Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?

Successor to Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

Aka Tolstoy-Tolstoy Him Sad

Finally finished Nixonland at the start of the month, and new job has given me a chance to read B.S. Johnson's See the Old Lady Decently, so that.

Was thinking I might be approaching my fill of fiction (for a while), when Ashbery died and some surprisingly (given prev. lazy skimming/stoned staring of yore) engaging, refeshing JA poems appeared on Twitter---which of his books should I get? (Maybe not Three Poems for now, that's the one I was staring at back in the 70s.)

― dow, Saturday, September 23, 2017 2:33 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Start with Houseboat Days.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:09 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, Houseboat Days, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Rivers and Mountains, and The Double Dream of Spring are probably the most compelling books to start with.

― one way street, Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:27 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Will get, thanks! Now I'm wondering about Frank O'Hara.

― dow, Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:39 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Start with Lunch Poems!

― one way street, Saturday, September 23, 2017 3:51 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A Wave too. He repeats himself something fierce, though, so his collections tend to bore me after a while -- as I learned this week when I checked Can You Hear, Bird? out of the library. You can start anywhere!

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, September 23, 2017 4:18 PM

Thanks again! Suspected as much; he always seemed a bit self-delighted, but understandably so. I'll at least try Lunch Poems, A Wave, and maybe the one Don Draper enjoyed, Meditations In An Emergency.

Sante on Ashbery, with his friends and colleagues:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/12/john-ashbery-1927-2017/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Dunkirk%20the%20Iliad%20John%20Ashbery&utm_content=NYR%20Dunkirk%20the%20Iliad%20John%20Ashbery+CID_eca46ddfb844fef709f70d7083254ac6&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=John%20Ashbery%2019272017

He studied Wallace Stevens with F.O. Matthiessen and Proust with Harry Levin, began making collages, and, six weeks before graduating, met Frank O’Hara. Each felt to the other like a long-lost twin.

"The Sea Change" Elizabeth Jane Howard. This started off so well that for the first 80 or so pages I thought I'd stumbled across something wonderful, but it tailed off badly. Not one of her better ones.

"Concluding" Henry Green. My third novel by Green and the one I've enjoyed most, but still not enough to turn me into a wholehearted fan tbh.

"A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years" Carolyn Abbate, Roger Parker. I've been dipping into this and have read about 3/4 of it. The best book I've read about opera: authoritative but not stuffy, insightful, opinionated at times but not hobby-horsey and with none of the de haut en bas tone you often get in books about opera.

Allende. La biografía - Mario Amorós.

Just started on Light in August, which will be my first Faulkner.

Human Voices. Beautiful - just as great as The Bookshop.

Simak's "City", which becomes more amazing the further into it I get
Lavie Tidhar's "Central Station" which is also turning out to be better than I expected at the outset

Ford Madox Ford - Parade's End.

i have a copy of Light in August i was supposed to read in lolcollege

I'm also starting City!

I read Nathan Englander's new one (Dinner at the Center of the Earth) and really enjoyed it, even if some of the spy schemes are totally ridiculous. I was hoping it would make me want to do some research into Israeli/Palestinian history and was not disappointed.

Also read Orhan Pamuk's new one and it really lost me after the initial childhood section, got very repetitive and heavy-handed with the themes.

finished reading bely's the silver dove & have now started on mr weston's good wine by tf powys

Artful, Ali Smith

finished OLD GORIOT and nicola barker's DARKMANS: i shd write a note abt both of them (actually i shd reread DARKMANS)

still not quite through the very short ballad of peckham rye: i suspect reading a few pages it last thing at night every night is a bit contra-indicated -- it's deceptive and requires closer concentration than i'm giving it (this may seem nuts to those familiar with it): anyway i think i've grasped the basic plot motor and my plan is to finish and immediately re-read how this is handled while keeping track of the various characters and how muriel is subtly sketching them (which i haven't quite managed this time through)

(lol pynchon NO PROBLEM; half a dozen 50s peckhamites and i am LOOOOST)

meanwhile i started AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, which i never yet read (bafflingly given my love of flann o'brien) and marlon james's OF SEVEN KILLINGS

reading "there are little kingdoms" by kevin barry - i just started a creative writing ma and it's on the syllabus. i prob should have read him before, i've read many of his peers. like a lot of this generation of irish writers there's some stories i absolutely love, and a few i don't, plus the slight sense of irritation at times, certain uses of language that feel like performative irishness. i've noticed a lot of the young irish writers, presumably copying each other, deploy the adjective in unconventional places and it's kind of twee and irritating to me. like in one story of barry's "his costume daily was..." - as a one-off it's fine but then i started to notice it over and over, something about it bothers me deeply - it's like the literary form of listening to irish radio and suddenly a host who grew up in a satellite of dublin like kildare is pronouncing "sunday roast" as "sunday roasht".

