Oh good a book post.
My favorite books from the past year or so:
- The Library Book, by Susan Orlean. Susan Orlean is a national treasure.
- An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones. I kind of forgot that novels could be so good.
- Circe, by Madeline Miller. I didn't expect to like this so well, since Song of Achilles was only so-so. I'm a little dubious about her project of rewriting the Greek myths as basically YA novels, but this was beautifully done.
- Chemistry, by Weike Wang. This probably isn't for everyone, but I found it so funny and so moving.
- Wonders Will Never Cease, by Robert Irwin. Part historical fiction, part ghost horror story. Pretty dumb but I loved it anyway.
- The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang. This was also dumb, but I have to plug it because I was so surprised by how bad it wasn't. Corny erotica, but all the sex is exactingly consensual.
- Prairie Fires, by Caroline Fraser. Historical background to the Ingalls Wilder books. Goes on too long (who cares about Rose Wilder Lane?) but the good parts are great.
The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
It's been a cheerful year!
I share in the general acclaim for Jesus' Son. I remember finding Life and Fate uneven (hard to avoid in a book that long) but the best parts were absolutely top-notch.
Jenny Erpenbeck was a great discovery this year: Go, Went, Gone is in a slightly awkward place being topical about refugees in Germany, but the wider angle of Visitation is just masterful.
Several good books by women in Ireland adapting the modernist tradition: The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride, Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, Milkman by Anna Burns (in the middle of this one).
Compulsory Games, a NYRB reprint of some Robert Aickman "strange stories" that I think many here might enjoy.
Paul Klee's Boat, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Russian poems unusually plausibly translated.
Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa, an interesting tack on the historical novel with an ensemble cast that just keeps growing.
In American fiction, Erasure by Percival Everett is very scabrous and funny on race and the literary world, and I admired the restraint in Katie Kitamura's A Separation.
And we went through all of Tove Jansson's Moomin books with the kid - neither lurid nor I had them in our own childhoods and we had no idea they were such masterpieces.
Oh it's wonderful that you've discovered Tove Jansson! I am slowly and inadequately translating a short story of hers that no one has done yet. This is a prod to my conscience.
Rudyard Kipling short stories. I was given a fancy edition of the complete ones, and they are just great in ways one has forgotten.
E. Nesbit, for reading to my poor mother. Books from her childhood are about all she can now absorb.
The poems of Dick Davies, quite unexpectedly lovely. I had never heard of him until I came across a review in the TLS.
Varlam Sharlamov, Kolyma Stories: Brexit could be worse.
Lots of Donne, for no very pressing reason. The sermons are extraordinary.
The poems of Thomas Tranströmer, started from duty and continued from delight. Clive James' late poetry.
Rupert Sheldrake, the Presence of the Past. Not properly finished yet, but very thought provoking. He remains a real scientist, interested in experiment.
Read of the year: "The 2020 Commission Report" by Jeffrey Lewis. I've been recommending it to everyone within reach.
The rest of my reading has fallen into serious and non-serious categories:
Serious, roughly in order of preference: Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai", Robert Massie "Peter the Great", Simon Schama "Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution", Alexander Esquemelin's "Buccaneers of America" and Charles Johnson's "General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates". Sir John Barrow's account of the mutiny on the Bounty is interesting if partial. Jim Frederick's "Black Hearts" is very good on leadership and culture. Lawrence Freedman "The Future of War: A History", Cecil Lewis' "Sagittarius Rising", Elias Canetti "Crowds and Power", CE Caldwell "Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice". "Beyond Earth" is an interesting bit of speculation on near-future technology but I think they make a few too many leaps of faith on things like the Q drive.
Non-serious: I've continued to enjoy John Sandford's thrillers very much - he's got two series detectives going, the Lucas Davenport series and the rather more light-hearted Virgil Flowers series; I haven't read a bad one yet. Alistair Reynolds' "Elysium Fire" was OK but a bit too similar to some of his other books, but "Revenger" was very good, and seems to be his stab at a slightly more YA approach - less exotic physics. Charles Portis' "True Grit" is one that everyone should read; the 2011 film is a very faithful adaptation. James Blaylock's Langdon St. Ives books are good early steampunk. I'm hoping for Ken MacLeod's "Corporation Wars" for Christmas. I blitzed through Daniel Abraham's economic fantasy series "Dagger and Coin" with barely a pause. The non-serious discovery of the year is the excellent "Lazarus" by Greg Rucka.
Written: in addition to my obligations to this House, several joke short stories written in response to challenges, three longer short stories set on the backs of extremely large flying animals and heavily inspired by the Basel rules on capital adequacy, another chapter of the novel, two chapters of literary criticism.
4: Yes to the unevenness of Life and Fate, but so much of it is very good, and the best (and sometimes most horrible) parts are just amazing. More of what I think about the book is here and here.
Random Penguin tells me that Grossman's prequel, Stalingrad, will appear in English for the first time next year. Since my Russian won't be up to novel-reading by then, I'm excited.
strongly endorse ajay's 2020 commission report recommendation, simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, and the end notes were quite the twist for me (likely not for someone more knowledgeable about the history of nuclear weapons than i).
just finished books do furnish a room in time for the backlisted Christmas day podcast, very much looking forward to that, and have enjoyed all the novels individually up to this one and also all the novels read together, if you see what i mean.
have been rereading a lot of frank o'hara. d'apres une histoire vraie was very good, i quite like de vigan, loved rien ne s'oppose a la nuit. read a bunch of other stuff but cannot remember now bc brain addled on asthma and asthma medications, am extremely sick and tired of being sick and tired.
9.1: yes, a lot of the book goes like this: "Description of terrifying fictional cockup! [52]" and then you read the note and it says "52. Lol this totally happened in 1983 and it almost killed everyone in the world, I have literally just changed the names involved".
Hetherington and Weiler, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. As I will never stop saying, everyone needs to read this.
Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma. White elephants, muchly murderous. Informative.
Adam Tooze, Crashed. Kind of lumpy; he's always been a rather clunky writer, but more so here. He never reaches the brilliance of Wages or Deluge, but I think that's inevitable this close to the events. Well worth reading nonetheless.
Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony. Meh. I felt very shallow and popularizing, but I think that's what it's trying to be, which is is fair.
Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy. Enlightening, possibly important.
Matthew Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy. Exactly what it says.
Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon. Very good, often funny.
Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth; Elman Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China; Randall Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the Yellow River in Late Imperial China. All three excellent, exactly what they say on the label.
Wang Zhenping Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia. Painfully badly written; structured geographically when obviously it needs to be chronological (multi-polar, guy, it's right there in your own title); the narrative chapters AFAICT adopt the style of their imperial sources, and accept their evidence mostly uncritically; the general analysis chapters are okay.
Fiction:
Edward St Aubyn, the Patrick Melrose novels. Astoundingly vicious, very funny. The 4th book I think should be omitted though.
GRRM, ASOIAF and Fire and Blood. Surprisingly good! Possibly in fact the anti-Tolkien. Far too many lamprey pies.
He has this unusual combination of being very impressionable and becoming zealous about whatever he's into, while having a comforting-fiction-piercing perceptivenes.
