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

I finished the Merton book about a week ago and had several thoughts about it to share here. Then I went camping, read 3/4 of another book and have lost the thread of what I would have written about Merton, other than to note that his book did fit well with the officially anti-Communist sentiments of the Church that was a Big Deal in the USA at the time. That probably gave it a bit of a push in its popularity.

The other book, of which I have read about 85%, is a historical novel by Don Berry, a local Oregonian author. It was published in 1960 and is called Trask. The title character was a fur trapper and the other characters are nearly all native Americans. It is set in 1848 on the north Oregon coast, which is very thinly settled by whites, mostly traders and a few ex-trappers like Trask. The natives outnumber them considerably. The California gold rush has not yet loosed its tidal wave of change.

For a book written about native Americans in an era when simple-minded TV westerns had been riding high for almost a decade, it is carefully researched and quite respectful. Like almost any historical novel, it is highly colored, plays up the drama and romance at the expense of realism, and the author is careful to give the reader both heroes and villains. These are not flaws in the novel so much as requirements of the genre. It's a pretty good story so far and it does the basic job of bringing the time and place alive. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

Peter Parker's Isherwood bio.

anna kavan: eagle's nest

Time for some Summer genre reading: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles by Kim Newman.

just started reading John Crowley's Little, Big. it's kind of a bumpy read not helped by the fact the text on the page is so tiny

Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs -- which rather startlingly breaks the series formula by having the book written by Maigret in the first person, complaining about all the mistakes, continuity glitches and simplifications of police process by Simenon in all the other books

I didn't read Borges after all - have instead spent whole week reading Charles Townshend's EASTER 1916. Riveting.

Finished The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. Once you look past the weird conceit played deadpan, it's not so secretly a sympathetic social-realist novel about the downwardly-mobile American male, Southern edition. Highly recommended.

Started The Transformation of the World by Jurgen Osterhammel. Should keep me busy for a while.

Great run this summer. The first two books are detective novels set ca. 1972 Lao, in the Alexander McCall Smith tradition but with sharper humor, more supernatural elements, and heaps of cynicism. The author is a fascinating fellow.

The Coroner's Lunch (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #1), Thirty-Three Teeth (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #2) by (Colin Coterell),
Baba Dunja's Last Love (Alina Brodsky)
Lincoln at the Bardo (Georfe Saunders)
The Sympathesizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
Uncle Scrooge Vol. 5 and 6: The Richest Duck in the World and Universal Solvant, (Don Rosa)
KRAZY: George Herriman, a Life in Black and (Michael Tisserand)

Just starting Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project. I needed a non-fiction break, preferably some vaguely popular-science-y stuff, pitched at a middlebrow level. This one looks interesting and Lewis's other books have never let me down, yet.

i bought the herriman bio a few months ago but haven't given it a shot yet. it got pretty solid reviews i think.

i'm working through The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by the VanderMeers. it has lots of translated stories that aren't well known, but unfortunately most of them aren't great. love the h.g. wells story at the start -- i need to read more of his short works.

The whole health care debacle has made me finish Robert Caro's Means of Ascent after having left it for about a year, and now I've just begun Master of the Senate.

Also, I'm reading Jay Leyda's Kino, on Soviet Cinema, and Maxim Gorky's Mother, because I'm going to write a bit about Mark Donskoy later, who made a lot of films related to Gorky.

I'm 180 pages into the Michael Lewis book and so far it reads like a high-quality, book-length People magazine article. The scientific content could be inscribed on a paper napkin.

The Big Book of SF is very uneven, and incl. some too familiar---trying to balance it for noobs and old hands---but though I'm the latter, there are many I'd never heard of---didn't know WEB DuBoise wrote fiction, much less SF--and his vision goes well with the excellent Wells catastrophic panorama. Some better translations later on.
Aimless, have you read Oakley Hall's Westerns?

W.E.B. Du Bois, that should be (respect).

Fleur Jaeggy: I am the Brother of XX -- depressing little stories
Svetlana Alexievich: Boys in Zinc -- depressing reportage of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan

Is Boys in Zinc an old book? There's a spoonfed hybrid track of the same name and I'm curious which came first?

Originally published very late 1980s or early 1990s (as 'Zincy Boys'), and translated into English in 1993; this is a new translation from this year

rex warner: the aerodrome (crumbling wwii era penguin which is probably going to fall to pieces by the time i'm finished)

Reading a Francoise Sagan novel (Sunlight on Cold Water) which is pretty hilarious in its 60s Frenchness. Gilles is an unfeasibly handsome journalist who has an apartment on the Left Bank where he lives with his girlfriend Eloise, a model for a fashion house. But he's filled with an unnameable ennui, and he's lost interest in life and even in sex with his girlfriend. He gets some pills from his doctor then goes off to see a former girlfriend, who is much older at 48, but luckily is still "physically superb". Unfortunately she's just off to see her 19 year old toy boy so is not up for sex, but she says she'll "send Veronique round". Veronique is "superb looking and one of the most versatile women I know. That'll take your mind off things". But Gilles, still suffering from his anomie, doesn't feel like sex with Veronique so he goes off to a jazz club where he gets into a fight with a colleague. Later, he goes to the country, where he beds a married woman, also physically superb. But still filled with anomie etc etc, he can't get it up. All this and I'm only on page 44!

