August, 2024 Reading: “That August time it was delight / To watch the red moons wane to white.” Swinburne

Starting off August with an omnibus of Wodehouse, while eying a couple of fat, tasty history tomes.

How about you?

Just finished THE DEVIL'S BEST TRICK, a book about the presence of evil in our society (and pretty much every society, regardless of its locale or era).

Sullivan is a bona fide journalist but I found it frustrating that he never dealt with his subject in a comprehensive manner, instead veering down side roads, including the supposed existence of a "devil cult" in a small Texas community, a visit to a festival of black magic in Mexico and the real-life exorcism that inspired the 1971 horror classic.

Occasionally interesting but for the most part unsatisfactory.

Last month's readings:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson: Bittersweet read. Kind of funny but, unintentionally, kind of sad and dark. At least BoJack Horseman had some self awareness. This one hasn't aged well. Maybe 3.5 stars. or less.

Dime-Store Alchemy by Charles Simic: I like the notion of a poetic examination of a visual artist, but the idea is better than the execution here. There are plenty of good moments though.

William Blake vs the World by John Higgs: Discusses various themes related to William Blake using current thinking about physics, neurology, etc. Some of the discussions are fascinating, others not so much. It’s a rambling book, a mixed bag. A couple of weeks after finishing it I am still thinking about his discussion of Blake’s visions. Would love to revisit that section in the near future.

The Song of Songs: A New Translation by Marcia Falk: Some beautiful poems here and there. Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil is a hard act to follow.

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck: I lost interest about 2/3 into the book. This the second Erpenbeck I read. I still believe she is a superior writer but the two books I've read have been oddly frustrating.

Time Regained by Marcel Proust: At some point the flaws become irrelevant because of the scope of the project. Enumerating them is missing the point. The book feels like an organic growth, excessive and shapeless. In any case the intelligence and the mastery are demonstrated over and over. I feel affection for these characters and for the book. Would love to revisit some sections in the future, others (The Captive and The Fugitive) I can do without. Loved the whole experience though.

Currently reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Saramago, and The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse.

(Cranky yet intelligent and humorous post deleted.)

Brothers of Earth, CJ Cherryh

Cherryh’s first novel (published a few months after Gates of Ivrel, but actually submitted and accepted first) from 1976. It’s based on a premise Cherryh has used many times throughout her career - a human man crashlands on an alien, but humanoid, world and tries to integrate, inadvertently kicking off a war between various nations/factions (cf Compact Space, Cuckoo’s Egg, Faded Sun, Foreigner, etc). The story takes place over a thousand years after Cherryh’s Alliance/Union history, although the Alliance still exists. But it’s at war with another human polity, the Hanan. Kurt Morgan, sole survivor of an Alliance warship, crashes and is discovered by a party of locals, the nemet. They take him aboard their sailing ship to the city of Nephane, where he meets the methi, the ruler of the city, who is Hanan, and the sole survivor of an earlier Hanan mission. She allows him to enter the household of Kta, the captain of the ship. Kta’s family is the Elas, and they’re descended from the Indras, inhabitants of a powerful theocratic state across the sea. Nephane is split between Indras-descended and the original locals, the Sufaki, with the former forming a wealthy and powerful elite. The Sufaki rebel, Morgan and Kta are caught up in it, and flee because the methi supports the Sufaki… The world is at a roughly late Bronze Age level - Cherryh used to teach ancient history - so it’s all swords and sandals and triremes, with the theocratic Indras versus the more liberal Indras-descended of Nephane versus the pantheistic Sufaki. This is stuff Cherryh has done many times since, and better. For a first novel, in the 1970s, it’s sort of impressive, and it’s interesting seeing how much of Cherryh’s style was pretty much there from the beginning. But the story does drag in places, and while there are plenty of strong female characters, the main protagonists are male - and there's an instance of fridging. One for Cherryh fans.

>3 mejix: DIMESTORE ALCHEMY and FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS are, I confess, big favorites here at Casa Burns.

Love Simic's poetry and you should also take a peek at his notebooks, THE MONSTER LOVES HIS LABYRINTH. Amazing, just amazing.

Reading FEAR AND LOATHING for the first time when I was around 18 years old was a life-changing experience...for reasons I can't go into because of Statute of Limitations considerations, etc.

