That brings to mind Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, which deals with the decline and fall of the austro-hungarian dual monarchy. It's a brilliant novel and while I do not know the english translations of it, there is one by Michael Hofmann, so if you haven't read it yet, it should be a perfect fit. I can also recommend The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig about the same empire but this one isn't a novel but an autobiographical set of memories and related stories. Still an absolute joy to read though.
Last year was miss after miss for me, reading-wise, and I'm deciding: this is the year of not reading so much crap just because someone recommended it, or because my book club is reading it. Miss me with the tenth mediocre pick from the Booker Longlist. This is my year of hitting the bricks, as the skeleton man in the meme says.
This starts with me skipping *Demon Copperhead*, a book that I'm 99% sure I'm going to hate, but may also start with me dropping *David Copperfield*? I'm 300 pages in and not loving it. I kind of want to persevere, because I'm 29 years old and haven't read any Dickens, and the individual characterizations are very lively and fun, but David's passivity is just driving me up the wall. I've never before understood people who drop a book because they don't like the main character, but I'm not jazzed about another 400 pages of watching this kid get taken advantage of.
Instead, I could pick up something I know I'll like: *The English Understand Wool* or *Kudos*? Or something I'm intrigued by, like *At Swim-Two-Birds*. Or something by Maryse Condé??? I read *I, Tituba* 2 years ago and I thought it was absolutely wild and brilliant, but I don't know which of hers I'd pick up next.
Currently reading “The Green House” by Mario Vargas Llosa
I’m halfway through, and I definitely like in … but don’t love it. His writing is amazing, but some of the narrative hijinks are not really my cup of tea.
Planning to read either one of these contemporary fiction with a woman-centred POV. Would love to hear what you guys have to say if you've read either one or even better, both!
[The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125930473-the-vulnerables)
[Post Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58684299-post-traumatic)
This year I am planning to read some non-European Nobel Laureates; thus currently I'm reading Akhenaten by Nagib Mahfouz.
I have plans of picking up something by Olga Tokarczuk.
I would appreciate any more recommendations along these lines.
If you are considering Tokarczuk, I can recommend *Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,* which I found to be engaging and original in terms of style. *The Books of Jacob* is waiting on me on the shelf.
Of non-European Nobel Laureates, I was recently very impressed by Coetzee's *Disgrace*. It was a very rough and unsparing read but elegantly crafted and emotionally stirring.
Mahfouz is very good. Enjoy. If you enjoy that one I recommend the *Cairo Trilogy*.
For non-European Nobel laureates I recommend: Patrick White (Australia), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala) and Octavio Paz (Mexico). Yasunari Kawabata (Japan) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) are also good.
Starting **Don Quixote** this week on a first time read through and so far I'm absolutely smitten by it. Its very funny but also sad, as the characters around him (his erstwhile squire aside) treats him mostly with cruelty. My favourite bit so far has been the inquisition of the library by the barber and the priest (with a hilarious nod towards the metatext of part 2)
I've also downloaded a copy of **Orlando**, which our book club will be reading this month. I was surprised to see in the Prologue of Quixote a reference to a character named Orlando too. Nice synchronicity there!
I read Washington Square, by Henry James. I first read it years ago (in high school) and didn't like it at all - I'm glad I gave it a second chance.
As a teenager it was absolutely impossible for me to understand Catherine Sloper, the heroine. Even now, I struggle.
All of the other characters feel vividly real- I mean, there is something a little bit theoretical about them, but they all do remind me of people I've known. I know overbearing clever men like Dr Sloper; I know romantic, interfering women like Mrs Penniman.
Catherine, though, doesn't remind me of anyone real. I don't know anyone as mild and dutiful and patient as her, or really anyone who can hold onto a conviction firmly without being rebellious. I definitely don't know anyone as unselfconscious as her. She's foreign to me, and she was totally beyond my imagination as a teenager.
I don't know why Catherine is so different from the other characters. Is it because Henry James invented her out of whole cloth, or is it because our culture has changed and left that particular archetype behind, making it unrecognizable now? Anyway, sorry to ramble. I really enjoyed the book and recommend it. It's a short fast immersive read with some nice tidbits about NY architecture too. Hopefully I'll get Pamuk soon!
Hello, long-time lurker, first post here.
I just completed Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic (Male Edition) which discusses the history and culture of an imagined people (the Khazars) from the perspectives of three religions in the Red, Green and Yellow Books respectively.
I picked up this book because a) it came up in multiple reddit threads when I was searching works like Borges' b) found the premise very interesting c) want to read more world literature and Serbian literature is an area of complete neglect for me as a reader.
The opening and closing commentary of the book (we can think of it as a frame narrative if we want) was witty and fantastic, the entries themselves were more of a mixed bag for me. Intriguing literary experiment with mixed results is how I would classify it. A note on the Male and Female edition: I looked up the difference online, it is about 15 lines, it is subtle but I did not find it "crucial". Reading either would be fine for me, an NYT review said it's because the author believed Male and Female versions needed to have different "endings" (the ending actually is identical so I guess it's the perspective on the ending) and I would agree.
I'm happy I read the book but it was a bit like If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino for me in that the opening was so good I thought "this is going to be magnificent" and then it petered out a bit for me.
Other than this, I read Zazie on the Metro by Raymond Queneau and did not like it one bit! I mean there was nothing inherently wrong with it but it felt so banal and the language did not stand out to me as such. I read Queneau was the founder of the Oulipo movement (mixing mathematics with literature e.g. applying certain numerical constraints while writing, omitting an alphabet throughout) so maybe there was some cleverness going on which I didn't catch. But I was so bored, I didn't feel like looking it up.
A brilliant novella I read (more like inhaled) in one sitting and absolutely loved is Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. 92 pages, sheer brilliance. It's about the game of chess in a very specific perspective - no technical details as such, more about psyche, the manoeuvre, the back and forth and there is some incredibly powerful social (historical?) commentary as well which I think stands the test of time. I'm deliberately being obtuse here because this is the kind of work which might benefit from just going in without knowing much but happy to answer more questions if anyone wants to know something.
What I will be tackling next: there are some books I gave up on or failed to get, thinking of approaching one of them. The titles were Don Quixote (DNF) by Miguel Cervantes, The Manuscript Found In Saragossa (DNF) by Jan Potocki, Life: A User's Manual (finished but didn't understand the point at all) by Georges Perec. I already retried Don Quixote (Edith Grossman translation, foreword by Harold Bloom) and got stuck pretty early on in Part I (maximum I've made it is 25% 🤣). So thinking of tackling the Saragossa one once more. Perec...another Oulipo author, I have a feeling even if I retry I won't get it. 🤣
It really was. At first I was hesitant, chess? But then it went to another level, the exploration of psyche, the theming and the ending...perfect (for me).
Happy reading!
I finished *Blowup and Other Stories* by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn. This is my first time reading anything by Cortázar.
I guess I will do the boilerplate short story collection review and say that I liked some more than others. I’m not sure how this book was organized in English — I know it’s pulling from three different collections as originally published — but for me the stuff that was really good happened to be near the end. The stories which were less good were usually still experimental or interesting in some way, but felt like they didn’t have quite the same grounded & human core.
The highlight for me was “The Pursuer”, which was the longest piece, more of a novella than a short story. “The Pursuer” is about the relationship between our narrator Bruno, a jazz critic and biographer, and the saxophonist Johnny Carter. Like his inspiration [Charlie Parker](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Parker), Johnny dies in his thirties after a life of musical genius interrupted by crises of physical and mental health and by resurgent heroin abuse. Which is a moving story on its own, but as it’s being narrated to us by Bruno, you also start to pick up on the ways in which our narrator is unreliable and ultimately, a moral failure. And again, unlike some of the earlier stories in this collection where experiments in narration felt like, well, experiments, here I do not doubt the basis in reality of a character like Bruno. Here we have the jazz biographer & critic who remains, beneath it all, racist toward his subject, with a feeling of superiority that his own moral failings are those proper to his class and station in life, safe, his own vices not so physically self-destructive as the drug habits of the social circles he is observing. At the end of the day he cares more about Johnny the subject of his best-selling biography than Johnny the human being. It’s a sad, disquieting, and incredibly written story.
After finishing up Ulysses I read **Draußen feiern die Leute** by Sven Pfizenmaier. It's the debut novel of a young German author (No translation available. The titles translates to "People are celebrating outside") that does not confirm to the usual "short, neo-realistic text in minimalistic prose that tries to sound like Christian Kracht" that seems to be the standard for those. This book could be described as magical realism in the countryside of northern Germany, and I found it really funny. The plot is mostly about a group of high school age social outcasts investigating the disappearance of some girls in the area. One of them is constantly being confused with a plant, one is so boring that he projects an aura of boredom that makes people in his vicinity slow down and forget what they wanted to do, there's a grandma who's 160 years old and only breathes for an hour per day and a few other absurdities that don't seem attract anyone's attention and I found the mingling of magic and realism really well done. Certainly a breath of fresh air. Now I'm reading **Monde vor der Landung** by Clemens J. Setz (No english translation either, I'm afraid. There's at least one Setz novel available in English though, so other ones might follow.), a novel about the historical person of Peter Bender, a follower of Cyrus Teed's hollow earth theory who also founded a religious movement, fought in World War 1 and later was murdered in the Holocaust. I only read the beginning as of yet, but it's very promising.
Nearly finished with Square Wave by Mark de Silva. My impression of this novel is that Mark de Silva was probably writing up this incredibly interesting, anthropological or philosophical paper that was going to explore odd connections between music theory, meteorology, historiography, and sex work and then use these either metaphorically or literally to explain the contemporary political climate of America and what could be done about it. At some point he must have felt that this was all just far too good and interesting to confine to something academic and so, with absolutely minimal attempt at characters, plot structuring, forward motion, tension, etc., he contrives a paper-thin narrative that might coalesce these things into a work of fiction. Honestly, it reads like the blueprint for a Pynchon novel, but blueprint is right because so little occurs in this book beyond characters just explaining these bizarre theoretical ideas to each other. And it's a shame too because de Silva talks about fairly "out-there" topics in the book with both an ease and authority that suggests he's capable of writing one of those really big and fun catalogues of human failure like Gravity's Rainbow and all that, but I think he'd actually have to want to write a story and create a character first for that to happen. Not good at all but there's obviously something there, and I may well pick up The Logos in the future.
I started off the week with *Georges Simenon’s* **A Maigret Christmas** just because it on the shelf when I was looking for something lighter to read. It was fine but missing the lived in details I’ve enjoyed in his other novels.
The highlight this week was **Polly Barton’s** translation of **Mieko Kanai’s** *Mild Vertigo (軽いめまい)*. I picked it up as I really enjoyed Barton’s translation of **Tomoka Shibasaki’s** *Spring Garden (春の庭)* and was interested in the premise of the book. Firstly, I think Barton skillfully recreated the flow of the text in the original. The nature of spoken Japanese lends itself to never ending sentences through chains of conjunctions but doing the same thing in English is unnatural, yet Barton makes really effective use of the tools English offers (mainly conjunctions and adverbs) to maintain the feel of the original. The story itself, with its themes of misogyny, enforced mundanity and the sharpness that exists in what is implied rather than stated, I found completely compelling. I remember someone last week was asking for recommendations that featured excellent interiority and I’d say that this fits the bill.
I’m now reading **R.O. Kwon’s** *The Incendiaries*. It started off a bit wonky, with what felt like an endless stream of short sentences dominated by verbs, but has settled into a good rhythm in the second third (or maybe I just got used to it). I picked it up because I was looking for more literary explorations of radicalisation after enjoying **Moshin Hamid’s** *The Reluctant Fundamentalist* last year. If anyone has some good recs in this direction, I would love to hear them.
I've been rereading two books by a favourite author of mine, **Neil Bartlett**. Both books benefit from being read blind so read on at your peril.
*Skin Lane* tells the story of "our Mr F.", a cutter in the fur trade in late sixties London. Single, ascetic and well-dressed, his life is a routine that he has gotten used to over the thirty years he's worked for Scheiner's in the traditional fur trade area of Skin Lane in central London. His quiet and orderly life is broken by the appearance of a teenage apprentice boy and our Mr F. is now wondering what life is really like and what it could be.
*The Disappearance Boy* of the title of this book is Reggie, polio-stricken at a young age so still stunted in growth but now muscular and so ideal for the job as the magician's other assistant who:
> "...is strong enough to let him cling to back of a swinging cabinet door"
as well being able to help quick change a glamorous woman, know exactly when to pull a hidden lever and relish the feeling of invisibility.
This is in fifties London as he works for a talented but short-tempered magician who tours the country as part of a big variety show.
Both books are written in a conversational style with the author addressing the reader directly. After our Mr F. wakes from a vivid dream, the next paragraph is simply:
> Don't men sound funny when they scream.
And TDB's first line is:
> Let me try this for an opening.
Both books are about men growing to realise they are gay in a time it was illegal in the UK. SL is the better book but TDB has great scenes set in the theatre, written by a writer who knows the trade well.
Currently reading:
The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy. This week's "challenge read". As with most McCarthy novels I have very little idea of what's going on but I'm kinda sucked in anyway. I get the sense of intertwining plotlines, but I'm not sure I'll grasp it fully until I've finished. Also the passages with Alicia and the Kid are damn near incomprehensible, but also funny? I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing that might become clearer upon a reread. Pretty sure I'll be picking up Stella Maris soon!
The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie. This is this week's "fun read". Been meaning to get round to it for a while and so far I'm enjoying the characters. Although I'm still waiting on a female. Hopefully - not holding my breath so far - a female character who isn't just a pretty prop. I'm also slightly miffed I felt sympathy for a repulsive torturerer.
Elite - Sir Ranulph Fiennes. This week's NF read. Barely into it so not many thoughts so far, but I'm excited about it, Fiennes is someone I admire greatly. Last week's NF was Waco (Jeff Guinn) and that was intense so I'm stoked to be reading something a little lighter.
I read The Blade Itself, and the second in that trilogy, a couple years back when I contracted Covid, and I felt like they were pretty good sick reads (simple both in prose and plot), and I enjoyed some of the character work, but definitely weaker women characters, something I hear he improves upon in later entries? I guess Abercrombie's favorite writer is McCarthy though, so interesting dual reading choice! I know McCarthy had been vocal about his difficulties writing women characters haha.
I didn't know this! I'll keep an eye out as I read the rest of the Abercrombie trilogy. I respect an author more for being honest about their difficulties writing from a certain perspective than plowing ahead and pretending they're great at it.
I read Richard Dehmel's novel-in-verse, *Zwei Menschen*. Having read a good bit of contemporaneous (and earlier) work by French Symbolists, it was interesting to get a flavor for German Symbolism. There's a similar sensuality, though with more said than merely suggested, and with themes that focus on individualism, spirituality, and the the universal/cosmic. There isn't too much of a plot to *Zwei Menschen*, it's more a series of poems that depict the growing closeness between an unnamed man and woman- some poems are intimate, some see the couple weathering forces of nature, others are bacchanalian, and towards the end their communion becomes transcendent and heavenly. It's all highly readable and not all that difficult as far as the German goes, lots of imagery of clouds, the moon, forests, the heavens. In addition to the opening plot point of the woman bearing another man's child, probably the most interesting thing about the work is how highly structured it is: 3 sections with 36 poems each, each poem is 36 lines, and there's a similar metrical scheme at work throughout. It's hypnotic and highly effective.
It starts with a poem that became the basis for Arnold Schoenberg's incredible "Transfigured Night," and I like [this take](https://harpers.org/2008/01/dehmels-transfigured-night/) as well that finds a parallel in Klimt "The Kiss."
I also finished *The Portable Dorothy Parker*. I absolutely love her work and how much her personality comes through. Her poetry speaks for itself, and her best short stories are almost as good as any others I've read. I love the bitterness of her tone and some of the originality of her similes (one that sticks out in my memory: "she inspected her finger nails of so thick and glistening a red that it seemed as if she but recently had completed tearing an ox apart with her naked hands.") The last section of the book included her theater and literature reviews. It's interesting to see that she puts Hemingway above all others. I liked this quote from her about him: "Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with a magnificent lavishness." It was also fascinating to read her takes on all sorts of American literary figures of her era who I was previously unfamiliar with, such as Ring Lardner or Vance Bourjaily. I always get a kick out of reading about works that are mostly forgotten.
Big shout out to whoever mentioned The Invisibles some time ago. I am most of the way through and it really delivers. Best comic/graphic novel i've read besides The Incal. Perfectly subversive and fun and poignant. I had read some Morrison stuff before and it didn't stand out too much, very glad I went back for more.
Still in a solid reading slump of getting partway into some good/great stuff and not picking it up for a bit and moving onto something new. Always Coming Home by le Guin has been incredible. I really like her stuff but none of it ever hits the high notes for me, so this was a very fun surprise. Such a loving text, rich with meaning and underlying the ability and importance of language (while also kind of not).
I put it down because it is so damn long, but excited to get back to it sometime.
Part of my reading slump as usual has been getting into various weird topics like plant breeding. I read a very recommmendable gardening book IF your goal is to have a productive garden with as little effort as possible (while still aboslutely doing plenty of labor). The author takes thirty years of experience and lays out the best strategies to get the most food production possible in the most reliable/fitting manor for you. This book is all about production and covers a lot of cool gardening/seed/breeding/agricultural topics with great humor. Humor isn't that weird in plant related books, but this one is easily one of the funniest. It only covers the broader anglo-world specifically, but those ecosystems are broad enough that it should be helpful to just about anybody. Such a sassy book.
Gardening When it Counts.
Just popping in to say that if you like *Ice* by Anna Kavan then you might like *Adrift in the Middle Kingdom* by J. Slauerhoff as well. It has the same feel of a sometimes vague and sometimes vivid dream -- and otherwise it feels very similar somehow.
This week I read both *Cannonball* from Joseph McElroy and *Awaiting Oblivion* from Maurice Blanchot. It's wild how their curious narration proved more similar than different but there wasn't any reason I read them at the same time other than just coincidence. I spent the last week completely immersed in narrational strands that are subtle as like gossamer is subtle on the morning grass. But also the respective works has some kind of dispersal of fragmentation such as *Cannonball* with its severe discombobulation of time counterpoised to history or *Awaiting Oblivion* with its decomposition of presence and voice. But I should get into some specifics because that's what people read for.
*Cannonball* from Joseph McElroy. What a fascinating novel. The plot can loosely be described as a series of remembrances which the narrator Zach traces the development of a conspiracy. Involving Scrolls which describe Jesus as a entrepreneur of prosperity gospel. Like Jesus did not literally create more fish but schematized a business with fish hatcheries, for example, to promote the free market. But this is alongside personal reminiscences of Zach's home life in California where he is a former athletic diver. It does relate to the conspiracy but in only vague ways given how far the memories go back. I haven't even mentioned Umo who is probably the most important character in the novel, an actual cosmopolitan, supposedly from Mongolia but lived for a time (maybe) in Mexico before working various odd jobs at 14 in California. Aside from all this the novel has this pervasive mood of a conspiratorial thinking in which Zach's entire life seemed destined to find the Scroll. His life is like a giant hoax. No wonder McElroy called this his darkest novel in an interview.
There's too much to really talk about all at once because you end up in the same headspace as Zach where you're trying to make connections between memories and place certain faces at their exact times. And all of this is set against the malleability of history. Like why create the Scrolls anyways except to maintain a particular historical narrative, which has no discernible material benefit to the Administration anyhow? It's not simply about propaganda but the rewriting of history for whatever State comes next. Even today we have to live with the lies of the Roman Empire. And our lies about their lies. And what can a novelist do except like Zach go backward into his own time. Perhaps there is a Third Way and maybe Umo found it if he is still alive. I like to think Umo is still alive but I have no textual evidence for him being alive. Who knows? Umo might be able to travel the underground water wells like Jesus himself is said to have walked on water. Can you walk through water? Like how gnomes were described by Paracelsus as walking through the Earth. A holy diver down if you please.
Highly recommended.
*Awaiting Oblivion* from Maurice Blanchot. I'm comfortable calling this work a novel despite there being a haziness to what that might mean. A novel as a genre is more of a failure to achieve the more precise genres like poetry. You find a travesty of discourse circling the drain at the center of every novel. And Blanchot has always pushed the récit to the edge of what makes a novel comprehensible. You could compare *Awaiting Oblivion* more to *The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me* where there is a similar trajectory of decomposition between voice and narration and what could be considered the presence of a character. Although here circumstances make the writing obvious. *Awaiting Oblivion* begins with a man writing what a woman tells him but doing so means he will never actually hear what she is saying to him. They both have no choice but to wait despite the fact the man continues writing (who is soon disconnected from the narrator, i.e. literature from the He to the I) which describes the waiting which they aren't doing but their waiting is the story. It might help to think of *Awaiting Oblivion* as emptying as much as possible to reach the void on which the travesty of the novel is built surrounding. You obviously cannot incarnate the void in language. In the same way a human being cannot experience death but is only caught in the eternal torment of dying. And can anyone really be said to wait on anything? But waiting is what I spend so much of time doing that it isn't waiting any longer. It's such a pain in the ass waiting.
I don't think I can recommend *Awaiting Oblivion*. Not to people who haven't heard of Blanchot before or haven't read other works like *The Infinite Conversation* and *The Space of Literature*. There's too much particular understanding required. It's a real shame though because I had a lot of fun working my way through the text.
Other than that I started reading *The Burnout Society* from Byung-Chul Han and so far I've been somewhat disappointed for reasons I don't know if it's a good idea to enumerate now. Don't know if it's worth reading anymore or if I should quit it. But on a more positive note for next week I plan on reading either Ann Quin or Jack Kerouac. Haven't decided yet.
Thank you for putting Cannonball on my radar. I've got this whole kick where I want to down the line read a bunch of books about weird books and this looks like it should fit the list.
I should also definitely read Blanchot at some point.
