Dancing Mad God

I finished a round 60 books in the second half of 2021, exactly half by non-white-males. The other measure I’m starting to keep track of is the number in German — 14 this time.

Short stories

Subtly Worded and Other Stories — Teffi
Where I’m Calling From — Raymond Carver
The Ebony Tower — John Fowles
The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed — Mariana Enriquez
Fallensteller — Saša Stanišić
Die Wahrheit über das Lügen — Benedict Wells
The Flicker Against the Light — Jane Alexander
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories — Haruki Murakami and Jay Rubin
365 — James Robertson

I kept up with at least one story a day — actually two a day, as I read one of James Robertson’s 365 online for each day in addition (the last one is excellent: https://three-six-five.net/Stories-And-Music/December/31 ). Wisdom from Raymond Carver:

In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another’s company.

And gems from Modern British Short Stories:

Wilson — We both agreed then that Rodney Galt was quite awful in most ways but that we rather liked him all the same. This is my usual experience with a great number of people that I meet, but Henry found it more surprising.

Ballard — The white flank of the Shuttle’s hull was a lantern of translucent bone, casting a spectral light over the sombre forest.

Carter — Our pelts were stippled with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains as if our skins were a mysterious uniform provided by the management in order to render all those who made love in that hotel anonymous.

There were some lovely comparisons in The Flicker Against the Light:

her mouth went tight like the opposite of chocolate

The Japanese stories had lots of interesting discoveries, while it was fun to read about a place not completely dissimilar to where I now live in the title story of Fallensteller.

das Dorf bald von einer Entführung sprach, nicht ohne Stolz, dass solche arabischen oder großstädtischen Vorkommnisse auch bei uns möglich waren.

Einige scheinen Bauarbeiter oder Promis zu sein, da im Oktober noch stark braungebräunt.

Non-fiction

Rewild Yourself — Simon Barnes
Das Verborgene Leben der Meisen — Andreas Tjernshaugen
Travels into Bokhara — Alexander Burnes
Sightlines — Kathleen Jamie
Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China — Arthur Waley
The Natural History of Selborne — Gilbert White
Storm in a Teacup: The physics of everyday life — Helen Czerski
The Journals of George Eliot — George Eliot

Simon Barnes’ Rewild Yourself was a good counterpart to my year of nature discovery — some things I’ve already done, some I’m working on, and some for the future. The Natural History of Selborne was tough reading in places — his approach was along the lines of ‘shoot first and observe later’, but it was interesting to compare his own observations with what I’ve seen. It’s full of little nuggets:

Now is the only time to ascertain the short-winged summer birds; for, when the leaf is out, there is no making any remarks on such a restless tribe; and when once the young begin to appear it is all confusion: there is no distinction of genus, species, or sex.

when some years ago many Guernsey lizards were turned loose in Pembroke College garden, in the University of Oxford, they lived a great while, and seemed to enjoy themselves very well, but never bred.

I have frequently remarked that swallows are seen later at Oxford than elsewhere; is it owing to the vast massy buildings of that place, to the many waters round it, or to what else?

A neighbour of mine, who is said to have a nice ear, remarks that the owls about this village hoot in three different keys, in G flat, or F sharp, in B flat and A flat. He heard two hooting to each other, the one in A flat, and the other in B flat.

The same person finds upon trial that the note of the cuckoo (of which we have but one species) varies in different individuals; for, about Selborne wood, he found they were mostly in D: he heard two sing together, the one in D, the other in D sharp, who made a disagreeable concert: he afterwards heard one in D sharp, and about Wolmer Forest some in C.

If any person would watch these birds [swifts] of a fine morning in May, as they are sailing round at a great height from the ground, he would see every now and then, one drop on the back of another, and both of them sink down together for many fathoms with a loud piercing shriek. This I take to be the juncture when the business of generation is carrying on…. When they mute, or ease themselves in flight, they raise their wings, and make them meet over their backs.

it does not appear from experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected by sounds; for I have often tried my own with a large speaking-trumpet held close to their hives, and with such an exertion of voice as would have hailed a ship at the distance of a mile, and still these insects pursued their various employments undisturbed, and without showing the least sensibility or resentment.

A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape, on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand. For, though it must not be said that every species of birds has a manner peculiar to itself, yet there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some certainty.

during these two Siberian days, my parlour cat was so electric, that had a person stroked her, and been properly insulated, the shock might have been given to a whole circle of people.