also with young irish writers, indie, just a general sense of indie views and viewpoints. bad characterisation of types of people they are bound to dislike. i'm not claiming i can do any better or am not susceptible to the same pitfalls though and kevin barry is definitely a really great writer. i'm looking forward to us covering this in class and everyone delighting in the lyrical magic of the bogman irish and i can say "nobody actually speaks like that, you've been duped"

when i dabble with writing i do find my vernacular to be a big difficulty. it's easy to over egg the pudding, and standard english feels unnatural and stifling

I'm also starting City!

curious to hear what you make of it. there are way more left turns in the narrative than I was expecting.

Standard English feels natural to me, and I'd rather have my characters clearly communicate what they need to than have them transform into broad slapstick stereotypes. Of course, what I aim for in my writing is not what everybody else does - when vernacular is done well it's excellent to read, I just don't necessarily see it fitting in to the type of work I'm writing now.

Btw LG my bro told me you were doing a Creative Writing MA as I'm hoping to get onto one next year (like most of my plans this totally might not happen, though). How are you finding it in general?

i think when i say standard english feels unnatural and stifling it's mainly because my interior monologue is in a strong glasgwegian vernacular a la a james kelman novel and i live in north america and so spend every day of my life speaking in a forced and uncomfortable standard north american english with a softened accent and altered vowels and writing is a pleasurable hobby so i want to be able to let my freak flag fly when I'm doing it

it's not that i don't like vernacular - i actually do for sure. it's not really how i want to write, though if i am writing about a character then i'd want them to speak authentically. it's more just over-egged vernacular bothers me, i mean in finished, massively critically acclaimed books. i prob wouldn't censor yourself in any way at the beginning - p much all writing is awful forever until a 100 edits make you think "hmm i don't despise every part of this". not that i'm in a huge position of experience.

Btw LG my bro told me you were doing a Creative Writing MA as I'm hoping to get onto one next year (like most of my plans this totally might not happen, though). How are you finding it in general?

yeah he mentioned this - i just did orientation this week so not even had a lecture yet but so far i feel good about it, it already feels like being in safe hands, in a way just getting in feels good, but also having a syllabus and a general plan. feel free to mail if you want any info once i'm more up and running.

I've moved on to the third and final fat volume of Heimito von Doderer's "The Demons". I think it might be really, amazingly good but I might need to read it again to be sure and I have no idea when I'll be slowly tackling the 1300 or so pages again. If one of you could have a quick run through it and let me know that would be great.

Andre Aciman - Harvard Square
Marianne Moore - Observations

I saw a copy of "Demons" last time I was at skoob and...I just couldn't #growingUp

'Course you can.

I have a few pages left in Courtesans and Fishcakes. It has been an interesting (for me, at least) excursion, although it affects to be promoting a somewhat controversial perspective on these aspects of the culture of classical Athens while merely stating the broad conclusions any casual reader of classical literature and history would arrive at by taking the most obvious route.

Apparently Foucault has promoted some opinions contrary to those given here, and such is his prestige in academe that openly disagreeing with Foucault's theories requires taking a defensive posture. This leads the author into some tedious restatements of his own views that weaken the book simply by making it more repetitive than it needed to be.

Anyway, this book introduced me to a form of gambling popular in Athens that I hadn't encountered before: quail-tapping. It involved drawing a circle on the ground, placing a quail within the circle, tapping it on the head, and the wagers were won or lost depending on whether the quail retreated or stood its ground. I swear this is the exact description of this pastime, as given by a respectable classical scholar.

Tim - yeah probably. Just reflecting on a year in which I've read little.

Primo Levi - Ist das ein Mensch?
Apparently Levi said that his year in Auschwitz was in colour whereas the rest of his life was in black and white. His meticulous plain description of the life in the concentration camp is quite unbelievable. There is hardly any hatred in his words. I am glad I came around to reading this classic.

brilliant book.

Aye, it's extraordinary.