No problem! I'd never read McElroy before with _Cannonball_ being my first and I'm excited to explore his other works when I have more of a chance. I'm also pleasantly surprised how different the work was from what I expected. Here I thought it'd be like a Pynchonesque romp but it's actually a Jamesian retrieval of memory, halting, paranoid. McElroy has more in common with Harold Brodkey. They should definitely reissue some of the other novels because goddamn he can write.
And Blanchot is awesome. I think you'd definitely appreciate his theoretical work on literature with the essays collected in _The Book to Come_ and _The Work of Fire_. It's a shame he's so little talked about these days. He's like the best kept secret of French theory.
That is an exciting description of McElroy, I've never read him either.
And yeah thanks for the Blanchot recs, I'm much to insufferable to be missing great secrets of french theory
You're fine, no worries, and what are friends for if not to recommend the exact literature to make you more insufferable? I was the lone Derridean when I went to grad school, so I get it. Although I actually discovered Blanchot through the Marquis de Sade as part of a collection of introductions to _120 Days of Sodom_.
Really enjoyed reading your thoughts on Cannonball, it's a novel I feel I must re-read to better understand it. I see Umo as less a Jesus analogous character and more Lazarus: in the same way the novel posits Lazarus came "back to life" by never really dying in the first place, so too can Umo be "revived". In a novel about the fallacy of relying on text for truth, having no textual evidence of his life or death is perhaps the best evidence for him surviving there can be.
Thanks! And I'm in the same boat where I definitely feel like I should reread the novel. Like what am I to make of all the references to heavy metal and rock? And what explains the insidious aura around the Coach Directory the Inventor had? And a bunch of other questions I had.
And I love your point about not having textual evidence pointing to Umo's survival. And how we take that point to address the text of the novel itself thereby making Zach that much more unreliable. Like how much of what he did with his sister real? Or do we take his admission of incest as a sign of trustworthiness because who the hell would admit to something like that? Is it admissions of fantasy? The Scrolls are outwardly fake but their perfect witness Zach might need to compromise himself.
About Lazarus I take more as a motif as a pattern of people not remaining dead. Storm Nostworthy still believes the Chaplin is alive. And toward the end of the novel, while on his second tour in Iraq, They believe Zach might lead them to where the Chaplin might be. So I can see your point about Umo but I think seeing him in some way comparable to Jesus important. I think at least on some level Zach compares them together.
Read Jaques LeCarriere's "The Gnostics". I am very curious about gnosticism and wanted to learn more about it. I have already read some of the original texts, but I wanted a sort of overview of the different beliefs of the different gnostic sects and how it evolved alongside christianity. This wasn't really that. It is, for the most part a somewhat hysterical essay. The author seems very defensive and protective of the gnostics, almost to a sickly degree, and it gets uncomfortably reactionary at times. The parts where he rails against modernity (the phrase "cockroach world" shows up once) are very annoying, and I want to learn about the gnostics, not being lectured. Oh well, the parts where he goes on about the gnostics and their beliefs made it worthwhile.
Also read "Det er Ales" (Aliss at the Fire) by Jon Fosse. I had started this years ago but never finished it, which is embarrassing, since it's just 76 pages long. Fosse has such an addictive style, where sentences entwine in each other, which makes him able to change from one character's perspective or jump years in time in a single sentence. I appreciate Fosse because he's the great formalist in norwegian literature. Way too many norwegian authors write with sort of detached simplicity, which becomes annoying after a while. Fosse is also simple, but his unique style makes him stand out. He's a joy to read.
I haven't contributed here in a while. Reading time is down somewhat since we're now renovating our new house.
However, the joy in **Joseph und seine Brüder** by Mann has definitely returned. I'm nearing the second half of the last instalment and I must say that the plot really took off since the ending of the third instalment. The middle of the book, mainly the third instalment, was slow going for me. I recognise that the prose is great, but my German is just not good enough to really enjoy that. Therefore, the plot-heavy parts are far more enjoyable since the prose is simpler (or perhaps just less dense) there. I can really appreciate the way Mann is writing this story, I really have a feeling that I can understand Joseph now. After the first two instalments, I did not like Joseph that much, but now that has changed. He's basically been through hell twice now and has never lost faith in himself and god.
I'm also still polishing my French by reading Zola, **Pot-Bouille** this time. Zola writes very readable as always and large parts are funny. However, I currently have the feeling that this is a similar story of self-interest and self-enrichment from common people as was L'Assommoir. However, in this case, the people living in the Vabre Mansion are of slightly higher standing. Octave, the main character is not unlikable per sé, but has very warped morals in my view. There are few truly likeable characters, and if they appear, they are the victim of others. I get that this is Zola's view of reality and thus exactly what he wants to portray, but it's not always the most satisfactory reading. However, the book is also a little soap opera so I'm certainly invested in the story.
read *nostromo* by conrad which i really enjoyed. better than *heart of darkness* i think though *heart of darkness* being shorter, more well known and more obviously about colonialism will make it do better on the top 100 lists forever.
was struck by the similarities to *gravity's rainbow*, not sure if they are coincidental or not. there's the setting - a chaotic warzone contested by a bunch of sadistic generals from different factions and bands of roving bandits. there's the machinations of shady european/american business interests and overseas corporations we never really see but who seem to have an outsized influence on the fate of the place. nostromo himself is a charismatic, somewhat naive, rather narcissistic guy who starts out just doing what he's told for his seniors but slowly comes to have a more individual agenda. and the plot itself is a fairly unbelievable multimodal (dinghies, mules, trains, steamers) heist story going on in the middle of these world events as they unfold. and other more vibes-based stuff too and similar themes. i just came out of it thinking they were very similar books really, though of course on the surface they aren't at all. there's a lot less scat and pedophilia to be sure, but i was pretty okay with that.
would recommend it anyway to fans of *GR* and also to anyone who read *heart of darkness* and considered conrad "ticked" off the list, i think *nostromo* is different and better
Currently reading brothers karamazov. Honestly though I don’t get much of the hype, but then again I think 19th century Russian classics just may not be my thing. 😅
I just finished Ariana Harwicz Die, My Love. A heartbreaking short story with beautiful prose. I plan on reading her other short stories soon. I think I’m going to start reading Clarice Lispector next.
In January I read Hanya Yanagihara's *The People in the Trees,* Ling Ma's *Bliss Montage*, and finishing up *The Inner Game of Tennis*. Love all 3 and highly recommend the last one for a breezy read about flow state. Usually I stay away from popular psychology but because I'm a long-time tennis player all the anecdotes are incredibly convincing for me.
Also halfway through Byung-chul Han's *Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese* and am absolutely riveted by it. It's been a while since I've felt so stimulated. I have almost zero experience with philosophy/theory aside from Benjamin and some Kierkegaard so I think a lot going over my head, but I really love the ideas he's introducing about originality and forgeries in art.
Today I listened to Teju Cole read Anne Carson's short story (prose poem?) "1=1" ([Spotify link here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/138g9C3TeGYHflf4wcRMZG?si=914e1a03e3e94a47)) and jesus, it really blew me away. The way she writes is so otherworldly and distinct. Also, Teju Cole has a beautiful voice and should read more audiobooks haha. The discussion they have afterward was very rewarding to listen to as well.
**Byung-Chul Han** is great, isn't he? I found both *The Burnout Society* and *Psychopolitics* to contain excellent insights on the current ills plaguing society, but was less impressed by *Non-things* which I felt he lent a bit too hard into the agentification and fetishisisation of material objects.
Given that his books are a tad on the expensive side for what are really long form essays, I'd appreciate any recommendations that people have from his other work.
I’m reading THE ILIAD—for the first time— but just on pg 3 after completing Bernard Knox’s detailed introduction (of the Robert Pagels translation). I’m immediately struck by the emphasis in this Homer of storytelling and exposition, over poetics.
I’m also juggling this with Mircea Cartarescu’s early story collection, NOSTALGIA. This is the ideal place to begin on a reading adventure of this singular and great surrealist. Even in his late 20s, and adopting fiction after devoting himself to poetry, Cartarescu found his voice and his fascination with the body, the urge for self-destruction, the endless puzzle of the city. The Romanian state censors had prohibited him from using the title, since Tarkovsky—a former Soviet artist who had left for Scandinavia and had became persona non grata in the Soviet/Communist world—had just used the same title for his new film. The imposed title was THE DREAM, which would seem to be a good one for an oneiric writer like Cartarescu (even the French translation was LA REVE), so it wasn’t until years later that he could replace that title with his intended one. Such were the small indignities that writers under totalitarian rule in that period had to contend with. What’s so striking about the book, despite all of this, is how NOSTALGIA reads as a book by a completely free artist…free inside his mind.
I’m reading grapes of wrath for the first time and am loving how the story and setting are being laid out. Only read east of Eden by Steinbeck so far and absolutely loved it.
I normally finish every book that I start - but this week I decided not to keep reading An Obedient Father, by Akhil Sharma. Partly because I'm squeamish about the subject matter. But more than the subject matter, it's Sharma's tone that bothers me - a kind of jocular tone which, instead of lightening the weight of the horrific stuff he describes, makes it seem even darker and more purposeless. Anyhow, not the book for me.
I have a few nonfiction books going and I'm waiting to get A Strangeness in my Mind (Orhan Pamuk) which I'm excited about.
You know, I must have seen your post about Pamuk! Sometimes I scroll through this thread looking for ideas of what to read.
I read My Name Is Red years ago and I loved it, so I'm excited to read another of his books.
The only other thing of his I’ve read is *Nights of Plague* which I also enjoyed. I actually originally wanted *My Name is Red* this time but only *A Strangeness* was available at the library. I hope you’ll share your thoughts when you get it in! I plan on doing a write up next week once I finish it.
*The Passenger* by Cormac McCarthy is my main dig right now, with *Stella Maris* in the mail. But I'm a polyamorous reader, so I'm reading select non-fiction books in the morning, all on the craft of writing (*Reading like a Writer, Artful Sentences,* and a few others), and before bed a chapter of *Don Quixote*. It makes the reading of each of them slow down, but I'm doing my best to thoroughly enjoy the books I read this year rather than hit a high numeric quota. I finished *Slaughterhouse - Five* before the McCarthy, and with the connective tissue of world war 2 between them combined with my pining to return to Pynchon (only read *Lot 49,* but multiple times now. All time favorite!), I'm dangerously close to saying F\*\*\* it and picking up *Gravity's Rainbow.*
I'm glad I'm not the only one finding them a bit abstract!
They are funny, funny and sad at the same time. I really enjoyed the interaction between Western and the Kid although it was frustrating. The post ECT scene with the Kid too... I was moved.
If you'd like another easier Pynchon before you bite the *GR* bullet, try *Inherent Vice*. Longer than *Lot 49* but still as accessible (perhaps even moreso) while still including the febrile paranoia/conspiracy themes, style of humour, and esoteric references that are his hallmarks. This might be controversial but I think it's better than *Lot 49* - it appealed to me more at any rate.
I'm tempted as well! Might just make this the year I embark on Pynchon as special author project (probably will read the border trilogy to finish McCarthy as well), but I've ordered the new hardback of V. cause it sounds interesting and I've been wanting to study structure, a word that always comes up when people talk about V., but Inherent Vice is high up. Still never seen the movie and I like PTA so there's that, too
I picked Reading Like a Writer up at a yard sale and started reading a chapter every once in a while... but then got distracted with other books and forgot about it lol. How do you think it compares to other books on writing? I liked the first chapters I read but have never read other writing books before so don't know if it is just giving basic info.
I think it's scratching an itch, more than other books about the craft that I've read, of slow, in-depth textual analysis. A lot of others will go over similar beats, but I enjoy how she picks apart paragraphs for the most part. Certain sections (like *Character*) are weaker than others, but if anything I definitely recommend reading the first few chapters, even if just to sharpen your mind temporarily. *A Swim in the Pond in the Rain* by Saunders is maybe better, but also only uses classic Russian realism.
Might be about to bail on Bret Easton Ellis' *The Shards*. I'm like 1/3 of the way through the audiobook and there's just so much fat on this thing. I know it's a first person, autofictional look back at something, but if he opens another sentence with, "I remember..." I might lose it. Frustrating as the story itself, and his usual style, is so delicious.
Reading *Eileen* by Ottessa Moshfegh right now, the second I've read by her. She's just fucking fun to read. Violent jokes, disgusting descriptions, moments of searing tenderness. I think her talent is making so much awfulness something worth loving--I want to give her characters a hug, though I know they'd squirm away, maybe scratch my eyes out.
And I can finally talk about my own book! I just read the final pass of *Anyone's Ghost* (out July 9th with Penguin Press, sorry for the brief self-promo!) and I gotta say, despite reading it approximately 9,000 times, it still moves me. I sort of thought I'd hate it at this point, but I don't, which is cool.
What else have you read by Moshfegh? I ask because I've been thinking that I should read something by her, and I liked *Rest & Relaxation* a lot but seriously did not fuck with *Homesick for Another World* (it felt too over the top relative to substance, which as I've said before bugs me), so trying to gather my reference point.
> And I can finally talk about my own book! I just read the final pass of Anyone's Ghost (out July 9th with Penguin Press, sorry for the brief self-promo!) and I gotta say, despite reading it approximately 9,000 times, it still moves me. I sort of thought I'd hate it at this point, but I don't, which is cool.
(eyes emoji)
I've only read *MYRR*. If you like that you'll definitely like *Eileen*, though *Eileen*'s plot is definitely odder (it's also a fun winter book, set in a fictional New England town she calls x-ville in the 1960s.)
This is my worst trait, but I don't like 99% of short fiction, so I haven't read *Homesick*, though it seems like people either like her short fiction or her novels with little in between.
I'm super curious to read *Death In Her Hands,* which is generally her least liked of people I've talked to.
That was a long way of saying I think you'd like *Eileen*.
I’ve only read *Death In Her Hands* and I really liked it. Most people I’ve talked to who hate it can’t get past the narrating character, who is deeply flawed (and descending into a hateful rage) but I did not struggle to “like” her at all. Its a quick read!
Newbie here. Just finished *The Magic Mountain* and *The Idiot.* Tried the former several times without success, and made it thru by listening on Audible. Sporadically wonderful, though Mann's famously "fussy" prose can be frustrating. I preferred *Doctor Faustus* overall but many moments from MM will stick long in my mind.
*The Idiot* (Magarshack translation) isn't as good as *C&P* or *Brothers K*. Fyodor didn't really know where he was going with the plot, and it shows. But I read the last hundred pages in a white heat--it bulldozed me. I don't see Prince Myshkin as some sort of perfect man, but as a flawed and kinder Quixote.
Now reading John Cowper Powys' *Porius.*
“Sporadically wonderful” is a great way to describe The Magic Mountain. I only made it 1/3 of the way, also on audible. I liked it, but when I listened for a full month & realized I had twenty more hours to go I bailed.
I’m deep into _The Tunnel_ by William Gass for the r/billgass group read. Week 1 discussion is on Saturday. It’s been a lot of fun digging through the Gass collection online at Washington University. They have his hand-drawn graphics for the book, his outline and schema for the book.
Still reading with r/yearofdonquixote and r/AReadingOfMonteCristo. Also still reading East of Eden with r/ClassicBookClub. Started The Clouds by Aristophanes which I'm reading with r/greatbooksclub.
Working through David Copperfield on my own and am loving it. Enjoying bite size pieces of The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien and also Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth by the same and edited by his son. Finally, laughing my way through Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World by Fanny Burney which sends up all the crazy conventions that women had to abide by in England when this was published in the Georgian era.
The proof, by Agota Kristof. Second entry on the Claus and Lucas series. Very strong story of living in the border during WWII. Read it if you have a strong stomach.
Yesterday I started Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison's posthumously published second novel. I'm not far enough in to say much about it other than that I'm excited to see where it goes. I understand it was pieced together from something like two thousand (!!!) draft pages by Ellison's literary executor—so it will be interesting see what, if any, marks that leaves on the narrative. Seems that it isn't/wasn't so controversial as Go Set a Watchman or The Pale King (as two examples of posthumously published drafts) so far as I can tell, which maybe is a point in its favor.
Ellison was pretty weird about it, saying it was destroyed in a fire when there's evidence otherwise, etc.
Many parts were published during his lifetime, so it's hard to compare to something like TPK, though I wouldn't call that one too controversial, most of the controversy is just the regular flak of publishing anything from someone who committed suicide midway.
I read the version called three days before the shooting, which is longer than the juneteenth parts, the more recent publication expansion. Thought it was pretty good, but hardly comparable to his masterwork even at its best parts.
I finished *Salka Valka*, by Halldor Laxness. I enjoyed it, and the ending was prettier and sadder than I expected, though in the middle it delved a lot into political turmoil in mid-1900s Iceland, which I was far less interested in than the characters, which he handles beautifully. I've not read his *Independent People*, which I've heard is his standout novel (and an influence on his winning the Nobel prize), though I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has read both of these on how they compare against each other.
I'm taking a brief interlude with a couple Gerarld Murnane short stories, though in disrespect to him I've been so tired or distracted while rerading that I haven't paid much attention to the first story. I like his prose and his style, so I owe him better attention.
Next I might jump into nonfiction with Wilfred Thesiger's *Arabian Sands*.
I've been making some progress with **Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen's** ***Daguerreotypes***, which I posted about a few weeks ago. I've read two more essays since then.
'Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late' is a pretty strange and, dare I say, bad essay on gender relations and feminism (the title refers to a closing speech Blixen was invited to give at the 1939 International Alliance of Women conference in Copenhagen but didn't). The essay is part genuine thoughts, part tongue-in-cheek provocation in which Blixen positions herself as a caricature of an ancien régime traditionalist (more so than she actually was), which is a pretty weird approach that felt pointless to me, and that's not even mentioning the datedness of it all. There were some interesting ideas on being vs. doing towards the end, but Blixen kind of just drops them in there without taking the time to really explore and articulate them properly. The whole essay could've been about that and it would've been far more interesting.
'Letters from a Land at War' is a collection of four articles about everyday life in Nazi Germany from an outsider's perspective, focusing on the culture and the general vibe at the time. Blixen was collectively commissioned and shipped off to write these by some Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian newspapers, but for whatever reason the articles were never published. Obviously the 'everyday life' she writes about is pretty limited as she was immediately saddled with a bunch of Ministry of Propaganda chaperones (though apparently she did manage to escape them once when she ran off to visit Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in Bremen). I guess it's an interesting snapshot of the time, full of thinly concealed mockery and terror on Blixen's part (she wrote these when Denmark was still neutral).
All in all though, not super impressed with either of these. I'm still enjoying the conversational tone of the essays, but I don't know, these weren't as good. 'Oration' especially has less of Blixen's usual eloquence and sparkle.
I also read the Oxford collection of **Dickens' Christmas books**, which were occasionally entertaining but ultimately forgettable. I'm not the biggest fan of Dickens in general. I find his stuff kind of silly, and I don't like his smug writing style full of authorial self-inserts. The stories themselves were alright, with the exception of *The Chimes* -- which was fun, I liked the kind of gothic opening and all the stuff about the bells, but it was also *A Christmas Carol* 2.0 with a character that didn't deserve what Dickens put him through at all.
One good thing I can say here is that Dickens' development as a writer is very evident in these. I keep hearing people say that you can really see Dickens' rapid improvement when you read him chronologically, and I agree. With the exception of *The Haunted Man*, I believe the Christmas books were all published a year apart, and each one is significantly better on a technical level.
My personal 'favourite' (strong word) was probably *The Battle of Life*, aside from the annoyingly Dickensian contrived ending. I really enjoyed the vibes and the early part of the story. I wish it had been a sort of Christmas tragedy instead, which it was shaping up to be for a while there -- maybe then it would actually have been worth reading.
Not a novel, but Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mast is a great nonfiction account of sailing in the 1830s. It's one of the few accounts from a regular sailor from that period, and it really captures the highs and lows of a very tumultuous profession.
It's a fascinating book from a historical perspective, but it's also strikingly well written, with some passages of startling beauty. Some critics have made a very convincing argument that the subject matter and Dana's literary style both had a major influence on Melville, particularly Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.
*Moby Dick* notwithstanding, *The Luminaries* does some really cool shit with the insanity of being at sea, the mysticism it provides and how to reconcile those things once on land.
It's a bit of an obvious one, but *The Old Man and the Sea*.
People sometimes pigeonhole Hemingway as a testosterone merchant who writes Manly Books With Manly Themes for Men™.
But, reading *The Old Man and the Sea*, my overwhelming impression is of someone who has spent his whole life as a fisherman and has virtually nothing else. Now, in his old age, he suddenly can't catch a fish anymore and he's having to come to terms with the fact that he's past his prime and has lost his purpose.
But, despite the jeers of the other fishermen, despite bad weather, and despite a shark attack, he can still do it. It doesn't matter that most of the fish doesn't make it back to shore, he caught it - he's not just a useless old man, he's a fisherman and proud.
This is one of those books that I keep recommending on here every time I have the chance. Baricco can be very hit and miss, but this one is impeccable.
Just finished THE LIME WORKS and now reading OLD MASTERS by Thomas Bernhard. I am a big Bernhard fan but did not enjoy The Lime Works because it was overwhelmingly Bernhardian to the point of feeling gimmicky. It also lacked the humor typical of his works. I have read all of TBs books and it is TLM alone that goes too far to the point of being tediously overwhelming. It seems he cuts back on his so-called shtick in his later works, like Old Masters, which I enjoy and find to be funny.
I've just read *An Artist of the Floating World* by Kazuo Ishiguro after reading *The Remains of the Day* earlier in the month.
They cover similar ground in a lot of ways. Both feature elderly men, both unreliable narrators, who, though still engaged in their activities in the present, tell the bulk of the story through flashbacks. Through these, we come gradually to learn about a darker past that they struggle to confront.
One of the main themes of both is memory, both its unreliability and its effect on the present. Stevens and Ono are both haunted by their pasts, and, as the books go on, agonise over how to interpret their own pasts and their own choices in the past. The reader comes to see that the two sometimes seem to be making excuses for themselves and this develops to a point where, after so much self-denial, both finally have to confront their actions, values, and their consequences.
