Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall 2015 ist. What Are You Reading Now?

Adieu Sommer, willkommen Herbst, hallo liebe Buchliebhaber!

A courtesy link to the prior WAYR thread for Summer 2015.

Boileau-Narcejac: Vertigo -- basis for the Hitchcock film; enjoyable but a bit of a dated translation: Opening lines set the flavour:

"Look here!" said Gevigne. "I want you to keep an eye on my wife."
"The devil! Running off the rails, is she?"

But it is improved by being set in Paris just as WW2 kicks in, adding a layer of dread and complication missing from the film.

been slightly umoored in recent months and fallen out of touch with friends, and lost regular habits - like posting to ilx. it don't seem right.

so

read the first two of Jake Vandemeer's Southern Reach trilogy. Enjoyed them by and large. The writing's a bit rocky occasionally - involved in some silent competition to see how many times he can use the word 'brackish' in the first book, not always in entirely convincing contexts, eg 'brackish light'. I'm not entirely sure how much I actually mind this sort of thing - there's something slightly hypnotic about this sort of badness, which is appropriate to the subject matter.

i enjoyed the claustrophobic and alarming atmosphere of the first one - the total insinuation of an environment and its organisms into ours reminded me a bit of ballard, the vivid and cthonic grotesquery is indebted to Lovecraft. much of the second is seemed devoted problems of not getting on with your colleagues and not being great at your job, but manages maintain a sense of dread and unease throughout, with some genuinely alarming moments.

Starting the third already because i have a bad tendency to binge read.

Also read Oliver Harris's Inspector Belsey novels, which I thought were very well written. Belsey is noirish police detective who, rather than just generally being a cynical drinkner, is actually under immediate danger of having his life collapse, which leads to enjoyable double plots as solving the crime becomes entwined with trying to escape his own retribution. harris has got some cheek calling his first The Hollow Man, and that one becomes hugely and enjoyably implausible by the end. Deep Shelter, the second, is very good - as with The Hollow Man, I really liked his London topography, which in this case is largely based round its WWII deep bomb shelters. That one becomes even more implausible by the end but nm. Minus points for unwholesome whiffs of laddism.

Dart by Alice Oswald. Poem that follows the river Dart from source to sea and incorporates her interviews with local people who live around or off the river. Couple of very good bits, but I haven't got it to hand right now.

Read Robert Musil's short story The Blackbird, which contained these lines:

The dining rooms are likewise piled up floor on floor, as are the white-tiled baths and the balconies with their red awnings. Love, sleep, birth, digestion, unexpected reunions, troubled and restful nights are all vertically aligned in these buildings like the columns of sandwiches at a vending machine. In middle-class apartments like these your destiny is already waiting for you the moment you move in. You will admit that human freedom consists essentially of where and when we do what we do, for what we do is almost always the same – thus the sinister implications of one uniform blueprint for all.

Which in turn, along with seeing stuff about the film, sent me to High Rise, which I hadn't read before. really liked it - will try and expand later.

Also Renaissance Self-Fashioning by Stephen Greenblatt, which I'd only really dipped into bits of before, at university, and hadn't held any strong feelings about at the time. reading parts of it now it seemed like a bit of a dog's dinner, but that's prob one for the academic language thread.

Available Light by Clifford Geertz, a late-career review of some areas. Started reading after watching The Act of Killing (in itself partly a consequence of the Vandemeer books, and their obsession with the permeable boundaries between observer and observed). Not an awful lot on Indonesia in there, and anyway, that was before the revolution. Still, he's always a pleasure to read, and Greenblatt in RSF traduces Geertz by claiming himself a pupil. Geertz's pragmatic and nuanced hermeneutic approach (almost feel maieutic is the best word) is far removed from Greenblatt's heavy-handed intellectual manner.

Also, picked up The Road to Xanadu: The Paths of the Imagination by Jonathan Livingston Lowes second hand and read some of it. I might read some more at some point. It seemed fine, and as a container for all sorts of coleridgian artefacts has a quaint or quixotic appeal, but i'm not so deep in coleridge lore that I need that right now.

