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

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.

A few stories into that Ashton Smith anthology and so far my takeaways are:

a) he's very good at coming up with weird blobby nightmare creatures

b) ppl point out a lot that Lovecraft was racist even for his time, which is true, but in terms of the actual fiction I think it shines through in Ashton Smith more than it does in HPL; so many stories featuring primitive natives worshipping evil idols. Even the one he sets on Mars is full of orientalism.

wrapped up louis menand's The Free World last night and am sorry to see it go. idk what ilx thinks of menand but i liked it a lot. agree with Raymond Cummings assesment of it in the summer thread: I guess I've aged into a 10-15 pages per day reader for stuff like this. It's just so rich, like a dark chocolate cake. I had to take a couple breaks from it over the months to cleanse my palate & read other things, but was always happy to get back to it.

particularly like how it was structured, not chronologically but as self-contained capsule histories of figures & ideas, often doubling back to the same moments or inflection points to view them from a different angle & spin off in other directions. (also made it easier to dip in & out of it, of course.) i'm sure some of the chapters must have started off as NYer pieces, but didn't feel at all like one of those books of frankensteined-together magazine articles.

I don't remember details of structure, but his The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America was very good for information, some of it startling. But his occasional narrow, small c conservative tendencies turned up in here, like dismissing abolitionists as a bunch of troublemakers, not letting the responsibles gradually find a middle way (yeah like Missouri Compromise, with plenty slavery left in place,'til it was torpedoed by Kansas Nebraska Act, also 'member The Fugitive Slave Act etc etc right through Congress, perfectly legit). But you can veer around such things, keeping an eye out.

(Also: he follows judiciously granular clarity of the New Yorker excerpt from his latest, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War with lament re too groups in wake of Berkeley's Free Speecn Movement so messy and not nicely organized, like [buttoned-down bespectled lining up in their little raincoats: carefully chosen pic here] like FSM etc.)(And I'll read the book anyway.)

too *bad* groups in wake

I had no problems with The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Idea when I reread what is essentially some superb New Yorker profiles. Agassiz and Adams' anti-Semitism is quite clear.

Yeah, he's usually very fair.
Would like to re-read some of AMC, including his mention of Abolitionists among the Transcendentalists.
(Somewhere in ILX, Scott Seward posted a pic of them incl. his ancestor Rufus S. King [related to Secretary of State William Seward, who, though wounded, fought off attacker on the night of Lincoln's assassination]---then an official portrait of Rufus, still looking much the same, as Union Brigadier General.)

Back to Menand: I'm fairly sure he said some of the Ts were very pro-John Brown, even maybe w fundraisers?! Yeah, no doubt a good read and re-read.

It's just that when the New Yorker latched on to these one-stop-shopping polymaths (Gladwell, Gopnik etc etc), their most annoying tendencies turn up again and again also.

dang I took xpost The Sentence back to library and now I'm missing some of those characters and their interactions, despite the frequent detachment of reading experience.

raced through Richard Osman's The Man Who Died Twice in a couple of days. v undemanding but I do really enjoy most of his cast of characters tbh.

a few chapters into Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mitzuki Tsujimura and I am properly hooked so far. 7 early teenagers who for various reasons aren't attending school are transported during school hours each day to a magical fairytale castle.

George Eliot - Middlemarch. Of course this is great, classic and everything though on this one read I think I was a lot more into Dorothea and her journey through the patriarchy than anything else. The universe in an English TOWN does come into full view in the end, and the chapters leading up to the 'persecution' of Balustrode/Lydgate are fantatstic. So much of England in that whole business.

Though the novel it reminded me the most of was Musil's Man Without Qualities, in that both are partly looking back at events in recent history. The main protagonist seems too clever and wasted on what everyone else is up to, they know it and are stuck, and the relationship between Dorothea/Will reminds me a bit of Agathe/Ulrich. These observations don't take account with what they are up to though, they are ambitious novelists who express their art quite differently.