>6 CliffBurns:
I love Charles Simic. I expected more of this one because it was about Cornell, whom I love too. It does have Totemism which begins:"Inside everyone there are secret rooms. They're cluttered and the lights are out. There's a bed in which someone is lying with his face to the wall. In his head there are more rooms." Lovely. Will keep an eye out for your recommendation.

Hehehe, yes, I can see myself liking Hunter Thompson at 18 too. I think I waited too long. There are books that I'm afraid to reread because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like them any more but the memory of reading them is very dear. Pretty much anything by Cortazar.

A Talent for War, Jack McDevitt

Actually a reread. Between 1998 and 2015, McDevitt appeared on the Nebula Award shortlist pretty much every year. Clearly, there was something going on, because his books are at best merely okay. A Talent for War is the first book of the Alex Benedict series, and is set in the 116th century - not that you would know it: there is FTL and earthlike planets and AI and holograms, but every planet is pretty much the same, with some sort of vaguely twentieth-century US culture. In fact, take away the spaceships and the novel isn’t even science fiction. Benedict’s uncle dies in a liner disaster, and Benedict discovers he’d been investigating the last days of the war with the alien Ashiyyur. A small fleet of frigates, led by Christopher Sim, a history teacher and self-styled military leader, fight an unexpectedly successful series of battles against the aliens, which eventually brings other more powerful worlds into the war, and ultimately leads to the creation of the Confederacy. Benedict’s uncle had been looking into the myths surrounding Sim, and it soon transpires there are people who don’t want the truth to come out. A Talent for War is a fast read, and the mystery part of it is quite well done… but the world-building is meagre and unconvincing. Sim sees himself as some latter-day Spartan and there are numerous references to Hellenic Greece. Yet we’re supposed to believe that 9,500 years from now they have better documentation about Thermopylae than they do about their war 200 years earlier. McDevitt has written a further 8 Alex Benedict novels, the latest published last year. Some of them might be actual sf.

>8 iansales: I found A Talent for War strangely effective in portraying a settled galaxy where Earth is distant, almost mythical. Perhaps I was reading it more between the lines; certainly, I've not experienced that in any of his other novels, though they have generally struck me as competent and workmanlike. Some of them came over to me as being a bit like 1980s or 90s tv movie scripts. Indeed, I visualised one of the heroines in another novel, completely unprompted, as having a bubble perm and shoulder pads.

I've read a couple of McDevitt books but I'm not a fan.

"Workmanlike" sums up his prose rather neatly--a C+ writer with a few good notions (which applies to A LOT of science fiction writers).

>9 RobertDay: replace the aliens with the Chinese or Japanese, the various worlds with different nations (even though the worlds all share the same bland US culture), and the space navy with a wet navy, and the story would not need to change at all. There are a couple of references to invented people and historical events - remarkably few, in fact, given the story is set 9,500 years from now - but much more detail of Ancient Greek history.

I had the same problem with The Stainless Steel Rat, and ended up binning my copy of that book. McDevitt's book is at least not offensive - well, other than adopting some bullshit philosophical position about it being better if Sparta had fallen than Leonidas and his men dying...

Finished THE MOST OF P.G. WODEHOUSE, a weighty compilation of the author's work.

Great summer reading, can't be beat.

>11 iansales: I'm sure you're right. I rather suspect that my reaction to A Talent for War doesn't stem from anything the writer did deliberately. I just had a happy accident with it.

The Seventh Son, Sebastian Faulks

I’ve been reading Faulks for a couple of decades now, ever since being impressed by his Birdsong, which, to be fair, is his most celebrated novel and one he’ll likely never better. He’s very middle-brow, a sort of latter-day John Fowles, but more prolific, and his novels tend to cover a wider range of topics. One subject he keeps on returning to is psychology, especially the practice of it - his novel Human Traces is about the history of psychiatry - and models of cognition. I think it was in a Faulks novel I first came across mention of bicameral mentality and Julian Jaynes. In The Seventh Son, set a few years from now, a techbro-backed fertility clinic secretly implants a half-Neanderthal embryo in a surrogate mother. The child grows to adulthood before the secret is revealed to all involved and the world at large, and Faulks has fun imagining how Neanderthals would think - linking back to Jaynes, and reminding me in parts of Ted Kosmatka’s ‘Divining Light’ and The Flicker Men (the short story is better than the novel). There are a few callbacks to Human Traces, and quite a few digs at Tory 21st Century Britain, but the logistics of the plot, and the fallout once the secret is out, are passed over quickly, and it’s the Neanderthal mentation that exercises Faulks the most. This is typical Faulks - an easy read, well-crafted, with an interesting premise that doesn’t require too much thought and he presents mostly convincingly, with a few notable points made along the way. It’s the sort of book that makes you feel good for reading “literary fiction”, but, to be honest, is that a bad thing?

