Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?

xyzzzz__, I could go up to the stacks to get it, but I'm wondering if you might want to post something instead as you are reading, which I think is most of the fun -- holding on to it, so to speak.

I checked out The Wild Duck by Ibsen, Correction by Bernhard, and Senselessness by Castellanos Moya and will probably read them in that order. But with Ibsen, I reverted to my own Bantam paperback because I started to get distracted by the marginalia and underlining in the Michael Meyer translation from the library.

Thanks Alfred, I suspect HJ is really up my alley. I wasn't connecting with The Bostonians, but in large part I just didn't have time to keep up with it, and it was due back at the library so I quit. Life is more conducive to novel-reading lately so I want to give him another try.

finished rory stewart. between that & the anand gopal, that's enough afghanistan for the immediate future, I think. tobias jones' "the dark heart of italy" next.

youn - finished and gave it back to my library the next day. I loved the last few pages, with its writing around decay of beauty. Solstad is not as relentlessly negative as Bernhard - who is doing it as performance, its that v particular voice of his. Correction was my first read by him.

I am reading a collection by Rilke - poems from all periods (tr. Steven Mitchell) which also has excerpts of the more 'poetic' passages of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Not sure what I think of doing so - suppose its as worthwhile a way of coming across that book.

I haven't read much James - tried some of his longer novels & bogged down in them quite quickly - but thought The Turn of the Screw was top-notch.

I always say start with the early novels first.

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power by Timothy Tyson

I became curious about Williams recently while reading another civil rights-era history. So far I've only read as far as his WW2-era military service:

His contempt for white authority soon earned him a three-month sentence in the stockade for insubordination; at the hearing, Williams said, 'I told them that I was black, and that prison did not scare me because black men are born in prison. All they could do was put me in a smaller prison.'"

(Sorry for fixing on the obvious pull-quote, even if it had become justly famous)

Hadot - The Veil of Isis

On three words of Heraclitus usually translated, "Nature loves to hide," which gets interpreted in different ways down through the ages. I'm trying to read in French and relieved to find that this is pretty clear and straightforward.

keep meaning to read that but

I think you would like it. It strikes me as a really cool perspective on the history of philosophy, or a cool choice of aphorism to serve as kernel to build a synoptic history around.

He's adding to my shame at how much I've neglected the ancients. I only read the Symposium for the first time a few weeks ago. Turns out it's really great.

i've read a lot of him, studied 'what is ancient philosophy?' pretty closely even - just haven't made the time

all of plato is really great! that's why he's plato

oh i like hadot
big influence on late foucault (re ancient philosophy as way of life/ care of the self/ askesis)

picked up #2 in the elena ferrante trilogy to read in cape cod next week B-)

The White Album - Joan Didion. This is fantastic. The alignment of personal psychology and exploration to the geist of the age is exact - tone, insight, humour make reading this feel very direct, very clear-sighted. I loved her observation about the San Francisco State College revolutionary actions:

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh could have gotten it down exactly right: Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people involved in odd games.

industrious self-delusion - it's a phrase that manages to be illuminating about Waugh, illuminating about her subject, and potentially illuminating for future ages such as ours (in countries like the UK anyway), where that very phrase seems like a characterising and besetting vice.

Enjoyed her piece Holy Water - about the water logistics and politics of the Western States - so much, that I'm going to sit down and watch Chinatown right now. My enjoyment is slightly unexpected (presumably harbouring some filthy unexamined prejudice), but stronger for that.

just started the dalkey archive's european fiction 2015 - a collection of short stories. the first two i read at random both had severed penises in them.

i have already abandoned a few due to them being twee magic realism shite, but there was a good one from france about a man who lives in an apartment block sending severed limbs and threatening notes to the residents association.

I first thought severed limbs would be sufficient threat, but then again he prob wanted to be precise, which is always helpful, or meant to be. Title, author?

Sjon: The Whispering Muse -- Icelandic fish expert/obsessive goes on ride to Turkey on a freighter ship; one of the crew is a former Argonaut (as in the golden fleece Argonauts, not the vintage kids radio show)

i got bored of the murray leinster book i was reading so i started reading john le carre's the night manager because i've never read any of his books! but i'm kinda not into that one either. i kept putting it down and then when i picked it up again i forgot everyone's names and who the flashback anecdotes were about. but i've always wanted to read him. i have a bunch of his later hardcovers. i dunno, guess i'm feeling a little uninspired at the moment. (so now i'm finishing the leinster out of a sense of duty...)

such a boring post. sorry. you guys read cool fancy books. i like the idea of having internet friends who read cool fancy books.

With le Carre I'd start with either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or else Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- if they don't do it for you, I'd doubt the others will. And I tend to enjoy them more as novels about amoral office politics where lives hang on the decisions being made, rather than just amounts of toner that gets ordered, instead of as spy novels. Does that make any sense?