Liked The Aerodrome. it keeps slipping out of print and then being rediscovered. Current UK edition has a weird lenticular cover thing going on.

Slow summer, so far:

Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Janet Malcolm - Reading Chekhov
Allen Ginsberg - Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems
Aime Cesaire - Return to my Native Land

Reading The Long Goodbye, which is even better than I was expecting, Roth's The Ghost Writer (as recommended on ILB), Tana French's Secret Place, and my usual summer treat to myself, a bunch of Star Trek novels - this year Peter David's New Frontier series.

I am glad to say the scientific content of The Undoing Project did pick up its pace in the latter part of the book, although as a long time observer of humans and their behavior, it is unclear to me why the work of these Nobel Laureates was deemed so startling. Their insights seem bland enough to me, but I guess what set them apart was their ability to design tests and gather data to substantiate what should have been fairly obvious to begin with.

I haven't read The Undoing Project, but if you're interested in more of the scientific content, you might like Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. On one level I agree that it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that humans are frequently irrational, however, in this book he goes into more depth on specific, repeatable, testable ways that people are prone to errors of logic and estimation. I thought it was fairly interesting, though not necessarily mind-blowing.

re the aerodrome, beneath the allegory of a quasi-fascist/technocratic takeover found the plot (& prose) oddly old fashioned like it could have been lifted straight from a nineteenth century sensation novel of familial intrigue ala wilkie collins. also read his earlier novel the professor, again about an attempted fascist coup d'état this time in an unnamed central european country. not very successful mix of farce & earnest warning about the precarious state of liberal democracy.

now reading blackout in gretley, a breezy jb priestley espionage thriller set in a grim northern industrial town.

i read the aerodrome a few months ago too. otm that it felt extremely old-fashioned, weirdly committed to an extremely neat and squared-away family-drama structure that in the end reduced to soap opera. but i found myself recommending it (w tiresome caveats) to more or less everybody i talk to; i've already given away my (weird lenticular) copy. rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist.

I finished A Lover's Discourse last night. I can plausibly claim to be still reading Moby-Dick and Alison Weir's The Wars of the Roses. Sometime soon I'm likely to open Dublin Murder Squad 3 and/or Neapolitan Novels 2

"rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist"

what is a work by a fascist that does this? I want to read such a thing.

Marinetti's manifestos!

You could also probably detect a latent fascism in more canonical conservative and reactionary writers who were contemporaneous with different kinds of fascism and whose works' emotional/sexual resonance can be said to express its appeal.

Read and enjoyed Bartleby and Co. and bought a copy of The Savage Detectives which is glaring at me from one of my shelves, so hopefully I will get around to it soon. I do enjoy how allusive Bolano and Vila Matas are as they've definitely exposed me to lots of Latin American novelists and poets whose work I don't think I would have necessarily otherwise found.

In addition to these, I'm also still reading Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence and I also began Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, as well, which I posted about on its own thread.

(speaking of fascists) rereading wyndham lewis's the vulgar streak: not one of his better works of fiction but i do remember it had some interesting things to say about class & the construction of self.

that priestley thriller was quite good and i liked that it had an explicitly leftist slant to it (seem to recall he was quite popular in the soviet bloc?) also probably the only one of his novels to inspire a nuggets era garage track

Great track, no lime, I'm listening again now---"the universe is permeated with the odor of kerosene" is the best opening line I've found in a while, and the song lives up to it.
DH Lawrence was something of a pagan folk metal fascist, wasn't he? Wouldn't have approved of Mussolini making the trains run on time.

what is a work by a fascist that does this? I want to read such a thing.

I don't know if he was a fascist but Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is often accused of glorifying fascism.

he was pretty much on the border where libertarians and fascists meet by the end

and incest . . . mongers

plus nipples going 'spung'

Three weeks of holidays in Japan gave me ample time to read
finished a few Eric ambler books, quite entertaining. Will def read some more if I happen upon them in the future.
Dave Hutchinson - Europe in autumn : picked it up based on someone recommending it here. Had a great time, was a bit surprised by the way it ends but am looking forward to read the rest. So thanks whoever it was that mentioned it here.
Don Winslow - the cartel : i really dislike the way it's written, but I kept reading anyways. Not very good tbh but it made me want to read a good non-fiction book about the war on drugs, Mexico the USA and cartels if anyone has a recommendation. My knowledge of all this is quite limited yet enough to recognize references in the novel to actual events and people and now I really want to read up in detail about this horrible situation.
Jerome K. Jerome - three men in a boat : read this quite quickly, was def good for a few laughs
Nakamura Fuminori - the thief : about a pickpocket in Tokyo. The fact I read it while in Tokyo made me enjoy it just a little bit more as I recognized the subway stations and places mentioned in here. The plot is not that great but I found the scenes where he described picking pockets quite thrilling.

