'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

(Now that a heavy weight of posts has chained and bowed the Summer WAYR thread...)

I just finished part 1 of Richard Jeffries' After London; not sure if I'll go any farther with this one--I kinda feel like introducing characters+plot will just ruin the setting? But the prose in the first couple of chapters is lovely, even if he starts to lose me with the complex hydrological speculations.

I'm also just now getting around to enjoying the Master of Reality 33 1/3 book by NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS NOMINEE John Darnielle, whose jokes are always very good, and really what more do you need?? Heavy (groan) subject matter, handled with the greatest sensitivity.

I have a bunch of anthropology books out that I'm sampling somewhat carelessly, trying to decide what I want to read in full. The Japanese undertaking industry, Greek funeral laments, and "compassionate cannibalism" in the Amazon are viable options. This anthology has been a useful guide:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Mourning-Burial-Cross-Cultural-Reader/dp/1405114711

The Blood of Angels by Johanna Sinisalo: Finnish science-fiction about grief, bee colony collapse and animal rights. Pretty good so far.

"The Japanese undertaking industry"

Read THIS!

Think I'll try compassionate cannibalism first.

if I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me

Just picked up a bunch of books from a charity shop as I do too frequently. Got 9 yesterday, loads for my expanding backlog but started William Goldman's Princess Bride.
Ostensibly an abridgement of a longer historical satire WG was read by his father while down with pneumonia in late childhood and the main impetus that got him into reading. The truth is a little different.
It was adapted by him into the screenplay of a good film version in the 80s (I think) which I haven't seen in a while. So was wondering if it kept the real world prelude. Think it does keep some of the asides though ascribing them to characters.

Also reading Chickenhawk. Bob Mason's memoir of flying helicopters in pre escalation Vietnam in the mid 60s.

Also near the end of 2nd book of the 1st Thomas Covenant trilogy.
Plus various sewing books.

hmmm, recently been reading mostly shortish works: a robert louis stevenson collection (pretty hit or miss, first time reading of jekyll/hyde, some of the later south seas stories almost proto-conrad), collection of hp lovecraft's short novels and (somewhat) related stories, followed that up by random readings in a peter haining ed. collection of nightmare tales which goes from the sublime (bierce, machen, le fanu) to the ridiculous (crowley), and a not bad story by madame blavatsky on the paganini theme. currently, on my second ever wilkie collins: basil; a story of modern life from 1852. so far, not finding it much of a page turner and the hero is totally insufferable.

re: after london, from memory the middle section is pretty weak (limp characters/dialogue and i don't even remember the plot) but his canoe journey into the toxic swamp that was london near the end is every bit as good as the descriptions of rampant revegetation at the beginning.

Ezra Pound - A Serious Character. A serious biography. Turns out the greatest enabler in 20th century lit history read little and cared about other people less. Quite good on the legal limbo in which he resided after those infamous Italian broadcasts during WWII: it's clear they weren't treasonous but the Italian govt did pay for them. The book suggests that Pound wanted to be in St Elizabeth's Hospital all those years b/c it kept him away from other people and let him cobble away at ever more incomprehensible Cantos.

John Berryman - "Homage to Mrs Broadstreet"

Knausgaard - struggle 3
Shambhala way of the warrior
Murakami - Colorless
Shafer - Whiskey tango foxtrot
George-warren - man called destruction (Chilton bio)

i think there are doubts about the scholarship of that pound bio? or a story about the manuscript being unreadable and worked on for months by a faber editor? i forget. i only ever flicked through it in parts; it was readable, gossipy, i guess. isn't the second volume of moody's possibly definitive but not very interesting one out now?

Not really! If there's gossip I would've remembered. Pound's life was dull.

Alfred, what did you think of The Small House at Allington and Call It Sleep?

my favorite pound bio is eustace mullins' _this difficult individual, ezra pound_ which is a bonkers right-wing apologia written in a hilarious bitchy buttoned-up proto-buckley style.

I was lukewarm on Call It Sleep. The pages and pages of dialogue wore me out. He's excellent at depicting emotional violence though.

Adam, that sounds .. kind of fantastic

as for The Small House at Allington, it was one of my least favorite Trollopes.

Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies - New penguin classics collection so I thought I'd check him out. About six stories in and wishing there was more of this type of stuff, from the back cover: "Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun/ of Secret worlds incredible, and take/ their trailing skies for vestment when I soar." So far there's been a few too many stories that take place in realistic settings. I think its a chronological survey so maybe he wrote the more cosmic strange stuff when was older?

Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun - Really happily surprised by this so far, tried 1q84 earlier this year but only could get through book 1. I think this was written in the same period he wrote Norwegian Wood/wind up bird, prose is definitely of that quality so far.

Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity - Bit of a slog through the first 30 pages of methodology/theory review, but its starting to pick up, excited to hear more about electric trains connecting st. petersburg and beijing, underground through the himalayas and caspian sea, as imagined by random russians in the mid 19th century.

I recommend Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler if anyone's looking for fun, accessible new philosophy that philosophers have apparently taken seriously as something original in the field. It's about doomsday scenarios like in Children of Men, where knowledge of mankind's imminent extinction has a widespread dampening impact on people's capacity to find joy and meaning in life, to form plans and have meaningful projects. He tries to draw out the implications of this conclusion, showing that a big part of what holds us together as purposive agents is this assumption that mankind will live on significantly after our deaths, and that this belief is actually much more psychologically crucial than beliefs about personal survival after death.

It also goes into immortality (would immortality be tedious?) and fear of death (is it rational to fear death?). This would be fun stuff to teach.

What I wondered while reading was whether mere thought experiments about our attitudes towards imminent extinction can effectively take into account the workings of the human emotional immune system. The period in which the reader is thinking about their possible reactions is probably only a few hours, whereas a real person in that situation might have enough time to become acclimated to mankind's new horizon and learn to accept it. That would fit with how people deal with their own individual mortality.

Reading the accumulating evidence, like this http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf, can only hope the Earth can eventually replenish, somehow, and that the next dominant species is wiser, or has no clue re any re-accumulating fossil-to-oil deposits---not for another good long while, anyway (but how many times has this happened).

reading wuthering heights. finding it impossible to do so without getting the song stuck in my head.

going back to the guardian article though, the comments are so infuriating. people seem so smug -- almost giddy -- about humanity's imminent extinction due to our greed or selfishness or other moralistic terms. they act like they're not implicated in it at all and also never ask the question if the risks of trying to develop an industrial civilization were worth it considering the potential it allows (never fully realized) for many people to live very well.

it's not that the grim analysis is wrong, but george carlin-esque cynicism seems so stupid and pointless to me. like, we are humans. if our species has an unsustainable way of life, let's try to fix that. even if it's impossible and industrialization -- or even agriculture -- was the beginning of the end, we should be looking at solutions. tsk tsking is dumb because these issues have nothing to do with people being "greedy" and everything to do with systemic issues like population growth and capitalist economies focused on growth at all costs.

Not referring to you dow, necessarily, but I don't personally really care about the "next species" to dominate earth any more than i do the hypothetical life forms in distant galaxies. Human extinction, even mass- scale traumatic population depletion through starvation or displacement, should still be thought of as preventable

Yeah, I had a bit of a minor meltdown in the global warming thread over that report. It's amazing to me that species like tigers can be so iconic in the human imagination, when in reality we've almost completely wiped them out. Some love of nature.

Didn't read the comments, know what to expect there, but prevention seems increasingly unlikely, esp. considering the price, in several senses, incl. the gamble of efficacy---no, we shouldn't give up, but
a big part of what holds us together as purposive agents is this assumption that mankind will live on significantly after our deaths, and that this belief is actually much more psychologically crucial than beliefs about personal survival after death. seems to require whatever recycling of hope, wherever it can be found (and to each his own)

Quite a lot of Blake, also Erdman's Prophet Against Empire
Feel a bit zombified in bursts, so a little Jim Thompson for switch-off (after dark, my sweet).
Biography of Nicholas Van Hoogstraten also worked for switch-off.
Never finished the Good Soldier Švejk so started that again. So funny!

My ILX posting has gone from a trickle to a narrower, slower trickle since my computer crashed this summer, but I'll resist the temptation to write a longer roundup post. I'm finished with In Search of Lost Time, which I'd been reading for most of the year. I think I want to let a decade or so elapse before I reread it in sequence, so I can see how my perspective on the text will have shifted, and I think I want to spend a couple of months reading mostly novellas for contrast. I have mixed feelings about Lynne Tillman on the basis of her essays and stories, but I'm impressed with the terseness of Haunted Houses so far. Casey Plett's first book of stories, A Safe Girl to Love, deals with the messiness of trans women's experience, and particularly their relationships with one another, in a way I haven't really seen outside of Imogen Binnie's Nevada and the work of a few other trans writers. Stylistically (and formally in a couple of stories narrated in the second-person), it probably owes something to Lorrie Moore, but it never feels safe or excessively workshopped.

i shd be done with proust this evening, thank god

don't spoil the ending for us

You will all begin again from page one, I can tell.

Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name. So so amazing.

Now onto Elio Vittorini - Women of Messina.

Big Flannery score:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/books/university-acquires-flannery-oconnors-papers-and-effects.html?_r=0

Cool, thanks. Feel like the physical building those things end up in should be guarded by peacocks. If not live ones then at least artistic renditions thereof.

Didn't read the comments, know what to expect there, but prevention seems increasingly unlikely, esp. considering the price, in several senses, incl. the gamble of efficacy---no, we shouldn't give up, but
/a big part of what holds us together as purposive agents is this assumption that mankind will live on significantly after our deaths, and that this belief is actually much more psychologically crucial than beliefs about personal survival after death./ seems to require whatever recycling of hope, wherever it can be found (and to each his own)

going back to the guardian article though, the comments are so infuriating. people seem so smug -- almost giddy -- about humanity's imminent extinction due to our greed or selfishness or other moralistic terms. they act like they're not implicated in it at all and also never ask the question if the risks of trying to develop an industrial civilization were worth it considering the potential it allows (never fully realized) for many people to live very well.

I know what you mean, but I've done everything I can do as an individual, and frankly I have o% confidence any governments are going to do the right thing, so giddy joy at the inevitable demise of all the fuckwits who have actively fought against doing anything to save the pklanet is all I have left

Dutch government is trying to do the right thing, for obvious reasons.

fair point. i live in Australia, however, which no longer even has a climate change policy, due to being run by genuinely evil fuckheads. anyway, back to books...

just finished portugal in european and world history by malyn newitt

for a small country portugal has had some interesting leaders

i was v much not into the last idk how many pages of proust

I am continuing with Foote's Civil War history. His Confederate sympathies are emerging more distinctly as Robert E. Lee enters the scene and the south begins to win more battles. Now that we're deeper into the campaigns of 1862, he tends to lionize the Confederate generals and army rather unabashedly. :(

Buddenbrooks -- at last.

Even the "masked ball" passage, Thomp?

Couple of jazz books I picked up yesterday. Jazz People by Val Wilner where I read the Babs Gonzales piece and a book of interviews from around 1970 called Note by Note or something

Even the "masked ball" passage, Thomp?

― one way street, Saturday, 11 October 2014 20:30 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the masked ball is good but still maybe the third best party of the parties. the one at the end is the worst party.

i have been reading SHORT BOOKS: clive bell's 'art', richard hughes' weird docu-novel 'in hazard', lars iyers's 'spurious'

Making a bit of progress in The Arabian Nights. I always really enjoy it but can't ever seem to keep up a steady pace.

I read one night a night for 2½ years.

Maybe I'll do that. The way I read, if Shahriyar had my attention span, Scheherazade wouldn't have lasted long.

no xbox in olden days

Elena Ferrante - Days of Abandonment.

I loved Vittorini's Conversation in Sicily but found Women of Messina tough going wrt writing, and Days of Abandonment was sitting there. Picked that up, loved it from the first sentence on page one (so connect with her voice) that I couldn't go back to Vittorini. Gave that back to the library.

I just picked up a copy of Capital in the Twenty-First Century on a 14 day loan from the library. I will not be able to renew it, because of the high demand. I will certainly not finish it in 14 days. But I do intend to interrupt my civil war odyssey long enough to evaluate whether or not to invest in my own copy of this.

Been reading Isaac Babel collected stories. Think I prefer the autobiographical and early stories to the Red Cavalry stuff, since it's not as disturbing.

ai, d.

BLEEDING EDGE !

more readable than I sometimes find TP
amiable, garrulous, sort of friendly narration
strikes me what a conventional novelist TP is - you could hardly guess from this that he was considered formally groundbreaking.
remarkably close to CL49 at times - to the point where it seems deliberate
also a ton of Neuromancer hip-hacker cobblers - a bit painful in adolescent tone

PF otm. i think the main TP characteristic these days isn't formal experimentation but writing books that create nebulous spaces where whimsical connections, psychic comprehension and colourful juxtapositions of language can meaningfully, sort of meaningfully, exist.

here it's the deep net which isn't really understood in any way as a technical thing - "Neuromancer hh cobblers" :) - but as an imaginary space for him to conduct his really quite enjoyable writing jam session.

not sure what that ai, d is doing there. think it was a discarded post where I was saying hello to deems perhaps.

