New audiobook, merely 35 hours of it. I was told this was an especially well done audio production and so far (30 minutes in) that seems true.

I‘m working to get into this. It‘s a charming mess of text, a jumble of commentary, conversations, 1st and 3rd person (on the same character in adjacent lines), playful lazy classical attributions and references. It‘s a little exhausting and demanding. But she‘s quite fun. Written 1921/1926, published posthumously in 1992.

On the #Booker2023 longlist

I've been reading the longlists since 2019 and this was a really good year in that small window. I gave five stars to four different books. I really liked that there was a lot of value given to poetic prose, not purple, but poetic and rhythmic, often personal and always generating reflection. Many of the authors are also published poets, and it shows.

I finished last week. My personal rankings are in the comments

I found this to be a novel of wonderful rhythmic hypnotic prose. It took me a few sittings, but I found myself swept up in Gopi's world of grief and squash.

It‘s unassuming, on a grieving family of Jains in England. After Ma dies, dad gets his three daughters into squash, and one of them really takes to it, embracing the sounds and rhythms of the play and the game flow and its strategies.

This finishes the #Booker2023 longlist for me

Now that I‘ve finished Chaucer, I‘ve made the Roman de Silence my morning book. This is a 13th century Old French Arthurian romance in verse. And so far, in translation, it reads a lot like the Lais of Marie de France - that is to say, light and charming.

My experience was on audio, in translation. It‘s autofiction about growing up in Rome with some issues. Fictional Veronica speaks with a false confidence, her anxieties sort of exposed in how she lies constantly, often for no apparent reason. It seems lying and imagined alternative lives are an escape. She tells her unreliable story with a self-deprecating humor. I liked it enough, but in hindsight I‘m glad to be past it. #Booker2024

This was a nice step into Faulkner's best stuff. I loved the book, and was enraptured by the Benjy section.

He's mute and mentally compromised and can only moan. But he observes everything. He watches and feels, but can't interact or express his feelings. He's like a reader. And he floats through time, weaving the present and past in meaningful ways. He catches everything essential, and much that is beautiful and he senses all this.

Not a River arrived today, the day of its US release. That‘s the last of the books i ordered for my birthday last month. Here are the 18 books I‘m calling my birthday books. (I‘ll list the titles in the comments.) So far I‘ve read one - Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, which i finished today

I just finished Undiscovered and feel rewarded. This is a work of personal reflection, of family and cultural and historical reflection, historical uncertainties and miscellany and crimes, the colonization of Peru, racism, and variations of unfaithfulness, with some lines perhaps designed to shock. This is on the International #Booker2024 longlist, a Peruvian author based in Spain.

Four months. I started Aprill shoures soote on January 1, and finished last week. I read from this almost every morning during that time. Once i was into the language, I adored this so much (except when he switched to dull prose). The stories were fine. The storyteller‘s wonderful, and interactions so entertaining, and Middle English verse and its freedom of expression, always drawing me in and unexpectedly charming.

My next book. I finished The Sound and the Fury tonight and started this. It‘s my last left from the #Booker2023 longlist.

My current audiobook, care of my library. Another from the International #Booker2024 longlist. The cringing face on the cover makes me cringe.

Reading with the #whartonbuddyread Actually, i started a week ago, just never posted.

My 5th on the International #Booker2024. Quilombos history - communities of free black escapes slaves in Brazil - is central to contemporary Brazilian politics. Here we get a story of black tenants farmers living in mud huts and their history with their landlords. What makes this book special to me was the look into the mythologies - African-originated encantados mixed into Catholic mythology and martyrs. This is worth a read.

Japan medieval history is very confusing and Clements makes it more confusing by giving the reader too many compressed details and not enough clear analysis. Still, lots of interesting stuff here. I was entertained to learn the origins of sushi and kabuki theater.

Read this mystery for the setting - Kyiv, Ukraine in 1919 during a brief Bolshevik occupation. The book opens as Cossacks randomly attack citizens on their way out of town, completing a white army retreat. Samson, our young orphan hero, has to manage this chaos having lost an ear and his entire family. He joins a nascent Bolshevik police force with no veterans or experience, and gets a firearm.