Like most of his fellow Nebraskans.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84. I actually expected to hate this doorstop novel (1100+ pages) but I found I couldn't put it down. There is a certain level of "Japanese people: don't tell me about your sex lives" weirdness, but the main plot is almost sweet.
Robert Graves, Count Belisarius. Not as good as I, Claudius, but then, what is? A good companion for it is Procopius, The Secret History. (Procopius gets seriously rubbished by Graves.)
M. K. Jemison, The Broken Earth. A trilogy (of course, because SF/Fantasy). Another thing I expected to hate (because Jemison is loudly and sometimes annoyingly "woke" in real life), but the book, while incorporating some of that attitude (a lot, actually, here and there), is really good. There are some pretty tough-to-read scenes, so be warned.
Charlie Stross, The Labyrinth Index. Latest "Laundry Files" novel, with a new and fairly sympathetic viewpoint character (not the egregious Bob Howard). If you like this sort of thing, you will like it, but you should start at the beginning of the now nine novel long series. If you like this sort of thing you probably have read them already, though. If you haven't: H.P. Lovecraft meets MI6.
N. A. M. Roger, The Safeguard of the Sea, The Command of the Ocean. History geeks and naval history geeks only. English/British navy from 650-1815. Helps if you have read the Hornblower and/or Aubrey/Maturin novels. I loved them all. A third volume, The Price of Victory, is expected any time now.
M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine. Biography of J. C. R. "Lick" Licklider, visionary of the internet. I read this when it first came out in 2001, but it's been reissued and I read it again.
It feels like I have barely read anything this year, but I guess that happens most years. I second ajay on Helen DeWitt. I read Lightning Rods first and can't exactly recommend it because of the subject matter but it's extraordinary.
God, there are too many books and so many sound so good. I find it disconcerting and somewhat discouraging (an objectively stupid reaction but absolutely what it invokes).
I mostly can't remember what I read this year -- I think plausibly it wasn't much, work was kicking my ass. Just this week, I read Rauchway's The Winter War, on the Hoover/FDR transition, which was terrific.
Endorsing "Count Belisarius" (actually I would say better than "I, Claudius") and the NAM Rodger books. "The Wizards of Armageddon" was fairly good as well. Didn't think much of 1Q84 for the reasons cited by DaveLMA. I've got "Crashed" but haven't started it yet, also David Edgerton's latest.
An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones. I kind of forgot that novels could be so good.
I really, really liked this book a lot, too.
Far too many lamprey pies.
TELL ME ABOUT IT.
I read a book on the Winter War that was pretty good, but it was mostly about dying Russians.
I also read a really good book about Napoleon's retreat from Russia. The moral of the story was " Try to avoid Typhus."
Another endorsement for Count Belisarius here. And NK Jemisin. The last half of the last book is a terrible demonstration of the pathetic fallacy, but when I said as much to a young woman at a party recently, she bristled. Obviously, she said, I had never been a Teenage Girl, because if I had, I'd realise that earthquakes destroying half the world are the very least that could do justice to your mood when you retire to your bedroom and slam the door behind you.
5. NW recommended Varlam Sharlamov, Kolyma Stories.
A good companion read to that would be Robert Conquest, Kolyma (non-fiction). There's a story (I read it in Martin Amis, Koba the Dread) that Conquest was asked in the post-Gorbachev years to give a new title to a revised edition of "The Great Terror," his classic 1968 account of the murderous Stalin era. He said, "How about 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'?"
Agree with Ajay about IQ1984, which is about 600 pages too long. Two translated Japanese novels I've enjoyed this year are Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and The Emissary (titled The Last Children of Tokyo in the UK edition) by Yoko Tawada. The former is bitingly funny in places, the latter wistful and elegaic (and the translator has done a fantastic job despite a lot of effectively untranslatable wordplay).
And I'm continuing to recommend Ghosts of the Tsunami as widely as I can.
I disliked IQ84 so much I can't even get the title right.
give a new title to a revised edition of "The Great Terror," his classic 1968 account of the murderous Stalin era. He said, "How about 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'?"
This is great.
I haven't read Count Belisarius yet and the Graves' Claudius books are among my favorites, will remedy that very soon. And it looks like I will be getting use out of my new Kindle my brother said he got me because it's out of print.
Apologies for writing "M. K. Jemison" instead of "N. K. Jemison" in 13. My typing, it is not under full conscious control.
Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma.
I really enjoyed his earlier personal history of Burma, The River of Lost Footsteps. I'd guess a lot of the content overlaps, though.
I discovered the amazing comic strip "Eyebeam" that ran in various Texas papers in the early 80s, and bought all the available paperbacks of it except the fourth one which keeps being over $20 on Ebay and Abebooks. Aside from that, same old same old.
A third volume, The Price of Victory, is expected any time now.
Devoutly to be wished. Every now and then I check to see if Rodgers' book shows on the forthcoming lists.
Oh, Nick Harkaway was new to me this year, and he's wonderful. Gnomon is his latest and probably his best, bit I'd start with Gone-Away World or Tigerman. He largely writes a style of SF that I usually don't enjoy (to put it dismissively, Inception-what-even-is-real) but does it well enough that it gets past my generic dislike. Gnomon is really amazing.
(He's John LeCarre's kid, and you can see it a bit in the books. Not as endlessly wearily sad, but there's something about the voice.)
13: If you haven't: H.P. Lovecraft meets MI6.
With a whole lot of The Office.
30: I haven't read that. This one stops c.1890, so maybe not so much overlap? He mentions some of the actors are his ancestors, but they get no particular attention.
I remember Eyebeam! It ran in the Boston Globe in the late eighties.
He's John LeCarre's kid
WHAT? I had no idea. I follow him on Twitter and think he should mention this every five tweets, for any of us that don't know. I picked up one of his books a while back, and while just-for-fun fiction isn't really my thing and I didn't finish it, it was well-done.
Thanks for the tip about the new Robert Irwin books, jms. I read The Arabian Nightmare probably fifteen years ago, and it was amazing, but none of the other Irwin novels scratched that same itch.
Circe was as good as people said. I didn't read a lot of serious fiction this year (new ones by Jim Crace and Rachel Kushner; I'm partway through Kate Atkinson's latest). In light fiction, I though Ann Leckie's Provenance was excellent, a nice branch away from her Ancillary novels; I thought the final book in Yoon Ha Lee's trilogy was a bit of a letdown. Splitting the distance between the two, Nick Harkaway's Gnomon was really quite astounding, although I know some people weren't as into it.
I've just started a half-cocked plan to read Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters before MLK Day in January. But it turns out it's a really long book, and I'm a slow reader.
Finally finished up Daniel Abraham's Dagger and Coin series, which was recommended to me forever ago when I asked for fantasy accounting reccs. (That still stands, by the way; of course Gladstone was wonderful.) There's some interesting ideas, and it's well-written, but by the later books it mostly shies away from the financial angle--except when the main character invents fiat currency. Reading that series got me into The Expanse, both the books and the show, which are very fun.
I'm slowly working through Hamilton. It's great seeing Chernow fall in love with his foci, as well as seeing how much he despises Jefferson, but he is a bit ponderous.
