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

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

xxp isn’t that the one where she compares the sound of her vagina to frogs? It’s one of the worst published things I’ve ever read

I don’t know! I found it very difficult to pay attention.

Finished Earthlings and wow! So strange and so massively disturbing. I think I enjoyed Convenience Store Woman more but this one will stick with me much much longer. Get the impression that in amongst the weirdness it might be horribly accurate with regards to trauma and it's àfter affects.

Bit about xpost the frogs seems like it might be mischievous, lil parody of cosmic nature books, so hope to take a look at Pond (and others if it's not in there). Even if it's unintentional comedy, that's okay too, sometimes more than okay, but hoping it's more than that.

More Sophie Mackintosh short stories. It’s just my mood this week maybe.

Self-improvement: this is like a lot of her work on familiar themes; body horror, lack of autonomy over same, the constraints of societal expectations on women. Ugly stories about beauty aren’t anything new. But I was reminded, reading this, a bit of Kyoto Okazaki’s startling Helter Skelter, which I loved. The descriptions of the treatments are largely omitted but give you enough to know what’s going on. The silent woman on the game show that all the men are in love with haunted me. I liked this a lot, mainly for the similarities to Helter Skelter I saw, the slow burn horror of the box of accoutrements and the wasting diet, and the last paragraph.

Communion: a woman lies down in a road. If you’re thinking of the music video for Just, you’re not alone. It’s a pretty obvious inspiration for the story, but it reminded me almost more of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. The veneration curdling into expectation into hate was very reminiscent. I’m not sure this one worked as well as some of her other stories but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s got a strange dark fable vibe to it. I enjoyed the note at the start that this was inspired by self-care.

We want to lie down too, the townspeople told each other. We want to lie down too, but we run around our lives like the dogs that go in great circles at the scent of the thunderstorms, and are we not also foaming at the mouths, waiting for our prescience to be recognised?

And are the children not infallible and blameless, subject to electricities we cannot see?

Gotta read that/those. Meanwhile, in The Sentence Covid's come through, momentum too, see yall way down the line.

Starter Driss Chraïbi's 'The Simple Past.' Someone else here had read it, yes? Anyway, I think it's phenomenal, will be finishing it before the weekend's out.

The last of these short story reviews.

May Day is, according to the author:

New fiction from me which is a very loose riff on a nightmarish element from the Mabinogion story Lludd a Llefelys! (TW for pregnancy loss) Thank you to @The_Fence_Mag & @John_S_Phipps https://t.co/HzL6YPOA4o

— Sophie Mackintosh (@fairfairisles) November 2, 2020

February, March and April teemed with birthdays. The heat of so many candles raised off the earth.

After the first class, we were allowed a rest break. I gathered with Jane, Lucy and Emily on a bench. Their names were pieces of sugar, and I hated them all but couldn’t admit it.

I could run alone now, any time of day. Men swerved away from my body. The talisman bumped over my heart with every footstep, and the trees lining my running route reminded me of the quiet of that night, of how the man hadn’t made a sound.

I see echoes of myself everywhere, shared mannerisms and hairstyles and laughs, like a video whose images keep freezing and stuttering. They are things that belong to me and yet they don’t. Three redheads in a row; a bracelet I also own on somebody else’s wrist.

finished Mary Barton. lots of people died. any suspense over the trial spoiled by the chapter title. lots happened and not much did.

Finished The Makioka Sisters. One of the best novels I’ve ever read.

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?

― dow, Monday, 8 November 2021 1

She's okay.

Thanks.
I finished xpost The Sentence, maybe too quickly, but momentum of second half seemed to encourage skating along the translucent surface, despite layers just below, and some seemingly baggy first-half elements now snapping together: seemed like some of the big themes and historical events, def incl. George Floyd Days of horror and rage (and shit from opportunistic looters of community, also more copshit, duh) seemed dumped in there and spread out, after being received: v. granular detail, but nothing revelatory (although some of it is startling, w possibilities I hadn't thought of, such as a new mother who is knocked down, spilling her breast milk---quickly pulled up and running again, she discovers that tear gas seeks moisture, including that of her nipples).
Was especially put off to find that a radio documentary I heard last night clarified and cogently expanded backstory of urban Indigenous, incl. how they got that way->what they're doing now, in Minneapolis: v relevant to these characters---doc did this in a few sentences, in ways that Erdrich's weaving and traffic management didn't quite, or sometimes at all.
Also, the whole thing about the ghost came to contrived-seeming, on the nose resolution---but there were good scenes and turns of thought-phrase-plot-life all along the way: it wasn't a bad read, just left me detached, for the most part.

Finished Driss Chraïbi's "The Simple Past" (an incredible and forceful bildungsroman, imho), then quickly read poet Chris Sylvester's "Book Abt Fantasy," a strange book that has more in common with performance art than poetry, to my mind. Still very interesting!

I'm now going to start Dodie Bellamy's "Bee Reaved." You can read more about Dodie and the book here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/american-experimentalisms-best-kept-secret-dodie-bellamy-bee-reaved

She was my thesis advisor, and Kevin Killian was a mentor as well. Going to be a bit of a weeper, as a result.

Loved Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, I wasn't sure at first about the setting or main character but the supporting cast, Fitzgerald's gentle sardonicism and the general Germanity of it all slowly won me over, I think I rate it higher than The Bookshop or Offshore.