Reading Sarah Moss's Names for the Sea. It's about a year spent in Iceland with her family, during which she worked at the university in Reykjavik. Ach, I dunno. It's beautifully constructed and she wears her learning lightly, but it's the voice of privilege and I find myself bristling at her moaning and wanting her to actually *do* something with her time. (She's constrained by having her family with her, yes, and I've lived abroad in similar circumstances (minus the family) and understand the paralysis to a certain extent, but still.) I've been glancing at Auden's Letters from Iceland as well, and lord knows his is the voice of privilege as well, but Auden is doing, doing - it's a diary of movement; Moss's is a diary of stasis.

Meant to bring up Kevin Barry myself after reading Beatlebone, imagining John Lennon's late 70s visit to his island off the west of Ireland, while on holiday - best novel I've read in ages. Intrigued to know if Deems has read it - largely set around Achill afaict. Had tried City of Bohane a few years ago but found the oirish noir-ish prose a bit overipe.

Also read Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn - surprised there hasn't been talk of it round here - a very ILxy novel, imagining Jesse Garon Presley materialising as a gonzoid rock critic at Warhol's Factory in the late 60s, and the twin towers reappearing in the South Dakota badlands sometime in the 21s century. Unfortunately even as a longstanding Erickson fan, I thought it was rubbish.

found the oirish noir-ish prose a bit overipe.

yeah this is sort of my criticism upthread. as i say tho when he's good he is amazing - lots of people influenced by him in ireland and not really as good. i might try beatlebone - tho i dunno if the subject matter would put me off - i don't like when music comes up in the short stories.

"City of Bohane" is the only book of his I read and I found the Mad Max gone culchie dialogue a bit cringey at times. I enjoyed a lot of it though the story didnt really go anywhere in the end imo. He has a good essay on living in Cork somewhere on the internet that I really liked.

I am now reading Dark Money, Jane Mayer, because even though I've known the broad outlines of the plutocratic counter-revolution since what seems like forever, I expect this book to bring the whole sordid story into sharper focus at a much higher level of detail than what I've picked up here and there over the decades. I am sure that my hatred of the Koch brothers will be stoked to a pure white flame.

"City of Bohane" is the only book of his I read and I found the Mad Max gone culchie dialogue a bit cringey at times. I enjoyed a lot of it though the story didnt really go anywhere in the end imo. He has a good essay on living in Cork somewhere on the internet that I really liked.

i guess with our own it's a mixed bag of prejudices and stuff, but i would read the short story collections. some parts annoy me but when he's good he's brilliant and it is moving the irish voice forward i guess. also sometimes it is fun to read about some mad fucker speeding out of gort in a hitachi van.

Natsume Soseki - Light and Darkness. I can turn pages on this quite easily, familiar as I am now with Soseki's deceptively light style (basically I am kinda scanning for moments where the internal anguish is revealed...I don't think he has ever written anything like Kokoro which is one of my favourite reading experiences, making it somewhat unlike the rest of his work).

Don't quite know what I thought of Artful - it's the story of the narrator dealing with the death of her partner, used to frame a series of academic lectures on literature, written by said deceased partner. Some of it is invigorating stuff, but they jump from point to point so quickly, and at some point the puns and references just start to feel like showing off?

Now on Ruy Castro's history of bossa nova. Cool to find out the majority of the big Bossa players started out in a Frank Sinatra fan club!

my book club's book was Paula McLain's Circling the Sun, which is terrible. McLain had success with rewriting Hemingway's a moveable feast as a novel, and she followed it up with this book which rewrites a memoir Hemingway liked, west with the wind by Beryl Markham, turning it into a novel. i checked markham's book out, and it's actually a fun collection of adventures, marred by some racial thinking and a "what is africa?" intro. mclain turns her into a passive protagonist just trying to eke by. also on the hunt for some man meat, including a passion for karen blixen's out of africa boyfriend. (markham's book only has a short chapter on him, on his death.)

I finally finished Jurgen Osterhammel's Transformation of the World. If a thousand-page, dense tome written at a fairly abstract level in occasionally jargony academic prose but offering a panoramic view of how the world changed during the 19th century sounds like your kind of thing, then you could do worse than this book. Probably the best thing about it is the fairly even-handed depiction of colonialism, which was a major fact of the 19th century globally speaking.

