dchaikin part 3 - beginning to wonder if I will actually get to Chaucer

back, from here

books read


Audiobooks completed

Read in 2023, by date read

(these links go the review on my part 1 page)
1. **** Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (read Dec 22, 2022 – Jan 11, 2023, theme: Booker 2022)
2. ***** Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright (read Jan 13-15, theme Richard Wright)
3. ** The Marne by Edith Wharton (read Jan 11-15, theme: Wharton)
4. **** A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark (read Jan 16-18, theme: TBR)
5. **** The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, read by Shivantha Wijesinha (listened Jan 1-24, theme: Booker 2022)
6. n/a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Basic and Beyond, Third Edition by Judith S. Beck (Read Nov 17, 2022 – Jan 25, 2023)
7. **** The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson (read Jan 3-26, theme: Naturalitsy)

(these links go the review on my part 2 page)
8. **** The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer (The Great Courses) by Seth Lerer (listened Jan 25 – Feb 1, theme: Chaucer)
9. *** Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner (read Jan 16 – Feb 6, theme: Chaucer)
10 **** The Trees by Percival Everett (read Feb 6-8, theme: Booker 2022)
11. **** City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (read Dec 4, 2022 – Feb 10, 2023)
12. *** Poseidon's Steed: The Story of Seahorses, From Myth to Reality by Helen Scales (Read Feb 1-16, theme: Naturalitsy)
13. ****½ The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride, read by JD Jackson & Susan Denaker (listened Feb 4-18, theme: random audio)
14. **** By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah (read Feb 11-20, theme: TBR)
15. **** Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich, read by Mike Chamberlain (listened Feb 20 – Mar 4, theme: random audio)
16. ***** The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (read Feb 13 – Mar 7, theme: Wharton)
17. ****½ Native Son by Richard Wright, (read Feb 20 – Mar 11, theme: Richard Wright)
18. **** Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson, read by C. M. Hébert (listened Mar 5-14, theme: random audio)
19. **** After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz (read Mar 15-25, theme: booker 2022)
20. **** Treacle Walker by Alan Garner (read Mar 26-27, theme: booker 2022)
21. **** Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (read Mar 27, theme booker 2022)
22. **** The Photograph by Penelope Lively (read Mar 28 – Apr 1, theme: TBR)
23. **** The Romance of the Rose (Oxford World's Classics) by Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun, and translated from Middle French by Frances Horgan (read Mar 3 - Apr 7, theme: Chaucer)
24. ***** The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, read by Kaiulani Lee (listened Mar 14 – Apr 8, theme: random audio)
25. *** Collected Poems by Donald Justice (read Feb 11 – Apr 9, theme: TBR)
26. *** Geoffrey Chaucer: Love Visions (Penguin Classics), translated with introduction and notes by Brian Stone (read Apr 5-16, theme: Chaucer)
27. ***½ The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson, read by Kaiulani Lee (listened Apr 10-29, theme: random audio)
28. ***** Black Boy by Richard Wright (read Apr 16-30, theme: Richard Wright)
29. ****½ The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (read Apr 11-30, theme: Wharton)
30. ****½ A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner (read May 1-7, theme: TBR)
31. ****½ Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin, read by the author (listened May 2-11, theme: random audio)
32. **** A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton by John McPhee (read May 14-15, theme: none)
33. **** Stay True by Hua Hsu, read by the author (listened May 11-18, theme: random audio)
34. *** Florence: The Biography of a City by Christopher Hibbert (read May 22-29, theme: Italy)

(links here go the review on this page)
35. **** A Brief History of Venice: A New History of the City and Its People by Elizabeth Horodowich (read May 25 – June 3, theme: Italy)
36. **** The Nymph of Fiesole by Giovanni Boccaccio, translated by Daniel J. Donno (read May 29 – Jun 9, theme: Italy)
37. ***** Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (read May 7 – Jun 12, theme: Richard Wright)
38. ****½ The Hamlet by William Faulkner (read Jun 10-29, theme: group read & Faulkner)
39. **** A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton (read Jun 30 – Jul 15, theme: Wharton)
40. **** Sixty Years of American Poetry: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Academy of American Poets (read Apr 9 – Jul 21, theme: poetry)
41. ****½ G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage, read by Gabra Zackman (May 19 – Jul 24, theme: random audio)
42. **** The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us by Alice Roberts (read July 1-27, theme: Naturalitsy)
43. ****½ One Hundred Poems from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth (read Jul 22 – Aug 5, theme: poetry)
44. *** The Town : Volume Two, Snopes by William Faulkner (read Jul 8 – Aug 16, theme: group read & Faulkner)
45. ***** In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, read by Freya Miller (listened Aug 1-18, theme: Booker 2023)
46. ***** Fatelessness by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson (read Aug 13-22, theme: TBR)
47. **** A Spell of Good things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, read by Ore Apampa, Babajide Oyekunle (listened Aug 19 – Sep 1, theme: Booker 2023)
48. ***½ The Mansion by William Faulkner (read Aug 23 – Sep 7, theme: group read & Faulkner)
49. **** Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, ready by Stephen Hogan (listened Sep 1-12, theme: Booker 2023)
50. ****½ The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon (read Sep 20-22, theme: TBR)
51. **** Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (read Sep 2-24, theme: naturalitsy)
52. ***½ If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, read by Torian Brackett (listened Sep 13-27, theme: Booker 2023)
53. ****½ Old New York by Edith Wharton (read Sep 3-28, theme: Wharton)
54. ***½ Walden by Henry David Thoreau (read May 2 – Oct 3, theme: naturalitsy)

Read in 2023, by year published (links are touchstones)

1275 The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun
~1345 The Nymph of Fiesole by Giovanni Boccaccio
~1387 Geoffrey Chaucer: Love Visions
1854 Walden by Henry David Thoreau
1918 The Marne by Edith Wharton
1920 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1922 The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton
1923 A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton
1924 Old New York by Edith Wharton
1938 Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright (expanded 1940)
1940
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Hamlet by William Faulkner
1941 Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson
1945 Black Boy by Richard Wright
1951 The Sea Around by Rachel Carson
1952 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1955
The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson
One Hundred Poems from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth
1957 The Town : Volume Two, Snopes by William Faulkner
1959 The Mansion by William Faulkner
1965 A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of Bill Bradley by John McPhee
1975 Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
1988 A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark
1991 A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner
1993 Florence: The Biography of a City by Christopher Hibbert
1995 The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride
1996 Sixty Years of American Poetry: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Academy of American Poets
2001
City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
2003 The Photograph by Penelope Lively
2004 Collected Poems by Donald Justice
2008 The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon
2009
Poseidon's Steed by Helen Scales
A Brief History of Venice: A New History of the City and Its People by Elizabeth Horodowich
2013? The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer (The Great Courses) by Seth Lerer
2014 The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us by Alice Roberts
2019
The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson
Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner
2020
Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond, Third Edition by Judith S. Beck
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our by Merlin Sheldrake
2021
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
The Trees by Percival Everett
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
2022
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin
Stay True by Hua Hsu
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
2023
Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
A Spell of Good things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Some stats:

2023
Books read: 54
Pages: 11,612 ( 416 hrs)
Audio time: 160 hrs
Formats: ebooks 18; Paperback 17; Audio 14; hardcover 5;
Subjects in brief: Novels 26; Nonfiction 20; Classic 18; Science 8; Nature 7; Poetry 6; History 5; Journalism 4; Biography 4; Memoirs 4; On Literature and Books 2; Anthology 2; Essays 2; Speculative Fiction 2; Religion/Mythology/Philosophy 2; Short Story Collections 2; Crime 1
Nationalities: United States 29; England 9; Scotland 3; Nigeria 2; Ireland 2; Sri Lanka 1; Sweden 1; mixed 1; Tanzania 1; France 1; Italy 1; Japan 1; Hungary 1; Guatemala 1;
Books in translation: 8
Genders, m/f: 31/20 (mixed 3)
Owner: books I own 51; amazon-unlimited 3;
Re-reads: 0
Year Published: 2020’s 16; 2010’s 4; 2000’s 7; 1990’s 4; 1980’s 1; 1970’s 1; 1960’s 1; 1950’s 6; 1940’s 4; 1930’s 1; 1920’s 4; 1910’s 1; 1800’s 1; 1300’s 2; 1200’s 1;
TBR numbers: even (acquired 51, read from tbr 50, abandoned 1)

All stats - since I started keeping track in December of 1990
Books read: 1300
Formats: Paperback 675; Hardcover 261; Audio 210; ebooks 116; Lit magazines 38
Subjects in brief: Non-fiction 509; Novels 419; Biographies/Memoirs 222; Classics 206; History 195; Religion/Mythology/Philosophy 138; Poetry 100; Journalism 98; Science 96; Ancient 76; On Literature and Books 69; Speculative Fiction 68; Nature 68; Essay Collections 50; Short Story Collections 49; Drama 48; Anthologies 47; Graphic 46; Juvenile/YA 34; Visual Arts 27; Interviews 15; Mystery/Thriller 15
Nationalities: US 728; Other English-language countries: 282; Other: 284
Books in translation: 220
Genders, m/f: 812/389
Owner: Books I owned 935; Library books 285; Books I borrowed 70; Online 10;
Re-reads: 27
Year Published: 2020’s 57; 2010's 275; 2000's 288; 1990's 181; 1980's 122; 1970's 62; 1960's 54; 1950's 35; 1900-1949 81; 19th century 21; 16th-18th centuries 38; 13th-15th centuries 12; 0-1199 21; BCE 55
TBR: 667

side notes:
- milestones this year: 200th audiobook, 100th ebook, 500th non-fiction book, 400th novel, 200th classic, 100th book of poetry, and 800th book by a male author.

links to all my old threads:

2009 Part 1, 2009 Part 2, 2010 Part 1, 2010 Part 2, 2011 Part 1, 2011 Part 2, 2012 Part 1, 2012 Part 2, 2013 Part 1, 2013 Part 2, 2013 Part 3, 2014 Part 1, 2014 Part 2, 2014 Part 3, 2015 Part 1, 2015 Part 2, 2015 Part 3, 2016 Part 1, 2016 Part 2, 2016 Part 3, 2017 Part 1, 2017 Part 2, 2018 part 1, 2018 part 2, 2019 part 1, 2019 part 2, 2019 part 3, 2020 part 1, 2020 part 2, 2020 part 3, 2021 part 1, 2021 part 2, 2021 part 3, 2022 part 1, 2022 part 2, 2022 part 3, 2022 part 4, 2023 part 1, 2023 part 2

35. A Brief History of Venice: A New History of the City and Its People by Elizabeth Horodowich
OPD: 2009
format: 259-page Kindle ebook
acquired: May 24 read: May 25 – Jun 3 time reading: 6:30, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: History theme: Italy
about the author: A professor of history at New Mexico State University, born ~1970?

Starts off so well organized. The chronology is clear, and all the themes are carefully worked in, making for a really terrific history with writing that feels very contemporary and that is of a quality that's hard to find. It didn't last through the whole book, which slows down a lot later. But it remained readable and informative. I recommend this to anyone going to Venice and looking for a quick thorough history. It's really good for that and I'm grateful to have read it during my visit.

Things I knew - Venice was a big deal before the Portuguese rounded Africa. It was a powerful, independent city, with a huge wealth based on controlling east-west trade.

Things I didn't know - Venice wasn't Roman. It was founded as a safe haven from Germanic barbarians, who didn't want to raid a swamp, after the fall of Rome. Venice conquered and controlled Constantinople for ~50 years (roughly from 1200 - 1250). Venice had a really weird system of government, run by a duke, the Doge, with heavily curtailed powers. This lasted about 1000 years, and Venice never had a peasant or popular revolt or uprising. Venice's surrender to Napoleon not only marked the end of its odd governmental structure, but also ruined the city, which became a backwater and tourist destination. Venice only has 60,000 residents, which is typically less the daily number of tourists.

>8 dchaikin: I might pick that one up before our visit to Venice (if it ever happens!)

>1 dchaikin: sigh. fell in love with that city first in books then being there for a week. Just heaven

>3 dchaikin: you have some good finished reads there I read the romance of the rose, invisible man, by the sea, the photograph and age of innocence. How did you like a far way from kensington?

How did the trip go? What do you think of Venice? Was it jam-packed?