I just started Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk because I guess I want to be angry all the time. In other non-fiction, dsquared's book was good, and a few months ago I found Ronan Fanning's Éamon de Valera a page-turner.
38: For whatever reason I liked the last book in Lee's trilogy (Revenant Gun, I think) more than the previous one. But neither captured the feeling of doing fantasy math as well as the first. Provenance was a nice romp. Leckie is good at character-focused stories, so it's great that she can reuse her well-developed universe.
I bought Hamilton when it first came out, which was back before I realized the part of my life where I had the attention span to read something like that was over. But it looks really nice on the shelf.
A book thread, cool.
Nonfiction:
"The Habsburg Empire: A New History" -Pieter M. Judson: Very good if you're into that sort of thing.
"Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School" - Stuart Jeffries: Group biography of a bunch of famously gloomy germans.
"Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World" - Noel Malcolm: Really fascinating. A portrait of the 16th century Mediterranean world as told through the story of 2 generations of a family of minor Albanian nobility who somehow managed to be involved in nearly every event of significance in the era. Particularly interesting was the story of one of them who managed to betray everyone he ever worked for, and the list of his employers is impressive: The Ottoman Sultan, the Doge of Venice, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, King Phillip II of Spain, and possibly Queen Elizabeth I of England. Unsurprisingly, he didn't die of natural causes (the Prince of Moldovia was finally one double cross too far).
"A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal" - Ben Macintyre: Another book about Kim Philby and his circle. Nothing new, but a nice reminder of how stranger than fiction the whole thing was.
"The Cybernetics Moment" - Ronald Kline: A history of cybernetics with an emphasis on the 20 years from the late 40s to the late 60s when it was the darling of the cold war military industrial complex. Among other things, a nice account of how an emerging discipline with so much momentum, pop culture cache, and government backing behind it nevertheless failed to cohere into anything solid.
"The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution" - David Wootton: Quite simply one of the best history/philosophy of science books I've ever read. Maintains that ideas like "facts" and "evidence" really were "invented" during the late 16th and 17th centuries, while also rejecting the relativist conclusions that some try to draw from this. In a just world, this would replace Steven Shapin's "The Scientific Revolution" as the standard source on the subject.
"The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance" - Jim Al-Khalili: Good overview of Arabic science during its golden age.
"Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism" - Eva Illouz: Pretty good. I'm not sure whether it's the author or the speed of change, but her ruminations about online dating sites feels curiously dated given that it was published in 2007.
"Liquid Modernity" - Zygmunt Bauman: I'm still reading it, but amazingly good so far. I thought that I might want to start with one of his more recent books, since something published at the turn of the century would be hopelessly outdated by the rise of social media. Instead my experience so far is the opposite. I keep finding myself thinking "how can he be describing the social dynamics of twitter and facebook so accurately in 1999?".
"Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World" - Noel Malcolm:
This has been sitting on my Kindle for months and I just haven't managed to get into it.
42. Apropos of Kim Philby, if you like fantasy, read Tim Powers, Declare, in which an only-semi-fictionalized Philby is a character.
Also, I will have to add the Habsburg book to my list, as I am into that sort of thing. Thanks.
Who was it who was looking Tang literature books a while ago? (I want to chew on their brains.)
Red Plenty's Spufford's novel Golden Hill is every bit as great as you'd expect. The narrator shows up in 1740's New York with a 1000 pound bill of exchange and an un-explained purpose. Couldn't put it down.
Oh hey, like everyone else I find this thread exciting!
This was the year when I actually planned to read 52 new-to-me books (not counting any re-reads) and read 52 new-to-me books. It was one of the very few times when I've made and 100% completed a sort of long-term plan. Admittedly, some of this was because I read a lot of fiction, and about half the fiction was on the order of Carnicki the Ghost Finder rather than anything more challenging.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route, by Saidiya Hartman and Memoirs of A Revolutionist, by Vera Figner, were probably the two that stuck with me the most. The Hartman is absolutely crammed with insights about racism, abjection and cruelty, plus a lot of history of Ghana. The Figner starts off so dully that I could barely get through it even when I was stuck on the bus with nothing else to read and becomes incredibly gripping once her adult political life begins. It gives you a very strong sense of cold, dirt, paranoia and oppression, and a lot of insight into the very strange class dynamics of late 19th century Russia.
I also read The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson's book about the Great Migration, which was vivid, informative and distorted my whole reading plan because it is over six hundred pages long. I'd recommend this book to just about any reasonably competent reader.
In terms of science fiction and fantasy, A Taste of Honey, by Kai Ashante Wilson, is one of the best short sorta-SF-sorta-fantasy books I've ever read. The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror isn't particularly horrifying or cosmic and the plot twists are not worthy of the name, but they're great books about the thirties in the US and the second one in particular is, except for the cosmic horror, an extremely recognizable and sad portrait of a certain kind of scientist.
This has also been the year of learning bad stuff about male writers - both China Mieville and Franco Moretti are now off my list. (Creepy behavior to an immigrant woman writer followed by legal threats in Mieville's case, not very well known because of the effectiveness of the threats; and pretty well documented sexual assault and harassment in Moretti's.) The depressing thing is that I don't really enjoy their books anymore, particularly Mieville's. I'd thought that I just wouldn't buy their new ones, but the whole thing has tainted my enjoyment of the old.
42: I actually have Liquid Modernity and am planning to read it in the new year! No one has heard of it in my immediate circles, so it is extremely validating to see that a pixel person who comments on a blog that I very occasionally comment on likes it.
Fiction:
"The Swan Thieves" - Elizabeth Kostova: Reminds me a bit of Possession, but I liked this more (I thought Possession was fine, but massively overrated).
"The Radetzky March" - Joseph Roth: Given my interest in things Habsburg, I don't know how it took me so long to get to this.
"A Great Reckoning" - Louise Penny
"Glass Houses" - Louise Penny
The 2 latest Gamache novels
"The Sugar House" Laura Lippman
"In a Strange City" - Laura Lippman
Given that I'm living in Baltimore, I suppose I should have started this series sooner.
"Complete Stories" - Clarice Lispector: I haven't read them all, just dipped in here and there, but they're quite good.
"Meddling Kids" - Edgar Cantero: A Scooby Doo/HP Lovecraft mashup. It's more fun than it sounds.
And speaking of Lovecraft
"Dreams From the Witch House" Yet another anthology of Lovecraftian stories, this one all written by women. A very strong collection, although recently whenever I read one of these anthologies I start to wonder whether "Lovecraftian" has any real meaning as an adjective describing weird fiction anymore.
"Cold Hand in Mine" - Robert Aickman: One of the recently republished volumes of Aickman's stories. Given my affinity for "weird" fiction, I've heard Aickman's name for years, but until recently it was freakishly difficult to find any of his work.
"Into the Drowning Deep" - Mira Grant: because the world needs more novels about killer mermaids.
"Autumn Journal" - Louis MacNeice: I read excerpts in a poetry anthology many years ago, but had the hardest time finding the whole thing until this year.
It occurs to me that I read very little "serious" contemporary fiction. It's either genre stuff or things written pre-1960. Maybe it's me. On the other hand, I find it more pleasant to just jump to the easy conclusion that modern writers of straight fiction are boring.
