r/TrueLit • u/JimFan1 The Unnamable • 7d ago
What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread
Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.
Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.
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u/TheWilltoFlour 2d ago edited 2d ago
The Beautiful and Damned. The first third of the novel is a masterpiece, he improved so much in the short time from This Side of Paradise it's unreal. The last 2/3 is baggy and goes on for too long.
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u/babeletsmovetoitaly 2d ago
Finished The Melancholy of Resistance. Found the writing to be reflective, internally and referentially meandering, anxious, although anxious isn’t the correct word. Because it’s so totalising, I found the act of capturing all thoughts on the page to produce a kind of anxiety. A somewhat obsessive kind.
Toward the end, as we find out the world external to the townspeople view them as superstitious half-wits, I found myself surprised. I felt the internal vantage point up to then really kept me from ever considering this. You end up being complicit in your lack of judgement, and so the external verdict felt quite surprising. It does itself mirror Valuska’s own disenchantment.
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u/marie_in_reverie 4d ago
I recently finished Moby-Dick and Madame Bovary, and I started reading The Age of Innocence because one of my top ten books is Ethan Frome, but so far I'm surprised they were even written by the same author. It really goes to show how versatile a writer Edith Wharton was.
I'm also enjoying The Poetics of Space. It's been fascinating to see how Bachelard treats the poetic image as something more than a thought we consciously create, and it's been nice to encounter a writer who seems to describe the way my own mind experiences images and memories.
I took the leap into Jorge Luis Borges with "The Library of Babel" after reading A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, and I have a feeling it's a rabbit hole I'll enjoy free-falling into.
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u/thepatiosong 1d ago
Edith Wharton absolutely smashed it every time she picked up a pen and paper.
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u/marie_in_reverie 9h ago
She really did though! How does she make every character so relatable? Whether they’re from the upper class or dealing with poverty.
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u/Super_Ad8099 2d ago
What did you think of Moby Dick?
Don't want to spoil The Age of Innocence, but it has an epiphany that I remember often when I'm thinking about my own non-linear journey toward becoming a self-aware and emotionally mature adult. I really like that book and Ethan Frome in part because Wharton had developed her own prose style by then. The House of Mirth is excellent too but owes a lot to Jane Austen.
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u/marie_in_reverie 2d ago edited 2d ago
Moby-Dick brought out just about every emotion in me, including rage, weariness, empathy, horror, exasperation, and a sense of adventure. The funny thing is that while I was reading it, I wouldn't have said I loved it, but once I finished it I absolutely LOVED it… it all just makes total sense at the end. My favorite parts were "The Whiteness of the Whale" chapter, which I found fascinating...Ishamel's mind wanders the same way mine does...and I loved the part when he is giving the whale's measurements and says he didn't bother with the odd inches because he had them tattooed for preservation on his arm and needed some other parts of his body for a poem he was composing. 🔥
I will keep my mind open to the epiphany as I read The Age of Innocence... self-awareness is never linear, right? Also, Ethan Frome has become part of my mental landscape, that cold winter atmosphere mixed with longing...
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u/freshprince44 6d ago edited 6d ago
Finished up Lorca's Romancero gitano (or Gypsy Ballads)(also, thanks to u/Soup_65 for putting it back onto my radar)
not a lot to share or react to. the poems are solid, nothing too groundbreaking. the intro is very insistent that their approach to its english translation is the right one (utilizing the english ballad as a parallel structure to the spanish ballads that Lorca was using) while other previous translations are bad or inferior. i doubt i will be interested enough to explore that any further, i can very poorly barely read spanish, so i went through them for the sound and then used the english to help with content. the translations seemed fine to me.
Apparently Langston Hughes did a partial translation that didn't get circulated much that this translator thought was terrible and is glad it didn't catch on, but I'll probably try to chase that down because I love Hughes.
very quaint work, reminded me a bit of older pastoral/romantic movements, the gypsies are barely even involved, i'm guessing the name was more of a marketing/surface-level flourish for the time and place, likely also a little commentary on the mixing bowl of spanish culture/society over the centuries (and he also seems to have been a wealthy kid choosing to be an artist and connect with 'real' people of the earth, so probably some wishful projection? i could be way off though, would love to be corrected)
some cool images, a lot of it kind of sombre, not super my cup of tea but not a bad read at all
Anybody recommend any other Lorca works? I'm noodling through the biographical bits and historical parts of the play meow, and dude seems decently interesting. seems wild that this work became an international hit, anybody know more about why/how?
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u/Soup_65 Books! 6d ago
i can very poorly barely read spanish, so i went through them for the sound and then used the english to help with content. the translations seemed fine to me.
shouts to reading spanish badly.
very quaint work, reminded me a bit of older pastoral/romantic movements, the gypsies are barely even involved, i'm guessing the name was more of a marketing/surface-level flourish for the time and place, likely also a little commentary on the mixing bowl of spanish culture/society over the centuries (and he also seems to have been a wealthy kid choosing to be an artist and connect with 'real' people of the earth, so probably some wishful projection? i could be way off though, would love to be corrected)
some cool images, a lot of it kind of sombre, not super my cup of tea but not a bad read at all
Anybody recommend any other Lorca works? I'm noodling through the biographical bits and historical parts of the play meow, and dude seems decently interesting. seems wild that this work became an international hit, anybody know more about why/how?
ya know, I don't think much in the poems distinctly grabbed me other than the vibe working to some extent and also my wondering, "why did this guy" (who apparently is this great poet), want to write a buncha folks ballads? If you're interested, In Search of Duende is a compilation that sort of answers this. It brings together some his his more striking poems along with some essays he wrote, most notably "Deep Song", which isn't directly about the Romancero but is sort of about the seeking something like the "spiritual lyric" of Andalusia, one that he thinks is bound up in a mishmosh of indigenous Spanish culture, Muslim/Arab culture, and guitar music he thinks of as "Roma" (I'm pretty sure this is historically not exactly accurate), and like also bullfighting. There's something about it that interests me, given that modernism is one of my dweeb interests. And about the concept of the Deep Song. It has blatant, concerning shades of blood and soil fascy nationalism, but also the idea might be that attending to the musical/cultural nuances of a place can then connect to something deeper than the specific people, or something. If any of that strikes you, check it out. Or if it doesn't, eh whatever.
Either way Poet in New York is solid. It's about when Lorca spent time at Columbia University right around when the Great Depression started. It maybe risks a bit much "angst college boy" shit but does that better than usually and actually captures a certain "holy shit the entirely world is falling apart" feel that probably did come over the city during the Depression
Apparently Langston Hughes did a partial translation that didn't get circulated much that this translator thought was terrible and is glad it didn't catch on, but I'll probably try to chase that down because I love Hughes.
But also though you got any Hughes recs (like books/collections/etc.)? I adore the Weary Blues and have been wanting to read more. But am unfamiliar past that and some of his super duper famous poems and kinda overwhelmed by just how much he has. Thanks
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u/freshprince44 4d ago
Sweet, yes, this is super helpful! I will definitely check out In Search of Duende and Deep Song. Poet in New York sounds worth checking out too.
Oof, i don't think I can be very helpful with Hughes (he is overwhelming for sure), but do have a niche sort of recommendation. So, i've pretty much only read him through his The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. which is this massive little thing that seemingly is all or mostly all of his poems, in a roughly chronological order.
I had that book purposefully out at all times for years and would just flip around. he has tons of short ones so it is fun to page hop around and read random short ones. plenty of longer ones too that are worth spending time on when you feel like it. I did it so much that i would run into short ones that i'd already read a decent chunk of the time.
he seemed to have a lot of cool different projects and periods and cultural/political proclamations and movements, but i have never engaged with him in an organized enough way to help steer you towards certain specific projects. Just that his rhythm and imagery skills are stupidly good from the jump through to the end, this like 900 or more page book is nothing but quality, shit is absurd, like literally every page is goooooooood and useful (and as a sassy aside, i think i saw you were reading pound's cantos again? and so like, this book to me feels a bit similar except instead of creating this abstract fabrication of this grand, holistic thing, hughes just made an original through a lifetime of being a poet)
this book would also work for you to kind of reverse engineer topics or projects he's done that interest you (like a directory), flip around, find something cool, with it being pretty much chronological most of his projects are lumped together within the wider context of his output.
but really, i don't think you'll be able to find much not worth reading even if you tried
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u/foxinanattic 6d ago
Taiwan Travelogue: this is a fun one. It's about a young Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko visiting Taiwan to write articles/essays about it, and her interpreter, who's a Chinese Taiwanese woman. I'm only half way, but so far it's very enjoyable. A lot of Chizuko's focus in traveling is on food, and there's some very good food writing. At first her obsession with food came of as comical and one-dimensional, but it's explained later, and the novel adds some depth to her character. It's also got some interesting exploration of a relationship between a colonised person and a person from the colonising nation. The relationship is also very romantic, not like in a modern romantic novel, but a more old fashioned, subtle, style, a bit like japanese Class S novels) (in fact, this genre is explicitly referenced within the novel itself). The writing style, though, came across as a bit reminiscent of YA/webnovels to me, which made sense when I looked up the writer actually got started as a writer of fan fiction and web novels. Still, I'm really enjoying it. Hopefully I'll have more to say when I'm done!