Would make an ideal Christmas gift ... er ... probably not ...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Rrsngm7hL.jpg

Perre Michon - Winter Mythologies and Abbots. Spent most of my evening in a pub reading this, and its the first book I finished in weeks. Amazing on a sentence-by-sentence level. The way he treats myth and God reminds me a little bit of Joseph Winkler - a catholic modernism.

Read it too fast and rather too excitedly so will return to all of this at some point in future.

poor old nono, say his name to me these days and i'm humming 2 Unlimited to myself for hours afterwards

My name on twitter dot com is based on one of his compositions, he is GREAT!

Graham Greene - Our Man in Havana
W.D. Snodgrass - Selected Poems

poor old nono, say his name to me these days and i'm humming 2 Unlimited to myself for hours afterwards

He did get something of a *kicking from all sides and so kept away from Darmstadt for yonks thereafter, so poor old Nono in way, tho not so poor as poor old Maderna who fell from being one of the Big Four to being regarded by many as a 'conductor who composes'. (*there is suspicion in some quarters that this was more down to Lachenmann's German translations than Nono's original words).

Friend and I did used to refer to 'a luigi' at work being something with which you immediately took exception to ('x annoying person will be coming to the pub' in the DMs would usually see a pic of luigi posted as a response).

Reading a few things:

Maurizio Lazzarato - The Making of Indebted Man. I approach people talking about debt very warily, because the philosophic or religious approach to it has been responsible for a lot of evil and bad thinking. This is not evil or bad thinking, though perhaps unsurprisingly, i do think he overdetermines on debt somewhat. An example might be where he says commodity fetishism has been completely replaced by the 'transaction of trust' that is credit - effectively trust, and a person's spirit has become the commodity here. Well, but commodity fetishism helps drive personal debt, and that's a simpler explanation? The idea metastasises beyond its useful ambit. That said, there's a lot of OTMFM in here as well. Not sure this thread is the place to explore it, but I'll try and put my thoughts down somewhere more appropriate. One note - is there really any excuse for either the original title or the translation having this 'indebted man' thing? I realise that going into the past 'man' may be said to have a more universal meaning, but i'm not sure even that is without contention, and certainly now there can't really be any excuse for not having 'person' there. That's at least partly because we may need to distinguish when a pathology is particularly suffered by men, and there's some room for ambiguity.

Jane Gleeson-White - Double Entry, a history of double-entry book-keeping. This is *excellent*, full of rich and interesting detail. I had no idea, for instance, about the abbaco schools (only really discovered to historians in the '60s apparently):

Fibonacci’s Liber abaci spawned an alternate education system to the Latin-based monastery schools of Italy: the abbaco schools, intended for the sons of merchants, who were taught Hindu–Arabic mathematics and learnt to read and write in their native tongues, an innovation that would encourage both the codification and standardisation of the vernacular languages of Europe, and the demise of Latin as the language of scholarship.

Gojko Adzic - Bridging the Communication Gap A work thing really, but there's plenty of food for thought for the faster u fuckers thread, and the style of the range of productivity, process optimisation, and self-help biz books has become sort of interesting to me. Like many of these sorts of books, it's well written enough for what it needs to do and is relaxed and thoughtful about its suggestions and dictates, and although you won't convince me there isn't an underlying sickness to it al, this one is freer of that sort of sensation than a lot of others.

Also started but haven't finished because i'm reading that sort of muck, but am looking forward to continuing:

Antonio de Benedetto - Zama
Kate Briggs - This Little Art, a small treatise on translation amongst other things. I started it and it seemed delightful, so I put it to one side when I could properly give it my proper attention.

Also read The Last Samurai again. it's still delightful.

I finished Dark Money yesterday. The overall picture it painted was familiar enough, but many of the details were gobsmacking and Mayer was able to connect various obvious trends that are not so obviously connected, such as the Citizens United decision and the growing incoherence of Republican politics.

Now I have started reading Brunelleschi's Dome, Ross King, about building the first domed space larger than what the Romans were able to achieve. It is admirably clear in its prose and brisk in its pace.

Just on the double entry bookkeeping book - Fibonacci’s 1202 treatise Liber abaci (‘ Book of Calculation‘) is a candidate for the GOAT opening line:

These are the nine figures of the Indians: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures and with this sign 0 which in Arabic is called zephirum, any number can be written, as will be demonstrated.

Earth-shattering tbh

I am now idling about in The Kings of Nonfiction, an anthology of short nonfic edited by Ira Glass. There's some nice stuff in there.

Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia by Ginny Hill.