>9 Dilara86: hope it happens

>10 cindydavid4: the book couldn’t really prepare me for the atmosphere. It felts a little surreal and magical in Venice.

>12 RidgewayGirl: the trip went great. Just one day in Venice, a Thursday (and two nights). Our internal time clocks a mess, were we out walking around at 7am. Nothing was open and there were no crowds. The piazza in front of St Marks was clear. We didn’t appreciate how nice that was until we came back later in the day.

After that we went to Rome and did a Vatican tour, and a lot of walking. One especially cool thing was an ebike tour that took us out of town, along the original Appian way and through a huge park full a aqueduct ruins. Then Florence, which included a one day tour of Pisa-Sienna-San Gimingano - not exactly recommended because it meant several hours in one day on a bus, but it was a chance to see those places. And we loved Florence, walking around, taking in the streets, gardens, museums, wine holes, churches and food.

>11 cindydavid4: ” you have some good finished reads there I read the romance of the rose, invisible man, by the sea, the photograph and age of innocence. How did you like a far way from kensington?”

Those were all good books. A Far Cry from Kensington is terrific, a look a the post-war publishing industry in London. It’s an entertaining quirky story placed in a specific post-war time and place, wonderfully captured.

>13 dchaikin: Your 7 AM walk in Venice is exactly what I would have recommended. :) When we were moving away from Padova, my last visit to Venice was taking the 5 AM train and getting to Piazza San Marco to watch the sunrise. Early mornings are amazing.

>7 dchaikin: You have set an all-world standard for this analysis of your reading. I can't imagine how anyone could aspire to such a standard. Many congratulations to you, and thanks for the hard work that this project took.

>14 dchaikin: glad you enjoyed it as much as I did!

>15 ursula: i should have asked. 🙂 We didn’t see the sunrise.

>16 JoeB1934: The secret to that post is to update it each new thread. Then I only add one link at any time. 🙂

>17 cindydavid4: 👍

>13 dchaikin: Florence is wonderful, isn't it? When we lived in Germany, it became automatic to head south whenever we could, usually to a place just outside of Arezzo that rented out old farmhouses (old there meaning 17th century), which meant a lot of day trips to Florence. And Rome is an overdose of extraordinary architecture. So much in a small area was overwhelming to me. I'd like to stay there for a few months, at least, just to come to grips with it. And how about the abundance of gift shops in the Vatican? Glad you got to go and I'm sure your kids will remember that trip for the rest of their lives.

>19 RidgewayGirl: Florence _is_ wonderful. Completely agree. As for Rome. Plant me there. I could live there forever (assuming i could afford it). It is awash in such a variety of stuff, has its own energy. (And the pizza or pinsa, was my favorite)

As much as I loved venice, I think Florence was my fav. The art the cathedrals and churches the history. What made it great also was reading sixteen pleasures about one of the 'mud angels' from around the world who come to the city to help restore books and art after the 1963 flood. Something about that event really moved me and made me appreciate what it had since grown to,

Speaking of which:
The Güevedoces of the Dominican Republic (this is a Facebook post by SciBabe)
Güevedoce on Wikipedia

>22 FlorenceArt: what Lola said. 😉

note: Not my cover. Mine has no dust jacket, just a plain blue cover.

36. The Nymph of Fiesole by Giovanni Boccaccio
translation: from Italian poetry to English prose, by Daniel J. Donno (1960)
Illustrations: by Angela Conner (1960)
OPD: ~1345
format: 1960 hardcover, and library discard
acquired: March 2022 read: May 29 – Jun 9 time reading: 4:00, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: classic theme: Italy
locations: mythical pre-Florence
about the author: 1313-1375, Florentine author, diplomat

An old prose translation of an underappreciated work by Boccaccio. I love that I read most of it, and the heart of it, in Florence.

A romantic tragedy. In the wilderness near Fiesole, a young beardless shepherd, Africa, spies a group of nymphs who committed their life to Diana, the wilderness and chastity. The boy, lovesick and wasting away, gets help and advice from Venus and her son, Love. He dresses as a nymph, gets to know some of them, and then, when the moment is available, pounces on and rapes his love, one poor Mensol. Alas, we're in mythology. Mensol first falls for Africa, but then, unknowingly pregnant, she runs off and rejoins her nymphs, claiming purity. Africa dies of grief. Mensol, her baby exposed, is turned into water by an angry Diana. But the baby is rescued, and his descendants will found Florence.

Among the things that make this story nice, beyond the wild tale outline, are how Boccaccio stays in and dwells within Africa's lovesickness, and we can relate. And then, as in Troilus and Cressida, how romantic he manages to make their youthful romance (overlooking the rape).

It's a fun, quick, light read. This old prose translation worked well for me.

37. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
OPD: 1952
format: 596-page paperback (1995 edition)
acquired: February 2022 read: May 7 – Jun 12 time reading: 18:29, 1.9 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Classic novel theme: Richard Wright sorta
locations: Manhattan, circa 1930s? or maybe post-war.
about the author: 1913-1994. American writer and critic from in Oklahoma City, mostly famous for this novel.

What a monster of a book, laying out long gangly arms every which way, rolling as it wants, until suddenly there is structure and its slowly locks into a reality, and then stays there a long time, but not entirely. It pushes a little surreal one way, a little the other, wobbly between literary states. Ellison uses American communism to work his ideas of racism, blindness, and the truth of conformity as an argument used for power grabs. But it's gloriously complex while staying completely within reach. Long, wandering, and very powerful. Not sure what I expected, but this was certainly richer and more rewarding than whatever I imagined.

A plot summary, it opens in the present, with famous opening lines:

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

We never learn the man's name, or names. But after setting his underground Manhattan situation, he reflects back on his history, attending a Jim Crowe era southern black college, and being expelled for mishandling a white trustee's visit. Arriving and stumbling through Manhattan and especially Harlem. He becomes the spokesperson for a lightly disguised equivalent of the communist groups active in New York in the 1930's. Communists were the first only non-all-black group of this era to openly recruit black members and support black issues and equality. Most of the book is about his role in this organization, how they use him and he uses it, how he learns and manages his community. But his success brings unexpected responses and lessons. It's here, where equality is preached, racism and blindness stand out so clear, and incontrovertible. In many ways, this world falls apart.

This is a demanding, but smart, creative and rewarding 5-star read.

Welcome back, Dan! Love your review of Invisible Man.

>23 dchaikin: Oops, wrong thread, I was wondering where my post went, I’m so sorry!

>25 dchaikin: Terrific review of Invisible Man. I really need to pick that one up again—it was wasted on high school me.

Sounds like a cool trip, Dan! I haven't been out that way in many years but hope to get back there. I did a similar trip—brief Venice, more Rome and Florence.

>25 dchaikin: "Did I do something wrong" asks the Invisible Man It is a roller coaster of a ride to read this book, but well worth it. Published in 1952, but still relevant to all the invisible people today. Glad you liked it Dan.

I spent a memorable week in Venice some time ago in November when the mist and fog made it a very atmospheric place. I won't be going back anytime soon because Lynn said there were too many churches.

>26 labfs39: thanks!
>27 FlorenceArt: no worries
>28 lisapeet: thanks. I think you would like a revisit. Trip was terrific, but I imagine it is more crowded now
>29 baswood: I agree, still relevant to anyone feeling that way. And we all do at times. I read your review from years ago, which is excellent. It can tricky, avoiding churches, especially in Europe (in tx we have road signs that say “church”, which i find an interesting warning.)

>30 dchaikin: Sometimes it seems that you can’t drive 10 km on a country road in France without seeing at least one sign pointing to a 12th or 14th or 16th century church or chapel. But they are meant to point at tourist attractions, not places of worship.

38. The Hamlet by William Faulkner
OPD: 1940
format: 344-pages within a Kindle ebook of the Snopes Trilogy (so random cover up there)
acquired: May read: Jun 10-29 time reading: 15:18, 2.7 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: Classic Fiction theme: group read
locations: Mississippi, ~1910s?
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

My first Faulkner. It took me a little time to find a way into this book. It's a collection of stories around Will Varner and Flem Snopes and the village of Frenchman's Bend. Varner owns the local plantation home, in ruins, and runs the town. But Flem Snopes works his way into taking over the village, installing various relatives in various jobs, seeming to conjure up weird relatives as needed. But Flem somehow never really makes much of an appearance. So we only get the periphery, and we spend a lot of time lost in this periphery.

This is Mississippi, after 1901, but not much after. No cars found. And not much money or hygiene. A dollar means a lot. What makes these run-on stories work, for me at least, is the rhythm Faulkner writes with. It's always there, rocking away, giving book a nice flow and I think it's this that gives the book most of its draw. The stories vary, but subtlety and complicated transactions where everyone is trying to make some money play a large role. Ultimately, I enjoyed the book, and I enjoyed the true main character, a sewing machine salesman, VK Ratcliff, who listens, seems to know everything, is game for any deal, and quiets everyone's' angst down with his charming responses, always involving his calming, "Sholy"

Wonderful review, Dan! I’m glad that you enjoyed it and I loved discussing it with you in the group read.

>33 dianelouise100: thanks! I enjoyed the discussions. Looking forward to starting The Town.

I read The Hamlet a few years ago apropos of an afterword in my copy of Melville’s The Confidence-Man which included it in a list of works to which Melville bequeathed “the vision of of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with impostors and masqueraders, and the image of the supreme tempter (the ‘super-promiser’, as West calls him) on the prowl through the world, assisting it towards its promised end. These books comprise the continuing anti-face of the American dream.” Don’t want to get political, but we might see these novels as being of particular interest right now.

>35 booksaplenty1949: thanks for this nice post. I love that Melville has credit for a humorous apocalypse. I didn’t know that, and I think I need to read more by him.

Great review of The Hamlet. I can't believe it's your first Faulkner. If you continue to read him, you've got some treats ahead. Like you, I really liked Ratliff, and his favorite phrase keeps echoing in my head. I'm sure I will be muttering "sholy" to myself in frustration wherever I'm dealing with difficult people in the future.

>36 dchaikin: The Confidence-Man is, like its eponymous anti-hero, a very elusive work but very worth reading. Quite short and quite unlike Moby Dick which is the only other Melville I’ve read. But like Moby Dick a key book for understanding the concept of “The American Dream.”

>7 dchaikin: I do something similar each year, but only on my 50-Book Challenge thread, not here on my CR thread.

>25 dchaikin: Great review of Invisible Man. That novel is on my seemingly endless list of classics I need to get to. Also, as I've said elsewhere (maybe here?), I'm glad y'all are enjoying the group read of the Snopes Trilogy. I greatly enjoyed those books.

>24 dchaikin: Speaking of "my seemingly endless list of classics I need to get to," I have The Decameron lined up about 4th or 5th in my current "coming soon" stack.

Cheers!

Enjoyed your Faulkner review, Dan. Looks like I'm not the only one who's not been as active on LT these days - your thread is quieter than usual!

>37 arubabookwoman:, >38 booksaplenty1949: >39 rocketjk: sorry for the late replies

>37 arubabookwoman: I hope so Deborah. I've been curious about Faulkner, a long time, just was intimidated. But I'm struggling to get into The Town

>38 booksaplenty1949: I adored Moby Dick one time. I was surprised how aware Melville was of what was outside American conservative culture.

>39 rocketjk: The Decameron is fun stuff. Enjoy. And I imagine you will embrace Invisible Man.

>40 AlisonY: Thanks Alison. Yeah, I'm a little lost in the woods lately. My reading down to about 30 hours a month, and I haven't been getting deeply into my books. But I'm still enjoying the books I'm stumbling through.

39. A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton
OPD: 1923
format: 247-page kindle ebook, pub 2019
acquired: June 30 read: Jun 30 – Jul 15 time reading: 9:28, 2.3 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Classic Fiction theme: Wharton
locations: Paris & France before and during WWI
about the author: 1862-1937. Born Edith Newbold Jones on West 23rd Street, New York City. Relocated permanently to France after 1911.

Wharton, a well-to-do American living in Paris during WWI, wrote a novel that somewhat parallels her experience. What's odd is that she chose an unpleasant main character, a self-centered artist and divorcé, who put his art before his family. His divorce was, in a way, due to his own neglect of his family as he pursued his art career. He's also the father of a miliary-age, French born American son, legally required to join the French army in case of war. And when he finally really tries to connect with his son, WWI intervenes.

