2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

Successor thread to: 2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?.

Last night I finished my second novel by Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own. It was a very wry Sicilian variation on the murder mystery genre that I found quite engaging. No one really wants to investigate the murder, because the central fact of Sicilian society is that whole layers of its life are submerged in secrecy and violence and each individual's safety depends on covering up that underground life under silence and polite pretense. Even the protagonist, a teacher, who solves the crime constantly tells himself he has no real interest in doing so beyond curiosity and would never dream of actively bringing the culprit to justice.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

hermann broch - the death of virgil

Reading all of 7 books in Gordon Korman's Bruno and Boots series for an article I'm writing. I don't expect that will mean anything to anyone outside of Canada.

Reading The Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen. It's really not that good :( I never made it through Witz either, but it was better.

As a Canadian kid in the 80s, I read a bunch of Korman's books. I remember writing a book report in 5th grade where I said he was my favorite writer. Looking him up now, I remember the book covers more than their contents.

Bought Virginia Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse' on a whim. I've no shame in admitting it's the first Woolf book I've read but.. It's not pretty. Those loooong loooong sentences, half-page sentences... It's nigh on unbearable. Every sentence is a labyrinth, sideways upon sideways. Was her editor asleep y/n or do I not *get it* and should I continue?

Life’s too short to force yourself to complete a piece of entertainment that doesn’t grab you , is my opinion...

Very true! But she has such a reputation, one feels like a fool "not getting it"...? I just cannot get over the long, drawn out sentences. It must not be for me.

Vandermeer "Annihilation"
Boswell "Life of Johnson"

picked up a copy of Graves' "I, Claudius" from the free "street library" but idk it's a bit precious

I had a hard time getting through To the Lighthouse as well, but the central few pages are absolutely incredible. It's really one of the few books where sticking with it pays off the most. But if you don't like it, you don't like it.

I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet but it's one of the hardest (ie. most annoying but 'there must be something here, somewhere') books I've ever read. I'll take your word for it, Fred!

You'll know it when you see it :)

That gives me great hope in carrying on :)

I have started Jane and Prudence, an early novel of Barbara Pym. I've no idea how it ranks in her canon, but it was available through my public library and I checked it out. So far it is competent, but nothing remarkable. There are some opportunities for understated comedy in her choice of characters and setting, but nothing resembling excitement is on the horizon.

I couldn't disagree more about TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

A magnificent masterpiece, a portrait of life, one of the greatest English works of art, in fact works of art period, that I know of from the last century.

Can I point out that the thread title appears to have a typo, unless I have misunderstood? Can this be fixed?

Currently reading America by Kafka, after watching Straub-Huillet's Class Relations on MUBI

Currently reading Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out, mainly provoked by endless conversations with my (currently Tory voting) old man along the lines of 'yes, but we don't want to go back to the 70s' when I reasonably point out to him that, actually, most of his principles are in line with Labour policy.

Bought Virginia Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse' on a whim. I've no shame in admitting it's the first Woolf book I've read but.. It's not pretty. Those loooong loooong sentences, half-page sentences... It's nigh on unbearable. Every sentence is a labyrinth, sideways upon sideways. Was her editor asleep y/n or do I not *get it* and should I continue?

― Le Bateau Ivre,

This is weird, for among the (minor) complaints I've got about Woolf her sentence are not among them.

also: what a coincidence. I'm reading Flush, her fictional biography about the Brownings' dog.

*sentences xpost

thread title appears to have a typo

correct. (or should that be 'incorrect'?) meanwhile, any fix for that would need to be requested via the mod board.

mrs dalloway is a better first woolf book than to the lighthouse, i think

It's getting better! I'm finally easing into it now, after an unusually tough start.

I finished "Sabbath's Theater". I'm not sure it was all that groundbreaking but it was well done. Roth has a lot of strengths as a writer that can cover over the occasional lack of inspiration. I could have done with fewer descriptions of sex but at least Roth can write dirty without embarrassing himself too badly, a minefield for many writers. For one thing he's quite fluent at switching registers from high to low, from the ivory tower to the street. He also always knows where he wants the book to go, the structure and pacing were sound. Although the book was written in the '90s, it didn't seem too terribly dated, in the sense that the things that were calculated to be offensive were still offensive. Not to give too much away, but during the course of the book, the aging lothario protagonist commits numerous counts of sexual harassment and piggish behavior. A good epigraph for the book would be Whitman's: "I believe in the flesh and the appetites ... The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer". Is it a send-up of the mid-20th century school of dick-obsessed male novelists, or just a particularly extreme example? Hard to say whether it matters much either way.

I'm almost halfway through THE GOLDEN BOWL and really going off it. It feels like a HOLLYOAKS plotline magnified to 540 pages through immense Impressionism, but with less realistic dialogue.

Less by by Andrew Sean Greer. I know next to nothing about this book, it was a birthday gift. Kawabata and Whitney Houston get namedropped within the first twenty or so pages tho so it seems good.

Also going through two Vandermeer anthologies: a fantasy one, which I'm reading by myself, and an anthology of "feminist speculative fiction", which I am reading out loud to my wife (Fizzles has broken the ILB taboo on mentioning this, I believe); latter is good but really stretching even the most generous definition of "speculative".

I didn't dislike Less, but the scent of #sadliberalgay often proved suffocating.

I am happy to report that the understated comedy has arrived in Jane and Prudence and it is sufficiently amusing.

I had diminishing returns with Pym last summer. Reading Austen is like stepping into bright sunshine.

Few novelists could withstand a side-by-side comparison with Austen.

Collusion by Luke Harding
The Russian background to the Trump collusion . I heard most of the surface part of this when it was happening but wasn't fully aware of the backgrounds of people like Kisliak. This fills in more of the details.
& it was €1 in a charity shop locally at the start of this week so thought I'd grab it.

What You Need to Know about Economics by George Buckley
teach yourself type book on economics, like.

For a break from James I started reading Chris Baldick, THE MODERN MOVEMENT - a big standard academic survey of 1910-1940, but opinionated enough to be a bit more interesting than the usual.

Has anyone read A Little Life? I'm on pg. 300 with a few hundred pages to go, and I struggle to explain my annoyance with it.

Yes. My minor issue was that a small clique of four friends all become fabulously successful in their own fields; my major issue was the ever-escalating torture porn.

Having finished Jane and Prudence, last night I picked up Roderick Hudson, the first novel of Henry James. In its opening 50 pages it appears that James already has most of the pieces of his lifelong modus operandum in place: the fresh-faced American(s) coming grips with European sophistication, the mentor character and the mentored, with a side dish of ruminations on art and culture.

I've started reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland.

Aimless, it's not his first novel, but it's the first that counts. This novel has to us an unrepressed homoeroticism.

would roderick

o nate I had so much fun reading Nixonland, it will be a good companion to the coming fall of crazy US politics

REBECCA

james's actual 1st novel is one seriously creepy piece of work, man grooming small child to be his perfect future wife.

I had to read Roderick Hudson at college and that put me off of James for most of my life. (Washington Square put me on again; Turn of the Screw then put me off, possibly permanently.)

o nate I had so much fun reading Nixonland, it will be a good companion to the coming fall of crazy US politics

I'm enjoying it so far, though I don't know if my enthusiasm will be able to keep up for another 600 pages of day-by-day, play-by-play commentary on every election cycle in the '60s. I wouldn't mind perhaps slightly less detail.

penelope fitzgerald

There are seven Bruno and Boots books now? I think last time I read them, there were only four. I always liked I Want to Go Home and Our Man Weston by GK.

Yeah, the series kept going until 1995! The strain on the formula was starting to show somewhat on the later books in the series, but the very last one, The Joke’s On Us, is pretty funny, even going so far as to deal with the fact that our boys are aging out of their role as pranksters as a new generation of kids (specifically, Boot’s little brother) are on their way in.

Just past halfway through Roderick Hudson. The most striking thing so far is the degree to which it minutely describes a culture of exquisite manners which was utterly snuffed out early in the 20th century. It also preserves a glimpse of the misshapen monsters hatched into that society by Byronic romanticism. Everyone is either repressed beneath a facade like an ornate snuffbox, or else flinging their emotional excrement about like angry monkeys. I am not sure how much of this effect was intended by James and how much is simply the product of my being the product of a society so unlike that which he observed.

James doesn't miss a thing; his light irony is one of the delights of his early style.

whoof Life of Johnson a bit of a slog, skipping ahead to the bits that are mostly just transcripts of conversation, cuz that stuff is pretty entertaining. Most eye-opening passage so far was Johnson (a royalist and a Tory!) making a studied and aggressive dismantling of slavery as immoral and then Boswell's "nope, gotta have slavery!" riposte

Burke opposed the growing empire.

I couldn't disagree more about TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

A magnificent masterpiece, a portrait of life, one of the greatest English works of art, in fact works of art period, that I know of from the last century.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, September 24, 2019 11:54 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

It has completely won me over and I now wholly agree. Marvelous, especially the second section ('Time Passes').