Some people close their tags but closing tags is for mundanes.
We should have a follow-up thread about what we are buying/borrowing based on this thread
So far I've bought three: Holes, Moomin, and the Spy Among Friends book.
52: Think about how much longer you're likely to live and how many books you're likely to read every year. Once you've gotten over being horribly depressed, see if this boosts the number of books you read.
Seriously, even if I read 52 new books a year every single year, that's only 520 books a decade. I could make an off-the-top-of-my-head list of 520 books I'd like to read right now, never mind the books I'll hear of as time goes on, the new interests I'll discover, etc. It is extremely unlikely that I'll read more than another 2500 books in my entire life, and that's awful to contemplate!
53: I read once that Alexander Gerschenkron did exactly that and immediately stopped reading newspapers.
Red Plenty's Spufford's novel Golden Hill is every bit as great as you'd expect.
Yes, it is, also look up his other books, "I May Be Some Time" and "Backroom Boys". Tim Powers is generally great and "Declare" is one of his best.
8: That's excellent news about the Grossman prequel on the way, looking forward.
14: I know, Lightning Rods! I actually thought that was a much stronger book than The Last Samurai. I know what you mean about the subject matter of course, but the way her control never slips is so impressive, and the unspoken rage behind it all is so clear.
24: Thanks for the Japanese recs; I'm trying to read up (and revive some of my rudimentary language skills) before going there in a few months. The earlier Tawada volumes I've read didn't always click for me, but clearly had a lot more going on than, say, Murakami, at 10% of the page count.
48: It is so great that all this Aickman is suddenly back in print! I wonder if there was some kind of negotiation breakthrough with the estate.
Creepy behavior to an immigrant woman writer followed by legal threats in Mieville's case
Very minor point, but the writer in question is British-born, not an immigrant.
57: Sorry - that seems like actually sort of a major point given perceptions of Britishness, and I should either have remembered or checked.
Speaking of perceptions of Britishness, the Spy Among Friends book has an afterword by John Lecarre, in which he recalls a conversation with Nicholas Elliot, and it's amazing how perfectly Elliot conforms to the stereotype one has about someone like him.
Lecarre asks him at one point whether there was serious thought of putting Philby on trial for treason (before his defection) and Elliot's response was almost literally (I don't have the book with me): "One of us, dear boy!"
Nobody mention that to Michael Flynn.
48. I start to wonder whether "Lovecraftian" has any real meaning as an adjective describing weird fiction anymore.
I felt that way when I read Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, which is a perfectly fine book about the intersection of the weird with American racism. It really has almost nothing to do with Lovecraft, except in the sense you suggest above. I see it's going to be an HBO series. Kind of how every fantasy novel got tagged with a reference to Tolkien back in the day.
intersection of the weird with American racism
Trumpian is the word for that.
A third volume, The Price of Victory, is expected any time now.
Has been expected any time soon for at least ten years. I for one wish the old bastard would get on with it; we're neither of us getting any younger. While people are waiting, Rodger's earlier "The Wooden World", about the 18th century Royal Navy as the largest industrial enterprise ever, or since the Roman army, or thereabouts, is also excellent.
Serious fiction: The Overstory by Richard Powers. Deeply strange novel about deeply strange relationships between humans and trees, and sometimes about relationships between humans and other humans, and between trees and other trees.
Also recommend catching on Powers' past work, particularly The Time of our Singing, a novel about German opera, race relations in the U.S. twentieth century, and the Manhattan Project. His first novel, Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance,, is fun if you're interested in the computer industry in the 1970's, and/or Central Europe in the early twentieth century.
Non-fiction: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsburg. Basically, it explains that Dr. Strangelove was non-fiction. The Pentagon Papers was a side project for Ellsburg; his main job was in nuclear war planning, and he stole huge amounts of documents on the topic but they were lost. He recreates much of the story from recently declassified materials.
35: It's a broad sweep, from first recorded history to the present day, with a lot of personal/family insight into the country in the 20th century (he's U Thant's grandson) as well as some very engaging writing. Recommended, though you might want to skip the history covered in the one you've already read.
56: I haven't read any of Tawada's other novels, but did love the writing in this one despite the faint feeling of dissociation it inspired. She writes in Japanese and German, and Memoirs of a Polar Bear and The Naked Eye were both translated from the German versions, whereas The Emissary has been translated from Japanese. I'd guess that lead to major differences in style, but will now have to read them to find out.
Random stuff that I forgot when making the previous 2 lists:
"The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914" - Richard Evans: General history of 19th century Europe. Not much new here for people who are already familiar with the period. There were a few interesting bits though. I had no idea that, despite its own precarious position, the newly minted republic of Haiti sent aid to the Greeks during the Greek war of independence. Since no one in the Western hemisphere would sell the Hatians weapons, they sent a shipment of coffee that could be sold to purchase arms.
"The Widow Basquiat" - Jennifer Clement: Somewhat impressionistic account of Suzanne Mallouk in NYC and her relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat.
"Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair" - Sarah Schulman: Rather meandering attempt of someone involved in LGBTQ activist circles to come to grips with some of the toxic behaviors endemic to those (and quite a few other) communities. My verdict is: so-so. She seems to want to ask hard questions without actually asking hard questions.
"Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles" - Bernard Cornwell: Just what it says on the tin.
"Masks and Shadows" - Stephanie Burgis
"Congress of Secrets" Stephanie Burgis
Alternate history set in the Habsburg Empire where alchemy is real. The first one is set on a Hungarian estate in 1779 and the second takes place during the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
"The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World" - Maya Jasanoff: I like Conrad and I read Jasanoff's "Edge of Empire" years ago and liked it, so this was an obvious pick. Very good.
61
I felt that way when I read Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, which is a perfectly fine book about the intersection of the weird with American racism. It really has almost nothing to do with Lovecraft, except in the sense you suggest above.
I'd agree that "Lovecraftian" is a vague term, but Lovecraft Country really should qualify. You've got a cult, alien technology that no one even tries to come up with technobabble for, a long-lost occult family secret causing big problems for people, and a lot of racism. The only thing missing is thalassophobia. If you want to say it's not Lovecraftian because the racism is aimed at the protagonists, I guess you could call it "post-Lovecraftian" or "a deconstruction of Lovecraft" or something... but it definitely belongs in the category.
I can't think of any books I finished in 2018 that I'd recommend. As for non-books, the Invincible comic book series ended. It was good. (I mean, a comic book is a type of book, but not a novel, and the notable thing isn't any one book of it but the whole series.)
As for books I finished but wouldn't recommend, I'd warn people away from the 1632 series. It always was lowbrow soft sci-fi, which may or may not be bad but isn't for everyone, and recent installments in the series have definitely got worse.
And as for books I would recommend but haven't finished, I'm about 80 percent of the way through The Three Musketeers. Started reading it in protest at the last 1632 book I read, in fact, or to see if I was judging it unfairly harshly. One of the last novels in the series just plodded, but before I completely wrote it off, I considered the possibility that it was intentionally emulating the style of that book. Lots of old fiction doesn't follow our modern conventions, after all. Turns out that, no, the original is awesome. Fun, fast-paced, and funny. I'd like to see an HBO treatment of it. Could be like Game of Thrones with marginally less sex and about 5 times more comedic scenes.