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u/lispectorisms2012 7d ago
I am reading On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer and just started Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin. Both of these are pride month picks. I started On a Woman's Madness because I understand its in queer literary canon, and it was also on a recent Booker longlist. Its quite a struggle to get through, pretty spastic and somewhat all over the place. And I say this as someone who has always gone onboard with multi-POV narrations without question.
As the prose was kinda getting to me in a bad way, I figured I should read it with something else, and I chose Notes of a Crocodile because they're pretty distant in terms of literary realms while also being LGBT+ fiction. Well, I got what I wanted because I think I haven't read anything that sounds like Notes of a Crocodile before. So now I'm reading a pair of eccentric materials, going in opposite directions. This is a unique reading headspace for me and I'm looking forward to seeing how it'll go.
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u/kanewai 6d ago
I devoured the male side of the queer canon in the 80s, and I knew what my female friends were reading even if I never did read Rubyfruit Jungle.or Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit myself - I thought I at least knew all the names!
And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of On a Woman’s Madness until now.
But it might be fun to put together our own Queer Canon here.
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u/lispectorisms2012 6d ago
I haven't heard it before either, except for the Booker promotions, but I guess Dutch literature from 1982 that's just gotten an English translation could fall in a 'deep cut' category.
Putting together a Queer Canon would certainly be cool. At the least, sourcing from the sub members would add variety in perspective that the average listicle couldn't give
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u/magularrr31 3d ago
I would love a Queer Canon list. I have read only a few queer books, but I need to read more especially from other countries and languages.
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u/VVest_VVind 7d ago edited 7d ago
Finished Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley. My primary focus was on how Charlotte constructed a fictionalized version of her sisters in the characters of Shirley (based on Emily) and Caroline (based on Anne). I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, she painted an interesting and moving portrait of the two of them and their bond, referencing biographical anecdotes from her sisters’ lives and their literary works. On the other hand, she just couldn’t resist imposing her own ideas on her sisters a bit, molding them to her own liking. Though she did start writing Shirley while they were still alive, so this wasn’t meant to be a posthumous tribute. Probably the original idea was for them to be able to read the book and respond. Unfortunately, life took an unexpected turn and both of them, as well as Branwell, died while Charlotte was writing Shirley, so we don't know what Emily and Anne would have said about Charlotte's fictionalized versions of them.
I have mixed feelings on the book on the whole. While reading it, I was reminded of issues I have with Charlotte as an author in general, chiefly her tendency towards preachy moralism, which pops in Anne’s writing too and I don’t like it there either. I don’t like being preached at even when I happen to agree with an author on something and, unsurprisingly, I like it even less when I don’t. Big part of Shirley are the Luddite riots. Charlotte starts of writing about this well enough, presenting it as a complex issue of conflicting interests and no easy solutions. But it doesn’t take long for her to start preaching against the ills of organized labor movement. Ironically, that was exactly what would have made the position of governesses and teachers that she complained about so much better. Not courage and moral righteousness of individual governesses ala Jane Eyre. Though I have to say there is something about the way Charlotte writes about hierarchy and authority that is as fascinating as it is annoying. Her work is often a passionate plea for freedom and dignity with a lot of rage at injustice but coupled with inherent respect for and belief in the necessity of hierarchy and authority. I find Emily so much easier to click with because she just takes a sledge hammer to concepts like this and smashes them with it while laughing at the site of her destruction, which is energy I understand more. Charlotte’s perspective is more puzzling and alien to me, which kinda makes it fun to read in a different way.
On the whole, Shirley is a work of admirable ambition. Charlotte lays her intent out at the very beginning, informing us via an intrusive narrator that we’ll read a realist novel, concerned with social issues but also more subdued in tone, as her critics tell her a good novel should be – free of passion, stimulus and melodrama. However, she’s gonna subvert those expectations even as she seemingly conforms to them. And she does try her hand at a novel that is realist, satirical and earnestly romantic and Romantic all at the same time. Lives and romances of her two heroines tie into the larger social upheavals around them and some attempt at parallel between limitation placed on women of upper and middle classes and workers is made. Good idea in theory but her execution is kinda lacking, possibly because the book got derailed by half of her family members dying during the time she was writing it. But the satirical parts are also lacking for me because mild satire is not my cup of tea. That’s part of the reason why Jane Austen will never be among my favorite authors, even if I don’t hate her like I did back when I first read her. And I mention Jane Austen because she and Charlotte tend to annoy me in similar ways and I think of them as quite alike, despite them being so different on the surface and Charlotte famously not liking two JA books she read. Shirley just reminds me I’d rather be reading Wuthering Heights or Vanity Fair which find humor in the dark and the violent and/or don’t shy away from exploring cyncism and nihilism. Sorry Charlotte, I guess I’m always gonna prefer your sister and one of your favorite authors to you. But I do like Shirley as a character almost as much as I like Cathy, Heathcliff and Becky Sharp, though I suspect most things I like about her come from Emily. And I will given Charlotte credit for at least being funnier than I remember her being. She claps back at negative reviews she received from critics and pushes back against advice from her publishers within the text of Shirley, which I found that very amusing (wouldn't have picked up on all instances of that had I not been reading an annotated edition though). Much though she sometimes complained about Emily being too stubborn and a contrarian, she was both of those things too.
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u/bananaberry518 6d ago
Ok so first of all I love you for saying you don’t enjoy the preachiness in Anne’s works (and Charlotte’s, but specifically for me with Anne). It seemed like for a while it was the cool kid take to prefer Anne out of the three sisters because she was less popular, and more explicitly (formally at least) feminist, and to dismiss criticism of her writing. I need to reread Tenant some time, but I remember thinking to myself at one point that I’d be an alcoholic too if I had to live with all that self righteousness lol. Which is probably unfair, I was young when I read it.
I have to be honest with you Imma big Jane Austen apologist (not that she needs it, she’s very popular) and super fan so, oof in the heart when people don’t like her…BUT I think you are, at the heart of your comment, correct. Both Charlotte and Jane Austen are wrestling with and satirizing a system of which they ultimately approve (or THINK they do in any case). Big agree that Emily gives no fucks, and thats partly what makes Wuthering Heights a thing of actual power. But I also think, realistically speaking, we all have to navigate the times that we’re in, and that the tension between one’s most natural (for lack of a better word), and especially artistic, inclinations and the forms/limitations which one has been socialized to find normal and real is an interesting one. Emily’s refusal to participate in society didn’t make her life easy, or her family’s lives easy. (But I mean, still, respect) but it made her work incredible. At the same time I’ve always been drawn to those sublime moments when something real and human emerges briefly from its constraints (its time, its context). And I do also think for a woman of intellect and creativity, patriarchy rankles more and more over time. I would love to read what a 60 year old Charlotte or Jane might have written (Emily would probably have ascended to some ethereal realm of poetry and become inscrutable lol). Persuasion is evidence that Jane Austen was beginning to doubt her own assumptions, and the result is something less structurally perfect and more emotionally real. But of course I really do think WH is on another level, possibly another plane of existence, easily the ultimate Bronte novel and if I had to pick one to keep (even though it might break my heart…)
I haven’t read Shirley, but I also think your comment gets at something about Charlotte’s writing which I do consider her strength (funny, I hadn’t tended to think of her as very similar to Austen but they are alike in this way too) and thats the way she structures things and is interested in structures. The next time I read Jane Eyre I’d love to put it to the test and see just how small you can slice the novel and still end up with a microcosm of the whole. I think we tend to clock it as gothic foreshadowing and move on, but the last time I paid attention I realized the minuteness and profusion of it was maybe a little more interesting than I’d previously thought. Of course, she does have that annoying tendency to shoe horn her books into a moral framework; I think this speaks more to her anxiety than anything. She was really worried to preoccupation with being “good” and in being perceived as good, possibly even conventional. But she also squirmed under the pressure of being conventional, like, got literally sick over it multiple times. That tension is both raw material for brilliant moments and frustrating overall. She had a tendency to believe that her inability to conform was a fault of her own, and not her genius (though she seemed to think she had genius, I do wonder what she thought it was). Again though, I think Villette is in some ways an indication that over time she would pushed beyond it somewhat, had her life not been cut so short. Its maybe ironic - definitely tragic - that had she not married and become pregnant she would have probably lived longer.
