Book club

[alex]

What have you read lately? What did you think about it? Should we read it too?

[rjbman]

i read a lot and wont bore yall with the meh stuff... so top books of the last... idk, 2ish years for me

• Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (supposedly his last novel!) - climate fiction about the transition to a renewable world from today's environment
• The Overstory by Richard Powers - trees are fucking awesome, a novel
• How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell - tech sucks, go watch birds (this is the one that got jrisk into birding)
• Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch - a history of linguistics of the terminally online

[thewisdomoftime]

My mom's by-far-best-friend from Denmark (she emigrated 40 years ago) gave me W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz for my 22nd birthday last year. Last summer I read it, a magically cold and worldweary episode about scraping history to find a lost and repressed life like a river still flowing under the ice of all you've ever known? Over last fall, I read his other books - there's only 4 'fictions,' or non-non-fictions as I call them: Vertigo, Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz in order - and about 20 pages into Emigrants, Sebald became my favorite author. He is unbelievably cynical, lost, and tender.

People compare him to Proust because he has something to say about memory, and because nobody got past the madeleines in Swann's way. Personally I'm 1/4 into Vol. 2, which is not much better, but I can tell you Sebald is not Proustian and Proust is not Sebaldian. Once I make a podcast I will do an episode on this, no matter what the podcast is about. There's also a political content to Sebald that's very obviously not Proustian, he reckoned with the Nazis, their archives, the holocaust, the missing, and the silence of Fortress Europe in a way that is thoroughly considered and aesthetically brilliant, just what the Frankfurt school lacked the practice for. (I make the joke sometimes that Adorno moved from Nazi Germany to Hollywood, and found the latter objectionable enough to write about; the same is true for Sebald moving from his Austria to England and writing Rings of Saturn with an eye to the horrors of British empire.)

At any rate, I was rereading Austerlitz on my 23rd birthday, and it's what finally got me to start learning Danish. I think this Austrian man might have taught me how to deal with the other half of who I am. I'm still infantile with the language, but I feel like no matter what question I ask my mother - about her growing up, her siblings (who are infinitely more akin to her than our American family), her village where she grew up, politics in the 70's and 80's, and headlines I read on /r/denmark - tears into a whole body of suppressed information that she couldn't or didn't want to explain to my brother and I when we were growing up.

I really, really love Sebald.

[yljt]

reading david graeber's "debt." really enjoying it so far. moten and harney's meditations on debt have really stuck with me, so it's great to read other texts on the subject

[silvaeri]

just finished The Empress of Salt and Fortune. Really enjoyed it, fun little fantasy novel with a cool narrative structure and good prose. Do recommend.

it's super short too, only like 130 pages in fairly big type and double spacing (my blind ass eyes love this).

some criticisms say it's choppy in parts, but i feel like it was just up to you as the reader to make some inferences based on the narrative. it felt super flowy to me and refreshing that things were implied rather than explicitly stated especially given one of the whole recurring narrative devices present (won't spoil it here)

[thewisdomoftime]

Just tore through Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co over the weekend. Probably a third of that book is now in my Notes app, that guy was writing for me.

For the lay-reader: Vila-Matas writes novels without events, with protagonist-narrators that can't help but notice how life is related to literature. For the lay-lay-reader: Vila-Matas is a hipster who is a little kooky. For the reader who is me: Vila-Matas is Derridean and insane, and his humor is as glacial as Pessoa's. I read his Montano's Malady in December, without knowing anything about him, because the used-bookstore-that's-ultimately-more-of-a-café had it for $6 and I trust New Directions. I read Montano's Malady with interruptions and felt like I was going insane. The narrator of Montano's Malady is - at the heart of it all - trying to stop seeing life in terms of its relation to literature. Easily 20 or so authors, including my most precious Sebald, become turns in the 'plot' of the book, which is intertextual and alludes to itself. Chapter 1 is a protagonist-narrated story written by the protagonist-narrator of Chapters 2-4, while Chapter 2 is a small encyclopedia of author's diaries with some events mixed in as it's being written. By Chapter 4, the real-fictional protagonist-narrator is convinced that he has become Robert Walser, and he stands by Robert Musil at a yawning abyss.

Bartleby & Co is uhh ... similar but even better; it's less intertextual with fewer events, and mentions more authors, as this protagonist-narrator creates a list of 86 footnotes on literary authors/works concerning/obsessed with/overtaken by/destroyed by the wordless question at the heart of literature, literature's own 'insufficiency/impossibility'. I'm not sure what if anything is left to add here-- if you've heard the term "castration" more than 50 times in your life, or if the Book of Disquiet made you happy for 9 months, then you should join me at the Vila-Matas table.

Friday I got a $50 haircut which involved almost no hair leaving my head, then bought and started Tao Lin's Taipei. For any moral consequentialists in the audience: my $7 went to the used bookstore and not Tao Lin. Unfortunately, nothing will undo the damage that the book is doing by affirming my drive to stop existing while alive in 2010s L-train Brooklyn. I'm only 80 pages in, so I am only beginning to resent the style. I tend to avoid American authors without intending it, and contemporary authors as well, but my sense of what's happened so far is that I'm reading a kind of millennial Iliad. The narrator is actually split from the protagonist, and is given sometimes as many as five paragraphs to provide a Proustian reflection on the shapes of gestures, events, relationships, and time's unfolding. The protagonist is not a more-heroic but only a more-chosen character than any other character who enters the narrative; he struggles to form relationships with others who (men) present utility value and rarely struggle, or (women) present an impossible psychic machinery the axioms of which are two layers out of reach; events transpire which, although they might remove characters forever or gloss over multiple days of languor, offer neither the narrator nor the protagonist any succor. It's reminding me so much of The Bell Jar; but, again, I don't read a lot of Americans, and the most short-sighted part of me wants to say something wild like that atomization and catatonic schizophrenia are more American than apple pie (I know, I know, but Bifo would get away with writing that).