We can relate to John Campton, regardless. And what comes across is partially a personal story, and partially a window into the American expat experience in Paris. It's maybe an important novel because this perspective of WWI. (Wharton had some kind of trouble getting support from her publisher, forcing her to delay and focus on other novels, like The Age of Innocence.) But it's not her best constructed novel. It lingers plotless here and there, leaving us readers stuck with this unpleasant dad in some drama doldrums. But is still has that Wharton prose.
`

40. Sixty Years of American Poetry: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Academy of American Poets
OPD: 1996
format: 368-page hardcover
acquired: 2001 read: Apr 9 – Jul 21 time reading: 11:09, 1.9 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Poetry theme: random
contributors
Robert Penn Warren - Introduction
Richard Wilbur - Preface
Barry Moser - Illustrator
Bruno Navasky - Editor, Ellen Rosefsky Cohen - Abrams editor
Poets: Diane Ackerman, Léonie Adams, Ai, Conrad Aiken, Mark Anderson, William Arrowsmith, John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Joseph Auslander, Leonard Bacon, John Balaban, Christianne Balk, Judith Baumel, Marvin Bell, William Rose Benét, April Bernard, Daniel Berrigan, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Blumenthal, Louise Bogan, Thomas Bolt, Philip Booth, David Bottoms, George Bradley, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Witter Bynner, Constance Carrier, Jared Carter, Cyrus Cassells, Nicholas Christopher, Amy Clampitt, David Clewell, Padraic Colum, Jane Cooper, Alfred Corn, Henri Coulette, Louis Coxe, Michael Cuddihy, E. E. Cummings, J. V. Cunningham, Peter Davidson, Jon Davis, Alison Deming, Babette Deutsch, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Van Doren, Rita Dove, John Duval, Mona Van Duyn, Cornelius Eady, Max Eastman, Richard Eberhart, Peter Everwine, Robert Fagles, Irving Feldman, David Ferry, Edward Field, Dudley Fitts, Robert Fitzgerald, Carolyn Forché, Robert Francis, Robert Frost, Margaret Gibson, Christopher Gilbert, Laura Gilpin, Peter Gizzi, Greg Glazner, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Jorie Graham, Melissa Green, Martin Greenberg, Debora Greger, Horace Gregory, Allen Grossman, Marilyn Hacker, Donald Hall, Kenneth O. Hanson, Peter Hargitai, William Harmon, Jeffrey Harrison, Robert Hayden, Vicki Hearne, Anthony Hecht, Robert Hillyer, Edward Hirsch, Daniel Hoffman, John Hollander, Martha Hollander, Garrett Hongo, Richard Howard, Marie Howe, Richard Hugo, Rolfe Humphries, Josephine Jacobsen, Randall Jarrell, Robinson Jeffers, Rodney Jones, Donald Justice, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, X. J. Kennedy, Richard Kenney, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Richmond Lattimore, Li-Young Lee, Brad Leithauser, Rika Lesser, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Chris Llewellyn, William Logan, Robert Lowell, Richard Lyons, Percy MacKaye, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Markham, Edgar Lee Masters, Cleopathra Mathis, J. D. McClatchy, William Meredith, James Merrill, Christopher Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Robert Mezey, Josephine Miles, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stephen Mitchell, Marianne Moore, Howard Moss, Lisel Mueller, Robert Nathan, John Neihardt, Howard Nemerov, Louise Townsend Nicholl, John Frederick Nims, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ned O'Gorman, Sharon Olds, Eric Pankey, Anthony Petrosky, Sylvia Plath, Katha Pollitt, Ezra Pound, Minnie Bruce Pratt, John Crowe Ransom, Kenneth Rexroth, Stan Rice, Adrienne Rich, Jan Richman, Alberto Rios, E. A. Robinson, J. Allyn Rosser, Muriel Rukeyser, Mary Jo Salter, Carl Sandburg, Reg Saner, Andrew Schelling, Peter Schmitt, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, james Scully, Phillip Schultz, James Schuyler, Frederick Seidel, Lauren Shakely, Jane Shore, Charles Simic, W. D. Snodgrass, Karen Snow, Edward Snow, Leonora Speyer, George Starbuck, Timothy Steele, Gerald Stern, Adrien Stoutenberg, Mark Strand, Jesse Stuart, Barton Sutter, May Swenson, Allen Tate, Elaine Terranova, Ridgely Torrence, John Updike, David Wagoner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Michael Van Walleghen, Robert Penn Warren, Rosanna Warren, John Hall Wheelock, Richard Wilbur, William Carlos Williams, Norman Williams, Susan Wood, James Wright, Charles Wright, Audrey Wurdemann, John Yau, Stephen Yenser, Cynthia Zarin

I read this in 10 to 15-minute sittings, so 11 hours of reading is something like 50 sittings.

This is actually an oddball collection. There is one poem each from every chancellor, fellow and award winner of the Academy of American Poets as of 1996 (The academy was founded in a 1934). But who selected them? It comes across as a very haphazard anthology from a wonderful body of poets. So interesting, sometimes wonderful, many times really wonderful, but mostly curious and interesting. Each poem has a publication date, and they are roughly in order. Altogether it makes for an oblique history of American poetry, a perspective I appreciated.

>32 dchaikin: I'm intimdated by Faulkner too Dan. Kudos to your for starting!

>44 markon: : ) Now I just to need to keep at him. Although what I've read so far in 1.5 Faulkner novels hasn't been intimidating at all.

41. G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
reader: Gabra Zackman
OPD: 2022
format: 36:36 audible audiobook (864 pages in hardcover)
acquired: May 19 listened: May 19 – Jul 24
rating: 4.5
genre/style: Biography theme: random audio
locations: Washington, D.C.
about the author: History professor at Yale (Yale alum, 1994)

Goodness, where to begin.

It worth spending a moment to point out that J. Edgar Hoover was considered an American hero during his lifetime. He was the one who built and defined the FBI as a mythically clean-cut law abiding, apolitical, white-collar, effective law enforcement organization that broke the 1930's crime rings, led communist crackdowns, and caught and prosecuted some WWII spies. He was supported and depended on by presidents FDR, Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon, who considered him a close friend. He joined the justice department in 1917, led the FBI from 1924 (under a different name. He got to name it the FBI), appointed under Calvin Coolidge. He served as director under eight presidents (Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), for 48 years until his death of a heart attack or stroke in 1972. His approval rating among Americans was over 90%. And he was given a hero's funeral, with a passionate speech by Richard Nixon.

It wasn't until Watergate that public opinion turned. The arrests leading to Watergate happened a week or so after Hoover's death. As part of the investigation, the FBI files were opened up, and country learned for the first time all the secret activities the FBI had been up to the last 48 years, spying, wiretapping, infiltrating and intentionally disrupting organizations deemed dangerous...or just leftwing. Martin Luther King was wiretapped, as was Malcom X. The Black Panthers were destroyed by infiltrators. The FBI was listening everywhere. And no one outside the FBI previously really knew. Hoover, in death, has become a villain he never realized he was, and a scapegoat of everything wrong with conservative paranoid America in the 1950's and 1960's. Where does one go with all these stories.

Hoover was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where he would live his entire life. He went to college locally, at George Washington University, where he joined Kappa Alpha, a notoriously southern and racist fraternity. His first government job was with the Library of Congress, and the information skills he learned there would influence his career. He was very conservative, something he was open about, and he was gay, something known but not widely, and never acknowledged. He later had a life-long partner, his main assistant in the FBI, Clyde Tolston, and they basically lived as a married couple.

His first infamous efforts in the Justice Department were as an active part of the Palmer Raids in 1919, during a Communist scare. Several radicals were found and arrested, with information carefully collated in part by Hoover, but public opinion turned against the law enforcement, and raids were a great justice department failure. Hoover dodged the blame. In an odd sequence, he was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation by a liberal US attorney general who believed in Hoover's integrity and capacity. Hoover did some really important things as director, defining the FBI myth. Needing to breakdown the resistance of local police toward federal interference, he created the first national database of fingerprints. Local police would contribute and then use the FBI to get matches. He also created the FBI academy, where police from around the country were sent for FBI training, being trained into the FBI mentality, and developing FBI connections and loyalties. Academy graduates would form key contacts throughout the FBI's history.

Up till WWII, Hoover's crimes were one of methodology and preference. He set up the FBI to be loyal to him, and under his thumb, despite his simplistic views on crime. He was in full control and very demanding. But once WWII began across the ocean, FDR needed surveillance, and he turned to Hoover. And then the wiretapping began, and the breaking of foreign codes. It was never legal. But Hoover had Roosevelt's encouragement. The British counterintelligence were horrified by Hoover because he was so unimaginative to them, and unsophisticated. (But also the British intelligence had a Russian spy at the highest lever, Kim Philby.) What I found interesting is that FBI would eventually identify over 100 Russian spies activity working for the Soviet Union in the United States, some in key roles, but they couldn't prosecute. Because the way they got the information was either illegal, or too secret to share. So, for example, Hoover knew Ted Hall was a key spy who gave Russians critical atomic bomb information, but he never prosecuted.

This became a policy. Collect information through any means possible, but then sit on that information, which was too valuable to divulge. Hoover would use it, but not in court. After his death, Nixon missed Hoover's influence, because he thought congressmen would be so afraid of the information Hoover had on them, they would never have been able to act against Nixon. But the truth is, no one outside the FBI understood just how extensive the FBI database was.

Hoover's fervent anticommunism became popular in the early Cold War, during the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and Joseph McCarthy's era. Hoover found McCarthy a problem, because he was so self-promoting, and bombastic and a liar. But Hoover supported the goal of fighting American communists. Among his policies, was investigating every government employee and even schoolteachers, looking for Communist affiliations. Hundreds were confronted and investigated, and around half lost their jobs. Ironically, he also was in charge of rooting out homosexuals in government.

The origin of COINTELPRO was as a tool against Communist organizations, a way to fight these organizations without going through the courts, or congress, or anyone. FBI agents would infiltrate Communist groups, and then actively disrupt them, creating conflict and divisions and distrust. It was effective. The techniques were later used against the Klu Klux Klan, and then against the non-Communist new left and civil rights groups, most notoriously the Black Panthers.

An interesting aspect of Hoover was that he worked against both the KKK and Civil Rights. He was a hard conservative that basically didn't want any cultural changes, as least not from the perspective of a Washington, D. C. southerner. And he blamed everything wrong on the country on groups undermining this status quo. But he also had his limits. When Johnson asked Hoover to plant wiretaps in the Democratic National Convention, Johnson's own party and a completely illegal request and unethical for the supposedly non-political FBI, Hoover agreed but demanded the request in writing. When Nixon became president, he was very frustrated that Hoover would not do whatever he asked for. Hoover balked at the requests, stalling. Nixon was forced to create his own dirty-work group, the Plumbers, the group busted in Watergate.

Over the years, Hoover became a power-center. The FBI ran to his rules, kept the hot information private. He had connections throughout the country through his FBI academy, and ex-FBI agents, several of whom were elected to congress. Politically, Hoover was very savvy, a conservative serving in liberal presidential administrations, often the only conservative of prominence. He had ways to creating trust. He was famous for making anyone, of any political persuasion, who came into his office, walk out thinking Hoover was on their side. Thurgood Marshall liked Hoover and would defend him publicly, even as the FBI was actively undermining his NAACP. During the 1950's, Hoover's favorite decade, he made key connections, and became close friends with Joe Kennedy, JFK's father, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, giving him deep connections to the next three presidential administrations. (He was also on close terms with Robert Ford, Nixon's successor.) It meant he stayed around, was publicly praised, viewed and talked about as an American hero. Those listening closely, the woke ones, if you like, were critical, but were also part of a small minority that had no popular traction.

If you can't tell, I found the book excellent. It's the first Hoover biography in 30 years and it's thorough and well done. It's a tough read in that Hoover is a tough person to spend a lot of time with. I felt some internal relief when he passed away in the book. The problem with processing Hoover in our heads is that he wasn't all bad, and never saw himself as doing anything wrong. He was of his era. But the crimes add up, and they got very hard to read about. So, an excellent biography of a difficult, unpleasant, but important American figure.

Thank you for this in-depth review! That was very enlightening, and also scary...

I’d heard a little about Hoover’s reputation, but I had no idea about all this. Thank you for this thorough review.