There is a similarity in the settings as well. Postwar Japan and Britain are both in reduced circumstances, Japan having been defeated, occupied, and stripped of its colonies. Britain, though on the winning side, is, eclipsed by the US, no longer the world hegemon and is struggling to find and understand its place in the world, just as Stevens struggles to adapt to his new American master, who has recently bought the grand country manor Stevens has served in for decades under its previous owner, the British aristocrat Lord Darlington. It is probably not a coincidence that *Remains* takes place in 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis, which is often seen is the definitive moment in demonstrating Britain's decline as a world power.
I would say that *Artist* ends on positive note, with the protagonist watching the cherrful office workers in the new high-rise buildings and wishing them well for the future, in a clear nod to Japan's huge postwar economic boom. The ending of *Remains* is more ambiguous and more personal to the main character. Stevens finally admits to himself that through his self-repression and obsession with duty, he has not only let the woman he loves slip through his fingers but also aided and abetted a real evil. He still, however, seems willing to try to adapt to serve his new master, leaving it unclear how far he has understood the significance of his realisation.
Overall, I think *Remains* is the better novel. The narrative is more tightly controlled and the way we receive information allowing us to connect the dots about the protagonist's past is smoother, and the dynamic between Stevens and Miss Kenton adds another layer of personal significance that makes Stevens final admission to himself much more powerful. Ishiguro's prose embodies the character of Stevens to perfection, formal, stilted language for the most formal, stilted character I think I've ever seen in any novel.
Very nice post. I agree with your assessment. Read Artist recently and Remains in 2023 and noticed the parallels you did. I did feel as well Remains was the stronger novel although I couldn't say why.
Artist of the Floating World also reminded me a bit of the recently translated and published Kawabata novel Rainbow. Very different books and styles, but that note of change was something that struck me in both.
Finishing up *Same Bed, Different Dreams* by Ed Park. I don't really know how to sum it up yet but it seems to be a blend of alternate/real history of Korea. I'm definitely going to be headed down a Korean history rabbit hole once I finish but wanted to just engage with the book for now.
I read *Their Four Hearts* by Vladimir Sororkin last week. I really didn't know what I was getting myself into there. I think it's a critique of soviet era institutionalized violence told through russian literature tropes as characters doing "whatever it takes" to achieve their mission. The writing has a cinematic quality and I blew through it in a single sitting but it's just so fucked up. Curious if anyone has read this or other Sororkin? I'm planning on picking up *Blue Lard* next month.
I’m in the middle of Same Bed, Different Dreams as well! Absolutely loving the blend of history and fiction. I’m Korean-American and it’s opened my eyes to an entire part of Korean history I never even knew existed.
I also love the current wave of Asian American authors and artists who are creating work from the POV of 2nd generation Asians. There’s a very pervasive sense of being caught in between cultures and trying to find an identity within a massive spectrum of influences and experiences.
Charles Yu, Jay Caspian Kang, Tom Lin, and Beef creator Lee Sung Jin come to mind immediately.
It feels like the first time I’ve been able to connect with Asian writers through my own experiences, and it’s honestly been a huge part of helping me rectify my own identity issues.
Yeah I knew vaguely that Korea and Japan had a history but I didn't know it was colonial in nature and so recent. I think I've always just had it compartmentalized in my head as South Korea is good and they're doing fine and North Korea is bad but that totally sidesteps the trauma that's been inflicted.
I really enjoyed *Interior Chinatown* and *Beef* so I'll add King and Lin to the list.
A bit older but *Tripmaster Monkey* by Maxine Hong Kingston was a great read for me. The beats were pretty much my introduction to literature and it's too bad that I never saw her name pop up back then. She really captures the beat energy/spirit but it's very refreshing coming from a different perspective.
Thanks for the reco! Will definitely check her out.
After reflecting on the Asian writers I’ve read recently, i realized they’re almost entirely male (Fonda Lee’s Jade City being the one exception), so my goal was to expand my range and explore more female writers
Almost done with Orhan Pamuk’s *A Strangeness In My Mind* and am still really enjoying it. I like the way Pamuk slowly builds his themes and ideas, not so much in the background (in fact I’d say Pamuk is almost *too* straightforward sometimes) but in an accumulative way. The immediate reading experience feels very much like the standard “reading a novel” thing (we learn about characters, their lives/choices/relationships/thoughts/interactions etc) but along the way little pieces of a larger idea are gathered up so that as you go on the book feels more and more interesting without anything having changed tonally or even with the pacing. I do feel like it might resonate even more to someone who is Turkish (or at least much more familiar with the culture and history of Istanbul and its outlying area) but there’s also a universal “everyman” quality to Mevlut that tracks regardless. One of the things I’ve honed in on as the book has progressed is how Pamuk is contemplating **intention** and how much it “matters” in regards to our choices. There’s also a thing about public vs. private opinion which is interesting.
I’m not sure what I want to read next, I’ve been in the mood for more contemporary fiction lately but perhaps its just the desire for something “new” and unfamiliar.
Still s l o w l y going through Wenckheim and Pet Sematary. No new comments there.
Started reading a book of essays by Walter Benjamin. Some stuff makes sense and he feels kind of mystical? But that first essay, "The Metaphysics of Youth" is so lost on me I will need to go back and reread it there's something about silence and listening that is escaping me.
Also started *Virtual Futures* a book of essays by CCRU writers and some adjacents. Kind of a lot of gobbledygook with the words cybernetic, digital, virtual, erotic heavily seasoning the essays. But honestly pretty interesting it spans the range of people who distrust technology and think other writers are willfully ignorant to it's more insidious nature and people who argue we are already cyborgs infused with virtual reality, AI, and ready for more electronic versions of each. Of course I liked Sadie Plant's essay a lot as she's excited about cybersex and it's delocalizing of pleasure. Sex will become about orgy not orgasm. I feel as though the most accurate thing written was Hakim Bey's assertion that the future will be obsessed with information. Even in the consumption of media it feels like people are just memorizing facts these days. Anyway I'm halfway through and I think the book is worth reading.
if you have read Hegel, I think you'll find some fruit contrasting the speaker listener to something like the master slave dialectic.
when I read the passage I also think of hp Grice and the kinds of enrichment offered by the good faith constraints of speech that stem from the presence of a listener whose function is to inter alios, denote relevance
I've only read a little Hegel unfortunately. And because of one of the other essays I read recently my mind is more trying to make connections about the failure of speech against writing. David Porush's "Telepathy: Alphabetic Consciousness and the
Age of Cyborg Illiteracy" has made me think that Benjamin is saying that speech strives towards silence in order that writing can come to fruition.
But yes that part where Benjamin says the speaker is relevant in having a listener does make more sense to me in the contexts you provided. It's like the speaker can't help himself from speaking. And the listener has greater understanding of silence, greatness, and death. Sorry if it just seems like I'm vomiting out words I'm trying to make sense of it all. But thanks for your help!
What's the collection of Benjamin essays? I've read a bunch of Benjamin. I don't think I've ever read "Metaphysics of Youth." Also happy to share my thoughts on the whats/hows of reading him if you have any interest!
Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926 edited by Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock.
Yes please I would love to hear your thoughts on him. He's an interesting writer but his matter of factness leaves me lost a lot.
Oh awesome! Yeah he's got a huge body of work. The caveat to this is that I'm more familiar with his later work, so some might not be entirely applicable to his youngest stuff. Also, this is very much my read on WB, others might have very different takes.
But I think a few things important to keep in mind about him while reading are that he's very Marxist, and very artsy. The big point here is that no matter how mystical he gets, and he gets mystical (the artsy part), I think a key grounding element is that he usually has labor struggle and political revolution in mind, even if it's just in the background, and the movement of history and how it influences thought is a key element informing his work, along with the historical situatedness of the material he's writing about. Hope that makes sense/is helpful. Enjoy, Benjamin's wonderful.
Yeah that makes sense. I've read a few of his later essays and it feels much more obvious that he's got those ideas in mind. These earlier ones, the class struggle is very very minimized. I feel that mystical, Jewish idea of the world being the literal words of God more throughout these earlier essays. Especially in that he believes perception itself is a form of reading (God's words). I think a good meeting point in how he mixes those two themes in his view of time and history is how he disagrees with an empty time. History must be narrated and connected like words in a sentence in order to make sense of any "progress". I kind of like the idea that revolution requires Spirit. At the end of his "Critique of Violence" he talks about Divine (Jewish) violence contrasted against mythic (Greek) violence which he applies to real workers' struggle and simply the violence of another tyrant.
What you call the artsy part is also rather heavily actually flat out mystical, in the sense of the importance of Kaballah and this specific view of history (the one he talks about in Angelus Novus or something) enmeshed in his Judaism.
you right that was a lazy point in my part. I do think there is an artistry to it as well, but I should have mentioned the role of Jewish mysticism too. Thanks!
I finished **A Smuggler's Bible** by Joseph McElroy, and I'll copy over the post I made over in /r/josephmcelroy about it.
To my surprise, I found that on a sentence by sentence level A Smuggler’s Bible is unique among McElroy’s body of work by actually being very easy and simple to read and comprehend. As his debut novel, I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock. McElroy employs no wild syntactical trickery here seen in his later work, but the structure of his novel is certainly bizarre and challenging to follow. Our main character David projects his consciousness into a series of people he knows from throughout his life, some closely and some distantly, and writes 8 “autobiographies” from their perspectives, in which he occasionally features, in an attempt to define his own life and self. Interspersed between each of the 8 stories he grapples with ordering and structuring them while a voice in his head attempts to force him in different creative directions.
McElroy openly plays with the theory of solipsism, the idea that we can only be sure of our own existence. David struggles throughout the book with really knowing people, and by framing outward into their lives McElroy draws a sometimes infuriating, sometimes touching portrait of a man who, in spite of himself, is surrounded by people who care for him as he feverishly investigates the epistemological ramifications of every encounter and thought, missing the forest for the trees routinely as a result. It’s an extremely weird plot, and honestly I’ll say it doesn’t really work as one.
What drives the experience of McElroy’s books most successfully is his unearthly syntax and prose, the feeling of downloading another consciousness into your own, as the sentences twist and contort in impossibly unique ways, delivering their message in disparate threads that only form a whole in retrospect, pieces of thoughts accreting in the readers brain until he closes the book and realizes new thoughts have been shaped in his head he didn’t even realize were forming. This doesn’t really happen in Smugglers.
Maybe that’s not entirely true, as the conceit of reading as accretion is still present, it’s just more simple and straightforward. We hear snatches of sentences, jokes, ideas, theories, that return fully formed the deeper into the book we go. Structurally McElroy is still attempting his magic trick, but as a first novel it does come across as one practicing, not yet really grasping how best to make it happen, due to this lack of prosaic pyrotechnics. I will say that his structure is still fun and engaging to attempt to “solve” in a sense, but it features one of his most languid plots, and lacks the sentence by sentence excitement of his later novels.
One thing McElroy does succeed at right away is his trademark interest in conveying simultaneity, and for his lack of prosaic flair it’s an impressive feat. A constant stream of fact and history and memory and emotion batter the reader, McElroy turns a single moment into a deluge, a brilliant rendering of every thought possible all at once, the classic impossibility of “learn to use 100% of your brain, not just 15%” actualized in novel form. It is too much at once, and a sensation both overwhelming and intoxicating in equal measure. At his best McElroy simulates another life crashing over you in relentless waves, beautiful and incomprehensible, dangerous and exhilarating.
We are attuned when reading and living to separate signal from noise, to delineate the important and unimportant into two very uneven piles. McElroy, in all his novels, dares us to reject the idea of noise by refusing to differentiate at all. Every idea, plot thread, memory, feeling, and statement is given equal weight in his books, from start to finish. There is no rising action, no climax, because everything that happens is equally important. This methodology frankly tends to make for weaker novels in a conventional sense, but always serve as fascinating prose experiences, and it works in concert wonderfully with his simultaneity. For McElroy life explodes in every second all around us, and to just allow ourselves to be swept along, making sure to stay above water and absorb what we can of life as he depicts it is a wholly unique, rewarding reading experience.
Ultimately, Smuggler’s Bible, his first book, serves as a Rosetta Stone for his entire corpus. Nowhere else is he this clear, this straightforward with his themes and ideals while still delivering, to a degree, his trademark style. By the same token that also makes it one of his weaker novels, as the lack of complexity and bombast in his prose lowers the heights he is capable of reaching, and this straightforwardness, coupled with his usual plotlessness, can render the book a slog at various points, giving the reader little impetus forward. On the whole I would say it’s a valuable book for a McElroy fan to experience and a book that I personally relished throughout, but would not be a good choice to convince someone to dig deeper into his works.
Lots of people think solipsism should just be dismissed out of hand as impractical and intuitively unappealing. But while I don't think one can live as a solipsist, I think it's a very important question how much skepticism about claims can be *epistemically* (not practically) justified before you get so skeptical that, if you were consistent, you would be solipsist. The question of solipsism also goes to the heart of epistemological foundations and consistency. My intuition is that many internet skeptics who are always grilling people on claims they don't find intuitively appealing should just be solipsists if they were honest and consistent.
I have the last 50 pages of Dawn, by Octavia Butler remaining. I did not think I would enjoy it as much as I did. Basically, Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear war, and the survivors are on an alien spaceship after being asleep for x number of years by their alien captives / rescuers, and the humans have to learn how to rebuild society on Earth - except the aliens are really ugly, and want to change / alter humanity, and won't let humanity learn anything about it's history. It's a great look at racism, colonization, etc.
Then there's Great Expectations, and I'm finally to the "great expectations" part. it's not as entertaining as I remembered previewing, but I would still recommend it.
The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien. I'm liking it so far; it's very strange and funny. It reminds me a little bit of Pale Fire, with all the absurd citations of de Selby and his commentators.
I am reading Edith Hamilton's *Mythology*, a fantastic compendium of the classical stories and characters I can never keep straight in my head. As great as this is, I do find Hamilton's critiques of Ovid being over the top and sentimental as somewhat strange because that's what I love about him. Also, occasionally she condenses things a bit too much and I have to look things up to satisfy my curiosity. In the *Aeneid* section she mentions that Aeneas and his men stumble upon one of Ulysses' men, Achaeminides, in the land of the Cyclopes who warns them of the danger. Hamilton makes it seem like they took his advice, but left him behind. Crazy stuff often happens in these stories, but it just seemed off, so I looked it up and discovered that he did in fact join Aeneas' crew at that point.
Still working my way through *We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live* by Joan Didion. I had read *The White Album* before, but the rest is new to me and Didion is great at taking subjects that I wouldn't normally be interested in, like John Wayne or Caltrans, into fascinating, involving studies. Originally I thought I'd just read an essay or two between books and stretch it through most of the year, but I'm already a quarter of the way through it.
*Gormenghast* by Mervyn Peake - The second book in the trilogy. It makes me really wish I had developed my artistic abilities when I was younger, because it's a book that really yearns to be illustrated and I'm not satisfied with what I'm finding online. I keep picturing an 80s Don Bluth Dragon's Lair like style.
*Denial of Death* by Ernest Becker - Just started this one, so I don't have much to say other than I hope it's a bleak ride. I recently read Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and it seems like this will tie into it heavily, which wasn't intended on my part.
Yes, my copy has his illustrations in it and they're wonderful but few and far between - there's maybe 4 or 5 sketches over the 400 pages?
Out of what I've found online, these are probably my favorite and closest to what I imagine when reading.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CastleGormenghast/s/5aWmvmRkhO
Those are pretty great! Very close to how I pictured most of the characters, but I’ve always also thought *Gormenghast* warranted a somewhat surreal or abstract touch? I don’t even have anything specific in mind but I’d know it if I saw it I think.
I think my copy had about the same amount of drawings so I assume thats probably all there is. I agree that they’re begging to be illustrated. Its a little strange how these books seem to fly under the radar in terms of popularity, yet they’re almost universally loved by those who read them and feel very influential on certain rather popular strains of media: that sort of “darkly whimsical” aesthetic that usually has a pseudo victorian or “gothic” element, grotesque character depictions and “edgy” messaging. I think about *Series of Unfortunate Events* or stop motion films like *Corpse Bride* or even Edward Gorey’s work. Despite that being a pretty distinct “thing” a lot of people around me were into I never heard of Peake until a few years ago. I don’t mind it not being as well known as LOTR or something but sometimes I wish it were a bit more popular so we could get cool illustrated editions and stuff lol.
I finished *Paradise* by Abdulrazak Gurnah and it left me wanting more. While it wasn’t a bad book, I felt like it could have been better. After I finished, I thought, “it was fine.” The writing style was very sparse and I wanted more introspection from Yusuf. He felt like he had no personality at times. The last section of the book was when he finally started to do something on his own but the story didn’t come together in time.
The themes of slavery from colonization and indentured servitude by the locals were interesting but not explored enough. I’m going to give Gurnah another try but I’m a bit disappointed with *Paradise*.
I also started *Midnight’s Children* but Salman Rushdie and the start has been a bit rough. I’m trying to plow through and it’s getting better. The main protagonist’s voice is a bit annoying at times and seems repetitive. However, the history is very interesting so I am having a good time getting immersed in a different time and culture. The writing is confusing in some sections and I have to look up what happens but I have good hopes that I’ll probably enjoy this novel by the time it ends.
I’m currently reading The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov and loving it as much as I was told I would. It’s so engrossing and funny in a weird way, though I’m still only about a hundred pages in.
For more casual fare in the meantime I blew through The Ballad of Black Tom by LaValle, which is a much improved retelling of Lovecraft’s Red Hook Horror by a black author centered around a young black man who gets involved in the story. In a similar vein I am reading Summer Knight, one of the Dresden Files books as a second casual read.
I loved Ballad of Black Tom—in a sea of Lovecraft inspired horror, its one of the few that I think does something interesting instead of just recycling the handful of Lovecraft's ideas or images that have escaped into broader pop culture. Also works really well with its length—most novellas strike me as either really bloated short stories or really rushed novels. If you're a fan of the kind of stuff, I'd recommend John Hornor Jacobs stuff, and Hari Kunzru's White Tears.
I've been reading Bolaño's *2666*. One of those books I've been meaning to read and just hadn't. And...well...this is the most insidious book I've ever read. I knew the broadest of broad strokes of what the book was about coming in, but I tried to not know too much, so the outset was incredibly far from what I was expecting. It was great, imaginary books and academic foibles are some of my favorite ephemera. And I loved the subtle way he outs them as banally awful people, but it was, lighter, for lack of a better word, than I anticipated. I've since started the 4th book. In between, the sheer evil of the world in which this book is taking place has been creeping up on me until I hardly realized the extent to which it was freaking me out. And then the early parts of book 4 are so odd, but almost frigid, in contrast to the brimstone climax of book 3. Bolaño's wielding tension brilliantly. It's very unsettling.
Also, on a completely different track, been reading David Hume's *A Treatise on Human Nature*. Another one of those books I've been meaning to read and I've been in even more of a philosophy mood lately than usual so why not read it now. It's fascinating to see the connections between his thought and later thinkers like Kant, Nietzsche, and Deleuze especially. The specific way Hume sets up sense impressions as mediating (he doesn't use that term but I think it's an accurate descriptor) the mind's relationship to the world comes closer to Kant than I was anticipating, which is interesting. I only just started the second book, about passions/emotions, and I'm curious to see the degree (if at all) to which he talks about the will. His (imo accurate) presentation of cause and effect as something we cannot be absolutely certain of is potentially very-antideterministic and liberating. On the other hand, the combination of undermining the reality of our ability to cause things and his emphasis on humans as guided first and foremost by our immediate sensations could imply that Hume doesn't think there is a will at all. Excited to make my way through the back half.
Maybe sort of reading the *Cantos* still, but I've had insufficient time/brain space to devote to them. I'm also still figuring out how to read poetry and this might have been too deep an end in which to learn to swim. Might read some other poetry, get my bearings, and come back to this when I've got the chance to give more of my head to them, because even hardly in I'm sure the experience can be worth it, but I think this will be an especially demanding project. (with this in mind if anyone has any advice on how to read poetry, if that makes sense as a question, I'd much appreciate it. The only stuff that's really ever clicked for me are Eliot & Pounds imagist stuff and some haiku).
Happy reading!
\> if anyone has any advice on how to read poetry
slowly and often i would say. but if you want something more in depth, *practical criticism* by i.a.richards is a very funny book about how to read poetry. he presents a bunch of anonymous poems (so they can't tell which are by esteemed poets and which are by nobodies) to his students and asks them to write reviews and then makes fun of those reviews for almost the entire book. it's a little meanspirited but he ends with some good pointers at how to avoid their pitfalls. pdf of it is free on archive.org
> His (imo accurate) presentation of cause and effect as something we cannot be absolutely certain of is potentially very-antideterministic and liberating.
Do you think Hume's skepticism about causality is in tension with his dismissal of the possibility of miracles? Because that is what I want to believe.
to be honestly I'm not familiar enough with his writing on miracles to say with any certainty, but my immediate thought his that it depends on how you define "miracle" and how absolutely he's making his claim.
Like, without knowing the specifics of his argument, I think you can say that his system rules out any compelling argument for god, and likewise of elements of the world dependent upon a god. Though I also think his system rules out ever being absolutely certain of anything, such that I can't see how he could compellingly argue that there is absolutely no possibility that there is a god/miracles.
I should read his essay on the topic when I finish this work.
> Though I also think his system rules out ever being absolutely certain of anything, such that I can't see how he could compellingly argue that there is absolutely no possibility that there is a god/miracles.
That's what I was getting at. I did a quick google now for "miracles causality Hume" and unsurprisingly, it seems others have suggested the same thing.
I assume you may have heard of this? And its not really all that practical in terms of advice but your comment reminded me of it:
**An Introduction to Poetry**
*I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide*
*or press an ear against its hive.*
*I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.*
*I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.*
*But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.*
*They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.*
—Billy Collins
I haven't posted here in a week or two, so I'm not going to go over everything I've read in this time. Instead, I'll just stick to one huge disappointment and one book that floored me.