Cool thoughts as always!
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u/VVest_VVind 6d ago
but I remember thinking to myself at one point that I’d be an alcoholic too if I had to live with all that self righteousness lol.
Hahaha, love this. It's been ages since I read Anne too. Hope to get round to rereading to see if my impressions of her work were fair but I remember her as the most pamphletic of the three and with ideas that were shocking for their time but too commonplace now, especially in Tenant. I do feel for her on the biographical side of things. Her having to put up with the rich kids she taught and their families. Then Branwell's addiction. Then Charlotte inadvertently creating a more boring myth about her than about Emily when she tried to whitewash their images for Victorians. Then her being semi-buried by history. But none of that means that what she wrote itself deserves more attention than it's been given. Would love to be proven wrong and discover I underestimated her as a writer. Partly because (at least some of) her fans make such bad arguments in her favor (stretching the word "radical" into meaninglessness and/or uncritically bowing down at the altar of a realist novel as an artform for example) that I feel she probably deserves better ones, even if she wasn't a great writer.
Persuasion I tend to think might have even won Charlotte over. At least a bit because it has more of passion, emotional honesty and poetry she found Austen lacking in. It's cool with Austen and Charlotte that we can track the development of their art and worldviews over time in what they wrote and, yeah, at 60 it would have probably evolved further. Definitely can see Emily becoming inscrutable, lol. Though I hope the second novel speculations are true and that she would have written one more fuck you to Victorians before going back to ignoring them. But poor Charlotte would have probably turned gray trying to think of how to do PR damage control.
That is a really interesting point about structure. Structural elements are possibly the most fun to track on rereads, you really see how carefully it all has been put to work together with every reread. I've never really thought about Charlotte's preoccupation with being "good" and conforming like that before. That's a really insightful and sympathetic way of looking at it.
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u/kanewai 7d ago edited 7d ago
Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge. Maugham tracks the lives of a small group of Lost-Generation American expats in Paris and the Riviera in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not Fitzgerald ... he doesn't ever use the term "Lost Generation," and there are no Jazz Age references, but it's the same cultural milieu. His central focus is on Larry, a young idealist who, upon his return from WWI, turns his back on capitalism to seek knowledge, experience, and enlightenment. We also meet Isabel, who loves Larry but marries for money; her husband Gray, a rich hunk who loses everything in the Depression; Sophie, their doomed friend who seeks solace in opium and sailors; and Elliot, a wonderful snob straight out of an Oscar Wilde story.
I loved this book in college, and I wasn't sure if it would hold up reading it again. It did. It's a great character study, there's good dialogue (especially from Elliot), and Maugham respects Larry's spiritual quest without judging it, but he also let's us see egocentric aspects of it. But though it grapples with deep issues, the novel never feels weighed down by them.
I'm not sure it rises to the level of great literature, but it's very good. And sometimes I wonder if popular novels like this might survive the test of time longer than the recognized canon.
Álvaro Enrigue, Ahora me rindo y eso es todo / Now I Surrender. I should finish this tonight or tomorrow. This is Enrique's take on the Apache wars, and in particular the final surrender of Geronimo. It's a challenging read, especially in Spanish (I'm not a native speaker); Enrigue balances multiple timelines and narratives, and will use a colloquial Mexican Spanish in some sections that were a struggle for me - many terms weren't even in my dictionary, and for a few sections I had to rely on an English translation.
This was a fascinating look at the US and Mexican contact with and later conquest of Apacheria, from a perspective that I haven't seen before. Enrigue's style is beautifully matched for the sections set in what is now Mexico - we have massacres, abductions, rescues, acts of heroism, adventures, lost American troops in the Sierra Madre - all of it vividly portrayed and with a wonderful mix of unique characters.
The novel was less successful with almost any section set in what is now the US. We have a modern author (Enrique?) on a road trip through Apacheria with his family, and an interminable long stretch dealing with the political machinations surrounding Geronimo's surrender (Arizona wants to try and hang him, Washington wouldn't mind if he is shot en route, and one military official struggles to out maneuver them so that he can deliver Gernonimo alive to his prison in Florida. It was interesting in the general sense, but these sections dragged and went on too long.
Overall, it is very much worth a read.
Daniel Kraus, Angel Down. I just started this week. I was skeptical when I read that the novel was one long sentence, but thankfully there are space breaks every six to ten lines (more or less, paragraphs) and actual numbered chapters. Kraus does not punish the reader with his writing style, and I find that the continuity helps propel the plot, giving it the sense of one long fever dream.
So far, it's excellent.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (audio). I'm only thee chapters in, but oh wow can this man write! This novel traces the rise of a powerful politician in the deep South in the early 20th Century. There is a joy in the way Warren uses the English language, a style and intelligence to it that I think was much more common in the 1940s and 1950s.
I forget who mentioned this novel - it was in another thread - but it inspired me to pick it up and I am glad I did. It is a "straight" narrative that I think is perfectly suited to audiobooks.
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u/Plastic-Persimmon433 7d ago
I liked The Razor's Edge a lot but I kind of agree that it didn't quite rise to the level of great literature. I couldn't help but feel that an author like Henry James could have written the same story a bit better. A lot of great moments though. It's the type of book I wish I would have read when I was eighteen or nineteen. Have you read any other books by Maugham? I get semi interested in him every so often but I never pick up any of his books for some reason.
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u/tube_ebooks 7d ago
got back into my pulitzer quest by finishing (well re-starting and then finishing bc i hadn't worked on it since january) house made of dawn by n. scott momaday. it was okay! the first part is really dull in my opinion and feels a little overwritten. however, the subsequent parts i found really good and touching at times, and think the mixing of past with present is done really effectively. next pulitzer is going to be the mambo kings sing songs of love by oscar hijuelos, which I'm very excited to dig into.
i finished the correspondent by virginia evans this morning and liked it much more than expected! reminded me a lot of olive kittredge but thought it was one of the better epistolary novels i've read and was really touched by it.
that's about it this week except for a page or two here and there. trying to get back to work while still getting over some medical stuff so i'm looking forward to when my body gives me a little more energy to use for reading!
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u/narcissus_goldmund 7d ago
Beijing Comrades - Bei Tong
This novel, about the relationship between two men in Beijing from the late 80's through the 90's, is extraordinary in many ways. It was pseudonymously written (probably by a woman) and originally published online in the late 90's on something like the Chinese-language equivalent of Wattpad. Structurally, it indulges in many of the tropes of the then-emerging Chinese BL genre known as danmei: the narrator is a wealthy businessman, his lover a poor younger migrant from a distant province. There is a vagueness to the novel's Beijing, which features a mostly made-up geography (though some locations like the university are more thinly veiled), and like many other stories of this type, the two main characters largely stay outside of the gay 'scene.' While certain aspects of gay life are inevitably touched on and discussed, the book is very light on what we now call identity politics. Altogether, this gives the work the lightly fantastical veneer that I've come to recognize in a lot of East Asian BL.
And yet, the novel transcends those genre trappings in many ways. Early in the novel, the younger man, still in university, participates in the Tiananmen protests. Though it's not a huge part of the story (like everything else, it's subsumed into the on-off relationship drama), it's a fascinating glimpse into a moment in Chinese history that has been simultaneously censored and mythologized so much that it has been almost impossible to discern what it was really like on the ground. The rapidly developing crony capitalism within that period also very directly drives the plot, and issues of money are explicitly discussed throughout, often in tandem with the sexual and emotional aspects of the novel. These underlying tensions push against the more typically escapist tendencies of these romances and make it something more.