Here’s another nature-watcher, Kathleen Jamie, on silence and teenagers:

a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies, coming from very far off. It’s deep and quite frightening, and makes my mind seem clamorous as a goose.

For a few years they’ll enter a dark mirror-tunnel whose sides reflect only themselves.

George Eliot’s Journals were rather a curate’s egg, with plenty of longueurs, but also wonderful views of her and Lewes being bored by Wagner, going rock-pooling, comparing sales figures with the Brontës’, and ploughing their way through the library.

SF/F

Vagabonds — Hao Jingfang
Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel
Memoirs of a Spacewoman — Naomi Mitchison
The House of Shattered Wings — Aliette de Bodard
Surface Detail — Iain M. Banks
The Dream Archipelago — Christopher Priest
Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch — Michael Ende
Parable of the Sower — Octavia E. Butler
A Stranger in the Citadel — Tobias S. Buckell
Blindness — José Saramago
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You — Neil Gaiman

I was really excited by the idea of Vagabonds, but the reality was some of the worst writing I’ve ever come across:

Thinking about everyone who had spoken with him about his film, Eko felt like a pedestrian standing still on a median, surrounded by busy lanes of rushing traffic. He didn’t care about the opinions of the other delegates, because they were like arrows aimed at the wrong target. The useless suggestions formed a constricting lasso around him, but his interest was like a soap bubble caught by the lasso, expanding in a different dimension even as the lasso tightened.

“It’s all because he picked the right mentor. I think the mentor was just promoted to be a system director recently, and his project has ironclad funding for the future. He really likes Martin and asked him to be in charge of several key simulations. Martin’s citation rate skyrocketed, which allowed him to be promoted over several researchers with much more seniority.”

In the sky, strange planets lit up one after another, like abstract pencil sketches.

Coincidentally, three of these books — Station Eleven, Blindness, and Parable of the Sower — were about societal collapse during or in the wake of pandemics; apply comparison here. I very much liked the first two, especially the hypnotic quality of Blindness:

I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

Station Eleven had its lighter moments:

They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”

Memoirs of a Spacewoman was quite an experience:

But meat-eating did make the jackals less pleasant to talk to than the dogs, though they were just as intelligent and perhaps rather more original-minded. The hyaena was intelligent too, and could be communicated with; leopards tended to be perpetually otherwhere.

Reading The Handmaid’s Tale was very much influenced by having seen the series, but there were some lovely linguistic touches:

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.

an aging bass baritone, his cheeks like emptied udders

her long broom-coloured hair [although I suspect I’m misunderstanding the “broom”, I prefer my interpretation]

Surface Detail had aliens suspiciously similar to people I know:

When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

A Game of You was probably the best Sandman I’ve read so far; despite being essentially one big dream sequence, it avoids the arbitrariness that they often fall into.

Crime

The Silver Swan — Benjamin Black
Knots and Crosses — Ian Rankin

Hm. Still not a huge fan of crime fiction.

Gutenberging

Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion — John Cuthbert Lawson

More details on this one in my earlier post: http://chinese-poems.com/blog/?p=2203

Poetry

Begin Again: Poems by Gracey Paley — Grace Paley
On Love and Barley — Matsuo Bashō
Shakespeare’s Sonnets — William Shakespeare
Purgatory — Alasdair Gray

I much prefer Paley’s stories to her poems, but this had plenty of enjoyable moments:

there is a plan being made
in that small apartment
TO BE GOOD AND HAPPY FOREVER
The fact is this can be successful
if it starts late enough in life

I am especially open to sadness and hilarity
since my father died as a child
one week ago in this his ninetieth year

It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless

And all of Hand-Me-Downs and Walking in the Woods, here: https://persimmontree.org/summer-2007/ten-poems/

Bashō’s haikus don’t always come over well in translation, but there were some very striking ones:

Clouds — a chance to dodge moon-viewing.

Skylark sings all day, and day not long enough.

Snowy morning — one crow after another.

The Sonnets were much weirder than I’d expected — the first group were by some way the least enjoyable, so it took me a while to get into them, but the Arden edition’s annotations were very helpful. Gray’s non-boring version of Dante continues, and I’m looking forward to Paradise.