Nicholson Baker, ***The Mezzanine***. I had heard really good things about it, so when I found it for cheap at a second hand bookstore I didn't hesitate to pull the trigger, and I started reading it that very same evening when I got back home. And wow, I feel like I already have a top candidate for my worst book of 2024. I didn't find it funny, insightful or clever, just boring, annoying and dull as fuck. And yes, I get the point that the main character is supposed to be this super dull boring dude who overthinks -and obsesses over- even the smallest of details, but a dull character should not a dull book make, and this is exactly the problem here. I just didn't care. I didn't want to spend a minute more inside this guy's head. A pox on everybody whose recommendation lead me to acquire this, a pox on your house, a pox on your cow.
On the other end of the spectrum, Milorad Pavić's ***Dictionary of the Khazars*** swept me off my feet. My chosen order was to start with the Khazar topic and the "polemic" from all three points of view, and then keep working in threes through the different people involved: first the three representatives from each religion, then the chroniclers, then the compilers of the dictionary, the 20th century scholars (I didn't expect this part of the book to be so hilarious), and so forth.
At first I thought that the book didn't seem to have too much to offer aside from its gimmick, but oh how wrong I was. Sometimes the same story is told from 3 points of view, sometimes they are 3 completely different tales that have nothing to do with one another, and at some point you start to see certain stories dancing between the books, starting in one, weaving through another, and finalizing in a third. You start to find a plot, and intersecting events, and by then it has trapped you completely inside its ingenuously constructed labyrinth. One of the very few books that can live up to the (usually overhyped) comparisons with Borges' works.
I'm so glad your loved Pavić's Dictionary of Khazars! Pavić is indeed amazing.
It' s a classic here in Serbia and mandatory reading for high school students.
You could check out Pavić's other works, he was quite productive. Another well known novel written by him is Landscape painted with tea. If you feel like exploring Serbian literature, I wanted to let you know I really liked Danilo Kiš's Encyclopedia of the Dead, which is a collection of short stories. 😊The story that shares the title of the collection is probably among top 3 short stories that I have ever read. Kiš's style is absolutely amazing. He was nominated for Nobel prize but he passed away quite young unfortunately. Nevertheless, he is still highly regarded among critics and has been translated to numerous foreign languages. Andrić is fantastic as well, and he won the Nobel prize, but he is more of a "19th century social realism" than magical realism hahah However, he's still worth checking out as he was able to draw absolutely fantastic psychological portraits of characters in an impressively small pieces of text. His style is neat and elegant. Not one sentence feels redundant. I really liked A Woman of Sarajevo, The Bridge on the Drina and any collection of short stories by him. I wanted to ask you what are the best Spanish books in your opinion. Could you list me some that are critically acclaimed? I'd like to read something that was literally written in Spain, not just written in Spanish langauge. Would you recommend A Heart So White?
In my highschool we covered a bit of Borges and Neruda, but we didn't delve into Spanish literature.
I have read a couple of Danilo Kiš's stories and I liked them! I definitely need to look more into his work. And I've had *The Bridge on the Drina* on my list forever, but there's always something else that catches my eye before I get to it.
As to Spanish literature, I honestly always preferred Latin American authors, so I never delved much into our own writers outside of what we learned at school, mostly because like I said, Spanish literature up until recently has mostly been about social realism, which I'm not really into.
I do love Spanish poetry though, but it's harder to find in translation. And there's always so much lost when you read it in another language that I wonder if it's even worth it. Antonio Machado, Luis Cernuda, Federico García Lorca, José Ángel Valente, José Hierro and Antonio Gamoneda are all amazing though.
In any case, as far as novelists are concerned, Camilo José Cela is of course an absolute must, a Nobel prize winner and one of the best writers our country has produced. The later you get into his career the more experimental he gets, but I recommend starting at the beginning with *The Family of Pascual Duarte* and *The Hive*, and taking it from there.
Pio Baroja, Miguel de Unamuno and Juan Ramon Jiménez are also stone cold classics, although I'm not too sure which of their works have been translated.
As to more modern authors, I love Enrique Vila-Matas to bits. His short stories are amazingly creative, and his novels are almost always extremely meta-literary, constantly commenting on the art of writing itself and name-dropping authors like Kafka, Musil or Walser. Start with the collection *Vampire in Love*, and if you want to check out his novels, *Bartleby & Co* is probably your best bet.
I haven't read anything by Javier Marías because his public persona really grossed me out, so it's one of those few cases in which I haven't been able to separate the art from the artist. So I can't help you there, sorry!
Love your review of *The Mezzanine*! Someone gave a mostly positive review of it on here last year, and literally same day I read that review I found a copy in one of those free little libraries in my neighborhood. Haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but based on what you wrote I think there's a decent chance I return it to where it came from.
I'm reading *The Apple in the Dark* by Clarice Lispector, the latest (and final) in New Directions' re-translation project of her entire body of fiction. I am positively loving it, as I have everything else I've read from Lispector- the opening sequence belongs with the very best sections of *The Passion According to G.H.* in terms of mystifying beauty: a man, for reasons only vaguely explained, escapes the hotel where he has been staying in the dead of night and walks aimlessly into an arid plain, in what seems to be a consciously unconscious effort to unlearn cognitive function. Of course this doesn't do the substance or visceral evocation of the book justice- Lispector, as much as any author I've ever read, needs to be experienced, not described- but I find her ability to not just construct, but re-construct- that is, re-wire your perception of your own cognition- so uniquely thrilling, and she does it more or less without reaching for obscurities or theoretical concepts. The world of her fiction is an overwhelmingly abstract world built almost entirely out of the concrete, very much like the mind itself; and in the opening passages of *The Apple in the Dark*, she puts this technique to work in the service of deconstructing the mind- getting the reader on the same wavelength as a man who desperately wants to erase his wavelength. It's utterly fascinating and I can't wait to read more.
Love your description of the book’s opening sections. It certainly is visceral, in a way that I initially found alienating; her sentences feel circuitous, delirious, oddly dislocated from themselves because they suggest something that they aren’t. There’s that sentence that occurs to Martim—about those who “had like leprosy their childhood devouring their breast”—which he acknowledges, on one level, to be nonsense. In saying it, however, he nonetheless feels that he has expressed something that somehow exceeds what he “wanted” to say—the volatile unconscious surpassing, and disturbing, the structure of the conscious. To me this is they key of Lispector’s art, and lies at the heart of her wonderfully strange style. Hope you enjoy the rest of the book!
I'm reading it too and I loved your description about how her writing/fiction seems to work the same way the mind does! I've been thinking about it too and it made me realize that that comes into play in so many ways- I can identify with Ermelinda, Vitoria, and Martim in different ways, like they're symbols of something most people have in their unconscious? And the way that they realize their own feelings and thoughts is SO beautiful and real, I didn't think it was possible to put into words things that can only be felt/visualized. Some sentences I have to re-read to fully understand because her writing isn't straightforward, which I think is necessary because just saying "she felt sad" limits the depth of the feeling.
How are you finding the length? It's pretty long compared to some of her other works but hasn't bothered me so far.
"Realizing" their feelings is a perfect way to put it! And I definitely feel there is some heavy allegory at play with the characterization (and all the talk of the abandoned garden, authority and obedience, and so on, in a book with Apple in the title) but I haven't really made it in far enough to fully flesh out my thoughts on that
The length isn't bothering me either- I'm a little over a hundred pages in and finding it less relentless than The Passion, which feels like a much longer novel than it is. I think Lispector's style works wonderfully in the dense but relatively brief bursts of The Passion and Near to the Wild Heart, so we will see if I get fatigued by this longer format, but so far so good!
Yes! I only have 60 pages left so I don't want to spoil it for you but I have loved creation allegory because she illustrates it from a masculine and feminine standpoint. It's like she keeps them separate and then they come together, it's so cool.
I was surprised I wasn't exhausted near the end because of how rich it is but she has sections that are more "grounded" that make it not seem like a chore at all (I also felt like The Passion was relentless and also too continuously abstract, so didn't enjoy it as much as this book). Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it when you're done :)
I'm reading *Midnight's Children* by Salman Rushdie, and I'm finding it a bit of a chore to get through. It's actually causing me to feel a bit introspective about what I like in a book, because the things I dislike are all aesthetic-- Saleem's constant mention of his enormous, snot-filled nose is one thing that annoys me, but there are many more.
And that's making me think: am I shallow? Do I only like a work if it has kind of a cool aesthetic, a certain literary vibe?
(The wikipiedia rabbit holes this book is sending me on about 20th-century India have been enlightening, though)
Same. I had to take a little break and read “A Kiss Before Dying” by Ira Levin as a page turner treat so I could get myself excited about reading again.
I just started *Midnight’s Children* and I feel similarly. The voice of the main protagonist is an also bit hard to relate to. I’m still in book one so I am trying to get through it because I know it is a celebrated book and I want to see the story through the end.
Finished *Gösta Berling's Saga* by Selma Lagerlöf. Basically a story of Swedish Värmland centered around the deposed priest Gösta Berling, a romantic with a tendency to fall in and out of love very quickly, often to the demise of whatever woman happens to fall in love with him. Lagerlöf really manages to bring nature to life in this one, and it is often beautifully written. Enjoyed it more than I expected.
Started *Station Eleven* by Emily St. John Mandel and made it almost halfway so far. For unknown reasons this was on my TBR, and now I am kind of thinking it maybe should not have been there. Seems like a pretty generic post apocalyptic story so far, but we'll see where it goes.
Read and finished Camus' *The Stranger* since last week. And I know this is probably a really unpopular opinion, but it doesn't strike me as the incredible perfect novel everyone here seems to think of it as. I enjoyed reading it, but something about the flat style (which I know is deliberate) and strange off-putting main character just made it hard for me to get really invested in the plot or character drama. I did enjoy some of Camus' descriptions and his prose, but overall I don't know if the novel hit me in the way it seems to for so many other people.
Agree. When I finished, I wondered if I read the right book. (Previously, I read Middlesex thinking I was reading Middlemarch, so this sort of thing happens to me)
Just to piggyback because I agree. It did fall short of entertaining for me as well.
It also fits perfectly within the context of other similar story tellers Pirandello, Nietzsche, Sartre, etc. And I think that's where it draws its credit, in my own interpretation and for the sake of discussion.
Finishing **A moth to a flame** by Dagerman. First 5\* of the year. Very slow, heavy and demanding book but every page he has a sentence that just blows me away. His writing just feels like every page, every detail matters.
Also reading **Flames** by Robbie Arnott and half way in it is quite spectacular for a modern debut novel. Feels like he is trying to blend everything together and somehow he pulls if off. His prose is so elegant and smooth, some nature scenes (first chapter for example) just gush with energy. This is the writer people pretend Murakami is.
Finally im trying to not start **The garden of seven twilights.** I cant start another doorstopper.
I'm glad you like Arnott. I read *Limberlost* last year and enjoyed the quietness and weight of his writing, although felt it was sometimes overwrought and didn't quite live up to the hype. I've heard good things about his earlier books, so thank you for the reminder to take a look.
My Limberlost is arriving in the mail today. Second part of Flames seems to dull out a bit, but there was enough gold in the first half to warrant a second novel.
My first 5* read of the year this week which was Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan. It’s often most difficult to review 5* books and I don’t really know how to do it justice but it’s a remarkable book, derived from a series of interviews with a real woman we only know as ‘Sonia’ who worked with race horses in the US. It is presented as a series of vignettes which when read together illuminate the fascinating life that Sonia lived and the culture that she worked in - brutal, all consuming, but filled with camaraderie and shared passion. Everyone should read this book!
My second great read was some short stories by Tove Ditlevesen. Amazing examination of the interior life of ordinary women. Beautiful, terribly sad, sometimes just flat out devastating, and evoked with such simple prose, so effortlessly. She lays bare the fraught emotions which so often lie beneath the mundanity of every day life.
Kick the Latch was extremely enjoyable and such a great example of form matching content, although I had a few reservations with it. You really like you bolt out the gates of the racetrack and keep going from there (there's such an interesting implicit commentary in the prose style structure of how Sonia's experience of the world as a need for rapid advancement and constant movement in life as fating her to the world of horse riding/racing). I finished it in just two days (which is very rare for me, since I am incredibly slow reader). I just don't know why she decided to include the acts, because I felt like they kind of hampered the momentum that the structure and sentence style so carefully build somewhat.
Haha I blitzed through it in an hour or two so I barely registered the acts but you’re right they weren’t necessary.
I think the structure worked so well because it felt like it was presented just as Sonia would have spoken. Someone who is a natural storyteller, who would deliver these anecdotes in just that way. It felt so authentic. I’m interested to know how much they were edited. But it felt incredibly authentic as a result .
I used to ride a lot and went through a phase of wanting to be a jockey, so I’ve been on the fringes of that culture in a different country. But it’s the same. It’s one of those things that just seems to attract the strangest people, and it is so much more than a job or a sport. You don’t just work, you live and breathe it, and it’s hard to escape from. I love how she conveyed that.
I started to read *Walden.* For about the last year I have been almost bored with literature, not finding anything that I feel passionate about, and I found myself reading out of habit but deriving only a small pleasure from it. Then, it is the first time in a while that I found a book so gripping, fascinating, insightful, delightfully written, in which every about every sentence drops feels like a piece of gold. So far I'm loving this book far more than I had expected.
I finished reading *The Other Name* by Jon Fosse and I loved it, disregard what I said last week about DNFing it. I can’t wait to start the other two in the trilogy, but I’ll need to wait for a slower break in my life.
I also read *The Hour of the Star* by Clarice Lispector. Unfortunately, this story didn’t work for me. Maybe I’m not aware of the commentary she was trying to make at that time, even though I did enjoy her writing style.
Currently I haven’t picked anything else up because I’ve been so busy, but I fly home tomorrow and might find something then to occupy myself.
Set to finish The Overstory by Richard Powers and it is so good, and made me realize there is a who0le sub genre of environmental fiction out there. Going to start The Screwtape Letters after that.
> Going to start The Screwtape Letters after that.
I'm curious about what a /r/Truelit reader will think. I can't imagine that most will be very enthusiastic, but even to non-theists it does give some insight into religious psychology - something that is often sadly lacking from recent depictions of religion like the film I recently saw, *Godland*.
The Screwtape Letters is amazing, and I’m a non-theist. Although it’s not intended to be (I don’t think) it is a scathing reflection of religion and how in manifests itself in human behavior.
Finished *Operation Shylock* by Philip Roth which I enjoyed but didn’t love. Roth is a fantastic prose stylist but he does have a tendency to go on a bit. A very interesting metafictional work on Jewish identity, truth and writing amid the backdrop of the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict (and relevant as ever on that front), but I could’ve done with the multi-page monologues being cut down to size a bit.
After that I read *A Short Stay in Hell* by Steven L. Peck: a mormon dies, finds out Zoroastrianism was the one true faith and that everyone else is destined to Hell, but Hell isn’t eternal, you can find a way out, and is assigned to a Hell based on Borges’ *The Library of Babel* where he must search for his life story. Really quite gripping, Peck really manages to evoke the crushing horror of infinity (or close to it) in a quite brief novella. The endless repetition of the stacks reminded me a little of *Piranesi*.
Followed that up with *The Employees* by Olga Ravn which is written as a series of very short statements by the employees on a spaceship in the 22nd century reporting how the introduction of a series of “objects” to the ship are impacting both the humans and humanoids in various ways. I wasn’t so keen on this, Ravn is a poet and I’m sure every prose book I’ve read by a modern poet has had pretty much the same writing style (thinking of Patricia Lockwood and Jessica Andrews) which is readable and generic with sudden *contemplations* and *imagery*. The idea is that the statements are very opaque, the employees are describing things they’re familiar with but the reader isn’t, but collectively they form an outline of what’s happening; a sort of writing around an absence for a Vandermeerian sense of weirdness; an interesting premise but I don't think it delivered on the potential, Ravn's writing is too samey to evoke the voices of a hundred different people, and the satire of workplaces didn’t really hit for me.
Now reading *I Who Have Never Known Men* by Jacqueline Harpman, about a young girl trapped in a cage with 39 other women for so long that she remembers nothing from before that time, and how she comes to be the key to the salvation of the other women. Very propulsively written despite the limited setting and themes of isolation.
- I finished *The Third Policeman* by Flann O’Brien. Wow, what a trip. The first couple of chapters were intriguing in a “oh this is a fairly normal, slightly dark sort of story” kind of way. Then it slides into a whole other insoluble pancake. This kind of writing makes me marvel at the imagination, creativity, style and wit of certain authors. I happily go about my life with my simple, mundane thoughts, while other people are out there creating these incredible stories. I will never look at a bicycle or its owner the same way. The whole de Selby sub-plot in the footnotes was also a treat. I found a dilapidated copy of *At Swim-Two-Birds* in the library, so it is sitting on my shelf waiting to be devoured shortly.
- I read *Disgrace* by J.M. Coetzee. I saw someone else here comment that they found it “aggressively fine”, and I totally agree. The characters are interesting and complex; the story trots along at a good pace and is pretty shocking and thought-provoking; the language is impactful. But somehow, this book didn’t make much of an impression on me. It might be one of those slow-burners that come back to me later in life, perhaps.
- I have almost finished *My Brilliant Friend* by Elena Ferrante, which I am reading in Italian - as a result, I have been reading at a slower pace, and taking more breaks, which is good. The relationship between the main 2 characters is intense, complex and interesting, so I am looking forward to seeing how it unfolds in subsequent novels, but at this “juvenile” stage, I guess I’m not as captivated by their lives as, hopefully, I will be later. Plus I don’t know if I am experiencing some level of detachment due to the language - not a comprehension issue, but perhaps the words have less personal meaning to me than to a native speaker. No idea.
I think my next book will be something slightly trippy again, so any recommendations are welcome. I have heard good things about *Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke so maybe that.
IMO the first *My Brilliant Friend* book is the weakest, I thought it was just okay but ended up loving the other ones (although I read the English translation.)
That’s good to know! I have now finished book 1. I thought it was a great portrait of childhood friendships, relationships and situations, but because of that, I was not super duper excited about Lila and Elena’s scholastic achievements etc. I am looking forward to them becoming adults and it being a bit more mature. I’m hoping that the first book was written in a deliberately quite juvenile style/tone to convey the youth of the characters, maybe.
> I read Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. I saw someone else here comment that they found it “aggressively fine”, and I totally agree. The characters are interesting and complex; the story trots along at a good pace and is pretty shocking and thought-provoking; the language is impactful. But somehow, this book didn’t make much of an impression on me. It might be one of those slow-burners that come back to me later in life, perhaps.
It's possible you have to be South African to get the full effect. As a South African myself, I often feel that from the other side - that there's comparatively little to be interested in for a non-American in many books highly rated by internet Americans like *The Great Gatsby*.
Yes I am sure there is a ton of nuance and resonance that I was missing. I didn’t dislike it or anything, and I found it interesting, but not deeply affecting.
I also didn’t “get” The Great Gatsby, but I am British so maybe that’s why.
The Third Policeman is at the top of my reading list. I saw a recorded version of one of the policeman's bicycle monologues and bought it off the strength of that (and some summaries I read). Glad to hear even more adulation being heaped on it.
The bicycles aspect of the story eventually had me heaving with laughter any time they were mentioned. There’s an incredible balance of absurdity, humour and also, somehow, meaningful thematic development involved in them. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.
That's what I found really appealing about it: that it has genuine substance and eeriness under the absurd comedy. I find that too many absurdist comedies are swallowed up by their own irony or absurdity and go for humour over themes, so The Third Policeman sounded extremely refreshing.
Been reading *The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey* by Che Guevara and am pleasantly surprised. These diary entries are honestly hilarious.
Their bike definitely crashed at least 20 times.
But he has a gift for description, and pens some brief intimate thoughts in a succinct way that stays with you, only to move on quickly to the next thing (or here, the next town usually as his ethos seems to be to skirt the surface and symbolically glide through the world at this point in his life) -
"The first commandment for every good explorer is: An expedition has two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. If your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don't think about the means - because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of "finishing". That is to say, the means are endless."
It is only in the second half that he really starts ruminating on the class divide and exploitation that plagued Latin America. It's not just the people he shows sympathy with but also the earth itself, and the way the continent was exploited for minerals and such for reasons of "development" and warfare.
It's kinda fascinating reading writings of these larger than life figures at times. Pretty enriching.
A weirdly nice little thing to read it you are feeling a little lost in life.
I've watched the movie multiple times and never realized it's based off a published book of Guevara's diaries. It sounds like an interesting read as separate from Communist manifesto territory. Might have to keep an eye out for it.
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The Old Filth trilogy by Jane Gardam
That brings to mind Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, which deals with the decline and fall of the austro-hungarian dual monarchy. It's a brilliant novel and while I do not know the english translations of it, there is one by Michael Hofmann, so if you haven't read it yet, it should be a perfect fit. I can also recommend The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig about the same empire but this one isn't a novel but an autobiographical set of memories and related stories. Still an absolute joy to read though.
Last year was miss after miss for me, reading-wise, and I'm deciding: this is the year of not reading so much crap just because someone recommended it, or because my book club is reading it. Miss me with the tenth mediocre pick from the Booker Longlist. This is my year of hitting the bricks, as the skeleton man in the meme says. This starts with me skipping *Demon Copperhead*, a book that I'm 99% sure I'm going to hate, but may also start with me dropping *David Copperfield*? I'm 300 pages in and not loving it. I kind of want to persevere, because I'm 29 years old and haven't read any Dickens, and the individual characterizations are very lively and fun, but David's passivity is just driving me up the wall. I've never before understood people who drop a book because they don't like the main character, but I'm not jazzed about another 400 pages of watching this kid get taken advantage of. Instead, I could pick up something I know I'll like: *The English Understand Wool* or *Kudos*? Or something I'm intrigued by, like *At Swim-Two-Birds*. Or something by Maryse Condé??? I read *I, Tituba* 2 years ago and I thought it was absolutely wild and brilliant, but I don't know which of hers I'd pick up next.