I've started in Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. I read a couple of letters before bedtime, and she's quickly becoming something of an imaginary friend who - in great detail, with wit and sprightly language - shares her travels and travails.

My problem with 'A Little Life' is that the synopsis makes it sound like it's gonna be about the 4 main characters but the author is clearly interested in only one of them and that happens to be the one I have least interest in.Still I slogged through to the end for some reason while not really liking it.

Just finished Stina Jackson's 'Silver Road' which is an impressively downbeat but not violent Nordic thriller with a oppressive momentum that I really dug.

That's about right, and it became disability porn ("Oh, goodie, let's see what other tragedy befalsl Jude today").

*befalls

Also last week a couple of Eric Ambler novels 'Mask of Dimitrios' and 'Cause for Alarm'. Enjoyed both.

Does anyone have any contemporary British satire recommendations? I’m in the mood for something biting and genuinely funny over knowing and sardonic.

How is To The Lighthouse progressing, LBI?

Great! In fact, I finished it already, as I mentioned above ("It has completely won me over and I now wholly agree. Marvelous, especially the second section ('Time Passes').") :-)

It was, of course, the second section I was talking about :) Completely surprised me when I read it.

I read Venedict Erofeevs 'Moscow to the End of the Line' for a second time, because I also watched a documentary about him. The translation isn't good, I think, it sounded much better in the film than what I read, but some of the scenes are scary dark.

Ah sorry, I missed that! Glad you enjoyed it. :) I think all of her books (that I’ve read) are profoundly memorable and have a way of colouring reflection itself ever after.

I really did enjoy it, a lot, and am glad I stuck with it! As I said, it was my first Woolf. Which one of her should I read next?

The Waves is mad and wonderful, but probably still Mrs. Dalloway. It’s one of those books that provides context to a hundred other things that followed.

Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando, which I'm happy has gotten more attention in the last thirty years from queer theorists and gender study people. It's her most purely entertaining book, fun as hell.

the waves whips ass but i think i love orlando the most

The less Woolf dealt with the concreteness of people and instead dealt with identities interacting with history, the more human her novels were. That's why it took so long for her to find a voice.

Very good that you came to like the novel, LBI.

The simple and reliable advice would be: Mrs Dalloway next.

I would not go for a later one like The Waves yet.

But you could enjoy an earlier one, eg The Voyage Out or, arguably more accomplished and important: Jacob's Room.

I reread Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss'.

VW said KM's was the only writing of which she had ever been jealous.

Thank you all for the recommendations, Mrs. Dalloway it is! I'll save The Waves for later.

Meanwhile I cannot stress enough the sheer joy I get from reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters (Gutenberg link here.

The opening section of Mrs. Dalloway as she goes flower shopping is kind of mindblowing.

Offhand I can't think of a more masterful free-indirect narrative, keeping so many balls in the air while moving a character from A to B to C

The Sandcastle, Iris Murdoch.

I’ve just finished Robertson Davies’ The Manticore, years after reading the first part of the Deptford Trilogy - Fifth Business. I don’t know why I waited so long. I’ll start on World Of Wonders shortly.

I’m reading the Colombian writer Tomas Gonzalez’ In The Beginning Was The Sea, about a pair of mildly obnoxious big-city types setting up on a remote island off the Caribbean coast and failing miserably, at the moment.

After finishing Roderick Hudson, I went back to read the highly prolix Introduction for it that James wrote late in life, for his collected works edition. He accurately places his finger upon the novel's greatest weaknesses, which was nice to see for he confirmed my own impressions.

In a nutshell, one critical character, Mary Garland, is wholly unrealized and unsatisfactory, but as soon as the character of Christina Light appears, she takes over driving the plot and the novel picks up a tremendous head of steam. Toward the end, when Christina disappears for several installments, the story sags at once and becomes fairly lifeless again. It also contains a handful of interesting subsidiary characters.

This novel has to us an unrepressed homoeroticism.

Sorry, Alfred, but I truly failed to detect this aspect of the story and to the extent it exists, I don't think "unrepressed" could possibly be the right word to apply to it.

It's okay if you don't. Rowland and I forgive you.

Haven't been reading anything for a while for... reasons, but forced myself back to it on the back of the last herne hill FAP (thanks Tim).

Attrib. by Eley Williams. Williams has enormous fun with the sound and look of language, and the heft of words and their relation to perception and memory. Normally I'm a little wary of the poeticisation of prose, but I don't think that's what's happening here. It reminds me more of Robert Louis Stevenson's approach to sentence construction, where he recommends an awareness of the patterns of sound across sentences. Love and loss are specifically realised through this prism of language and thought, which makes their representation more elliptical than more conventional representations of those emotions, but more pointed, more tender, with a bursting sense of things felt but not directly expressed so that, to quote Isaac Rosenberg, they are 'understandable but still ungraspable'.

I've started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt. I hardly need to say that it prompts a great many thoughts about present day events.

Reading The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial by Maggie Nelson, recommended by my girlfriend. It's pretty incredible, though also very very dark.

I read that recently too! I agree, it's fantastic. I felt a bit ambivalent reading it and was glad when she starts formulating about her own right (or perceived lack of) to be telling the story, but that some things just need to be told irrespective of response or moral ambiguity. I love the way she manipulates time in her books and rounds back to earlier themes within themes.

I'd really recommend reading The Argonauts afterwards too if you've not read it.

I've started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt. I hardly need to say that it prompts a great many thoughts about present day events.

must be in the air, you're like the third person I know to have read this in the past year

still slogging my way through Life of Johnson, but also picked up the following (both short fiction collections) in the meantime:

Brian Aldiss "Canopy of Time"
Joanna Russ "The Hidden Side of the Moon"

also apparently Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" is waiting for me at the library

Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 2000s was one of those watershed moments; it sent me into an Arendt frenzy for the better part of a year. On Revolution was an even bigger influence on my political development.

yeah I've never read On Revolution, that's on my list

Wow Rebecca is really somethin’ else.

Finished the poetry chapter of Baldick's THE MODERN MOVEMENT. Useful and accurate on Georgians and Auden generation. In general the book is something of a polemic against overstating the centrality of modernism, as such, to the era -- and it's thus quite useful and informative. Now on the chapter about modern drama, which says that modernism didn't arrive on the UK stage till the 1950s.

About 30pp to go in THE GOLDEN BOWL.

I read Autumn by Ali Smith. By its very nature (written quickly; including currents of news and world events), it's a ragged, propulsive thing - for good and ill. The central relationship is well rendered but it felt like a well-trodden path (aspects of Sophie's World and the Little Prince) and the framing device of exploring Pauline Boty's Pop Art isn't entirely successful. Smith's writing sings, though and I'll definitely carry on with the series.

Been a bloody difficult year, reading-wise, to such an extent that I am trying to get that muscle in the brain that can absorb words again. I have a pile of mostly short-ish fiction to help, here is the first batch for the autumn. No time to talk about it and I can't bear to do ratings so I'll just post them in like a cunt lol. But I have a feeling I am connecting...words...they are good again.

Noemi Lefbvre - Self-Portrait in Blue
Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
Colette - Gigi and The Cat
Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Elizabeth Hardwick - Sleepless Nights
Kingsley Amis - Ending Up
Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies
Marie Darrieussecq - My Phantom Husband

Jacques Camatte - This World We Must Leave and Other Essays

really into reading about left communism lately, this is a delightfully loony former bordigist's 70s turn away from marxism and towards some of anti-capitalist primitivism

I'm reading Sleepless Nights right now!

Kingsley Amis - Ending Up

The last four pages = wow

such a happy ending

read it again recently. extraordinarily compressed, technically skilful book. the writing is at the very highest level.

The ending was savage but I need to read it again, was on *what are these things on the page?!* stage

I'm listening to Dracula on Audible. Started reading it about 10 years ago but kind of got bored after the nth blood transfusion. Managed to get past some of the more tedious mid-section parts and back to the action but it's interesting to hear about how the Icelandic 'translation' ended up being an almost total re-write

It's a shitload shorter, too, if that helps you.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' -- the 2009 translation (J.A. Underwood) which is more direct and colloquial

Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' - struck more now by the Edwardian formality of VW's voice than by the adventurousness of her ideas. Some lovely stuff but the way she writes about dwarfs, blind people, beggars etc would not go down well now.

my aunt applied to do a masters and while processing her application they told her, to her great surprise, that they could not accept her because she never completed her English Lit BA; she has one credit remaining, a course on Milton. so my mother and i are reading Paradise Lost with her in solidarity

aw!

I took a course on Milton in college. I groaned, but the first few books of PL are surprisingly brisk, and Satan earns the rave reviews (Adam and Eve are joyless).

i have never listened to audio books but during a particularly bad bout of insomnia the other night i started a free audible trial and lined up willie rushton (thankfully fairly little of him) reading Father Brown - they’re mainly dramatised rather than an audio book.

i’ve never really got on with the blue cross as a story but the queer feet is *grebt* for a radio dramatisation!

it didn’t send me to sleep but it did stop my brane ripping itself to pieces as it likes to do in the wakeful wee hours.