Thomas King, The Back of the Turtle

I finished everything in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 and Vol. 2A. Highlights were Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season". I read a few from Vol. 2B but I'm taking a break from it.

also read Erik Davis - 33 ⅓: Led Zeppelin IV (2005). Some funny bits from Thomas Friend's crazy book. Didn't care about the journey of "Percy".

currently reading:
2015 Hugo nominees. "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" may be the worst thing I have ever read.
Thomas Harris - Red Dragon. Because I like the TV show. Low reading grade level -- feels like the only 3-syllable words in the book are "psychopath" and "cannibal".

Are those Hugo nominees the right-wing misogynistic illiterate ones?

the gap between 'red dragon' and 'silence of the lambs' is really remarkable, bookwise

I've only read the second--is it the better or the worse?

xp Right wing and illiterate, yes. Of the ones in the bloc I read, only "Totaled" had female characters, and that one's actually OK.

dow - it's by nicolas bouyssi and it's called an unexpected return

could be in another collection of his own but i read it in this: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/best-european-fiction-2015/

jm i think 'silence' is p close to being a Great Popular Novel, which i think is a difficult thing to do; red dragon is an awkward misfire

Silence is the Harris to start with, for sure. Although the serial killer seemed blurry; can see how Hannibal upstaged him in a lot of reviews, and certainly on screen---but the descriptions from Clarice's point of view have stayed with me more than any other element. When she's examining/contemplating the body of a dead girl, visiting her house (a tall, narrow wooden house near a canal? Or am I putting in a house from somewhere else? The one I picture seems to fit). In her room, reading it like she reads her memories, knowing about that little secret drawer in the valued dime store case, where the snapshots will be. The focus of such scenes and others, with morbidity something to be duly noted, while learning to read and recognize the killer from/in what he's left behind, in his work. Recognizing the kind of girls he chooses, she recognizes the changes he makes. Hannibal edits Clarice with relish, too---not his absolute fave, but he'll take what he can get.
Thinking about Great Novels also as crime fiction, the Dusty I've been trying to catch up with, the restored Native Son I'm reading now.

Thus Were Their Faces, the NYRB collection of Silvina Ocampo's short stories

I'm reading 'The Dispossessed' by UKLG which evidently has a bit of a cult following around these parts, but is the first I've read by her. Pretty great so far.

It took me half a minute of puzzlement to suss that UKLG was Ursula K. LeGuin.

Lately I've been reading Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, Gertrude Stein's Ida, which is charming and puzzling but doesn't capture the uncanniness of American spectacle quite as vividly as Everybody's Autobiography, Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, which is satisfyingly acerbic about the callousness and hypocrisy of the gentry but seems a little simplistic next to Charlotte's Vilette (though most bildungsromane would), Kim Hyesoon's book of poems Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, which is by turns melancholy and feral, and William Gibson's The Peripheral, which as of halfway through has some interesting worldbuilding but surprisingly flat prose so far, though I'll reserve judgment on it for now.

Thanks, LocalGuardia, I'll check that out (publisher's page is somewhat worrying: Best European Fiction brings new names and new work to an international audience, at a time when the United States and Britain are seeing a dearth of translated texts. Makes me wonder what I'm missing.)
I need to check out Ocampo and Link too.

Intrigued by review of this new collection:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/mapping-the-wander-lines-the-quiet-revelations-of-fernand-deligny
Beginning in the 1950s, Deligny conducted a series of collectively run residential programs — he called them “attempts” (or tentatives, in French) — for children and adolescents with autism and other disabilities who would have otherwise spent their lives institutionalized in state-run psychiatric asylums. After settling outside of Monoblet in the shadow of the Cévennes Mountains in southern France, Deligny and his collaborators developed novel methods for living and working with young people determined to be “outside of speech” (hors de parole).

Militantly opposed to institutions of every kind — he occasionally referred to his small group as living like a band of nonlethal guerillas — Deligny was critical of the dominant psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and positivist educational doctrines of the time. He rejected the view that autism and cognitive disability were pathological deviations from a preexisting norm. He did not try to force the mostly nonspeaking autistics who came to live with them to conform to standards of speech. Instead, Deligny and his collaborators were “in search of a mode of being that allowed them to exist even if that meant changing our own mode.” They sought to develop “a practice that would exclude from the outset interpretations referring to some code” — anticipating, by several decades, some of the central tenets of the neurodiversity and autistic self-advocacy movements: “We did not take the children’s ways of being as scrambled, coded messages addressed to us.”
(He traced the paths of autistic youths in daily treks, which influenced his ideas about the development of language, in his own writing and in history (staying away from neurobiology), and the physical movements behind language, thence to working with Truffault and Marker, for inst., as well as making his own films, now on DVD.)
Like a spider’s web, a network is always in formation for Deligny, always in the midst of being built and maintained in compositional responsiveness to its environment. It is a precarious enterprise, in perpetual danger of either falling apart or, alternatively, rigidifying into an institution. (It is not surprising, given all of this, that Deligny was an important influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s later elaboration of the rhizome.)
Sorry, this too, since it's ILB after all:
His writerly voice is hard to locate genre-wise, skirting between philosophy and poetry, anthropological observation and quasi-prophetic (if emphatically secular) aphorism. Deligny seems to have approached the practice of writing with the same spirit of open-ended, improvisatory experimentation that characterized his various attempts at radically anti-institutional communal living...
Yet patient readers will find this book shimmering with quiet revelations. In place of orderly, coherent interpretive systems, Deligny attunes his reader to the lower frequencies of a life lived on the margins. His essays evoke the austere desert terrain of the Cévennes Mountains where he and his collaborators spent much of their time living in relative isolation; his deeply impressionistic writing surveys this landscape for its minor stirrings, and strives to imagine new arrangements of common life.
Not a s spoiler, there's lots more.