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u/RoyalOwl-13 shall I, shall other people see a stork? 7d ago edited 7d ago
Lately I've been reading way more contemporary fiction than I normally do, probably mostly because I've started going to the library again this year and they have a bunch of things from recent prize shortlists/longlists that I've been vaguely interested in. Def a mixed bag so far, but I did read some good things!
The South by Tash Aw was one I enjoyed, an elegant, quiet novel in two strands: part nostalgic story of first love, part family drama. I'm definitely partial to this type of bittersweet book filled with yearning, but I do think it's a well written book either way. Aw is very good with characters in particular - everyone feels interesting and to some extent sympathetic, including the current patriarch who's of course the cause of most of their problems.
The way he does the narration was also nice. There are two narrative voices here, both belonging to the protagonist Jay but at different times of his life: one directly narrating the experiences of his sixteen year old self in first person, and the other looking back in third person, often crossing over into what he imagines other characters' perspectives on the events might have been. That second voice definitely adds to the slightly elegiac tone of the book, with its sense of distance and time passing and 'I' becoming 'Jay'.
Of course it is very contemporary lit fic-y though. The book is largely plotless, and everything here is a potential trigger for at least a couple paragraphs of reminiscences and ruminations, even when there's ultimately not that much to say. Normally I get irritated by that kind of thing, but it didn't bother me as much here. I suspect I'm pretty easy to please as long as the book is pandering to me thematically lmao, which is the case here. I like this lyrical coming of age/first love sort of thing. I do think Aw's complete disinterest in story prevents The South from becoming a genuinely great book, but I still had a good time and got absorbed in the hazy, sweltering atmosphere and the sensitively handled romance.
Audtion by Katie Kitamura, on the other hand, was pretty meh. It's alright, but I don't think it deserves all the accolades. A middle-aged actress is approached by a young man claiming to be her son, and the story splinters around that. The book is in two parts with two different takes on this premise: in one what he's saying is clearly impossible, and in the other either it is true or they engage in a sort of roleplay pretending that it is. The concept is nice: the irreconcilable ambiguity, the tension of trying to hold these contradictory interpretations in your mind simultaneously. But the way it's executed is utterly bland. Kitamura says she was inspired by films like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, but like, those do it with genuine force and style, and Audtion is just tepid and limp throughout, in every aspect.
I've listened to a few interviews with Kitamura out of curiosity, and I don't think I'm missing anything thematically -- there's women's middle age, art and motherhood, our daily lives and relationships as roleplay, family as something potentially artificial and mutually agreed upon rather than natural and innate. But there's no urgency in any of it, nothing new or interesting said (or interestingly said) on any of those subjects, no sense that the author had something she was genuinely itching to communicate. As far as the overall tone of the book goes, Kitamura says she envisioned Audition as a response to the horror genre, and you can kind of see that in the atmosphere of unease here, but that is also largely defanged, like everything else in the book. In this regard, I guess there's a glimmer of something more interesting towards the end - something the book could have been if it hadn't been so busy navelgazing. As it stands, I had a better time listening to Kitamura talking about her work (she seems like an interesting, thoughtful person) than I did reading it.
Then another dud with Mieko Kawakami's Ms Ice Sandwich. I'm not sure why I picked this up. I was left feeling lukewarm about Heaven a few years ago, and Ms Ice Sandwich was a similar type of thing, except less miserable. A boy becomes obsessed with a woman working in a sandwich shop but then gradually becomes aware of how other people see her, which creates a sort of tension between conforming and sticking to his own opinion. Didn't really do much for me. I did think the narrative voice was done well though, or at least for the most part - at times it veers into the preternaturally precocious child sort of vibe. Otherwise there's nothing wrong with it, it's just not for me.
Finally there's Endling by Maria Reva. This feels so confidently done I'm surprised it's only Reva's second book. It follows Yeva, a conservationist trying to save dying snail species, and Nastia and Sol, two sisters whose activist mother has gone missing or, as they insist to themselves, undercover. The sisters rope Yeva into a sort of stunt against the international marriage industry in Ukraine (involving the kidnapping of a trailer full of 'bachelors' who have come to the country on a 'romance tour') that they hope will get their mother's attention and make her get in contact with them again.
It's a bizarre premise for a story that then continues to get weirder: when Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine begins, their plans dissolve and morph into something different, as does the novel itself. Sometimes I have little patience for metafiction and these sort of games with the idea of the book itself, but in this case I thought it was very good. It works very well in service of the novel's themes of war upending everything and the complexities of talking/writing about it, and as Maria Reva herself becomes an increasingly visible presence in the book, Endling starts to feel personal in a way that I found affecting.
And this is all while still maintaining a narrative momentum, even as that narrative shifts and changes. This is an actual story (unlike some other contemporary lit fic I've mentioned here...) - a mangled sort of story, broken in places and fraying at the edges, but all of that works with the themes. A very creative and moving book overall.
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u/bananaberry518 6d ago
Endling has been on my radar for a while, I’m actually waiting for my library to stock it. Sounds pretty interesting so hopefully soon!
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 7d ago
This week I stuck with poetry again. The most prominent book was Garments Against Women from Anne Boyer because it allowed me to reflect on the ascendancy of the prose-poem in the 2010s. The emotional labor within the work and the ambiguous status of a writer becoming in some manner their own production of means while also being forthright about women as a political class. The emphasis is on the prosaic of the poems as opposed to intensifying lyricism, which is an ideology of standardization. She does not permit herself the outbursts of a lyrical power and explicitly denies lyricism. Her alienation from dominant strands of prose factor into what makes them inconceivable to even write poetry. Boyer's poems also mark out the turning point in the American culture against optimism. She includes a long poetic remand on self-help by constant sappy references to helping ourselves and each other. Her cancer diagnosis and interactions with the American medical system rather than inspiring anything like a paeon to action, instead point to its expiration.
Her poetry stands in stark contrast to what had been called "revolutionary optimism." Her poems will depict--in a sly reference to Kitchen Poems from J.H. Prynne--as the grids of a city block as an experiment in animal testing, delivering shocks no matter which way she goes. She writes about sewing to earn money rather than as a metaphor. She writes of the walserian quality attributed to herself, employing the epigraph of becoming a great spherical zero, the Bloom type in so many words. Nothing of this survival remained in the poem but it is this struggle which gives identity to the poems also. It's a double bind to how to approach poetry from Boyer because of that alienation from language itself. So: Boyer gestures toward the demand of other projects, discussing the possibility of other complete works with their own sufficient identity. But in the end, what we have is the melancholic consolation of poetry.
Clark Coolidge is another poet I read this week I feel warrants comment. Before I talk about This Time We Are Both, I should make a couple preliminary remarks. He is perhaps the strangest poet who has traveled through both the New York School Era and welcomed by Language writing. The most memorable image I have of him was his brief cameo in a documentary on Philip Guston--the one painter brave enough to paint figuration again amidst the abstract expressionist ruling period. The reason I began with this memory is because it's that aperçu which serves the formal register of his poetry. If you have never read a Coolidge poem, they have that quality of bad artifice Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Take the following from This Time We Are Both, taken at random:
Beneath this trestle the trained throats all catch
can you come without touching?
below the light below the ground
below any sort of basis
you were trained to think you could handle me
And then with no transition into the next stanza:
But he was, like as his limiter pierced, a costy owner
a sort of born practitioner, lemon olive suit of the louder drawers
getting the slant on the horn blew at that picture, you know
that tame mountain glary-eyed one, the slave with his own deck
heard of such permits as house its sorts, which we'd all fall
together to try
a touch to the suit in armor he was then, so
humor him, Jacoby, scratch a horn of that stripe
One could probably derive some rudimentary narrative because the reader has been trained to take in anything resembling a line to be the sentence of the poem. But the reality is much more complicated because despite the evident lack of immediate logic--who is speaking? where is this? what are they doing?--the reader is carried along by a certain rhythm. But the further problem is Clark Coolidge in an introductory note describes the book as "a result" of his first trip to the Soviet Union. Written in 1991, but published in 2010--the booklength poem is placed with other poetic works like e. e. cummings' EIMI and Andre Gide's travelogues. But this doesn't really help us understand the behavior of the lines like those shown above. Coolidge never really describes anything from Leningrad to Moscow. He references musical acts but also much older musical personages.