Wasn't the movie with Charlie Sheen enough?
66: The other Tawada I've read is early stuff, story collections translated from Japanese: The Bridegroom Was a Dog and Facing the Bridge. (One story in the latter is all about being a German-Japanese translator and is sort of a riff on an Anne Duden story.) There was a lot of obvious talent but it seemed a little scattered, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's gotten more focused with time. (I don't mind a faint feeling of dissociation.) Will revisit!
If you have any further-reading recs for someone who's a huge fan of Soseki and Akutagawa, that would also be of interest.
69 last: Recommend 1973 3 musketeers movie, excellent good fun, Raquel Welch gets to let her physical comedy flag fly high and historical interest from the oo la la oomph assumed when Michael York flaunts his nekkid torso, so charmingly scrawny by monotonous contemporary stay puft standards. Whole cast is great. Would make an awesome double bill with l'armata brancaleone.
39: Parting the Waters is long, but it's really, really good. One hundred percent worth the effort.
38: Yes, the third in Lee's trilogy would have been better if there had been less of it. Also, turns out I'm not nearly as interested in Jedao as Lee is.
53, 54: So died the last chatty blog I know of...
Seconding 69.1.
Also, the link on my name takes you to a site where I (and the unindicted co-conspirators) write about books. I think I have about 60 reviews from this year.
Seconding 72. The 1973 Three Musketeers is great.
70: That was very abridged and made lots of changes to the story. Also, it was PG. There's definitely the material for an R rating.
Also me = objectively pro PG *with* RAQUEL. Less gruesomeness, more yowza.
69. I think I have a tighter definition of "Lovecraftian" than you. Doesn't mean it wasn't a good book; also the reader and the protagonist knowing Lovecraft was a racist permeates the book. I guess I just miss C'thulhu.
May I suggest the 1973 movie version of "The Three Musketeers"? Less sex than GoT and lots of comedy. Had Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Roy Kinnear, and Raquel Welch, among others. Directed by Richard Lester, script by George MacDonald Fraser (of "Flashman" fame).
Ouch: pwned by 72, 75, 77. Damn but you folks are fast.
My mom asked for "a good novel" for Christmas. I'm trying to mine this thread for ideas but I don't really understand her tastes well enough to pick things out, which is the same problem I've been having with bookstores and other lists. "Not genre" is about the best I can do.
81: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
Not genre (well, I think it's a fantasy but it has neither swords nor magic beyond a little sleight-of-hand), long enough to be engrossing but short enough not to be intimidating, mostly told by a congenial protagonist, clever and funny in many places, and not nearly as much death as you would think for a book set in Moscow in the 20th century's first half, plus a satisfying ending. Bob's yr uncle.
38. I actually have never read Arabian Nightmare! I meant to a while ago and somehow forgot. I'll go put it on my library holds list now.
Snarkout, how is the new Kate Atkinson? I've never successfully finished a novel by her. I tried Life after Life and Human Croquet and they were definitely not my thing. But everyone else seems to really like her, so maybe I just picked the wrong ones?
68: I didn't really like Conflict Is Not Abuse that much. I felt that the connection between Palestine and general activist community issues wasn't especially well fleshed out and I thought it was kind of thin and poorly organized in general - it read more like a series of blog posts than a book. I also read Gentrification of the Mind and thought it way, way too long - it could have been an essay. Disappointing, because Sarah Schulman's novels of the eighties and nineties are some of my very favorites.
Also, I felt that lurking beneath the surface of Conflict Is Not Abuse was the desire to say, "kids these days with their stupid trigger warnings, what a bunch of whiners". It seemed oddly out of touch.
(On that note, I think it's a mistake to assume that because Olds - such as myself, god knows - socialize with the Youngs and keep up with footwear and political trends, we really are the best arbiters about basically young-people stuff like trigger warnings. We're simply experiencing the world too differently, often from a much greater position of security, to be able to really get at what's going on with, like, campus activist culture trends. All the debates over stuff that exercises everyone about activist culture (callouts, trigger warnings, "is it emotional abuse if you make me feel sad" stuff) just isn't very relevant for most people past their mid-thirties at the latest, because we've had a chance to become ourselves a bit more and tend to have more social power anyway. I think that young-people activist culture stuff should mostly be worked out by young people activists.)
~~~
On another topic, has anyone read the indubitably Lovecraftian Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe? It's sort of a riff on The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and it is extremely soothing while also being a critique of the usual things to critique about Lovecraft.
Wow, great comments and lists.
I read The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the first two-thirds are quite good, especially the hospital and road chapters.
Peter Gay's Weimar Culture, deeply knowledgeable and very personal recounting of the currents and circumstances that made Weimar Germany very different from what I had thought and from the US.
I'm in the middle of Tom Jones, which I'm reading for the first time. Such an inviting and knowing tone in the telling and a lovely story.
Introduction to Nutrition and Metabolism by Bender. Nice level of precision, plenty of biochemistry. I'm sick of not having much context for evaluating stuff I read. And it's interesting how ingested material becomes part of a living organism.
CV Wedgwood's biography of Cromwell. Informative, short, not bad but not great.
Astra Taylor's People's Platform Insightful, intermittently novel, uneven. IMO has aged badly in light of how concentrated and slanted online culture has become. She's perceptive overall, but it reads like a loosely thought out book written in a hurry.
A picture book, The Push Pin Graphic
Mick Herron's "Slough House" series of London set spy thrillers (well, black comedy/spy thrillers):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Herron#The_Slough_House_series_(Jackson_Lamb)
are really very good as entertainment.
I tried Life after Life and Human Croquet and they were definitely not my thing. But everyone else seems to really like her, so maybe I just picked the wrong ones?
Again I agree with jms.
26: the Conquest story is not only great but true.
Thirding Golden Hill; I would have put it on my list but I think I read it last year. I'd get it it for the mother in your life if she is at all literary.
Spufford also recommends the Daniel Abraham books; I would recommend his book about Christianity, Unapologetic, for anyone interested. And, for anyone who has not read it, Robert Bellah's "Religion in Human Evolution" about which I managed to write 16 separate articles while convalescing a few years ago.
I had to read a lot of duty books this year -- ask me anything about Anders fucking Breivik, do -- and so I can't really remember any new frivolous ones, which is sad.
At least if you have an English Kindle, it is possible to get the complete works of Joseph Conrad for something like 99p at the moment.
71.last: Who else have you read? Of older writers, Shusaku Endo is hands-down my favorite: Silence is wonderful (and really well translated, which is not negligible; the translation of Wonderful Fool in particular is irritatingly bad). Among recent writers, Takashi Hiraide's The Guest Cat is delicate and also beautifully translated (both author and translator are poets). Tomoyuki Hoshino is a young writer who's been getting a lot of press recently: I liked his short story collection We the Children of Cats, and the first three-quarters of Me fizzes with invention, though the ending was a bit disappointing. Miri Yu is a zainichi author I've been hearing a lot about from friends, and I'm looking forward to her Tokyo Ueno Station being published in English in February.
