[steveri]

But a very reasonable £2.70 for postage.

[seankenny]

Recently read:
They, by Kay Dick. Dick, in a snub to normative determinism, was a lesbian publisher and writer in the 60s and 70s, but her weird, deeply English dystopian novel They went out of print and was only rediscovered recently. In a series of short, almost interlocked stories a nameless narrator describes life in Sussex as a mysterious band of philistines known only as “they” harass and attack artists. A bit rough and almost unfinished feeling, but also creepy and disturbing.


I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron. A series of essays by the writer of When Harry Met Sally. Covers New York life, cookbooks, disappearing bakeries (of New York), purses, apartments (in New York), falling out of love with Bill Clinton, and so on. My partner bought it for me “because it’s about women’s things” and it is, but it’s also very much a love letter to a city and for the duration of the book I could definitely see myself living comfortably in Manhattan. This effect may have been exaggerated by watching Moonstruck the week before, because I normally have no desire to live in New York.

[slab_happy]

Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché is huge fun -- yes the same Helen MacDonald who wrote H Is For Hawk, yes they took time off from nature writing to co-write a sci-fi techno-thriller horror romance espionage surreal mash-up about a secret military programme to weaponize nostalgia.

If anyone's familiar with Tim Powers' Declare, the authors have mentioned that as an influence, along with Annihilation and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And also internet fanfic. Which is quite an intersection to be playing with. Anyway, it's a blast.

It has things to say about nostalgia and populism and memory and loss and yearning, but also the writers decided they were going to have fun and write everything they enjoyed reading because it was lockdown and fuck it, so it's laced with snark and thriller shenanigans.

M. John Harrison gave them a blurb:  "Proper science fiction – self-aware, funny, ruthlessly propulsive, full of invention … I loved it."

Free sample: https://lithub.com/prophet/

[Falling Down]

It’s hot and I’m indoors so thought I’d drop a few notes on some books I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of years that others might like too.

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These.   A brilliant short novella set in 1985 in Ireland that revolves around Bill Furlough, a family man who runs a small coal and fuel delivery business.  He grew up adopted, has three young children of his own and the book takes place on the run up to Christmas.  Bill delivers logs to the convent which is also a Magdalene Laundry for ‘troubled’ teenage girls where he encounters the cruelty of the sisters first-hand.  I won’t give any more away as I don’t want to reveal the plot. I found it absolutely gripping and it’s so beautifully written.

Patrick Barkham, The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin.  I loved Waterlog when it came out in the 90’s, and later Wild Wood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, both of which were published posthumously.  Barkham has tackled Deakin’s biography by using Deakin’s own copious journal notebooks and interviews with those who new him closely.  From life in London as an ad-man, second hand-furniture salesmen and then buying the farm in Suffolk with the moat that inspired Waterlog.  He must have been both a joy and awful to live with.  Warm, eccentric, moody and brilliant. Just like this book.

M John Harrison, Wish I was Here.  MJH’s anti-memoire.  An autobiography of writing, living, climbing and memory itself.  I’ve used the words ‘flint-sharp’ to describe his writing before and I can’t think of any better so they’ll do.  The sections about climbing and ‘the life’ are superbly evocative.  The writer, writing about writing parts are very writerly, but I like writerly, so this reader, reading about a writer writing about writing thoroughly enjoyed himself.

David Keenan, Monument Maker.  I read this last Summer but it’s just been published in paperback.  It’s more of a dream or waking vision than conventional novel.  A summer in France. The siege of Khartoum. Fascist cryptozoologists.  A rock band on the moon.  Not everyone’s cup of tea by any means but I loved it.

David Keenan, Industry of Magic and Light.  A sort-of prequel to This Is Memorial Device.  A caravan in Airdrie, inhabited during the late sixties by a hippy becomes a treasure trove of found objects, each then forming the basis for the chapters of the book which tells the story of ‘60’s Airdrie (and further afield including Afghanistan) via the creators of the light show that gives the novel its title.  Again, if you’ve read and enjoyed This is Memorial Device, Xstabeth and For the Good Times, you’ll love it. 

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead.  Is Dickens’ David Copperfield retold in contemporary, opioid ridden, rust-belt Virginia.   Damian (Demon) has a bad start in life and it gets worse. You fall in love him from the get-go.  It made me cry at times on the sun lounger this Summer and won the Pulitzer prise for fiction this year.  Well deserved.

Tanya Shedrick, The Cure for Sleep.  Shedrick’s ferocious and tender memoir of motherhood, early life, relationship and a late-blooming creativity.  Brutally honest and fascinating.  A great read.

John Moriarty, (Several books). A hut at the edge of the village, Dreamtime, Turtle was gone a long time (A trilogy of three volumes), What the curlew said, Nostos.  Once I’d read the opening chapters of ‘A Hut’, a compendium of Moriarty’s writing I was hooked and went on a streak over the last couple of years.  I’d never heard of him until Martin Shaw (the storyteller) and Mark Rylance both talked glowingly of him on a podcast during lockdown. 