Excellent review of G-man. Especially interesting to read a little about the early history of the FBI. The whole book is enough to make most people paranoid. I wonder what other American's feel about the man - comments so far on your thread only from people the other side of the pond.

Sixty years of American poetry looks to be a real mixed bag, but a good introduction to a variety of poets.

think I mentioned this, but the biopic "J. Edgar" starring Leonardo de Caprio was outstanding. Well worth watching

>50 cindydavid4: thanks. I’ll need to prep myself first. 🙂

>47 Dilara86: >48 FlorenceArt: >49 baswood: The conservative element in the US has a long strong history. Not sure if everywhere is like that and it’s just a human element. But Hollywood and entertainment in general has catered to this US conservative element for a long time, at least since the 1930’s. Hoover is just one aspect.

The surveillance is, to me, less surprising. During war, hot or cold, it’s critical. It’s also very dangerous and potentially destructive. What was unique about the fbi is that there was no baseline. Hoover wasn’t a spy and he had to learn how to do surveillance. Obviously he never leaned where to stop.

I think after Watergate, Americans were horrified they had a government doing lots of dark damaging and manipulative stuff. But it was a brief horror. By 1980 Reagan (another Hoover friend) was elected and no one was all that surprised by the secretive (and often destructive) stuff done under his watch. That’s my long way of saying Hoover probably isn’t hated by conservatives today (I mean, by those who know about him). Hollywood mocks him. But Hollywood is an exaggeration, and sometimes what it expresses rebounds backwards popularly.

What I personally have thought about, since posting, is all the stuff I didn’t mention - southern lynchings and Jim Crowe, the Rosenbergs, the jfk assassination, and the insights into Truman (not consulting experts), Eisenhower (had to be baptized so he could promote Christian America), the Kennedys (hot headed and mob connected and not supportive of civil rights), Johnson (and his efforts to keep conservative southern support and push civil rights), MLK, and Nixon (who comes across almost human). There is a lot within.

>46 dchaikin: This looks fascinating. I can't see reading 864 pages, but I'm tempted by the audio option. I space out and miss details, but I get through it. 36 hours would take me about two months also.

>52 qebo: the Hoover bio works nicely on audio. The reader is good. And sometimes it’s ok to space out on it. Also, the book has one nice aspect in that a lot of the most interesting stuff happens late. So you get a 2nd-half push.

>53 dchaikin: The last one I read was dragging so I set it to 1.2x which sounded normal but more perky. Yeah, this was one with the interesting stuff then the deathwatch, so a 2nd-half push would be welcome.

Thanks for the review of the Hoover biography Dan. I hope I'll remember it next time I "don't have anything to listen to."

>51 dchaikin: Great review of the Hoover book. Your last paragraph here with the snippets on different presidents' dark sides is making me yearn to read a book that covers all that across all the presidents through time. If anyone knows of such a book let me know please!

>57 dchaikin: thanks. That wasn't even in my review. :) I should add it in on the review page. I don't know of any book that fits your description. But histories tend of have their choice asides. That was one cool aside of the Hoover novel, the oblique American history, 1917 to 1972. But I wouldn't recommend it for that aspect alone.

42. The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us by Alice Roberts
OPD: 2014
format: 361-page Kindle ebook
acquired: July 1 read: Jul 1-27 time reading: 11:03, 1.8 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Popular Science theme: Naturalitsy
about the author: English academic, TV presenter and author, born in Bristol, 1973

Read with the Naturalitsy group on Litsy, this was a surprisingly difficult read. Several people dropped out early. It's not hard on the sentence level. Roberts is a radio personality and writes in a chatty tone that is enjoyable. It's just very dense. It's essentially a human anatomy book, and human anatomy has a lot of parts, and Roberts wants to cover everything. So chapters have a tendency to go on and on.

But if you're ok tolerating that, you will be rewarded. The information is terrific, maybe exceptional. Roberts brings in a variety of ideas and hunts down perspectives, and it left me feeling very up-to-date. Highlights include ideas on the human spine, brain, the muscles we only use when run, the human trick of turning our palms up (a trick most mammals lack), all the intricate movements behind throwing - something we do really well. Did you know human knees are pronated? And there is all the evolutionary theory behind this all. Her chapter on genitals is fantastic, maybe the best chapter in the book ... but I was too shy to bring that up in our discussion.

Recommended to the willing.

> I think I do?

Started an audio book of it but was too much ll at once even for my 6-hour drive home, might have to do this with a physical copy

So, my reading time has really dropped. I put in 30 hours in June and upped that to 33 in July. Normally I would have read 100 hours over those two months. My mind just isn't all-in. So I'm wasting time (especially on crossword puzzles, something I have typically not thought much about), and I'm having trouble getting into and staying into books. I'm not ready to blame Faulkner, but I'm struggling with The Town. But real culprits include a lot of traveling, and a lot of personal issues, some day-to-day schedule changes, and slow adjustments from or to this stuff. I just got out of the flow, and I haven't gotten back into it.

I finished four books in June, all really good: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Hamlet by Robet Faulkner, A Brief History of Venice by Elizabeth Horodowich, & a translation of The Nymph of Fiesole by Boccaccio

I finished three books in July, all good, but not really good: A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton, Sixty Years of American Poetry: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Academy of American Poets, and The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us by Alice Roberts

Audio also slowed down, but that's just how I was able to manage a 36-hour biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the only book I listened to over these two months. I'm not ready to call the audio a slump.

The result is a lot of planned books that I haven't gotten to. Among these are anything by Chaucer or Richard Wright. I had planned to read Fatelessness by Imre Kertész, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon, The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright, & Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk all in June and July.

This month I'm hoping to finished The Town by William Faulkner, and Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. Maybe The Mansion by William Faulkner, I should at least start it. If I hit stride, I'll get to Fatelessness after all, and even start Troilus and Criseyde.

>59 stretch: tricky on audio. I'll bet she read it herself and very well. But it will be exhausting. :)

>60 dchaikin: if I was you, I would read something fun now.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wasting time. I do it all the time ;-)

>57 dchaikin: I know it wasn't in your review, but you gave a very interesting comment about other presidents in your response to someone's comment!

>60 dchaikin: Is The Town by Robert Faulkner a thing? Your link takes me to the William Faulkner novel of that name. Thought maybe you were exploring different authors with a common surname.

>62 dianeham: In theory, all my reading is fun. 🙂 And once i get into a book, it really is. But it can also a reflection of my state of mind.

>63 FlorenceArt: 🙂

>64 AlisonY: yes, and thanks

>65 booksaplenty1949: oye - typo. I meant William Faulkner, not Robert. Sorry.

>66 dchaikin: "typo. I meant William Faulkner, not Robert. Sorry."

Have you ever see the Jim Jarmusch movie, "Down by Law?" It's an absurd, hilarious (for me, anyway) buddy picture, in which the buddies are played by Tom Waits, Jonathan Lurie and Roberto Benigni. There is much humor mined from Benigni's character's unfamiliarity with English. At one point he tells Waits' character, Zach, "I like to read Bob Frost in Italian." Zach is greatly amused. "Bob Frost," he says, then a beat, then, "In Italian." I'm not really doing the scene justice, though. The only clip of it I could find was riddled with dubious pop ups, so I'm not linking to it. Anyway, it doesn't take much to make me think of that movie, which I adore.

This message offered by Digressions Daily. The first one's free! Sign up now for a daily digression on your thread!

I'm catching up on your thread, Dan, and was treated to three excellent reviews. I take it A Son at the Front was written differently than Fighting France? Different war, different aim. The Hoover biography sounds fascinating. Did it talk at all about his role in the South American Nazi surveillance in WWII? In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, the cryptologists were irate about it. I wish I had read The Making of Us before doing the human body unit with the girls. It sounds full of interesting tidbits. Maybe I'll add it to the queue after The Color of Water. (I seem to get all my audiobook recommendations from you!)

>67 rocketjk: thank you, Jerry. 🙂 I haven’t seen “Down by Law”, but I might need to now. (Awaiting the next digression)

>68 labfs39: I’m not familiar with Wharton’s Fighting France. Eventually I’ll have to read some of her nonfiction works. My Litsy group is only planning to read fiction (hopefully also A Backward Glance).

The Hoover bio talks about SA but in limited detail. The FBI created an elaborate spy ring in SA during wwii, under instructions from Roosevelt. But after the war, Truman, who didn’t like the OSS or Hoover, and so created the CIA, forced the FBI to be domestic only, and Hoover pulled out in a bad manner, essentially burning his organization’s info. Very interesting. But that’s about all I learned.

I’m not sure The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us would work on audio. But curious if you try. Robert’s is a radio personality and probably reads it terrifically. I’m more worried about info overload on audio. But The Color of Water is special on audio. 🙂

>69 dchaikin: You're welcome. And here's your next digression, if it even is a digression at this point, since we've already been discussing the topic. I leave that to you. You should definitely stream Down by Law, then. We raved about it so much to another couple, great friends of ours, in Mendocino County that they arranged for the four of us to have a Down by Law-watching party at their house just before we left California for NY. They both said afterwards that they spent the first 10 or 15 minutes thinking, "What the heck is this?" but then both got into the rhythm of the thing and thoroughly enjoyed themselves the rest of the way. There is an entertaining (sez I) plot that gets going eventually, but just don't look for logic. I found a couple of iterations of the movie's trailer. I was going to link to one here, but they all include a halfway-point plot spoiler I don't like. It is not the best movie I've ever seen, by a long shot, but it is my favorite, in part because it is largely filmed in New Orleans and originally came out only a few weeks after I'd moved from there to San Francisco.

>67 rocketjk: in the jail cell "not enough room to swing a cat."

>70 rocketjk: >71 dianeham: man, that’s more than a nudge. And New Orleans…

>69 dchaikin: In my mind, I was saying I would try the Hoover after the McBride, but that's not what came out of my mouth (or fingertips in this case).

>73 labfs39: first, that's funny. But also the Hoover bio does works well on audio, if you can find those 36 hours ... and spread them out.

So I’m reading Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. She’s an Australian young adult author and this is her first “adult” novel. On her webpage she (or her publisher) says it’s her first book of “literary fiction”.

Ok, that’s not an easy thing to define, but it’s clearly not literary fiction to me. It’s a plot driver novel filled with stereotypes, and it’s constantly working to create tension in every moment. In my head i call it a sort of sneaky thriller. I don’t mind it yet. It’s fun so far. But, sometimes…

So this line stuck with me today:

“There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing.

The other is made of fear.”

—-

You know, it sounds good. It has drama. But it makes no sense. You can replace “made of fear” with any other phrase and it’s just as meaningful/less. Put in “being high on lsd”, or “made of lemon cream pie”. “There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing.

The other is made of fart smell.”

Well, that was maybe young immature adult of me. Anyway… Jerry, this my own momentary digression entry

LOL! Sometimes if feels good to read something you can make fun of.

The other is made of rabid wolverines.

"The other is made of fear.”

"The other is made of fart smell.”

Well, but I think you've made her point for her. :)

Ha! I crack myself up. Honestly, though, I share your disdain for faux "deep" observations that turn out to be essentially useless, all smoke without even the benefit of a mirror.

Anyway, here's mine:

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing.

The other is made of lousy metaphors and self-conscious, nonsensical pronouncements. Also irony. This other world has lots of irony. Did I say sarcasm? Definitely lots of sarcasm. And fear.

>75 dchaikin: Ha! Yikes I would have tossed the book after reading that line

>78 rocketjk: HAhahahahaha perfect

>76 FlorenceArt: yeah. It does. 🙂

>77 ursula: I think you need to use full quote for affect:

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing.The other is made of rabid wolverines.

>78 rocketjk: yes, that’s the spirit! I buy it, too.

>79 cindydavid4: if this becomes reoccurring, I might have to stop. But so far the other literary crimes have been more tolerable for me than that one.

I really liked Migrations and I liked her next book, Once There were Wolves even better. In Migrations, I liked the slow, circular reveal of Franny's life and the eco-dystopian setting that was disconcertingly believable.

Migrations did have some plot holes for sure and some of the writing was over-dramatic, but I thought the writing created a compelling mood for the book.

>82 japaul22: Good to know. Obviously i have issues with it, but I’m still enjoying reading it. And i like the (post-climate-change-apocalyptic?) setting.

>75 dchaikin: I have read her other book Once There Were Wolves and liked it very much.