Really good discussion of khat culture in the first few pages

Does anyone know of interesting end-of-year fiction lists? I'm not seeing much that looks appealing among the most frequently recommended novels (Exit West, etc).

― jmm, Saturday, December 2, 2017 6:56 PM (six days ago)

Largehearted Boy is keeping a running list of all year-end lists:
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2017/11/online_best_of_75.html

I have started The Greek Alexander Romance, in the Penguin version translated and edited by Richard Stoneman. It should be a quick read. It's a fantasy, in the same way that the Arabian Nights are fantasies, but incorporating Alexander the Great and some bits and pieces of his life and history.

The textual footnotes seem mostly concerned with untangling the many corrupt texts one from another and explaining the translator's decisions for how they've been cobbled together in this version.

Is it good?

Noah Feldman -- The Three Lives of James Madison
W.S. Merwin -- Unframed Originals
Robert Forster -- Grant and I

That last is an import, I assume

I bought it quite easily on Amazon and got it in two days.

I finished Little Big Man. It's a big, rollicking, fun read, and I highly recommend it. Not sure I really love the Battle of the Little Bighorn as the bravura finish, with its perhaps too tidy symmetry with the Washita massacre portrayed earlier. Though the author wisely refrains from drawing his thematic threads together too neatly and the ultimate feeling one is left with is a chastened ambivalence, yet it would have been perhaps more satisfying to have the ending focus more on the colorful figure of Crabb himself and less on the dutifully historic cardboard Custer. In my view, Troubles is ultimately a more successful model of how to interweave a tale with historic events, without letting them usurp the novel's essential prerogative to create its own world.

An hour ago I closed the back cover on Jakob Wegelius's FABULOUS children's novel, "The Murderer's Ape." It is a long (588 pages!), slow, old-fashioned adventure story typed onto an Underwood by a non-verbal ape (Sally Jones), about a three year attempt to exonerate her best (human) friend from a false murder accusation. It takes place in Portugal and colonial India, and features a depressed fado singer, an accordion manufacturer, an anarchist plot, scheming seamen, a lovelorn maharajah, life-and-death chess games, and amateur aeronautics. It is like Joseph Conrad by way of Beatrix Potter.

I want to recommend it to... everybody. It is beautifully illustrated, translated from Swedish by Peter Graves (who translates Strindberg and Linnaeus), and deep, and introspective. I know this board as a whole is not into whimsy or children's literature, but this is a totally weird and genre-transcendent book.

Capsule review here
Sample chapter here

I bought it quite easily on Amazon and got it in two days.

Is it good?

I'm well past halfway through now and I'd say no. It is more of an artifact than art. The historically founded parts are filled with garbled nonsense. The fictional set pieces that are dropped in are of poor quality.

This "romance" may be the portal through which much of the world came to see Alexander in the period from about 300 CE to 1500 CE, but if anything it diminishes the historical figure of Alexander, even given all the resources of fiction and imagination with which to aggrandize him. Not worth seeking out, in my opinion, unless you wish to understand it as an artifact defining the ignorance of past ages.

Poo. I might get the murderer's ape then.

"Murderer's Ape" sounds fab!

Finished Brownstein's autobio a few days ago; enjoyed it a lot, despite a lack of interest in 90's alternative rock (I came for Portlandia, which the book doesn't really cover). I should stop being surprised that good lyricists are often also really great prose writers.

Now it's E.M. Delafield's Diary Of A Provincial Lady. I was expecting something satirical, perhaps somewhere akin to a female Wodehouse. And it's certainly funny, but sad too - you really feel for the protagonist, with her idiot husband, hellion children, "friends" constantly invested in rubbing her money troubles in her face. Complaints about the uppity service evoke less sympathy, but that was the age, I guess.

Diary of a Provincial Lady's sequels maintain the quality

I am now reading a book by one Sue Burrell, Waiting for Aphrodite. The subject matter is invertebrate biology, but handled gently, with a minimum of jargon and only a wee pinch of academics. She assumes the reader knows almost nothing, writes only to mend the largest holes in their ignorance, then thoughtfully provides a bibliography at the end of each chapter for those who care to run some experts to earth. It is soothing in its way. I like it.

Correction: Sue Hubbell (I was trying to read the spine across the room.)

Primo Levi: Natural Histories -- mostly darkly comedic science fiction, with occasional vertiginous glimpses of horror that remind you of the sort of things the author must have seen in Auschwitz

Yikes! Any good?