I'm going thru a Wila Cather phase. I reread The Professor's House and One of Ours (mediocre Great War story w/mild homoerotic undertones) and My Mortal Enemy for the first time. Gonna try an obscure Edith Wharton best-seller called Twilight Sleep. Those '20s blockbusters are getting their own Library of America edition, due next week.

fizzzzzless feel free to contribute to this thread:

where lies the strangling fruit...Area X - The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer

i like hearing what people think of that thing.

i think i've just gotten really good at ignoring some of the clunkiness in SF/fantasy. for the most part, i thought southern reach read like a dream. i was certainly impressed by some of the writing in a big way. i liked how he sustained the tone for so long. but i guess that's part and parcel with the "new weird" lovecraft thing. you are supposed to keep the dread and fear dripping slowly like water from a tap. the thing i like the most about that kind of world is how even real life becomes something alien and unrecognizable. which is the dream thing again. it's certainly unnerving when done well.

Ferrante - The Story of a New Name
Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings

I'm going to Istanbul in week 42 - anyone recommend me a good Orhan Pamuk?

I love My Name Is Red, but that's all I've read by him.

I recently read three Ali Smith novels...The Accidental was really good, How to Be Both was pretty good, and There But For The was fine. They're all well-written and sort of refreshingly low-stakes.

Now I'm on the new Patrick deWitt and Rushdie novels, both of which are hugely enjoyable so far.

Patrick deWitt is one of those writers on my endless "i need to read" list. If I'm prioritizing, is the new one better than The Sisters Brothers?

continuing to delve into british crime/detective fiction of the early/mid-twentieth century: more michael innes (mostly excellent), nicholas blake, margery allingham (surprising elements of ruritanianism in some of her work) & edmund crispin. the latter is okay but strikes me as a cut-price innes from what i've read of him so far... interestingly (or not), except for allingham, appears they all very consciously approached their crime fiction as a secondary occupation/money earner.

think i'm more or less done with this stuff for the moment.

i am reading ARISTOTLE

he can be pretty funny

If I'm prioritizing, is the new one better than The Sisters Brothers?

Too early to say, but I think The Sisters Brothers is some kind of classic.

essential for istanbul - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1848851545?keywords=istanbul&qid=1443212383&ref_=sr_1_10&sr=8-10

This week I read Chéri by Colette, not really my thing (I wanted a dirtier French novel) and This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, whose lightness reminded me of chamber music, the sort you might hear played live in a setting where no one is really paying attention and you're indulging the free wine while largely keeping to yourself.

I am reading andy beckett's "promised you a miracle: UK 80-82" & am off to lyon/nice in a couple of weeks with the last two ferrantes

Finished Pitol's The Journey - has a flavour drawn from Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia - which Pitol himself mentions as a book that doesn't mentions Armenia that much. And here Pitol (as I put it in my prev post on this in the summer thread) travels by reading as much as he does in the actual spaces he walks around in. Josep Pla - who I thought was ok if a bit disappointing, at least in Life Embitters) - prefers to tell the stories of his encounters w/people as he travels and drifts around, letting the quirky nature of these encounters speak, as anybody would. Pitol also has that true sense of drift and yet attentive enough to focus on a moment, but its like he uses these digressions on literature as a way to understand where he is at, and to ultimately further out the drift. Later on he'll use the visual: Pirosnami's unknowing art to look at a corner of Georgia, for example. Pitol goes to these places as a cultural attache to Mexico (so there is some comedy to be gained too) and just reads and sees and then wants to understand something but not come out with something conclusive, just a way to live it out.

Can't wait for the final volume.

Deszo Kosztolanyi - Kornel Esti: A Novel

Also read Oliver Harris's Inspector Belsey novels

These are amazingly good, I thought, and quite unusual; the second was especially good, and made me think of Patricia Highsmith writing 1980s UK nuclear paranoia/conspiracy TV series 'Edge of Darkness'

And Kornel Esti is great. All of Kosztolanyi is wonderful, really.

nicholas blake/cecil day-lewis's 'The Private Wound' is probably his masterpiece: not one of his series novels, it's self-contained and very atmospheric and bleak

Too early to say, but I think The Sisters Brothers is some kind of classic.

Seconded

xp Aristotle is heaps fun, Poetics has lots of punchlines but Ethics is great to iirc:

Similarly the excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy.

Thanks for the Istanbul tips, just ordered My Name is Red at library and found an ebook-version of Strolling - looks good!

at the moment: thomas morris - we don't know what we're doing and barthelme - 60 stories.