I have Migrations on my list so I took a look at a number of reviews on GR about it. It appears that readers either love it or hate it.

The interesting thing to me is that those who dislike the book have complaints about the inconsistency of the science backing up her scenario, Like, why is the world in such bad shape, but other events in the book aren't equally bad.
I don't plan to read it now.

I also want to mention that I read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead last year and it was a solid 5 stars for me. It taught me a lot about how other cultures exist and what is rational in theirs that surprised me.

I can't find the review on LT anymore but there was one reader who charged the author with being sacrilegious and blasphemous. I viewed it as magical realism.

>84 JoeB1934: thanks Joe. I’m very interested in Drive your plow. There’s no question the scientific logic behind Migrations is imaginary and probably not well worked out. A lot of future scenario fiction is that way, since the author wants to explore the experience within the situation, not the cause.

But, having said that, I think I’m going to abandon Migrations. I’m 80 pages in and questioning everything - not just the animal die-off logic, but the terns, the characters, the plan. (Naturally?) it’s coming apart at the seams in my head.

Good on you for abandoning a book that isn't working for you and seeking greener pastures, so to speak. What's up next?

>86 labfs39: I’m eyeing Fatelessness

>87 dchaikin: I will be curious as to your impressions if you do read it next. It really upended my thinking about Holocaust survivor stories. Kertez is an interesting author.

>87 dchaikin: >88 labfs39: I started thinking about reading Fatelessness hoping to break back into my usually continuous reading state. I’ve really enjoyed the few Hungarian writers I’ve come across. So I hope this will do the trick.s.

It passed the first sentence check! Reminded me of another famous opening line….

>89 kjuliff: this post motivated me. I’ve cracked it open. Now I’m adapting to what this seems to be.

>88 labfs39: upended? Hmm. I mean, that sounds like it did a lot. Hoping my little stunted-feeling brain is open to that.

>90 dchaikin: I'll be very curious to hear what you and Kathleen think.

>88 labfs39: without reading the book, can you tell me what his thoughts are?

I don't want to bias the people currently reading it, as I am very interested in their takes. You can read several reviews online, such as this one.

>93 labfs39: Thanks. I read the first part. Of the review but stopped reading as I didn’t want to know how the story develops.
The tone, the was the mc views the world is so detached that it certainly is a different take on the usual “Holocaust “ novel.

It’s tone has the same detachment as the novel I alluded to. In my early post on this book, about first lines.

>94 kjuliff: it certainly is a different take on the usual “Holocaust “ novel.

Yeah. It me trying to figure out how to approach this.

>95How far in to the book are you? Did you look at the review Lisa posted?

>96 kjuliff: all the way to page 28. ☺️ I’ll read Lisa’s review after I’ve finished.

>97 dchaikin: I’m audiobooking it and at 10%. It really reminds me of the French existentialists in style.

>98 kjuliff: Actually, we're at the same place. Page 28 computes at 11%. I have never read a French existentialist, but if "absurd" is the style, there is definitely some of that here. A dark humor.

43. One Hundred Poems from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth
OPD: 1955
format: 148-page New Directions 1964 paperback
acquired: inherited from my grandmother in 2004 read: July 22 – Aug 5 time reading: 2:40, 1.1 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: Poetry theme: Poetry
about the author: (1905–1982) A self-educated American poet, translator, and critical essayist, regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. He was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine. He was born in South Bend, Indiana.

Hasegawa Tohaku (cover artist), David Ford (cover designer)

authors: Yamabe no Akahito, Akazome Emon, Bunya no Asayasu, Fujiwara no Astutada, Ō-e no Chisato, The Monk Eikei, The Abbot Henjō, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Lady Horikawa, Lady Ise, Lady Izumi Shikibu, The Monk Jajuren, Minamoto no Kanemasa, Taira no Kanemori, Fujiwara no Go-Kanesuke, Lady Kasa, The Prime Minister Kintsune, Fujiwara no Kiyosuke, The Emperor Kōkō , Ono no Komachi, Fujiwara no Go-Kyōgoku, Fujiwara no Masatsune, Fujiwara no Michinobu, The Mother of the Commander Michitsuna, Ōshikochi no Mitsune, Minamoto no Morotada, Fujiwara no Mototoshi, Prince Motoyoshi, Minamoto no Muneyuki, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, Ariwara no Narihira, The Monk Nōin, The Monk Ryōzen, Fujiwara no Sadaie, Fujiwara no Sadayori, Lady Ōtomo no Sakanoe, Fujiwara no Sanesada, The Shōgun Minamoto no Sanetomo, The Emperor Sanjō, The Priest Sarumaru, Lady Sei Shōnagon, The Monk Shun-e, The Monk Sosei, The Stewardess of the Empress Kōka, The Lady Suo, Mibu no Tadami, Fujiwara no Tadamichi, Mibu no Tadamine, Ki no Tomonori, Minamoto no Tōru, The Priest Fujiwara no Toshinari, Fujiwara no Toshiyuki, Minamoto no Tsunenobu, Harumichi no Tsuraki, Ki no Tsurayuki, The Emperor Uda, Lady Ukon, Otomo no Yakamochi, The Empress Yamatohime, Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu, The Emperor Yōzei, Ariwara no Yukihira

I had forgotten I inherited this. When my grandmother was getting rid of everything, I asked for books. She had been a traveler, and a collector of Asian art, and this book was, in a way, part of that visual collection, dating from when my grandfather was still alive. He had passed away in 1976. She would pass later the same year she sent me a bunch of her stuff, having become a widow twice.

As for the book itself, well, it's Rexroth's recreation, his own impression of Japanese classic poetry, all of these works dating back around 1000 years, some back to the 600's, what Rexroth considered the most open age of Japanese poetry.

It's a gorgeous book. Visually, each page is gorgeous. Each has the text, in English, then the Japanese transliterated only, in Latin letters, then the author's name in Japanese calligraphy. With a lot of white space. The sense, while reading, is visual. The poems are all so short, a compression of multi-meaning sparse impressions. Rexroth includes mini-biographies of each author in the back, which adds some needed weight for lost a reader like me. I don't know anything about Japanese, or Japanese poetry, or anything about ancient Japanese history. I had no context for these. I enjoyed them, even if they didn't stick. I enjoyed looking at them.

>100 dchaikin: you might enjoy these, I have a few they are gorgeous

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2008/04/japanese-crepe-paper-fairy-tales.html

they are 3x4" painted on crepe paper from the late 1800s to early 19

>99 dchaikin: I meant the detachment. The lack of the insertion of external morality. I exist therefore I am. Eg Albert Camus Thee Stranger. Even the opening line The Stranger this to me.

Popping in to see what you've been reading. Great stuff. About every other day I think of rereading all the Gurnah books again, but then talk myself out of it (and I think I gave some of the early volumes to Darryl years ago).

>102 kjuliff: oh. I’ll have to work through that idea as i read it. Very interesting observation.

>103 avaland: i need more Gurnah. 🙂

>104 dchaikin: I would be interested to know your thoughts. Loook at the first lines- content and structure of The Stranger and Fatelessness.

-I didn’t go to school today; but rather I did go but only to ask for a day off (2nd part paraphrased...)
— Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know.”.

I’ve now read 33% and it reads withoiut feeling or moral overtone,

>106 kjuliff: it reads without feeling or moral overtone

Yes! and that distance in a Holocaust novel is as unsettling as Camus' opening.

>106 kjuliff: well, first I'm struck by the vast difference in topic! But after that, I'm a little afraid to say much because I'm still trying to keep my mind open, and (at 17% in) it still feels like it's setting the stage and atmosphere. Detachment? or adolescent world take-in? Lack of external morality, or a search for it? (if a search, what a world to search in!) I need to give it more time.

Side note: My paperback copy started a page with " hile". It took me a bit to figure out the "W" from "While" wasn't printed. A few pages later, I came across four spaces, the " or". I couldn't decipher that one. A few pages later the entire first line of the page wasn't printed. I flipped through and there were other pages like that. sigh. So I bought a Kindle copy and I'm reading an ebook now.

>107 labfs39: you came in while I was typing/thinking what to say. :) When I read Primo Levi, there was a great deal of distance whenever there were things he simply couldn't capture. He just left them distant. Here, it hasn't reached that level yet. It's still, to me, only a little strange, 45 pages in. I mean, we know what's going on. But he, the narrator, doesn't. So, there is maybe an innocence, rather than a distance. My feeling.

>108 dchaikin: I’ll be interested to know what you think when you read more. I’m over 33% through and am of my initial opinion.

Interestingly the first line of The Stranger has been the subject of much comment re the initial translation.
“Mother died yesterday” has beeen altered. The original French was
“ Aujourd'hui, maman est morte” which is much less harsh and softens the tone - “Mother” being too informal”. It’s been changed in later translations, I think to “Maman”.

Different topics? Yes. But there is a common concept I think.

>109 dchaikin: I'll hold off saying more until you are done, Dan. Look forward to your thoughts.

>110 kjuliff: I'm pondering over this. It's a great insight.
>111 labfs39: :)

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
OPD: 2020
format: 278-page ebook
acquired: August 7
Abandoned: I read 81 pages, Aug 7-12, took me 2:42, at 2.0 mpp
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Naturalitsy
locations: Greenland, Ireland, Atlantic Ocean
about the author: Australian author, born in Darwin in 1988, and living in Syndey.

As far as I got, this is world where all animals are dying out. There's no good explanation (other than a general hand wave at a human caused global environmental catastrophe). Our main character wants to track the last terns making their last migration from Greenland to Antarctica. She had a troubled childhood and now has some unresolved issues.

It had a sort of plot-focused start. It had an interesting setting, and then cardboard cutout characters for efficiency, because let's get to the story, and there was some fun mixed in. I made my peace with problems, and was ok with it, was even enjoying it... and then I wasn't. Not sure exactly what flipped the switch, but my enjoyment to time commitment ratio suddenly seemed to dip below some mental threshold. I felt like the story began to come apart in my hands.

Not recommended to blue personalities.

I tried to read it too. Even the used store wasnt taking it so put it in the library sale pile

>112 dchaikin: I’m just over two thirds through…. I might be slightly changing my thoughts.

>114 cindydavid4: What didn't work for you?

>115 kjuliff: interesting! I finally finished The Town today, so I can focus on Fatelessness tomorrow.

>116 dchaikin: I’ve written a draft review of Fatelessness here
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351418#8210788
I will put it in the Review section when I’ve had a chance to tidy it up, but had to write something while it was fresh….

>117 kjuliff: I'll check it out when I finish. I'm on page 99, but I've really gotten into it. It's been a while since I got into a novel.

44. The Town : Volume Two, Snopes by William Faulkner
OPD: 1957
format: 371-page hardcover (4th printing from 1957)
acquired: 2006 (From author Larry D. Thomas read: Jul 8 – Aug 16 time reading: 15:24, 2.5 mpp
rating: 3
genre/style: Classic Fiction theme: Faulkner
locations: Fictional Jefferson Mississippi, roughly 1910’s to 1927
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

I want to be more circumspect, but I found this tough. Not difficult tough, just not catching, as in it was a drag. Wandering monologues around an ok story.

The book is a direct sequel to The Hamlet, published 17 years earlier, where Flem Snopes, from nothing, takes over the political and financial dominance of a rural village, including marrying the daughter of the previous dominant person, Will Varner. In The Town, Flem and a couple other characters have moved into the local town of Jefferson, MS. And Flem continues his manipulations, getting key positions to have some control in town utilities and finances. But the story focused on the human side elements, especially on Flem's wife Eula, and his daughter Linda, who is not actually his biological daughter, a sort of open secret.

The story is told through three voices, Charlie Mallison, only 12 when the book, covering about 17 years, finishes, his uncle, Gavin Stevens, and a family friend, V.K. Ratliff, who lived in the village Flem took over and who feels he knows what Flem's up to. Charlie tells us the stories he's been told, sometimes narrating as a "we", as if the whole town is telling the story. Gavin, the Harvard-educated town attorney, is deeply involved, having fallen for Eula, and later, awkwardly, for Eula's teenage daughter. Ratcliff, a sewing machine salesman who used a horse-drawn carriage in the first book, but has upgraded to a motorcar, gives us the town intelligence, sometimes only in hints. Both Ratliff and Gavin would like to stop Flem, but neither seems have much impact on him...until Gavin reaches Flem's daughter.

