2026: What Are You Reading?

Happy New Year everyone! May your coming days be low in stress, high in satisfaction and full of nourishment for the body and soul. If you'd like to share any kind of thoughts or information about what you're reading, this is the place.

I've been marking time until New Year's Day is over to start my next book. At the moment, I'm strongly drawn to re-reading Varieties of Religious Experience, William James. As a general goal, I'd like to increase my percentage of re-reads this year.

This time around, because the 'What Are You Reading?' threads tend to be the de facto catch-all thread for I Love Books, and because most of us employ Site New Answers as our primary entry point for ILX, I thought a dull, but straightforward thread title would make it easiest to identify in the crowd.

Here's a link to the 225 thread: 2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread

So, happy reading, y'all! Let the gabfest commence!

after very long Trollope in December i went completely the other direction with a Neuromancer reread

I found a neat book called The Names of Comedy, by Anne Barton, about the art of naming characters in comic drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Jonson). I'm going to try to read it over the remainder of break. I love topics like this which blend philosophy of language and literary studies.

"They confronted a fundamental choice: whether to give 'speaking' names, as Adam did in the garden, expressing the nature of the characters, or 'accidental' names which allow for greater independence and for change. These different attitudes towards naming are bound up with the larger debate about the truthful or arbitrary nature of language itself; the debate was formalized in Plato's Cratylus and continues today."

Brought Michael Amherst’s ‘The Boyhood of Cain’ with me on a short jaunt to NYC, where I’ll be reading in the annual Poetry Project marathon if anyone is attending

I've almost finished Francis King's recently back in print The Domestic Animal.

mentioned on the what did you read thread, but i am working my way thru october, china mieville's narrative history of the russian revolution. it's somewhat of a historical blind spot for me, so i'm enjoying it so far. mieville does a great job of sketching out the key figures and capturing the history-shifting drama of the moment

and also succinctly explaining the ideological differences between the various revolutionary factions

So funny, I found ‘October’ to be so dry as to make me utterly somnolent every time I opened it. It is currently on my “to sell/give away” pile, could hardly break 25 pages.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

Vijay Prashad The Darker Nations
A history of the Third World from a series edited by Howard Zinn

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie. A fictionalised account of the lives of two 14th/15th century female christian mystics. Very interesting really, I might take a look at one of the primary texts, The Book of Margery Kempe, considered to be the first autobiography written in English.

Heading into that Lockwood everyone hated. So far surprised by the conventional, third person style that it is written in. She felt she needed to switch it up I guess.

yeah if i were more familiar with the subject matter, i could see myself feeling that way.

I know the general outline— I took a few Russian history and art/culture courses in college— but I think that generally speaking, most history books aren’t for me, so it is probably a me problem.

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

I have, as indicated above, begun to re-read Varieties of Religious Experience. Because it was written and delivered as a series of lectures it was originally meant to be heard, not read, which makes for a somewhat more conversational authorial voice. I find it reads easily and reveals Wm James's character through the way he addresses his audience and makes his points. I find real pleasure in that aspect of the book, above and beyond which he was a very acute and congenial (to me) thinker on this subject.

"down there on a visit", christopher isherwood

also about ¾ way thru "the book of eve" by carmen boullosa which i was enjoying at 1st but have kind of bogged down in now

Currently giving Nixonland a go. I’ve decided this is the year to read all the fat books on my shelf that I’ve been avoiding. Also America seems to be more and more perplexing so I might as well learn something about y’all.

loved nixonland

I'm still reading the Duchamp bio by Calvin Tomkins.

Oh yeah, definitely. Tbh, this is a book that's been sitting on my shelf since forever. I bought it a long time ago, read a few chapters, and then set it aside. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time. But I was reminded of it when I read Tomkins's piece about being 99 years old in the NYer this past year and picked it up again. I'm glad I did, because for whatever reason I'm enjoying it now. It's very light on any kind of art criticism or any thoughts about the deeper meaning or theory of art. Duchamp was an unusual person who lived during interesting times and had a lot of interesting friends, and the book mainly focuses on that aspect. Tomkins has a worldly, understated style which suits the material. Duchamp claimed to have retired from producing art when he was fairly young, and insisted that everything he made after that was not art, and Tomkins respects that intention, leaving it up to the reader to ascribe whatever significance to the little artifacts he crafted and sold or gave to collector friends or the odd poems/puns he had published under his nom de plume, Rrose Selavy.