Literature

Birdcage Walk — Helen Dunmore
Gehen Ging Gegangen — Jenny Erpenbeck
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead — Olga Tokarczuk
A Change of Climate — Hilary Mantel
Das Haus der glücklichen Alten — Valter Hugo Mãe
The Magic Toyshop — Angela Carter
In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts — Eugen Ruge
Secrecy — Rupert Thomson
Engleby — Sebastian Faulkes
Schäfchen im Trockenen — Anke Stelling
The Third Man — Graham Greene
Der Sommer der Schmetterlinge — Adriana Lisboa
Spring — Ali Smith
The Butt — Will Self
Archipel — Inger-Maria Mahlke
Stephen Hero — James Joyce
Mein Deutscher Bruder — Chico Buarque
Blaue Frau — Antje Rávik Strubel
Adas Raum — Sharon Dodua Otoo
Pointed Roofs — Dorothy M. Richardson
A Way in the World — V. S. Naipaul
Die Ausgewanderten — W. G. Sebald
Bellwether — Connie Willis

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was great fun, an anti-detective, environmentalist novel with a memorable protagonist you want to spend time with.

For some time I shared my bed with a Catholic, and nothing good came of it.

They were more human than people in every possible way. More affectionate, wiser, more joyful.

The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.

Stephen Hero was no Portrait of the Artist, but there are some great lines:

The young men in the college regarded art as a continental vice

Stephen gazed at the idea-proof young man

A spiritual interpretation of a landscape is very rare. Some people think they write spiritually if they make their scenery dim and cloudy.

I do not idealise the girls I see every day. I regard them as marsupials.

Civilisation may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws

Who taught you to drink pints of plain porter, might I ask? Is that considered the proper thing for an … artist to do?

Angela Carter writing the uncanny:

Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who seem always to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues.

I loved Das Haus der glücklichen Alten — emotionally devastating, satirical, but also very amusing about life, fascist Portugal, and especially age:

als hätte ich wütende Katzen in den Knochen

Wir haben am Ende mit dem schrecklichsten Tier zu tun, dem Tier in uns, mit der Bestie, die wir selber sind. Die entscheidet, dass der Moment gekommen ist, in dem unsere Sinne allmählich abgeschaltet werden, und die entscheidet, wie und wann wir welchen Schmerz oder welchen Wahnsinn erleiden müssen…. alt sein heisst, gegen den Körper zu leben. Die widerliche Bestie, die wir sind und die uns nicht mehr erträgt.

In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts was another great discovery, thanks to parents-in-law; a big story of people living their lives in and after the DDR-period. Blaue Frau and Adas Raum were contrasting, but equally exciting German-women discoveries. Die Ausgewanderten had a great almost-Austrian gloom:

Der Hemdkragen war ihm um seinen faltigen Hals, der wie der mancher Federtiere oder einer Schildkröte harmonikaartig aus- und einfahren konnte, zu weit geworden

nichts war für mich, seit ich einmal in München gewesen war, so eindeutig mit dem Wort Stadt verbunden wie Schutthalden, Brandmauern und Fensterlöcher, durch die man die leere Luft sehen konnte.

Meanwhile, Mein Deutscher Bruder included someone trying to read Sebald:

das Kapitel nahm keine Ende. Es waren Seiten und Seiten eines einzigen Absatzes, und ich konnte nicht mehr mittendrin aufhoeren

Twitter, of all places, introduced me to Dorothy M. Richardson:

She loathed women. They always smiled. All the teachers had at school, all the girls, but Lilla. Eve did . . . maddeningly sometimes . . . Mother … it was the only funny horrid thing about her.

Did she want to tell anybody? To come out into the open and be helped and have things arranged for her and do things like other people? No….

There are no rules for English pronunciation, but what is usual at the University of Oxford is decisive for cultured people

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

Next

I managed most of what I’d planned this time, but non-Shakespearean plays (Ibsen? Strindberg?), volume 2 of Parfit’s On What Matters and Max Porter are still to do. There are a lot of other things I want to fit in: Eliot’s poetry, three German books a month, finishing the Culture read-through … my planning spreadsheet currently has 66 books, which might be a tall order! Some of them are also very long: Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob (992 pages), Nino Haratischwili’s Das Achte Leben (1280 pages), and Birds Britannica over the course of 2022. Here’s to a wordy year!

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.

A total of 46 books in the last six months; with the 55 last time, that makes a pleasing 101 for the year. In the spirit of the times, I made an effort to be a bit more diverse in my selections, so 22 of the 46 were by non-white-males.