And Kornel Esti is great. All of Kosztolanyi is wonderful, really.

Apart from Skylark (read) and Anna Edes (not), is there anything else?

I'm reading ilxor John D's "Wolf In White Van" (loving it) and also reading Richard Rushton's book on film theory.

I was surprised to find that tractate was in the google keyboard dictionary.

Anyway, More Ghost Stories. Just finished 'tractate middoth', next up is 'casting the runes'. It's in the trees... It's coming...

Started reading Michael Lewis's The Blind Side, in tribute to the start of brain-injury season.

Starting Alejandro Zambra's My Documents and wading into Samuel Delany's omnibus of his early fiction A, B, C: Three Short Novels (Jewels of Aptor, Ballad of Beta-2, and They Fly at Ciron)--none of which is as dazzling as his fiction of the later sixties, but it's interesting to see him start to sketch out his themes as an extremely precocious young writer, even if the earliest novels seem at times rushed or structurally awkward.

nicholas blake/cecil day-lewis's 'The Private Wound' is probably his masterpiece: not one of his series novels, it's self-contained and very atmospheric and bleak

thanks for the tip! only read a couple of later blakes so far... would also like to read the early one(s?) where strangeways is reputably based much more on auden's characteristics than those ones are.

found a copy of e.c. bentley's trent's last case, so going on with that now.

Jewels of aptor was the delaney i read second after the wonderful babel-17, and it really cooled my enthusiasm for a long time, until i got a collection of delaneys short stories which revved me up again.

finished 'the last chronicle of barchester'

read 'a theory of fun for games design' which is, well, i guess you wouldn't expect the guy who ran ultima online to be an intellectual as such

starting murakami's 'hear the wind sing' -- did not realise that the omnibus of those two had come back out, so they made an enjoyable impulse buy -- as some sort of entr'acte between interminable victorians and fantasy novels

aren't you going to tell us what his theory of fun is

Jewels of aptor was the delaney i read second after the wonderful babel-17, and it really cooled my enthusiasm for a long time, until i got a collection of delaneys short stories which revved me up again.

― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Sunday, September 27, 2015 6:21 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, Jewels is definitely meandering and awkward at times: I think my enjoyment was largely predicated on watching Delany in the process of teaching himself to write SF. The whole "seemingly magical world filled with genetic anomalies and built on the ashes of our civilization" conceit is certainly more successfully deployed in The Einstein Intersection, but it's interesting to think about Jewels as in some ways providing material to be reworked in that later novel.

Yeah, and wasn't it his first novel, first published anyway, written when he was maybe 19, published when he was 20? As 1962 spaceboy debuts go, it's not Bob Dylan, but promising and entertaining enough.

Also, Bobby D. didn't write much of his debut, Chip D. did.

(I might feel less charitable if I'd payed for his writing lessons, but I got it from the library.)

i have incredible little memory of all the early delanys, for some reason. just no idea what happened in any of them.

also idk if ralph koster has a theory of fun really

Also, Bobby D. didn't write much of his debut, Chip D. did.

think i'm more or less done with this stuff for the moment.

― no lime tangier, Friday, September 25, 2015 6:38 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Never read any michael innes for some reason, but edmund crispin/bruce montgomery felt fairly sketchy. curious comment - his books feel full of self-loathing. A sort of facetious imitation of golden age crime novels, which he clearly loved, but which he maybe also felt he was above. I've got a 1st ed. copy of Wyndham Lewis' Paleface which is signed by a Bruce Montgomery from the period he would have been up at Oxford and I like think it's him - it certainly seems possible. maybe i'm just misreading deep cynicism for that strained farcical humour that damages mid-late period john dickson carr do badly. BM notable also for being identified as an alcoholic bore by kingsley amis of all people, only just before he became pretty much the same sort of thing, and that may be where I'm picking up the self-loathing from. Seems everyone who knew him when he was young felt he was enormously talented but was unable to find any real outlet for it other than Carry On film music and the only partially successful crime novels.

the women writers were undoubtedly the best along of them, with peak period jdc, and with agatha christie being something of an outlier in terms of method and even success of execution. Though the idiosyncrasies in methodology must be what distinguished her and accounted for her success. i went on a miss marple binge earlier this year and what struck me was how they're almost always about the pre-war world attempting to cope with the post-war world. immigration, people returning from the war changed in personality and motivations, relations unknown or uncertain:

And that, thought Craddock, was exactly what was oppressing him. He didn’t know. There were just faces and personalities and they were backed up by ration books and identity cards—nice neat identity cards with numbers on them, without photographs or fingerprints. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card—and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a town nobody expected to know his neighbour. In the country now nobody knew his neighbour either, though possibly he still thought he did

That's crucial in multiple novels and short stories. There's another quite nice quote that illustrates it differently, in almost science-fiction terms:

And ever since the war quite half our clocks haven’t gone at all, and the ones that do go are often either fast or slow or stop because we haven’t wound them up.’ Mrs Swettenham paused to let this picture of confused time sink in

Miss Marple's main detection method is repeatedly stated to be finding analogues for the current cast from her total knowledge of the village she lives in. In a world where identity is uncertain, Miss Marple is successful by doing what no one else can, and allows everyone is a cipher, and then finding the platonic type from her store of knowledge. It's an extremely odd thing to do really - very far from the avowed deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes from whom in theory the golden age novelists derived their rules. Quite sinister.

Also read Oliver Harris's Inspector Belsey novels

These are amazingly good, I thought, and quite unusual; the second was especially good, and made me think of Patricia Highsmith writing 1980s UK nuclear paranoia/conspiracy TV series 'Edge of Darkness'

― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Saturday, September 26, 2015 8:20 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yep, this is a really good call. Feel I underplayed their virtues in my comment, and you've hit the nail on the head about the paranoia/conspiracy feeling, in fact it almost fits in to the '70s tech/nature/government conspiracy science fiction genre.

The indications in the titles of the type of personality crises belsey has (Hollow Man and Deep Shelter) are exploited very successfully too as well.

In this respect it reminded me of Chris Petit's The Passenger where there is (iirc -it's been a while) a complete lack of assumptions about how character is constructed. I've never read a piece of popular fiction that so brutal in its method - here that no one in the entire book has anything that could be said to be an identity or inner life, and that being its whole point and approach.

My 'whiff of laddism' was mainly due to the female characters and the slight villain/car chase aura, but i think this is a misreading, or at least gets it wrong.

Looking forward to the next one anyway.

Now reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations - the short paragraphs are handy, and allow you to treat each as a useful and provoking thought game. going walking for the rest of the week though, so it's getting dumped in favour of the kindle. going to be walking offa's dyke. any suggestions for suitable reading? mercian hymns felt like it might be good, but i read it earlier this year, and wouldn't be able to get a copy that i'd feel happy jamming into a rucksack.

definitely got the sense of an underlying/lurking smirk (if not a sneer) while reading crispin. ha, at the pale face thing. if i'm remembering right, pale face is his anti-lawrence, anti-primitivist screed? only ever read an extract from it. lewis very much the type of writer who would appeal to a certain very up-to-date young intellectual type of the period.

one crispin piece that struck me is the story 'we know you're busy writing, but we thought you wouldn't mind if we just dropped in for a moment'. nice misanthropic roald dahlish quality to it.

there are similarities between crispin and innes (not least the incessant literary allusions they're both addicted to), but innes is much more playful and enjoyable.

if i'm remembering right, pale face is his anti-lawrence, anti-primitivist screed?

that's the one.

i like the sound of that story, and will try innes at some point that is not right now, because i'm undergoing one of my boomerang aphelian moments wrt detective fiction, and hankering after chewy intellectualism. it won't last.

Shirley Hazzard - The Bay of Noon. Just plays on the post-WWII city/society/people in flux as Jenny adventures around Naples - finding ruins, friendships, encounters. Only one comment about her on ILB ever, anyone else? I am enjoying it but I don't have a whole deal to say at the min - she name checks a couple of the neo-realist films at the beginning so plugged into that and now using it to read faster than I should instead of savouring the flow of the writing.

Reading more second tier Edith Wharton: The Mother's Recompense.

Graham Greene credited Innes with encouraging, maybe even inspiring him---by example---to write thrillers minus value of Empire as a given, for a post-WWI audience. I don't know about any similarities of approach, departure, quality etc.

starting in on Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" - been awhile since I've read anything like this

I'm about 2/3 into The Blind Side and I'm loving it. Michael Lewis seems capable of telling any kind of story knowingly and humorously.

Beautiful prose throughout, of course, which is what you pay your Nabokov money for

In that case I want my money back for Ada.