I enjoyed this curiosity, found it wonderfully done, found the writing, which focuses so much on the sound, always interesting and terrific, with its own rhythm and life. And I say this even I didn't really get it. (I missed a lot, as I discovered afterwards reading online reviews) This maybe should have won the Booker (and I loved the winner, Prophet Song)

My 3rd from the International #Booker2024 longlist, now on the shortlist. 1980‘s East Berlin. A young woman, 19, falls for a married man, age 53. It starts out somehow romantic before getting darker. What‘s interesting, and what i thought about while listening, was how this relationship reflects the state of the dying GDR. It‘s, if you like, a romantic look at a lost, stifled but stable East Berlin. It makes for interesting read.

Started today. And after reading a couple notes…looks like I‘ll need to read that part over again.

Looking for audiobooks and indecisive, I found this free on audible. I‘m fascinated, all of 20 minutes in.

This finally comes across as a playful satire on 1920‘s NY moneyed culture, mocking supposed progress and 1920‘s shallowness, spiritual fads, bad parenting and human frailties. But there are real weighty elements here. The youthful 1920‘s are represented in Lita and Nona. Clear-sighted Lita wants to be admired, maybe a movie star, disowning responsibility for consequences. Nona quietly sacrifices herself to manage her family‘s failures.

A little tough to photograph the super-reflective public library cover. But my model did good. I peaked into this yesterday and seems I‘m reading it. Easy reading. (Reminds me of Gogol‘s The Nose in tone) #booker2024

Twilight Sleep was originally released in a series in Pictorial Review with this cover, before the book was released and temporarily became a bestseller.

So, what did you think? Did you understand the end? (If not, Wikipedia has it laid out in the plot summary.) Like The Glimpses of the Moon, I think this was a Wharton having a little fun with satire, but here also playing with perspectives. #whartonbuddread

Offbeat 1990‘s Stockholm. This reads a lot like Rachel Cusk, but it‘s a study of relationships, lovers, friendships and mom. It has a lovely tolerance of personal oddities and failures, and a warmth in appreciating the whole person. I enjoyed it. (And it‘s short. Took this slow reader 3.5 hours to read these 137 pages) #Booker2024

I really like Kadare. He‘s playful and serious and very critical of the Albanian Stalinist state he lived most of his life in. Here he looks at one phone call, when Stalin called Boris Pasternak without warning and asked him about the recent arrest of fellow Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, Pasternak basically failing this impossible call. Around this is Kadare‘s experience under the rule of this kind of tyrant. It‘s an odd, curious, readable book.

She‘s like, “yeah, right” 🙄 But it‘s my next read and I‘m looking forward to it. #booker2023

The image is from a 1916 documentary of the Twilight Sleep birth process (women only)

Book II - #whartonbuddyread

Characters develop. Mostly the Pauline satire (and the Alvah Loft frustration cure), but also a lot more on Lita, Dexter, Nona, and Stanley. We meet masked Aggie Heuston and Kitty Landish. And learn of Cleo Merrick.

Does Lita have issues, or Pauline offended by the lack of appreciation? Any thoughts on this transitional section?

Started this, a library loan. Getting Rachel Cusk vibes. #booker2024

A treasure highlighted by the Women‘s Nonfiction Prize longlist. This is a memoir of a difficult impoverished childhood in Jamaica with a domineering Rastafarian father who becomes abusive. It‘s, first, gorgeous, with a poetic prose throughout (brought out especially on audio), but also intense and fascinating. Recommended!

I seem to be reading this. Library loan that is taking this slow reader about a minute a page. #Booker2024

Twilight Sleep : Book one
#whartonbuddyread

Flapper shocker? 🤷🏻‍♂️ What are your thoughts on Nona, Lita, Pauline and her men?

We are in Wharton‘s later books. She‘s experimenting, and she‘s bringing middle aged women to life. So as we sigh at her Pauline satire, also take a moment to think why Wharton spends so much time on her.