Ogged, Heebie:
After Holes, go to:
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale. (The next books in the series are fine, but not as spectacular as Princess Academy.) Her other books also solid.
A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck (I hope to one day be Grandma Dowdel.)
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
I have recommended those here before, but I have also recommended Holes here before, so I see that repetition is required. The Grandma Dowdel books were new to me (recommended by Shannon Hale on Twitter) and I loved them.
If, by accident, you have seen the Ella Enchanted movie, do not dismiss the book! The book is clever and funny and great.
On Googling Hoshino, he was born in 1965. So not actually a young writer. (I saw him at an event in London earlier this year, and assumed from his appearance he was in his 30s.)
90: Thank you! Silence is on the shelf but I haven't broached it yet.
It occurs to me that I read very little "serious" contemporary fiction. It's either genre stuff or things written pre-1960. Maybe it's me. On the other hand, I find it more pleasant to just jump to the easy conclusion that modern writers of straight fiction are boring.
I'm the same. I think fundamentally, a lot of it just is boring. The tediously over-examined lives of the middle-classes. Or, fucking "Great American novels" in which ageing nerds wank on endlessly about baseball and their own penises.*
* I've said this before.
The tediously over-examined lives of the middle-classes
New mouseover text?
It's either their own penises or dinosaur penises.
O.K. I got three books and if I don't like any one of them I'm never trusting book recommendations here again. Even though one of the books wasn't listed here.
Of course, now that I have other things on my life, I might read "Elements of Surprise." I can't read anything unless I'm intentionally not reading something else.
82: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
One I was going to mention. Entertaining for me. Can also recommend Rules of Civility by the same author, his first a nice brisk novel of manners set primarily in late 1930s New York City.
Like LB, I cannot remember much of what I have read this year (despite reading more in retirement). Of those that I do recall can solidly recommend The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August a nicely worked tale in the time travel genre.
Am a bit more mixed on The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. a fairly unique viewpoint on the Vietnam war but a bit hackneyed within that uniqueness.
Finally, I realized I had never read a full length Joyce Carol Oates book, so read The Falls. It turned out to be a Supposedly Interesting Thing That I will Never Do Again. (It was actually a lot better of a book than that would indicate, but I think like DFW her short pieces are her strength, a novel givers her too much space and she uses it fully and relentlessly.)
Finally. I will mention Late Air which just came out. Not a comfortable read, but it includes some interesting (and knowledgeable) perspective on running and intercollegiate sports. mentioning* it as it is sort of a fictional complement to the recent thread on where youth sports gets you to (although even though that sets the framework of the story it is really not what drives the main narrative arc).
*Also full disclosure: The author is a first cousin once removed. This is her first book.
I don't have any literary cousins.
Anyway, I've been rereading various Peter Wimsey mysteries or The Complete Walker too often.
56.2: Yeah, it's probably impossible for a book to be more targeted to my interests(/obsessions) than The Last Samurai and so I appreciate it both for that and for not fucking up things I care about, but Lightning Rods is just an astonishingly great narrative voice, to the point where I would almost put it before I Capture the Castle (which I read at least five times this year, including finishing today) as my favorite voice except that it's horrible and I hate it while admitting it's perfect. On the plus side, I didn't freak out the first date who got to hear about it when she asked what I'd been reading lately and we are still happily together and mostly reading different things.
What other books? I didn't make 52 yet unless you count multiple rereads and possibly not even then. Everyone is right about Gnomon being amazing and in fact it's better the second time through. I'm absolutely in love with The Murderbot Diaries, four novellas about a murderbot (obvs) who's hacked its programming to be able to watch soap operas rather than be under human control at all times but ends up learning to feel and care and it's just like meeeeeeee and makes me cry. I also really liked How We Get Free, including and about the Combahee River Collective. And I'm biased by knowing the author but I found The Beginning of Everything: The Year I lost My Mind and Found Myself, a memoir of the aftermath of a terrifying medical condition (CSF leak) while dealing with parenting through divorce, both moving and informative.
The second book by the author of The Hate U Give looks like it's going to be an accessible read for a preteen who's not reading at grade level, so I'm hoping that will gain traction but I haven't read it myself yet. Howl's Moving Castle was probably the read-aloud hit of the year. Maybe we should go back to some All-of-a-Kind Family sequels since The BFG was deemed too scary or perhaps more of the Bagthorpe Saga. First I have to get my voice back anyhow.
107.last is a hopeful story and I'm glad of it.
92: I don't even hate the movie! Possibly because I saw it with Hawaii when she was home sick and she was super excited to show me it.
103.last: My review of DFW's book of essays was going to be titled "A Supposedly Good Author I Will Never Read Again" until I realized I could just run the headline and dispense with the review. I've kept the promise in the headline.
85.last: Yes, and I liked the opening sequences in the College best. I appreciated the reversal of Lovecraft, but also found the quest structure less than compelling. More here.
Twenty-plus years on (really?), I'm going to hold to my opinion that Infinite Jest is a singularly good book and stands significantly above Wallace's shorter pieces, as much as I was entertained by the best of them. Yes, there are flaws all over the place and you can pick at them, absolutely. It's still the real thing and justifies its length, as almost no book of that size does.
108: Agreed, the Murderbot Diaries were solid SF with a good narrative voice. For read-aloud, SGD has been tearing through Roald Dahl in book form and on CD in the car; she particularly enjoyed "Danny, the Champion of the World", which is maybe less weird and scary than some of the other kids' books, and, much to my delight, "Going Solo". (last year's Xmas present)
And if they liked "Howl's Moving Castle" there are loads of other good Diana Wynne Jones; Dogsbody, Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona etc.
98. Yes, I've practically stopped reading non-genre fiction altogether. In the immortal words of Dorothy Sayers:
As I grow older and older
And totter towards the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.
I've got nothing against DFW as a writer. I read Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing... and liked them both fine (on the other hand, the few stories from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men that I read seemed like exactly the sort of quotidian stories of sad middle class people that I have no patience for). What I've never understood, though, is the DFW phenomenon.
His celebrity reminds me a bit of Zizek. In both cases, a cultural niche was empty (boy genius writer and radical continental European "Theorist") and they checked off most the required boxes and got slotted in.
wank on endlessly about baseball and their own penises
Properly, this is called metawanking.
I don't get either of them, though making fun of people in a cruise ship was good.
In re serious contemporary fiction: After many years of reading mostly science fiction and fantasy, I stumbled on quite a lot of serious contemporary fiction that I enjoy. I think there's lots! It's just that the most-chattered-about stuff is very same-y, written by the same people for the same people.
In about the past year I've read Tyrant Memory and Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, both about, I guess, how people deal with living in the wake of (US-backed) state violence and censorship; Guadelupe Nettel's The Body Where I Was Born, which is sort of about social trauma in the background of personal trauma and which I really liked even though it was a bit wandery; The Emmigrants, by WG Sebald, which like all Sebald is enticing, wonderful and about death; and Hilary Mantel's Fludd, which seemed kind of slight but which had a lovely early Angela Carter quality.
