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

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.

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.

I can't really think of Sense Of An Ending as a genre novel, unless we're doing the "literary realist fiction is a genre" thing. Sure there's a mystery in it, but it's not a crime novel/detective kind of mystery.

I will agree with you the ending's rubbish, though - felt very melodramatic and ridiculous to me, like something straight out of a 19th century novel.

No, you're right, it's not a genre novel. But the trope of using mystery and suspense in the service of a deliberate anticlimax - "because that's how life really is" - is (and has always been) a tiresome cliche, imho - in both literary and genre fiction. I think Tana French gets it right, though.

(The ending of Broken Harbour, for example. It's a quotidian ending, but it's not like it retroactively judges you for enjoying the "thriller" elements.)

george meredith - the egoist

I finished A Way of Life, Like Any Other. It's an interesting book that I'd have to study a while to get at. The story is plain enough. Everything that happens it described clearly enough to understand. What lingers is the author's voice and tone, which kind of hovers in an indeterminate space, touching irony, sadness, farce and a hint of anger, while rarely touching any one of these notes exclusively, but more often striking several at once, as if playing minor chords. The effect never raised me out of my seat in amazement, but it did affect me. Worth a read. Plus, it's short.

I haven't hit on my next book. I keep toying with the idea of plowing into a monstrously long book, like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but so far I'm too timorous to take the plunge. Maybe further into winter. I'll probably make a brief excursion into Greene's Ministry of Fear, instead.

I had a go at Very Merry by Zsigmond Moriscz, Hungarian Minot Gentry hi-Hils, got bored and drifted off about halfway through.

Then I read “Mothering Sunday” by Graham Swift, on a lens from my mum, it was alright, I liked the way it seemed abstracted from a huge Barbara Taylor Bradford potboiler but it left me largely unmoved.

I read the 33 1/3 about The Raincoats, as covered elsewhere.

I read a book of sharp little short stories by Lara Williams, called “Treats”.

Now I’m a chapter in to “Let The Blood of Man Not Flow” by Mikhailo Stelmakh, Ukrainian Soviet mythmaking by the looks.

aimless, i forget, do you have a kindle at all? burton is surprisingly lighter-feeling when you don't have to lug around that brick of an nyrb edition.

I own a Kindle, but I rarely make much use of it. I own an older edition of Robert Burton in hardback, copyright 1927, Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, editors, Farrar & Rinehart publishers, ~1000 pages total including front matter. All the hundreds of Latin tags are translated into English, which is nice.

I'm already partway into Ministry of Fear with a Georges Simenon novel on deck. As I said, the prospects for my tackling an ultra-long book will improve as winter deepens. Last winter it was The Man Without Qualities, Musil. The previous winter it was Shelby Foote's civil war history.

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.)