Jan. 2023/Reading: "Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account." Oscar Wilde

Hope 2023 is a great year for one and all.

This year I'm determined to tackle some of the classics in my TBR pile, stuff I read years ago, or in inferior translations or somehow neglected (up to now).

That includes DON QUIXOTE, Russian literature and whatever else I can manage.

For the moment, however, I'm working my way through THE PRIVILEGED LIFE AND RADICAL PRESIDENCY OF FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, a nice, fat biography of America's greatest president.

I've started Rousseau's Confessions, which is proving easier reading and more amusing than I'd expected.

Finished The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector. A mixed bag. You could make a really amazing Selected Stories out of this book.
Also finished The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt. Written while Judt was battling ALS. It's an odd book. Very reticent. Starts as a memoir but ends up being a selection of essays with some biographical details sprinkled here and there. There's some sadness and some crankyness. Moments of absolute brilliance. Good companionship.

Posted a couple of reviews this month:

The Spy who came in from the Cold, John le Carré - https://medium.com/p/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold-john-le-carr%C3%A9-160982...

Engine Summer, John Crowley - https://medium.com/p/engine-summer-john-crowley-fcf79159ff4b

Finished George Saunders' latest collection of short stories, LIBERATION DAY.

I've followed Saunders' career for ages, a huge fan...but this one didn't affect and move and unsettle me as much as previous books. The writing was proficient, as always, but the tales lacked the edge and deep sense of unease I've come to associate with the man's work.

I'll be curious what other folks think.

Finally got STELLA MARIS under my belt, the companion volume to Cormac McCarthy's THE PASSENGER.

It's a two-hander, long conversations between the brilliant but disturbed ex-mathematician Alicia West and her psychiatrist.

She tries to explain the life that has brought to the psychiatric hospital, her devotion to her brother and her fascination with higher order thinkers.

A short book but a slog, since I know about as much about math and physics as I do the sport of cricket. And that's saying something.

Interesting bits but, unlike THE PASSENGER, it left me unmoved.

When We Were Real, William Barton - a sort of reread, in as much as this is the "author's preferred edition" ebook of a novel originally published in paperback in 1999. The narrator, Murph, is born into a matriarchal society in a space habitat in the Alpha Centauri system in a future where all planetary systems outside the solar system are dominated by powerful corporations. Murph flees his habitat the night before his wedding, signs up with Standard ARM as an engineer on a medevac spacecraft. Where he meets Violet, a purple-furred fox-faced Optimod, the medevac spacecraft's pilot. They fall in love. They are sent into battle. She is killed. He goes on a long wander about the various star systems inhabited by humans, experiencing torture, rape, war, revolution, suppression... before meeting up with Violet, who had survived, and ending up in one last battle in which Earth finally defeats the corporations. I'm a big fan of Barton's fiction, and I think what appeals so much is the combination of hard sf sensibilities with space opera universes originally created when Barton was a schoolboy. It's that mix of adult sf on a substrate of juvenilia. The universes are fun, but the stories set in them are grim. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition. In a foreword, he explains his career had stalled, despite his novels being reasonably successful, because his fiction was too downbeat. Se he decided to write a romance. And while When We Were Real certainly revolves around a love story, it's hardly a romance. Good stuff.

The Old Drift, Narmali Serpell - this won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020 and I have no idea why. True, it was not a good shortlist that year - a by-the-numbers pastiche of Wolfe by Tchaikovsky, an astonishingly shit novel by David Wellington, a Kameron Hurley (she's good but I've yet to read this one), and a pair of meh sf novels by Charlie Jane Anders and Arkady Martine. But The Old Drift is not that good, nor is it actually science fiction. It's basically the history of Zambia, as told through the stories of three interlocking families, from Livingstone's first sighting of the Victoria Falls in 1855 to the near-future. The writing has its moments, but is often bad - the author uses both "secrete" and "secret" as a verb and still gets the meaning wrong, for example; and they seem to think Mandelbrot studied heredity. The boko is a slog for the first third, but then begins to pick up a little, and I found myself liking it a lot more than I had initially. Not a deserving winner.

The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch - I thought The Old Drift not as good as advertised, but The Book of Joan was awful. Word-salad prose that just throws words at the page and hopes they make sense - which they often didn't. A completely nonsensical plot about sexless humans living in an orbital habitat and a young woman on the Earth's surface who is some sort of ecological Joan of Arc. Except the novel completely garbles Joan of Arc's story. One of the worst-written books I've read for a long time. Avoid.

That Glimpse of Truth, David Miller - subtitled "100 of the finest short stories ever written" (which Amazon has mangled into "the 100 finest short stories ever written", which is not the same thing at all). The editor and compiler was a literary agent, and there are a lot of obvious picks, and a lot of surprising ones. Some of them I just didn't get - what they were about, or why they were chosen. Others seemed an odd choice from a writer better known for other works. An interesting read, but not really one to get excited about.

Engine Summer, John Crowley I wrote about this here: https://medium.com/p/engine-summer-john-crowley-fcf79159ff4b

The Goshawk by T.H. White. It was alright. A bit pompous and grandiloquent at times. It is a short book but somehow it managed to feel padded. The Peregrine by J.A. Baker is far superior. Or My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley. At least that one was weird.

LATE FRAGMENTS by Charles Baudelaire--a new translation by Richard Sieburth.

Remarkable book; as advertised, the last writings of Baudelaire. The author had taken refuge in Brussels to escape his creditors but soon developed a deep loathing for the Belgian people. A substantial portion of this book is pure invective directed toward his host country. Quite hilarious at times (admittedly, I have a nasty sense of humor).

Highly recommended, especially to unrepentant misanthropes...and folks who have something against Belgians.

>9 CliffBurns: "I can think of no more offensive term for the Belgians than: 'The Belgians'." (Monty Python)

Personally, I don't see it. Brits and Belgians have so much in common - love beer, chocolate and chips...

That's funny, the Python bit on the Belgians occurred to me as well.

I found myself laughing out loud at various points during Baudelaire's book--his insults are so ridiculous and over the top. For instance, he accuses Belgians of walking forty feet while looking backward over their shoulders, a hazard to other pedestrians. Where did he come up with that one? He also calls them "atheistical quadrupeds". And that's one of his tamer remarks...

Belgium has an underwear museum. Enough said.

Folks have been recommending Sam Lipsyte to me for years, so I finally got around to reading his novel NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU.

Set during the first Clinton administration, the story of a post-punk band in the midst of imploding due to substance abuse and personality conflicts.

The lead singer is a junkie who steals his bassist's guitar to feed his habit. Said bassist spends the rest of the book trying to a) recover his instrument and b) rally the band for one last farewell gig.

A light, funny palate-cleanser.

>12 iansales: Huh. Vienna has a Goulash Museum.

>14 RobertDay: to be fair, goulash is Hungarian. Underpants are not normally associated with Belgium.

I, personally, have no trouble with an underwear museum.

Better that than a James Patterson memorial statue.

MY NAME IS YIP by Paddy Crewe.

Historical novel set in 19th century Virginia. The protagonist is a mute, small of stature--not an imbecile, as the local townspeople believe, but wise beyond his years, which he proves when he learns to read and write.

A superb evocation of a brutal era, a compelling and bewitching story marred slightly by an abrupt ending.

Recommended.