But yeah, in general I agree.

my uncle just told me at thanksgiving that nabz was his professor at cornell!

for a second i read that as 'nabisco'

Was he a good teacher?

Didn't mean the Eliot etc bit as a lecture, just thinking loud x caffeine, sorry

shit and now wrong thread, sorry, sorry

my uncle just told me at thanksgiving that nabz was his professor at cornell!

was Justice Ginsberg in his class?

Was he a good teacher?
What do mean is he a good teacher?
Well, how does he read?
Close. Very, very close.

he said he was cool. he didn't know him as a writer when he took the class. i mean he had never read his writing.

my uncle more business-y than artsy.

this is great.

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/there-are-other-forces-at-work/?single=1

Just started Svetlana Alexievich's 'Voices from Chernobyl': really good, but incredibly bleak--all these people well-meaning people who didn't know what they were getting into/had no choice being sacrificed to cover up and clean up such a hideous fuck-up. Some of the descriptions come as close to hell on earth as I suspect you could find. But occasional moments of beauty, too.

xp nice, didn't notice the author till i'd finished!

Apparently during one of Cage's infamous performances his wife or a close friend was compelled to stand up and shout "I love you John but this is intolerable!"

i have those moments on ilx fairly regularly

in the blurbs this book is compared to mervyn peake, edward gorey, ray bradbury, shirley jackson, franz kafka, stephen king, and edgar allan poe. okay! not too much to live up to...

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/12346431_10154388790627137_7600098211344240692_n.jpg?oh=51aaa6be9a365d47cb2426da3d11efce&oe=56DBAD2D

After my last exam on Monday, I blew thru Submission, Houellebecq's latest, which was quite the page-turner. Anybody else read it? Feels like a reach to call it a "novel of ideas", but I've found it fun to think/talk about...

I wanna read that, after the Knausgaard, but I suspect the book I would encounter is much worse than the one KOK read, somehow.

Hah, I just read the KOK piece... hard to see much of Houellebecq's text through the schtick.
I thought this was a good review essay, anyway: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/next-thing

re Soumission I wrote on another thread :

I finally finished Houellebecq's Soumission. It's a very Parisian novel, not one I see having much of an audience if it's ever translated into English. The narrator's conversion in the end is hilarious for its shallowness: it's only when he sees other new converts drinking choice booze and having marriages with 15 year old girls arranged by madams that he takes the leap. There are discussions of politics and metaphysics (creationism, really) but they play almost no role in the narrator's move toward Islam. The university president who persuades the narrator to convert in exchange for a choice professorial post is a Nietzschean who was active in his youth in Catholic right wing circles, and seems to see Islam as just another means to his ends: the domination of women and more broadly the assumption of power (maybe these are the same for him). There are only two female characters of note, neither of whom is able to sustain any resistance to the Islamic tide, and both of whom are involved in the plot largely as sexual actors. (There are also several prostitutes.) I suppose the novel plays out its personal drama---an aging professor who just wants to eat and fuck well---as resolvable through submission to Islam, and so religiosity is itself simply a manifestation of the will to power.

after 13 november I've thought a lot about the events surrounding the party at the musée de la vie romantique, the fighting near the Place de Clichy that the media won't report. I don't know.

city on fire
hope to read more modiano (not everything bad that could be caricatured) and the first bad man (if it is returned on or before Jan 13) and the book my sister let me borrow that is in the dresser drawer at my parent's house that I need to return to her
happy for fat modern novels even if they are in memoriam

per the "recommend me a book on the history of labor/organized labor in the US" thread i've been reading Stayin' Alive: The 1970's and the Last Days of the Working Class and it's boss

At work today I'm readin Chine Mieville's new collection, while putting off Dreyfus' Being in the World. Pretty good so far, if you like his stuff.

xp- awesome!

currently blasting through michelle alexander - the new jim crow. it's kicking my ass. kind of a masterpiece of exposition and persuasive social justice writing.

Chico Buarque: Budapest --- novel about a Brazilian ghost writer who becomes inadvertently obsessed with Hungarian after an unplanned plane landing in Budapest - really lovely so far.

Voices from Chernobyl was a tough book to finish--it was excellent but hard to pick up; some of the stories were genuinely heartbreaking, especially those involving the children of Chernobylites.