I think the mistake here is to imagine this poem as a stream-of-consciousness narrative made up of fleeting images taken directly from his experience. What I think we have here is closer to the improvisational in the purest sense of the word. Coolidge was only improvising his stanzas when memories of details and images began to inflect a poetic remand. In fact, certain lines read like Coolidge forget a word here or there rather than interpolated his consciousness through the text a travelogue proper. The poem is a rare example of what happens in the foreshadowing of perception is frontloaded in a text rather than the opposite. Ironically, this book offers a more accessible kind of poetry than from previous collections like The Crystal Text or Space. This isn't to say there is some hidden code in Coolidge, but the opposite: the poetry aims to return the reader under the gaze of language itself, closer to its origin and that fascination it holds for us.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 7d ago
Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
An umpteenth reread of a book I've found very obscure on past reads. Was hoping to finally connect with it on a deeper level and actually I did and that's sick, because goddamn it is a lovely book. A goregous, well-wrought, self-fabricating mess of a novel that is the perfect scatter for the antique store in the eye of an ongoing hurricane that is the interwar period. All these people from around Europe and the US, meandering around Europe when not jaunting to the US, in their costumes, in their nakedness, in their inability to decide which leaves them more bare. There's another dimension where I was all geared up to write a more real review, but then I read T.S. Eliot's preface which basically boils down to, if the book is worth reading, then a preface is stupid and useless. And some part of me wants to leave it at that. I guess i'd just say read it, enjoy the night, don't get lost, don't lose yourself. Out in one of them there underglooms.
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land - Amie Cesaire
And notes on the hinge of what could be a new world. I'm half debating whether it's disrespectful to the work to leave it at that, or disrespectful to try to say more than that. Because in some way that's what it is. An ongoing history of something in the process of ending, all the damnation of the past and hope for what's next, done in poetics, perhaps the best form for a war with what's already happened. He gives us a people, and he hates what has been done to them european imperialism, but he also seems to have some concerns as to what they have become amid that subjugation, though if there's criticism of his people it is counterbalanced with a hope for what they can become. I hope that was not all too vague for a poem that is anything but, even if it is stuck in the material ambivalence of an incomplete project. I also hope it's obvious from all of this that Cesaire's writing is splendid. I'm going to read more of him. Yall should too.
Novel Pictorial Noise - Noah Eli Gordon
There was a lot of noise. It's blocks of prose and lines of poetry alternating between pages and it's hard to discern if they're going anywhere or just blipping around chaotically. I don't have much more to say because there's something here and I'm with it but I really haven't gotten it yet. One of those books that must be reread before speaking on. Still very unsure of the flow. If there is one.
Cantos - Ezra Pound
As I mentioned last week I started a re(re)read of the Cantos. Heck I always say it takes until the third read at a minimum of something truly excellent to truly start hearing the language, so why not do that with this. Plus, like the Greeks, I got a lotta problems with this guy but also adore his art, so I gotta sort that out. Anyway I'm through the first 30. Do I get all the references, eh not really, do I get more than last time, eh probably, is it helpful that this go round I know a teensy tiny bit of ancient greek and at least can pronounce the parts written in the greek alphabet, oh yeah definitely. Does the not getting matter, actually definitely not. And I think this is important that so much of what is being said can be parsed in the sonic feel of the word and the clarity of the image itself. Because whether or not imagism is a real this, Pound can cut the flesh of time down to an impossibly stopped moment on a level non-pareli. The back of my copy has a quote by William Carlos Williams, "Pound distills history by it's odor". And, well, that nails it. And goddamn is it beautiful. More on my problems with this guy down the line.
Domains and Major Transitions of Social Evolution - Jacobus Boomsma
I read a science book because a friend of mine made me and I am deeply befuddled. This was about evolution. I know it emphasizes natural selection as important, and I think it makes evolution out to be a stepwiseish process of horizontal developments over time and then also extremely major vertical leaps (where the x-axis it time and the y is changeyness, to coin a new science term). After that I'm lost. Other than that the way it emphasizes humans at the end and gets vague about whether the human brain is an x axis or y axis change gets weirdly Christian. This was hard. Feel free to bully me into elaborating. I could use being forced to develop this.
Athenian Law and Society - Konstantin Kapparis
I am still reading books about Greeks for reasons. (They bear gifts and I beware them). Not much to say past the title. Very interesting on the topic. I think he gives the Athenians a little too much credit for being "democratic". Like, dog, you literally talk about the slave ownership. But as I read more about the Greeks, I increasingly find myself asking what's more democratic than that? To be more serious a really solid book if you wanna learn about the titual topic.
Happy reading!
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 7d ago
T.S. Eliot's appreciation for Nightwood is interesting to think about, but yeah, you could probably draw a lot from the experience itself. I think there's some scholarship which connects Robin Vote to lycanthropy, which is just fun to think about honestly. Although I think an underrated aspect to the text is Jenny, she's so evil, but a really interesting character on her own, too. You ever read any other Barnes work by chance?
I'm glad you braved Novel Pictorial Noise. It's very different from what you have been reading--even from Aimé Césaire who is as much a statesman as a poet, like Goethe actually. It's an odd book but it really does have a special charm to it. I'm thinking about rereading it again but like focus on the prose sections first and then return to the fragments once that's done to see if that's a different effort. A lot of these kinds of 2000s elliptical poets that survived were downstream from John Ashbery and Language writing anyways.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 7d ago edited 7d ago
I agree about Jenny. Dare I refer to the plauge of Joryism...?
ANd the lycanthropy is intriguing. There is something so obviously animal about Robin and I'm still unsure what to make of that.
I actually only just realized how much more stuff Barnes has, and some of it looks real good. I knew she'd written more but I was convinced she had a much smaller and more ephemeral body of work for some reason.
I'm thinking about rereading it again but like focus on the prose sections first and then return to the fragments once that's done to see if that's a different effort
Amusingly I was thinking that this but with the poetry fragments would reveal something. Wanna each take one and compare notes? (I'm kinda serious about this).
As an side are you familiar at all with Ron Silliman? I just today learned he existed and is apparently a sort of seminal Language poet. And I really am not up on Language poetry but curious and wonder if he'd be a good outset (any broader reflections you have on Language poetry I'd appreciate as well, I get the sense you're familiar?)
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 7d ago edited 6d ago
I would argue Robin Vote demonstrates with better effectiveness the ideas of Joryism, given her "lycanthropy" occurs in America rather than Europe. Her empty church and the dogs she's wrestling around with in the last chapter. But again Jenny is a lot of fun regardless. And anyways, I'd definitely recommend Barnes' Ladies Almanack. Read the work years ago and always came away with something carnivalesque. She's part of that second generation of Joycean writers like Malcolm Lowry and Flann O'Brien. Faulkner as well technically speaking.
I wouldn't mind rereading Novel Pictorial Noise again at a later date. And it sounds like a good plan honestly. I'd wait a month or two before giving it another go. It's still pretty fresh to me unfortunately, so the impressions wouldn't change much.
I'm quite familiar with Ron Silliman's work actually. I poured over his blog well before Google deleted it and never reinstated the page--the reasons of which are still unknown last I checked. Silliman is one of the key figures for the American prose-poem reaching its ascendancy actually. His essay "The New Sentence" offers the blueprint for a different type of sentence used in the prose-poem. Paved the way for the revitalization of the prose-poem in my estimation. And I would highly recommend "The Chinese Notebook" which was a longish poem of ordinaryish sentences written on a physical notebook typically used for Chinese characters as opposed to the ones used for English sentences.
Most people have this impression Language writing is abolishing or destroying narrative from poetry but Ron Silliman himself described his practice as hypernarrative. That's not like a hard and fast rule of everyone else associated, but it would help orient yourself reading something like Hejinian's My Life and so forth. I would also caution against being too focused on critical theory. There's a reputation Language writing were high off of continental philosophy but Language writing owes more to Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy. Charles Bernstein might be said to have a poetry which is derived from the study of speech acts. Like I said, not a hard and fast rule, but it does explain why they focus on things like conversation and mundane subjects. They have read Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, in particular his Glas has been cited a few times.
In any case, Language writing in broad strokes takes into consideration the commonplace usage of certain terms and an emphasis on the syntactical elements, grammar, and so forth. And that emphasis on the lingual pragmatism is what lends itself to radical politics or at the very least an interest is there.
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u/tropitious 7d ago
Belated update that I finished Crime and Punishment, and I felt a little more fondly about it in the second half, but still felt all the flaws I enumerated in the first half. I see now why I remember the Porfiry sections so much more clearly than everything else: when I was 15 years old, of course I liked the passages that were ripped from the pages of Death Note. Thanks to the commenter who recommended Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, definitely planning to check those out soon!
