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

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

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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)

Well mark I have read the first few chapters...and the last few sentences in the last chapter so know what happens. Its ok though :-)

I finished Cellini's Autobiography. The traits I mentioned upthread remained consistent to the end of the book. Everything is vivid, larger than life and he is at the center of it all, deserving of mountains of credit for his genius when things turn out well and never to blame when things go wrong. I was interested to note that Vasari was one of the many artists he roundly disparaged and considered and enemy.

My next book is A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Darcy O'Brien. It's a NYRB reprint, somewhat humorous, but so far it seems more sardonic than comical. It's about growing up among Hollywood splendors, born as the child of famous and wealthy actor-parents, whose careers perish, then whose lives fall apart in rather histrionic fashion. Most of the book takes place After The Fall.

I've only just begun it, so I have as yet little to say about it.

Loved that book. Guy is a Joyce and Flann O’Brien scholar. Made the mistake of reading his true crime books. Which were really well written, but that actually made them harder to take.

He lulls you with a false sense of security with the well-turned phrases and then -wham!-the bottom drops out

reading a big biog on joseph losey, and joyce carol oates short stories 'heat' & my brilliant friend ~

What's the Losey biog like?

detailed - its the one subtitled a revenge on life by david caute

Great title - will be on the lookout.

I'm not a fan of Amis/McEwan/Barnes, but my university library was giving away free copies of "Sense of an Ending" - I read it over a day and it was... okay? Compelling plot but wincing useless dialogue and no sense of place. It's kind of a mini-me Atonement. Both of them do that really annoying thing of being genre books that end with a deliberate anticlimax to prove how very "above the genre" they are.

(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.)