Weird stuff, too, like the fact that the massive Chernobyl sarcophagus covering the reactor (400,000 m3 of concrete and 7,300 tonnes of metal framework) is this vast tomb for the body of one man, Valery Khodemchuk, who was killed by the reactor explosion and whose body wasn't able to be removed.
http://static2.stuff.co.nz/1360791308/853/8302853_600x400.jpg

Appealing selections---especially intrigued by this description of Reptile House:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/12/11/our-contributors-pick-their-favorite-books-of-the-year/#.Vm7rIlSioD4.twitter

the Berlin book made the NYT list too. 7 women on the Times top ten.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/02/books/review/best-books-of-2015.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

oh man the kitty cat chapter in this Tem book whooooooweee! a tour de force of kitty dread. yikes! i've been watching my cats suspiciously all night....

worth reading just for that. i guess. it's really something else.

John Le Carre - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

David Baldacci - The Innocent, Hit, Simple Genius, The Escape, Zero Day v formulaic but p easy to whip through quickly. The ones featuring John Puller are very Lee Child Jack Reacher. Quite enjoyed the Will Robie series.

Michael Lewis - The Big Short, mostly horrifying but also darkly hilarious.

I finished off 1876 last night. I think next I'm going to give Rick Perlstein's Reagan book, The Invisible Bridge, a whirl. Based on my recent choices, I must be into political horror shows atm.

I put in a couple of hours with Invisible Bridge last night. I'm not sure I'll stick it out for 800 pages. The crap he will be describing was my daily fodder during what were probably the most formative years of my young adulthood (ages 18-21), so other than some insider tidbits (his specialty) I can't see myself learning much. It would just be reviving a multitude of bleak memories and ghastly old heartaches.

Chico Buarque: Budapest I had no idea the Brazilian pop-star Chico Buarque was a novelist, though I did remember reading that he was from some prominent literary family (a dictionary dynasty iirc).

I'm reading My Struggle Book 3.

Read the first few chapters of that Chico Buarque book a few years back and they were great. Made me want to learn both Hungarian and Portuguese,

so that actually is by the musician? huh

No it is by the WRONG DUDE

the chico buarque did write that book tho

Definitely THE chico buarque. There are two other books by him in English atm - 'Spilt Milk' (which seems to be a dynastic family story in under 200 pages) and an OP novel called 'Turbulence', both of which look really promising too

Thought it was by Kósta Szose.

Okay, have to come clean: I actually own this book in Portuguese, it is a beautiful object.

I'm intrigued! Any pictures online?

Sure, just search Budapeste Buarque.

do u see?

Look for the one with both the front and back covers.

Also, one of the images hit seems to be the star of O Clone, whose is appearing in the filmed version.

Nicely done!

We should have a winter thread? Finishing a few shorts:

Adolfo Bioy Casares - The Invention of Morel. I think the idea for the story is so strong yet I wasn't exactly caught into how it was told. For me it could be overshadowed by what I think Borges might've done with it. Kind of afraid Casares (and Ocampo and Arlt whenever I get to them) will all fall short. I'll be reading Asleep in the Sun shortly. In tandem I also finished Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, which I liked a lot once I got over the shortness of everything. I love In Rome, his 'tribute' to Ingeborg Bachmann, how he uses a dead friend as a means of continuing his pathological hatred of Austria and the culture he made so well out of. Yves Bonnefoy's Rue Travesiere is a series of linked micro-essays, ranging from Renaissance art to memories of his poor neighbourhood (the Rue of the title), I veered from a feeling of too concentrated a bunch of thoughts to parse, to others that were so slight, demanding an abrupt end. His poetry is great so hopefully I can hunt down some more next year. Joanna Walsh's Hotel is another bunch of micro-essays more novelistically linked by her times in Hotels (as reviewer) and as a window to naked emotions - her marriage has just fallen apart, so hotels become a substitute, or do they? One cold thing for another. Walsh is aware (or maybe scared) that this could (kitchen)sink into a British melodrama so uses plenty of continental theory (Heidegger, Freud's 'Uncanny') to theorize on the spaces she encounters and to use it as a distancing device. The personal is never far away though - and rightly so.

Here you go: Now Is The Winter Of Our Dusty-dusty 2015/2016, What Are You Reading Now?

Thanks - good to see TRADITION is still upheld at this time of year.