General Literature

The Devils’ Dance — Hamid Ismailov
Gargantua and Pantagruel — François Rabelais
There But For The — Ali Smith
Queenie — Candice Carty-Williams
Stay With Me — Ayòbámi Adébáyò
Offshore — Penelope Fitzgerald
Fever Dream — Samanta Schweblin

I bought a nice hardback of Gargantua and Pantagruel about twenty years ago, and finally got round to it this time. The lists complemented the ongoing Finnegans Wake very well. Offshore was funnier than I’d expected, while reading Fever Dream was an interesting way to spend Christmas Day.

German

Atemschaukel — Herta Müller
Das Testament des Herrn Napumoceno — Germano Almeida
Der Spaziergang — Robert Walser
Kelwitts Stern — Andreas Eschbach
Jahresringe — Andreas Wagner
Die Nacht, Die Lichter — Clemens Meyer
Ruhm — Daniel Kehlmann
Mittagsstunde — Dörte Hansen
Erzählungen — Thomas Bernhard

German reading was slowed down by the harvesting of vocabulary, but I managed a fair number. Mittagsstunde was brilliant, combining eccentric characters and universal experience. The Thomas Bernhard stories were mostly early works, but already perfectly Thomas Bernhard.

Robert Walser gives some handy instructions for walkers, and shows us all how you do a proper list:

Höchst liebevoll und aufmerksam muß der, der spaziert, jedes kleinste lebendige Ding, sei es ein Kind, ein Hund, eine Mücke, ein Schmetterling, ein Spatz, ein Wurm, eine Blume, ein Mann, ein Haus, ein Baum, eine Hecke, eine Schnecke, eine Maus, eine Wolke, ein Berg, ein Blatt oder auch nur ein armes weggeworfenes Fetzchen Schreibpapier, auf das vielleicht ein liebes gutes Schulkind seine ersten ungefügen Buchstaben geschrieben hat, studieren und betrachten.

Poetry

The Irish for No — Ciaran Carson
Flight — Vona Groarke

Ciaran Carson was a bit over my head, unfortunately — I think a reader would benefit from a closer knowledge of Belfast than I have — but I enjoyed Flight a lot.

SF/F

The Prestige — Christopher Priest
Jerusalem — Alan Moore
Anima — M. John Harrison
Emanon — Monica Sly and Wayne Shorter
2084: The End of the World — Boualem Sansal
The Fifth Season — N. K. Jemisin
Bloodchild — Octavia E. Butler
Again, Dangerous Visions — Harlan Ellison (ed.)
The Wild Road — Gabriel King
Look to Windward — Iain M. Banks
Greybeard — Brian Aldiss
Rosewater — Tade Thompson
The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists — Neil Gaiman

Jerusalem is one of the few books that one can reasonably compare to Ulysses. A history of the world in a story of the slums of Northampton, it’s given me an unexpected urge to visit the East Midlands. Splendid Harrisonesque similes too.

It wasn’t like he placed a lot of stock in dreams as others did, as his dad John had done, but more that they were often smashing entertainment that cost nothing and there wasn’t much you could say that about.

the deep, sincere green that you found on mallards’ necks

Sure, he’s not a pretty boy. He likes to think he’s got a lived-in look, albeit lived in by three generations of chaotic Lithuanian alcoholics who are finally evicted in an armed siege after which the premises remain unused for decades, save as a urinal by the homeless. Then it all burns down in an insurance fire.

Her expression had been like a knife fight between pity and contempt while incredulity looked on and didn’t do a damned thing.

Rotated slowly on a spit of wakefulness and perspiration-glazed, Mick Warren is a hominid kebab that slumber has regurgitated in the dreamless gutter-troughs of an unending Friday evening.

She has a wilfully Carpathian worldview, Alma.

Seen from a long way off his fellow human beings were reduced in meaning and importance, not just magnitude, with their unguessable perambulations become finger-puppet dramas, toy parades enacted only for the entertainment of a bored observer. It occurred to him he’d always had this feeling, unexamined until now, that far away was fictional. Perhaps in time, too. He supposed this was how almost everybody saw things, without being consciously aware of it. He didn’t know if all that other life and that other experience would be remotely bearable if people actually considered it to be as real, as valid, as their own.

The multitude of references in the pieces thus far, whizzing past above Mick’s head, had made him feel like he was being strafed by Melvyn Bragg but this, at last, was one he caught; was one he recognised.