Tomkins on Duchamp is just the break I need from the hagiographic Andrew Jackson bio (by Robert Remini) I'm about to finish. Thanks.

About 1/3 of the way through Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. Feels bit like Elfriede Jelinek + Thomas Bernhard on either steroids or hallucinogens or both. Pretty great but I have to take in small doses at a time.

Just finished reading Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, which I thought was dreadful, but it has at least the virtue of being an interesting failure. Typed out a longer reflection but ultimately it's not worth it. Felt like he really fumbled the ghost story and was never able to successfully incorporate the other part of the story (hypochondriac womanizing alcoholic inn owner has a depressing life experience), so that both felt kind of flat and incongruous. I would explain why I feel this way, but that would require me to open the book again, which I don't want to do

Ah, see, that's one of the few Amis novels I like (the others: Lucky Jim, Girl 20, Ending Up, The Old Devils).

(I also read it in musty library hardcover form in 2007 before NYRB's handsome reissues a few years ago, so).

I like three of the four you listed (haven't read Girl, 20), so this was the first time an Amis novel left me cold

Will probably finished the Lin book today, am also reading Michael Amherst's 'The Boyhood of Cain' before bed. After a bit of a slow start, things are starting to pick up about 40 pages in— our protagonist's personality is coming more into view, and the tensions of the book are making themselves more apparent. probably the first time a book has been described to me as a "slow burn" and actually been that!

I just finished Gerald Murnane's Inland. Kind of amazing, couldn't stop reading it. I'll have to read more of his work now. A great example of how brilliant abstract writing with some depth can be, even when what's beneath is intangible. I note Claire Louise-Bennett is one of the hype quotes on the back of my edition and that makes sense as I now realise her work is like Gerald Murnane if the first-person narrator was Mrs Doyle from Father Ted.

I've resumed The Hemlock Cup, a biography of Socrates by Bethany Hughes after abandoning it last year. Really enjoying it, it's sort of a history of the time as well as his life, just sort of interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict and she has a knack for story.

Love Murnane, still think it's criminal that he hasn't won the Nobel

I love some of the digressions that become sort of meta-observations of the writing process, there are some in which the exact technique he's describing is embodied in the form he uses to describe it but he's still writing lyrically and freely as he does so, and not explaining or outlining. Virtuoso stuff.

interesting in wider ways than you'd be able to predict

Socrates lived in an exceedingly interesting time and place, spanning the Periclean rise of Athens to an imperial power, its collapse during the Peloponnesian War, and the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants. Also the cultural and intellectual ferment that accompanied all these events. An unusually well-documented, incredibly concentrated, and very archetypal historical period.

This is what I'm learning - the war and political conflict are incredibly interesting and obviously prescient, at any time I guess but also now.

I know a bit about Roman history as did Latin in school but don't really know Greek and this has a great narrative flair to it. Obviously a very different subject but it was recommended to me when seeking another history book as enjoyable as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Already there's so much I didn't know, Socrates hated the written word!

Socrates also had his failsons.

Started end of '26 as I ended, with a bunch of yoga books

Elisabeth Kadetsky - First There is a Mountain. A book where a Californian journo goes to yoga intensives in India given by yoga master BKS Iyengar (whose teachings I know well as I have been practicing his form of Hatha Yoga for ten years, and teacher training rigorously in it for the last three years). Its also about India, anorexia, processing family trauma while looking and being fascinated by a flawed man who had a tough upbringing in utter poverty in post-colonial India and went on to popularise Yoga in the West (while being overlooked at home). Its a properly written (very New Yorker style) book (she ran several interviews with him for it), and it gets uncomfortable as some of the people around his studio (potentially including Iyengar's son) are clearly highly sympathetic to the Indian far-right, and there's plenty on the feedback and tensions between East and West and the underlying post-colonial order. I think its pretty readable to a non-yoga student though you may want to look up some of the poses and bits of background on yoga philosophy to get more of a grasp.