The story isn't really the point, although it provides a narrative drive and has its moments. The point is early 20th-century southern small-town life during the American technological transition period. The book covers roughly 1910 to 1927. These towns were dominated by traditional leading southern families who sent their children to ivy-league schools, and were characterized by casual law-enforcement, a scurry of unnamed black men and woman filling in the servant roles and other undesirable jobs, while staying almost invisible. Education, economics, and morality seem to all fall in consistent extremes, with a few middle-class skilled or industrious types. Flem, having no education or morality or lineage, makes an exception an influencer.

Not sure anyone needed that whole summary, but if you read it, I hope it serves to show that this isn't a dead book. There is a lot going on here. But it's also a little, or maybe a lot, tough on the reader who just wants to enjoy his or her books. Recommended only to Faulkner completists.

>7 dchaikin: smashing it on the stats Dan. You have me wondering about my pre 2007 numbers, but they're well behind you (as ever). And I've been getting all nostalgic as I approach 500 since 07.

I'm also a Florence lover - but have not seen St Marks Sq at 7am. Your trip sounds wonderful.

Invisible Man, Faulkner, the poetry collection, I really enjoyed catching up on your thoughts. I am starting a poetry project with my high school students soon, so I loved to see the poetry collection that I might want to check out. Thanks!

>120 tonikat: Thanks Kat. :) I'm still kind of in awe we walked through that empty St Marks square.

>121 OscarWilde87: What are your students going to read? Those comments were nice to read. Thanks.

I have been following the talk about Fatelessness with interest. I don't need another book in my wishlist, but in it goes anyway!

>122 dchaikin: The project will be about how identity is expressed in poetry. We will be starting with two Shakespeare's sonnets (130 & 18) to learn something about their characterisitcs and features of poetry in general. I'd like to move on to more modern poems and I was thinking along the lines of Bukowski and Gorman so far. Suggestions are welcome, though.

>124 OscarWilde87: "how identity is expressed in poetry. . . . I'd like to move on to more modern poems . . . Suggestions are welcome, though."

The poems I just read by Frank O'Hara in his small City Lights collection, Lunch Poems definitely come to mind. I just reviewed the collection on my CR thread, if you're interested:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351911#8213739

I'm sure you'll get a bunch of great suggestions here.

>125 rocketjk: Fantastic, thank you!

>91 labfs39: oops Now irrelevant post and edited out. It was about a tech issue affecting LT not combining two entries of the same book, which was affecting where my review of Fatelessness would appear. While writing, LT fixed the double entry problem. Fast work indeed!

>93 labfs39: so I finally read this (note, >96 kjuliff:), and, Lisa, I read your review too. The essay is great. Your review has me thinking about "the happiness of the concentration camps", line. I'm still puzzled in my own response, which is on a different direction of thought, but I'm not sure exactly where yet.

>101 cindydavid4: I missed responding to you up there. Those are gorgeous.

>124 OscarWilde87: sounds like a great class. I don't have good suggestions for modern poems. I like Sharon Olds, but not sure if that applies. I've only read Gorman's Biden inauguration poem, which was more about the moment, then about poetry, maybe. Still interesting. I've read a book by Bukowski. It was one of those experiences where the first poem is terrific, but after a while they sound a lot the same. He was all cold downtown-world-of-concrete-and-gunk emotionless angry emotion. But he's fresh again anytime I come across a single poem.

>125 rocketjk: admiring the suggestion.

45. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
reader: Freya Miller
OPD: 2023
format: 13:38-audible audio book (512 pages in hardcover)
acquired: August 1 listened: Aug 1-18
rating: 5
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: Rotterdam around 2000, and somewhere in California around 2030.
about the author: Scottish author of three novels, born 1983.

A literary sci-fi book of tone. What I mean is that if you take to the language, a cold, careful, logical tone that can bring out something both distant and beautiful, then this book is a 5-star listen. It's read beautifully on audio by Freya Miller.

The book itself has elements of DeLillo's Ratner's Star. But whereas DeLillo used adolescent wry humor, satire and sex, this is all restrained tone. It takes place mostly about 10 years in the future, where a Dutch marine biologist studying algae finds herself involved in a newly created ocean chasm with ancient microscopic life forms, and then later a for-profit space agency in California looking to for self-creating food supplies for long missions.

I loved this, loved listening to it, could relisten to it again, starting at any point and ending at any point. Would I feel differently, if I read it? I suspect I would still have liked it a lot, but maybe not at 5-stars, as I have given it here. Those 5-stars in this case are partially for the experience and enjoyment of listening to this.

Recommended to anyone who likes the Audible sample.

----

one quote: "The silence that surrounds us, the un-meaning of deep space. Terrifying, endless directionless plane. It wasn't possible to domesticate and cultivate this non-place."

46. Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
translation: from Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2004
OPD: 1975
format: 262-page Kindle ebook (side note: I started with a paperback I bought in SF in Nov 2022, but it turned out to be a bad copy.)
acquired: November 2022, then again August 15 read: Aug 13-22 time reading: 8:39, 2.0 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: modern classics? theme: TBR
locations: Hungary & several concentration camps
about the author: Jewish Hungarian author and journalist from Budapest, a Holocaust survivor, and the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. (1929-2016)

I find Holocaust books tough to respond to, and tough to review, and this classic is no different. It's very powerful. It's semi-autobiographical in that it's the story of a 14-year-old Hungarian boy, Jewish only by lineage, who experiences and survives concentration camps, something the author experienced, and also it's all told in first person.

What sets this apart is the perspective. We never meet György Köves's parents, or anyone he's deeply connected to. He is emotionally distant. Unexperienced, but passionlessly curious, with an open logical mind. So, when finds himself and Auschwitz, he's not emotionally horrified so much as practical and scared in that way. He observes logically, within his understanding, even justifying various actions of guards in terms of what makes sense to him. There are bodies going up in smoke within his line of sight, bodies of people he just got off the train with, who have already been gassed, and he's focused on how people with valuables respond to requests by guards to give these up voluntarily, or by the way a newly shaven rabbi washes himself in showers (showerers that look the same as the gas chambers).

"At the very beginning, I still considered myself to be what I might call a sort of guest in captivity--very pardonably and, when it comes down to it, in full accordance with the propensity to delusion that we all share and which is thus, I suppose, ultimately part of human nature"

When he eventually returns home, and is questioned by what turns out to be a news or magazine writer, he answers questions saying, "naturally" this or that traumatic event. He is angry, but he is shaped by this experience, and embraces that impact on him, which is strange, especially in light of how grown up and mature he sounds at the end of the book.

What was weird for me, as a reader, is that I was never horrified while my mind was within the tone of the text. I was invested in György, like in the way I might be invested in a pretty good unprofessional challenger in America Ninja Warrior. I wanted him to succeed, to overcome. This kept me reading, and drew me back between chances to read. I was engaged. But I would need to pull myself out of the book, look around, so to speak, to grasp the context. That was very strange to me.

This is an important work. In my mind, it's up there with Night, If This is a Man, and Maus, as a pillar towards understanding the Holocaust in a literary or artistic context. So highly recommended to those with this kind of interest. Personally I was drawn to this from other ClubRead comments and review (like from Labfs39, years ago), and also because part of being Jewish is to be drawn to this cultural heritage.

Finally catching up on your thread, Dan—really good reviews and discussion here, and some effective takedowns as well. My alternate non-rock-and-mineral world is made of cat hair. Also, I need to retry Faulkner. I read As I Lay Dying in my 20s and... I think was just too young to really get the voice and the tone.

The discussion of Down By Law made me swoon a little with nostalgia—I remember seeing that in the theater when it first came out and it's so of its time for me. I need to rewatch one of these days, and then probably Stranger Than Paradise too. Jerry, if I actually post some content on my thread, please feel free to come by and digress there as well.

>129 dchaikin: This is so impressive a review that I am immediately using one of my Audible credits to acquire a copy.

As you know I am strictly an audio book reader and this sounds so interesting to me!

>130 dchaikin: I have been eagerly awaiting your review of Fatelessness and it was well worth the wait. I had only found the book from an earlier post of yours in this thread. So thank you on two counts. I agree - it is a very important book.

I had the audio copy (I can only read audio) and I should mention it was very well narrated.

Straight after Faithlessness I listened to Old God’s Time brilliantly narrated and so far away in time and place and literary style - something I really needed. So brilliant that I don’t think I would have the words to write a review. Have you read it?

>131 lisapeet: for full effect:

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing.

The other is made of cat hair

>132 JoeB1934: oh, I really hope you enjoy. I loved In Ascension

>133 kjuliff: thank you! I’m not familiar with Old God’s Time. Sounds a lot different. (Perhaps why you chose it?)

>129 dchaikin: Defitinely had this on the radar. Now going to request the Audiobook at the library.

>133 kjuliff: I too have listened to Old God's Time and it is close to my best book for the year. One reason for my interest is that it has reflections by a person as their life is approaching the end. The author is incredible, also.

Hey, Dan. Just wanted to let you know that I followed the conversation about Fatelessness with great interest. I will be on the lookout for that book. Thanks for your great review and to all who have taken part in the conversation. You've made the book sound entirely intriguing and worthwhile. Cheers, all.

>135 stretch: I hope you enjoy it ( In Ascension) too, Kevin!

>136 JoeB1934: hmm. Noting!

>137 rocketjk: that was an interesting conversation (on Fatelessness). Glad kjuliff read it about the same time i did. I hope you can get to it. (Just be careful with the paperbacks. I have a bad copy, bought new last year. I switched to an ebook.).

>138 dchaikin: "I have a bad copy, bought new last year."

What makes a copy a "bad copy?" Sounds like something out of a Thursday Next novel.

>139 rocketjk: misprints. First it was the 1st letter that was missing. Then the first several letters. Then I found a page with the whole 1st line missing. Not light or hard read, just clean paper where that line should be printed. Then I flipped through and discovered there were other pages like that, missing the entire 1st line on the page (always the left page).

>133 kjuliff: >136 JoeB1934: - I just noticed that Old God’s Time is on the Booker longlist, which means i should get to it within the year. I’m not sure yet it i’ll use audio, but I’m grateful to know it works well that way.

>140 dchaikin: Oof! Those books should never make it to the shops!

>140 dchaikin: OK. I thought it was something like that. Thanks. I will doublecheck if I buy a copy.

>141 dchaikin: yes Old God’s Time is so excellently narrated with just enough Irish brogue. I feel some Irish novels are narrated in over-the-tp Irish accent, Donal Ryan’s books spring to mind.

I had worried that the stream of consciousness parts of Old God’s Time would make listening difficult, but it didn’t. My best read/listen this year.

So, August: I only finished 3 books in August - The Town by William Faulkner, Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz, and 100 poems from the Japanese, a 1955 anthology by Kenneth Rexroth (which only took an hour or so of time to finish this month). I did read 39 hours, better than the last two months, and I got into my books. Well, not the Town, but I really enjoyed Fatelessness and I'm into Faulkner's The Mansion.

On audio, I loved In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, and i really enjoyed A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (I finished this morning.)

September is laid out. I'll mostly read Old New York by Edith Wharton (I'll lead a group on Litsy), Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (with another group on Litsy). I'll finish, eventually, The Mansion by Faulkner, and ... I should finally start Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer (yay!)

47. A Spell of Good things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
readers: Ore Apampa & Babajide Oyekunle
OPD: 2023
format: 12:40 audible audiobook (352 pages in hardcover)
acquired: August 19 listened: Aug 19 – Sep 1
rating: 4
genre/style: Contemporary Fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: contemporary Nigeria
about the author: A Nigerian author who was born in Lagos, in 1988, and grew up in Ile-Ife, living in the University Staff Quarters of Obafemi Awolowo University.

My second from the Booker longlist was another good one, although very different.

This opens slow. We're in a Nigerian city that is not Legos, but is also apparently never named. We meet characters from two different economic classes: Wúràọlá, a young doctor starting her professional career, exhausted, and unmarried in her late twenties, although in a relationship. And Ẹniọlá, the teenage son of an out of work high school history teacher. Ẹniọlá's wants a college education, but his family is starving, and can't afford his school fees. He occasionally works at a tailor shop, but doesn't have the money needed to become an apprentice. Wúràọlá's mother has her dresses made at this tailor shop, making a thin connection between two.

