Reading List 15

I finished an industrious 54 books in this six months — more than my rough target of two a week. Also pleasingly, exactly half were by non-white-males. So woke. There were also a few big books, notably Doris Lessing’s and Grace Paley’s collected stories, Tony Harrison’s collected poems, and of course the Wake. I have many quotes this time!

Short stories

Ted Chiang — Exhalation
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories — Ken Liu
Scenes of Clerical Life — George Eliot
Stories — Doris Lessing
Tales of the Jazz Age — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories — Susanna Clarke
The Door in the Wall and Other Stories — H. G. Wells
The Thing Around Your Neck — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time — A. L. Kennedy
Smoke and Mirrors — Neil Gaiman
Tenth Doctor Tales — Peter Anghelides et al.
Collected Stories — Grace Paley

A bit of a tragedy here — this was the last of George Eliot, at least in terms of prose fiction. I need to find her letters, and start on them. Even this early work is full of gems:

As she entered, her face wore the smile appropriate to the exits and entrances of a young lady who feels that her presence is an interesting fact

And indeed the Mr. Gilfil of those late Shepperton days had more of the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint of in the open-eyed loving Maynard. But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.

this tenderness of the son for the mother was hardly more than a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease, because the man who was linked in this way with an innocent past, had become callous in worldliness, fevered by sensuality, enslaved by chance impulses; pretty, because it showed how hard it is to kill the deep-down fibrous roots of human love and goodness–how the man from whom we make it our pride to shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with us through some of our most sacred feelings.

Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.

Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left to us, to enable us to be useful and agreeable—that we don’t know exactly what our friends think of us—that the world is not made of looking-glass, to show us just the figure we are making, and just what is going on behind our backs! By the help of dear friendly illusion, we are able to dream that we are charming and our faces wear a becoming air of self-possession; we are able to dream that other men admire our talents—and our benignity is undisturbed; we are able to dream that we are doing much good—and we do a little.

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is very clever, if lacking a little in soul, with thought-provoking ideas about the effects of technology on our selves:

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

Fitzgerald was sometimes splendidly spiky:

Then came supper, and after that they went out for a walk, up two blocks and through Central Park, or sometimes to a moving picture, which taught them patiently that they were the sort of people for whom life was ordered, and that something very grand and brave and beautiful would soon happen to them if they were docile and obedient to their rightful superiors and kept away from pleasure.

Grace Paley completely blew me away. Clever, funny, and wise:

Inside the head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up.

The only problem is that she didn’t write enough, but I’ll try the poems.

A. L. Kennedy mentioned on twitter that We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time had sold 85 copies in hardback, so I felt obliged to get the 86th. And very glad I did: she writes so well about the ordinary crises of life.

Literature

Normal People — Sally Rooney
My Cleaner — Sally Gee
The Children Act — Ian McEwan
Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi
Finnegans Wake — James Joyce
Beyond Black — Hilary Mantel
4321 — Paul Auster
Winter — Ali Smith
Stonemouth — Iain Banks
The Voyage Out — Virginia Woolf
The Gustav Sonata — Rose Tremain
Hamnet — Maggie O’Farrell
Silence — Shusaku Endo

Finnegans Wake took a bit of determination to get through, but with the skeleton key to give an idea of what was happening, I was free to enjoy the use of language. The lists, especially, were splendid. 4321 is also hugely long — too long, at times — but the device of the four narrators works very well to address the philosophical idea of what makes a person through convincing stories.

The Voyage Out is very odd, but includes some great descriptions:

The shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial objects

“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole more so to him.

Rachel was an unlicked girl

Hamnet achieved another impressive trick — writing about Shakespeare, but making Agnes a perfectly natural centre of the novel.

SF/F

The Apex Book of World SF — Lavie Tidhar (ed.)
The Evidence — Christopher Priest
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again — M. John Harrison
Little Eyes — Samanta Schweblin
The Hydrogen Sonata — Iain M. Banks
Midnight Robber — Nalo Hopkinson
The Constant Rabbit — Jasper Fforde

Little Eyes is a little gem, dealing with contemporary themes of surveillance and social atomisation through a mosaic of tales. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is one that I need to read again; as he often does, he incorporates material from one of his earlier books in a very disorientating way. Credit also to Jasper Fforde for a very funny take on good old British xenophobia.

The Hydrogen Sonata includes some of Banks’ best lines:

It would be far preferable if things were better, but they’re not, so let’s make the most of it. Let’s see what fresh fuckwittery the dolts can contrive to torment themselves with this time.

Any customary sign-off?
Well, hers to me is usually, ‘Well, if you’re going to be like that!’ followed by the screen going blank, and mine is usually, ‘Um, you take care,’ because it sounds, well, caring, without necessitating the use of the word ‘love’.

The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses its value even when it doesn’t.

German

Herkunft — Saša Stanišić
Eine unberührte Welt Band 2 — Andreas Eschbach
Die fünf Seelen des Ahnen — Ulrike Nolte
Die Ringe des Saturn — W. G. Sebald
Altes Land — Dörte Hansen
Liebesarten — Ulla Hahn

I’d read the Sebald long ago in English, but some things just sound better in German:

ich wusste wohl weder damals, noch weiss ich es heute, ob ich das einsame Gehen als eine Wohltat empfand oder als eine Qual.