I picked up Sleepless Nights yesterday on the recommendation that ‘everyone in book club hated it’.

I’m reading Supper Club by Lara Williams. I wasn’t sure at first because it begins with a first term at university, but the conceit is starting to carry it along nicely. It’s enjoyable to read about queer hedonism anyway.

Not really sure why I’m reading under the skin for the third time in as many weeks, but going to just go with it

Sleepless Nights is grebt, what is up with your book club?

It's not my book club. I'll report back when I've read it, but I'm excited.

xp Lol at reading Under the Skin so often! It bore little resemblance to the film, but it was hard for me to separate the two at the time. On reflection, a lot of its unique disturbances have stayed with me. The description of the original bodies of the creatures in particular.

I didn’t finish the film but I was intrigued by the book descriptions. They’re quite different but I liked the book much more for the level of detail and description of their world. I loved all the scenes with the hitchers where the perspective suddenly flips and the sense of gradual unraveling. Idk, it just appeals to me a lot.

Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' - struck more now by the Edwardian formality of VW's voice than by the adventurousness of her ideas. Some lovely stuff but the way she writes about dwarfs, blind people, beggars etc would not go down well now.

Not sure if this is the one where she also goes on and on about "filthy" Jews, etc

There is one of those.

Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand ENDGAME'

Longer and more difficult than I remembered. Paragraphs of Beckettian length over 3 pages.

"Ok, so when Doctor Strange comes back, what you have to remember about the infinity gems is...."

I don't think I mentioned here that I had finished THE GOLDEN BOWL.

Henry James: Search and Destroy

Joseph Conrad, 'An Outpost of Progress' (c.1897). A kind of trial run for HEART OF DARKNESS, or a tale that anticipates that one anyway: trading station in Africa, Belgian settlers going crazy in the heat, absurdity of the degraded colonial situation. Much cruder and simpler than HoD, and more simply racist in its language also.

I notice JC's adjectival tendencies that Leavis complained about - sentences with multiple nouns each with their own adjective crowding the prose up. I don't mind this though.

Just finished White by Deni Ellis Béchard, which attempts to turn Heart of Darkness on its head: the Kurtz in this case being a pseudo-conservationist, casting some light on the persistence/inexorability of the colonial dynamic—how postcolonial guilt and the best stated intentions can be leveraged/exploited. I thought it got unnecessarily clever twd the end but was interesting and well plotted.

I've finally finished Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies. It's been a slog but worth it. I'll admit to a fatigue at the 'capsule biography, visit to important site on a hot August day' pattern of things but it's incredibly well researched and comprehensive.

This, from the epilogue, has me wondering however (it was published in 2008): "these days Britons no longer mourn their empire. They are more comfortably European. They are more relaxed about race, sexuality and gender. Their government is no longer fighting a war in Ulster... The feel of life is more feverish than entropic. The look of things is gaudy and skin-deep, rather than heavy, worn out and grey."

Even then that must have read like bullshit but fuck, 2008 seems like a long time ago.

Deborah Eisenberg! Read v. appealing profile a while back, but now I'm blanking on where that was and on favored titles---which of her collections should I start with?

Chinaski: yes that is very much Beckett's MO - as in his PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE: 'Now, meeting me in his office on an unseasonably warm March afternoon, Geoffrey Howe was courteous, neat, yet seemed naturally worn down by the two decades that had passed since his devastating attack on the Prime Minister' - et al.

Joseph Conrad: 'Karain: A Memory'. 25pp to go in this. Some of Conrad's wild descriptive luridness - Malay places, natives, etc - yet still what strikes me is how much simpler a writer he is than James. I had vaguely imagined them as stylistically a bit closer together.

This story also evidently has implications on 'race', savages, empire, etc, which I won't get till I've finished it.

Deborah Eisenberg! Read v. appealing profile a while back, but now I'm blanking on where that was and on favored titles---which of her collections should I start with?

― dow, Saturday, October 12, 2019 1

Her collected stories doesn't feel bulky, but her latest book Your Duck Is My Duck is the way to go.

I forgotten to mention: I also started Anita Loos, GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES.

I got the James Baldwin collected essays from Library of America a while ago and started it this week, beginning with Notes of a Native Son. James Baldwin is all he’s cracked up to be it turns out: sad, beautiful, wry, relevant.

I finished Eichmann in Jerusalem a couple of nights ago. It was very informative regarding all the main elements of the trial and Eichmann's crimes. Arendt's command of the facts and her powers of observation and penetration were quite impressive. Apparently her reportage on the trial and the resulting book were attacked in a variety of ways, but those attacks and subsequent controversy have faded away, leaving the book to speak for itself. It does so with great clarity and persuasiveness.

I would say her central point was that Eichmann was not so much a monster of hateful criminal depravity, but a very small man who earned his position in the Nazi hierarchy through his hard work, his petty ambition for advancement, his bland self-absorption, a remarkable capacity for self-delusion, a fondness for adopting slogans in place of thoughts, and a grotesque lack of compassion. He had so little human definition that he easily warped himself into the required shape to fit into the Nazi's genocidal enterprise.

Been reading William Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories, which a friend gifted me recently. I’ve read a lot of his stuff over the years but haven’t touched any of his books in abt a decade. I was worried I wouldn’t have the patience anymore for his style and affectations, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. All the baroquely-told tales of death and decay are kind of perfect for these grey mid-October afternoons.

... how much simpler a writer (Conrad) is than James. I had vaguely imagined them as stylistically a bit closer together.

Conrad is stylistically simpler, but thematically the reverse might be true. I don't think James attempted anything on the scale of Nostromo.

The Princess Casamassima vs. The Secret Agent would be a good apples-to-apples comparison.

I'm contemplating whether or not to make another run at reading The Divine Comedy - I've faltered in the past midway through the Purgatorio. I picked up Mandelbaum's translation last night and read the first three cantos of the Inferno, but if I am going to succeed, I think I had better start in the Purgatorio and move on from there. Or I might just bag it and go another direction. I may not be up to the mark for 500 pages of dense allegorical theological poetry right now.

Apparently her reportage on the trial and the resulting book were attacked in a variety of ways, but those attacks and subsequent controversy have faded away, leaving the book to speak for itself. It does so with great clarity and persuasiveness.

agree that in hindsight the "controversy" seems sorta ridiculous, essentially her getting taken to task for maintaining a critical eye rather than just parroting emerging orthodoxy.

to me one of the other really striking things was realizing just how convoluted and dysfunctional the Nazi hierarchy was. As a kid I only heard the more notorious names - Hitler, Goerring, Goebbels, Eichmann, Himmler, Mengele - and had this picture of them all being at the top of a tightly controlled pyramid, when in reality there were layers and layers of both more powerful and less famous functionaries really running the machine.

xp

Another book I read earlier this year, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, also exposed the essential dysfunction of the Nazi regime. It seems like they managed OK when all they had to do was control Germany, but as soon as the war started and they had to manage two-thirds of Europe and multiple battle fronts, the whole jury-rigged apparatus became increasingly chaotic.

Her collected stories doesn't feel bulky, but her latest book Your Duck Is My Duck is the way to go.

I picked this up recently and thought it improved with each story. I wasn't convinced at the start (the politics felt a bit forced), but the stories built on each other in a way that gave new meaning to the earlier ones. Ultimately it felt deeply personal and was a captivating introduction to Eisenberg.

Brad C, yes I entirely agree. That's part of what I was saying on the Henry James thread: that the immensity of his novel was in excess of its content. And yes, Conrad can deal in plots of greater scale and more obvious import.

I agree that that particular comparison of novels would be worth making.

I finished 'Karain: A Memory' and think Cedric Watts correct to find it Kipling-esque -- even though I don't know much Kipling. Tone of irony around the white men's persuasion of the native to accept their fake magic, based on Queen Victoria.

Then 'Youth: A Narrative': the first appearance of Marlow. This entire story is about things going wrong with a ship: weather, leaks, fire, explosion. It's like a cartoon, WACKY RACES or ROAD RUNNER or the like. It is also packed to the gunwales with unexplained nautical terms and slang.

Two thirds into The Sandcastle : an almost stereotypical English Novel, domesticity and repression and headmasters. It's the story of an affair, usually something that bores and/or exasperates me (baggage from being a child of divorce, probably), but I have to say that the moment where the cheating couple gets caught really HIT me in an almost horror-novel kind of way, despite not being particularly sympathetic to them in the first place (the wronged party is also such a one dimensional shrew that...probably not my place to accuse Murdoch of internalized misogyny...). Very strange that this is by the same author who wrote the knockabout, bohemian, almost Wodehousian at times Under The Net

I couldn't face the immensity of The Divine Comedy and set it aside. To save face with myself I'm reading Plato's Theatatus in a Penguin edition that has an attached, lengthy essay upon the niceties of the arguments that I shall also read. Then it's back to lighter, more entertaining fare, which means 'almost anything but Dante and Plato'.