From the Guardian obituary.. “Many recognise John as a major writer, comparable to Yeats, Joyce and Beckett.  A large, rough-hewn man with bright, deep set eyes beneath a leonine mass of curls, John had a rich and melodious Kerry voice that changed from a gentle softness to a bellowing ebullience that erupted into a laughter that shattered all pomposity. His pain at our blindness to the riches of our created world and the God who made us resonates through all his writing. A mystic and prophet in the Old Testament meaning of the word, his was an inspiring vision of a world and a culture that is truly healing.

His writing could be dense and difficult, requiring a knowledge of myth and religion similar to his own, but there are so many passages of such intense and vibrant beauty, one can forgive such heavy going.”

Dreamtime was (literally) a revelation.  There’s a lovely short on YouTube with Tommy Tiernan (comedian) and Moriarty speaking at his home in Connemara. If you like what he has to say, start with ‘A Hut’ and go from there.  Remarkable and genius.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  A stunningly beautiful read similar in style and form to Thoreau’s Walden.  Often bracketed in the nature-writing category, a label that Dillard resisted, Tinker Creek is one of a kind.  It also won a Pulitzer for non-fiction in 1975.

Wendy Erskine, Dance Move.  Character driven short stories from one of Northern Ireland’s best writers.  Superb.

Jay Griffiths, Nemesis My Friend.  Griffiths lives in mid-Wales and this lovely quiet, deep book reflects the landscape in which she wrote it.  The book tracks the light of the year from Winter through the seasons.  Nemesis as the archetype of limitation.

Ian Penman, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.  I love Ian Penman’s style and Fassbinder’s films, so this great long-form essay, part biography was right up my Strasse.

I’ve run out of steam now and fancy a walk.

[Duma]

Some of those look lovely, thanks FD. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek made a huge impression on me as a teenager when I pulled it from my parents shelves, thanks for the reminder.

[andy popp]

Superb post Ben, thanks.

[chris05]

Great list FD, thanks for posting. Have added them to the list.

[TobyD]

The Hare with Amber Eyes: Edmund de Waal
I was highly recommended this, and spoken to others who have liked it; I thought it was interesting but lacked enough narrative drive to make it in any way compelling for me. In my opinion, it's okay but not great.
Snow country: Sebastian Falks
I really liked this, on the other hand; some of the cover blurb on it says that it's a love story, but this doesn't do it justice; it is, in a sense, but along with history and stuff about psychoanalysis. Recommended.

[slab_happy]

Relevant to this thread's interests -- M. John Harrison in conversation with Helen Mort about "Wish I Was Here", 21st Oct in Sheffield:

https://offtheshelf.org.uk/event/wish-i-was-here/

[Will Hunt]

David Keenan, Monument Maker ...Not everyone’s cup of tea by any means but I loved it.

Yeah, ok, you gave fair warning! I got a chapter in and ran a mile 

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These.   A brilliant short novella set in 1985 in Ireland that revolves around Bill Furlough, a family man who runs a small coal and fuel delivery business.  He grew up adopted, has three young children of his own and the book takes place on the run up to Christmas.  Bill delivers logs to the convent which is also a Magdalene Laundry for ‘troubled’ teenage girls where he encounters the cruelty of the sisters first-hand.  I won’t give any more away as I don’t want to reveal the plot. I found it absolutely gripping and it’s so beautifully written.

Loved this. Incredible to be able to write something so short but to have it all so well formed. Needed it badly after finishing Beastings by Benjamin Myers which has a similar theme but which makes Cormac McCarthy look like Willy Wonka.

[spidermonkey09]

Beastings is awesome but fuck me that's a bit of a kick in the teeth in the last few pages!

[andy popp]

I've been delving into some Americana. First, A Cool Million by Nathanael West - a broad and vicious satire on American rags-to-riches, bootstrapping boosterism (West wrote the much better known Hollywood satire Day of the Locust, in which the name Homer Simpson makes its first appearance).

Next up, two short John Steinbeck novellas, perhaps the first time I've read him in nearly 40 years: The Pearl and The Red Pony. I enjoyed both but the latter, four interconnected stories about a boy growing up on a remote farm in Northern California, is particularly good: beautiful, simple, brutal. This too reminded me of Cormac McCarthy, only much better (I think McCarthy is massively overrated).

Finally, I'm currently reading Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, non-fiction reportage of the Republican and Democratic party conventions of 1968, the latter descending into mass street violence. Again I haven't read Mailer in decades, and have never read very much anyway. It is incredibly sexist and no woman escapes appraisal of her sexual attractiveness to Mailer but there is some absolutely bravura writing and penetrating, scathing analyses of the competing politicians, Nixon in particular (so far I've only got to the Republican convention in Miami).