This quilt of Nigerian life crawls along with problems and subtleties, and for 2 hours of audio time I was kind of bored, but it suddenly comes alive. Nothing dramatic happens, except when some stuff did happen, I became invested in Ẹniọlá's school problems, and Wúràọlá's relationship and family problems. It escalates more, becoming a satisfying novel.

One of the awkward lessons of this book for me was a different understanding of the title, from my original take, as optimistic, to something much more bitter (one meaning of a spell is "a state or period of enchantment", which, by definition, comes to an end).

This one is recommended to those with a little patience, because it eventually rewards, but also with maybe some optimism in their reserves. Also, note that I thought the audio readers were a little difficult to understand.

Enjoyed your review! And I loved the book. It was my first of this year’s Bookers and I thought I had read the winner first, not so much now after Old God’s Time and This other Eden.

>147 dianelouise100: interesting about how it compares to those other books. I liked In Ascension so much, that it stands above this in my mind (although I've come across many reviews that find IA "boring". And, no doubt, it's slow) I'm listening to Old God's Time. My first response, maybe 30 minutes in, is very resistant to it (despite the heavy-handed Chekhov elements, which I like). Will see how it goes.

I’ll be very interested in what you think of Old god’s Time. I found it confusing, especially in the beginning, but so beautifully written that I liked it very much by the end.

>148 dchaikin: I was blown away by Old God’s Time which I listened to. The narrator is excellent, Irish but not the over-doing of the Irish brogue that often happens with Irish-authored audio books.

The stream of consciousness passages we’re handled very well by the narrator - often i finds stream of consciousness difficult to keep my interest in audio. But the novel is so beautifully crafted and narrated that it really works. 5*

>149 dianelouise100: >150 kjuliff: I'm settling in. Not confusing yet, but I've been expecting something like a case and haven't found one yet. I'll listen to more on my commute the next few days.

>150 kjuliff: I like that the reader is really clear and easy to follow, but I don't like that he's heaven handed with the tone. I prefer closer-to-neutral readers. Personal preference.

>151 dchaikin: I agree with you regarding the readers’ tone in general; I prefer readers to read and not “act” the book, as it can come across as a theatrical. But I didn’t find the reader to be heavy-handed in Old God’s Time. I find many Irish novelists to have readers with very strong Irish brogues - for example Donal Ryan’s readers. Was it the accent or the tone of the reader you didn’t like in Old God’s Time? I can see how an Irish accent can sound overbearing, like the Australian one. I recently started listening to a novel by Tim Winton and couldn’t handle the Australian accent that got in the way, though I can see the importance of readers using the writers’ accent.

>152 kjuliff: just a random update to say that I’ve taken to Old God’s Time, and i’ve now fully embraced the reader. I’m enjoying it (now, without reservations)

It’s wonderful isn’t it? Glad you are embracing it now. You get to feel you have entered Tom’s world.

I'm just gliding along. it's sad but moving.

48. The Mansion by William Faulkner
OPD: 1959
format: 386-pages within a Kindle ebook trilogy called Snopes
acquired: May read: Aug 23 – Sep 7 time reading: 17:04, 2.7 mpp
rating: 3½
genre/style: Classic Fiction theme: Faulkner
locations: Fictional Jefferson Mississippi and surrounds, including Memphis, during the 1st half of the 20th century.
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

Full trilogy:
The Hamlet (1940) – 4½ stars, run-on writing with lots of points for quirkiness and romantic bestiality. An experience.
The Town (1957) – 3 stars, slightly annoying telling of an ok story with some substance
The Mansion (1959) – 3½ stars, decent, but also with a wonderful ending that I’m still thinking about.

This whole trilogy is only ok, with some entertaining quirky writing in the first book, and some substance in the story and atmosphere. But it also comes with one of the most satisfying conclusions to a book ever, especially after all that the reader works through before. I won’t put in any further spoiler in than that, but it’s important when explaining my response to the book. It really ends well. My short take is that The Hamlet was curious, The Town was terrible (wandering narrative, soft story), and The Mansion was OK. And I’m hoping this wasn't Faulkner’s best work. But longer take is more forgiving. The world and full substance of the series holds something more meaningful.

The Mansion seems has three parts, each titled on one character, Mink Snopes, Linda (nee Snopes) and Flem Snopes. Mink has prominent quirky bit in The Hamlet, and then got left behind in book 2. But his story unexpectedly picks up here, and he’s far more complicated and earthy than we realized. Ultimately he has a gravitas from his disoriented illogical but fierce mindset. Laura doesn’t get to tell her story. Like her mother in the previous two books, we always see her through the men, and the lust colors what isn’t supposed to be lustful story, more platonic and wanting and disenchanting in a way. Flem also doesn’t get any say in his section, although things come around back to him, with him in the center.

The true central character of the trilogy is Gavin Stephens, a bachelor and Harvard educated town lawyer, defined by his reserve and repressed lust of Linda’s mom, Eula, and later, his inappropriate love/lust of Linda, 20 years his junior. Never improper, he gets nowhere with anything, But he’s a central figure in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi. And he and his nephew, with some commentary by a country-born uneducated know-everything sewing machine salesman, V.K. Ratcliff, tell most of the story. All these characters have some presence in whatever real-world Faulkner experienced in his Mississippi and wanted to share. His flawed truth, where African Americans are anonymous and where woman are physical forms defined by the way men react to them - either silently enduring screwed-up dads and husbands, or, if they’re physically attractive, silently enduring undue constant small-town attention. We’re in soiled humus of the low Mississippi hills, and also in a world of contemporary technology, high education, and distant world wars the men run off to fight, often through the air force. That is this little place is insulated, hard, inward looking and resistant, but also swamped by the larger seemingly more enlightened, but equally vicious wider world. In this way, it’s a book that is larger than its little story.

I’m glad I read this. I’m grateful for Faulkner’s ending. But I’m only recommending this to Faulkner completists.

Great review, Dan. I’m glad you don’t regret the time spent reading.
I think Faulkner critics generally agree that this trilogy and the very early preYoknapatawfa County novels are the weakest part of his work.

>157 dianelouise100: well, writers are human too. I hope to read through his work chronologically, with a biography added in there somewhere. I’m ok slogging through a few imperfect early books, to some extent. They tend to be very revealing about what the author is trying to do. (And they tend to be much easier to read than any literature criticism)

I haven't read any Faulkner other than the Snopes trilogy, but I did enjoy it immensely. Sorry you guys haven't liked it as much. "Larger than its little story" I think is an apt description.

>158 dchaikin: Not being a Faulkner completist, I’ll be pleased to see what you think of the earliest works, and of the works from the 30’s and later also. Earlier this year I read Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography, a fine study you might also enjoy.

>156 dchaikin: Yikes, I haven't even started the book yet and you're already finished! I'll come back to your review when I've read the book - 'til then I have to skip it.

>159 rocketjk: I’m glad you enjoyed, and glad we aren’t all identical readers.

>160 dianelouise100: I’m seriously thinking about that Blotner biography.

>161 SassyLassy: I hope you enjoy. I’ll look for your posts.

49. Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry
reader: Stephen Hogan
OPD: 2023
format: 8:34 audible audiobook (273 pages in hardcover)
acquired: Sep 1 listened: Sep 1-12
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: 1990’s Dublin
about the author: Irish novelist, playwright and poet born in Dublin, 1955

As we lose track of where we are in plot in here, we might take a moment to notice how involved we are in whatever place we happen to be inside Tom Kettle's mind. And we might also appreciate the how much Barry embraced his Chekhov; and maybe also how he toys with, but only brushes along the edges of the literary crime genre.

Tom Kettle, a retired detective and widower living alone outside Dublin, is visited by some old colleagues about a case and has his own memories prompted, even as his current reality seems to fit loosely. Barry, however, is more interested in the moment inside Kettle's mind than in the plot he eventually lays out to us. The book, slow-moving by design, has its own efficiency and self-propulsion as every moment of thought and observation serves a purpose going forward. There is a plot line, but once we get it, it's one that leaves us wondering what it all added up to. If there's a main villain, it would be the Irish Catholic orphanages. I really enjoyed this interior novel.

I used an audiobook. It took me a bit to adjust to the reader, but once I did, I found it a bit of a treat.

Recommended to anyone happy to be lost in someone else's mind for a bit.

I'm enjoying If I Survive You so far, making four good Booker longlists in a row, four for four. All on audio.

My 2023 Booker Longlist ranking:

1. In Ascension
2. Old God's Time
3. A Spell of Good Things
(at the moment, If I Survive You would fit here, 4th, but snuggly because I'm enjoying it a lot.)

I enjoyed your review, Dan, and thought the book excellent. I struggled mightily with the stream of consciousness narration from a character whose consciousness is sometimes only loosely anchored in reality—until I realized that it’s Tom’s reality that is the focus of the novel. I’m eager for In Ascension to be published in U.S.—or for it to make the Short List, then I’ll order it from U.K.

>163 dchaikin: Recommended to anyone happy to be lost in someone else's mind for a bit.
Perfectly put.

>165 dianelouise100: yes, Tom’s mind is unexpectedly the book. 🙂 FYI: i used audible for In Ascension, which usually means a US release.

>166 kjuliff: 🙂

>166 kjuliff: That is exactly why I appreciated the book so much. I am now at the age where similar thoughts are in my mind.

>168 JoeB1934: I am an older reader too and many of my favorite authors have retired or lost their touch, or passed on. Many too have written about being old and I normally avoided them. Now that I have past my three score plus ten I’ve taken to reading them. Some, like Old God’s Time really resonate.

>170 kjuliff: Thanks for that update. Resonating with me also.

However, I do not consider it an obsession with my own death. It is simply a way to relate to people at, or near my age. At 89 years old I'm not sure there are many at my age.

>167 dchaikin: I intend to get In Ascension from Audible. But I didn’t realize a book could be released on Audible in the US before being released in other digital or printed formats. Is it a copyright or a production issue?

I see it has been available in hard-cover on Amazon but sold out till October.

>168 JoeB1934: >170 kjuliff: - as one whose been perpetually lost in my own head at every age (including my current comparatively young middle age), I’m not always drawn to being lost in fictional heads, but i do find i can relate when i am. 🙂

>172 kjuliff: I’m pretty sure, like almost certain, that the US release applies to audible too.

>173 dchaikin: I would think so too. So it must be just faster to produce an audio version than a paperback. Can’t see why though.

>173 dchaikin: I’m not always drawn to being lost in fictional heads, but i do find i can relate when i am.
I initially read this as "I do find I can relocate when I am", which also seemed apt.

>175 SassyLassy: 🙂 i can go with that too.

I started reading The Polish Boxer this morning, after reading your post that you had started it yesterday. I've only read the first chapter, but gosh, do I love Halfon's writing. This is the third book by him that I've read, and I am once again enthralled. I'm sad that I will only have one book left to read by him after this. Hopefully more will be translated. Go Bellevue Literary Press!

>177 labfs39: this my first by him after your posts (and Lois’s) got my attention last year. I’m really enjoying this. It’s fun and serious, playful and sad, all at once.

>177 labfs39: & >178 dchaikin: I started keeping an eye out for Halfon's novels when a few folks here started praising his work so much a while back, but I never did run across anything, and then that mental memo slipped down to the bottom of the "oughta be looking for" stack. Thanks for the reminder, y'all.

Like this random passage. It's about nothing special, but it just gets me:

Look, how tragic, Lewis said, pointing to a dead deer on the road. Real common said the driver, to see deer run over around these parts. It occurred to me then, as a limousine carrying a Guatemalan and a Mormon rumbled past deer carcasses toward an academic conference on Mark Twain, that I was in the wrong place. Sometimes, just briefly, I forget who I am.

>180 labfs39: i typed up two quotes… and that was one of them. : ) (the other was on the Calchikel language word for poetry.)

>179 rocketjk: i would love your take on Halfon. If you need a buddy read, check the Strand for a copy and join us.

>181 dchaikin: Lol, great minds... I loved the other quote you copied too. Pach'un tzij.

>182 dchaikin: Yes, Jerry, join us. I am reading really slowly, it's just so delicious.