If one wanted to read a book by JEAN RHYS, what would be the best choice?

Still reading GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES in odd moments - is it supposed to be hilarious? It's lightly droll but given its lack of substance otherwise, the lack of real comic heft is a bit disappointing.

I finished Conrad's 'Youth' and as an insomniac returned to Chris Baldick's THE MODERN MOVEMENT. Ingenious how he puts WOMEN IN LOVE into the (useful, a good idea) category of 'romance / fantasy' and hardly conceals his disdain for it (refreshing: what a dreadful, horrible book). Then he describes Powys's GLASTONBURY book and makes it sound absolutely nuts.

For Rhys I can vouch for Voyage In The Dark. That’s the only one I’ve read so far. Cold eyed and gripping.

I'd say Good Morning, Midnight for Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea is remarkable but I'm not sure I'd suggest it as emblematic.

Voyage In The Dark is indeed a stunner.

Next up for me: Riding For Deliveroo: Resistance In The New Economy by Callum Cant. I've a friend who used to work for them - participated in trying to get Deliveroo unionized - so it'll be interesting to see how experiences match up.

Should I give Patrick White's Voss a go? If so, why?

This was an ok piece even if it doesn't make read Patrick White

https://lithub.com/on-patrick-white-australias-great-unread-novelist/

I finished GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES. I suppose it was only ever supposed to be slight. It's quite good on the curious blend of cynicism and innocence in the narrator: she's an utter diamond-digger but doesn't see anything wrong with that; a kind of amoral ingenue.

Anita Loos, I will say if I haven't before, must be simply the best-looking writer in history.

I took GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT from the library and started it. Coincidentally I think Jean Rhys must be one of the 5 or so best-looking writers of the expanded modernist pantheon. But I mostly won't judge the book on that basis.

Nearing the home straight of the 1910-1940 survey by Chris Baldick, very much not a good-looking writer.

I'm reading Martin Gayford's Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. There's a story at the heart of Keiron Pim's book about David Litvinoff, wherein Litvinoff is badly beaten up, strapped into a chair and suspended, upside down, from the railings on his balcony. It was always considered to be a 'warning' from the Krays - whom Litvinoff was close to but of whom he would say far too much in public - but Pim's research seemed to lead to Freud. After reading that book I went to see a Freud painting in the Tate Britain (it had been taken down literally the day before) and for a walk around Litvinoff's old haunts in Chelsea. Man with a Blue Scarf was in the Tate shop.

It's great so far: Gayford has a huge amount of time as he sits for Freud, so it becomes a slowly uncoiling meditation on Freud's method and history, his position in the canon and something more existential as he grapples with the sense of being a subject.

Bill Bryson - Body. I know practically nothing about biology so enjoyed it in my duncey way.
George Eliot - Silas Marner. Was okay.

JD Bernal: The World, the Flesh and the Devil - An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul
Interesting to see so many still-central ideas of science-fiction, like asteroid habitats, genetic engineering, generation starships, etc etc, in this nearly century-old bit of elegantly written Marxist futurology.

I don't know why I'm doing this but I am forcing myself to finish The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I hate it so much. 100 pages to go!

Anyone read "Milkman" by Anna Burns? Im 70 pages in and its excellent so far. Slightly absurd; the opening line is “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” Its unique in the way it gets at the odd rituals and learned behaviours of Troubles-era Norn Iron. Surprisingly decent (and readable) for a Booker Prize winner too!

Whenever I see that Anna Burns novel I immediately start singing the Aphex Twin song to myself.

THE SECRET HISTORY I am ambivalent about - I like the idea of Tartt but I am unsure how good she really is. People have pointed out that she is an oddly trashy / thriller-ish writer packaged as more upmarket, or something of that kind - though, to be a good thriller writer is a great skill. THE SECRET HISTORY specifically, anyway, I think is mainly just too long. It's about 600pp and could be 250pp.

People here I am sure have discussed MILKMAN before. I read it in July. The best recent novel I have read in a long time. Outstanding, a minor (?) masterpiece. A great book about the Troubles, a great parade in language or exercise of voice, full of ironies, black comedy, remarkable additional touches and minor characters. Probably the best novel I have read this year.

I started rereading Nella Larsen's PASSING.

I also reread Hope Mirrlees' long modernist poem PARIS.

THE SECRET HISTORY I am ambivalent about - I like the idea of Tartt but I am unsure how good she really is. People have pointed out that she is an oddly trashy / thriller-ish writer packaged as more upmarket, or something of that kind - though, to be a good thriller writer is a great skill. THE SECRET HISTORY specifically, anyway, I think is mainly just too long. It's about 600pp and could be 250pp.

― the pinefox, Thursday, October 24, 2019 5:42 AM (

All her novels are too damn long.

I started rereading Nella Larsen's PASSING.

Love this book, very twisted (not in an 2edgy4u way).

I have begun one of R. K. Narayan's rather gentle novels, Swami and Friends, featuring schoolchildren as the main characters.

cosine pinefox on MILKMAN. Brought me entirely, movingly into a time and place I know very little about, with a deep and humane sympathy for its people

THE SECRET HISTORY I am ambivalent about - I like the idea of Tartt but I am unsure how good she really is. People have pointed out that she is an oddly trashy / thriller-ish writer packaged as more upmarket, or something of that kind - though, to be a good thriller writer is a great skill. THE SECRET HISTORY specifically, anyway, I think is mainly just too long. It's about 600pp and could be 250pp.

― the pinefox, Thursday, October 24, 2019 5:42 AM (

All her novels are too damn long.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 24, 2019 6:06 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

OTM. When I got to the "Part II" page halfway through I was astounded that the book hadn't ended ~75 pages ago.

I have begun one of R. K. Narayan's rather gentle novels, Swami and Friends, featuring schoolchildren as the main characters.

Narayan is the best

Love Narayan.

Donna Tartt is rubbish. And The Secret Histroy looks like a masterpiece next to the extended bullshit of The Goldfinch.

Haven’t read Tartt, would rather read Gone Girl, and I haven’t got all that much interest in that either.

Gone Girl also cack

The Secret History is a great young adult novel where young = 19/20ish, ideally first read when at university.

THE GOLDFINCH is a remarkably awful film! So that's not a good sign.

Where should I start with Narayan? The Guide? Swami and Friends?

Of those I've read, I can't say any are bad, but two that stick out in my memory are The Guide and The Painter of Signs.

I finally finished Rick Perlstein's epic tome Nixonland. I'm not sure I needed to read 700+ long pages about this, but I'll give him credit that it does pick up pace in the second half and manages to feel fresh while covering increasingly familiar material. The main context of the second half is how the American body politic slowly and haltingly comes to awareness that it is thoroughly bogged down in a world-historic shit show in Vietnam. There are lots of cautionary tales in the fact that the Democrats nominated a staunch no-nonsense antiwar candidate to face the notoriously slippery and dishonest Nixon, and despite the increasingly pervasive unpopularity of the war, still get their ass handed to them in '72.

It's familiar now because so many op-ed writers have ripped Perlstein fof.

*off

I just meant that it covers the more familiar '60s historical events like Vietnam, Watergate (though that remains one of many subplots in this book), the '72 election, etc. True that Perlsteins' take has become nearly conventional wisdom now.

The current Republican party has no idea how to address the place of Nixon in their history other than to vigorously deny that he has any relevance to the present, while hinting that he wasn't as bad as all that.

Remember that convention where Schwarzenegger talked about watching a JFK vs Nixon debate as a child in Austria, asking his dad who Nixon was, him answering "he's a republican" and Arnie going "THEN I'M A REPUBLICAN TOO"? Crowd went wild.

Also, Nixon's surrogates eventually claimed that he had to conduct his own investigations/stooges' break-ins of Ellsberg's shrink's office and Democrats HQ---after publication of the Pentagon Papers and McGovern's visit to Cuba, absolutely nothing to do with whether he'd taken bribes in antitrust settlements etc.---because he couldn't trust the (Deep State). And die-hard defenders still say he was driven too far by virulence of radial liberal uprising.

I finished PASSING, and decided to read Larsen's other novel QUICKSAND.

I think it's not as accomplished, can feel more naive; has a kind of PRIDE & PREJUDICE element (the woman who can't understand her own repressed feelings of love for a man who keeps cropping up) which yet gets frustrated. But contains some good writing on place and atmosphere, and remains basically interesting in content.

Larsen and Rhys both have a strong fascination with clothes, and enjoy listing differently coloured dresses, fabrics, etc.

I'm reading Concrete Island.

among my v favorite Ballards!

The first one I ever read, gave me a weird impression of his ouevre

Haunting of Hill House. Second time apparently or I’m a good guesser. Lol

The gate of angels. Which means I’ve only got the blue flower left after this :(

And also puttering through Dave Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn, which is much better-written than it needs to be

The Gate of Angels is probably her most off-the-wall novel. It has elements of a ghost story in it, and so, it's well-timed for Halloween.