Absolute Friends, John le Carré

This is an angry book. It was published in 2003, after the US/UK invasion of Iraq, something le Carré plainly did not support (who did, other than right-wingers, greedy industrialists and venal politicians?). The two friends of the title are Edward Mundy and Sasha (cannot remember if his surname is mentioned, it probably is). Mundy was born in Lahore just before it became part of Pakistan. His father was a disgraced officer in the Indian army, his mother was aristocracy but died in childbirth. After Partition, Mundy and his father returned to the UK, where Mundy attended public school, then Cambridge, then moved to Berlin and became caught up in the anarchist movement there. Which is where he met Sasha. Mundy was booted out of Berlin after being arrested at a demo. He joined the British Council, where he acted as escort and factotum for various UK artistic troupes touring East Europe, And so was consequently recruited by MI6. And also ran into Sasha, in East Berlin, where he was now a Stasi officer. Sasha recruits Mundy as a Stasi asset, but is really himself a MI6 asset using Mundy as the go-between. The Berlin Wall falls some time later and their careers come to an end. In the present day, Mundy is pulled out of “retirement” by Sasha, who wants to recruit him to a scheme run by a philanthropic oligarch (2024 readers will immediately be suspicious here, with good reason). Nothing, of course, is as it seems, and nothing ends well. Le Carré’s views on Bush and Blair are clear, even if neither is mentioned in the novel. The plot leaps about chronologically but is never confusing. If the book has a flaw, it’s that its story implies redemption but finally offers the opposite. It’s a good novel, well-written and impressively researched; and it’ll make you as angry as le Carré was when he wrote it.

SELECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, edited by Charles Tomlinson.

Ugly New Directions edition. Man, their covers were hideous in the 70s and 80s.

In my book journal I note: "Williams is the Pope of the prosaic, the poet laureate of the inconsequential." I mean, a poem about a red wheelbarrow?

But I find much of his work agreeable--more good stanzas and lines than great, memorable poetry. His longer stuff is not very good and judging from the excerpts of "Paterson" Tomlinson supplies, that book-length effort would definitely NOT be my cup of tea.

New review of Alan Dean Foster's debut novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/the-tar-aiym-krang-alan-dean-foster-b867abfad1d2

RADICAL WORDSWORTH by Jonathan Bate.

Bate makes the case that Wordsworth, at least for the first part of his life, changed Literature forever by being the first truly autobiographical, self-analytical poet, an artist who used as source material their memories and deepest feelings.

In his later years, Wordsworth became a crotchety reactionary and wrote little of value, living off the largesse of a wealthy patron and collecting a stipend from the government, regretting his progressive days.

Excellent biography.

>18 CliffBurns: i recall a story about a prisoner of war who desperate for something to read asked a friend if he could help. His pal tore his copy of Wordsworth's collected poems in half and gave the man the second half. As the book was arranged chronologically one wonders if this was really an act of friendship.
Possibly an apocryphal story- I hope so for the sake of the bored prisoner.

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Isabel Waidner

This was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award this year, but lost to In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (which I’ve also read). Having now read Corey Fah Does Social Mobility… nope, don’t get it. A mildly amusing and very surreal short novel set in some invented East European country that seems to be stuck in the mid-twentieth century, and… It’s done well, the prose is clever, but it’s neither amusing nor entertaining. I’ve read surreal fiction before, while I wouldn't consider myself a fan, I can enjoy and appreciate it. Corey Fah wins a literary award, the Fictionalization of Social Evils award, but won’t receive the prize money until she physically collects the trophy. Which is some sort of UFO. And there are these wormholes between the present, 1967 and 1942. And through one of them comes Bambi Pavok, who is half-fawn and half-spider, and also Angry Young Man playwright Sean St Orton, who in 2024 fronts a TV show in which he discusses these wormholes. The story is a fast-paced read, in Fah’s voice, through the events following her winning the prize, appearing on St Orton’s TV show, Bambi Pavok’s trip back to 1967… and by this point, I’d no idea what any of this meant or why I should care. Normally, I’d read the book, mark it as “not for me”, and move on. But it was nominated for the Clarke Award, and I find that baffling. I don’t believe in gatekeeping genre fiction, so anything that uses genre tropes or is written with genre sensibilities, I’m happy to claim as science fiction or fantasy, no matter what the author says. But when the Clarke nominates books not published as genre - and sometimes even chooses them as the winner, as it did with In Ascension - then I usually feel the book is being presented as part of a conversation. And I can’t see how Corey Fah Does Social Mobility fits into that conversation. In Ascension, I can; but not Waidner’s novel. It puzzles me… and it assigns more importance to a novel that I don’t honestly feel deserves it. Huh.

