Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

starting a whole bunch of books to be able to mix it up as the mood seizes me. This my current reading list, all started.

Congrats!

I too like to have several books going at once, but four or five is my sweet spot. More than that and I start to lose track.

So that said, among other books:

Originally Posted by issybird

I’m currently reading the first volume of Henry “Chips” Channon’s diaries; dish about English society and and the corridors of power in the interwar years is so much jam to me. Delicious stuff.

Compulsively readable, the world from the point of view of a gold digger/social climber who must have been charming in person as he comes across as repugnant in his private account. Having finished the first volume, I couldn't resist tearing into the second and these are hefty suckers at over a thousand pages apiece, although a significant part is footnotes etc. I'll probably take a breather before reading the third volume.

Ending Up by Kingsley Amis, a hilarious short novel about a group of old people who live together.

Listening to Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis which has not aged well; it's a very heavy-handed examination of "modern society" a century ago. I'd probably DNF it except that it's doing the trick for bedtime listening and Grover Gardner is always good.

[DiapDealer]

I just finished up the audiobook version of Into the Distance by Hernan Diaz (narrated by Alexander Skarsgard). I quite enjoyed it. Much more so than his later Trust (which I did not dislike -- I just found its four independent book structure a bit too ambitious for its own good).

I found this tale of a "young Swedish immigrant's solitary trek across the 19th-century American frontier" to be a more straightforward story. I don't typically like these sorts of descriptions; but the best thing I can come up with is that it reminded me of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, but with much more heart. And a lot more punctuation!

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I find myself with a full month off of my full time job (for time served) and an itch to spend the fall days reading. I've set myself two major projects:

• Re-reading The Odyssey (without the silly trappings of the film discourse as I will certainly never watch it)
• Reading Herodotus' Histories and pairing it with Ryszard Kapuściński's Travels with Herodotus.

I also have my regular reading on the go, which currently consists of:

• Kobo - A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker 1925-2025 edited by Deborah Treisman. This is getting tougher the further into the modern stories I get. My tastes didn't really run with that of the magazine from the early 00s onward, save for the occasional gem. So I am pushing through these looking for those gems.
• Hardcover - The 2024 edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Christanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell
• Boox - Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. My wife has been on a bit of a kick for epistolary novels that she can read one letter a day in (see Frankenstien and Dracula from the last few months). She decided to attack a larger one and I am joining her as I've not read this since I was in my early 20s. Can't wait to see what a difference a handful of decades makes.

I am midway through my month off and have been deliriously ill for the first two weeks of it. Not Covid and not flu, but the sickest I have been in my adult memory. As such, I've not read quite as much as I'd like and have shifted some things around.

• Re-reading The Odyssey (without the silly trappings of the film discourse as I will certainly never watch it)
• Kobo - A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker 1925-2025 edited by Deborah Treisman. Still going slow and less fun almost every new story.
• Hardcover - The 2024 edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Christanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell
• Boox - Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
• Paperback - The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje, translated by Donald McKay - I am enjoying this so much that I bought Daanje's other translated work The Remembered Soldier, which was longlisted for a number of awards this year.

During the worst of the illness, I listened to a few more Rex Stout Nero Wolfe titles as well as Emily Wilson's Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature. I listened to the first essay, which was about Anne Carson, on the day Carson was announced as the winner of the Nobel. The book was a bit uneven as they were all revised versions of previously published essays and reviews, but there were some real delights.

[Dr. Drib]

I accidentally placed this in the wrong thread (post now deleted), and moved it to the correct thread:

I'm reading a wonderfully weird novel right now and I'm almost finished. [update: now finished.]

Experience of the Night - Marcel Bealu.

This is a literary novel. It's not available in ebook form (that I could find). It's available in trade paper only, to the best of my knowledge.

I would love to have an epub, if anyone knows where to buy one.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I accidentally placed this in the wrong thread (post now deleted), and moved it to the correct thread:

I'm reading a wonderfully weird novel right now I'm almost finished. [update: now finished.]

Experience of the Night - Marcel Bealu.

This is a literary novel. It's not available in ebook form (that I could find). It's available in trade paper only, to the best of my knowledge.

I would love to have an epub, if anyone knows where to buy one.

I looked this up and am intrigued to see Bealu described as "the French Kafka."

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I looked this up and am intrigued to see Bealu described as "the French Kafka."

That is exactly what attracted me! It's a wild novel, to be sure, and I'm in the mood for 'wild' in my reading.

The copy I have is from Archive.org and it's not the best copy. Fortunately, I have the original Scribe and that's where almost all my PDFs go.

You might also look up Gogol's Wife & Other Stories, by author Tommaso Landolfi. The story titled Gogol's Wife is very much Kafkaesque and magical realist in tone. He's been called "The Italian Kafka." WILD!

The book is available in ebook and is published by New Directions. Here's a link to Amazon for addtional information:

https://www.amazon.com/Gogols-Wife-S...s%2C399&sr=8-1

Thank you.

[Fbone]

Black Dawn by K. Gorman.

Started out interesting and suspenseful but quickly turned silly and ridiculous. Characters were stupid. The plot meanders. Obvious solutions aren't used. The writing was competent although basic. This may have been written for young teens, I hope. Story continues in book 2, 3, 4 etc. Rated D+ [2.50 stars] KU eligible.

[Dr. Drib]

Just started a new novel [literary], The Body Where I was Born, by Guadalupe Nettel.

It's attention to detail, along with bits of humor, reminds me somewhat of G. Cabrera Infante , a Cuban writer, (although Nettel's novel is without the cultural references to film).

I'm quite excited by Nettel's novel, but I've only read about 20% of it.

Nettel is a Mexican writer.

[DiapDealer]

Following up on the deconstructive Western nature of my previous read/listen (Hernan Diaz's In the Distance), I've now begun John Williams' Butcher's Crossing. Narrated by Anthony Heald.

[Uncle Robin]

Still dipping in and out of 10 books, but Sara Woods' Let's Choose Executioners book 10 her Antony Maitland series has commandeered all my attention right now. It requires slow, careful reading, the payoff is worth it.

[issybird]

I've finished Kate Atkinson's Our Noble Selves, published last month. A slight murder mystery set during the Festival of Britain, it's very inferior Atkinson with a whole lot of padding.

I feel as if I've read several dud new releases from favorite authors this year.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by issybird

I've finished Kate Atkinson's Our Noble Selves, published last month. A slight murder mystery set during the Festival of Britain, it's very inferior Atkinson with a whole lot of padding.

I feel as if I've read several dud new releases from favorite authors this year.

Ah, the loyalty tax! I learned that phrase earlier this year in the context of people who stay with utility providers out of inertia and miss out on newcustomer incentives, it fits well with this situation too. "Ooh, X has new book out, ugh, Y did I waste my time with that?"