evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

Nothing, actually! Unless you count the NYT magazine as a "book," which you shouldn't as it's only about fifty pages long and most of that is pictures. I did almost finish last week's crossword, though.

Wait, no, that's not true. I finished The Star Fraction in time for sci-fi book club, and it was all right! If you like really fine-grained niche political bickering in a mildly cyberpunky setting, you might like it. It was a little too chatty for my current mood. The setting is a future UK that has broken up into dozens of wildly different microstates, which facilitates less spectacular fish-out-of-water action than I would like, but more than most books can offer. I doubt I would have stuck with it if not for book club, as I found it pretty hard to follow in the beginning, but Chekov's smartgun (you'll know it when you meet it) is deployed beautifully by the end.


What I'm Reading Now

Do you ever memorize poems? I'm not very good at it, but sometimes I memorize a poem, just so I'll have something in my head in extreme old age besides the lyrics to "It Wasn't Me." Anyway, if you are looking for a new poem to memorize, the first poem in the May 2020 issue of Poetry (the magazine) is easy and rewarding:

( Daedal by A.E. Stallings )

I decided against re-reading my second copy of Be Frank With Me, even though I think some of its failures are interesting, because life is actually extremely short when you think about it. One very small element that I liked is the title of the reclusive author's smash-hit first novel, which we're meant to believe is Pitched (for a book about a gifted baseball pitcher who struggles with off-field life). This is not a totally impossible title for a 1970s publishing phenomenon, but it was hard for me to read it in a book published in 2016 without feeling that it had a very strong flavor of early-2000s YA. Very late in the text, however, the title of the r.a.'s first book is changed to the much less distracting The Pitcher, and no one ever goes back to find and replace.

I've realized that I just don't like Tobias Smollet's translation of Don Quixote as much as the one I started with. After I finished Part One, I went back and read Smollett's opening chapters, and was taken aback by how much less lively they were than Motteux's.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Female Responses to Swetnam, The Woman-Hater are still slow and pleasant; I won't get through them any time soon.

What I Plan to Read Next

On Monday I came back from the garden to find a large brown package at my door, hand-addressed in orange marker and wrapped in a truly extraordinary amount of tape. My family is famous within itself for using too much tape on everything, but this was more tape than I had ever seen used even for purposes of intrafamilial parody. I didn't recognize the return address, so my first thought was that I'd bought some kind of subscription in the past and forgotten all about it. It wasn't until I had cut away almost a third of the tape that I remembered Caveat Emptor, osprey_archer's local used bookstore. They were selling "care packages" as a fundraiser a few weeks ago, and she very kindly sent me one. It contains:
( Four books! )

I'm looking forward to reading my new books! Actual reading pace may stay slow for a while, though.

What I've Finished Reading

My first issue of Poetry (March 2018) arrived last week, and I couldn't be happier with my subscription. Will this be the best $15 that I've ever spent? Maybe! We have stunning poetry, pretty good poetry, poetry that isn't quite my thing but who am I to judge, essays about poetry with laugh-out-loud John Ashbery quotes in them, and reviews of poetry books that make me want to run out and buy the books, which is not always a guarantee when it comes to poetry book reviews. One of the things that makes it so great: it's short. Sixty pages of poetry, twenty pages of prose, with plenty of white space to soothe the eye and heart, and a couple of pictures here and there. It always makes me sad to get a gigantic literary magazine with three hundred pages of densely-packed prose. I feel bad for the contributors because I know that my feelings of ennui and satiation are not their fault, but I can't help feeling them.

I suspect that if you're part of the Poetry World, you might look askance at Poetry because it's rich and popular and even bookstores in Alabama carry it. There are probably aesthetic quarrels involved that I don't understand. Maybe you call it "the Billy Collins of poetry journals," or maybe I just made that up. I am emphatically not part of the Poetry World, which I guess makes me Poetry's target audience. Anyway, it's pure delight and I love it.

Just in case you were wondering:

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot

-John Ashbery

I liked nearly everything in Poetry March 2018 and was underwhelmed at best by almost all of Free Lunch nos. 3 and 6 (Autumn 1989 and 1990), which makes me worry that I'm overly susceptible to being Of My Time. But who isn't?

I also read a tonne of Anthony Powells over the weekend, but somehow I have even less to say about Powell than I have to say about anything else on Earth. I enjoyed them thoroughly & couldn't remember them very well afterward, except that some of the characters have become old friends, in the diluted Facebook sense (Our algorithm won't rest until you reconnect with: Kenneth Widmerpool). This is an accomplishment poor C. P. Snow has only managed once (with George Passant) though I promised myself/everyone I would say something nice about C. P. Snow in the middle future. I will! But it won't be right now because I had to take all the books back to the library.

What I'm Reading Now

I got Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson from the juvenile section of the library, because I can't deal with how much I love the first half of Williamson's 15-novel novel and I want to make myself extra sad when it turns all intolerably bitter and fascist, I guess. The subtitle, "His Joyful Water-Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers" is just my flavor of twee. So far the baby otter's relationship with his mother and sisters bears a surprising similarity to that of Phil Maddison in the novels, taking into account that one is a baby otter and the other is a human boy. I'm beginning to suspect that Henry Williamson might have been an oldest child with two sisters? It's very dense and lush and Williamson's love of slightly off-kilter and old-fashioned diction is out in full force.