Also finished:
Svātmārāma - Hatha Yoga Pradipika (notes by Krishnamacharya, tr. Mohan) - the 'best known' medieval Hatha Yoga book, with commentary by BKS Iyengar's Teacher
The Gheranda Samhita (tr. Mallinson) - another Medieval Hatha Yoga manual
Shadow Yoga, Chaya Yoga - Shandor Remete (former student of BKS Iyengar who went onto develop his own school of Hatha Yoga, to the extent I have started practicing some of it

At various stages:
BKS Iyengar - Astadala Yoga Mala (vol. 1, of 8) - collected interviews/writings
Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)
Swara Yoga Treatise - this is a sort of Tantra Yoga manual, can't make much of it, a lot of Vedic astrology and morals

you're mainlining the inner peace

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

Abel Ferrara’s autobio - A breezy, entertaining read. Messy, wild, full of great anecdotes.

Teoría del color ( J. Pawlik)

Started the first of Darwyn Cook’s “Parker” adaptations

you're mainlining the inner peace

― LocalGarda, Monday, 5 January 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Namaste

Most of my reading is through audiobooks. I recently very-much enjoyed David Szalay's Booker Prize-winning 'Flesh'.
So I was surprised to see a lot of people online didn't like it, including one or two people on ILX. Maybe it's because the narrator was extremely compelling, but frankly I thought it was fantastic.

Szalay employs a deliberately stark writing style to mirror the lead's taciturn character, it's an exploration of masculinity, sex, trauma, class and outsiderness. I saw a few people expressing frustration that the writer denies the reader any insight into the main character's inner life. I'd say this is what makes the book special. There is a world of meaning expressed in small-talk exchanges like: "How are you?" / "I'm okay." / "What do you mean 'Okay'?" / "I don't know...".

So yeah, bare on description, bare on emotional exposition, but somehow I could imagine every character and location extremely vividly. And despite nothing in the book having ever actually happened to me, every scenario and conversation felt relatable. Do readers really need their characters to be gregariously pouring their hearts out on every page? For me this was an enjoyable (if bleak) and quick read.

My first book this year was a novella: The Alienist by Machado de Assis. Not essential, not at all unpleasant either. The satire takes up the whole space and we are left with stock characters, some witticism, and a light atmosphere, when it seems like he could have fleshed it out and touched a bit more on the philosophical aspects of madness.

And now I'm in the first pages of Of Human Bondage, which is my first by Somerset Maugham. The length looks daunting, but it's the start of the year, so Godspeed.

I have also picked up Thus spoke Zarathustra at my parents for a first look in over 20Y. I thought I would just skim through, but I may end up rereading. At age 17 I was looking for deep truths, now I am curious to what extent this was a personal, therapeutic, self-psychanalysis book for Nietzsche, fed by bitterness or regret. Not that I would reduce it to this lens, but taking advantage that it's an open book lending itself to different interpretations.

Finished Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Deep House,’ which I expected would take me a few more days but which I simply had to complete this evening. It’s about his nearly 30 year relationship with another man, but also about borders, gay marriage, shifting cultural and sexual paradigms, and more. I enjoyed reading it!!

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table)

Gay Bar impressed me in 2022.

going to grab a copy of that one

reading new paltz, new paltz, first novel by erstwhile(?) ilxor(???) mike powell (if none of that turns out to be true, he's a colleague whose work i've admired for a decade-plus). it is totally fucking excellent

Erich Schiffmann - Yoga The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (another former student of BKS Iyengar, who is now an Indepedent teacher - a really cool hippie vibe)

i checked this out based on the title and your description and i may have to get a copy. good first page!

i used to go to yoga classes billed as "iyengar" style in d.c. the woman who taught them would scream at students and wasn't shy about let's say emphatically making adjustments by hand. she was unhinged lol.