I'm also reading Vol. 2 of the Proust.

[alex]

I am probably done with Kafka forever after reading a bunch of his books one after the other. I can say for certain that he is a major influence on my German writing style and I appreciate the comma more than ever now. But jesus christ enough of the existential horrors of bureaucracy for now. Still, check out The Trial if you haven't, it explores some very interesting and grueling facets of pre-WW2 German thought and life so well.

Currently reading Hermann Hesse. Started off with Siddharta which is a really cute read on some central ideas of buddhism. Very healing. Sort of like religious indian 20th century slice of life. Now I'm halfway into Steppenwolf, which is less healing and despite being from the 1920s feels weirdly in tune with the current zeitgeist. If the dude were alive today he would have such an edgy podcast.

[miles]

My favorite types of novels, aside from the 19th cent. ones, are the ones where the narrator visits a dreary city for somewhat murky reasons and encounters a succession of interlopers who tell the narrator meandering personal histories or some kind of history of the city/country.


Reading the Unconsoled by Ishiguro right now, which is covering all those bases. Can also think of Austerlitz/Rings of Saturn and Kudos by Rachel Cusk off the top of my head. Bruce Chatwin in Patagonioa is also kind of like that I believe. Any other recs?

[starfox64]

All of Ishiguro's novels feel pretty similar IMO (at least the five that I've read), so if you're enjoying the Unconsoled you may enjoy his other books as well, although Never Let Me Go and the Remains of the Day are much more, like, small scale personal stories than what you're describing.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster may be worth checking out, although I may just be conflating it in my head with the Unconsoled because I read them around the same time (also Waiting for the Barbarians).

[bels]

Last chunk of books I read was

The Leopard- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - good

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt - not really worth it

Mahogany by Édouard Glissant - expensive and I didn't really get it

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder - nice easy read

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - good.

If anyone has any reccs that are:

- Fiction
- Not written by a straight white man
- Published before the year 2000 or originally published in a language other than english.

I would be open to them.

[Julio]

am currently rereading perdido street station by china miéville.
enjoying it again and realizing there's a lot happening that i don't quite recall.

[seesaw]

- Fiction
- Not written by a straight white man
- Published before the year 2000 or originally published in a language other than english.

I would be open to them.

good time to read Palestinian authors. i really enjoyed emile habibi's "the secret life of saeed the pessoptimist" and i liked ghassan kanafani's short stories. there are probably some less basic recs out there

[brücke]

The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria is incredible weird fiction

[rjbman]

If anyone has any reccs that are:

- Fiction
- Not written by a straight white man
- Published before the year 2000 or originally published in a language other than english.

I would be open to them.

have you read Ficciones by Borges?

[bels]

Yes though I think that's about as straight as a book can get without being Charles bukowski

[copeland]

So years ago I posted an unfinished short story in the previous version of this thread and received very helpful feedback. I mentioned to someone I've been seeing recently that I "write" as a hobby and now they want to see my writing and I have nothing. Now I'm trying to clean up the story and make it look like the beginning of a novel which is actually my long term goal that I've worked very little towards. The link is below. I'll be adding more as I clean up the bits and pieces I've already written. Thanks for reading.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10lI ... sp=sharing

[thewisdomoftime]

reproduction of the book club post I wrote (appx 6:20-7pm today) that was destroyed by clicking the preview button (appx 7pm today):

first paragraph: I've read less this year than last, because of my job, i'm 15/24 into my goodreads goal. 7 were philosophy. I manage to end this paragraph in a fantastically clever statement about how I was trying to hold each of the fictions up to my own remembrance-interpretation but was realizing I don't even like reading the things I have to say, and my writing isn't decisive enough to warrant pith.

"The quiet exception is the Norwegian lesbian cancer death novella". I mention that I found it on the dalkey archive website, where they have no danish books in translation, but a little bit of norwegian literature, mostly stig sætterbakken. I reveal the name of the Norwegian lesbian cancer death novella. I state that the pivotal themes are things like 'strangeness of body' and 'unwanted cancer.' I praise the author for how richly she renders the interiors, seasons, and the protag's failure to valorize herself to herself. I can't really remember but I think I had a neat statement about 'typically norwegian characters and hyperemphases like beige, white, pine, glass, welfare'. This paragraph I remember was written in a powerful grad school manner with semicolons, nested clauses, and statements and list items with multiple ands redirecting the reader to address ambiguities in which sentence components are operator and which argument.

"the loud exception is Slow Homecoming." I say I read it because its backside blurb includes a statement from Sebald about it being good and 'I spent the next weeks in shock' because it held up. I found a way of describing the kind of man that Peter Handke wrote in the book (I don't clarify that I mean the man in section 1 of the book, which has 3 not expressly associated sections and not identically named protagonists), something like 'cowardly-made-tenderhearted adornean man' which I was planning to revisit and improve upon. I also had not included anything about seeing the book as the fullest reproduction of my own strange moral compass that I've yet found in writing/art/whatever, which is strange because I remember this is what I was saying to people when I was reading the book, remarks about the moral compass. I was finishing this paragraph with a statement ending in a colon like "an excerpt, which steps below the typical level of sense in the narrative:," and then a massive {quote}-block containing pages 40-41 of the NYRB edition of Slow Homecoming, which stood out as I typed them as prone to a good reception on care-tags, though the last time I typed out one of those nobody liked it. I was planning on writing a sentence like 'Slow Homecoming convinced me my terrible and unconvincing life is not yet ruined and now I'm 335/470 pages into a different Handke book of ambiguous worth.'

"I am also reading volume 4 of the Proust."