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

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.)