Yes! If you like Calvino's fables and tall tales, especially.

Thank goodness for xmas break, getting through a fair bit:

Wolfgang Hilbig - Old Rendering Plant
Muriel Spark - The Abbess of Crewe
Kristen Roupenian - Cat Person
Muriel Spark - The Hothouse by the East River*
Slowomir Mrozek - The Elephant
Marguerite Duras - Yann Andrea Steiner

Hilbig and Duras are the keepers here. Very different styles and aesthetics. The Duras starts as a brief account of her relationship with a much younger man. From one of their conversations it then jumps into this fictional account of love between two jews (a big age gap here too, except the woman is an adult and the man is actually a young adult, no older than 10) that provides some sort of cathartic release on the holocaust, or somesuch. Its a real high-wire act, what unites the two strands is the care of one person for another (damaged) individual - of course, its something she explores in Hiroshima Mon Amour and many of her books. The Hilbig is an extraordinary account of a boy's obsession with a coal plant. Its transformation of the landscape into this magical realm is reminiscent of Proust's walks around Combray, but even more so Tarkovsky's stalker (its the gothic). Both will pay and re-pay much re-reading.

The Muriel Spark books were sorta boring, couple of interested ideas un-followed (I didn't finish The Hothouse). Mrozek's collection of short pieces is from Penguin Central European Classics strand and there are bits of Schulz, Walser, Kafka. Its diverting enough, worth a read but I wouldn't go out of my way.

Finally Cat Person was a remarkable story in The New Yorker. Tell you all more about it later, but do read it - I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

delighted to be catching up things i hadn't got round to or in some cases finished this year. first up This Little Art by Kate Briggs, which I bought and started earlier this year, but then put down. That's because I was battling with it a bit - my own fault - I tend to want to be a bit ruthless with the evident difficulties of translation. It means that 'when you say you've read the translated book, does that *actually* mean you've read at the book do you see' stuff quite tiresome.

that really isn't what the book is like at all though, and now I've broken the back of it i'm finding it really enjoyable. the main substance of it centres around her translations of Barthes' late lectures:

...a critic, theorist and writer whose very last piece of writing, the one that was left on his desk on the day of the accident that led to his death, was titled: 'One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves.'

Or, in an alternative translation: we always fail to speak of what we love.

Or alternatively again: you (a general you that includes me, the you we use in English, sometimes, to embrace both you and me),

you always fail to speak, when you speak of what you love.

that passage hit me quite hard. (actual French title was on échoue toujours à parler de ce qu'on aime and was an essay on Stendhal apparently.

also read a shit load of poirot. five little piggies is *excellent*, really interesting and impressive, with a couple of cruxes that are done extremely well. the big four is *dire*, really spectacularly bad. it was written aiui when Christie was at a very low ebb, and it shows, she even mutilates poirot at one point, and it's making me want to understand more about what she was going through at that time.

of course one of the persistent comedies of poirot is that he speaks in english nearly all the time, apart from the most basic words any person would learn immediately. in this sense, as was pointed out to me last night when talking about this, he actually speaks very like the archetypal english person in France - ie basic words in french, anything even slightly beyond that in stilted english.

xp Yeah my twitter's been all over those (except that last one, dunno what that is)

I'm sure the fact that he killed himself this year is significantly affecting my response, but mark fisher's the weird and the eerie is a lovely little book. It could maybe be a little more rigorous at times - I remember seeing somewhere (maybe here) that the eerie is poorly defined, which I don't agree with, but I do feel like the case for certain works belonging to the eerie aren't convincingly argued - but in general it gets across what's valuable about these modes and makes me want to spend more time in them.

Just started Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford. Too soon to say anything else about it.

five little piggies is *excellent*, really interesting and impressive

That's good to know, as I'm coincidentally just about to read it!

After your post I read the Wikipedia page for The Big Four, it sounds very WTF in a tantalising way, but I'll avoid it on your advice.

I tend to read 3-4 Christie books every year, usually as a clear-the-decks exercise after something more challenging. Was really impressed by Cards on the Table - although impossible to explain why without spoiling - and HP's Christmas, which is a generic "posh patriarch cops it" mansion mystery, but the solution is quite ingenious.