I finished Chris Baldick, THE MODERN MOVEMENT. It ends in a blaze of over-the-top polemic, but is really a terrifically sound, inclusive survey of the era 1910-1940.

Haunting of Hill House. Second time apparently or I’m a good guesser. Lol

― nathom, Sunday, October 27, 2019 11:16 AM (yesterday)

we watched 1963's The Haunting, a remarkably good adaptation, a couple weeks ago, and I want to reread this.

I'm reading Younghill Kang's East Goes West, a pre-WWII picaresque about an educated Korean youth trying to make it in North America, in a Penguin Classics edition from this year that came out together with three other novels by Asian-American writers. It's funny, observant, and a stylistic marvel.

have that, must read that

I have started reading Clare Hutton's SERIAL ENCOUNTERS: 'ULYSSES' AND THE LITTLE REVIEW.

250pp+ of small print, publishing-history minutiae, charts and tables from Oxford University Press.

I may be some time.

Why Love Matters, Susan Gerhardt. Homework assignment from my therapist.

The past few nights I've been reading Henry Adams' 1300 page history of the two administrations of James Madison, but I'm hesitant to say I'm fully committed to it. I'm only a bit past 100 pages into it.

About five years ago I read his equally long and detailed history of Thomas Jefferson's two terms and it was pretty fascinating. Adams' main fault is his desire to be exhaustive, to uncloak all the evidence he sifted and correspondence he studied and to quote each relevant paragraph that substantiates his account of what every major participant thought or desired at each step along the way. He leaves no room to doubt his narrative, but being exhaustive is also exhausting. Luckily, the period he covers is hugely formative in the nation's history and extremely complex to grasp, so that having such a reliable guide is paramount to understanding what was happening.

If I do read it all, expect to see me come up for air some time in three or four weeks. I won't attempt to synopsize it, but I may offer some tidbits that I find especially tasty, if I run across any.

A great day for Danish literature yesterday as Jonas Eika won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for his book 'Efter Solen'. He gave an extremely political speech calling out Danish state racism, calling out prime minister Mette Frederiksens policies, even as he said he realized she was 'somewhere in the room' (she was in the front row, looking a bit uncomfortable). It's a great short story collection, btw, do seek it out when it gets translated.

I read Coetzees Disgrace, really powerful and condensed. I don't think I've seen this situation depicted this way before, the powerful becoming the powerless, and knowing full well that it's inevitable, that it's fair, that it's as it should be, but still not accepting it, of course not.

Now I'm reading Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk, the good one of the two Nobel winners this year.

The past few nights I've been reading Henry Adams' 1300 page history of the two administrations of James Madison, but I'm hesitant to say I'm fully committed to it. I'm only a bit past 100 pages into it.

About five years ago I read his equally long and detailed history of Thomas Jefferson's two terms and it was pretty fascinating. Adams' main fault is his desire to be exhaustive, to uncloak all the evidence he sifted and correspondence he studied and to quote each relevant paragraph that substantiates his account of what every major participant thought or desired at each step along the way. He leaves no room to doubt his narrative, but being exhaustive is also exhausting. Luckily, the period he covers is hugely formative in the nation's history and extremely complex to grasp, so that having such a reliable guide is paramount to understanding what was happening.

If I do read it all, expect to see me come up for air some time in three or four weeks. I won't attempt to synopsize it, but I may offer some tidbits that I find especially tasty, if I run across any.

― A is for (Aimless)

This volume fascinates less because Madison ain't Jefferson as personage and president.

I soaked up the first volume about nine years like a rich meal with subtle colors. Madison doesn't require irony; Jefferson does. And Adams' irony is among the subtlest and (quietly) funniest in American prose.

*about nine years ago

Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

I finished Jean Rhys, GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT.

I can't say this is really great writing. Maybe its main value is its sense of Paris c.1930s, and the poignancy of the vulnerable, despairing protagonist.

Midway through Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers. I think I would be enjoying it more if it weren't so damn long.

Started again on Ronald Firbank, VALMOUTH. Possibly the campest prose fiction I've ever read.

I liked The Flamethrowers, the end didn’t leave a big impression but I’m a sucker for stories of woman artists being misunderstood and disappointed

I read Stefan Zweig's novella Journey into the Past in the Anthea Bell translation. Bell was the major selling point for me, since I found out she translated two books whose prose style I admired (in the translation): All for Nothing and Austerliz. Sadly I now see that she has passed, but fortunately she has lots of other works I have yet to read. As for the novella, it was a pleasant and short read, a finely-observed melancholy quasi-romance.

Bell was great. She also translated the Asterix books into English.

Just read Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley. Wonderful. Written in a slightly clipped arcane 1930s vernacular without seeming forced, and dealing with contemporary issues of English identity in a slyly murderous way. FFO The Falling, Ben Wheatley and the gothic pastoral in general. May contain scenes of harvesting.

Didn't have that modern-writer voice. Was moved to think 'they still make 'em like this!' - but of course the book is as much a critique of such thoughts, of nature-writing, of too-fervently celebrating tradition and history, as it is guided by them

Finished Rachel Cusk's Coventry (first half personal essays is good, second half book reviews is much less interesting). Also Karen Russell's Orange World. I know it's hard to end short stories, but most of these just...end, in a way that probably feels hip or sophisticated to writers (like ending on a jazzy unresolved chord), but also unsatisfying. Still a lot of images that will stick with me. The one about the ferrywoman living in a flooded post-apocalyptic Miami could have been a novel.

I'm reading the new Zadie Smith collection of short stories now, so far so good.

Never read a good Zadie Smith short story, so intrigued that people seem to like the new collection.

I hated White Teeth and the one or two random opinion-type pieces I've read of hers.

Yeah, I don’t get her. Another, similar author I can quite warm to is Helen Oyeyemi. In an interview I found her smarmy, and her fiction makes my eyes roll to clacking.

zadie smith is bad imo

So Zadie Smith is cancelled on here in a mere three posts? "Never read a good Zadie Smith short story", "hated White Teeth", "I don't get her." Really? Get the fuck outtahere.

"I don't get her" is the prize quote, from Remy Bean. Yeah, suppose you do in fact do not *get* her: who might be to blame for that? Her, of you? Sheesh. The worst of times etc :-/

xp lol and another one, "zadie smith is bad imo". Care to explain?

Hostility is fine, "Zadie Smith is bad" is fine, but for god's sake, back up these preposterous claims ppl

Okay: she’s boring.

I think it was over 20 years ago that I started (and put down) White Teeth so I'd be hard-pressed for details. I recall just hating the style and tone of it, overly precious and contrived.

I wouldn't say she's "cancelled" (ie, you shouldn't patronize her because of some loathsome views/actions), go ahead and read her what do I care. I will not.

I've only read on beauty and found it arch and unfunny and a bit "do you see?"

xxxp We're all boring, iirc.

I wouldn't say she's "cancelled" (ie, you shouldn't patronize her because of some loathsome views/actions), go ahead and read her what do I care. I will not.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, November 5, 2019 1:24 AM (fifty-nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't patrronize her, I used the word 'cancelled' after a three-bullets-fired string of posts abt how she is supposedly the worst of the worst. Which strikes me as wrong, or exaggerated at the very least. But yall mmv.

I love her. As I understand it, short stories are a newer thing for her and they're not all amazing, but I'm always happy to spend time inside her brain.
Xp

NW is her best. She was so young when she started getting published.

Yeah, suppose you do in fact do not *get* her: who might be to blame for that? Her, of you? Sheesh.

Chill, LBI. Remy made a statement where the subject of the sentence is "I", not "she". Admitting that you do not *get* an author is intrinsically a statement about the speaker's inability to connect, not about the author's value.

Srsly. Nobody canceled anybody, pls. knock off the hyperbole. Nothing wrong with casually disliking authors, or falling outside of their appeal. For the archives, here’s an unindexed, off-the-cuff list of well-regarded authors I’ve recently read but don’t get:

George Eliot
Henry James
Thomas Mann
Ken Follett
Steven Pinker
Henning Mankell
George Simenon
Elizabeth Gilbert
Marlon James (But I keep trying?)
Lionel Schriver
Ostefa Moshfegh
Neil Gaiman
Elizabeth Strout
Tomi Adeyami
Celeste Ng
Ocean Vuong
Russell Banks
Frank O’Hara

I read White Teeth around when it came out. I was kind of ambivalent on it. I do like her nonfiction writing in the NY Review of Books. She has an interesting piece on Celia Paul and Lucian Freud in the current issue:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/11/21/muse-easel-celia-paul-lucian-freud/

I've recently started Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. So far it's funnier than I expected.

Actually, I read White Teeth in 2007! My review is in the archives of this very board. Apparently my view of the book was remained consistent.