Schiffmann is really nice. There are a few meditations in there (he is v much into meditation as well as yoga), and he has an interesting technique he relates to from a Hatha Yoga teacher (Joel Kramer, who has articles you can find on his site and are v interesting if you practice) that is about finding energy lines, whereas Iyengar Yoga is about alignment in the pose and specific sequencing.

The teaching can be v strict. My teacher was taught by Geeta Iyengar (the daughter, who sounds worse, in the Kadetsky book she relates how she was reduced to tears by her) and she is v tough but its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down. But its done in a yoga context so people walk out, hate it etc. Its not for everyone and will probably die out. But I probably wouldn't want to teach if it was for my teacher. There's a lot of fluff in yoga, as she says.

The younger Iyengar crowd are a different generation, and they are much nicer.

its basically a martial arts style approach of breaking you down

yeah this was the vibe. my take is - martial arts intensity without the rush of combat? lol no thanks.

on the other hand the difficulty and pain of actually adjusting skeletal alignment sort of calls for that approach. and people who want to be pushed like that are definitely around.

i remember her asking students to make the skin on their legs move. lol wtf? not to get on too much of a tangent.

Headstand and shouldderstand for 10+ minutes with deep backbends/forward bends/twists will probably be the nearest I get to combat lol

Yeah stuff around skin is a more advanced instruction and shouldn't be given to any beginning students tbh. In general classes I am going to ask you to engage your thigh muscles and lift up the kneecaps and so on. Those kinds of instructions should suffice and work at a more "gross", rather than subtle, level.

Gave the Lockwood a break, not because it's bad - not far enough in to make that judgement call yet - but because it's on my nightstand as my before getting up book, and having had quite a difficult beginning to the year feverish evocations of the pandemic is definitely not what I want my day starting with at this moment. So instead I've picked up the Dictionary Of British Cartoonists and Caricaturists, 1730-1980 by Mark Bryant and Simon Heneage. This was an impulse buy at the Cartoon Museum, seduced by both the book's format and the illustrations on the cover; only after purchasing did I think about how you don't read dictionaries and if I ever got into the position of looking up a British caricaturist surely I would now do so online. But hey, just because there's conventions doesn't mean you have to follow them and so I've started reading it the way one would do a novel. The entries are so short that I doubt any names will truly stick with me, but dry, mundane facts are a soothing start to my day - studied in Liverpool, served under regiment x in wwi/wwii (choose which one applies); lots of advertising work as well as contributions to The Tattler and a weekly strip in the Observer. That kind of thing. Perhaps if I finish it, even not retaining any names I'll have acquired a holistic knowledge of the field in these eras. Or perhaps I'll get bored with it in a couple of days and pick something else.

Interesting - do they limit themselves to newspaper editorial cartoonists like Cummings of the Express or Mac of the Mail, or are strip cartoonists and comic book artists included too? As far as I know there's still a gap in the market for a David Thomson-like Biographical Dictionary of British Cartoonists, where some sort of critical insight and a certain literary style would offer more than a Wiki entry.

A friend of mine wrote this extremely useful A-Z of British Newspaper Strips, complete with plenty of examples:

https://bookpalace.com/info_azbritnewsstrips

As with Woody Allen, you can make a case for the Early Funny Ones.

First half of Decline and Fall one of the v funniest English language novs imho - parts of it are exceptionally racist even for the time. It all moves like a rocket which Waugh can’t quite keep fizzing all the way to the end.

Ending of Handful of Dust adapted from an earlier Waugh short story called ‘The Man Liked Dickens’, often anthologised in horror story collections.

Man Who Liked Dickens

was unaware of this fact thanks

Feel like Other People (who are they?) like Brideshead and The Loved One but the real heads prefer his earlier work, as basically just stated upthread

Waugh is often funny but I think when I came to his work this factor had been overhyped - I expected something like Wodehouse and though he admired him a lot Waugh is not at all that.

They have little in common except the same bottomless fount of well-bred rotters to satirize -- and, in Waugh's case, admires.

I know them well

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. I bought this right before the 2024 election and was too depressed to dig in then, but I pulled it out and it's filling The Power Broker sized hole in my heart.