A few week ago there was an unsurprisingly annoying Front Row episode discussing Christie, with Giles Coren, Sophie Hannah and whoever's been adapting those fucking awful recent BBC Christmas specials. Coren kept saying the books were terrible, the BBC lady was rambling about how she hadn't read much christie but preferred the outside-the-formula books without detective characters, and Hannah kept trying to position Christie as a great social satirist, and it was like JFC how much wrong analysis can you get in a six minute segment.

Had Voltaire in Love for ages, never read it--will be interested to hear what you think

Theodor Fontane: On Tangled Paths -- really enjoying this after a somewhat wobbly start (lots of local colour peasant types getting up to shenanigans, but then the political and sexual intrigue kicked in); annoyingly I already had another copy of this, but under a different title ('Irretrievable') and from different translator

Never could get along with Christie, I have to admit. I just want to punch Poirot in his face.

I've been reading At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It was an unasked-for gift from last year. I guess I feel a little guilty for not just reading the primary sources, but that's a silly reaction to have, especially when Bakewell has done such a fine job of research. It must be difficult to write a fairly light and entertaining book about philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Also, I should be honest with myself, I was never going to read Heidegger or Husserl anyway and at least now I have some sense, however superficial, of their thought.

I'm in a reading trough and am desultorily reading:

Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild, which is beautiful and clear-eyed and wise and all the things that make Snyder 'one of our best humans' (trademark). It does feel a little dated, but I don't think that's his fault.

Anita Brookner's Look At Me, which is limpid and arch and precise and all the things that make Brookner so good but hell I find her hard work sometimes.

Brian Vaughan's Saga, which is magnificent.

Never could get along with Christie, I have to admit. I just want to punch Poirot in his face.

Read The Stone Tide by Gareth E Rees, sits somewhere in the psychogeography - autofiction - old weird England continuum without being squarely any of them, and also taking a wry look at those modes, I enjoyed it. Mostly set in Hastings, and a bit in Bexhill-on-Sea.

I read Old Men In Love by Alasdair Gray, it's the first of his I've read, and I enjoyed that too, feels like Proper Old Fashioned (but not that old fashioned) Lit Fic, takes the ruse of being The Collected Papers Of the main character, includes diaries and drafts of part-finished novels. Well done everyone. Set mostly in Glasgow.

I read Worlds From The Word's End by Joanna Walsh, tricky and rewarding "experimental" short stories, she's very good indeed. Set nowhere in particular. Eley Williams remains my short story champ this year, I love "Attrib" beyond all reason.

Now I'm reading "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie" by Jean Rhys. Would like to keep reading it forever. Set in Paris so far.

I have a fresh unopened copy of attrib. sitting waiting for me at home as I type

(along with the ya novel THUG and spufford’s golden hill. all recommended by the what page are you on podcast)

Richard Holmes - Shelley: The Pursuit
Katherine Anne Porter - "Old Mortality"

The Odyssey, tr. Emily Wilson. Spare, swift, and true.

I'm back for air after sequestering myself with Proust since late summer (am halfway through - just finished the first vol. of Sodom and Gomorrah/Cities on the Plain, to be precise - and am taking a small break, but still very much engrossed).

I've heard nothing but excellent things about the new translation of the Odyssey and am looking forward to reading it. I'm hoping to read a few other books during my holiday break before returning to Marcel.

As it's the time of year of year-end recaps, in the spirit, I thought I'd share a few highlights from 2017 which may be of interest to some (a few of which were taken from recommendations from threads earlier in the year - thanks all :))

Distant Star + Last Evenings on Earth - Roberto Bolano
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Transit - Rachel Cusk
The Malady of Death - Marguerite Duras
Youth - JM Coetzee (am meaning to read the other two in the trilogy, as well)
Torpor, I Love Dick - Chris Kraus
Lightning Rods - Helen DeWitt
The Sellout - Paul Beatty
Bartleby and Co - Enrique Vila Matas

The Economics of Global Turbulence - Robert Brenner
Detroit I Do Mind Dying - Dan Georgakas
October - China Mieville
Memoirs of a Revolutionary - Victor Serge

Also hoping to read these over the holidays (meant to include in earlier post!) and also hoping to eventually get to Henry Green after finishing In Search of Lost Time.