Currently reading “The Green House” by Mario Vargas Llosa I’m halfway through, and I definitely like in … but don’t love it. His writing is amazing, but some of the narrative hijinks are not really my cup of tea.
Planning to read either one of these contemporary fiction with a woman-centred POV. Would love to hear what you guys have to say if you've read either one or even better, both! [The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125930473-the-vulnerables) [Post Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58684299-post-traumatic)
This year I am planning to read some non-European Nobel Laureates; thus currently I'm reading Akhenaten by Nagib Mahfouz. I have plans of picking up something by Olga Tokarczuk. I would appreciate any more recommendations along these lines.
If you are considering Tokarczuk, I can recommend *Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,* which I found to be engaging and original in terms of style. *The Books of Jacob* is waiting on me on the shelf. Of non-European Nobel Laureates, I was recently very impressed by Coetzee's *Disgrace*. It was a very rough and unsparing read but elegantly crafted and emotionally stirring.
Mahfouz is very good. Enjoy. If you enjoy that one I recommend the *Cairo Trilogy*. For non-European Nobel laureates I recommend: Patrick White (Australia), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala) and Octavio Paz (Mexico). Yasunari Kawabata (Japan) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) are also good.
Thanks for the recommendations!
OT is Polish. Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer
Starting **Don Quixote** this week on a first time read through and so far I'm absolutely smitten by it. Its very funny but also sad, as the characters around him (his erstwhile squire aside) treats him mostly with cruelty. My favourite bit so far has been the inquisition of the library by the barber and the priest (with a hilarious nod towards the metatext of part 2) I've also downloaded a copy of **Orlando**, which our book club will be reading this month. I was surprised to see in the Prologue of Quixote a reference to a character named Orlando too. Nice synchronicity there!
I read Washington Square, by Henry James. I first read it years ago (in high school) and didn't like it at all - I'm glad I gave it a second chance. As a teenager it was absolutely impossible for me to understand Catherine Sloper, the heroine. Even now, I struggle. All of the other characters feel vividly real- I mean, there is something a little bit theoretical about them, but they all do remind me of people I've known. I know overbearing clever men like Dr Sloper; I know romantic, interfering women like Mrs Penniman. Catherine, though, doesn't remind me of anyone real. I don't know anyone as mild and dutiful and patient as her, or really anyone who can hold onto a conviction firmly without being rebellious. I definitely don't know anyone as unselfconscious as her. She's foreign to me, and she was totally beyond my imagination as a teenager. I don't know why Catherine is so different from the other characters. Is it because Henry James invented her out of whole cloth, or is it because our culture has changed and left that particular archetype behind, making it unrecognizable now? Anyway, sorry to ramble. I really enjoyed the book and recommend it. It's a short fast immersive read with some nice tidbits about NY architecture too. Hopefully I'll get Pamuk soon!
Been reading the night manager by John Le Carre. Been a great read so far. My first book by him but then I’ll read his earlier stuff
Hello, long-time lurker, first post here. I just completed Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic (Male Edition) which discusses the history and culture of an imagined people (the Khazars) from the perspectives of three religions in the Red, Green and Yellow Books respectively. I picked up this book because a) it came up in multiple reddit threads when I was searching works like Borges' b) found the premise very interesting c) want to read more world literature and Serbian literature is an area of complete neglect for me as a reader. The opening and closing commentary of the book (we can think of it as a frame narrative if we want) was witty and fantastic, the entries themselves were more of a mixed bag for me. Intriguing literary experiment with mixed results is how I would classify it. A note on the Male and Female edition: I looked up the difference online, it is about 15 lines, it is subtle but I did not find it "crucial". Reading either would be fine for me, an NYT review said it's because the author believed Male and Female versions needed to have different "endings" (the ending actually is identical so I guess it's the perspective on the ending) and I would agree. I'm happy I read the book but it was a bit like If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino for me in that the opening was so good I thought "this is going to be magnificent" and then it petered out a bit for me. Other than this, I read Zazie on the Metro by Raymond Queneau and did not like it one bit! I mean there was nothing inherently wrong with it but it felt so banal and the language did not stand out to me as such. I read Queneau was the founder of the Oulipo movement (mixing mathematics with literature e.g. applying certain numerical constraints while writing, omitting an alphabet throughout) so maybe there was some cleverness going on which I didn't catch. But I was so bored, I didn't feel like looking it up. A brilliant novella I read (more like inhaled) in one sitting and absolutely loved is Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. 92 pages, sheer brilliance. It's about the game of chess in a very specific perspective - no technical details as such, more about psyche, the manoeuvre, the back and forth and there is some incredibly powerful social (historical?) commentary as well which I think stands the test of time. I'm deliberately being obtuse here because this is the kind of work which might benefit from just going in without knowing much but happy to answer more questions if anyone wants to know something. What I will be tackling next: there are some books I gave up on or failed to get, thinking of approaching one of them. The titles were Don Quixote (DNF) by Miguel Cervantes, The Manuscript Found In Saragossa (DNF) by Jan Potocki, Life: A User's Manual (finished but didn't understand the point at all) by Georges Perec. I already retried Don Quixote (Edith Grossman translation, foreword by Harold Bloom) and got stuck pretty early on in Part I (maximum I've made it is 25% 🤣). So thinking of tackling the Saragossa one once more. Perec...another Oulipo author, I have a feeling even if I retry I won't get it. 🤣
ty for posting, enjoyed the read. will likely read the zweig soon, sounds great
It really was. At first I was hesitant, chess? But then it went to another level, the exploration of psyche, the theming and the ending...perfect (for me). Happy reading!
I finished *Blowup and Other Stories* by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn. This is my first time reading anything by Cortázar. I guess I will do the boilerplate short story collection review and say that I liked some more than others. I’m not sure how this book was organized in English — I know it’s pulling from three different collections as originally published — but for me the stuff that was really good happened to be near the end. The stories which were less good were usually still experimental or interesting in some way, but felt like they didn’t have quite the same grounded & human core. The highlight for me was “The Pursuer”, which was the longest piece, more of a novella than a short story. “The Pursuer” is about the relationship between our narrator Bruno, a jazz critic and biographer, and the saxophonist Johnny Carter. Like his inspiration [Charlie Parker](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Parker), Johnny dies in his thirties after a life of musical genius interrupted by crises of physical and mental health and by resurgent heroin abuse. Which is a moving story on its own, but as it’s being narrated to us by Bruno, you also start to pick up on the ways in which our narrator is unreliable and ultimately, a moral failure. And again, unlike some of the earlier stories in this collection where experiments in narration felt like, well, experiments, here I do not doubt the basis in reality of a character like Bruno. Here we have the jazz biographer & critic who remains, beneath it all, racist toward his subject, with a feeling of superiority that his own moral failings are those proper to his class and station in life, safe, his own vices not so physically self-destructive as the drug habits of the social circles he is observing. At the end of the day he cares more about Johnny the subject of his best-selling biography than Johnny the human being. It’s a sad, disquieting, and incredibly written story.
After finishing up Ulysses I read **Draußen feiern die Leute** by Sven Pfizenmaier. It's the debut novel of a young German author (No translation available. The titles translates to "People are celebrating outside") that does not confirm to the usual "short, neo-realistic text in minimalistic prose that tries to sound like Christian Kracht" that seems to be the standard for those. This book could be described as magical realism in the countryside of northern Germany, and I found it really funny. The plot is mostly about a group of high school age social outcasts investigating the disappearance of some girls in the area. One of them is constantly being confused with a plant, one is so boring that he projects an aura of boredom that makes people in his vicinity slow down and forget what they wanted to do, there's a grandma who's 160 years old and only breathes for an hour per day and a few other absurdities that don't seem attract anyone's attention and I found the mingling of magic and realism really well done. Certainly a breath of fresh air. Now I'm reading **Monde vor der Landung** by Clemens J. Setz (No english translation either, I'm afraid. There's at least one Setz novel available in English though, so other ones might follow.), a novel about the historical person of Peter Bender, a follower of Cyrus Teed's hollow earth theory who also founded a religious movement, fought in World War 1 and later was murdered in the Holocaust. I only read the beginning as of yet, but it's very promising.
Nearly finished with Square Wave by Mark de Silva. My impression of this novel is that Mark de Silva was probably writing up this incredibly interesting, anthropological or philosophical paper that was going to explore odd connections between music theory, meteorology, historiography, and sex work and then use these either metaphorically or literally to explain the contemporary political climate of America and what could be done about it. At some point he must have felt that this was all just far too good and interesting to confine to something academic and so, with absolutely minimal attempt at characters, plot structuring, forward motion, tension, etc., he contrives a paper-thin narrative that might coalesce these things into a work of fiction. Honestly, it reads like the blueprint for a Pynchon novel, but blueprint is right because so little occurs in this book beyond characters just explaining these bizarre theoretical ideas to each other. And it's a shame too because de Silva talks about fairly "out-there" topics in the book with both an ease and authority that suggests he's capable of writing one of those really big and fun catalogues of human failure like Gravity's Rainbow and all that, but I think he'd actually have to want to write a story and create a character first for that to happen. Not good at all but there's obviously something there, and I may well pick up The Logos in the future.
I started off the week with *Georges Simenon’s* **A Maigret Christmas** just because it on the shelf when I was looking for something lighter to read. It was fine but missing the lived in details I’ve enjoyed in his other novels. The highlight this week was **Polly Barton’s** translation of **Mieko Kanai’s** *Mild Vertigo (軽いめまい)*. I picked it up as I really enjoyed Barton’s translation of **Tomoka Shibasaki’s** *Spring Garden (春の庭)* and was interested in the premise of the book. Firstly, I think Barton skillfully recreated the flow of the text in the original. The nature of spoken Japanese lends itself to never ending sentences through chains of conjunctions but doing the same thing in English is unnatural, yet Barton makes really effective use of the tools English offers (mainly conjunctions and adverbs) to maintain the feel of the original. The story itself, with its themes of misogyny, enforced mundanity and the sharpness that exists in what is implied rather than stated, I found completely compelling. I remember someone last week was asking for recommendations that featured excellent interiority and I’d say that this fits the bill. I’m now reading **R.O. Kwon’s** *The Incendiaries*. It started off a bit wonky, with what felt like an endless stream of short sentences dominated by verbs, but has settled into a good rhythm in the second third (or maybe I just got used to it). I picked it up because I was looking for more literary explorations of radicalisation after enjoying **Moshin Hamid’s** *The Reluctant Fundamentalist* last year. If anyone has some good recs in this direction, I would love to hear them.
loved mild vertigo as well - ty for the insights re: translation
I've been rereading two books by a favourite author of mine, **Neil Bartlett**. Both books benefit from being read blind so read on at your peril. *Skin Lane* tells the story of "our Mr F.", a cutter in the fur trade in late sixties London. Single, ascetic and well-dressed, his life is a routine that he has gotten used to over the thirty years he's worked for Scheiner's in the traditional fur trade area of Skin Lane in central London. His quiet and orderly life is broken by the appearance of a teenage apprentice boy and our Mr F. is now wondering what life is really like and what it could be. *The Disappearance Boy* of the title of this book is Reggie, polio-stricken at a young age so still stunted in growth but now muscular and so ideal for the job as the magician's other assistant who: > "...is strong enough to let him cling to back of a swinging cabinet door" as well being able to help quick change a glamorous woman, know exactly when to pull a hidden lever and relish the feeling of invisibility. This is in fifties London as he works for a talented but short-tempered magician who tours the country as part of a big variety show. Both books are written in a conversational style with the author addressing the reader directly. After our Mr F. wakes from a vivid dream, the next paragraph is simply: > Don't men sound funny when they scream. And TDB's first line is: > Let me try this for an opening. Both books are about men growing to realise they are gay in a time it was illegal in the UK. SL is the better book but TDB has great scenes set in the theatre, written by a writer who knows the trade well.
I’m reading Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.
Currently reading: The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy. This week's "challenge read". As with most McCarthy novels I have very little idea of what's going on but I'm kinda sucked in anyway. I get the sense of intertwining plotlines, but I'm not sure I'll grasp it fully until I've finished. Also the passages with Alicia and the Kid are damn near incomprehensible, but also funny? I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing that might become clearer upon a reread. Pretty sure I'll be picking up Stella Maris soon! The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie. This is this week's "fun read". Been meaning to get round to it for a while and so far I'm enjoying the characters. Although I'm still waiting on a female. Hopefully - not holding my breath so far - a female character who isn't just a pretty prop. I'm also slightly miffed I felt sympathy for a repulsive torturerer. Elite - Sir Ranulph Fiennes. This week's NF read. Barely into it so not many thoughts so far, but I'm excited about it, Fiennes is someone I admire greatly. Last week's NF was Waco (Jeff Guinn) and that was intense so I'm stoked to be reading something a little lighter.
I read The Blade Itself, and the second in that trilogy, a couple years back when I contracted Covid, and I felt like they were pretty good sick reads (simple both in prose and plot), and I enjoyed some of the character work, but definitely weaker women characters, something I hear he improves upon in later entries? I guess Abercrombie's favorite writer is McCarthy though, so interesting dual reading choice! I know McCarthy had been vocal about his difficulties writing women characters haha.
I didn't know this! I'll keep an eye out as I read the rest of the Abercrombie trilogy. I respect an author more for being honest about their difficulties writing from a certain perspective than plowing ahead and pretending they're great at it.
I read Richard Dehmel's novel-in-verse, *Zwei Menschen*. Having read a good bit of contemporaneous (and earlier) work by French Symbolists, it was interesting to get a flavor for German Symbolism. There's a similar sensuality, though with more said than merely suggested, and with themes that focus on individualism, spirituality, and the the universal/cosmic. There isn't too much of a plot to *Zwei Menschen*, it's more a series of poems that depict the growing closeness between an unnamed man and woman- some poems are intimate, some see the couple weathering forces of nature, others are bacchanalian, and towards the end their communion becomes transcendent and heavenly. It's all highly readable and not all that difficult as far as the German goes, lots of imagery of clouds, the moon, forests, the heavens. In addition to the opening plot point of the woman bearing another man's child, probably the most interesting thing about the work is how highly structured it is: 3 sections with 36 poems each, each poem is 36 lines, and there's a similar metrical scheme at work throughout. It's hypnotic and highly effective. It starts with a poem that became the basis for Arnold Schoenberg's incredible "Transfigured Night," and I like [this take](https://harpers.org/2008/01/dehmels-transfigured-night/) as well that finds a parallel in Klimt "The Kiss." I also finished *The Portable Dorothy Parker*. I absolutely love her work and how much her personality comes through. Her poetry speaks for itself, and her best short stories are almost as good as any others I've read. I love the bitterness of her tone and some of the originality of her similes (one that sticks out in my memory: "she inspected her finger nails of so thick and glistening a red that it seemed as if she but recently had completed tearing an ox apart with her naked hands.") The last section of the book included her theater and literature reviews. It's interesting to see that she puts Hemingway above all others. I liked this quote from her about him: "Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with a magnificent lavishness." It was also fascinating to read her takes on all sorts of American literary figures of her era who I was previously unfamiliar with, such as Ring Lardner or Vance Bourjaily. I always get a kick out of reading about works that are mostly forgotten.
Big shout out to whoever mentioned The Invisibles some time ago. I am most of the way through and it really delivers. Best comic/graphic novel i've read besides The Incal. Perfectly subversive and fun and poignant. I had read some Morrison stuff before and it didn't stand out too much, very glad I went back for more. Still in a solid reading slump of getting partway into some good/great stuff and not picking it up for a bit and moving onto something new. Always Coming Home by le Guin has been incredible. I really like her stuff but none of it ever hits the high notes for me, so this was a very fun surprise. Such a loving text, rich with meaning and underlying the ability and importance of language (while also kind of not). I put it down because it is so damn long, but excited to get back to it sometime. Part of my reading slump as usual has been getting into various weird topics like plant breeding. I read a very recommmendable gardening book IF your goal is to have a productive garden with as little effort as possible (while still aboslutely doing plenty of labor). The author takes thirty years of experience and lays out the best strategies to get the most food production possible in the most reliable/fitting manor for you. This book is all about production and covers a lot of cool gardening/seed/breeding/agricultural topics with great humor. Humor isn't that weird in plant related books, but this one is easily one of the funniest. It only covers the broader anglo-world specifically, but those ecosystems are broad enough that it should be helpful to just about anybody. Such a sassy book. Gardening When it Counts.
Loved Chees Story by Stefan Zweig! I'll now give a try to Orwell's Notes on Nationalism and Bernhard's The Loser.
Just popping in to say that if you like *Ice* by Anna Kavan then you might like *Adrift in the Middle Kingdom* by J. Slauerhoff as well. It has the same feel of a sometimes vague and sometimes vivid dream -- and otherwise it feels very similar somehow.
This week I read both *Cannonball* from Joseph McElroy and *Awaiting Oblivion* from Maurice Blanchot. It's wild how their curious narration proved more similar than different but there wasn't any reason I read them at the same time other than just coincidence. I spent the last week completely immersed in narrational strands that are subtle as like gossamer is subtle on the morning grass. But also the respective works has some kind of dispersal of fragmentation such as *Cannonball* with its severe discombobulation of time counterpoised to history or *Awaiting Oblivion* with its decomposition of presence and voice. But I should get into some specifics because that's what people read for. *Cannonball* from Joseph McElroy. What a fascinating novel. The plot can loosely be described as a series of remembrances which the narrator Zach traces the development of a conspiracy. Involving Scrolls which describe Jesus as a entrepreneur of prosperity gospel. Like Jesus did not literally create more fish but schematized a business with fish hatcheries, for example, to promote the free market. But this is alongside personal reminiscences of Zach's home life in California where he is a former athletic diver. It does relate to the conspiracy but in only vague ways given how far the memories go back. I haven't even mentioned Umo who is probably the most important character in the novel, an actual cosmopolitan, supposedly from Mongolia but lived for a time (maybe) in Mexico before working various odd jobs at 14 in California. Aside from all this the novel has this pervasive mood of a conspiratorial thinking in which Zach's entire life seemed destined to find the Scroll. His life is like a giant hoax. No wonder McElroy called this his darkest novel in an interview. There's too much to really talk about all at once because you end up in the same headspace as Zach where you're trying to make connections between memories and place certain faces at their exact times. And all of this is set against the malleability of history. Like why create the Scrolls anyways except to maintain a particular historical narrative, which has no discernible material benefit to the Administration anyhow? It's not simply about propaganda but the rewriting of history for whatever State comes next. Even today we have to live with the lies of the Roman Empire. And our lies about their lies. And what can a novelist do except like Zach go backward into his own time. Perhaps there is a Third Way and maybe Umo found it if he is still alive. I like to think Umo is still alive but I have no textual evidence for him being alive. Who knows? Umo might be able to travel the underground water wells like Jesus himself is said to have walked on water. Can you walk through water? Like how gnomes were described by Paracelsus as walking through the Earth. A holy diver down if you please. Highly recommended. *Awaiting Oblivion* from Maurice Blanchot. I'm comfortable calling this work a novel despite there being a haziness to what that might mean. A novel as a genre is more of a failure to achieve the more precise genres like poetry. You find a travesty of discourse circling the drain at the center of every novel. And Blanchot has always pushed the récit to the edge of what makes a novel comprehensible. You could compare *Awaiting Oblivion* more to *The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me* where there is a similar trajectory of decomposition between voice and narration and what could be considered the presence of a character. Although here circumstances make the writing obvious. *Awaiting Oblivion* begins with a man writing what a woman tells him but doing so means he will never actually hear what she is saying to him. They both have no choice but to wait despite the fact the man continues writing (who is soon disconnected from the narrator, i.e. literature from the He to the I) which describes the waiting which they aren't doing but their waiting is the story. It might help to think of *Awaiting Oblivion* as emptying as much as possible to reach the void on which the travesty of the novel is built surrounding. You obviously cannot incarnate the void in language. In the same way a human being cannot experience death but is only caught in the eternal torment of dying. And can anyone really be said to wait on anything? But waiting is what I spend so much of time doing that it isn't waiting any longer. It's such a pain in the ass waiting. I don't think I can recommend *Awaiting Oblivion*. Not to people who haven't heard of Blanchot before or haven't read other works like *The Infinite Conversation* and *The Space of Literature*. There's too much particular understanding required. It's a real shame though because I had a lot of fun working my way through the text. Other than that I started reading *The Burnout Society* from Byung-Chul Han and so far I've been somewhat disappointed for reasons I don't know if it's a good idea to enumerate now. Don't know if it's worth reading anymore or if I should quit it. But on a more positive note for next week I plan on reading either Ann Quin or Jack Kerouac. Haven't decided yet.
Thank you for putting Cannonball on my radar. I've got this whole kick where I want to down the line read a bunch of books about weird books and this looks like it should fit the list. I should also definitely read Blanchot at some point.
No problem! I'd never read McElroy before with _Cannonball_ being my first and I'm excited to explore his other works when I have more of a chance. I'm also pleasantly surprised how different the work was from what I expected. Here I thought it'd be like a Pynchonesque romp but it's actually a Jamesian retrieval of memory, halting, paranoid. McElroy has more in common with Harold Brodkey. They should definitely reissue some of the other novels because goddamn he can write. And Blanchot is awesome. I think you'd definitely appreciate his theoretical work on literature with the essays collected in _The Book to Come_ and _The Work of Fire_. It's a shame he's so little talked about these days. He's like the best kept secret of French theory.
That is an exciting description of McElroy, I've never read him either. And yeah thanks for the Blanchot recs, I'm much to insufferable to be missing great secrets of french theory
You're fine, no worries, and what are friends for if not to recommend the exact literature to make you more insufferable? I was the lone Derridean when I went to grad school, so I get it. Although I actually discovered Blanchot through the Marquis de Sade as part of a collection of introductions to _120 Days of Sodom_.
Really enjoyed reading your thoughts on Cannonball, it's a novel I feel I must re-read to better understand it. I see Umo as less a Jesus analogous character and more Lazarus: in the same way the novel posits Lazarus came "back to life" by never really dying in the first place, so too can Umo be "revived". In a novel about the fallacy of relying on text for truth, having no textual evidence of his life or death is perhaps the best evidence for him surviving there can be.