Currently I'm reading The End of Eddy, by Edouard Louis. On the one hand, it's been marketed as and I think gets read as this sort of "here, o educated liberal, a glimpse into the sordid violence of those poor benighted racist homophobic poor people in rural France" - poorsploitation, basically. On the other hand, its depiction of pervasive, pervasive bullying and exclusion really captures how it feels to be pervasively bullied and excluded, gotta say. It's weird and frustrating that because gay writers can't really succeed without selling a lot of books to straight people, depictions of gay lives - no matter how complex, varied, realistic, whatever - always get marketed and consumed as spectacle and anthropology.
I suppose that's a reason to read science fiction - the spectacle is built right in, there's an already-existing relationship to anthropology and writing about, eg, GLBTQ experiences is done through analogy, the building of imaginary worlds, the creation of new sensibilities, etc so perhaps while science fiction qua genre is just another commodity, the ways that GLBTQ experiences are written can't be consumed as comfortably as they can in the "realistic" novel.
BTW, anyone want to recommend where to start with the Alliance/Union series? (I've read Cherryh's Dreaming Tree, and Rider at the Gate and its sequel. All really intensely good.)
Apparently it's like deeply non-linear and stuff.
Jesus but you people read a lot, and Frowner doing the math upthread has me really depressed. I've been mostly reading genre fiction of the hard-boiled variety, Higgins, Thompson, that sort of thing. Finding myself wishing I hadn't read all of Ross Thomas a long time ago and all the Flashman too because that was some of my favorite stuff.
OK, specific question for my wife. Her genre is serious non-genre fiction. She loves Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Richard Powers. She's has a PhD in English, and is not currently employed, so long and complicated is fine. The Last Samurai? Anything else?
121: Merchanter's Luck is pretty good (and short).
124: I said to people, I said, this will make you depressed. It made me depressed and slightly panicky.
I honestly recommend the book-a-week thing, also I recommend a lot of late Victorian and Edwardian ghost fiction.
A book a week isn't really that much! If you throw in some Victorian ghost stories, a little YA (one weekend when life had made me very sad I read, like, three of those Dealing With Dragons books) and some genre fiction, you can actually build up a buffer of a few books so that when you're reading something that is legit time consuming, you don't fall behind.
Also, memoirs are good. You'd be surprised how many books are called Memoirs of a Revolutionary.
125: What about WG Sebald? Also, I like Hollinghurst very much and I also like The Century's Daughter, by Pat Barker.
125: lourdes' novel!! I guess it's technically not out until next year, though. Someone here can probably backchannel you the deets. Frowner, you might possibly like it too...
126: Thanks. And then? Does it matter?
128: I am interested in all secret novels! I have a very infrequently used google mail at frowner008, if the secret of the details is safe with me. (Biscuit conditional!)
I have a very powerful frown! If I didn't have a license, people would just be keeling over all illegal-like.
125: Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall), if historical doesn't stretch her commitment to the mimetic genre too much. In the department of big and complicated (and also amazeballs), gotta go with 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, if she hasn't already. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Thomas Mann, probably Buddenbrooks or Magic Mountain.
She could try the Odyssey triptych that I have yet to manage: Joyce, Kazantzakis, and Walcott's Omeros,, though that last is in verse, which I hope is not disqualifying.
A Jo Walton triptych would be short but rewarding. Tooth and Claw is, despite its title, a Victorian novel of manners. Among Others is about growing up as a bookish kid in Wales and coping with the death of a sibling plus parental divorce. My Real Children is about the slipperiness of reality.
Is David Mitchell too weird for her? Cloud Atlas, obvsly, but I preferred number9dream. Ghostwritten is good, too; I have not tried his newer work.
Orhan Pamuk! Snow is the one that won him the Nobel, and rightly so. I'm told the new translation of The Black Book is much better than the one I slogged through. My Name is Red is not long by my standards, but it is kinda complicated.
Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy (With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Fire in the Steppe) is awesome, though again historical, but only in the modern, W.S. Kuniczak translation. The early 1900s translation is teh suck.
Let me know what she wants to do the following week.
At some point in the past I did the same math as Frowner and the book-a-week thing, or some equivalent, is the proper cure and an incentive to spend less time on bullshit. I quietly keep track on Goodreads so I know I'm not falling behind, and then when a thread like this comes up it's easy to go back and recall what I read and liked.
Frowner, secret details secretly sent.
125. Sebald and Pamuk both seconded enthusiastically, and agreed with Frowner about Sebald.
Another one I really liked is 2666 by Bolano.
128: Congratulations! So nice to hear that a publisher found it!
I would also like to know the details of the Secret Novel of Lourdes Kayak.
125: Several standard recs that often float around here would be (and all of which she has possibly read and which may be insultingly obvious choices to her...)
In vaguely decreasing order of strength of my recommendation.
Life: A User's Manual by Perec
Independent People by Laxness
2666 and The Savage Detectives by Bolaño. (on preview I see 2666 has already been twice mentioned)
And a what is probably a more personally idiosyncratic choice: The Greenlanders by Smiley
Ada by Nabakov
Honeymooners:A Cautionary Tale. by Chuck Kinder. Fictional reworking of his relationship with Raymond Carver; and the author and book which inspired Chabon's (which is my favorite Chabon).
If she has not read all of Murdoch, I just plowed through The Message to the Planet which is annoyingly fulll of "ideas" and UMC English folks discussing them but may be the most Murdochy Murdoch I have read. (I much prefer Under the Net but presume she has read that.)
DeLillio's Underworld but which has the baseball, mid 20th century guy thing in spades.
The Sotweed Factor by Barth or God, even Giles Goat Boy. (I now pretty much view Barth as a too-clever by half detestable shithead but it took me a half-dozen of his books reread to get to that point.) If she wants to hate him, humanity and herself for having read it go with The End of the Road, or for slightly lighter fare, The Floating Opera.
Thank you for the secret details!
125: Has she read any Doris Lessing? On the one hand, Lessing was many things but no prose stylist; on the other, if she enjoys Hollinghurst for the social history and milieu, she might enjoy Lessing for the same reasons. My very favorites are actually the Martha Quest books and the under-read Diaries of Jane Somers.
In the face of these massive public demands for information disclosure, I think this is ok to leak: the distributor's page makes it available to bookstores, corporate titans and the general public starting in May, but I believe this site, originally set up to crowdfund the print run, still works as a slightly irregular means of acquiring an early copy.
Re: 125, for long and mimetic, Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan four-pack is fantastic, though the hook doesn't really land till halfway through the first book.
98 and jump to the easy conclusion that modern writers of straight fiction are boring.
I tried to read non-genre fiction, but pretty much all I want from a book is internal consistency and a good plot. The couple contemporary fiction books I tried had no plot that the central character couldn't unilaterally overcome. On any page anywhere in the book, it could have been:
Suddenly, he stood stock still. Nothing his mother could leave him in her will was worth tolerating her for another minute. He texted his friend to get the name of that good therapist the friend mentioned. He looked around at the trees newly leafing out and took a few deep breaths. It had been a while since he cooked dinner for the family; he made a note to compliment his wife on her new haircut. Maybe his son would build legos with him after dinner.
THE END
There was fucking nothing stopping him from winning! He just wanted to wallow in misery some more. I didn't understand why I was reading it. Fortunately, no one is making me read any others like it.
