Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

Awesome, that last looks most appealing of all thx.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche. Got this, it's great!

All that Foundation Shit - Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a garbage writer, honestly the guy could not write for shit, and the Foundation series is facile as fuck, but as often with him, he did click on a central point of fascination: let's look at epochal history through a series of critical points, dramatised. Three-Body Problem is so much better but wouldn't exist without Asimov. (ok that was two sentences fuck you) Also otm---although, having gotten The Foundation Trilogy as bonus for joining the Science Fiction Book Club, when I was 9, I''ve always been immune to his notorious prose, though always liked the spare or sparse approach (word is the forthcoming stream will be tarted up with aliens and mysticism and shit). Also always liked history as predictive sci-math-art, and how that went...Also poignant reveal of The Mule.

i read the schorske book earlier in the year & yes fascinating period. found the section on the architecture possibly the most interesting part despite having very little knowledge or interest in the subject generally.

currently reading norman douglas' old calabria describing his sometimes arduous but mostly leisurely traipse through southern italy in the early part of the last century.

I'm reading The Makioka Sisters, which is wonderful so far. I definitely want to get a bunch more Tanizaki books. The pages just flow by.

Try Some Prefer Nettles next, it's quite short with a lot to say about the westernization/modernization of Japan.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, another of those Greek classics retold by female characters, this one feels like it must have almost written itself. From the perspective of the treatment of woman it's harsher than Madeline Miller's Circe (maybe just because it's more realistic), but less lyrical and the slang ('eat shit', 'fuck's sake', 'gagging for it') does jar somewhat. In Circe Odysseus really does come across as both charming and cunning, not here (he's the one who uses the phrase 'gagging for it').

For whatever reason (idk my personality/sleeping four hours a night), I am all over the place atm and so’s my reading.

A couple of weeks ago a friend linked me this incredible essay about the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, which I’ve read on and off since I was a teenager but haven’t read at all since my late twenties. The essay was so great, it just totally got what the series is about and the moral core that’s wound throughout it like a vein, and I ended up buying not just the latest book but also the previous four books and I read them all in the past two weeks along with some of the older ones.

Based on this essay, I also bought the writer’s own White City which I picked up from a bookshop yesterday and will read in the next fortnight. The Guardian review says:

White City synthesises familiar forms into a whole: the rogue’s confession, the young man finding his way, the post-Celtic Tiger satire on puffed-up, self-perpetuating bullshit businesses. Our guide is 27-year-old Ben, son of a disgraced Dublin banker, languishing in rehab and writing an account of his wrong turns as therapy. He’s half-bookish, half-lazy, really just wants to write his terrible-sounding novel (“Decay: A Report”), and only gets a job when his father is charged with embezzling €600m from his bank and the money tap is turned off.

Ben encounters an old schoolfriend, Mullens, who seduces him into joining a dodgy property deal in Serbia via the promise of a few million euro and lashings of meaningless banter (“Shake it handy, and if you can’t shake it handy, shake it hard”). This leads to a certain amount of capering with a bunch of Serbs who are mostly portrayed as sinister: but the Irish characters are mostly stupid or corrupt, so there’s equality of insult.

But an even bigger danger is sex, as a reporter we’ll call Chester found out. Chester doesn’t ride his bike as much as he used to because, about a year ago, he had a bad cycling accident after a romantic interlude. He was writing a story on topless dancers when he struck up a friendship with Lola. Maybe Lola fancied herself a Marilyn Monroe to his Arthur Miller. Who knows. All Chester knows is that one evening she called him up and said she was lying around in her bed at Trump Palace, and could he come over. He hopped on his bike and was there in fifteen minutes. They went at it for three hours. Then she said he had to leave because she lived with someone and the guy was coming home. Any minute.

Chester ran out of the building and jumped on his bike, but there was a problem. His legs were so shaky from having sex they started cramping up just as he was going down Murray Hill, and he crashed over the curb and slid across the pavement. “It really hurt,” he said. “When your skin is scraped off like that, it’s like a first-degree burn.” Luckily, his nipple did eventually grow back.

Yes!

The Silent Woman's still my favorite Malcolm.

I haven't read the Sex and the City columns, but I do like the book, which I think is basically columns strung together. I remember reading the line, "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and thinking, wow, this is a completely different voice from the show, and it's great.