The Confidence Man is good but I have only read 50 pages. I need a few hours of concentration and no worries to break the back of it.

Meantime I have finished:

Jane Bowles - Two Serious Ladies

About to finish:

Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Gripsholm. This is a good find. Like Robert Walser he seems to have written short stories for Feuilletons of the day and this begins like a bunch of those stories expertly put together. Starts with a back-and-forth between the author and publisher on the stories he is looking to buy (love stories, natch) and royalties that he'll get. Then we dive in: a couple, train journey, holiday. Then they come across a girl, she is crying and in distress and run away from a boarding school because the headmistress is up to no good. Because this was written in '32 as the Nazis were to take over this takes on those tones. You read the author has committed suicide a few years after this. It wears its lightness darkly and all but I wonder whether the biography surrounding this will take over. It is funny, and slight on purpose too and that is more than ok.

enjoyable writing jam session. Fans of this approach should def check Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace, which works a time-space groove like no other, but does remind me of TP's more enjoyable transitions, minus the murk (says me, but there were some complaints from some fans, as there always are, no matter what he does). NY recently produced a second memoir and announced that he's working on a science fiction novel.
My local library's only copy of The Brothers Karamazov is the Constance Garnett translation, but I finally picked it up and went right through the first 30 pages, then had to peel it way because Xmas chores. But soon and very soon, the rest will be another gift to self.
Recently finished My Brilliant Friend and need to cool off a little lest I babble "spoilers," but---do believe the hype.

Cool. Are you going to start the second one?

"Deejay activities alternate with live local bachata groups, a bright, twangly mandolin / bottleneck sound, an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"
-- BLEEDING EDGE

"an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"

"why, my six year old could talk gooder than that..."

just read Merritt Tierce's debut novel, Love Me Back, and immediately wanted to read the whole thing over again from the beginning. it's horrifying and excellent.

Susan Fast, Dangerous - A new entry in the 33 1/3 series, every bit as good, I think, as the justifiably acclaimed Carl Wilson and John Darnielle volumes.

Having done with Rabelais, I have just picked up Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer's book about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon. The writing style is ferociously overwritten and grossly self-involved, but this is offered to the reader as if it were all a sly joke.

It actually works as humor for a while, but after 50 or so relentless pages of this the humor is wearing thin and the self-aggrandizing poses begin to seem far too threadbare not to be Mailer's normal state of mind. Unless something happens soon that is not grotesquely Mailer-centric, I will throw this book at the wall.

ha i love that book!

Welp---Robert Lowell, William Sloane Coffin, Doctor & Mrs. Spock, Ed Sanders, Paul Goodman, a Nazi, a Capitol cop, and a lot of people trying to levitate the Pentagon are among those who show up, and he's interested---he's also Mailer of course, but when he gets interested, can be a pretty good describer (though more in his reportage from conventions).

Colm Toibin - Nora Webster

He might be, quietly and persistently, our best conventional realist novelist.

Oh yeah, heard interesting Fresh Air interview re the one about Mary, not too thrilled about being boosted from mother to Mother. Thought about reading that one (& NM). Is it good?

I think THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT is really good!

I think Toibin as a journalist is an incredibly slack writer. I was not very impressed by BROOKLYN. But perhaps his other novels are better.

BLEEDING EDGE seems to be the second best Pynchon novel I have read yet.

Brooklyn was one novel I didn't finish this year. There may have been others. I read the first half of Howard Jacobson's J, skimmed the second out of bored curiosity.

David Lodge's novel about Henry James is far superior to Toibin's

reassuringly awful

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines

Brooklyn isn't a great novel but it offered consistent pleasure; I practically read it in one sitting in summer '09.

He's never written one outstanding novel. He reminds of William Trevor in that way: consistent pleasure.

reassuringly awful
tl;dr

But lol at taking Ballard at face value in the part I did read.

xpost James, I hope to read the second Neapolitan Novels fairly soon; will say more on dedicated NN thread when get some homework done.

I loved Brooklyn but not sure what to read by him next.

His first story collection boasts a couple of stunners.

A 1/3 of the way through Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida on Penguin (selected and partly translated by Robert Chandler). So far I loved Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and the surprise of the collection is The Greatcoat by Gogol. Never held him in to much affection when I tried him years ago. My fault then. Certainly like to pick up more by him.