#whartonbuddyread 🙂

Just downloaded this morning. It may the only international booker longlist book i will read on audio. It‘s also the first from the list that I‘ve started. #booker2024

Getting going #whartonbuddyread

Faulkner‘s 1st book set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha county MS. It sets the backdrop most of his other work going forward. His postage stamp. It was rejected by publishers for having no plot or character development.

And yet I enjoyed it. I took in these characters and I closed it with real affection - the myth of Colonel John Sartoris, his brother, son, great grandsons all a short paths to glamorous bad ends, or haunted by the prospect.

A young adult biography that serves as an excellent introduction into who Wharton was. It‘s a library book that I picked up to scan through and found myself wanting to keep reading. I liked that it's a nice efficient take that covers the essentials of Wharton's very complicated life. It explained a lot of stuff I was only loosely aware of or didn't know at all. #whartonbuddyread

#whartonbuddyread

A little prep for our next #whartonbuddyread - Twilight Sleep. We discuss Book One on March 23.

These are all library books I checked out today

My past week. I finished Ammonites, started Faulkner‘s Flags in the Dust - which will take me most of March. Chaucer and How to Say Babylon continue. (I finished Sir Tropas in Canterbury Tales)

Started Faulkner‘s 3rd novel yesterday. The publisher felt it was too long, and only published it in a cut form in 1929. The full version wasn‘t released until 1973. There were corrections made in 2006.

I know it‘s on me, but this just wasn‘t what I was looking for. I was hoping for a memoir, but this is a collection of five personal essays on somewhat random topics. It's all written with her sharp intelligent prose, and reads beautifully. And, reading her essay on being 80, you can't help but be struck by how mentally sharp she is as a writer. And she does have some lovely quotes. See comments.

I just didn‘t expect this to be so charming and funny. I mean the events aren‘t funny, but the text is, constantly.

Smith addressed serious hot-button cultural issues with a freedom and freshness that is unusual, and insightful. She gets into serious extreme Islam (on the eve of Sep 11), and also into English-Bengali and English-Jamaican racial issues. It's smart, and unexpectedly charming, and works wonderfully.

A collection of quotes from contemporaries. It‘s a messy production, but still, I found it interesting. The editors chose who they thought was of interest and then gave an intro for each writer or editor or critic. It ends up as an overview of an era (1920‘s to 1950‘s)

My week in reading. I finished Pearl, Edith Wharton‘s The Mother‘s Recompense (1925), Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time (2005), and, yesterday, the terrific White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000). Chaucer continues (on The Pardoner‘s Tale), and I‘ve started Penelope Lively‘s memoir at 80, Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013), an intriguing and poetic memoir, How to Say Babylon (2023) by Jamaican-born Safiya Sinclair 👇

Kay Boyle (1902-1992):
Asked whether something special characterized the 1920s:

There was indeed. It was the revolt against all literary pretentiousness, against weary, dreary rhetoric, against all the outworn literary and academic conventions. Our slogans were Down with Henry James, down with Edith Wharton, down with the sterility of "The Waste Land"… ?

#whartonbuddyread ?

Edith Wharton, for example, the grande dame of American letters nearing the end of her career, wrote to a friend in 1934: "What a country! With Faulkner and Hemingway acclaimed as the greatest American novelists, & magazine editors still taking the view they did when I began to write! Brains & culture seem nonexistent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, ?

I‘ve been really scattered brained. So I decided to find the most boring book on my shelves, from my 1994 undergraduate class on the Roman Empire. (Yeah, I was supposed to read it then. Oops) Well, i‘ve been reading it. Not sure how far i will get.

Trying to get into this. I am infinitely more excited about it than my pup. (Well, her interest is zero) So far a lovely look at being 80.

My 11th from the #booker2023 longlist is surprisingly humble. This search for a lost mother, who stepped out and was never seen again, is a life‘s work. Hughes has been reworking this story since she was a teenager, and it‘s her 1st and only novel. It reads like a memoir, and it feels real. It‘s just that deeply thought through. It seems to do everything Hughes wanted it to do. Recommended.

Finally, baseball is back. Also I‘m trying to read this collection of contemporary responses to Hemingway and Faulkner. It‘s a little bit of info overload. So reading in nibbles (and hoping the library is patient with me)