I have raved about Dave Hutchinson, so I will take the credit

The Big Book of SF is very uneven, and incl. some too familiar---trying to balance it for noobs and old hands---but though I'm the latter, there are many I'd never heard of---didn't know WEB DuBoise wrote fiction, much less SF--and his vision goes well with the excellent Wells catastrophic panorama. Some better translations later on.
Aimless, have you read Oakley Hall's Westerns?

― dow, Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:42 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

W.E.B. Du Bois, that should be (respect).

― dow, Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:44 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm trying to think where the subject of Sci Fi by W.E.B. du Bois came up recently. Was it natalie Mitchell's interview in The Wire or something.
Don't think I'd heard about it before a couple of weeks ago.

but keep having the name Webby du Bois and his brother Shooby running through my head.

Think I have the Souls of Black Folk around somewhere still waiting to be read after at least a couple of years.

I just picked up a copy of Manahttan Transfer by JOhn Dos Passos yesterday and read the first chapter last night.

Susan Sontag On Photography is my bathroom book

& The No-Nonsense Guide to Fair Trade is currently my transport book but I think I'll finish it shortly. Then move on to Gunter Grasse's Tin Drum.

now reading blackout in gretley, a breezy jb priestley espionage thriller set in a grim northern industrial town.

― no lime tangier, Monday, July 31, 2017 8:52 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Does that relate at all to the Gonn track about not realising the protagonist is wearing sunglasses? Though I thought that Was Blackout OF Gretely

I missed the new thread!

Re-read House of Leaves, which I acknowledge is a mess, but even second time around it had a profound effect on me. It's the evocation of the uncanny, the limitless potential of the house (the book), the pathos of it. It seems to me to be a commentary on the limits of analysis and hermeneutics - of texts, of place, of the self - and also an exploration of depression and trauma. It's extraordinary and maddening. The Truant stuff annoyed me fist time, but I found it more affecting this time. Ach, I dunno.

Read my fist Maigret (...and the Killer) - will be reading more! Now reading Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is lovely. I thought I'd had my fill of the 'broken confessional finds solace in nature' narrative, but evidently not.

Oh, and I read Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Magnificent.

weirdly committed to an extremely neat and squared-away family-drama structure that in the end reduced to soap opera

For me this ruined an interesting book. An extremely old-fashioned world by itself wouldn't have. If memory serves the author implies in a forward that the traditional Englishness of the non-aerodrome world was a sort of parody, and he did lay it on pretty thick.

rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist

Pinter's Party Time does that too.

About 1050 pages into Alan Moore's Jerusalem, took a while to get through the cod-Joyce section. Obviously it's tremendously self-indulgent and overwritten but in a (mainly) easygoing, enjoyable sort of way. The dead kids time-travel adventure story that makes up the middle section is a blast.

Also reread Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver last weekend when I was in a shitty mood and hadn't been able to concentrate on anything, read it straight through in a couple hours, still riveting despite my familiarity and the fact that there's only the bare bones of a plot.

The True Deceiver is an astonishing little book

Reading Lydie Salvayre: Cry, Mother Spain -- fictionalised version of her parents' lives during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Interesting and entertaining, but also structurally a bit messy, and not sure that the characters ever break the 2D barrier

Aciman writes 28-year-olds exactly the same way.

I don't read my student's monologues, Morbsy.

I'm enjoying it. Apparently the film kept the peach scene.

I really meant do you remember yerself at 17. ;)

xpost

If that's the case, between this and Toni Erdmann, we have an interesting little cinematic trend going on here.

I've been reading Dennis Lim's elegant and insightful David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, a series of essays on antiblackness that examines the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather as figures for the Middle Passage and the structures of white supremacy, and Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian's capacious anthology of writing from the New Narrative movement, Writers Who Love Too Much, which works both as an overview of the major US and Canadian experimental prose writers of the 1980s and early '90s and as a welcome redress to the obscurity of many of the less prolific writers from New Narrative circles, something like a Bay Area counterpart to Brandon Stosuy's Down is Down, But So is Up.

*("an overview of most of the US and Canadian experimental prose writers of the '80s and early '90s whom I actively find interesting, apart from Delany, Wallace, Wojnarowicz, and Anne Carson" might be more accurate, though)

Chinaski I was very pleased I'd read some sagas when I went, Njal's is a good one, I really like Laxdaela and Gisli's also. "Independent People" by Halldor Laxness is a must IMO.

More Nordic bizniss inc all the Icelandic bits that come to my mind here on the bus here: Scando Lit: search

Including all the above, sorry.

Cheers, Tim - that's fantastic.

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.)

Start with Houseboat Days.

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.

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

Start with Lunch Poems!

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!

Turn a leaf: Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?