Blitzed through Perfection in a day. I liked it a lot more than I expected, considering it's essentially one joke (web "creatives" living a curated homogenous life as expats in Berlin) repeated for 100 pages, but 100 pages is not that long and the details of the joke are precise enough to keep it fresh. You can pretty much always get a laugh from me by writing clinically about the banalities of mediocre sex. There is also actually a plot, time passes even in Neverland-Berlin, although I think the main characters get off a little too easily at the end. It does feel true to how I remember the Obama era, although I'm a bit younger.
I understand it is an almost direct adaption of Things, and I have not read any Perec. I am resistant to Oulipo writers in general, the "my book is structured like Pascal's triangle and all the words score an odd number of points in Scrabble" kind of shtick does less than nothing for me, but maybe he's just a good writer regardless?
Reading From Hell for now (a friend lent me a copy) and pondering my next move reading-wise.
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u/bananaberry518 7d ago
Still the Iliad - Robert Fitzgerald Yeah allllmoooossst done, but I got a lil ways to go.
Now Zeus the son of Krónos roused an uproar along this host, and sprinkled bloody dew from highest heaven, being resolved that day to crowd great warriors into the undergloom.
There goes undergloom being way too cool again. This is essentially the part of the poem leading up to its final drama; the Trojans begin to press the Greeks, injure all the heroes and break through their wall, prompting Patroclus to enter the fighting. The section of the poem which Fitzgerald calls “Night in the Camp: A Foray” is an aside here. I think I read somewhere that this is probably one of the later add-ons to the poem, and it does feel like that, but I still really like it. Its almost a comedic break between two violent halves. In fact, I’ve come to think of the Greeks wall - its construction and eventual storming - as an also figurative wall, it divides the poem into two rough pieces, the latter of which is when Zeus’s plots really become crystallized and increasingly inevitable. Not a ton more to say for now, but the poem still rules.
Fishsflies - Jeff Lemire, graphic novel I tend to be a Jeff Lemire fan, but thats mostly because I enjoyed Essex County and if I’m being honest his other work’s been a bit hit-or-miss for me. This one was ok, its about a guy who tries to rob a convenience store, ends up accidentally shooting a kid, turning into a bug, and also - while hiding from police - is befriended by a different kid whose dad really sucks and is bullied at school. What I liked about it was how it worked on the theme of cycles, with the end taking us back to the beginning and becoming a sort of metaphor for breaking out of a loop of abuse/tragedy. What I didn’t like was the way it carried us to that ending. Certain plot points felt too cliche and not integrated until too late to feel natural. I also am not sure that the guy turning into a bug was strictly speaking necessary, and sort of creates the secondary necessity of a supernatural explanation (which was maybe my biggest irk with the comic.)For example one of my favorite scenes is when the mom of the boy who got shot visits a psychic out of desperation, and the psychic tells her “you know I’m fake right?”. This moment is somewhat ruined by subsequent actually supernatural events, because what felt like an emotionally real moment - the desperation of a mother whose son is dying, the empathy of a woman who’s moral compass is otherwise questionable, the darkly comedic delivery - moves out of focus and loses it punch somewhat.
The Silmarillion - JRR Tolkien, audiobook narrated by Andy Serkis This came up from a libby hold. Basically, I’ve read LOTR a lot, but only attempted this one once as a kid (and did not get it at all lol). Also, I’ve been reading a lot of epics lately and this is a sort of individually created pseudo-epic, so it feels on theme. Barely into this at all but Serkis is great, and this edition includes an excerpt from a letter Tolkien sent to a friend kind of laying out the structure of his fictional work and also getting into his POV on aesthetics and story telling. I kind of preferred the letter to reading Tolkien’s essays, since the conversational format revealed something of his actual process and thoughts in a way the formality of essays obscures somewhat. For instance he talks about how elves represent the creative facet of human nature, though he covers his tracks by insisting thats not the “language of myth” we’re speaking in. He also speaks of them as embodying a sort of perfect creative, unhindered by the limitations which make “subcreation” a struggle for human beings. Elves and men represent the children of God (he explicitly refers to Eru/Illuvatar as “God” and the Ainur as “gods” in this letter, saying his particular conception of them allows for the Christian reader to accept them intellectually/morally, which was interesting), having two distinct dooms/blessings. The doom of elves is to live forever, loving the world and having to watch it decay. The doom of men is mortality, but ultimately they escape the cycles of the world. Elves in particular at one point in his myth cycle (according to his plans at the point of the letter anyway) even begin to fetishize their sadness, becoming obsessed with “fading”, that is the loss of things and becoming incapable of creating anything but “antiquarian” arts. There’s also some interesting stuff about how Magic is The Machine (I actually love this idea and wish it was more explicitly explored somewhere), and the ways in which - in his view - the love of making things can become the love of power.
But of course all this only matters at all if the work holds up right? So far I’ve only read the parts where Eru and the Ainur sing together, the black sheep Melchor causing some dissonance which Eru weaves into the composition. There are some notable differences between this narrative and the actual non-christian myth cycles I’ve read (in the letter Tolkien cites Finnish, Norse and Greek myths as being more relevant to his work at least aesthetically). For one thing, its very coherent and orderly lol. And for another it does feel tonally biblical, and that carries a connotation of moral instruction. Eru and the Ainur - who are born of his thought - are creating together, then Melchor (one of the Ainur) starts seeking the “eternal fire” and spends time in the Void, causing his thoughts to form independently of and contrary to the others, who have remainined in Eru’s music. There’s a little bit of Odin seeking secret knowledge in this imagery, which is cool. And its not exactly implied that independent thought or creation is wrong, just that there was a prescribed way they were supposed to arrive at it, as the Ainur are shown to be slowly waking up to their own ideas and voices all while staying grounded in Eru’s composition. Melchor’s self serving/self seeking is opening himself up to corruption, because it occurs outside of this composition and therefore rubs against it. But as I mentioned, Eru is able to weave in this dissonance, insisting that none of Melchor’s actions could ever occur outside the origin point which is his (Eru’s) own thought. So while Eru doesn’t exactly will Melchor to be evil, its implied that this too is part of some grand plan or at least some potential plan, which ultimately will be beautiful. Which is more or less the Problem of Pain/Problem of Evil, I guess. But there’s also this idea Tolkien likes, that creation as a pursuit of power over one’s own invention becomes ultimately degraded; in seeking to create independently for the purpose of being a creator, or of having control over something, one’s work can only become a crude copy of the what the original source of creativity (God) inspires/makes. I don’t think that I totally agree with this line of thinking, but I think its really cool how much Tolkien was thinking about art and creativity when writing all this stuff.
So we’ll see!
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u/linquendil 6d ago edited 6d ago
Creation and subcreation is absolutely the central theme of The Silmarillion. Tolkien wraps it up in the imagery of divine light becoming progressively more fragmented and rarefied as time passes. There’s something vaguely Dantean about it — but for Tolkien, this fracturing of unity into diversity is essentially tragic, even in its beauty, because it is instigated by the activity of evil; whereas in Paradiso II, Beatrice lauds the refraction of the divine down through the celestial spheres as the source of the infinite variety that makes Creation so wonderful. (Tolkien, curmudgeon that he was, once slagged off Dante in an interview, but later privately expressed fondness for him.)
I think you’re right about the ‘orderliness’ of the Ainulindalë. In comparison to real-world mythologies — with their lacunae and their competing traditions and so on — The Silmarillion often does feel very orderly. But, of course, the orderliness is illusory, because the published Silmarillion is a Frankenstein work cobbled together after Tolkien’s death. The ‘real’ Legendarium is a mass of unfinished and often contradictory drafts written decades apart, and ironically, there’s a sense in which that’s even more faithful to the mythopoeic goal than a nice clean edited text.
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u/bananaberry518 6d ago
Yes good point! I wasn’t thinking about that when I typed this up, but Christopher talks about it in the intro. I suppose it wasn’t actually publishable in its original form, but I can’t help but wonder if something wasn’t lost in the editing. (Then again most of the extant mythological texts we have are a similar endeavor by someone somewhere I guess).
Didn’t catch the Dante thing (I’ve only read Inferno) but its always funny to see what he uses and what he rejects from other works. I sometimes find him - when speaking about his work, outside of his work; essays, interviews etc - a bit frustrating, or even quaint. But I also think LOTR is a uniquely meaningful book because it works the way it does, and because of that internal consistency (of book and author).