Read a nice chapbook by Kristen Gallagher, a conceptual poet working in a slightly more lyric mode.

Now I have started moving through ’Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine,’ a fascinating collection of essays and reports from Canadian experimental poets Steve McCaffery and bpNichol under the aegis of their Toronto Research Group. It’s poetics but chatty. Cool and kind of crazy. Enjoying myself.

Waugh seemed most interesting when dealing with a sense of wistfulness for Better Times, long before he and his characters were born. He deals with the downside of this, like the guy goes on that xpost rongway expedtion to Brazil, hoping to emulate the British explorers of yore. But the protagonist of Scoop is a country correspondent who limns the consolations of birds and shit, then gets mistaken for a war correspondent, is sent to Africa, where publisher of The Daily Beast is promoting conflict, for "Conservative" reasons---country mouse and his author are real conservatives in their ways, though author's caricatures cut right through much folly, and not taking as much time for racism per se (here mostly part of a flattening "what fules we all are in our own ways" effect) as I thought it might.
So Scoop and Decline and Fall are the best straight-through that I've read; yeah Handful of Dust goes downhill in second half (seems like Brideshead did the same, though the TV series was much better, read The Loved One for school and seems like it was ok? Liked that it was v. short, because brevity is the soul of wit, as he shoulda remembered sooner).

I always thought that Waugh seemed a bit off, tending to the jerkish, even aside from the racism, but eventually read some terrible things (not written by him) about his parents, and, while they can't be blamed for everything, it was like the "New Amsterdam" ep of Mad Men, when we meet off/jerkish Pete's parents: he could've been a lot worse!

"I always thought" that in reading *about* him, also some of his lesser writing, but was surprised when I got to the better of his early books, going in reverse order: sort of like reading stupid Johnny Ramone quotes and then getting to the good Ramones records.

Re-reading "At swim two birds" for the first time in over 20 years. Im enjoying it a lot more than I did back then. You just gotta go with the flow with this one, some hilarious writing

Paul Mason -"Postcapitalism' - its fine, even though it was written 10 years ago it feels weirdly dated now with the current looming threat of AI

Also listening to the audiobook of "Stoner"

the better of his early books, going in reverse order: sort of like reading stupid Johnny Ramone quotes and then getting to the good Ramones records.

t0m 3wing formerly of this parish just finished reading the entire dance to the music of time series - i think he liked it!

I spent the summer of 2007 reading it. Its effect is cumulative. I wasn't mad about it overall but I'm glad I finished it. Once in a while I'll meet someone and go, "Another Widmerpool."

A Dance To The Music Of Time is a great title if nothing else.

Learned from that John Gross book recently that Bennett wrote a guide to "developing taste" that features 350 books he deemed to be the best of English literature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Taste:_How_to_Form_It

Even in 1969 Gross was already finding much on there that no one knew about anymore; could be a fun, if insane, project to try to read 'em all.

William Godwin's Caleb Williams is a good pick: from pre-channeling Dickens to pre-channeling Kafka, or something like that. Haven't gotten far w Tristam Shandy---how's Humphrey Clinker?

The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati. Not the saddest book I've ever reda (that would be Foster by Claire Keega, then The Greatcoat) but quite affecting at the end.

HHhH by Laurent Binet. A weird one, it's the story of the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 but it starts long before the war, with the run up to the Munich Agreement, and it's interspersed with talking about how he wrote the book, his research, his quibbles about inventing scenes and dialogue and making characters out of real people, but he does it anyway, then regrets it. He'll describe a scene then in the next chapter says "oh but my research says it couldn't have happened like that" and it's all done in quite a jokey tone at odds with the subject matter. It is a page turner though.

Finished Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, which was fairly funny and good.

About two thirds into Jose Saramago - Death At Intervals. Though the sort of arch narration can be a bit annoying at times, it is generally really good and the concept is explored so brilliantly and forensically.

I like the underlying idea that death's mysteries and unpredictability are essential to so much of how we live, not just in the obvious ways but in all sorts of ways we don't really think about. Also the bureaucratic administration of death as we know it is so engrained in the state, obviously I suppose, but it's not often analysed.