Driss Chraïbi's 'The Simple Past.' Someone else here had read it, yes?

I read it last year. An angry stream-of-consciousness story of a young man with an oppressive, authoritarian, possibly murderous father, living in a conservative, traditional, religious society, ie. mid-20th century Morocco. Hard to follow for me at times, but impressively single-minded in its rage.

Natalia Ginzburg - Family and Borghesia
Sophie Collins - Who is Mary Sue?
Baudelaire - Intimate Journals

So glad there is a focus on Ginzburg as it allows me to fill me in the gaps on stuff I haven't read by her. The novella is where she is at her most powerful, where a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.

As for Collins' poetry, its her first collection - I got to know of her by the (now deacivated) presence on twitter, and followed that up with Baudelaire's prose. He is a 'bad boy' as much as Collins is careful and considerate.

a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.

Quite well put. As much as I dislike artists of the same gender, I see a similarly elusive simplicity in Elena Ferrante.

🤨

Last night I finished My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell. It felt like one of her weaker efforts, largely because it was strongly tethered to her own life story and I think the pull of memory interfered with her natural instincts as a satirist and storyteller.

Now I've started The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût, set in the Moluccas.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet Malcolm

If you asked me about what I thought about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, my view was formed at 16 and hasn’t moved on much since. I loved Plato’s poetry intensely for the two years I studied it, but I admittedly haven’t thought of her much since, although I own her collected works and still find great enjoyment in them. So a few weeks back, I was talking about how my entire English class haaaaated Hughes, because of him cheating on Plath and then both Plath and Assia Wevill’s suicides, xyzzzz__ mentioned this book, which I’ve never heard of.

What a book, though. Malcolm picks her way carefully through the stuff we all know; the work, the deaths, the rumours. Somewhere in reading this, I came to feeling almost sympathetic towards Hughes, which Malcolm freely admits is her bias in writing this book.

The book delves a lot into the other biographies about Plath and Hughes. Hughes himself is the great unseen in this; he is never directly interviewed by Malcolm, but instead is glimpsed through letters, stories and most of all through his sister Olwyn’s passionate advocacy. But his presence towers over everything. It is hard to forget his anguish about being treated as though he is dead by biographers, in terms of what they see fit to speculate about. When Malcolm writes about Wevill’s suicide, and in passing says (of Hughes), that his pain must have been unimaginable, it startled me. It’s a totally obvious point to make, of course, but I had been so set in the image of this couple that I’d held more or less untouched for the last 18 years that it shocked me.

Malcolm picks her way through Plath’s own words, in the form of her poetry, letters and journals. Between this and the various coverage of people who knew her, she tries to sift down to some kind of truth, but freely admits at all times the difficulty in doing so. Although she confesses her bias towards the Hugheses, I still felt sympathetic towards Plath. It is clear that she was in a lot of pain in life, pain that perhaps none were equipped to help her handle. Malcolm notes the casual cruelty of even Plath’s supposed defenders in this life towards her memory, and is sharp about what they gain from it. In this, her view is very much aligned with that of the Hughes siblings.

Memory and its failings as a method of establishing some kind of objective truth are a theme visited and done well here. Malcolm is skilled in the way she releases information at key points, so I was surprised when she is surprised, and the ending of the book is sublime.

What did I most like about this? Her portrayal of, and various entanglements with, Olwyn Hughes is up there. The meeting with Jacqueline Rose is a highlight. The careful piecing together of the story - for it is a story, as much as it was also people’s lives - is incredible, and I find myself thinking about certain phrases from Hughes’s various letters excerpted throughout.

A truly amazing book, and one that I will return to time and time again. Thank you so much for recommending me this xyzzzz__!

Lol that Plato is obviously meant to be Plath.

Excellent book. It got me to read Anne Stevenson's (okay) poetry.

👍👍👍 xp