I think you should try Chuck Tingle then.
141: Moby's heart is in the right place.
Honestly, every time I've tried to read a non-genre modern novel, I've been too bored to finish also.
Look for the wizard. That's the sign of a book with a plot.
140. Try in order
19 Versions of Wang Wei
Invisible Cities
Life: A Users manual
I think the first one is Californian.
Thanks folks. Off to the bookstore . . .
Suddenly, he stood stock still. Nothing his mother could leave him in her will was worth tolerating her for another minute. He texted his friend to get the name of that good therapist the friend mentioned. He looked around at the trees newly leafing out and took a few deep breaths. It had been a while since he cooked dinner for the family; he made a note to compliment his wife on her new haircut. Maybe his son would build legos with him after dinner.
THE END
But that's not the end, Megan. He tries to play Legos with his son and his son gets frustrated, knocks over all the pieces and starts screaming, "I hate Legos! I want to play my video game!"
He compliments his wife on her "new" hair cut and she says, "What? I got this done a month ago! Do you ever even notice me?"
He decides to go to the bar.
Bought a bunch of books (along with all the DVDs and Blu rays) to take back with me to Arrakis including "The 2020 Commission Report" which has been on my list for a while.
I read the 2020 commission report on the commute yesterday. It disappointed me, although it's a very well done techno thriller which presses all the right buttons (hah) for this audience. In fact it presses them so well that my strongest emotional reaction at the end was disappointment that so many members of the Trump family survived [spoiler alert] the North Korean nuclear attack on the US he had provoked with an ill-timed tweet.
I don't otherwise know why I find this kind of disaster porn upsetting. 2020C is not a cosy catastrophe in the Wyndham tradition. But there is a reassuring quality to its dystopia, a conviction that that things will go on being bad in the same way that they are now. Surely we should be looking for fresh hells now.
Hey, I think I preordered Lourdes' book and forgot. Blushful Hippocrene is it, right? It just arrived.
The blushiest! Many thanks, I'm glad it found you.
I blitzed through Daniel Abraham's economic fantasy series "Dagger and Coin" with barely a pause.
"Economic fantasy" is a thing? A genre, even?
This is a great thread. Adding some titles to my list...
Also, ajay's recommendation of True Grit (which I've never read, which it's never even occurred to me to read, but maybe I should?) reminds me that the most gut-wrenching novel I've read recently is Sebastian Barry's Days Without End. An Irish writer takes on the American western, and plays around with the mythology of the West, and makes it so awful and so heartbreaking. It's like William Trevor channeling Mark Twain or something.
OT: I think Sgt. Troy is going to get attempted murdered on.
Maybe she's not going to try to kill him.
She's not going to try to kill anyone. Disappointing.
Somebody tried to kill her, but didn't succeed.
Maybe she faked that herself, to distract from her own murderous intentions?
""Economic fantasy" is a thing? A genre, even?"
Well, not a _large_ genre I admit. But yes. Dagger and Coin, and Max Gladstone's Craft series (fantasy corporate law).
I thought Gladstone's economic fantasy was very well done. Recommended.
Also, Tim Snyder, Bloodlands. Which, I don't get why it was so highly praised. I knew most of the information in it already, which doesn't help; and maybe there's a sizable audience who are familiar with Nazi or Soviet atrocities but not both, so combining them in one book was useful. I don't see the utility of the basic "bloodland" conceit. "Why did so much bloodletting happen in this region?" Because you drew the borders of that region to include the bloodletting. The USSR also killed vast numbers of people in Kazakhstan and Siberia. By what logic are they excluded? If one drew a bloodland for East Asia in the midcentury it would fall on the Chinese Central Plain, not because it's a long-disputed polyethnic frontier region but because that's where the people live.
139, 155. I just received it too, signed, no less. Congrats, lourdes!
Watched another Midsomer Murders, this time my son paid attention. It's good that all the creepy see in this one wasn't incest.
I enjoyed the Miss Fisher's Murder Mystery books as much as the show. I've also been binge-reading NK Jemison, Octavia Butler, Kelley Armstrong, and some mediocre British detective series.
Hey. I'm right here.
It was the porter, in the various places, with a comically oversized spoon.
I think I saw that one! The only episode I ever saw. Someone gets crushed with a grass roller?
No spoilers. Anyway, he was beaten to death with a spoon, then crushed with a grass roller after his death to hide the evidence.
165 and preceding: Somehow I missed 6 when I wrote 40, but what ajay called "economic fantasy" I've been calling "fantasy accounting." I'd also count The Traitor Baru Cormorant in this, although perhaps that's more fantasy logistics. I got both Dagger and Coin and Max Gladstone's series from previous recs here, and they are both great, especially Gladstone's--it's almost all about the effects of our current form of capitalism. Looking forward to his new novel, which I think is in a different setting. Honestly, I suspect my desire for reading this sub-genre is greater than the total supply of it, so all recommendations are appreciated.
And of course if you like fantasy--especially fantasy with a tinge of high tech, in the way reminiscent of the older Final Fantasies--N.K. Jemisin's* books are great, especially in their voice. They're the only fiction series where I've reread it quadratically, reading all previous books whenever a new one came out.
* I have to double-check the spelling of her name every time, mostly that last vowel. Glad I'm not alone.
140 is a great comment. As is 144.
175.1 inspired me to look at whether the second Baru Cormorant is out yet and it finally is, which I wondered about yesterday but didn't check. I really like the Max Gladstone books but haven't yet read Dagger and Coin. I would also appreciate more suggestions in that subgenre.
(Now I'm rereading the first and having the same qualms about characterization that I did 3+ years ago, so at least I'm consistently peevish!)
Dagger and Coin is one of the books I got, but I haven't started it yet.
61: It really has almost nothing to do with Lovecraft, except in the sense you suggest above.
I'm behind, but the description is from one of the characters; he's imagining going from Chicago to an upstate New York filled with inbred backwoods types. The weird fiction, which is of varied sorts, is as you say not at all Lovecraftian. (For that you should read Victor LaValle's novella The Ballad of Black Tom, which is a retelling of Lovecraft's quite bad story "The Horror at Red Hook" from the point of view of Robert Suydam's African-American assistant.
Also, I'm only about a quarter through the new Atkinson, but I'm enjoying it so far. It seems to be playing games slightly with the Smiley books (although there has been absolutely no transference of sympathies from the protagonist to the anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists types, whom she is mostly embedding undercover with as a means of getting away from her stultifying office job with MI-5).
Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back. Succinct reminder of the virtues of the pax americana, but nothing new.
Tim Winton, Breath and Shallows. Very good, very Australian (first fiction I've read from there, I think), trailing off into relentless bleakness.
178. I read the Joe Abernathy "First Law" books and found them disappointing. Now about a quarter of the way through Dagger and Coin and thinking, "This is how that kind of thing should be done."
Has anybody recommended Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series yet? Comes to mind because I just bought the 4th (and last?) but haven't started it yet. Excellent and original. My current non-fic. is this. A bit dry, but apparently well researched. The author is an "independent researcher", which worried me a bit, but he seems reassuringly sane. Basically just another poor bloody humanities PhD who couldn't get an academic job.