I guess it's a book that makes a case for itself in that regard, not many ways we can easily examine this stuff, fiction is underrated as a tool for these kind of explorations.

John Lahr's Tennessee Williams bio and Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say.

I have confidence in Lahr on TW, because TW, but how's the Strout? Have only read Olive Kitteredge, a series of stories linked by title character, a tall, retired middle or high school math teacher who many remember as kind of scary, and she is brusque/fraught, good inner life, though fits into the Lake Woebegone older married couple groove, where all the men are getting leaky and all the women are getting harder toenails.

There are characters of different ages and proclivities, and one of the very best stories is Olive visiting her weird son, who finally comes out of his shell in NYC, which would shine this strange, shaking-up light even if we hadn't spent so much time in Crosby, Maine.

But you have to just go story by story, pick your faves on their own, for the most part (cumulative effect of son's gradual emergence is main novelistic effect). For inst, a couple under very-well-described and thought-out stress says the kind of shit to each other that you really, really can't take back, and would be great in a magazine or anthology, where you could make up your own continuation, but here, the couple shows up in subequent stories with no apparent aftereffects of this ill conversation. Oh well.
Overall, not sorry I read it, and may eventually check out follow-up, Olive Again or something like that

Those stories are cumulatively impressive, and the sequel is just as insightful. Strout's good at depicting the increasing silences of old age.

(Also, along with the Older Marrieds typecasting elements, some of the younger characters get into melodramatic set piece and/or plotty typing, bookended/upholstered by elders. But yeah, every story has its good parts, and the stronger ones support the weaker.)

I'm not a massive reader but I did read a bunch of Olive Kitteridges and the one based on the other town characters.
Enjoyed them more than I expected although they didn't always hit the mark for me, but extremely readable anyway.

The nuances of frustration and like vs love with their son quite moved me, especially in the second book when people start dying.

keep meaning to catch up here, with some other posts, unfinished business etc, but that all seems to get in the way of actually posting.

however, i just picked up Vingt minutes de silence... well, rewind, I saw Twenty Minutes of Silence, Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs (This Little Art - her very good book on translation) recommended somewhere - it's just come out in Fitzcarraldo. The brief description caused my divining rod to twitch (quiet at the back etc), so I picked it up, started and was hemming and hawing a bit, and realised 'oh wait, this is in French, I am very slowly and badly learning French, I should read it in French - this sing song looping repetition feels like it might not be a bad learning aide' so I got a copy.

arrived today, and started on it, and it was like a bolt of electricity shot up my spine. *this is the stuff* - a prose poem of sorts, a policier of sorts. reality is constructed, layered, looped and on a sentence by sentence level assessed, reversed. you get the sense of things establishing themselves, but that the need to know - there is a crime, the facts need to be established - the need to know is running up against reality, or The Nature of Things, ordering itself, not making itself available, and that the rules that govern the protean state of facts, of meaning and relation are poetic rules, facile rhyming and chiming, cadences of iteration and reiteration like waves. sentences themselves do not feel assured things, but are falling apart, held together more by the sound of things than the grammar of any logic.

establishing sentences, to establish the world, to establish... the atmosphere, facts, questions and solutions (to take the chapter titles - I've left out 'anxiety')... to establish the matter of the novel, is picked out and built up from a blank canvas. so it's not so much a whodunnit, as what does it mean to establish a world - a written, a read world - where such things as justice, culpability, grief, guilt have a place. what are the elements?

it reminded me in its opening passages of baudelaire slightly, the baudelaire of chanson d'après-midi - nursery rhyme poems of accusation and guilt, conversational . the opening 'scene' - of the Paris train, departing the station with the dead body of the father in it - is a marvel of impressionistic images, a picture of endings - the end of the world as much as anything else, it feels.

it's hard to grab snippets because some of the force is in the repetitive, contradictory ebb and flow.

