You Are So Reading What? v. 2019

Last week I finished reading this, also for the first time.

 

The Last London: True Fictions From an Unreal City, the most recent (in the US) collection of fictionalized essays and essay-ified stort stories culminating a fifty year writing career by my favorite England-based writer, Iain Sinclair.

 

Planet Walker: 22 Years of Walking, 17 Years of Silence by a guy who, in response to a sense of futility brought about by an oil spill in his area, and life in general, decided to embrace the futility by walking around the world (as much as possible) without using motorized vehicles (as much as possible), most of the way without talking, by John Francis. Not sure how I haven't come across this yet, given that I've been reading books on walking and epic walks for awhile.

 

"In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of firsthand testimony -- personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence -- to explore how the German people experienced the Second World War."

 

Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, a detailed treatment of an annual conference held in Switzerland pretty much every year from the 30s to the present featuring scholars involved in what later would be called the Human Potential Movement, by German independent scholar (and obsessive footnoter) Thomas Hakl.

 

Suite for Barbara Loden, a book about the movie Wanda, recently released the Criterion Collection DVD/BluRay and filmed in my town. A strange book to read as my morning walk was altered because of filming for an upcoming movie on the same street where Wanda concludes, in fact as I finished it a lackey came in and ordered two quadruple double espresso's for Anthony Hopkins stunt stand in. The book is advertised as a blend of memoir, biography, film criticism and fiction. I wasn't finding any fiction until, around the production of espresso #12 for Anthony Hopkins' stunt double, Nathalier Leger writes about arranging a meeting at the Houdini Museum with Mickey Mantle, where they spend some time discussing Proust. Obvious fiction, since the proprietor of the museum, Dorothy Dietrich, absolutely hates Proust.

 

Albert Murray -- Train Whistle Guitar

My first read in this Albert Murray collection. This 1974 novel is the first of four semi-autobiographical novels featuring Scooter, this one set in childhood in the 1920s in small-town Alabama near Mobile.

 

The Rings of Saturn, a ... memoir/novel/travel narrative covering the author's walk around the Southeast coast of England, in which descriptions of landscapes seamlessly turn into meditations on... pretty much anything ... by W. G. Sebald

 

Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, a great book on walking and literature/culture/history in the above mentioned city by Une Americaine en Paris, Lauren Elkin. Great chapter on Virginia Woolf's hoofs around London, George Sand in Paris, artist Sophie Calle in Venice, and Elkins own attempts to navigate the pedestrian paradise that is Tokyo

 

The Thirty Years War by CV Wedgewood

Don't know much about this time period and this is a very good book.

 

Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell a study which attempts to ask the question about how each of these authors could have skeletons in their closets ranging from some hairy political associations in their life (Eliade with the far right Iron Guard in the Romania of his youth-- Jung with Nazi-adjacent scholars in the 30s, and Campbell with life-long anti-Semitic and racist biases), and do these mistakes color their work? By Robert Ellwood

 

The Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas

I have been beating my head against this book for a month. I have to pack it in or I might not read anything else this spring. My wife and I even had a drop-everything-and-read weekend, and in 13 hours I think I only read 260 pages. I'm on page 774. And I still have 470 pages to go.

This book needs to be expurgated. It's a fine story, but Dumas is not the writer that Hugo is. Les Miserables clocks in at 800 some pages, but there must be 30 passages, paragraphs, or even a couple of sentences where Hugo makes you just stop. Hugo can take your breath away. Dumas? Not so much.

Of course, with Notre Dame burning, it may be time for me to revisit Hunchback....

 

Arden Of Faversham -- Unknown

This is a fascinating play, one of the first true crime stories written in English (at least). John Arden was a wealthy man who was made even wealthier when King Edward VI gave him some church land (he wanted to punish a particular bishop.) Arden's wife was in love with a man who was in love with her money, and so the two of them hatched a plan, or should I say plans, to kill Arden. Only they were among the most incompetent of plotters and they tried at least three times to kill him. They also convinced four other people to try and kill Arden, and one of them hired two other people to try and kill him. Eventually they do. And eventually all the conspirators are caught and executed.

This murder captivated the imagination of the English, so much so that it is one of the few "commoner" stories in Holingshed's Chronicles, and this play was written 45 years after the deed, and was still quite popular at the time. The play itself is pretty bland: you get to struggle with Elizabethan english without the beauty of Shakespeare, and the characters are very two-dimensional. But still. Historical true crime. That's a pretty narrow genre.

 

On Becoming a Novelist -- John Gardner

This book is frequently found on lists of sneaky-great books on writing and/or the writing life. There's a reason its on lists of "sneaky great" books, because it's too uneven, and way too idiosyncratic, to be considered great. It's an intriguing book and it probably deserves a more thorough reading than I gave it, but this volume may be destined for a bottom shelf in my library.

The most interesting part of this book is the forward -- written by Raymond Carver. I've never read such a glowing tribute as Carver gives Gardner. Gardner was apparently one helluva English 101 prof.

 

Thanks for posting these. FUN!

 

This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City, a series of travels around his home town mostly on foot with a bit of help from public transportation when his knee locks up on him by documentary filmmaker John Rogers who regularly posts brief videos about his walks around overlooked parts of London as well as things like The Olympic Village.

 

We're on a London streak:



The London Perambulator, a book from 1925 based on walks around the off-the-beaten-path of late Edwardian London by James Bone, illustrated by his brother Muirhead Bone

 

The Myth of the Lost Cause by Bonekemper. I was raised in the south and was steeped in the 'lost cause' perspective, even though I don't recall being explicitly taught the phrase. In any case, many years ago I stopped believing that nonsense, but I don't have a strongly constructed set of refutations. Therefore, I'm reading this book to bolster my understanding of the myth's construction and deconstruction.