[Falling Down]

Thanks Andy, great post & they all sound great, especially the Mailer.

Has anyone read any Jon Fosse? I’ve never heard of him until yesterday.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/05/where-to-start-with-jon-fosse

[andy popp]

Thanks Ben. I haven't finished it yet but the Mailer is really very good - a bit of revelation (and the influence on HST is very clear).

As to Fosse, no, I'd heard the name vaguely but knew nothing. I

[jwi]

Thanks Andy, great post & they all sound great, especially the Mailer.

Has anyone read any Jon Fosse? I’ve never heard of him until yesterday.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/05/where-to-start-with-jon-fosse

For many years I amused myself with publishing my guess who would get the Literature Prize the day before it was awarded (I guessed correctly three years in a row, if I might brag). I stopped in disgust after an american pop artist got the prize. But, as such I scanned books by favourites (since they ask about 4000 institutions for a list of authors, an approximate shortlist is close to general knowledge). Fosse has been a top ten favourite for some ten years now. I quickly scanned some of his works and wasn't too impressed at the time.

[Falling Down]

David Keenan, Monument Maker ...Not everyone’s cup of tea by any means but I loved it.

Yeah, ok, you gave fair warning! I got a chapter in and ran a mile 

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These.   A brilliant short novella set in 1985 in Ireland that revolves around Bill Furlough, a family man who runs a small coal and fuel delivery business.  He grew up adopted, has three young children of his own and the book takes place on the run up to Christmas.  Bill delivers logs to the convent which is also a Magdalene Laundry for ‘troubled’ teenage girls where he encounters the cruelty of the sisters first-hand.  I won’t give any more away as I don’t want to reveal the plot. I found it absolutely gripping and it’s so beautifully written.

Loved this. Incredible to be able to write something so short but to have it all so well formed. Needed it badly after finishing Beastings by Benjamin Myers which has a similar theme but which makes Cormac McCarthy look like Willy Wonka.

Sorry Will I just saw this and didn’t realise you’d had a crack.  Yeah the Keegan is brilliant, so brilliant. Glad you enjoyed it.  If you’ve still got the stomach then I’d stick with Monument Maker as it’s like six novels in one but also give it up if it’s not your bag. Though I do think This is Memorial Device and For The Good Times are easier ways into Keenan’s world.

I loved Beastings though. Like you say, it’s brutal and Ben is great writer. If you want something exquisitely written and much, much gentler then I can really recommend The Offing. A coming of age novel set around Robin Hoods Bay. I read it in a single sitting and was utterly beglamoured by it.

[Falling Down]

The great Olivia Laing interviewing MJH in Granta.

https://granta.com/olivia-laing-m-john-harrison/

There’s a short passage on the commodification of climbing that’s less swivel eyed than one I read just recently.

[Johnny Brown]

Nice one Ben. MJH is talking in Sheffield tonight coincidentally, tickets still available.

[Falling Down]

With Helen Mort right? It’ll be good.

[Duma]

Currently reading The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, and literally the page after I picked it up for the first time since seeing that Granta piece was a line almost word for word the same as his description of getting his mother to button his coat.

[andy popp]

I've just finished a book I think a lot of people here might enjoy (indeed, might have read already). In 1950s Togo, a young boy has a nearly deadly encounter with a snake, recovering he reads a book about Greenland and becomes obsessed with travelling there. In 1958, aged 16, he ran away from home and spent the next eight years working his way through Africa and Europe before eventually reaching Greenland in 1964. In Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland Tété-Michel Kpomassie tells the remarkable (true) story of that journey and, in particular, the eighteen months he spent living among the inidigenous Greenlanders, by whom he seems to have been welcomed without question. It is a rich, vivid, and humane portrayal both of the author as a young man and of a culture even then coming under immense pressure (Denmark does not come out of this particularly well). A highly unusual and very worthwhile piece of travel writing. First published in English in 1981, Penguin reissued it last year.

[jwi]

Sounds very interesting, thanks Andy! A quick google seems to indicate that it is a travelogue of legendary status in Africa and France, with many editions and re-editions.

Downloaded.

[andy popp]

A quick google seems to indicate that it is a travelogue of legendary status in Africa and France, with many editions and re-editions.

The edition I read has a very interesting, long afterword that recounts what happened when he returned home, how he came to write the book, and the opportunities it led to across his life (he's still alive). Yes, renowned I think across Africa and France.

[sherlock]

Just started this yesterday on your recommendation.
Fascinating, thanks.

[Wellsy]

Same, looks great

As for a recommendation, it is a known classic but Donna Tartt's The Secret History is bloody brilliant. 100% worth a read. Made me get off my arse and organise starting French Lessons next year as well