Altes Land is a great portrayal of life in the German countryside — various mixes of locals and immigrants try and generally fail to understand one another, and Hansen manages to understand and laugh at everyone simultaneously.

In Liebesarten, I discovered that I’m not the only one to have amused myself in this way in church:

Thekla schaute ihn an und ließ, wie sie es als Kind in der Kirche mit den Kerzenflammen getan hatte, durch ein leichtes Nachobenkippen der Pupillen die Konturen seines Gesichtes verschwimmen

And I loved:

selbst im Sommer sah [der alte Birnbaum] mit seinem spaerlichen Laub wie ein getarnter Winterbaum aus

Shakespeare

Henry VI Part 1 — William Shakespeare
Henry VI Part 2 — William Shakespeare
Henry VI Part 3 — William Shakespeare
Richard III — William Shakespeare

First Henriad! The first three are a little ropey, but Richard III more than made up for it. It stirred vague memories of Ian McKellen at His Majesty’s in Aberdeen.

Entertainment

March Violets — Philip Kerr
The Constant Gardener — John le Carré

I read The Constant Gardener mainly because I thought that The Constant Rabbit would be a parody of it; in this respect I wasted my time. I wasn’t really amazed by my first le Carré, but I’ll give the earlier ones a try.

Poetry

Hell — Alasdair Gray
The Birthday Letters — Ted Hughes
The Sun-fish — Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Collected Poems — Tony Harrison

I was a bit uncertain about Hell, as not being “real” imaginative Gray, but it turned out to be a hoot. He ruthlessly cuts out all the boring bits of Renaissance Florence politics, and there are interesting overlaps with Lanark‘s questing, being guided, and phantasmagoric dystopia generally. After a slow start with the early works, I really enjoyed Tony Harrison too; he makes great use of rhyme:

Or getting a taxi to Slovakia to have a/stroll round medieval Bratislava/and, with herby Becherovka and weak tea,/I toasted you in Slovak: Nazdravi!

Non-fiction

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief — Lewis Wolpert
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake — Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson
Orientalism — Edward Said
The Hidden Life of Trees — Peter Wohlleben
Breathtaking — Rachel Clarke
Venice — Jan Morris

One interesting point from Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

Science is not the same as technology. Technology alters nature: things are made. The final product of science is understanding, while that of technology is a product, something that is used. Much of modern technology is based on science, but this link is of recent origin, since science had virtually no impact on technology until the nineteenth century. Technology includes the ancient arts of agriculture and metal making, as well as the great Renaissance buildings and the machines and engines of the Industrial Revolution. All these were achieved without any influence from science

The Hidden Life of Trees was full of interesting nuggets, especially relevant to the mixed oak and beech that I’m living near now:

When there is a lack of nitrogen, the [fungus] releases a deadly toxin into the soil, which causes minute organisms such as springtails to die and release the nitrogen tied up in their bodies, forcing them to become fertilizer for both the trees and the fungi.

In a forest that has been left to its own devices, the genetic makeup of each individual tree belonging to the same species is very different. This is in contrast to people, who are genetically very similar…. In contrast, the individual beeches growing in a stand near where I live are as far apart genetically as different species of animals.

Breathtaking — an account of the first wave of Covid — was another which I wasn’t sure I’d take to, but I recommend it highly. It’s a reminder of just how well and how badly different people responded at the time, and manages to balance the terrible facts with an underlying optimism about human nature which is very moving.

The episodic nature of Venice meant that it took me a while to finish, but it was always enjoyable. Morris includes portraits of the people and out of the way places (such as the further-flung islands of the lagoon) which most visitors don’t experience, and has some brilliant lines:

(she is the only Christian city marked on Ibn Khaldun’s celebrated fourteenth-century map, together with such places as Gog, Oman, Stinking Land, Waste Country, Soghd, Tughuzghuz and Empty In The North Because Of The Cold)

I once went to an exhibition in Venice that consisted of some fifty portraits, all by the same artist, all meticulously executed, all very expensive, and all of the same cat

I once saw a young business man, sitting on his haunches in the Via 22 Marzo, fanning an exhausted bull terrier with his briefcase

The lanes of Venice often have lovely names – the Alley of the Curly-Headed Woman; the Alley of the Love of Friends Or of the Gypsies; the Filled-In Canal of Thoughts; the Broad Alley of the Proverbs; the First Burnt Alley and the Second Burnt Alley, both commemorating seventeenth-century fires; the Street of the Monkey Or of The Swords; the Alley of the Blind.

‘The piazza of St Mark’s’, wrote a medieval Venetian monk, with a fastidious sigh, ‘seems perpetually filled with Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other monsters of the sea.’

There are 107 churches in Venice, and nearly every tourist feels he has seen at least 200 of them

While the women stitch, the men go fishing, as in an allegory, or an opera.

My plan for the rest of the year so far: Shakespeare sonnets; more non-Shakespearean plays; Paley’s poems; more German; volume 2 of Parfit’s On What Matters; the last biggish Joyce for me — Stephen Hero; and explore a few new people — Rupert Thomson and Max Porter look intriguing.


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