Pourquoi le gris autour devient-il plus foncé ?
Je n'en sais rien.
Peut-être, est-ce parce que tu as pleuré ?
Sèche tes larmes, viens rentrons.
Non, Elle préfère pleurer. Ils sont tous pareils, attachés à ce qui les blesse, liés à l'émotion jusqu'à en crever.
C'est la première fois de sa vie qu'ellee voit des monter dans un car.
Et le klaxon pour appeler
pour appeler
pour appeler les retardataires.
Appels, adieux, rires, tintamarre.

(that's a lovely last line - there's a lightness and a playfulness to it all, which is actually where the fun of reading it comes from)

translated by Kate Briggs
The surrounding grey – why is it growing darker?
I've no idea.
Is it because you cried?
Dry your tears now, come along, let's go home.
No. She'd rather cry. They're all the same: attached to what hurts them, strangled by emotion.
She has never seen anyone board a coach before, it's the first time in her life.
And here's the horn
to summon
to summon the late passengers.
Shouts, final goodbyes, laughter, commotion.

Briggs has given herself a hell of a job translating this - that last line is fine for instance, but has none of that tap-tap of 'tintamarre' reflecting adieux and rire just before, and playing nicely against the p of Appels at the beginning. Really 'train coach' would have been less ambiguous, or 'carriage'? tho that would still have been ambiguous, but she's conserving the weight of the line, appropriately enough, as that's partly what's being played with in the story. (it seems to me, anyway).

it's been really interesting reading - attempting to read - literary french, because i have absolutely no feel for what good is, as I do reasonably easily in english. There's Michon's careful building up of complexity across paragraphs, and his complicated dependencies. There's Marie Chaix's Les lauriers du lac de Constance, with her pinpoint precision and variation of grammatical tense, and wonderful ability to convey a lot extremely economically, while retaining a personality of narrative. Or there's the absolute demote pagaille of Jacques Yonnet in Rue des Maléfices. And there's this.

It's a lot of fun having to construct not just meaning but a sense of style - how is it that you put together meaning - out of the process of reading.

*demotic

incidentally. fitzcarraldo - printed the title page three times in differently sized font, and also the opening section title three times. i thought maybe it signified? (tho what who could say). but no. it’s not in the original. weird and sloppy.

i love the sound of this!

Reading a monograph on the work of painter Henry Scott Tuke, most famous for his paintings of nude male youths staring out to sea. very much my shit.

Reading Flaubert's Salammbo because it's been on my list for a while and the author/narrator of the last book I read (HHhH) sang its praises. The first chapter is like a fever dream - what is going on? In the second chapter it's clear historical accuracy is not a major concern:

The Greeks ranged their tents of skin in parallel lines; the Iberians placed their canvas pavilions in a circle; the Gauls made themselves huts of planks; the Libyans cabins of dry stones, while the Negroes with their nails hollowed out trenches in the sand to sleep in.

Citation needed. But who cares, there are amazing images here - the avenue of crucified lions, the fat general who drinks "a ptisan made of the ashes of a weasel and asparagus boiled in vinegar from a silver cup handed to him by a slave".

Eh, that's a typical Sat night for me.

Highly recommend Druillet's Salammbo comic strip, which 'reimagines' the Flaubert as a psychedelic space opera told on a typically vast scale.

Ok wow. I was already picturing in a Villeneuve Dune style so I'm not that surprised someone already went there. I'll read that in full afterwards.

xp lol

I discovered Irène Némirovsky yesterday. I'm reading Irène Némirovsky.

er, The Courilof Affair.

Irène Némirovsky by Irène Némirovsky seemed more interesting!

OTM. Thought it was some kind of Borges tribute.

"Saint-Just, Colleague of Robespierre" by Eugene Newton Curtis.

Seems to be about the only biography of Saint-Just in English? It's from 1935, hence the wonderfully prosaic title. As ever, my eyes tend to glaze over when presented with pages on troop deployments and manoeuvres. Anyway, we're coming up to Thermidor, it'll soon be over.

I finished The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins, last night. It was very good in its oddball way. I say oddball because it is a pastiche of crime story, romance, pseudo-science, gothic fabulism, adventure tale, drawing room comedy, and social satire, whose only object from start to finish is to keep you reading. The titular gemstone is built up to grand dimensions in the first 80 or 100 pages, then all but disappears from the story for the remainder of the novel. But somehow it all works and I read it to the end.