Though actually the first season of the show is a lot closer in tone to the book than the rest of the show is, which is why I like it better. I wish they'd kept those cynical little parody interviews with random New Yorkers.

Yes I do mean the book that’s the columns- I specified cos the sort of disjointed flow is interesting to me and also iirc she’s since written a couple of tie-in novels more in line with the series which, no.

I think s1 is pretty similar plot wise but the casting and tone are still quite different. New York in the columns is scary, harsh and hard. Even when the show is cutting, it’s never as quite as harsh as

It was just three years ago Christmas that Carrie had been living in a studio apartment where an old lady had died two months before. Carrie had no money. A friend lent her a piece of foam for a bed. All she had was a mink coat and a Louis Vuitton suitcase, both of which were stolen when the apartment was inevitably robbed. But until then, she slept on the piece of foam with the fur coat over her, and she still went out every night. People liked her, and nobody asked questions. One night, she was invited to yet another party at someone’s grand Park Avenue apartment. She knew she didn’t really fit in, and it was always tempting to stuff your face on the free food, but you couldn’t do that. Instead, she met a man who had a name. He asked her to dinner, and she thought, Fuck you, all of you.

Oh yeah for sure. The show toned it way down, even in the first season. But it still had some of that bite, and I wish they'd kept it like that.

It's been a few years since I read the book so I don't remember the details that well, I just remember liking it a lot and being surprised by how much of an edge it had.

The Gossip Girl books are similar - clear-eyed, observant, funny, merciless - they’re the sort of books Harriet the Spy might have grown up to write. The series is more like Dynasty for teens, although like S&TC, it’s enjoyable in its own way.

(Also to tie it in with Janet Malcolm, who wrote a fun column in the New Yorker in praise of the GG books.)

I’d never read this column but have read some of the books, but you know when you start reading a thing and know you’re instantly going to love it?

As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store.” This is the exact type of black comedy that Cecily von Ziegesar, the author of the best-selling “Gossip Girl” novels for teen-age girls, excels in.

Oh also, I found a pdf of the Midwich Cuckoos on an old usb last night and I got three quarters of the way through it yesterday. Will finish tonight. Weirdly funny.

> The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

the new one's out now, Women Of Troy, which is less homer's Iliad and more euripedes' Troades from the reviews i've seen. but it sounds like you weren't that impressed by the previous one so...

currently reading 'Mary Barton', which is dickensian without any of the funny bits. (Hard Times is probably the closest dickins, but this is grimmer. manchester cotton mills in a down period, people starving)

Mary Barton was stern stuff. I haven't picked up another Gaskell.

i am halfway through. however, i did see the chapter titles which contain spoilers - "Not Guilty!"

North and South has a similar setting but fewer people going deaf and/or blind and/or dead, focus more on the romance / industrial iirc.

the only other stuff of hers i've read is her contributions to dickens' christmas editions of his magazines (which were mostly anonymous, at the time)

The Silent Woman is so great - something I'd like to read again. I'd say Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession probably edges it for me but both are amazing.

I'm reading Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. It's a collection of his columns for the Building Design magazine, where he undertook a series of visits to British cities - inspired by no less than JB Priestley - looking at the failures of the New Labour project and the scars left on the urban environment. I'd assumed I'd find this hard going because I lack any specialist knowledge of the subject, but Hatherley is great company and wears his learning lightly. He's naturally pretty scathing about the PFI wastelands he finds in the various cities (Southampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Nottingham etc) but there is a sense of it being locked in 2010 due to the 'end of capitalism' feel that permeates the text: everything is held in suspension post-2008 and there's an awful seesaw of hope/despair that from this vantage point feels oddly utopian. Also, because of the gazetteer nature of the visits to the cities, everything feels a bit rushed compared to the astonishing Southampton chapter - a city Hatherley knows best of all having grown up there.

This is an aside, and I know it was messy and fractured and lots of the feeling is retroactive and rose-tinted, but christ do I miss that golden period of blogs and the sense of hope and unity that came with them.

line of the day, at least: "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and not just because I've known people like that.
mention of Mary Barton reminds me I'd been wondering about Lucy Barton's creator, Elizabeth Strout--local library has a ton of her books---descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered, Jean Staffordesue (though also remind me of a favorite line of greeting cards)---is she good?