>183 labfs39: another - on discovering an Israeli with his mother’s last name:

“…and while she verified it (my mother’s last name) on my driver's license, I started to think about the remote possibility that we were related, and I imagined a novel about two Polish siblings who thought their entire family had been exterminated but who all of a sudden find each other after sixty years apart, thanks to the grandchildren, a Guatemalan writer and an Israeli hippie, who meet by chance in a Scottish bar that isn't even Scottish in Antigua, Guatemala. Yael got a liter of cheap beer and filled three glasses. Tamara gave me my license back and the three of us drank a toast to us, to them, to the Poles. We stayed silent, listening to an old Bob Marley song and contemplating the immense smallness of the planet.”

Well, i finished The Polish Boxer in my flight to SF.

>184 dchaikin: love that! will have to add that to my list

>186 cindydavid4: I'll second you on that. :) He has a lot of quirky appealing lines line that.

>164 dchaikin: Dan, do you know which other Booker’s long-listed are available in Audio?

>188 kjuliff: i have a list 🙂

Martin MacInnes - In Ascension 13:38
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ - A Spell of Good 12:40
Sebastian Barry – Old God’s Time 8:34
Jonathan Escoffery – If I Survive You 8:01
Siân Hughes– Pearl 6:41
Paul Harding – This Other Eden 6:08
Chetna Maroo - Western Lane 4:21
Sarah Bernstein – Study for Obedience 3:59
Tan Twan Eng – The House of Doors - releases Oct 17

No audio
Paul Murray – The Bee Sting
Paul Lynch – Prophet Song
Elaine Feeney – How to Build a Boat
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow – All the Little Bird-Hearts

>189 dchaikin: Thank you Dan. My eyesight is getting worse and it’s getting harder to google. I can still type but I have difficulty reading what I type as I type it.

I’ve only read Old God’s Time from the long list to date. Thanks also for including reading times. V helpful.

Y'all, I've discovered a used bookstore in my area where I'm planning a browse before work Monday. Books are mostly in bins, so who knows what I'll run a across, but Halfon is on my list of authors to look for.

>191 markon: I do love good used bookstores. Curious what you find.

>191 markon: Canción is my favorite, fwiw.

50. The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon
translation: from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, Lisa Dillman, Daniel Hahn, Anne McLean, & Ollie Brock (2012)
OPD: 2008
format: 181-page paperback
acquired: November from City Lights in San Francisco read: Sep 20-22 time reading: 6:32, 2.2 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: TBR
locations: Guatemala, North Carolina, and Belgrade, Serbia (roughly 2003)
about the author: Guatemala-born Jewish author who went to school, from age 10, in South Florida and later taught literature in Guatemala. (born 1971)

I loved this. Literature and life and a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural clashes and mishmashes. And many beautifully quirky lines. Halfon is a Jewish-born Guatemalan grandson of a Polish Holocaust survivor and here writes about himself fictionally or metafictionally, occasionally holding the seams up for us to see.

51. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our by Merlin Sheldrake
OPD: 2020
format: 363-page ebook from Apple Books
acquired: September 1 read: Sep 2-24 time reading: 13:21, 2.4 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: popular science theme: naturalitsy
about the author: English biologist, born in 1987

Surprisingly engaging. It's well written, despite lots of dense info, and also somehow very human focused. I thought the first chapter was exceptionally well written. After that it gets a little info heavy, and sometimes without clear direction. But it's always interesting and always thorough. Shardlake doesn't just tell you the ways a fungus does and doesn't act similar to a human brain, he goes into the whole theory of anthropomorphizing.

Among the cool stuff and ideas - he likes you to think of a fungal network from the fungal perspective, everywhere at once along its physical path, the fungus connects to many plants, and transporting nutrients to other plants in self-centered sort of trade balances, giving phosphate in exchange for carbon, or whatnot. So, trees of different species connect through fungi entwined with their roots and spreading through the soil, linking to each other and the fungal system in symbiotic ways.

So how to characterize a fungal network that grows here and there, and dies off here and there so that the network persists and exists everywhere at once, but any specific point comes and goes? In one of Sheldrakes's creative imperfect metaphors, he likes it to humans over time. If you tracked yourself over time, you would exist over paths of space, like a growing fungus. (Also, like a fungus, not physical part of us persists throughout our lifetime.)

He also goes into evolutionary ideas, truffles and truffle hunters, the fungi within us, magic mushrooms (psilocybin), the history of the study of fungi, how lichen is not a single animal, but a symbiotic evolved dependency of fungi and algae, and even Isaac Newton's mythic apple tree. (As he puts it, what was "far and away the most likely candidate for the tree that didn't drop the apple that inspired the theory of gravitation."). He goes in depth into three books I have read - The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard (he puts into perspective just how important her work really was in the 1990's), How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Recommended to anyone looking for a random fun science book.

52. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
reader: Torian Brackett
OPD: 2022
format: 8:01 audible audiobook (272-pages in hardcover)
acquired: September 13 listened: Sep 13-27
rating: 3½
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: Miami and Jamaica
about the author: American author and professor of creative writing. He was born (~1980) in Houston to Jamaican immigrants and grew up in Miami.

I really enjoyed the opening section where he writes about growing up in South Florida as the son of Jamaican born parents. Not black, not white, not Puerto Rican or other Latino heritage, fictional Trelawney has trouble fitting in S. Florida's very inflexible cultural divisions. I'm older than Escoffery, but I grew up that 1980's S. Florida world too - ethnically diverse, with no mixing.

The book goes much softer after that. He seems to push to cover the impoverished experience in S. Florida, where it's a little weirder in its own way than elsewhere, a little hyper-showy and hyper-unethical. But the book does this with less complicated characters and some social-media-meme friendly plot points. So, overall ok.

53. Old New York by Edith Wharton
OPD: 1924
format: ebook (maybe 300 pages?)
acquired: September 1 read: Sep 3-28 time reading: 9:26, 1.9 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: Classic fiction theme: Wharton
locations: New York City and surrounds
about the author: 1862-1937. Born Edith Newbold Jones on West 23rd Street, New York City. Relocated permanently to France after 1911.

A collection of four novellas that each focuses on a different decade in the 1800's, and that each loosely ties into The Age of Innocence (which opens in the 1870's).

Themes are the stifling culture of New York's old elite inter-marrying families, where men control the money, and woman are dependent, and unsatisfied relationships characterize the best marriages. Wharton gives us humans within this culture. Overall, the stories benefit from that Wharton prose that makes everything easy and comfortable and interesting. Her writing catches us readers early. You're involved, characters crystallize before your eyes quickly, sometimes many all at once, each distinct. On the flip side, each story is very different, and most readers will probably find three stories pale before whatever they choose as their favorite. I liked The Old Maid the best, but actually think more about The Spark.

Each story:

False Dawn (The 'Forties) - Welcome back to Wharton. This opens with an assortment of rich characters standing on their airs in their Long Island vacation homes. A pair of misfit lovers grab our attention. We get art and Europe, egos and irony to go along with some compassionate warm and sad moments.

The Old Maid (The 'Fifites) - A married mother, Delia Ralston, takes care of her spinster sister, Charlotte Lovell and Charlotte's secret child. But Delia takes a few things from Charlotte along the way, including the reader's focus and curiosity. Delia is fascinating. A character study on cruel kindness, maybe.

The Spark (The 'Sixties) - A character study of a Civil War veteran. We have moved to the 1890's when veteran Hayley Delane's wife openly cheats on him. But he's a curiosity. Something happened to him during the war. He not only doesn't seem fazed by his wife's actions, but continues to embrace her, with no animosity. The word "queer" drops in there. It comes without clear indication, but it's there. Mainly I was interested in the impenetrabilty of Hayley.

New Year's Day (The 'Seventies) - A hotel fire outs the secret affair of a married woman, Lizzie Hazeldean. The story misleads the reader, creating a kind of mystery of who she really is, dropping a handful of unexpected breadcrumbs before laying out some strength of character and an explanation that not all readers will be comfortable with, including me.

>196 dchaikin: "So, overall ok."

This was my reaction to If I Survive You as well. Good, but not great. I thought Escoffery spent a lot of time on side plots, time that would have been better spent exploring his main characters more deeply. My wife liked the novel somewhat better. I will keep an eye out for Escoffery's future work, however.

>194 dchaikin: I finally sat down and finished The Polish Boxer this morning. Although I found some of his writing and lines exquisite, I didn't think the narrative arc was as good as that of Canción (written thirteen years later). I forget, have you read anything else by Halfon?

>198 rocketjk: i wish i could remember your review. I checked the work page and read Kay’s review, which was along the same lines - promising but only ok by itself. His future work could be special.

>199 labfs39: nope. My 1st one. I think his book got a little lost in Belgrade and I was going to add that to my review, but decided it was a secondary issue to my discovery of a special voice, so left it unmentioned. I would like to read his other books.

>197 dchaikin: Love NYC and always wanted to reaad this; glad it workd well, will have to look for it

>194 dchaikin: I loved, loved, loved The Polish Boxer! This was my review of that book.
This book had been recommended to me by berthirsch.

>201 cindydavid4: Any excuse to read Wharton is probably a good one. In November we are apparently reading her ghost stories.

>202 SqueakyChu: i really enjoyed your review and share your enthusiasm. Lisa led me to the author. ”Did {his grandfather}escape his imprisonment there because a Polish Boxer told him what to say, or was it because he had been a carpenter?” - You know, it struck me these aren’t contradictory options. Perhaps the Polish Boxer could have said, “tell them you’re an expert carpenter” 🙂

September* was my first good reading month in a while. I got 51 hours of reading in, finishing four books. Plus I also finished three audiobooks. And, finally, I started Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

I'm finding my way with Chaucer. I had paced out 30 hours to read all of T&C in September, instead I read a little under 10 hours, mostly in several 30 minute-sittings, and I have still about 30 hours to go. I'm reading like I might read a collection of poetry. Enjoying the language, diving in, relishing it, really, and then getting tired and putting it down for the day. The plot so far could be summed in a few words. It doesn't move, it's just lingual play. After Troilus falls for Criseyde, Pandura spends many pages trying to get him to talk, using every trick he can come up with to convince Troilus to open up. Then, learning his widowed niece is the one on Troilus's lustful heart, he goes to convince her to open up to him. She's not interested, so he goes on and on trying to convince her. It's funny, but mostly it's just joyful linguistic play.

This English is very unstructured. Spelling is arbitrary, and up to the scribe's will. The grammar is also inconsistent and random, sometimes familiar, sometimes in grammatical orders we don't associate with English. And, this was interesting to me, it's full of English idioms. They aren't grammatically consistent with our English today, but these idioms are familiar. It's fun stuff; it's weird and playful and charming and ridiculous in the best of ways. My new plan is to continue these 30 minute sessions, so i'm planning 15 hours for T&C in October.

Otherwise, September was two group reads, Old New York, and Entangled Life, and one from the TBR shelf, planned, The Polish Boxer. The last one, by Eduardo Halfon, was most rewarding. I bought this book following up on some CR reviews, he was as good or better than advertised. I hope to read more of him. But it was really all good reading. I also worked through the later parts of Walden, which I've been stumbling through. It's curious, but not really fun reading. I sort of finished, but my edition has On Civil Disobedience appended to the end, and I've never read this famous essay.

Octobers plans are Chaucer, and more Wharton (we haven't chosen our book yet). And hopefully I'll return to Richard Wright and read his posthumous The Man Who Lived Underground, first published in 2021, and get to Drive Your Plow Over the Bones, and if I find I finish early, I'll have to make some decisions. But I'm eyeing discworld's Guards! Guards!

*yeah, i had “October” there. 1st word. Glad brain is strong this Sunday afternoon.

>204 dchaikin: October was my first good reading month in a while. I got 51 hours of reading in, finishing four books. Plus I also finished three audiobooks. And, finally, I started Chaucer's Troilus in Criseyde.

Predicting the future?

>204 dchaikin: Troilus was definitely into Creseyde, but I think the title of the book is Troilus *and* Creseyde, not *in* Creseyde.

>205 dianeham: >206 booksaplenty1949: oh, for all my typos, these are very entertaining! (I’m going fix them now…)

just kindled Old New York, and ordered Polish Boxer, like I have nothing else to read....

>208 cindydavid4: oh, you did good! May you suffer good reading for your sins! 🙂

hee oh i love that kind of repentance!

>200 dchaikin: "I wish I could remember your review."

Here you go!
https://www.librarything.com/topic/347255#8033908

>210 cindydavid4: me too!

>211 rocketjk: thanks! I actually do remember that review now. It’s nice to revisit after listening to the book.

I've moved over here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/354226