The primary explanation for how drawn out and wandering it is (at 500 pages!) is that it was written, much like Dickens, Dumas, or Trollope, to be read as a serialized story, week after week, and if the story caught on with the readership, then it was in the interest of the publication and the author to milk it for as long as possible. The nearest modern equivalent would be the endless soap operas on television. Tune in tomorrow!

I finished Hermann Hesse's "Gertrude." Why I have this compulsion to keep reading Hesse, I don't exactly know. Partly it's the beautiful Milton Glaser artwork that graces the covers of these '70s FSG paperbacks I keep finding at Half Price Books. And because because he's easy to read, and he's flawed in interesting ways, and because I'm sympathetic to the themes of friendship and spiritual awakening that recur in his books. I didn't find "Gertrude" to be all that great, it felt rather rushed and ultimately scant, narratively and philosophically. But it did have some nice moments and I can't say I regret spending two evenings with it.

Then I read "Lenz," the short story (or "fragment") by Georg Büchner. Was made aware of it via Deleuze and Guatarri in Anti-Oedipus, stumbled across a collection of GB's works a few weeks later and took a chance. It's about a writer and contemporary of Goethe who experiences a mental health crisis in the forest. In its preoccupation with walking around in nature and feeling profound and often turbulent emotions as a result of this walking and this nature, it struck me as very German. I was particularly pleased by this line, which I later read is one of the more celebrated sentences in the work: "He felt no fatigue, but at times he was irritated that he could not walk on his head."

"The Moonstone" sounds interesting. I enjoyed a collection of Collins's shorter suspense stories. He seems like a versatile author. I finally finished the Knausgaard "My Struggle Book 6". The long essay interlude in the middle kind of kills the momentum. The bio of Hitler was fine, but the parts where he uses his summarizing of Hamsun and Celan as a springboard into sub-Zizekian musings on society, art and meaning are best skimmed quickly. It does pick up steam again at the very end. For all his gifts as a writer and despite the fact that he focuses obsessively on his own inner experience, I feel like Knausgaard doesn't really have a lot of self-awareness. Even after reading all six volumes, I'm not really sure I know what he would be be like in social situations. After a while, you start to suspect that there is a reason why so many other characters act strangely around him, which is the hidden variable in all these interactions, Knausgaard himself.

Now I'm reading "Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Jules Verne, an enjoyable and well-told adventure story.

Finished the book about Tuke, moved on to ‘A definitive history of five or six years on the lower east side’ which is not really by David Wojnarowicz, but about him. Somehow had never read this, my friend sold me a copy for next to nothing.

I am also reading a lot of Hopkins, which is of course always a pleasure.

i was slowly reading the moonstone between other things when my ereader broke and i lost the bookmark. never went back and finished it.

I'm just dabbling in various books for now. First, I sampled The Age of Innocence, Wharton. I'll get back to it later, but I'm about to spend two weeks camping and this didn't feel right for that trip.

Last night I dipped into Mark Twain's best-selling debut, The Innocents Abroad. It's been decades since I last read it, but he flexes all the muscles that will make him famous, deftly blending comic storytelling and descriptive prose in the romanticizing vein that mid-nineteenth century audiences expected, even demanded. When compared to his contemporaries, Twain's descriptive prose is unusually restrained, disciplined and clean. The man could write. As I read about 50 pages, I could see why the book was an overnight sensation.

ledge apparently Flaubert read something like 80 books of background for his research on Salammbo. He apparently took a lot of pride in the accuracy of the detail.

there's uh.. somebody.. who has done a reading in podcast form, one episode per chapter and there's a bonus episode at the end that interviews the Flaubert specialist from King's College London about the book

https://shows.acast.com/elireads/episodes/welcome-

bah

https://shows.acast.com/elireads

there's uh.. somebody..

:) nice one, I'll check it out.

Good to know that all the obscure and archaic words are deliberate, I was thinking of kvetching on the translation thread.