Staffordesque duh sorry

Read Gilda Musa's 'Total Memory,' translated by my friendly acquaintance Nicole Trigg. Interesting stuff.

Now onto a friend's book of poetry, which I love but...well, he needs an editor. There's too much going on.

Might put that down and read either one of the newer Jalal Toufic books or Rabbih Alameddine's "KOOL AIDS" next.

I'm also facilitating a manuscript workshop at the moment, so I read two pretty fascinating manuscripts over the weekend.

descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered

Caustic and layered is an excellent description of Olive Kitteridge, both of those are good.

Mary Barton was stern stuff. I haven't picked up another Gaskell.

I think you would probably like Wives and Daughters a lot, actually.

Whoops, meant to italicize that first line - that was me quoting Alfred.

ha, that would make a good monthly reading theme alongside that turgenev I've been meaning to read

(turns out I've also read one of her collections, 'curious if true', including the Nurse's Story that's in every Victorian ghost anthology)

KOOLAIDS by Rabih Alameddine is absolutely incredible about 50 pages in, I think many here would appreciate it.

I like Gaskell a lot, but I'll happily acknowledge that all her books are flawed - except for Wives and Daughters, which is perfect except for the tiny minor detail of it not having a last chapter because its writer dropped dead a week or so too soon.

My cousin book club is reading The Catcher in the Rye so I'm re-reading it for the first time since I was twelve, and omg this is a great book; I really did not appreciate it properly as a kid.

Oh also, I found a pdf of the Midwich Cuckoos on an old usb last night and I got three quarters of the way through it yesterday. Will finish tonight. Weirdly funny.

Raymond Queneau Odile
Story about the narrator turning up in a rundown part of a French town and hanging with some ne'erdowells . Continuous thing covers 119 pages in teh version I have. i was looking for an obvious page break and couldn't find one. It has paragraphs but no gaps or chapters or anything. BUt it is pretty sublime, quite funny in places, surreal in others and pretty earthy thorughout.
Glad i got this from the library yesterday. Thought I might be overdoing it . have the full quota of books out with this.
just finished Walter Benjamin's Illuminations to get a new book I thought would come through on order and may turn up at the end of the week. Had looked up Queneau since i have wanted to read whatever translation of Le Chiendent since my mid teens when I saw Rowland S Howard had it in his Portrait of teh Artists as a Consumer in the NME in BIrthday Party Days. I did try reading The Bark Tree from the local library at teh time but didn't finish it. Current version is out as Witch Grass but I couldn't see either on tyhe library system but did see they had 3 things in teh local library which I presumably had not thought to look for when I was in there., THink I tend to go to music, politics, medicine, sci fi , classics and a few other things instead of looking through teh general fiction shelves.
Well got it now and enjoying it but possibly reading too many things at the same time.

Otherwise still reading the Mary Robinson book on Climate Justice and then going to finish off the book on Torture in the UK Cruel britannia and the other half of Adam Rutherford's book on Race. & Ibram X kendi's Stamped From The beginning and whatever Toni Morrison I started & Stephen Barker's books on punk and loads of other things.
JUst picked up the Smartest Guys In the Room and still have IBM In the Third Reich and several books on indigenous people in the Americas I started.

I seem to have been in a conversation recently where someone said something like "nobody should read THE CATCHER IN THE RYE after the age of 14" and people sagely, maturely agreed, though I didn't really.

I see that Lily Dale doesn't either.

catcher in the rye rules

A couple weeks ago I read a terrific Janet Malcolm essay which prodded me into giving Franny and Zooey a shot.

Iain Sinclair - The Last London

really fascinating, pretty dense and also I think, not having lived in London for 40 years, I am probably losing out on a lot of the context but still I like it

Just started Sebald's Rings of Saturn although I think it will be slow going if I reach for Wiki every time I come across a literary reference I don't recognise (most of them)

Catcher in the Rye is great and everyone shiting on about it being for a) teenagers or b) boys can be safely disregarded

I read and passed it around when I was 15, don't remember that much, maybe will re-read. Next was Nine Stories, which has never left my head, but I did revisit sev years ago and thought it held up pretty well, now seeming like an influence or forerunner to Sedaris's better stuff, blending serious x snark, not that it doesn't go past that, as outright fiction can. Ditto "Franny," which I think of as the Tenth Story; "Zooey" built on or around a little too much of her big brother's harangues, but can see where he's coming from (also Salinger seems undestanably worried about kids taday jumping on his agenda x beefs a bit extremely, long before the Summer ov Love!) And of course it's got the hooks, could do w/o The Fat Lady revelation tho.
Rise High.../Seymour...: good? Looked like Buddy's voice, didn't like his letter to Zooey that much.

doesn't go past Sedaris, that is.