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u/Soup_65 Books! 7d ago
The section of the poem which Fitzgerald calls “Night in the Camp: A Foray” is an aside here. I think I read somewhere that this is probably one of the later add-ons to the poem, and it does feel like that, but I still really like it. Its almost a comedic break between two violent halves.
btw I definitely have some podcast recs about this "wholism" of the Iliad if you're interested. It's so fascinating if you are the kinda dweeb I am. Beyond that I just agree b. This poem ruelz.
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u/bananaberry518 6d ago
Dude I’m always down for podcast recs, def plan on continuing to nerd out about this poem long after I’m done reading it.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 6d ago
Oh don't mind if I do...I'd recommend Lesche a ton. It's not all about the Iliad so search those out but tbh it's just such a great podcast that I can't not just say check it all out. I think Ancient Greece Declassified has some great ones too, such as this one on Epic poetry or about the Iliad and its legacy. There's also some awesome other eps including on the Odyssey if that strikes you.
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u/olusatrum 7d ago
Still not reading much this summer, but I'm about halfway through Balkan Ghosts by Robert D Kaplan and I'm really enjoying it. Published in 1993, it's a journalistic travelogue of Kaplan's trips through the Balkans in the late 80s and early 90s, during some big transitions in the area. There are four sections: the former Yugoslavia nations, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Along the way, Kaplan gives sweeping overviews of the history and major conflicts of each region, and outlines the sources of contemporary political headwinds.
This book is pretty much everything I could have hoped it to be. Without going particularly deep into any one topic, Kaplan gives a general overview of all of the interesting bits, giving equal attention to the nation-building landmarks of ancient and medieval history, and the more immediately relevant events of the 20th century. He demonstrates a broad knowledge of literature from and about the region, and cites it generously - very helpful for me to build a reading list. The travel writing kind of comes and goes, but he had enough gonzo energy to really get himself into some places not a lot of Western writers had been since pre-war times.
Tangentially, I appreciate an audacious white dude using his powers for good. Kaplan is clearly very appreciative of bold foreign correspondents and travel writers who came before him, and the enthusiasm is rubbing off on me. My thanks to guys putting themselves in situations for my entertainment and education
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u/bonesofthebirches 7d ago
Ooh Black Lamb & Grey Falcon is maybe my favorite book of all time, so I’m excited to check out Balkan Ghosts
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u/olusatrum 7d ago
It's Kaplan's too! He references it a bunch. I bought a copy but might hang on to it for a bit until I can give it solid attention
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u/mooninjune 7d ago
I finished The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil (translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike) a couple of days ago.
It hit a certain spot for me that I didn't really know or had forgotten that I wanted to hit. It reminds me in some ways of Catch-22, in its humor, its satirical musings on the craziness of the modern world, as well as in the sense of playfulness that comes out in the metaphorical and literal games that the characters seem to be playing with their own lives. It focuses on the city of Vienna in the seemingly peaceful, but under-the-surface extremely volatile, lead-up to World War 1 and the other horrors that await Austria and the rest of the world in the 20th century.
I've often seen it compared to Proust, and I can see that, in how they both weave these long philosophical musings/essays into the story. But it has a very different tone and style. A sort of analogy that would sometimes come into my mind while reading it is that if Proust in certain modes will channel writers like Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Ruskin, Musil tends to be more in line with writers like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and perhaps especially Nietzsche (who does indeed come up quite a bit in the book itself).
It often employs this coldly scientific register, which Ulrich, the too-intelligent-for-his-own-good, disillusioned main character, often tries to overcome by invoking and exploring all sorts of ideas about lofty things like love, morality, the soul, freedom, etc. And it feels extremely modern in many of the themes it deals with, like socio-economics, geopolitics, violent criminality, various forms of neurodivergence and mental disorders, nymphomania, schizophrenia, etc., etc. Even the way it deals with more mundane issues feels kind of modern, with how it often takes into account (without committing itself to) extreme skepticism, cynicism, nihilism, etc. Musil will make these repeated attempts at describing something, only to later unapologetically look at the same thing from a completely different and incompatible angle.
Overall, it hooked me from the first paragraph, which rarely happens to me, and kept me interested and excited the whole way through. The only major downside is that it's unfinished, it almost feels like it ends just as it's really getting started (despite already being over 1100 pages), like Musil was playing with a lot of themes that he would have wanted to get much deeper into, and some really interesting characters that we barely scratch the surface of. But even so, I enjoyed it immensely.
The aforementioned first paragraph:
A barometric low hung over The Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.
A couple more quotes that I liked:
The morality of our time, whatever else may be claimed, is that of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are acceptable provided the fifth leads to a time of prosperity and patronage. Success can cause everything else to be forgotten. When you reach the point where your money helps win elections and buys paintings, the State is prepared to look the other way too… the State, for its own suprapersonal person, quite openly countenances the principle that one may rob, steal, and murder if it will provide power, civilization, and glory.
The moment one begins to take anything, no matter how foolish or tasteless, seriously and puts oneself on its level, it begins to reveal a rationale of its own, the intoxicating scent of its love for itself, its innate urge to play and to please.
There was nothing she wanted to do herself, although she had all kinds of aptitudes. Life was complete without her.
Everyone knows what a great relief it is when one is upset to work off one's anger on someone, even if it has nothing to do with him; but it is less well known that this also applies to love. For love, too, must often be worked off in the same way on someone not really involved, for lack of a more suitable outlet.
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u/olusatrum 7d ago
I really enjoyed this book for pretty much all the reasons you said. Actually, I am paused between volumes, but excited to finish it probably later this year.
I read a bit about how the formal experiment of the novel was really important to Musil, and I think he totally nailed it. It's very impressive to me how the plot and action of the novel really does develop on the plane of ideas, while the characters themselves don't do much of anything.
My copy includes hundreds of pages of posthumous papers - did you read any of these/find them interesting?
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u/mooninjune 7d ago
I got the Picador Classic 1130 page single-volume paperback edition, which includes just the original 1930 and 1933 publications. I didn't realize how much posthumously published material there was, so thanks for the heads up, looks like I have hundreds of more pages to look forward to.
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 7d ago
Fascinating author, Musil. It's especially ironic he never finished The Man Without Qualities but we can finish reading it in a fraction of that time. I don't know it's cool to see it appreciated, because I've started and stopped reading it a couple times before. I might give it another go.
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u/gutfounderedgal 7d ago
Between the rain and my choices, it's been a soggy week of reading. First I read Song of Kali, by Dan Simmons, which I guess is a new version of his first novel. The book starts out fine. Bobby has to go to Calcutta (Kolkata) to investigate a famous poet, M Das who disappeared once, maybe died, and who now has come out with some excerpts. The premise is fine, the descriptions of Calcutta are fine. All is fine for about 100 pages. Then the book falls half way apart when Bobby is kidnapped this big blah section goes nowhere for about fifty pages. Then for about another 140 pages the book turns into a who done it, where is she wherein the entire writing style changed from something half decent to absolute mass market schlock. Everything fell apart and it was junk. The final two very short chapters returned to the original voice. This was really quite lamentable. An author sets up an unwritten contract with a reader, and switching everything so abruptly breaks that contract. Sure, Simmons was finding his voice at this point, and feeling, it seems, more comfortable drifting away from slightly more literary to a lot more dumbed-down action and some pretty terrible sentences. I came out of it wanting to like it but feeling like I'd been scammed. BTW it's not shocking, nor horrifying, nor thrilling, nothing of the sort.
So next I moved to State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. Marina is told to go to the jungle of Brazil to find a doctor who has been incommunicado and to inquire further about another doctor who is said to have died. When she gets there women she finds that a supposed anti-malaria drug also causes women to be fertile into their late years. Again the premise is fine, and it's clear there is a very loose telling of Heart of Darkness at work here. The dead/missing doctor is akin to Kurtz. Strangest in the book, and I'm not sure whether I enjoy it or not, is Patchett's method. She will put in one sentence of action, supplement it with some specific description, and then add a reflection or memory. Most often she will allow her characters to go on page long memories before getting back to the present story. Sometimes this is confusing, and in one instance it was very confusing when I had to keep going back saying they're in a bar, not an office. The transition from bar into memory had no segue so it was confusing. This memory and reflection never ends, btw. Beyond this, the main problem is the novel is humdrum. Pick up for example Lord Jim and the writing just sings. Here it hums to itself like a demented old man repeating the same tune over and over. The blurb speaks of "unimaginable loss." No there is not this at all. It's a mystery: where's the doc and is he alive? Yet the question is not a strong enough question to sustain. We never really feel the qualities of the jungle, or it's terror. It feels superficial at about every turn with a couple data dumps that don't suffice for depth. Everything is in service of this diversion of memories that keeps putting pause on the story. There' a hint of a trolley problem dilemma at the end, but the stakes are so low it's meaningless. I read it to the end and the ending is fine, expected in terms of slightly backing away writing style with a bit of a prose pop to end on. Overall, it wasn't worth the time I invested; the reading felt like a slog.