Thomas Mann

booooooooooooo

the George Eliot mention is the real boo

as I get older, her attention to the nuances of weird personalities interacting with small town conventions is almost cosmic in its acuity idk

The Mill on the Floss was my introduction to the Victorian novel way back when. I've been meaning to give it a reread.

Remy, apologies for my misguided posts.

Re Zadie Smith, her first novel was a big baggy flawed fun clever debut novel, promising but not a masterpiece. Her second novel was genuinely awful. Her third was pretty good, but not as good as the EM Forster book it was explicitly based in, and so a bit pointless. Her essays can be very good indeed, but even when not get treated like the pronouncements of genius. Her earlier short stories were rubbish; the newer ones in the new book may be great, as may her most recent novel, but at this point I don't care enough to find out. There, can i go now?

Only after you read her fourth novel!

Middlemarch is tha bomb---altho your challops awaits, Squire:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-truth-about-casaubon-a-great-intellect-destroyed-by-a-silly-woman-1395385.html

But, furtively sounding out friends - male, middle-aged friends - I have discovered that some of us share a grudge. Mr Casaubon is hard done by.

Isn't Lydgate's story enough consolation for all the male middle-aged thwarted geniuses?

I thought On Beauty was great and even as a major EM Forster stan I don't think it's "pointless"; the plot machinations may be the same but the environments they take place in are radically different, the characters are different, the roadmap to only connect in the early 21st century isn't the same as it was in the early 20th. Loved the description of Hampstead Heath and the heartbreaking bit where the academic goes to visit his dad in a shitty part of West London and they just can't relate.

I've started The Flamethrowers , Rachel Kushner.

I was pleased to see Henry Adams, writing in the 1880s, make such a clear and unambiguous condemnation of the treatment of native Americans by the US government and racist white settlers. His condemnation was severe, but it mainly consisted of accurately describing how they acted, which was sufficient to comprise a withering critique.

I finished Firbank's VALMOUTH - rather inconclusive ending. Much to say about race in this author I think. I didn't quite feel up to reading more Firbank immediately, so went on to ...

Stan Barstow, A KIND OF LOVING. Absolutely exemplary post-war working-class regional writing sub-genre item -- like SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING but perhaps more fun and entertaining. Very into the minutiae of clothes, workplace, bus fares, etc. The language 'racy' and actually slightly bluer than I'd have expected from a 1960 novel. Strong sense of passion for the woman the hero desires, but the idiom also rather comes unstuck around this - 'Oh, she was just such a marvellous bint', etc - losing its poise and becoming awkward.

I like reading this novel. There is also a page where the protagonist discovers ULYSSES and it's described pretty accurately.

I've read Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. It depicts girls at border schools, very minimalistic, with a sense of claustrophobia, sexuality and even insanity just below the surface. Robert Walser is namechecked on page one, Young Törless seems an obvious inspiration.

Now I don't really know what to read. Am going away for the weekend, so will get a lot of time to read, will start a couple of new books. Which ones? That will be revealed this sunday, this place. Stay tuned!

I'm intermittently reading Robert Richardson's intellectual biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire (I know it was recommended on here, but I can't remember where). Richardson's method is to take Coleridge's dictum - quantum scimus sumus - we are what we know - and see how it becomes flesh. It's pretty extraordinary - both as a feat of research and immersion in subject matter and in how it brings Emerson into the present.

Listeing to Tade Thompson's 'Rosewater' on Audible - a Nigerian sci-fi. I like it.

(oh, that's interesting - Rosewater is currently 99p as an ebook from amazon.co.uk)

I'm reading Julian Jackson's superb De Gaulle bio. I finished Conversations with Friends. I wanna reread Daniel Deronda.

Nearly finished Dostoyevsky's Demons, which I keep putting aside. I don't entirely trust the translation (Maguire), especially in contrast with the Ignat Avsey Karamazov I read earlier this year.

I also just read Germaine Brée's Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, which was great, one of the best Proust studies I've found.

Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass
Horacio Castellanos Moya - Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador
Yasunari Kawabata - The Old Capital
JM Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians
Gerald Murnane - Border Districts
Girogio Bassani - The Garden of Finzi-Continis
Italo Svevo - As a Man Grows Older

Did I mention Maigret in Society? In the middle of A Maigret Trio, after Maigret's Failure, in which he was accosted by an obnoxious childhood acquaintance, who remembered him as the smart son of the steward of the local estate of tottering aristo relics (well that's how the kids thought of them). (The "failure" was that he let his feelings affect his professionalism---he thought this, though procedure etc. seemed to go as well as possible, in my own practiced judgement). "Society" here mostly consists of other relics, in Paris, who trigger not only thoughts of those behind the gates in the sticks, but also those who emote and pose in bad French novels ca. 1901 (why that year, does he have specific reading in mind?) Yet the more he reluctantly delves into their affairs, the more he is struck by their unabashed personal mythologizing, the way the principal couple have made their own agreements, taking bits of old code, mores and maybe bad novels too. And whatever else life has presented them with (incl. possibly shady yet faithful retainers and skeevy heirs-in-waiting).
I'm not totally convinced by the revelation of the whodunnit, but in effect the point is that Maigret sees it, wants to believe it---and the epiphany of that is what the whole story has been building to, as he grapples once again with feelings and conduct, based in two kinds of experience.

I finished Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. I don't really get who the target audience for this book is. It's kind of an insular, gnomic self-consciously Kafkaesque parable (part of the story revolves around a highly speculative conspiracy theory about Kafka) built around the theme of midlife crisis and spiritual wandering. Besides Kafka, it seems to be influenced by the loose and open-ended ruminative novels of W.G. Sebald. I think it was hobbled a bit by the parallel track structure. It made you think maybe the book should have been a couple of novellas, but I guess those are even harder to sell than novels these days, not that I can imagine this sold in any kind of quantity. There were flashes of real squalid human emotion near the end, but I guess the goal was to go for a kind of passive dreamlike flow. A bit too clinical for my taste.

Finished the Henry Cow biography by Benjamin Piekut a couple of weeks ago. Enjoyed it and it filled out my knowledge of a band I've liked for the last 30 odd years since discovering the Concerts lp (at the time it was a toss up between taht and What A Bunch Of Sweeties by the PInk Fairies in the same record shop at the same time.)
Have been reading a book on Cartoon Music by Daniel Goldmark

want to read Caliban and the Witch cos it was brought up as reading material for an art festival that is happening locally.
& maybe reread Religion and the Death of Magic which I've been reminded of by the same festival.

I've put aside Henry Adams' history of the Madison administrations for the duration of a brief beach vacation, during which I am reading Doting, Henry Green. If I run through it quickly I have At Freddie's, Penelope Fitzgerald, as a back up.

Meanwhile, back in the Madison history, after ~450 pp. of excruciatingly pointless diplomacy, the War of 1812 may soon be declared underway. As I recall, it starts badly for my side, but turned out OK in the end. I expect confirmation of these impressions somewhere within the next 800 pp. (the entire book is just shy of 1400 pp.)

I finished Doting, which was quite funny, though not in a belly laugh kind of way. It's more a comedy of manners, so loaded with dialogue that it could be adapted to a screenplay with minimal effort, but with a plot so lacking in resolution that the resulting film would leave its audience highly amused, but vaguely dissatisfied. That's less of a problem for a novel.

As noted in the 2019 Poetry Competition thread, I have also been reading Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese, a third of which consists of poems by Tu Fu. Rexroth captures the highly condensed and suggestive nature of Chinese poetry, where terse concrete imagery, mostly of nature, provides an objective narrative, often coupled with an unstated symbolic one in parallel.

I haven't read a Green novel that didn't compel me to stop for a minute, return to the start of the chapter, and take notes on lacunae.

I started my third reading of Daniel Deronda and will pick up my copy of Corey Robin's Clarence Thomas book in a bit.

Green leaves little doubt about how we are to view his five primary characters. There is no subtlety in the frequency with which he quotes them directly and then describes their words as having been "wailed" at one another. Lacunae aside, they seem transparently rationalizing, selfish and manipulative.

I am nearly finished with At Freddie's and will resume reading the Henry Adams history after I am done with this short novel.

My impression is that it has all of Fitzgerald's customary strengths of concision, acute observation, and dry wit. Its major weakness is that it revolves around the lives and characters of theatrical people, whose oddities make them appear interesting at first, but when carefully probed, even by Fitzgerald's generous eye, they become rather empty and tedious. It seems wise of Penelope to have confined the book to 160 pages.

I'm reading Younghill Kang's East Goes West, a pre-WWII picaresque about an educated Korean youth trying to make it in North America, in a Penguin Classics edition from this year that came out together with three other novels by Asian-American writers. It's funny, observant, and a stylistic marvel.

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Monday, October 28, 2019 9:32 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

have that, must read that

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, October 29, 2019 12:16 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

finished this today finally, after a run of evenings devoted mostly to video games, and indeed you must. Recommended if you like idylls about wanting to read everything, novelistic evidence that people are always the same, lamentations of selling, notes on the Machine Age.

donald antrim - elect mister robinson for a better world

it's a riot

Yeah all of Antrim is great. The Hundred Brothers especially and the memoir about his mother...