Raise High.../Seymour is my favourite Salinger (though is a couple of decades since I read any)

the "you have to read this book by a certain age or it's no good" line has always bothered me. i think that any good book should hold up no matter what age you read it at.

the entire negative discourse directed at catcher in the rye bugs me. especially hate it when people say that holden shouldn't complain so much because he has a pretty good life. i don't think people who say this actually remember the book very well.

Don't know when the negative discourse started, but I have to wonder if it has much to do with an overall boomer backlash--Salinger wasn't a boomer, obviously, but it might be fair to say that they were the first generation of readers to embrace it, and probably the first to canonize it by assigning it on high school reading lists. I know at least one adolescent lit scholar who seems to just reflexively loathe it (I've read it twice and loved it both times).

I was about to write something like 'the great veteran ILX poster "J.D." has always written well about Salinger, you can find him on this Salinger thread' -- then I saw that said great poster had already turned up on this thread.

(The Other) J.D. (Salinger)

I read "Catcher in the Rye" for the first time as an adult and enjoyed it. Though I will admit I found it perhaps slightly underwhelming given the reputation. Maybe the narrator's sarcastic voice felt new and liberating for the time, but for readers weaned on that type of narrator, it might be a little "you had to be there". Another book that is often lumped in as being for younger readers that I read more recently and enjoyed was "A Separate Peace".

I had a copy of Steppenwolf that had an introduction where Hesse says that nobody ought to read the book before a certain age, or maybe amount of experience.

at what age in elementary school should one read The Magic Mountain?

Yes, A Separate Peace is beautifully heartbreaking (and queer).

It's been years, but the sequel Peace Breaks Out is good too.

i haven't read catcher in the rye since i was a teenager but i'm reading franny and zooey now and it's very good!

By coincidence I re-read Steppenwolf in my early 50s and noticed that Hesse said it ought to be read by people that age. When I finished the book I could see his point. It bitterly addresses issues that are far too real at that age, whereas a twenty-something would be prone to view the book through a falsely romanticized lens.

Quite unusually for me, yesterday I started and finished a book in one day. It was Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham.

The thesis was extremely interesting and well-constructed, namely that humans physically evolved into our modern species because our proto-species, a smaller, tree-dwelling ape who already used crude tools and ate meat, began to use fire to cook its food. This change in diet allowed a massive improvement in the efficiency of their digestion, and triggered a series of physical changes around 1.8 million years ago, leading to Homo Erectus, a taller, heavier, far-ranging, ground-dwelling, nearly modern species that soon spread out of Africa into Europe and Asia.

This thesis occupies about the first 125 pages of a 200 page book and he produces an impressive amount of evidence, especially in the face of a sparse fossil record. The chain of inferences is strengthened by reference to many measurable pieces of evidence about human biology and anatomy, food chemistry, analogies to modern hunter-gatherer diets and such. It's pretty darn convincing.

The final part of the book is much weaker, arguing that cooked food was decisive in the creation of human social structures. Here there is little evidence aside from speculations woven out of imaginative storytelling. It was OK, but not exactly compelling.

I'm currently reading Divorcing by Susan Taubes, which occupies that unfortunate niche of novels that were finished shortly before the author's suicide. I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would (it was sent to me as a book club selection).

many thanks, pinefox!

i recently reread salinger's very strange last story, "hapworth 16 1924," just because i stumbled across the copy i had found somewhere on the internet and printed out as a teenager. i still find it completely baffling (even the title), but it is much funnier than i remembered. it's the only thing in salinger's body of work that i think would benefit from being able to call the author and ask what in the world he was trying to do.

Was maybe "Fuck off, stans" in possible intent/effect? Haven't read it, but that's what I heard.