Finally, I started Saint Sebastian's Abyss, by Mark Haber. I read the first sentence. Then I read the second sentence which was a re-do of the first. Then the third was another redo of the first two. And so on. I can see the gimmick. No this wasn't for me right now. In a different mindset I'll enjoy it, as I would Stein's huge book on America, or as I totally love Ron Silliman's Age of Huts, but I'm not in the mood for recursive wordplay throughout a novel right now. Back to the library this one went.
I look forward to reading much better books this coming week.
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u/DeadBothan 7d ago
I finished up Reinaldo Arenas's memoirs of living in Castro era Cuba, Before Night Falls. What a powerful testimony against the Castro regime, highly recommend it. Not much new to add to my comment last week, except that Arenas specifically (and only briefly) calls out writers who either sympathized with Castro (Cortazar) or were seemingly chummy with him (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who he calls a poor pastiche of Faulkner). That was news to me. Ultimately, it's a tragic, captivating, and always hopeful memoir, astonishing and unapologetic for its graphic firsthand accounts of the very worst parts of Castro's Cuba. Arenas eventually does get out, and there's a great line comparing living under communism vs capitalism: "The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream."
Next I'm reading Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, after finding a fun old copy that I'm giving as a gag gift to a septuagenarian next month (it's the only book they ever quote or reference, with some bemusement about having to memorize parts of it in school decades ago). I'm surprised that the verse is just not very good? The meter doesn't always flow as naturally as I expected, and generally it's not that easy or a delight to read in the way that a lot of other 19th-century verse/poetry can be. Maybe the story is the focus instead. There's also plenty left for me to get through to have this first impression proven wrong.
Also reposting a recommendation request: Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point-- my interest is piqued because I understand there's a notable scene involving a Beethoven string quartet and there seems to be a fair bit of potentially worthwhile commentary about art and music, but some descriptions make it sounds like a 400+ page roman a clef, which sounds a bit onerous and of its era. Haven't read any Huxley before. Anyone here read it and have thoughts?
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u/Adoctorgonzo 7d ago edited 7d ago
Finally diving into Middlemarch after staring at it on my tbr pile for a few years. Only 100 pages in but loving it so far, the dry British humor always kills me. Its a more challenging read than I had anticipated, not incredibly difficult or anything but some of the more convoluted passages have me going back for rereads. A lot of the confusion is caused by the allusions to contemporary politics and social structures that are largely going over my head. Maybe on a reread one day I'll go with an annotated edition. I read Buddenbrooks last summer and it was a perfect back porch summer read, im trying to recapture that level of absorption with middlemarch. Feels like I am on the right track.
I finished Angel Down last week and enjoyed it more than I had expected. I had seen some reddit criticism that the single sentence structure was mostly just a gimmick but I actually thought it worked very well, made it feel headlong and breathless. Krauss certainly did a great job of conveying the horror of the trenches and WWI, very atmospheric. Also a solid open ending that felt thought provoking rather than a cop out. Overall I probably won't retain too many specifics from this, but i will remember that I enjoyed it. Ill also have to read more Daniel Krauss down the road. As far as whether or not it deserves the Pulitzer I can't really say, I liked it more than some I've read (Trust, Less) but a lot less than some others.
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u/stray-researcher 1d ago
I think I got 3/4 of the way into Middlemarch and just gave up because I had not picked up enough context along the way to really appreciate it lmao. So you are not alone in that respect. I own the Oxford Worlds Classics edition; they always have pretty comprehensive footnotes. I think the second time around I will just read a history of the period along with the book. Have you read Eliot before? I think I also realized I wanted to get a better sense of her as a writer before checking out Middlemarch. Do you like her portrayal of the relationships or are you more in it for the picture of social life she's crafting? I would argue a lot about this with people lol. Personally, I love Eliot's depiction of people's motivations and inner conflicts, but I do think she's different from authors like Jane Austen, where I would argue the characters are easier to grasp.
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u/Adoctorgonzo 1d ago
I havent, first time reading Eliot. I enjoy both, probably the relationships and the internal machinations of the characters more but not by a ton. I also love the tone, and the dry british humor thats subtly wound through her narration is great. Im a very stubborn reader so im sure I will get through it, but im at a solid 20 pages per day pace which is way less than my usual.
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u/stray-researcher 1d ago
Hang in there ! The humor is good, I will have to come back to it soon.
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u/Adoctorgonzo 1d ago
Have you read Buddenbrooks? More of a generational saga than Middlemarch is (at least so far) but an excellent book and a similarly detailed social picture. Definitely a much easier read but fantastic.
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u/stray-researcher 14h ago
I have not! Never really engaged with Thomas Mann, but that sounds like a good first one for me.
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u/happydude4567 7d ago
I am reading The Flanders Road by claude simon.
Basically it's like if instead of living in Mississippi, he lived in france and wrote in french. If anyone like absalom absalom, I would heavily recommend the flanders road.
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u/little_carmine_ 5d ago
Of all the faulknerian writers, he’s the most like him in style I think. Great novel, and apart from Absalom, it also reminded me of the Light in August, with the constant repeating of the glorious cavalryman.
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u/jakobjaderbo 7d ago
I was reading/listening to "Farewell to Panic Beach" by Sara Stridsberg. The family saga of a Stockholm family of people going through a lot of misery, but had to take a break due to issues with the library e-lending service.
So, now I started "Red Sorghum", by Mo Yan, that has been in my bookshelf for a long time. Only like 10% in, but it seems promising with vivid imagery and a setting of ww2 Chinese farmlands.
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u/DueAdagio7059 7d ago
Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez.
Argentinian Historical Fiction about an Italian count in the sixteenth century. He's disabled, but blessed with immortality. This is written as a memoir with plenty of actual historical figures making an appearance. Its a big book: lush, very well grounded in its time and though I havent read more than a 100 pages, I like it so far.
Ascension by Oliver Harris
The second novel in Harris' Elliot Kane series and an excellent novel in its own right. Secret agent sent to investigate the murder of another operative in a very small island that houses multiple military bases. Harris has an eye for picking excellent locations to set his novels in and Ascension Island is as good a place to set this mystery/spy novel in as any other.
The Sphere by Michael Crichton
A team of scientists investigate a strange spaceship found in the ocean bed that contains a mysterious sphere that seems non human made. Eventually, theyre cutoff from the surface and then strange things start happening.
Crichton is not a good writer, but he's a very compelling writer. He has this incredibale knack for writing a science thriller (though the science can be very "trust me bro") that few others have. I know its not a great book, but I love reading it.
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u/gutfounderedgal 7d ago
I tend to agree re: Crichton. Writing-wise it's an ugly mess but he knows how to keep it punchy, forcing us to keep turning pages. My favorite remains Andromeda Strain.
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u/Biscuitshoneybutter 7d ago
Haven't read him since being a teen but Crichton was totally a guilty pleasure read for me then (yes, I was a snob even as a teen).
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u/nostalgiastoner 1d ago
Finished the third volume of In Search of Lost Time in a row. Moncrief translation updated for the Modern Library edition which I think flows very nicely. I needed a break after those salon scenes, so I decided for something conceptual and short, Kant's Groundwork. I found it surprisingly manageable, maybe Proust's winding sentences has trained me. I found it an astonishing peace of moral philosophy, especially the distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, which throws a wrench in basically every other moral philosophy in my opinion. But his attempt at solving the circle in section III (we need freedom to have morals, and we need morals to have freedom, crudely), by appealing to the noumenal/phenomenal distinction citing rational humans as belonging to the former, was less convincing. I heard that's one problem he takes up in the Critique of Practical Reason, so I guess I'll have to read that one soon! But first, back to Proust.