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

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.

i didn't like Catcher when i read it 5 years ago,. but my hot take is lost within the vagaries of Facebook's search system.

I've always loved "Catcher," because it captures the spirit of a young person rebelling against what he perceives as the senselessness and cruelty of the world. That is, tonally, it may be whiny, but it is also very *true* in a certain way. People who dislike it obviously can't remember being a teenager.

*SOBS*

(2011 it was when i reread it, but no comments were recorded)

100 pages into Sayaka Morata's Earthlings. Loved her Convenience Store Woman and this is good too so far ,though both weirder and way way more harrowing and heartbreaking.

Yeah Convinience Store Woman is apparently her most accessible, everything else she's done is supposed to be way weirder.

I'm starting on a Clark Ashton Smith short story anthology.

Have been slowly reading all of Sophie Mackintosh’s published short stories, after reading her novels The Water Cure and Blue Ticket last couple of months and loving them both.

Some of the short stories don’t quite work, but then there are others, like The Running Ones, that do:

She thought about kissing the flushed plane of his cheekbone in the morning when he was too hot under the covers. They hummed a soft tune together and she thought briefly, ‘my heart is breaking’, but banished it. No more of that, she told herself. No more.

Really enjoyed Queneau's Odile. Weird strucure. Guess it's just a rambling memeoir of a certain point in a character's life but 119 pp with no page breaks is a long way to go. Still very enjoyable. Musty read the We Always Treat Women too Well that's also in th library.
Have Kehinde Andrew's first book waiting for me when I return thius.

I've started reading My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell, one of the last two in-print novels of hers I haven't read. So far it seems to have a lot of overlap in character, setting and tone with her earlier novel, Dance Night. I expect the elements that show the most redundancy between the two novels are based strongly in her own life memories, but the sense that at times I'm reading a novel I've already read detract from it a bit.

I just finished a book about my wife's great uncle, who was a WW2 bomber turret gunner who was shot down over Germany, sent to a POW camp, and then spent 80 days under forced march around Germany under horrific conditions. He kept a journal during his time in camp and kept it safe during the march. The book was terribly written (weirdly disorganized and repetitive) but I'm glad I read it.

I think I'm going to start Book of the New Sun and probably order Against the Day.

My misgivings about Erdrich's The Sentence aren't being by good, eerie shifts and scenes, which I would like to be closer together, though I get that seemingly breezy traffic management is set-up for sucker punches and jabs, passing through...
Narrator, in initially jacked-up, on drugs and her life, is set up in crime caper that doesn't quite add up, like the kind of TV writing (even occasionally in Breaking Bad) where getting from plot points A to G is so pressurized that some key details get fudged along the way---oh well, she, being Ind (which I'll use in place of her references to herself and most other characters as Indigenous and Indian), from stereotypically bad origins and with her own lengthy record, gets a somewhat unlikely, unjust (but, as she acknowledges, not entirely either) long-ass, though eventually commuted prison sentence, serving which she eventually gets her shit together, honing talents for observation of self and others, also deep reading and art of memory (has to recall all the books she's ever read to keep from going crazy without them, while in solitary, early on).
Once out, she gets a job in the author's bookstore (real, w good free advertising here, incl. for a lot of other author's books). Most of the workers, like most characters, are Ind women of various ages, mostly younger than narrator Tookie. White newcomers ask whoever they see, even males, "Are you Louise?" and one or more from a list Tookie has made, for instance, "What's a good Indian name for my/self/kid/dog/ancestor?"(trying to nail Indian blood). One of the best customers, Flora, an "Indian wannabee" (term explained at some lenght), the kind of seeming social hub who tries to buy friendship in the community, but never really finds anyone who satisfies her, according to Tookie, is found dead at home--in bed, with a compulsively collected, elaborately covered book book open by her side---but comes in the next morning anyway, picking through the shop stock as always (Tookie recognizes the route and sounds, inc. of fabrics and jewelry).
Powers of close observation, moment-to-moment and in some good overviews, lead proming elements through many details of menu, attire, especially of younger characters, scrolling through their own menus of relationship and reading interest, with work and party and work party repartee, complaints, gossip, occasional reflections, incl backstory (mostly Tookie and her husband, who had always loved her and resigned from Tribal Police after turning her over for prosecution etc)
Starting to remind me of lots of yadda-yadda between outbreaks in 50s monster etc. movies.
(Since the present is between All Souls Days of 2019-20, I'm also speculating that the narrator will pass over, meeting up w the ghost of the wannabee and maybe some of her own, while still talking quite a bit. Eternity)

Dammit! aren't being *dispelled* by

Passing over because Covid

Gave up on pond by Claire Louise bennet about a third of the way in. Very motonous autofiction (I think?).

Monotonous

Jeez Louises