His father taught an Eliot course I took in my undergrad years.

I'm about halfway through Middle England by Jonathan Coe. Not sure it will help me understand Brexit any better but so far it is an enjoyably droll domestic comedy that seeks to take a cross-section of society.

i've only read his stories in the emerald light in the air and was totally unprepared for how flat-out bonkers and surreal elect mister robinson is. the combination of over-the-top violence and his measured, beautifully constructed sentences is hysterical

Don’t want to stop reading. started reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and knocked out the first quarter of it already.

That's a coincidence, Silby, I saw a documentary on her last night and also wanted to read this novel!

I would also like to read MIDDLE ENGLAND some time.

I am still reading A KIND OF LOVING. It's very enjoyable. I have my next two novels after lined up already.

Enjoying The Flamethrowers, though the early 20th century Italy bits fascinate me more than the 1970's NYC bits, which as a time and setting feels a bit overexplored. That being said I did read some of that during breakfast yesterday and the place I was at played "Street Fightin' Man" and "Pale Blue Eyes", it was pretty lol.

I've pretty much admitted defeat with Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's partly my state of mind, partly having left large gaps between reading and partly my being unable to deal with books that basically require me to construct a family tree. I've fallen through the elisions and can find it in me to care what happens to anyone.

Don’t want to stop reading. started reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and knocked out the first quarter of it already.

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Sunday, November 17, 2019 9:41 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

perfect book

the kindness of her spirit inhabits her work in a way that really moves me.

I've pretty much admitted defeat with Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's partly my state of mind, partly having left large gaps between reading and partly my being unable to deal with books that basically require me to construct a family tree. I've fallen through the elisions and can find it in me to care what happens to anyone.

― Life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering...save string (Chinaski),

When I recorded my experiences about four years ago here, I was so disappointed with my first Fitzgerald that I kept away until I gave The Bookshop and Offshore a try. I'm glad I did.

It never surprises me when a book I loved fails to connect with another reader. I've often enough been on the other end of that event, eagerly seeking out a book that was praised by a trusted source and finding no joy in it. Reading is very personal and personal conditions vary almost as much within individuals and between them. Maybe try again later, but only if your curiosity has revived.

"The Fall and the Rise and The Fall" Brix Smith Start
"My First Summer in the Sierras" John Muir
"The Great God Pan and Other Stories of Horror" Arthur Machen

I'll definitely try more Fitzgerald. I'll have a break and maybe give this another go. I've been reading lots about Kant and Coleridge so it's a good fit in terms of subject matter if nothing else.

The Great God Pan is fantastic.

there were certain parts that were particularly great but idk, not sold on him tbh. It was almost comical how deeply misogynistic the first two stories were, uptight British men quailing before the unutterable evil that is femininity wot wot. Just ridiculous.

I also don't find the Wicker Man scary... as a theme, "civilized" Brits recoiling at paganism more often strikes me as deeply silly than as horrific.

I assume Anglo-Paganism as a theme for horror is some sort of cultural working-out of the cultural loss from Christianity's ascendancy. Same with heavy metal.

Machen is certainly ridiculous and reprehensible in places but he does access something to do with the unrepresentable and the uncanny. And I'd agree that this particular brand of landscape horror isn't (only) about class but about loss.

I do like his Arabian Nights-nested narration structures and there are passages that are just fantastic so I'll probably finish it. It's a good follow-on from "Voyage to Arcturus" (which was admittedly even more phantasmagorical and insane)

I've been looking at a Machen volume that was presumably brought into the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop for Halloween. Think it might be that one, have been meaning to pick an anthology up by him for a while. Think I have an illustrated thing by him somewhere that came out about 20 odd years ago.

Looks like it might be The White People and other stories.

I do enjoy this picture of turn of the century London that he paints, where it's just full of unemployed dandies bumping into each other and trading salacious gossip over endless bottles of chianti

The new Julian Barnes, 'The Man in the Red Coat', is a sort of biography but a very achronological and expansive and meandering one. Really beautifully done, actually: an elegant and witty wander through Belle Époque Paris. Barnes is the only one of those Best Young Writers of 1983 or whatever it was that I would still make strong claims for. And this includes a lot of writing about art and artists, which he's very strong on.

I just ordered that one on the basis of some great reviews I read. Looking forward to it.

It's impressive how Barnes has kept writing books - so many book, so regularly. He's never given up or run out of ideas. I'm glad if this new one is doing well.

It’s odd: he’s not one of my favourite authors, but he takes up a lot of shelf space.

Finished A KIND OF LOVING at last.

Very good: dense, down to earth, droll, thoughtful. Surely one of the best works of its particular genre / movement / era.

Just read Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley. Wonderful. Written in a slightly clipped arcane 1930s vernacular without seeming forced, and dealing with contemporary issues of English identity in a slyly murderous way. FFO The Falling, Ben Wheatley and the gothic pastoral in general. May contain scenes of harvesting.

Half way through and loving it, the evocation of time and place and customs and atmosphere is just incredible.

Been dipping into the book on Cartoon Music which is various essays by different people on various aspects of teh subject from the beginning of film adaptation to the current day of when the book was published.
Pretty interesting.

Found a cheap copy of Viv Albertine's 2nd book To Return Unopened which I read about the 1st chapter of.
Really enjoyed her 1st book with the repetitive title which covered her punk etc years.

I finished the 650 pp. of Henry Adams' History of the First Madison Administration, 1809-1813, but for some reason I am now forging ahead with the next volume, his 700 pp. History of the Second Madison Administration, 1813-1817. I am determinedly ignoring whatever misgivings I may have about this decision and plowing ahead. For now.

Somebody’s got to

Virginia Woolf: ORLANDO.

I read A Kind of Loving as a teenager because my parents had it lying about the house. Fond memories of it and might be tempted to re-read to see how it stacks up now. I also remember a movie and televised drama, both decent.

I've recently read:
A few Maigrets, addictive.
An American Marriage, Tarayi Jones. I read this because my wife was reading it for a book group. Soapy, not particularly sophisticated, overpraised, but an enjoyable enough read.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I picked this up because Amazon had it for less than a quid and I thought I had nothing to lose if I didn't stick with it. Oddly reminiscent of the Jones in some ways, both use characters to tell the story and then fail to give them plausible voices, both progressively bien pensant but pulling their punches the cause of fair mindedness, neither quite as well written as I'd hoped but both moderately entertaining reads.
The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West. Not great, but a fascinating curio, a window into a certain strand of 20C intellectual fashion, popular fiction from the 50s weirdly mixing the values of the Sunday Post, watered down Nietzscheanism and hints of the supernatural.

Started reading the Once and Future King this morning since I picked it up yesterday. Meant to get a copy for years, having seen the Disney film of Sword in the Stone as a kid. Can see how the book feeds into wanting to make a cartoon like that out of it. Book has a very conversational writing style that the fillm may pick up on.Need to rewatch the thing.
Had assumed beforehand that the book would be a lot more stuffy and classically written.

also started reading
The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs
which I picked up yesterday after finding out a local shop has a number of cheap copies of Gooley's books. This turned up being recommended by a speaker who came into do a weather reading talk in the Tulca festival a few weeks ago.

& read the first couple fo chapters of Walter Yetnikof's Howling at The Moon

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. i haven't read all that much genre fiction (bar some hard-boiled detective fiction), so it's not really correct for me to say that i'm not into sci-fi books, but i've just never really given it much of a go. really enjoying this so far, about 200 words in. will be reading the remaining books in the series

rest of 3BP is p different from the first 200 words

Fall by Stephenson, love that guy

Maybe some inspiration here :

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/books/notable-books.html

What I've read this year so far:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKbQ8pBUEAE5YHq?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

I can’t even

This year?! It would take me less than half and hour to read all those... book covers, but only if they were in a much higher resolution.

How does one get through a book every day and a half? Do you not do movies or television or go out? Or are you a speed reader?

A Maigret Christmas & Other Stories

Started reading the Once and Future King this morning since I picked it up yesterday. Meant to get a copy for years, having seen the Disney film of Sword in the Stone as a kid. Can see how the book feeds into wanting to make a cartoon like that out of it. Book has a very conversational writing style that the fillm may pick up on.Need to rewatch the thing.

Loved this when I was an Arthurian mythos obsessed kid. Remember the second volume - relating to adult Arthur - being quite heartbreaking.

Djuna Barnes, NIGHTWOOD.

I read on the bus, at lunch at work, at night when I can't sleep, and don't watch much tv or film

Figured as much, especially the part about the bus and at lunch at work.

also for a break for fun reading: a bit of

Stefan Collini, ABSENT MINDS: INTELLECTUALS IN BRITAIN

I usually read about 35 books a year. In the past three months since my daughter was born, I read 3/4 of one Penelope Fitzgerald novel

They say it changes your whole life

I've read so many more books this year than I usually do. The trick for me has been to really dive into what's happening in young Danish literature, there's so much energy, so much passion, it's so direct. Feels much more like a joy to follow, instead of trying to read whatever's won the Pulitzer, Booker, International Booker, Swedish Genocide Denial Prize, etc.