I'm also reading C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton, because it was the earliest book in the series I could find at Trade'N'Books. It's pretty good! There's a beautiful noir opening in a grody gym, and Kinsey Millhone, the narrator-detective, is tough to the point of comedy. I laughed at her description of how her apartments have narrowed along with her life. Millhone dresses for comfort, but felt inexplicably compelled, when she saw how fancy her new client's house was, to "blend in" by digging around in the trunk of her car for some fancier clothes. So she comes tottering in on a pair of heels last used in an unsuccessful prostitution sting, wearing a skimpy shirtdress with a stain on it, because what the hell, it was the best she could do. No one at the fancy house comments on this dubious decision. I like her.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm taking a month-long break from 99 Novels (at least until Love and the Loveless arrives) and burrowing into my TBR shelves. I came here with every intention of listing a few of them but went away daunted without listing even one. Next time! Maybe!

Cross-posted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene. I don't know why I liked this little book so much when the other two Greenes left me cold. Maybe because the main character's sexual relationships are all in the past, so I can't hypocritically turn up my nose at his Human Weakness (TM). Maybe because he isn't self-pitying and is instead beset by irritating neighbors who keep trying, against his wishes and despite his efforts, to make him a figure of sympathy, or worse, of veneration. Querry used to be an architect, but it was no good; he used to design new churches but people kept spoiling them by dragging in all the tacky old Catholic paraphernalia he was trying to bypass, and anyway he doesn't believe in God anymore. He came to this leper colony to try to make himself useful, now that he doesn't believe in anything, but no one believes in his disbelief and it all ends badly. It's probably some kind of stealth Greene trick to make me look at my failings that whether or not I like his books depends so heavily on how much I "like" or "can relate to" his central sinner, but that's all right, it's all part of the game. You got me, Graham Greene! Thumbs up to you.

Lions and Shadows - Christopher Isherwood's autobiography with made-up names, because autobiographies are necessarily fictional so you might as well own it. It's completely delightful. Isherwood spends a tremendous amount of time embroidering a private fantasy world with his particular friend, then decides to get himself expelled from Cambridge: it's easier and more interesting than studying for the first big round of exams, besides which his particular friend is leaving and he'll be miserable and bored. His plan is to burn out spectacularly by writing inflammatory joke essays, which turns out to be just as much effort as doing the exams for real. No satisfying infamy results; it just makes his tutor confused and disappointed. Then he lucks into one of those exploitative and familial art-world jobs (secretary to a musician) and spends even more time trying to figure out a way to turn the folie a deux that has occupied so much of his mental energy into a book that other people might want to read. Eventually he gives up and writes a different book instead, which is panned and forgotten and later remembered vaguely as having shown some promise.

What I'm Reading Now

A Girl of the Limberlost, by special request of osprey_archer - I will post something about it Friday or Saturday.

Gaius Valerius Catullus: The Complete Poetry (translated by Frank O. Copley) and The Poems of Catullus translated by Peter Green. I can't tell you how much I love this asshole Catullus. He's a first century BCE Roman poet with nothing better to do than hurl insults at everyone who ever slept with his girlfriend or said his poems were garbage. He flails wildly between painful tenderness and pitiful self-centered petulance, he mocks his friends for sending him bad poems and threatens to send them worse poems in retaliation, he knocks the furniture around like Citizen Kane, he makes jokes about dudes sucking their own dicks.

If Catullus were a contemporary of mine there is a good chance I might not love him as much. Maybe I would read a few pages of his shit-flinging and think, "Dude, you are talented but you are not for me," and go read a nice cozy murder story instead. Certainly if he were transported into the present with his first-century Roman sexual politics intact, he would be a nuisance at best. But he wrote all these poems two thousand years ago, and thanks to a long series of choices and accidents they still exist, and they are startlingly, hilariously alive.

Frank Copley's translation is beautifully weird and very loose; he totally ignores the original line breaks, throws in contemporary (1954) references and generally strives to create a hip beatnik lounge atmosphere. At first I just thought it was funny, but it grew on me fast. Green's translation is more of a translation in the traditional sense, and includes the original Latin on a facing page. Copley would like us to feel that Catullus is one of us, despite the centuries and the language barrier; Green wants to make sure we don't forget how alien he is, and to prevent us from being fooled by superficial points of common interest like sex and insults. Probably they are both right.

What I Plan to Read Next

Lots of book recs from other books! I recently bought Travels With My Aunt, which was recommended to me last year as The Graham Greene You Will Like If You Didn't Like Any of the Other Ones. I hope it will still work given that I liked A Burnt-Out Case. When I saw A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood at the bookstore, I immediately bought it on the strength of Lions and Shadows, and came home to find that it was one of my 99 Novels.

I learned from Among Others that Mary Renault wrote a novel about Alcibiades called The Last of the Wine. Alcibiades is either my favorite or my second favorite Plutarch's Life (so far), so I should probably read this soon. There may be some other Alcibiades-related reading in the near future.