patient readers will find this book shimmering with quiet revelations

it's hard to respect the critical opinion of someone who thinks it is good idea to describe revelations as 'shimmering'.

he only did it once

but he read it back to himself approvingly several times before he published it

Reminds of something else here: updike novels poll

I left in a little context but mainly before and after the system bump, especially before.

p hard to respect the reading comp level of someone who thinks in that sentence the adjective 'shimmering' modifies 'revelations' ~

shimmering is not used as an adjective there, bucko

oh, bloody hell! look what you made me go and do.

look, thomp, if you want to defend the use of 'shimmering' in that context, please go ahead and defend it on its merits. I'd be delighted to hear some positive words about the excellence of that word choice. alternatively we could start slanging on another about the grammatical nuances of what is an adjective, what is an adjectival, what modifies what and whether books shimmer or revelations shimmer.

your choice, but I may not come along for that ride.

https://screen.yahoo.com/shimmer-floor-wax-000000185.html

does sound interesting in a way that feels like i might not get to it soon. but psychology-within-landscape is an appealing subject to me and reading Stevenson made the Cévennes a place of permanent interest.

fwiw shimmering seems ok here? fits with both strange effects of book about psychological borderlands and the "austere desert" setting.

am reading Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen by Elizabeth David - a book my mum has been recommending i read for long time. very good of course, full of great anecdotes from the history of eating and cooking and many delightful never-going-to-do-that recipes:

We had for dinner, a fine Cod's Head and Shoulders, boiled, and Oyster Sauce, Peas Soup, Ham and 2 boiled chicken, and a fine Saddle of Mutton roastef, Potatoes, Colli-Flower-Brocoli, and Cucumber. 2nd Course, a rost Duck, Maccaroni, a sweet batter Pudding, & Currant Jelly, Blamange, and Raspberry Puffs. Desert, Oranges, Almonds & Raisins, Nutts, & dried Apples, Beefans. Port & Sherry Wines, Porter, strong Beer & small. After Coffee & Tea, we got to Cards...

snap presumably.

To revert back to what I am reading. Not fifteen minutes ago I finished The Bostonians. It definitely did not shimmer with revelations. It ended grotesquely, as befit the grotesque nature of the main characters. I feel a bit resentful, tbh, at my having trusted Mr. James to have been in possession of some insights worth the expenditure of so many words, which trust he thoroughly failed to justify.

Fizzles: I have mixed feelings about Didion which I believe were discussed (with others') on the Joan Didion thread here, years ago. That thread might interest you.

finished Colm Toibin, ON ELIZABETH BISHOP. Not brilliant, mainly adequate to quite good. Just a couple of daft clangers. A bit too much Toibin. But quite a good sense of a world of the poetry and life, and it picks up human interest when he really goes into the Bishop-Lowell relations. The book also ends very well indeed.

Now I start his novel NORA WEBSTER.

thanks pf - will check out the thread.

I'm on the final stretch of A Brief History of Seven Killings, and it's really picking up in the last 150 or so pages. The middle was a slog, which sort of fits the mood and subject matter.

Does ILB like Ali Smith? I bought The Accidental and How to Be Both on a recommendation, just started digging into the former.

Agree about Seven Killings being a bit of a slog but in the end the effort was well worth it.

Finished Zacahary Leader's The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 and while I sympathize with the criticism that it was too long, I gobbled it up. Even the early days were fascinating and I usually get bored by childhood tales, as important as they are in the developmental scheme. Russian village life in the late 19th century is so far removed from 20th century America that it's amazing to contemplate those immigrants' experience. (This is my wife's family background too, so that helps. Thought about my late father-in-law and his parents while reading about the Bellow clan). It also helps that I'm a fan of Bellow's novels though I sympathize with anybody who finds him windy and self-involved. Per Leader, Saul really struggled to make his mark pre: Augie March and developed a king-size chip on his shoulder in the process. Utter lack of support, emotional and otherwise, from his family didn't help. Leader resists the urge to simplistically treat the novels as directly sourced from Bellow's life yet deftly explicates the complex autobiographical roots of virtually everything he wrote. Two concluding thoughts: Saul was cruelly demanding of his wives yet maintained a flexible let's say concept of monogamy. It's a 50's guy thing I guess? And not only was he thin-skinned to a fault, a critic-baiter and academic-hater (and later a teacher!), Bellow also surrounded himself with sycophantic sidekicks and seemed pretty delusional about them until he got fucked over. File under fiction writer not necessarily the best judge of character (including his own) in real life.