without having to pretend to reform everyone else's.

Second, the essay Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective, collected in the book of the same name, by Clifford Geertz. Not the first time I've read this, it's an extraordinary essay on how the management of the 'place of fact in a world of judgment' in western jurisprudence is constituted with regard to قّ / ḥaqq, dharma, and adat in other cultures. I think what I admire most about Geertz is the flexibility of his intelligence to manage questions of relation in a framework that allows comparison. To recognise that sometimes you are going to have to manage matters pragmatically, but that you have to retain an ability to distinguish and to relate. As with Rosen, his deep, deep knowledge allows firmness of opinion where it is due, and a relaxed approach to differences of opinion where any such dogma is unhelpful or inappropriate to assert.

It's an essay that would be in my own personal canonical reading list, and perhaps i ought to try and do better justice to it elsewhere. but as with many geertz essays - and i'm no anthropologist and i'm sure he's been superseded or contradicted by mightier authorities - but you feel like you're getting the literary equivalent of that intelligence chip musk wants to put in people's branes (i might be summarising frivolously ofc). Free intelligence, right here, anyway. And again, the quality of the thought, and its expression, is invigorating to read.

Vehicle – Jen Calleja. I really liked her collection of short stories, I'm afraid that's all we've got time for. Man, I struggled with this. I am delighted that it exists though, and I love the fact that prototype publishing is putting this sort of thing out.

It is not, as the subtitle states, a verse novel. It is, I guess a work of metafiction. And again, the theory is quite enticing, a wandering set of islands, colonised by our european nations, suffer a schism from the Mainland colonisers. A group of academics and writers are paid to recover the history of the schism and its aftermath from the fragments of texts and recordings that remain, only to find this is a political attempt at erasure of history. the substance of the texts are centred around the people and events that orbit around the punk/post-punk group Vehicle. Translation, xenophobia, immigration are the themes.

By fuck it's heavy going. I feel bad because I was going through a period of struggling to read and it's more than possible that i just didn't have the energy or mental sharpness to tackle this book – if any ilxor can rescue it for me I'd be delighted because I really wanted it to work. Didn't finish, I'm afraid.

more tomorrow to avoid DoS-ing the books thread.

one more

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession – Janet Malcolm.

Sharp, well written, but her tame psychoanalyst is frequently quite annoying... "At our next meeting, I confessed to Aaron that I sometimes got tired of hearing him talk..." No. shit. is what i have to say to that. The book describes the jealousies and organisational politics – and disputes over theories of transference – of New York/US psychoanalysis of the period through the eyes and mouth of a self-pitying, somewhat pooterish psychoanalyst. the focus is very narrow and although that should be its great weakness it's actually probably its strength, as a documentary of the subject and period. It's like a short film or feature piece, unsurprisingly maybe. Malcolm is a very sharp writer. odd little book though.

I commence rereading Sean O'Casey's early play JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK (1924). It's shorter and feels more vivid and immediate than the later plays I've mentioned above. Some of the broad humour also comes through OK on the page.

I've been reading in Some Trick, a book of short stories by Helen DeWitt, presumably early work of hers that was published after Last Samurai in order to take advantage of the surge in interest. It has that feel to it. They're pretty interesting and her talent is obvious, but they're not mature work.

Just finished Geoff Dyer's The Last Days of Roger Federer which was a fun early summer read - hits all the usual Dyer notes (Tennis, Burning Man, jazz, living in Brixton in the mid-80s etc) in a way that worked for me.

Picked up Knausgaard's The Morning Star for £1.50 in a charity shop yesterday. Tempted to dive in (I read, and enjoyed, the first six and a half volumes of My Struggle but just wondered if anyone on ILB had actually read it.

i think some trick is a mixture tbh. imo a few of the stories are up there with her best - brutto for instance or entourage and the french style of mlle matsumoto. these have the recent v laconic style, and sit well with the sexual codes of the europeans and the english understand wool.

the earlier ones are less successful (especially the one set in oxford - famous last words?, as are the rock music ones, which are just slightly off though still have key hdw elements.

JUNO & THE PAYCOCK is perhaps O'Casey's most famous play. I read it long ago. I never thought I liked it that much but returning to it, I do find that it has a directness and comic effect that's better than the later work. Broad comedy in eg: the way that Boyle says he'll do one thing then immediately does another. Odd English middle-class character who's a Theosophist. The Civil War context perhaps doesn't come through so well - a character is shot, but there is never any sense of what people are fighting for.

I then started O'Casey's play COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY (1949). This is odd. It starts with an actor dressed as a cockerel walking across the stage. It seems to concern, in part, misogyny and distrust of women (that is, it seems to be critical of these things) - but I'm not far in yet.

Hitchcock did an adaptation of Juno & The Paycock during the silent era.

True. I should see that. I'm surprised John Ford never filmed it.

I pause the COCK play to read Flann O'Brien's short TV play THE BOY FROM BALLYTEARIM. Its historical setting (Boer War and WWI) is of interest, but the play is very slight. Oddly there's no real twist or action.