Or, it might be that most up-and-coming Danish writers write 60 page poesy/essay hybrids. That might also be a reason why I've read more books. Dunno.

I know someone who reads 'around 80' books a year. He also says he barely remembers anything of the books he reads. I find this completely bizarre.

Anyway, I'm around 50 a year at the moment which I'm pretty happy with given my insane job and my insane children.

rest of 3BP is p different from the first 200 words

― flopson, Thursday, November 28, 2019 4:25 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

(´д｀)

I'm impressed James M. I'd like to read more long form work but i'm afraid the internet has broken my brain.

^truth bomb

i thought one of the jameses worked in a bookshop and slammed back multiple tomes per day

He made a tiny bookshop replica once but don’t think he works in it.

I did use to work in a bookshop, but not for a while. And having a 6yo daughter has actually slowed me down.

reading percival everett's 'erasure' which is v. good and also specifically shits on a bookshop (and possibly me) in which i worked at the time in question

I'm loving Robert Forster's "Grant & I" so far. Tender and funny.

Agreed.

Thirded, although I read it based on Alfred’s recommendation, so not sure if my vote will count.

I finished Middle England and am now reading Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying.

Dasa Drndic. Started with Doppleganger, now 100 pages into Belladonna. She is really something, this is what I want from books

Erasure is so much fun.

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" rn

just finished Gut by Giulia Enders, liked it a lot.

now alternating between Raymond E Feist Magician whilst at home, and Eric Ambler Epitaph for a Spy whilst at work.

I read Val McDermid's A Darker Domain which I picked out from this year's Harper Perennial Olive paperbacks (the theme this year is thrillers, striking red and black covers), didn't really think much of it honestly, not inclined to seek out more of her work in covers not designed to entrance bookstore-haunting hipsters. Going to finally read Ancillary Mercy now

ERASURE is an extraordinary book for sure - so many things going on in it.

I reread E.M. Forster's story 'The Obelisk'. Also extraordinary in its own little way!

still weaving through Machen, but picked up a copy of Priest's "Inverted World" (which I've been meaning to re-read for several years now) over the holiday.

don’t you mean for many miles now?

heh

My aunt wrote a powerful book about her experience of getting attacked with a hammer and coping with traumatic brain injuries. Beautifully-written and had me tearing up all the way through.

I'm also reading lots of hard sci-fi :)

wow

Late to the Simon Rich party. The Last Girlfriend on Earth, Ant Farm down. Free-Range Chickens, Hits & Misses, Spoiled Brats up soon, followed by whatever else I can find at the library, incl. both seasons of "Man Seeking Woman".

Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Caravaners and the Charles Barr book on Ealing.

I've bailed (temporarily, I think) from the Emerson biography. It's an extraordinarily immersive book but I feel a bit beleaguered - especially as I don't have the time to read anything else. I'm so unmoored I have no idea what to read next.

Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line

Shoot For the Moon, James Donovan’s book about the early years of manned spaceflight (leading up to the moon landing). Plenty of ground covered, much of it familiar to me through years of reading up on the space race and films/documentaries such as The Right Stuff and First Man and Apollo 11. Really good, and thrilling stuff. It’s 400-something pages long so some events are moved past somewhat swiftly but as a portrait of the interpersonal politics involving the main players and how the roles of astronauts shifted over time during the Mercury 7 era from being “spam in a can” to using their test pilot skills is of particular interest. I don’t know if it’s the definitive book on the subject as Michael Collins suggests in the main pull quote but it’s excellent. I always get bummed out reading about Gus Grissom, he seemed like a true dude.

picked up a copy of Priest's "Inverted World" (which I've been meaning to re-read for several years now) over the holiday.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, December 5, 2019 11:48 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

one of the best books I’ve ever been tipped off to on here

currently reading elif batuman ‘the possessed’ about doing a phd in Russian literature. making me crave Russian lit. also curious about other novels/memoirs about graduate school

hermann broch - the death of virgil

two months & a couple of weeks later, finally finished this (found myself having to put it aside after every twenty or so pages till the final section which really needed to be read in one ongoing flow), can't say i picked up on the underlying symphonic structure mentioned in arendt's intro but the arrival in brundisium and nightmarish journey to his last abode have stuck in my mind, also the night scene with the trio of vagabonds who almost seemed to have dropped in from an absurdist drama. now for the sleepwalkers.

Rereading Wolf Hall, because he, Cromwell, haunts my imagination

He, Cromwell !

I'm pulling up to the end of 1814 at around 1100 pp. into Henry Adams's history. I confess, I had no idea just how utterly bolloxed up the entire government of the USA was during that time or how close the union came to dissolving under the stress of the War of 1812, only this time the strong secessionist sentiment was from New England. Only 250 more pages to go!

Keeping track of which positions Monroe held got confusing too.

Agatha Christie: THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD.

Her only vaguely worthwhile book, and she nicked the central idea from Chekhov.

Geoff Dyer's Zona, about Stalker. I liked his jazz book and the novel Jeff In Venice but this was sort of a letdown. It has a slapdash quality that I think is meant to be charming but for stretches feels just lazy/hurried with meh digressions, and 200+ pp but he makes scant mention of Roadside Picnic.

In the early going that he boasts of not having seen The Wizard of Oz and claims he never will, which is just...weird? Later he claims that Stalker's wife turns into something "hideous" at the end of the film when she lights a cigarette, and professes to "hate all gestures associated with finding, lighting, and smoking a cigarette," which I can't begin to understand. I'm hard pressed offhand to think of a better set of gestures!

going to read 'brothers karamazov' over my winter break; picked it up at the bookstore today. reading 'the possessed' got me insanely pumped for it lol. got the pever & volokhonsky translation bc it was 3$ cheaper and 300 pages shorter than the david mcduff one, but was pleased to read some pretty nice reviews of it ex post

The Caravaners is very good - comedic novel about a militaristic Prussian gentleman and his wife traveling through the UK being baffled. Quite different in tone from the other Van Arnim I've read, which was more of an E.M. Forster thing.

Also racing through The Way Of All Flesh again for a podcast.

finished epitaph for a spy, not sure if i've ever read a novel with such a wholly useless/unimpressive protagonist. in the other Ambler's i've read the main character while completely out of their depth at least had a little something about themselves, in epitaph there's nothing, just totally ineffectual and hopeless. v relatable tbh.

In the early going that he boasts of not having seen The Wizard of Oz and claims he never will, which is just...weird?

― Suggest Banshee (Hadrian VIII), Wednesday, December 11, 2019 3:26 AM (eighteen hours ago)

i read dyer's book on d.h. lawrence a long time ago. it was good -- really enjoyable -- but i remember him spending a weird amount of time talking about all of the lawrence books he wasn't going to bother to read.

new thraed Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019 reading thread

Last night I started my first ever Eric Ambler novel, Judgment on Deltchev. It's set in the immediate post-WWII period in an unnamed Balkan country that seems loosely modeled on Bulgaria, but really is generic.

The last of my autumn reading:

Ursula LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Alicia Kopf - Brother in Ice
Halldor Laxness - The Fish Can Sing

Just finished Brent Weeks The Way of Shadows and am onto the sequel Shadow's Edge. Also about a quarter into Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which is a lot more florid than I was expecting.

I liked Ali Smith’s Autumn, with its decentering of time and focus on Pauline Boty, a fantastic artist

It's been fascinating reading Ali Smith doing this hyper-topical litfic thing - the last in the quartet is due out in July and goodness knows how she's going to keep it feeling up-to-date, it feels like we've had at least three very distinct eras in the UK in the last six months.

(On the subject of Pauline Boty, UK people might like to watch Ken Russell's 60s doc on four british pop artists which is up on player for now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00drs8y/monitor-pop-goes-the-easel but you should be warned that there is Peter Blake content.)

Gerard Manley Hopkins - Poems and Prose
Gottfried Benn - Poems and Prose

Benn's essays make him out to be just an appalling individual: the man who keeps quiet and goes about his work, disregarding what is going on outside in the way he waves away at Nazism (not quite working outright with the regime but just keeping his head down the whole time), and finding the eugenicism more than a bit ok. Writes away after all is said and done as if nothing has happened, collecting prizes and acclaim.

Then I turned to his poems and they are often great. The usual riddle.

The Hopkins poems and journals are a marvel tho'. Nature and god find an intensity in a set of poems that were written by this...jesuit priest? No bohemians around. The Geoffrey Hill lecture on the one poem (Monumentality and bidding) is a good companion to read this with.

we have Spring 2020 'What Are You Reading?' thread now. we're right up with times:

"And sport no more seen / On the darkening green" -- What are you reading SPRING 2020?

Ah thanks didn't read the title

lock thread...