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

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

Now reading Air Guitar, a collection of essays by Dave Hickey, many of which originally ran as columns in Art in America and other publications, primarily about popular music and/or fine art.

donald antrim - the emerald night in the air

really enjoying this. the first story, about a horny drama teacher directing a performance of a midsummer night's dream at a liberal arts college, is still my favourite. i like that his writing is so good yet feels somehow imitable (obvious this is an illusion, but it feels inspiring in some way)

also reading three body problem but only barely barely started. the extremely violent scene that it opens with is very uh, beautifully written?

I haf read A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and I thought it was top notch.

I might try 4321 next.

I fell pretty hard for Letters from Iceland. I've floundered with Auden in the past and it turns out what I needed was an anchor and this was just the job.

I'm going to wade back into my selected poems, but any other recommendations for what other Auden stuff could/should I look at?

John le Carre: A Small Town in Germany -- weird reading about a financially and diplomatically knackered UK desperate to get INTO the EU

Chinaski - Dyer's Hand is great.

Cheers xyzzzz. It's at my uni library so will go grab it.

Natahn Hill-The Nix.
Intelligent entertainment. Not many novels deserve that title imo.

Reading Leave it To Psmith, as recommended by various here or on ILE. It's great! My favourite Blandings so far.

I am on vacation for few days and have begun an appropriately fluffy book, The Lost Continent Bill Bryson (1989). The first chapter is relentlessly jokey, with such gems as the opening paragraph:

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

Nevertheless, this roughly my speed at the moment. I wanted to get away from seriousness for a bit and this younger, less-curmudgeonly version Bill Bryson seems hellbent to amuse me. I intend to permit him.

poor mh

Been buying books faster than I can read them recently. In theory that should mean they form a queue. In practice some get forgotten or left behind for much later, while newer arrivals get taken up immediately. One of those newer arrivals is Richard Olney's Simple French Food. It's very good. Although he explains why he decided he couldn't write about 'improvised cooking', the way he approaches ingredients and recipes does as much as any cookbook i have read to inform and encourage the reader to assemble their own dishes around some fundamental principles of food and cooking:

My consciousness is cluttered with memories of memories and half-memories of endless pilaff garnished with a variety of sautéed vegetables and scrapings from roast chicken or game carcasses – or combined with [i]ragôuts concocted from leftover roasts or firm-fleshed fish stews, heightened perhaps with butter-stewed onion, saffron, mushrooms, dried or fresh, one or several of the garden's native and denizen herbs; of cromesquis, crêpes, raviolis, or cannellonis stuffed with refrigerator remainders become soufflé mixtures, mixtures cheese-bound or béchamel-bound, held together with mushroom purée, stiff soubise, egg and breadcrumbs or rice (a recent and happy memory in this vein is that of cannelloni stuffed with a mixture of braised sweetbreads and braised fennel, each drained, coarsely chopped, mixed with chopped fines herbes and bound with fresh sheep's milk cheese, egg and Parmesan, the cannelloni moistened with the braising liquids, sprinkled with Parmesan, and gratinéed); salads and soups; myriad vegetables sweated in butter, herbs, and their own vapours, vegetable grains, puddings, hashes, stews, and daubes.

Certain of these terms suggest "extemporaneous" or "makeshift." Daube, for instance, means (approximately) "a mess," the origin of the word being presumably the same as that of "daub" in English.[/i]

tagging dammit!

oh and Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks from Bloodaxe. It's striking me right in the heart this weekend. deep autumnal colours and landscapes of love.

Continuing my theme of reading classics I had never got round to before, I'm now reading Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son. I also felt like it was a good match to read after Faulkner - while I thought Faulkner's prose was amazing and the world beautifully and horribly drawn, I was acutely aware that I was reading a white man's perspective on deep south race relations, and that perspective is not enough, not nearly enough.

Finished the Dave Hickey, and started reading Troubles by J.G. Farrell. It kind of effortlessly draws you into a world that becomes stranger and more real the more you learn about it. Wickedly funny as well.

Imre Kertesz: Detective Story

Troubles is so good

I finished with Bill Bryson. In 1989 he had fully perfected his formula, so that The Lost Continent felt almost indistinguishable from any of his other subsequent travel/humor books I've read. I don't begrudge him his success with this formula. It is a hard row to become a marketable author who makes his living from books alone.

Now, as a sort of follow-on to the book about Brunelleschi, I have picked up the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. I last read this 40 years ago in college. He is an incorrigible braggart, but he is also a talented storyteller, whose stories capture the intricate and unfamiliar world of the renaissance in Italy and France. They're good yarns, so it's cool with me that he is the unconquerable hero at the center of every tale he tells.

SPQR by mary beard

Finished Light and Darkness by Soseki. Up until the last third the plot the 'plot' was something like man has operation and the four other people in his life argue with and around him, at various levels of consequence. The shape of the story finally materialised in the last section as the main character checks himself out of the hospital and visits the woman who walked out on him.

Soseki died before finishing, so he might have written another 500 pages of those two sorting each other out. I felt it really took off in those last 100 pages (his earlier novel The Gate has a similar set-up where the main character goes to a monastery to find something...that going away was similarly done)

Postscript: what makes Cellini's endless self-worship palatable and somewhat engaging is that he doesn't stint his praise of others. He obviously saw the whole world as a heroic and highly colorful place, filled with brave, skillful and handsome men, beautiful and gracious women and amazingly spirited horses. Set against these are the evil, scheming scoundrels and craven cowards who act as the sworn enemies of the brave and honest men. It's a thoroughly boyish worldview, but kind of sweet.

I love the Soseki I've read, need to get more

Aimless, have you read Vasari? I want to, also interested in those two new Da Vinci bios.

I read various bits and pieces of Vasari long ago and I presently own a Penguin Classics paperback that abridges Vasari to ~465 pp. that I can refer to at need. iirc, Vasari is about on a level with Diogenes Laertius, collecting mostly entertaining anecdotes with some dull stretches interspersed.

Saw recent v. favorable mention of C. De Vere translation of Vasari, unabridged Everyman's Library ed.

I love the Soseki I've read, need to get more

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, 27 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I suspect he achieved something strange and unique for his time with his last few works - in one sense there is v little there in some of these intrigues, but they do amount...I would say almost all of his last few books are worth a read (NYRB did an edition of The Gate). Light and Darkness is out of print here and you come across in this old picador edition, almost all have a broken spine.

Ron Chernow - Grant
A collection of James tales called A London Life.

Stendhal - The Red and The Black. 20 pp in and I have said this before and I'll say it again: the canon is often excellent in lit.

i was spoilered for the red and the black by reading the stupid introduction and hence have never finished it

(also it was a v ancient pb and entirely fell apart as i read)

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.)