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10581.html
Autumn - Ali Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_(Smith_novel)

It's so weird that smith & knausgaard both have books called winter out now, that are the 2nd volumes of "season" tetralogies

Diary of a Provincial Lady's sequels maintain the quality

Turns out I had purchased an omnibus of all of these! Had a buncha flights so binged, which is perhaps not the best way to read them (some comedic tricks do repeat a lot), but overall am very very impressed. Foreword rightly points out how modern Delafield's character is in balancing home life and professional ventures; I also enjoy the frequent shout-outs to plays/books/movies the protagonist has enjoyed. Am in total agreement w/ her on René Clair's Le Million and the moment where she confesses that she would leave her husband and children in a heartbeat if propositioned by not Ivor Novello or Douglas Fairbanks but CHARLES LAUGHTON is <3 <3 <3 Also, the frequent hopes for a bolschevick revolution when she has to deal with her snotty neighbour. Very interested to check out more Delalfield.

Now reading the second volume of the Penguin Book Of The British Short Story and the early selections being of course filled with Wodehouse and Wharton I was a bit wary I'd OD on English whimsy, reading this right after Delafield, but then it gets into the WWI era and jesus. The story that's impacted me most so far is "The German Prisoner" by James Hanley, whom I'd previously not heard of. It's like an EC Comics war story but with Italian cannibal movie levels of violent gore. Can't say I enjoyed it, and am not entirely sure what I think of it (Author's Intention, although a red herring, always seems to pop up in this kind of thing, I think), though it's certainly a nice corrective to the rah-rah nonsense of Buchan and the like. Anyway, it's certainly something. Approach with caution.

I've been reading At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It was an unasked-for gift from last year. I guess I feel a little guilty for not just reading the primary sources, but that's a silly reaction to have, especially when Bakewell has done such a fine job of research. It must be difficult to write a fairly light and entertaining book about philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Also, I should be honest with myself, I was never going to read Heidegger or Husserl anyway and at least now I have some sense, however superficial, of their thought.

Really liked this. I've mentioned this a few times but there's a section she quotes from De Beauvoir's memoirs that is basically the end speech from Blade Runner.

(Wharton? I meant Waugh, duh)

Some good ones I read in the last couple of weeks:

Jennifer Egan - Manhattan Beach
Gerbrand Bakker - The Twin
Sayed Kashua - Second Person Singular
Magda Szabó - The Door (thanks, ILB!)
Sebastian Barry - Days Without End
Emmanuel Carrère - Class Trip

The best one was probably Days Without End. A really good novel about the American Civil War, told by a very modern protagonist.
The Door took a while to get going, but turned brilliant in the last 80 pages.

The story that's impacted me most so far is "The German Prisoner" by James Hanley, whom I'd previously not heard of.

Highly recommend James Hanley's novel Boy, equally grim in its way and successfully prosecuted for obscenity during the author's lifetime. Love this from the Wiki entry on it:

Novelist Hugh Walpole, in a review, described Boy as "A novel that is so unpleasant and ugly, both in narration and in incident, that I wonder the printers did not go on strike while printing it"

Yeah, I saw that mentioned in the author blurb at the back. E.M. Forster repped for it!

'Boy' is one of the most depressing things I have ever read, and I've read a lot of depressing things.

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar + her poetry from '62 till her death. I liked the novel, its very much of a piece that is comfortable (as with a few Hollywoood films at the time) in taking in psychoanalysis, mental health, certain (now controversial) treatments. What she does in the book that the films wouldn't do is slap an agreeable ending.

Bernard Sumner's memoir Chapter and Verse. Still at him being a kid, just taking his 11 plus and trying to avoid the local non-Grammar High School.

I Swear I Was There about the first 2 Sex pistols gigs in Manchester teh ones put on by Howard devoto and Pete Shelley.

FOPP has a stack of great titles in the 2 for £5 section
also got a thing on the Who in the 60s and 77 Sulphate Strip.

Might go back for a couple of the books on style, The Bag I'm in for one.

New thread: And The Snow Fell Softly On ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

In last weekend's WSJ, Daphne Merkin reviewed massive new collection of early letters from Plath, with at least one more volume to come. Her mother had her trained to report back on everything, everything, and she seems to have enjoyed it, is DM's impression, plus the "microscopic" focus, though disconcerting at first, becomes very involving, hypnotic even. But not too zone-out/in for perspective/patterns.

I've got a vol of Letters Home to come, and really looking forward to cracking on in 2018. I do like Plath's poetry but the talent of course was cut short, and from reading her I felt there was so much more to come (which I possibly don't feel about Kafka, say, but there was so much more of it, and it was miraculously something on a sentence-level.)