The Wild Road was another surprise: a fantasy novel about cats (really), co-written by M. John Harrison, and with some really good bits amid the slumming:

Cy stared at them resentfully, as if they had interrupted an important message from outer space.

Every so often he stopped to shake out his charred feathers with a noise like dry reeds rustling in the wind. Sometimes he drove his beak into them like a bird who has at last located a live-in adversary of considerable age, evasiveness, and durability.

Mornings so windy the crows had to climb out of the air and into the branches of the trees.

For some pure Harrison I re-read Anima, which has some very characteristic descriptions:

He smelt rank and lively, like a small animal in straw.

one of those pale blue ties with the small white spots you see in the shop next to the men’s lavatories at Euston Station.

His face was thin, already muscular about the mouth from the effort of suppressing some internal tension. His eyes, though, remained clear and childish, and he had a habit of staring at you after he had spoken, as if anticipating some response you could never make.

Men, women and children died in subsidences and premature explosions, of privation, overwork, bad housing, puzzlement, or grief;

someone who looked as if he used to run Butlins was interviewing someone who looked as if he used to run Bulgaria.

Two naive and happy middle-class people embracing on a bridge. Caught between the river and the road, they grin and shiver at one another, unable to distinguish between identity and geography, love and the need to keep warm.

Non-fiction

Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume 1 — Mark Twain
The Journal/Essays/Journey from Essex — John Clare
The Greater Freedom — Alya Mooro
Foundation (History of England Vol. 1) — Peter Ackroyd

John Clare was inspired (as it were) by Jerusalem, in which he figures as a character. The Journey especially was enjoyably odd:

the swallows are flocking together in the sky ready for departing & a crowd has dropt to rest on the wallnut three were they twitter as if they were telling their young stories of their long journey to cheer & check fears

Had a visit from my friend Henderson … we talked about books & flowers & Butterflyes till noon

there is happiness in lolling over the old shivered trunks & fragments of a ruined tree destroyed some years since by lightening & mossing & wasting away into everlasting decay

to bend over the old woods mossy rails & list the call of the heavy bumble bee playing with the coy flowers till he has lost his way — & anon finds it by accident & sings out of the wood to the sunshine that leads him to his mossy nest lapt up in the long grass of some quiet nook — such is happiness

having only honest courage & myself in my army I Led the way & my troops soon followed

I lay down with my head towards the north to show myself the steering point in the morning

the road very often looked as stupid as myself

on the third day I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the road side which seemed to taste something like bread

the woman jumped out & caught fast hold of my hands & wished me to get into the cart but I refused & thought her either drunk or mad but when I was told it was my second wife Patty I got in

Foundation combined a lot of chaps and dates with some colour:

Apprentices also had a reputation for being unruly and even violent; one of their favourite games, when they found themselves in a group, was known as ‘breaking doors with our heads’.

Short Stories

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby — Donald Barthelme
All the Rage — A. L. Kennedy
That Glimpse of Truth — David Miller (ed.)
The Doll — Daphne du Maurier
Stone Mattress — Margaret Atwood
Three Short Works — Gustave Flaubert

I’ve continued reading at least one story a day, so that’s at least 365 this year. I liked Stone Mattress much more than the MaddAddam trilogy, so I need to explore further there. About 30 years after reading Flaubert’s Parrot, I finally found out the story of Loulou.

Detective

A Morbid Taste for Bones — Ellis Peters
The Wire in the Blood — Val McDermid

My first and last (for now) Cadfael book really was a load of tosh: The Wire in the Blood was more interesting, but very, very nasty. I haven’t quite got the hang of detective fiction as a genre yet.

Plays

The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising — Günter Grass
Much Ado About Nothing — William Shakespeare

Not much progress on Shakespeare this term, but one more down.

Project Gutenberg

The Happy-go-lucky Morgans — Edward Thomas

The last of my Edward Thomas books for PG was pretty poor as a novel, but included some of his trademark oddities:

If I climbed up into the old cherry-tree that forked close to the ground I could be entirely hidden, and I used to fancy myself alone in the world, and kept very still and silent lest I should be found out. But I gave up climbing the tree after the day when I found Mrs Partridge there before me. I never made out why she was up there, so quiet.

Each autumn a dozen little red apples hung on one of its branches like a line of poetry in a foreign language, quoted in a book.

He was too busy and enthusiastic ever to have become an eater, and he found that walking saved him still more from eating.

The pigeons lay all along under the roof ridge, too idle to coo except by mistake or in a dream.