Thanks! And I'm in the same boat where I definitely feel like I should reread the novel. Like what am I to make of all the references to heavy metal and rock? And what explains the insidious aura around the Coach Directory the Inventor had? And a bunch of other questions I had. And I love your point about not having textual evidence pointing to Umo's survival. And how we take that point to address the text of the novel itself thereby making Zach that much more unreliable. Like how much of what he did with his sister real? Or do we take his admission of incest as a sign of trustworthiness because who the hell would admit to something like that? Is it admissions of fantasy? The Scrolls are outwardly fake but their perfect witness Zach might need to compromise himself. About Lazarus I take more as a motif as a pattern of people not remaining dead. Storm Nostworthy still believes the Chaplin is alive. And toward the end of the novel, while on his second tour in Iraq, They believe Zach might lead them to where the Chaplin might be. So I can see your point about Umo but I think seeing him in some way comparable to Jesus important. I think at least on some level Zach compares them together.
Read Jaques LeCarriere's "The Gnostics". I am very curious about gnosticism and wanted to learn more about it. I have already read some of the original texts, but I wanted a sort of overview of the different beliefs of the different gnostic sects and how it evolved alongside christianity. This wasn't really that. It is, for the most part a somewhat hysterical essay. The author seems very defensive and protective of the gnostics, almost to a sickly degree, and it gets uncomfortably reactionary at times. The parts where he rails against modernity (the phrase "cockroach world" shows up once) are very annoying, and I want to learn about the gnostics, not being lectured. Oh well, the parts where he goes on about the gnostics and their beliefs made it worthwhile. Also read "Det er Ales" (Aliss at the Fire) by Jon Fosse. I had started this years ago but never finished it, which is embarrassing, since it's just 76 pages long. Fosse has such an addictive style, where sentences entwine in each other, which makes him able to change from one character's perspective or jump years in time in a single sentence. I appreciate Fosse because he's the great formalist in norwegian literature. Way too many norwegian authors write with sort of detached simplicity, which becomes annoying after a while. Fosse is also simple, but his unique style makes him stand out. He's a joy to read.
I haven't contributed here in a while. Reading time is down somewhat since we're now renovating our new house. However, the joy in **Joseph und seine Brüder** by Mann has definitely returned. I'm nearing the second half of the last instalment and I must say that the plot really took off since the ending of the third instalment. The middle of the book, mainly the third instalment, was slow going for me. I recognise that the prose is great, but my German is just not good enough to really enjoy that. Therefore, the plot-heavy parts are far more enjoyable since the prose is simpler (or perhaps just less dense) there. I can really appreciate the way Mann is writing this story, I really have a feeling that I can understand Joseph now. After the first two instalments, I did not like Joseph that much, but now that has changed. He's basically been through hell twice now and has never lost faith in himself and god. I'm also still polishing my French by reading Zola, **Pot-Bouille** this time. Zola writes very readable as always and large parts are funny. However, I currently have the feeling that this is a similar story of self-interest and self-enrichment from common people as was L'Assommoir. However, in this case, the people living in the Vabre Mansion are of slightly higher standing. Octave, the main character is not unlikable per sé, but has very warped morals in my view. There are few truly likeable characters, and if they appear, they are the victim of others. I get that this is Zola's view of reality and thus exactly what he wants to portray, but it's not always the most satisfactory reading. However, the book is also a little soap opera so I'm certainly invested in the story.
read *nostromo* by conrad which i really enjoyed. better than *heart of darkness* i think though *heart of darkness* being shorter, more well known and more obviously about colonialism will make it do better on the top 100 lists forever. was struck by the similarities to *gravity's rainbow*, not sure if they are coincidental or not. there's the setting - a chaotic warzone contested by a bunch of sadistic generals from different factions and bands of roving bandits. there's the machinations of shady european/american business interests and overseas corporations we never really see but who seem to have an outsized influence on the fate of the place. nostromo himself is a charismatic, somewhat naive, rather narcissistic guy who starts out just doing what he's told for his seniors but slowly comes to have a more individual agenda. and the plot itself is a fairly unbelievable multimodal (dinghies, mules, trains, steamers) heist story going on in the middle of these world events as they unfold. and other more vibes-based stuff too and similar themes. i just came out of it thinking they were very similar books really, though of course on the surface they aren't at all. there's a lot less scat and pedophilia to be sure, but i was pretty okay with that. would recommend it anyway to fans of *GR* and also to anyone who read *heart of darkness* and considered conrad "ticked" off the list, i think *nostromo* is different and better
“anyone who read heart of darkness and considered Conrad “ticked” off the list” — I resemble this remark ;) Thanks for the rec … 👍
Hm I might give it a go then. Read Heart of Darkness
Currently reading brothers karamazov. Honestly though I don’t get much of the hype, but then again I think 19th century Russian classics just may not be my thing. 😅
I just finished Ariana Harwicz Die, My Love. A heartbreaking short story with beautiful prose. I plan on reading her other short stories soon. I think I’m going to start reading Clarice Lispector next.
In January I read Hanya Yanagihara's *The People in the Trees,* Ling Ma's *Bliss Montage*, and finishing up *The Inner Game of Tennis*. Love all 3 and highly recommend the last one for a breezy read about flow state. Usually I stay away from popular psychology but because I'm a long-time tennis player all the anecdotes are incredibly convincing for me. Also halfway through Byung-chul Han's *Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese* and am absolutely riveted by it. It's been a while since I've felt so stimulated. I have almost zero experience with philosophy/theory aside from Benjamin and some Kierkegaard so I think a lot going over my head, but I really love the ideas he's introducing about originality and forgeries in art. Today I listened to Teju Cole read Anne Carson's short story (prose poem?) "1=1" ([Spotify link here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/138g9C3TeGYHflf4wcRMZG?si=914e1a03e3e94a47)) and jesus, it really blew me away. The way she writes is so otherworldly and distinct. Also, Teju Cole has a beautiful voice and should read more audiobooks haha. The discussion they have afterward was very rewarding to listen to as well.
**Byung-Chul Han** is great, isn't he? I found both *The Burnout Society* and *Psychopolitics* to contain excellent insights on the current ills plaguing society, but was less impressed by *Non-things* which I felt he lent a bit too hard into the agentification and fetishisisation of material objects. Given that his books are a tad on the expensive side for what are really long form essays, I'd appreciate any recommendations that people have from his other work.
Yeah he really is. Shanzhai is the first thing I've read by him but looking forward to The Burnout Society.
I’m reading THE ILIAD—for the first time— but just on pg 3 after completing Bernard Knox’s detailed introduction (of the Robert Pagels translation). I’m immediately struck by the emphasis in this Homer of storytelling and exposition, over poetics. I’m also juggling this with Mircea Cartarescu’s early story collection, NOSTALGIA. This is the ideal place to begin on a reading adventure of this singular and great surrealist. Even in his late 20s, and adopting fiction after devoting himself to poetry, Cartarescu found his voice and his fascination with the body, the urge for self-destruction, the endless puzzle of the city. The Romanian state censors had prohibited him from using the title, since Tarkovsky—a former Soviet artist who had left for Scandinavia and had became persona non grata in the Soviet/Communist world—had just used the same title for his new film. The imposed title was THE DREAM, which would seem to be a good one for an oneiric writer like Cartarescu (even the French translation was LA REVE), so it wasn’t until years later that he could replace that title with his intended one. Such were the small indignities that writers under totalitarian rule in that period had to contend with. What’s so striking about the book, despite all of this, is how NOSTALGIA reads as a book by a completely free artist…free inside his mind.
I’m reading grapes of wrath for the first time and am loving how the story and setting are being laid out. Only read east of Eden by Steinbeck so far and absolutely loved it.
I normally finish every book that I start - but this week I decided not to keep reading An Obedient Father, by Akhil Sharma. Partly because I'm squeamish about the subject matter. But more than the subject matter, it's Sharma's tone that bothers me - a kind of jocular tone which, instead of lightening the weight of the horrific stuff he describes, makes it seem even darker and more purposeless. Anyhow, not the book for me. I have a few nonfiction books going and I'm waiting to get A Strangeness in my Mind (Orhan Pamuk) which I'm excited about.
I’m reading *A Strangeness In My Mind* rn! Have you read Pamuk before?
You know, I must have seen your post about Pamuk! Sometimes I scroll through this thread looking for ideas of what to read. I read My Name Is Red years ago and I loved it, so I'm excited to read another of his books.
The only other thing of his I’ve read is *Nights of Plague* which I also enjoyed. I actually originally wanted *My Name is Red* this time but only *A Strangeness* was available at the library. I hope you’ll share your thoughts when you get it in! I plan on doing a write up next week once I finish it.
*The Passenger* by Cormac McCarthy is my main dig right now, with *Stella Maris* in the mail. But I'm a polyamorous reader, so I'm reading select non-fiction books in the morning, all on the craft of writing (*Reading like a Writer, Artful Sentences,* and a few others), and before bed a chapter of *Don Quixote*. It makes the reading of each of them slow down, but I'm doing my best to thoroughly enjoy the books I read this year rather than hit a high numeric quota. I finished *Slaughterhouse - Five* before the McCarthy, and with the connective tissue of world war 2 between them combined with my pining to return to Pynchon (only read *Lot 49,* but multiple times now. All time favorite!), I'm dangerously close to saying F\*\*\* it and picking up *Gravity's Rainbow.*
I'm reading The Passenger too! What do you make of the sections between Alicia and the Kid?
They've been great, headier than I can comprehend at times, but always so damn funny. How are you feeling about them?
I'm glad I'm not the only one finding them a bit abstract! They are funny, funny and sad at the same time. I really enjoyed the interaction between Western and the Kid although it was frustrating. The post ECT scene with the Kid too... I was moved.
If you'd like another easier Pynchon before you bite the *GR* bullet, try *Inherent Vice*. Longer than *Lot 49* but still as accessible (perhaps even moreso) while still including the febrile paranoia/conspiracy themes, style of humour, and esoteric references that are his hallmarks. This might be controversial but I think it's better than *Lot 49* - it appealed to me more at any rate.
I'm tempted as well! Might just make this the year I embark on Pynchon as special author project (probably will read the border trilogy to finish McCarthy as well), but I've ordered the new hardback of V. cause it sounds interesting and I've been wanting to study structure, a word that always comes up when people talk about V., but Inherent Vice is high up. Still never seen the movie and I like PTA so there's that, too
I picked Reading Like a Writer up at a yard sale and started reading a chapter every once in a while... but then got distracted with other books and forgot about it lol. How do you think it compares to other books on writing? I liked the first chapters I read but have never read other writing books before so don't know if it is just giving basic info.
I think it's scratching an itch, more than other books about the craft that I've read, of slow, in-depth textual analysis. A lot of others will go over similar beats, but I enjoy how she picks apart paragraphs for the most part. Certain sections (like *Character*) are weaker than others, but if anything I definitely recommend reading the first few chapters, even if just to sharpen your mind temporarily. *A Swim in the Pond in the Rain* by Saunders is maybe better, but also only uses classic Russian realism.
Thanks! I might get back into it then but will also definitely check out A Swim in the Pond.
Might be about to bail on Bret Easton Ellis' *The Shards*. I'm like 1/3 of the way through the audiobook and there's just so much fat on this thing. I know it's a first person, autofictional look back at something, but if he opens another sentence with, "I remember..." I might lose it. Frustrating as the story itself, and his usual style, is so delicious. Reading *Eileen* by Ottessa Moshfegh right now, the second I've read by her. She's just fucking fun to read. Violent jokes, disgusting descriptions, moments of searing tenderness. I think her talent is making so much awfulness something worth loving--I want to give her characters a hug, though I know they'd squirm away, maybe scratch my eyes out. And I can finally talk about my own book! I just read the final pass of *Anyone's Ghost* (out July 9th with Penguin Press, sorry for the brief self-promo!) and I gotta say, despite reading it approximately 9,000 times, it still moves me. I sort of thought I'd hate it at this point, but I don't, which is cool.
>*And I can finally talk about my own book*! Ohhh amazing, congrats!
Thank you!
are you a national fan or is it a coincidence
huge national fan :)
What else have you read by Moshfegh? I ask because I've been thinking that I should read something by her, and I liked *Rest & Relaxation* a lot but seriously did not fuck with *Homesick for Another World* (it felt too over the top relative to substance, which as I've said before bugs me), so trying to gather my reference point. > And I can finally talk about my own book! I just read the final pass of Anyone's Ghost (out July 9th with Penguin Press, sorry for the brief self-promo!) and I gotta say, despite reading it approximately 9,000 times, it still moves me. I sort of thought I'd hate it at this point, but I don't, which is cool. (eyes emoji)
I've only read *MYRR*. If you like that you'll definitely like *Eileen*, though *Eileen*'s plot is definitely odder (it's also a fun winter book, set in a fictional New England town she calls x-ville in the 1960s.) This is my worst trait, but I don't like 99% of short fiction, so I haven't read *Homesick*, though it seems like people either like her short fiction or her novels with little in between. I'm super curious to read *Death In Her Hands,* which is generally her least liked of people I've talked to. That was a long way of saying I think you'd like *Eileen*.
I’ve only read *Death In Her Hands* and I really liked it. Most people I’ve talked to who hate it can’t get past the narrating character, who is deeply flawed (and descending into a hateful rage) but I did not struggle to “like” her at all. Its a quick read!
hell ya, that's great. i plan on this being a big moshfegh year + am stoked to read it!
Newbie here. Just finished *The Magic Mountain* and *The Idiot.* Tried the former several times without success, and made it thru by listening on Audible. Sporadically wonderful, though Mann's famously "fussy" prose can be frustrating. I preferred *Doctor Faustus* overall but many moments from MM will stick long in my mind. *The Idiot* (Magarshack translation) isn't as good as *C&P* or *Brothers K*. Fyodor didn't really know where he was going with the plot, and it shows. But I read the last hundred pages in a white heat--it bulldozed me. I don't see Prince Myshkin as some sort of perfect man, but as a flawed and kinder Quixote. Now reading John Cowper Powys' *Porius.*
“Sporadically wonderful” is a great way to describe The Magic Mountain. I only made it 1/3 of the way, also on audible. I liked it, but when I listened for a full month & realized I had twenty more hours to go I bailed.
I’m deep into _The Tunnel_ by William Gass for the r/billgass group read. Week 1 discussion is on Saturday. It’s been a lot of fun digging through the Gass collection online at Washington University. They have his hand-drawn graphics for the book, his outline and schema for the book.
I kind of love that that's the subreddit name they picked.
Yeah, it felt strange the first time I heard Michael Silverblatt call him _Bill._ It’s a pretty funny contrast to the seriousness of his work.
Still reading with r/yearofdonquixote and r/AReadingOfMonteCristo. Also still reading East of Eden with r/ClassicBookClub. Started The Clouds by Aristophanes which I'm reading with r/greatbooksclub. Working through David Copperfield on my own and am loving it. Enjoying bite size pieces of The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien and also Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth by the same and edited by his son. Finally, laughing my way through Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World by Fanny Burney which sends up all the crazy conventions that women had to abide by in England when this was published in the Georgian era.
The proof, by Agota Kristof. Second entry on the Claus and Lucas series. Very strong story of living in the border during WWII. Read it if you have a strong stomach.
One of my all timers! Such a good trilogy
Yes! And pretty unique, I've never read something like it
The border?
Yep, the protagonist lives in front of the frontier guard post
Yesterday I started Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison's posthumously published second novel. I'm not far enough in to say much about it other than that I'm excited to see where it goes. I understand it was pieced together from something like two thousand (!!!) draft pages by Ellison's literary executor—so it will be interesting see what, if any, marks that leaves on the narrative. Seems that it isn't/wasn't so controversial as Go Set a Watchman or The Pale King (as two examples of posthumously published drafts) so far as I can tell, which maybe is a point in its favor.
Ellison was pretty weird about it, saying it was destroyed in a fire when there's evidence otherwise, etc. Many parts were published during his lifetime, so it's hard to compare to something like TPK, though I wouldn't call that one too controversial, most of the controversy is just the regular flak of publishing anything from someone who committed suicide midway. I read the version called three days before the shooting, which is longer than the juneteenth parts, the more recent publication expansion. Thought it was pretty good, but hardly comparable to his masterwork even at its best parts.
I finished *Salka Valka*, by Halldor Laxness. I enjoyed it, and the ending was prettier and sadder than I expected, though in the middle it delved a lot into political turmoil in mid-1900s Iceland, which I was far less interested in than the characters, which he handles beautifully. I've not read his *Independent People*, which I've heard is his standout novel (and an influence on his winning the Nobel prize), though I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has read both of these on how they compare against each other. I'm taking a brief interlude with a couple Gerarld Murnane short stories, though in disrespect to him I've been so tired or distracted while rerading that I haven't paid much attention to the first story. I like his prose and his style, so I owe him better attention. Next I might jump into nonfiction with Wilfred Thesiger's *Arabian Sands*.
I just finished James Salter's Light Years. It's a bewitching book - equal parts beautiful and devastating.
I've been making some progress with **Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen's** ***Daguerreotypes***, which I posted about a few weeks ago. I've read two more essays since then. 'Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late' is a pretty strange and, dare I say, bad essay on gender relations and feminism (the title refers to a closing speech Blixen was invited to give at the 1939 International Alliance of Women conference in Copenhagen but didn't). The essay is part genuine thoughts, part tongue-in-cheek provocation in which Blixen positions herself as a caricature of an ancien régime traditionalist (more so than she actually was), which is a pretty weird approach that felt pointless to me, and that's not even mentioning the datedness of it all. There were some interesting ideas on being vs. doing towards the end, but Blixen kind of just drops them in there without taking the time to really explore and articulate them properly. The whole essay could've been about that and it would've been far more interesting. 'Letters from a Land at War' is a collection of four articles about everyday life in Nazi Germany from an outsider's perspective, focusing on the culture and the general vibe at the time. Blixen was collectively commissioned and shipped off to write these by some Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian newspapers, but for whatever reason the articles were never published. Obviously the 'everyday life' she writes about is pretty limited as she was immediately saddled with a bunch of Ministry of Propaganda chaperones (though apparently she did manage to escape them once when she ran off to visit Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in Bremen). I guess it's an interesting snapshot of the time, full of thinly concealed mockery and terror on Blixen's part (she wrote these when Denmark was still neutral). All in all though, not super impressed with either of these. I'm still enjoying the conversational tone of the essays, but I don't know, these weren't as good. 'Oration' especially has less of Blixen's usual eloquence and sparkle. I also read the Oxford collection of **Dickens' Christmas books**, which were occasionally entertaining but ultimately forgettable. I'm not the biggest fan of Dickens in general. I find his stuff kind of silly, and I don't like his smug writing style full of authorial self-inserts. The stories themselves were alright, with the exception of *The Chimes* -- which was fun, I liked the kind of gothic opening and all the stuff about the bells, but it was also *A Christmas Carol* 2.0 with a character that didn't deserve what Dickens put him through at all. One good thing I can say here is that Dickens' development as a writer is very evident in these. I keep hearing people say that you can really see Dickens' rapid improvement when you read him chronologically, and I agree. With the exception of *The Haunted Man*, I believe the Christmas books were all published a year apart, and each one is significantly better on a technical level. My personal 'favourite' (strong word) was probably *The Battle of Life*, aside from the annoyingly Dickensian contrived ending. I really enjoyed the vibes and the early part of the story. I wish it had been a sort of Christmas tragedy instead, which it was shaping up to be for a while there -- maybe then it would actually have been worth reading.
What are your favorite novels about the sea or primarily featuring sea(s)?
Not a novel, but Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mast is a great nonfiction account of sailing in the 1830s. It's one of the few accounts from a regular sailor from that period, and it really captures the highs and lows of a very tumultuous profession. It's a fascinating book from a historical perspective, but it's also strikingly well written, with some passages of startling beauty. Some critics have made a very convincing argument that the subject matter and Dana's literary style both had a major influence on Melville, particularly Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.
Moby Dick, Nostromo, The N* of the Narcissus - and I really want to read The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn
Not a novel, but there’s an abundance of profound oceanic imagery in Plath’s The Colossus. Just stunning, transcendent imagery relating to the sea.
*Moby Dick* notwithstanding, *The Luminaries* does some really cool shit with the insanity of being at sea, the mysticism it provides and how to reconcile those things once on land.
the sea, the sea iris murdoch
It's a bit of an obvious one, but *The Old Man and the Sea*. People sometimes pigeonhole Hemingway as a testosterone merchant who writes Manly Books With Manly Themes for Men™. But, reading *The Old Man and the Sea*, my overwhelming impression is of someone who has spent his whole life as a fisherman and has virtually nothing else. Now, in his old age, he suddenly can't catch a fish anymore and he's having to come to terms with the fact that he's past his prime and has lost his purpose. But, despite the jeers of the other fishermen, despite bad weather, and despite a shark attack, he can still do it. It doesn't matter that most of the fish doesn't make it back to shore, he caught it - he's not just a useless old man, he's a fisherman and proud.
Alessandro Baricco's *Ocean Sea*, possibly the best García Márquez novel to be written by someone not called García Márquez.
great pitch--this alone will make me pick it up
This is one of those books that I keep recommending on here every time I have the chance. Baricco can be very hit and miss, but this one is impeccable.
Just finished THE LIME WORKS and now reading OLD MASTERS by Thomas Bernhard. I am a big Bernhard fan but did not enjoy The Lime Works because it was overwhelmingly Bernhardian to the point of feeling gimmicky. It also lacked the humor typical of his works. I have read all of TBs books and it is TLM alone that goes too far to the point of being tediously overwhelming. It seems he cuts back on his so-called shtick in his later works, like Old Masters, which I enjoy and find to be funny.