I then start rereading Flann O'Brien's early play FAUSTUS KELLY (1943), set in a regional council. Critics have always dismissed this play. But all the dialogue so far holds up well, including long speeches from Kelly that are hilarious pastiches of political discourse. I think it's been underrated.

I go on to Flann's other substantial play RHAPSODY IN STEPHEN'S GREEN (1943). Three acts set in the park, in which insects and other animals talk. Social and political allegory. It's all quite entertaining and has some striking elements - such as the bees whose desire to sting, which will kill them, brings sex and death together in a way unusual in this writer. On the whole I think these plays have been underrated because his other work shortly before them had been so outstanding. They're better than his late work.

Silvia Federici Caliban And The Witch
very interesting book looking at the develo9pment of capitalism and how it effected the working class and especially women who were seriously disenfranchised by the process It looks back at how feudalism was not the idyll it seems to be painted as in school history lessons and that there were actual means of protest at inequality and injustice etc. It also looks ta the rise of the witch hunt and who exactly got vilified.
One problem I had with the text was the constant ping pong one had to play between the text's narrative flow and turning to the end of the chapter where the endnotes are. These are often pretty substantial, which while showing a great deal of research also seriously disturbs the narrative flow. So it takes a bit longer to read than a book with less notes or where all the reference numbers are to citations not actual significant background information. Very good book anyway.
I think I have been meaning to read this for years. Have now been listening to a load of podcasts and archived talks and interviews with the author and other people talking about the book and related subjects.
I think I will try to get hold of the updates on the subjects covered since they do seem to be in the library system.

Ed Yong An Immense World
Science journalist looks at the Umwelt the world created by the senses and how this differs in various animals.. He makes the point that since these create the understanding that an animal lives in it would be very difficult to fully understand what it is like to exist as that animal. He references Thomas Nagel's essay What is it Like to Be A Bat which i had a similar take on in University 20 years ago which I think differed from how the lecturer was framing things. But I think this is very central to an understanding here , the basic understanding is down to one's experience of the world and since the filters of how one experiences the world are down to these senses it will be different without that being your basic experience. You can't visit temporarily and have the same experience and so on.
Good book, have been enjoying podcasts and talks with the author too.I think I will need to read his book on microbes too.

Lydia Edwards How To Read A Suit
great book on the development of men's clothing over about 400 years. This mainly concentrates on the suit as the title suggests. It wasa follow up to a book called How To Read A Dress by the same author. I need to read that one too. I heard about these books a few years ago on teh Dressed podcast. Glad i have read this now and now I have done i found out that I have a bit more time with it. I thought I was having to rush through to get i back for the next person in the library system queue. Not sure what happened there cos it was definitely reading as one copy in the system and one reserve.
Anyway did give me a couple of things i want to adopt and utilise in things I'm making. & would love a further book on other aspects of the male wardrobe showing development over time.

Song of The Outcasts Robin Totton
book on Flamenco that I've had out for too long without reading. Seems to have a lot of interesting info but I'm not 100% taken by the author's attitude to his subjects seems very very white gaze and quite patronising in places..
But may be turning me onto some decent new stuff.

Having finished Caliban and The Witch this morning and got within a couple of chapters of An Immense World I thought I might just give Theodore Allen The iNvention of The White Race another batch.
Sp I picked up from where i put it down last time I was trying to read it then went back to the beginning of the section. I've just read the beginning of the section on the colonisation of Ireland and the restructuring of the power structure and land ownership.
It is already peppered with reference numbers and i watched a tv appearance or heard a podcast referring to the amount of endnotes. It said 35% but it occurred to me earlier that I wasn't sure what that statistic referred to . I have the first of 2 sections which have more recently been omnibused together by Verso. I couldn't wait another few months to get hold of it when I bought it then left it unread for 2 or 3 years. Have meant to get back to it but it has been a couple of years where I have had several books on the go at almost all times. Hoping I will get through this this time and then read the 2nd Volume when I get a chance to. Not sure if 35% was across the 2 volumes. Seem to be a number of citations but also a couple of things that have been half a page long.
Anyway seems to be a good book that I hope i am going to fully ingest. Have heard quite a bit about it and probably have done a lot of reading that touches on this and will help- flesh out understandings better since I started trying to read it.

I finished RHAPSODY IN STEPHEN'S GREEN. It contains a lot of interesting material, and the voice of the human Tramp is very amusing. The satire of Loyalists and war in the third Act is bold, if crude.

I returned to O'Casey's play COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY. This is truly strange. It has almost no continuity of character, motivation or causality. People keep acting normally, then bonkers things happen, including a massive cock rampaging around the countryside causing havoc. It's played by an actor dressed up in a big cockerel outfit. Characters suddenly grow horns. Drink changes colour. You can't tell what's really going on or why. The most coherent thing to say about the play is that it's a critique of puritanism and misogyny, with a certain logic in all the women leaving at the end for a better life. But the play is mostly less coherent than this sounds.