Turgenev and Tolstoy's stories are nothingy. Dostoevsky's Bobok is amusing and I can't wait to give a couple of his novels another go next year.

Sounds interesting. I read a Pushkin short story collection I really liked a long time ago called The Captain's Daughter, looks like it is still in print, although some complain about the translation. Search: the story "Snowstorm." Also Search: Thorold Dickinson's underseen, underrated film version of The Queen of Spades. May be Anton Walbrook's best performance. Search also, although not Russian, the same actor-director team and the superior if suppressed, original film of Gaslight.

I am borrowing The Captain's Daughter from the library (same translator) (NYRB bought out a paperbk of it last year) and the film looks good too.

I'm also reading Pushkin!

Will check out the NYRB version, thanks. One I had was old Vintage edition. Cover art teh awesome, though:
http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n6/n34100.jpg

David Lodge's novel about Henry James is far superior to Toibin's

― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Tuesday, December 23, 2014 6:00 AM (Yesterday)

Has anyone read his H.G. Wells book?

Hm. When are they going to retranslate the Other Stories?

the best James in fiction is the one who pops up in Gore Vidal's Empire, intrigued by Teddy Roosevelt's noise.

Hm. Apparently he shows up in Lodge's Wells book as well.

Halfway through Armies of the Night and thank god the past 60pp have deemphasized Mailer's constant monitoring of his every fluctuation of mood and he has noticed some of what was happening outside of his woolly cow-sized head.

I finished the third volume of My Struggle. It seemed less carefully written than the others (or, for me, the writing did not magically cross time and space). I've just started The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber and am enjoying it so far.

Season's greetings, incl. "Out Demons Out!" for all yall Armies of the Night readers, and everybody else, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ0RkMcPbQA

wonder what became of the footage from the bbc crew following mailer about

I finished the third volume of My Struggle.

Hitler's not a good writer imo

Rejected ILB Thread TItle: It's Springtime for Knausgard, What Are Your Reading Now?

Reposting link to Eagleton review of Lodge and Toibin books about James, along with amusing quote:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview27

Though he is impressively candid about his rancorous feelings about The Master, a book he still can't bring himself to read, the whole coincidence, minor enough in itself, begins to sound as momentous as Joyce and Lenin landing up in Zurich at the same time. He couldn't have been more agitated if he'd learnt that Tóibín had nicked his credit cards or was impersonating him every night in the Groucho Club.

Hahah!

C. Vann Woodward - The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Pushkin - The Captain's Daughter
Elizabeth Drew - Whatever It Takes

Origins of The New South: more CVW enlightenment re my neck of the woods

And what came back out of it

Started Argonauts of the Western Pacific. I also found an interesting book of Malinowski's photography in this period, which I'm gonna read concurrently.

T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone - Absolutely loving this, savoring a chapter every few days. T.H. White just seems like he would have been the coolest grandpa.

Jeff Vanermeer, Annihilation - Had my expectations up but the prose is often awkward and characterizations kind of laughable. Its hard to sell me on the believability of this strange "other" world when you can't establish "normal" human nature convincingly. Like the setting seems cool but the narration just keeps taking me out of it. Roadside Picnic handled this "weird zone that needs to be explored" scenario much better.
But I'll probably still buy the sequels to see how it all turns out...

I finished Armies of the Night and I am glad to say that Mailer did redeem his very wobbly start by the time the book ends.

I will remark that, although it is apparent by the end why Mailer chose to make this book is so Mailer-intensive, I would still rate this book as highly flawed. The meat of the book is contained in maybe 40 of the 300 pages and he only pulls this mess together loosely, by virtue of some low-grade intellectual tap dancing. Still, it was worth reading all 300 to get at those 40 and the book is a valuable period piece.

The third volume explains why twee love is best: that is when boys and girls are more or less equal and can still get along doing things like skipping rope or playing long lost wanderer returns to island home. After that, they grow apart and perhaps are not reunited until old age. This assumes best means compatible and sympathetic, but if you want tension, look to middle age.

I have now started Speedboat. I started State of Grace last year but did not finish. I read Dept. of Speculation last year and gave it to my sister.

The timing of the end of the Book of Strange New Things was perfect -- before the descent, in time to see the Manhattan skyline.

It definitely seems like it's time to spawn the next WAYR thread, now that January is here. I'll see what I can do about a clever title, but I am not feeling particularly clever atm.

To quote a famous rabbi: "It is done."