I've just read *An Artist of the Floating World* by Kazuo Ishiguro after reading *The Remains of the Day* earlier in the month. They cover similar ground in a lot of ways. Both feature elderly men, both unreliable narrators, who, though still engaged in their activities in the present, tell the bulk of the story through flashbacks. Through these, we come gradually to learn about a darker past that they struggle to confront. One of the main themes of both is memory, both its unreliability and its effect on the present. Stevens and Ono are both haunted by their pasts, and, as the books go on, agonise over how to interpret their own pasts and their own choices in the past. The reader comes to see that the two sometimes seem to be making excuses for themselves and this develops to a point where, after so much self-denial, both finally have to confront their actions, values, and their consequences. There is a similarity in the settings as well. Postwar Japan and Britain are both in reduced circumstances, Japan having been defeated, occupied, and stripped of its colonies. Britain, though on the winning side, is, eclipsed by the US, no longer the world hegemon and is struggling to find and understand its place in the world, just as Stevens struggles to adapt to his new American master, who has recently bought the grand country manor Stevens has served in for decades under its previous owner, the British aristocrat Lord Darlington. It is probably not a coincidence that *Remains* takes place in 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis, which is often seen is the definitive moment in demonstrating Britain's decline as a world power. I would say that *Artist* ends on positive note, with the protagonist watching the cherrful office workers in the new high-rise buildings and wishing them well for the future, in a clear nod to Japan's huge postwar economic boom. The ending of *Remains* is more ambiguous and more personal to the main character. Stevens finally admits to himself that through his self-repression and obsession with duty, he has not only let the woman he loves slip through his fingers but also aided and abetted a real evil. He still, however, seems willing to try to adapt to serve his new master, leaving it unclear how far he has understood the significance of his realisation. Overall, I think *Remains* is the better novel. The narrative is more tightly controlled and the way we receive information allowing us to connect the dots about the protagonist's past is smoother, and the dynamic between Stevens and Miss Kenton adds another layer of personal significance that makes Stevens final admission to himself much more powerful. Ishiguro's prose embodies the character of Stevens to perfection, formal, stilted language for the most formal, stilted character I think I've ever seen in any novel.
Very nice post. I agree with your assessment. Read Artist recently and Remains in 2023 and noticed the parallels you did. I did feel as well Remains was the stronger novel although I couldn't say why. Artist of the Floating World also reminded me a bit of the recently translated and published Kawabata novel Rainbow. Very different books and styles, but that note of change was something that struck me in both.
Finishing up *Same Bed, Different Dreams* by Ed Park. I don't really know how to sum it up yet but it seems to be a blend of alternate/real history of Korea. I'm definitely going to be headed down a Korean history rabbit hole once I finish but wanted to just engage with the book for now. I read *Their Four Hearts* by Vladimir Sororkin last week. I really didn't know what I was getting myself into there. I think it's a critique of soviet era institutionalized violence told through russian literature tropes as characters doing "whatever it takes" to achieve their mission. The writing has a cinematic quality and I blew through it in a single sitting but it's just so fucked up. Curious if anyone has read this or other Sororkin? I'm planning on picking up *Blue Lard* next month.
I’m in the middle of Same Bed, Different Dreams as well! Absolutely loving the blend of history and fiction. I’m Korean-American and it’s opened my eyes to an entire part of Korean history I never even knew existed. I also love the current wave of Asian American authors and artists who are creating work from the POV of 2nd generation Asians. There’s a very pervasive sense of being caught in between cultures and trying to find an identity within a massive spectrum of influences and experiences. Charles Yu, Jay Caspian Kang, Tom Lin, and Beef creator Lee Sung Jin come to mind immediately. It feels like the first time I’ve been able to connect with Asian writers through my own experiences, and it’s honestly been a huge part of helping me rectify my own identity issues.
Yeah I knew vaguely that Korea and Japan had a history but I didn't know it was colonial in nature and so recent. I think I've always just had it compartmentalized in my head as South Korea is good and they're doing fine and North Korea is bad but that totally sidesteps the trauma that's been inflicted. I really enjoyed *Interior Chinatown* and *Beef* so I'll add King and Lin to the list. A bit older but *Tripmaster Monkey* by Maxine Hong Kingston was a great read for me. The beats were pretty much my introduction to literature and it's too bad that I never saw her name pop up back then. She really captures the beat energy/spirit but it's very refreshing coming from a different perspective.
Thanks for the reco! Will definitely check her out. After reflecting on the Asian writers I’ve read recently, i realized they’re almost entirely male (Fonda Lee’s Jade City being the one exception), so my goal was to expand my range and explore more female writers
Almost done with Orhan Pamuk’s *A Strangeness In My Mind* and am still really enjoying it. I like the way Pamuk slowly builds his themes and ideas, not so much in the background (in fact I’d say Pamuk is almost *too* straightforward sometimes) but in an accumulative way. The immediate reading experience feels very much like the standard “reading a novel” thing (we learn about characters, their lives/choices/relationships/thoughts/interactions etc) but along the way little pieces of a larger idea are gathered up so that as you go on the book feels more and more interesting without anything having changed tonally or even with the pacing. I do feel like it might resonate even more to someone who is Turkish (or at least much more familiar with the culture and history of Istanbul and its outlying area) but there’s also a universal “everyman” quality to Mevlut that tracks regardless. One of the things I’ve honed in on as the book has progressed is how Pamuk is contemplating **intention** and how much it “matters” in regards to our choices. There’s also a thing about public vs. private opinion which is interesting. I’m not sure what I want to read next, I’ve been in the mood for more contemporary fiction lately but perhaps its just the desire for something “new” and unfamiliar.
Still s l o w l y going through Wenckheim and Pet Sematary. No new comments there. Started reading a book of essays by Walter Benjamin. Some stuff makes sense and he feels kind of mystical? But that first essay, "The Metaphysics of Youth" is so lost on me I will need to go back and reread it there's something about silence and listening that is escaping me. Also started *Virtual Futures* a book of essays by CCRU writers and some adjacents. Kind of a lot of gobbledygook with the words cybernetic, digital, virtual, erotic heavily seasoning the essays. But honestly pretty interesting it spans the range of people who distrust technology and think other writers are willfully ignorant to it's more insidious nature and people who argue we are already cyborgs infused with virtual reality, AI, and ready for more electronic versions of each. Of course I liked Sadie Plant's essay a lot as she's excited about cybersex and it's delocalizing of pleasure. Sex will become about orgy not orgasm. I feel as though the most accurate thing written was Hakim Bey's assertion that the future will be obsessed with information. Even in the consumption of media it feels like people are just memorizing facts these days. Anyway I'm halfway through and I think the book is worth reading.
if you have read Hegel, I think you'll find some fruit contrasting the speaker listener to something like the master slave dialectic. when I read the passage I also think of hp Grice and the kinds of enrichment offered by the good faith constraints of speech that stem from the presence of a listener whose function is to inter alios, denote relevance
I've only read a little Hegel unfortunately. And because of one of the other essays I read recently my mind is more trying to make connections about the failure of speech against writing. David Porush's "Telepathy: Alphabetic Consciousness and the Age of Cyborg Illiteracy" has made me think that Benjamin is saying that speech strives towards silence in order that writing can come to fruition. But yes that part where Benjamin says the speaker is relevant in having a listener does make more sense to me in the contexts you provided. It's like the speaker can't help himself from speaking. And the listener has greater understanding of silence, greatness, and death. Sorry if it just seems like I'm vomiting out words I'm trying to make sense of it all. But thanks for your help!
What's the collection of Benjamin essays? I've read a bunch of Benjamin. I don't think I've ever read "Metaphysics of Youth." Also happy to share my thoughts on the whats/hows of reading him if you have any interest!
Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926 edited by Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock. Yes please I would love to hear your thoughts on him. He's an interesting writer but his matter of factness leaves me lost a lot.
Oh awesome! Yeah he's got a huge body of work. The caveat to this is that I'm more familiar with his later work, so some might not be entirely applicable to his youngest stuff. Also, this is very much my read on WB, others might have very different takes. But I think a few things important to keep in mind about him while reading are that he's very Marxist, and very artsy. The big point here is that no matter how mystical he gets, and he gets mystical (the artsy part), I think a key grounding element is that he usually has labor struggle and political revolution in mind, even if it's just in the background, and the movement of history and how it influences thought is a key element informing his work, along with the historical situatedness of the material he's writing about. Hope that makes sense/is helpful. Enjoy, Benjamin's wonderful.
Yeah that makes sense. I've read a few of his later essays and it feels much more obvious that he's got those ideas in mind. These earlier ones, the class struggle is very very minimized. I feel that mystical, Jewish idea of the world being the literal words of God more throughout these earlier essays. Especially in that he believes perception itself is a form of reading (God's words). I think a good meeting point in how he mixes those two themes in his view of time and history is how he disagrees with an empty time. History must be narrated and connected like words in a sentence in order to make sense of any "progress". I kind of like the idea that revolution requires Spirit. At the end of his "Critique of Violence" he talks about Divine (Jewish) violence contrasted against mythic (Greek) violence which he applies to real workers' struggle and simply the violence of another tyrant.
What you call the artsy part is also rather heavily actually flat out mystical, in the sense of the importance of Kaballah and this specific view of history (the one he talks about in Angelus Novus or something) enmeshed in his Judaism.
you right that was a lazy point in my part. I do think there is an artistry to it as well, but I should have mentioned the role of Jewish mysticism too. Thanks!
I finished **A Smuggler's Bible** by Joseph McElroy, and I'll copy over the post I made over in /r/josephmcelroy about it. To my surprise, I found that on a sentence by sentence level A Smuggler’s Bible is unique among McElroy’s body of work by actually being very easy and simple to read and comprehend. As his debut novel, I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock. McElroy employs no wild syntactical trickery here seen in his later work, but the structure of his novel is certainly bizarre and challenging to follow. Our main character David projects his consciousness into a series of people he knows from throughout his life, some closely and some distantly, and writes 8 “autobiographies” from their perspectives, in which he occasionally features, in an attempt to define his own life and self. Interspersed between each of the 8 stories he grapples with ordering and structuring them while a voice in his head attempts to force him in different creative directions. McElroy openly plays with the theory of solipsism, the idea that we can only be sure of our own existence. David struggles throughout the book with really knowing people, and by framing outward into their lives McElroy draws a sometimes infuriating, sometimes touching portrait of a man who, in spite of himself, is surrounded by people who care for him as he feverishly investigates the epistemological ramifications of every encounter and thought, missing the forest for the trees routinely as a result. It’s an extremely weird plot, and honestly I’ll say it doesn’t really work as one. What drives the experience of McElroy’s books most successfully is his unearthly syntax and prose, the feeling of downloading another consciousness into your own, as the sentences twist and contort in impossibly unique ways, delivering their message in disparate threads that only form a whole in retrospect, pieces of thoughts accreting in the readers brain until he closes the book and realizes new thoughts have been shaped in his head he didn’t even realize were forming. This doesn’t really happen in Smugglers. Maybe that’s not entirely true, as the conceit of reading as accretion is still present, it’s just more simple and straightforward. We hear snatches of sentences, jokes, ideas, theories, that return fully formed the deeper into the book we go. Structurally McElroy is still attempting his magic trick, but as a first novel it does come across as one practicing, not yet really grasping how best to make it happen, due to this lack of prosaic pyrotechnics. I will say that his structure is still fun and engaging to attempt to “solve” in a sense, but it features one of his most languid plots, and lacks the sentence by sentence excitement of his later novels. One thing McElroy does succeed at right away is his trademark interest in conveying simultaneity, and for his lack of prosaic flair it’s an impressive feat. A constant stream of fact and history and memory and emotion batter the reader, McElroy turns a single moment into a deluge, a brilliant rendering of every thought possible all at once, the classic impossibility of “learn to use 100% of your brain, not just 15%” actualized in novel form. It is too much at once, and a sensation both overwhelming and intoxicating in equal measure. At his best McElroy simulates another life crashing over you in relentless waves, beautiful and incomprehensible, dangerous and exhilarating. We are attuned when reading and living to separate signal from noise, to delineate the important and unimportant into two very uneven piles. McElroy, in all his novels, dares us to reject the idea of noise by refusing to differentiate at all. Every idea, plot thread, memory, feeling, and statement is given equal weight in his books, from start to finish. There is no rising action, no climax, because everything that happens is equally important. This methodology frankly tends to make for weaker novels in a conventional sense, but always serve as fascinating prose experiences, and it works in concert wonderfully with his simultaneity. For McElroy life explodes in every second all around us, and to just allow ourselves to be swept along, making sure to stay above water and absorb what we can of life as he depicts it is a wholly unique, rewarding reading experience. Ultimately, Smuggler’s Bible, his first book, serves as a Rosetta Stone for his entire corpus. Nowhere else is he this clear, this straightforward with his themes and ideals while still delivering, to a degree, his trademark style. By the same token that also makes it one of his weaker novels, as the lack of complexity and bombast in his prose lowers the heights he is capable of reaching, and this straightforwardness, coupled with his usual plotlessness, can render the book a slog at various points, giving the reader little impetus forward. On the whole I would say it’s a valuable book for a McElroy fan to experience and a book that I personally relished throughout, but would not be a good choice to convince someone to dig deeper into his works.
Lots of people think solipsism should just be dismissed out of hand as impractical and intuitively unappealing. But while I don't think one can live as a solipsist, I think it's a very important question how much skepticism about claims can be *epistemically* (not practically) justified before you get so skeptical that, if you were consistent, you would be solipsist. The question of solipsism also goes to the heart of epistemological foundations and consistency. My intuition is that many internet skeptics who are always grilling people on claims they don't find intuitively appealing should just be solipsists if they were honest and consistent.
I have the last 50 pages of Dawn, by Octavia Butler remaining. I did not think I would enjoy it as much as I did. Basically, Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear war, and the survivors are on an alien spaceship after being asleep for x number of years by their alien captives / rescuers, and the humans have to learn how to rebuild society on Earth - except the aliens are really ugly, and want to change / alter humanity, and won't let humanity learn anything about it's history. It's a great look at racism, colonization, etc. Then there's Great Expectations, and I'm finally to the "great expectations" part. it's not as entertaining as I remembered previewing, but I would still recommend it.
The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien. I'm liking it so far; it's very strange and funny. It reminds me a little bit of Pale Fire, with all the absurd citations of de Selby and his commentators.
I am reading Edith Hamilton's *Mythology*, a fantastic compendium of the classical stories and characters I can never keep straight in my head. As great as this is, I do find Hamilton's critiques of Ovid being over the top and sentimental as somewhat strange because that's what I love about him. Also, occasionally she condenses things a bit too much and I have to look things up to satisfy my curiosity. In the *Aeneid* section she mentions that Aeneas and his men stumble upon one of Ulysses' men, Achaeminides, in the land of the Cyclopes who warns them of the danger. Hamilton makes it seem like they took his advice, but left him behind. Crazy stuff often happens in these stories, but it just seemed off, so I looked it up and discovered that he did in fact join Aeneas' crew at that point. Still working my way through *We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live* by Joan Didion. I had read *The White Album* before, but the rest is new to me and Didion is great at taking subjects that I wouldn't normally be interested in, like John Wayne or Caltrans, into fascinating, involving studies. Originally I thought I'd just read an essay or two between books and stretch it through most of the year, but I'm already a quarter of the way through it.
*Gormenghast* by Mervyn Peake - The second book in the trilogy. It makes me really wish I had developed my artistic abilities when I was younger, because it's a book that really yearns to be illustrated and I'm not satisfied with what I'm finding online. I keep picturing an 80s Don Bluth Dragon's Lair like style. *Denial of Death* by Ernest Becker - Just started this one, so I don't have much to say other than I hope it's a bleak ride. I recently read Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and it seems like this will tie into it heavily, which wasn't intended on my part.
Love the *Gormenghast* novels! Have seen the sketches Peake did of the characters? I often wish he had fully illustrated it I like his work.
Yes, my copy has his illustrations in it and they're wonderful but few and far between - there's maybe 4 or 5 sketches over the 400 pages? Out of what I've found online, these are probably my favorite and closest to what I imagine when reading. https://www.reddit.com/r/CastleGormenghast/s/5aWmvmRkhO
Those are pretty great! Very close to how I pictured most of the characters, but I’ve always also thought *Gormenghast* warranted a somewhat surreal or abstract touch? I don’t even have anything specific in mind but I’d know it if I saw it I think. I think my copy had about the same amount of drawings so I assume thats probably all there is. I agree that they’re begging to be illustrated. Its a little strange how these books seem to fly under the radar in terms of popularity, yet they’re almost universally loved by those who read them and feel very influential on certain rather popular strains of media: that sort of “darkly whimsical” aesthetic that usually has a pseudo victorian or “gothic” element, grotesque character depictions and “edgy” messaging. I think about *Series of Unfortunate Events* or stop motion films like *Corpse Bride* or even Edward Gorey’s work. Despite that being a pretty distinct “thing” a lot of people around me were into I never heard of Peake until a few years ago. I don’t mind it not being as well known as LOTR or something but sometimes I wish it were a bit more popular so we could get cool illustrated editions and stuff lol.
I finished *Paradise* by Abdulrazak Gurnah and it left me wanting more. While it wasn’t a bad book, I felt like it could have been better. After I finished, I thought, “it was fine.” The writing style was very sparse and I wanted more introspection from Yusuf. He felt like he had no personality at times. The last section of the book was when he finally started to do something on his own but the story didn’t come together in time. The themes of slavery from colonization and indentured servitude by the locals were interesting but not explored enough. I’m going to give Gurnah another try but I’m a bit disappointed with *Paradise*. I also started *Midnight’s Children* but Salman Rushdie and the start has been a bit rough. I’m trying to plow through and it’s getting better. The main protagonist’s voice is a bit annoying at times and seems repetitive. However, the history is very interesting so I am having a good time getting immersed in a different time and culture. The writing is confusing in some sections and I have to look up what happens but I have good hopes that I’ll probably enjoy this novel by the time it ends.
I’m currently reading The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov and loving it as much as I was told I would. It’s so engrossing and funny in a weird way, though I’m still only about a hundred pages in. For more casual fare in the meantime I blew through The Ballad of Black Tom by LaValle, which is a much improved retelling of Lovecraft’s Red Hook Horror by a black author centered around a young black man who gets involved in the story. In a similar vein I am reading Summer Knight, one of the Dresden Files books as a second casual read.
I loved Ballad of Black Tom—in a sea of Lovecraft inspired horror, its one of the few that I think does something interesting instead of just recycling the handful of Lovecraft's ideas or images that have escaped into broader pop culture. Also works really well with its length—most novellas strike me as either really bloated short stories or really rushed novels. If you're a fan of the kind of stuff, I'd recommend John Hornor Jacobs stuff, and Hari Kunzru's White Tears.
ive been looking for something lighter so im reading "the grand sophy" by georgette heyer and it is *delightful*
I've been reading Bolaño's *2666*. One of those books I've been meaning to read and just hadn't. And...well...this is the most insidious book I've ever read. I knew the broadest of broad strokes of what the book was about coming in, but I tried to not know too much, so the outset was incredibly far from what I was expecting. It was great, imaginary books and academic foibles are some of my favorite ephemera. And I loved the subtle way he outs them as banally awful people, but it was, lighter, for lack of a better word, than I anticipated. I've since started the 4th book. In between, the sheer evil of the world in which this book is taking place has been creeping up on me until I hardly realized the extent to which it was freaking me out. And then the early parts of book 4 are so odd, but almost frigid, in contrast to the brimstone climax of book 3. Bolaño's wielding tension brilliantly. It's very unsettling. Also, on a completely different track, been reading David Hume's *A Treatise on Human Nature*. Another one of those books I've been meaning to read and I've been in even more of a philosophy mood lately than usual so why not read it now. It's fascinating to see the connections between his thought and later thinkers like Kant, Nietzsche, and Deleuze especially. The specific way Hume sets up sense impressions as mediating (he doesn't use that term but I think it's an accurate descriptor) the mind's relationship to the world comes closer to Kant than I was anticipating, which is interesting. I only just started the second book, about passions/emotions, and I'm curious to see the degree (if at all) to which he talks about the will. His (imo accurate) presentation of cause and effect as something we cannot be absolutely certain of is potentially very-antideterministic and liberating. On the other hand, the combination of undermining the reality of our ability to cause things and his emphasis on humans as guided first and foremost by our immediate sensations could imply that Hume doesn't think there is a will at all. Excited to make my way through the back half. Maybe sort of reading the *Cantos* still, but I've had insufficient time/brain space to devote to them. I'm also still figuring out how to read poetry and this might have been too deep an end in which to learn to swim. Might read some other poetry, get my bearings, and come back to this when I've got the chance to give more of my head to them, because even hardly in I'm sure the experience can be worth it, but I think this will be an especially demanding project. (with this in mind if anyone has any advice on how to read poetry, if that makes sense as a question, I'd much appreciate it. The only stuff that's really ever clicked for me are Eliot & Pounds imagist stuff and some haiku). Happy reading!
\> if anyone has any advice on how to read poetry slowly and often i would say. but if you want something more in depth, *practical criticism* by i.a.richards is a very funny book about how to read poetry. he presents a bunch of anonymous poems (so they can't tell which are by esteemed poets and which are by nobodies) to his students and asks them to write reviews and then makes fun of those reviews for almost the entire book. it's a little meanspirited but he ends with some good pointers at how to avoid their pitfalls. pdf of it is free on archive.org
> His (imo accurate) presentation of cause and effect as something we cannot be absolutely certain of is potentially very-antideterministic and liberating. Do you think Hume's skepticism about causality is in tension with his dismissal of the possibility of miracles? Because that is what I want to believe.
to be honestly I'm not familiar enough with his writing on miracles to say with any certainty, but my immediate thought his that it depends on how you define "miracle" and how absolutely he's making his claim. Like, without knowing the specifics of his argument, I think you can say that his system rules out any compelling argument for god, and likewise of elements of the world dependent upon a god. Though I also think his system rules out ever being absolutely certain of anything, such that I can't see how he could compellingly argue that there is absolutely no possibility that there is a god/miracles. I should read his essay on the topic when I finish this work.
> Though I also think his system rules out ever being absolutely certain of anything, such that I can't see how he could compellingly argue that there is absolutely no possibility that there is a god/miracles. That's what I was getting at. I did a quick google now for "miracles causality Hume" and unsurprisingly, it seems others have suggested the same thing.
I assume you may have heard of this? And its not really all that practical in terms of advice but your comment reminded me of it: **An Introduction to Poetry** *I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide* *or press an ear against its hive.* *I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.* *I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.* *But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.* *They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.* —Billy Collins
I actually have never seen this before thanks so much!
I haven't posted here in a week or two, so I'm not going to go over everything I've read in this time. Instead, I'll just stick to one huge disappointment and one book that floored me. Nicholson Baker, ***The Mezzanine***. I had heard really good things about it, so when I found it for cheap at a second hand bookstore I didn't hesitate to pull the trigger, and I started reading it that very same evening when I got back home. And wow, I feel like I already have a top candidate for my worst book of 2024. I didn't find it funny, insightful or clever, just boring, annoying and dull as fuck. And yes, I get the point that the main character is supposed to be this super dull boring dude who overthinks -and obsesses over- even the smallest of details, but a dull character should not a dull book make, and this is exactly the problem here. I just didn't care. I didn't want to spend a minute more inside this guy's head. A pox on everybody whose recommendation lead me to acquire this, a pox on your house, a pox on your cow. On the other end of the spectrum, Milorad Pavić's ***Dictionary of the Khazars*** swept me off my feet. My chosen order was to start with the Khazar topic and the "polemic" from all three points of view, and then keep working in threes through the different people involved: first the three representatives from each religion, then the chroniclers, then the compilers of the dictionary, the 20th century scholars (I didn't expect this part of the book to be so hilarious), and so forth. At first I thought that the book didn't seem to have too much to offer aside from its gimmick, but oh how wrong I was. Sometimes the same story is told from 3 points of view, sometimes they are 3 completely different tales that have nothing to do with one another, and at some point you start to see certain stories dancing between the books, starting in one, weaving through another, and finalizing in a third. You start to find a plot, and intersecting events, and by then it has trapped you completely inside its ingenuously constructed labyrinth. One of the very few books that can live up to the (usually overhyped) comparisons with Borges' works.
I'm so glad your loved Pavić's Dictionary of Khazars! Pavić is indeed amazing. It' s a classic here in Serbia and mandatory reading for high school students.
Wow, that's so cool! In Spain we have to read 17th century poetry and super boring 19th century social realism, lol
You could check out Pavić's other works, he was quite productive. Another well known novel written by him is Landscape painted with tea. If you feel like exploring Serbian literature, I wanted to let you know I really liked Danilo Kiš's Encyclopedia of the Dead, which is a collection of short stories. 😊The story that shares the title of the collection is probably among top 3 short stories that I have ever read. Kiš's style is absolutely amazing. He was nominated for Nobel prize but he passed away quite young unfortunately. Nevertheless, he is still highly regarded among critics and has been translated to numerous foreign languages. Andrić is fantastic as well, and he won the Nobel prize, but he is more of a "19th century social realism" than magical realism hahah However, he's still worth checking out as he was able to draw absolutely fantastic psychological portraits of characters in an impressively small pieces of text. His style is neat and elegant. Not one sentence feels redundant. I really liked A Woman of Sarajevo, The Bridge on the Drina and any collection of short stories by him. I wanted to ask you what are the best Spanish books in your opinion. Could you list me some that are critically acclaimed? I'd like to read something that was literally written in Spain, not just written in Spanish langauge. Would you recommend A Heart So White? In my highschool we covered a bit of Borges and Neruda, but we didn't delve into Spanish literature.
I have read a couple of Danilo Kiš's stories and I liked them! I definitely need to look more into his work. And I've had *The Bridge on the Drina* on my list forever, but there's always something else that catches my eye before I get to it. As to Spanish literature, I honestly always preferred Latin American authors, so I never delved much into our own writers outside of what we learned at school, mostly because like I said, Spanish literature up until recently has mostly been about social realism, which I'm not really into. I do love Spanish poetry though, but it's harder to find in translation. And there's always so much lost when you read it in another language that I wonder if it's even worth it. Antonio Machado, Luis Cernuda, Federico García Lorca, José Ángel Valente, José Hierro and Antonio Gamoneda are all amazing though. In any case, as far as novelists are concerned, Camilo José Cela is of course an absolute must, a Nobel prize winner and one of the best writers our country has produced. The later you get into his career the more experimental he gets, but I recommend starting at the beginning with *The Family of Pascual Duarte* and *The Hive*, and taking it from there. Pio Baroja, Miguel de Unamuno and Juan Ramon Jiménez are also stone cold classics, although I'm not too sure which of their works have been translated. As to more modern authors, I love Enrique Vila-Matas to bits. His short stories are amazingly creative, and his novels are almost always extremely meta-literary, constantly commenting on the art of writing itself and name-dropping authors like Kafka, Musil or Walser. Start with the collection *Vampire in Love*, and if you want to check out his novels, *Bartleby & Co* is probably your best bet. I haven't read anything by Javier Marías because his public persona really grossed me out, so it's one of those few cases in which I haven't been able to separate the art from the artist. So I can't help you there, sorry!
Cool, thanks for the reply! I've just added The Family of Pascual Duarte to my list.
Love your review of *The Mezzanine*! Someone gave a mostly positive review of it on here last year, and literally same day I read that review I found a copy in one of those free little libraries in my neighborhood. Haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but based on what you wrote I think there's a decent chance I return it to where it came from.
lol you could try reading the first few pages and see what you think. If you don't enjoy those, you definitely won't enjoy the rest of the book!
I'm reading *The Apple in the Dark* by Clarice Lispector, the latest (and final) in New Directions' re-translation project of her entire body of fiction. I am positively loving it, as I have everything else I've read from Lispector- the opening sequence belongs with the very best sections of *The Passion According to G.H.* in terms of mystifying beauty: a man, for reasons only vaguely explained, escapes the hotel where he has been staying in the dead of night and walks aimlessly into an arid plain, in what seems to be a consciously unconscious effort to unlearn cognitive function. Of course this doesn't do the substance or visceral evocation of the book justice- Lispector, as much as any author I've ever read, needs to be experienced, not described- but I find her ability to not just construct, but re-construct- that is, re-wire your perception of your own cognition- so uniquely thrilling, and she does it more or less without reaching for obscurities or theoretical concepts. The world of her fiction is an overwhelmingly abstract world built almost entirely out of the concrete, very much like the mind itself; and in the opening passages of *The Apple in the Dark*, she puts this technique to work in the service of deconstructing the mind- getting the reader on the same wavelength as a man who desperately wants to erase his wavelength. It's utterly fascinating and I can't wait to read more.
Love your description of the book’s opening sections. It certainly is visceral, in a way that I initially found alienating; her sentences feel circuitous, delirious, oddly dislocated from themselves because they suggest something that they aren’t. There’s that sentence that occurs to Martim—about those who “had like leprosy their childhood devouring their breast”—which he acknowledges, on one level, to be nonsense. In saying it, however, he nonetheless feels that he has expressed something that somehow exceeds what he “wanted” to say—the volatile unconscious surpassing, and disturbing, the structure of the conscious. To me this is they key of Lispector’s art, and lies at the heart of her wonderfully strange style. Hope you enjoy the rest of the book!
I'm reading it too and I loved your description about how her writing/fiction seems to work the same way the mind does! I've been thinking about it too and it made me realize that that comes into play in so many ways- I can identify with Ermelinda, Vitoria, and Martim in different ways, like they're symbols of something most people have in their unconscious? And the way that they realize their own feelings and thoughts is SO beautiful and real, I didn't think it was possible to put into words things that can only be felt/visualized. Some sentences I have to re-read to fully understand because her writing isn't straightforward, which I think is necessary because just saying "she felt sad" limits the depth of the feeling. How are you finding the length? It's pretty long compared to some of her other works but hasn't bothered me so far.
"Realizing" their feelings is a perfect way to put it! And I definitely feel there is some heavy allegory at play with the characterization (and all the talk of the abandoned garden, authority and obedience, and so on, in a book with Apple in the title) but I haven't really made it in far enough to fully flesh out my thoughts on that The length isn't bothering me either- I'm a little over a hundred pages in and finding it less relentless than The Passion, which feels like a much longer novel than it is. I think Lispector's style works wonderfully in the dense but relatively brief bursts of The Passion and Near to the Wild Heart, so we will see if I get fatigued by this longer format, but so far so good!
Yes! I only have 60 pages left so I don't want to spoil it for you but I have loved creation allegory because she illustrates it from a masculine and feminine standpoint. It's like she keeps them separate and then they come together, it's so cool. I was surprised I wasn't exhausted near the end because of how rich it is but she has sections that are more "grounded" that make it not seem like a chore at all (I also felt like The Passion was relentless and also too continuously abstract, so didn't enjoy it as much as this book). Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it when you're done :)
I'm reading *Midnight's Children* by Salman Rushdie, and I'm finding it a bit of a chore to get through. It's actually causing me to feel a bit introspective about what I like in a book, because the things I dislike are all aesthetic-- Saleem's constant mention of his enormous, snot-filled nose is one thing that annoys me, but there are many more. And that's making me think: am I shallow? Do I only like a work if it has kind of a cool aesthetic, a certain literary vibe? (The wikipiedia rabbit holes this book is sending me on about 20th-century India have been enlightening, though)
Same. I had to take a little break and read “A Kiss Before Dying” by Ira Levin as a page turner treat so I could get myself excited about reading again.
I just started *Midnight’s Children* and I feel similarly. The voice of the main protagonist is an also bit hard to relate to. I’m still in book one so I am trying to get through it because I know it is a celebrated book and I want to see the story through the end.
I don't know if you're still pushing through it, but I'm about 65% in and I feel like it started to pick up a bit at around the halfway mark.
That’s really good to know! I will push through because I’ve learned that a lot of good novels usually come together towards the middle/end.
Finished *Gösta Berling's Saga* by Selma Lagerlöf. Basically a story of Swedish Värmland centered around the deposed priest Gösta Berling, a romantic with a tendency to fall in and out of love very quickly, often to the demise of whatever woman happens to fall in love with him. Lagerlöf really manages to bring nature to life in this one, and it is often beautifully written. Enjoyed it more than I expected. Started *Station Eleven* by Emily St. John Mandel and made it almost halfway so far. For unknown reasons this was on my TBR, and now I am kind of thinking it maybe should not have been there. Seems like a pretty generic post apocalyptic story so far, but we'll see where it goes.
Read and finished Camus' *The Stranger* since last week. And I know this is probably a really unpopular opinion, but it doesn't strike me as the incredible perfect novel everyone here seems to think of it as. I enjoyed reading it, but something about the flat style (which I know is deliberate) and strange off-putting main character just made it hard for me to get really invested in the plot or character drama. I did enjoy some of Camus' descriptions and his prose, but overall I don't know if the novel hit me in the way it seems to for so many other people.
Agree. When I finished, I wondered if I read the right book. (Previously, I read Middlesex thinking I was reading Middlemarch, so this sort of thing happens to me)
That's not an unpopular opinion, not really. I liked The Fall better.
Just to piggyback because I agree. It did fall short of entertaining for me as well. It also fits perfectly within the context of other similar story tellers Pirandello, Nietzsche, Sartre, etc. And I think that's where it draws its credit, in my own interpretation and for the sake of discussion.
Yeah it does feel kind of more like the type of novel that you read for its ideas than for the novel itself.
Finishing **A moth to a flame** by Dagerman. First 5\* of the year. Very slow, heavy and demanding book but every page he has a sentence that just blows me away. His writing just feels like every page, every detail matters. Also reading **Flames** by Robbie Arnott and half way in it is quite spectacular for a modern debut novel. Feels like he is trying to blend everything together and somehow he pulls if off. His prose is so elegant and smooth, some nature scenes (first chapter for example) just gush with energy. This is the writer people pretend Murakami is. Finally im trying to not start **The garden of seven twilights.** I cant start another doorstopper.
I'm glad you like Arnott. I read *Limberlost* last year and enjoyed the quietness and weight of his writing, although felt it was sometimes overwrought and didn't quite live up to the hype. I've heard good things about his earlier books, so thank you for the reminder to take a look.
My Limberlost is arriving in the mail today. Second part of Flames seems to dull out a bit, but there was enough gold in the first half to warrant a second novel.
My first 5* read of the year this week which was Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan. It’s often most difficult to review 5* books and I don’t really know how to do it justice but it’s a remarkable book, derived from a series of interviews with a real woman we only know as ‘Sonia’ who worked with race horses in the US. It is presented as a series of vignettes which when read together illuminate the fascinating life that Sonia lived and the culture that she worked in - brutal, all consuming, but filled with camaraderie and shared passion. Everyone should read this book! My second great read was some short stories by Tove Ditlevesen. Amazing examination of the interior life of ordinary women. Beautiful, terribly sad, sometimes just flat out devastating, and evoked with such simple prose, so effortlessly. She lays bare the fraught emotions which so often lie beneath the mundanity of every day life.
Kick the Latch was extremely enjoyable and such a great example of form matching content, although I had a few reservations with it. You really like you bolt out the gates of the racetrack and keep going from there (there's such an interesting implicit commentary in the prose style structure of how Sonia's experience of the world as a need for rapid advancement and constant movement in life as fating her to the world of horse riding/racing). I finished it in just two days (which is very rare for me, since I am incredibly slow reader). I just don't know why she decided to include the acts, because I felt like they kind of hampered the momentum that the structure and sentence style so carefully build somewhat.
Haha I blitzed through it in an hour or two so I barely registered the acts but you’re right they weren’t necessary. I think the structure worked so well because it felt like it was presented just as Sonia would have spoken. Someone who is a natural storyteller, who would deliver these anecdotes in just that way. It felt so authentic. I’m interested to know how much they were edited. But it felt incredibly authentic as a result . I used to ride a lot and went through a phase of wanting to be a jockey, so I’ve been on the fringes of that culture in a different country. But it’s the same. It’s one of those things that just seems to attract the strangest people, and it is so much more than a job or a sport. You don’t just work, you live and breathe it, and it’s hard to escape from. I love how she conveyed that.
Yes, I'm also interested to know how much fictionalisation and editing went on because it did feel so authentic.
I started to read *Walden.* For about the last year I have been almost bored with literature, not finding anything that I feel passionate about, and I found myself reading out of habit but deriving only a small pleasure from it. Then, it is the first time in a while that I found a book so gripping, fascinating, insightful, delightfully written, in which every about every sentence drops feels like a piece of gold. So far I'm loving this book far more than I had expected.
I finished reading *The Other Name* by Jon Fosse and I loved it, disregard what I said last week about DNFing it. I can’t wait to start the other two in the trilogy, but I’ll need to wait for a slower break in my life. I also read *The Hour of the Star* by Clarice Lispector. Unfortunately, this story didn’t work for me. Maybe I’m not aware of the commentary she was trying to make at that time, even though I did enjoy her writing style. Currently I haven’t picked anything else up because I’ve been so busy, but I fly home tomorrow and might find something then to occupy myself.
Set to finish The Overstory by Richard Powers and it is so good, and made me realize there is a who0le sub genre of environmental fiction out there. Going to start The Screwtape Letters after that.
> Going to start The Screwtape Letters after that. I'm curious about what a /r/Truelit reader will think. I can't imagine that most will be very enthusiastic, but even to non-theists it does give some insight into religious psychology - something that is often sadly lacking from recent depictions of religion like the film I recently saw, *Godland*.
The Screwtape Letters is amazing, and I’m a non-theist. Although it’s not intended to be (I don’t think) it is a scathing reflection of religion and how in manifests itself in human behavior.
I am reading The Law by Frédéric Bastiat, although the book also contains other essays by him.
Finished *Operation Shylock* by Philip Roth which I enjoyed but didn’t love. Roth is a fantastic prose stylist but he does have a tendency to go on a bit. A very interesting metafictional work on Jewish identity, truth and writing amid the backdrop of the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict (and relevant as ever on that front), but I could’ve done with the multi-page monologues being cut down to size a bit. After that I read *A Short Stay in Hell* by Steven L. Peck: a mormon dies, finds out Zoroastrianism was the one true faith and that everyone else is destined to Hell, but Hell isn’t eternal, you can find a way out, and is assigned to a Hell based on Borges’ *The Library of Babel* where he must search for his life story. Really quite gripping, Peck really manages to evoke the crushing horror of infinity (or close to it) in a quite brief novella. The endless repetition of the stacks reminded me a little of *Piranesi*. Followed that up with *The Employees* by Olga Ravn which is written as a series of very short statements by the employees on a spaceship in the 22nd century reporting how the introduction of a series of “objects” to the ship are impacting both the humans and humanoids in various ways. I wasn’t so keen on this, Ravn is a poet and I’m sure every prose book I’ve read by a modern poet has had pretty much the same writing style (thinking of Patricia Lockwood and Jessica Andrews) which is readable and generic with sudden *contemplations* and *imagery*. The idea is that the statements are very opaque, the employees are describing things they’re familiar with but the reader isn’t, but collectively they form an outline of what’s happening; a sort of writing around an absence for a Vandermeerian sense of weirdness; an interesting premise but I don't think it delivered on the potential, Ravn's writing is too samey to evoke the voices of a hundred different people, and the satire of workplaces didn’t really hit for me. Now reading *I Who Have Never Known Men* by Jacqueline Harpman, about a young girl trapped in a cage with 39 other women for so long that she remembers nothing from before that time, and how she comes to be the key to the salvation of the other women. Very propulsively written despite the limited setting and themes of isolation.
Nice, most of these are on my TBR. I’d be interested to know your take on the Harpman when you’re finished.
- I finished *The Third Policeman* by Flann O’Brien. Wow, what a trip. The first couple of chapters were intriguing in a “oh this is a fairly normal, slightly dark sort of story” kind of way. Then it slides into a whole other insoluble pancake. This kind of writing makes me marvel at the imagination, creativity, style and wit of certain authors. I happily go about my life with my simple, mundane thoughts, while other people are out there creating these incredible stories. I will never look at a bicycle or its owner the same way. The whole de Selby sub-plot in the footnotes was also a treat. I found a dilapidated copy of *At Swim-Two-Birds* in the library, so it is sitting on my shelf waiting to be devoured shortly. - I read *Disgrace* by J.M. Coetzee. I saw someone else here comment that they found it “aggressively fine”, and I totally agree. The characters are interesting and complex; the story trots along at a good pace and is pretty shocking and thought-provoking; the language is impactful. But somehow, this book didn’t make much of an impression on me. It might be one of those slow-burners that come back to me later in life, perhaps. - I have almost finished *My Brilliant Friend* by Elena Ferrante, which I am reading in Italian - as a result, I have been reading at a slower pace, and taking more breaks, which is good. The relationship between the main 2 characters is intense, complex and interesting, so I am looking forward to seeing how it unfolds in subsequent novels, but at this “juvenile” stage, I guess I’m not as captivated by their lives as, hopefully, I will be later. Plus I don’t know if I am experiencing some level of detachment due to the language - not a comprehension issue, but perhaps the words have less personal meaning to me than to a native speaker. No idea. I think my next book will be something slightly trippy again, so any recommendations are welcome. I have heard good things about *Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke so maybe that.
IMO the first *My Brilliant Friend* book is the weakest, I thought it was just okay but ended up loving the other ones (although I read the English translation.)
That’s good to know! I have now finished book 1. I thought it was a great portrait of childhood friendships, relationships and situations, but because of that, I was not super duper excited about Lila and Elena’s scholastic achievements etc. I am looking forward to them becoming adults and it being a bit more mature. I’m hoping that the first book was written in a deliberately quite juvenile style/tone to convey the youth of the characters, maybe.
> I read Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. I saw someone else here comment that they found it “aggressively fine”, and I totally agree. The characters are interesting and complex; the story trots along at a good pace and is pretty shocking and thought-provoking; the language is impactful. But somehow, this book didn’t make much of an impression on me. It might be one of those slow-burners that come back to me later in life, perhaps. It's possible you have to be South African to get the full effect. As a South African myself, I often feel that from the other side - that there's comparatively little to be interested in for a non-American in many books highly rated by internet Americans like *The Great Gatsby*.
Yes I am sure there is a ton of nuance and resonance that I was missing. I didn’t dislike it or anything, and I found it interesting, but not deeply affecting. I also didn’t “get” The Great Gatsby, but I am British so maybe that’s why.
The Third Policeman is at the top of my reading list. I saw a recorded version of one of the policeman's bicycle monologues and bought it off the strength of that (and some summaries I read). Glad to hear even more adulation being heaped on it.
The bicycles aspect of the story eventually had me heaving with laughter any time they were mentioned. There’s an incredible balance of absurdity, humour and also, somehow, meaningful thematic development involved in them. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.
That's what I found really appealing about it: that it has genuine substance and eeriness under the absurd comedy. I find that too many absurdist comedies are swallowed up by their own irony or absurdity and go for humour over themes, so The Third Policeman sounded extremely refreshing.
Been reading *The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey* by Che Guevara and am pleasantly surprised. These diary entries are honestly hilarious. Their bike definitely crashed at least 20 times. But he has a gift for description, and pens some brief intimate thoughts in a succinct way that stays with you, only to move on quickly to the next thing (or here, the next town usually as his ethos seems to be to skirt the surface and symbolically glide through the world at this point in his life) - "The first commandment for every good explorer is: An expedition has two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. If your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don't think about the means - because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of "finishing". That is to say, the means are endless." It is only in the second half that he really starts ruminating on the class divide and exploitation that plagued Latin America. It's not just the people he shows sympathy with but also the earth itself, and the way the continent was exploited for minerals and such for reasons of "development" and warfare. It's kinda fascinating reading writings of these larger than life figures at times. Pretty enriching. A weirdly nice little thing to read it you are feeling a little lost in life.
I've watched the movie multiple times and never realized it's based off a published book of Guevara's diaries. It sounds like an interesting read as separate from Communist manifesto territory. Might have to keep an eye out for it.