IN MY TIME OF DYING by Sebastian Junger.

Junger has put himself on the line in many of the world's hot spots...but then he was struck down by an abdominal hemorrhage and came within a whisker of dying.

And, like many people, he had a NDE (near death experience).

Junger is a legit journalist, one of the best, so it was interesting to see him train his sights on something like NDEs. He explores the process of the body dying, the science of consciousness and even takes on theoretical physics.

A short book and I wouldn't count it as one of his best, but definitely worth a look.

Unquenchable Fire, Rachel Pollack

Another Clarke Award book, although this one won the award in 1989. And another book I didn’t get. It’s set in the US, specifically Poughkeepsie, eighty-seven years after some sort of supernatural / spiritual revolution, perhaps even a “rapture”. Jennifer Mazdan moved to Poughkeepsie with her husband, who was from the town, but he later divorced her because, well, she seemed to be the focus of a series of unwarranted events - not “unexplained”, as inexplicable and somewhat surreal events seem to be a feature of post-Revolution USA. These come to a head when Jennifer is waylaid by a… vision? prior to the visit to the town of a famous Teller, and subsequently finds herself pregnant. She doesn’t want to be pregnant, but her life now seems to be controlled by what calls “the Agency”. That’s “agency” as in “power”, not “agency” as in “government bureau”. And that’s it, that’s the plot. Jennifer rails against her fate and tries various schemes to prevent it - and Pollack describes her world as she does so. It’s done well, and impressively bizarre - sort of like some weird Christian Right utopia, and yet not at all biblical, as if it shares some aspects of their worldview but combined with something more like an urban fantasy setting. It’s a well-written novel, and very readable, but I have to admit if I’d been on the Clarke jury that year I’d have given the gong to Gwyneth Jones’s Kairos (which happens to be a favourite novel). And I’d perhaps argue that Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard might have been a better choice, although I find its “US military adventurers in Central America” plot somewhat tired, and I think US authors, perhaps especially Shepard, have over-used those countries as settings for their fiction. Unquenchable Fire: worth a read.

The Scorpion God, William Golding

I’m not sure why I started reading Golding. I read Lord of the Flies at school, as of course did all Brits of a certain age, and at a public school too, which was not considered ironic. Perhaps because then teachers had bought into the myth the book was about society at large, when in fact it was quite clearly about a particular type of people. Anyway, I read more by Golding, and found the lucidity of his prose impressive. I liked the fact he experimented, even if some of those experiments, such as Pincher Martin, are somewhat obvious to a modern reader. And I liked the fact he was unafraid to explore other worldviews from the inside, particularly ones which were almost entirely acts of imagination, like The Inheritors. And so to The Scorpion God, which is a collection of three historical novellas. The title novella is set in Ancient Egypt, sometime around 3000 BC, and does that thing where terms that have been subsumed into English are given as their literal translation, such as “Great House” for “pharaoh”. A pharaoh fails to complete the tasks he must complete every seventh year to “keep the sky up” and prevent the river from overflowing. A courtier called the Liar, who tells stories of ice, snow and white people, refuses to be killed and interred with the pharaoh, and so brings about a change to the land. ‘Clonk Clonk’, which has one of the worst titles of any piece of fiction I’ve read, is set in prehistory, perhaps even in the Rift Valley, and describes a simple society in which women and men live different lives, follow different mythologies, perhaps even speak different languages, and don’t seem to realise how they procreate. The final novella is ‘Envoy Extraordinary’, and was later turned into a play, ‘The Brass Butterfly’. During the reign of an invented Caesar, a Greek inventor appears and persuades Caesar to allow him to build three inventions: a pressure cooker, a steam-powered paddle ship, and a ballista which fires an explosive warhead. Caesar’s son, a successful general, afraid a grandson is after the throne, returns to Rome to resolve matters. But the Greek inventions accidentally defeat the son and save Caesar. This one might not have been entirely convincing (it was originally published in 1956), but it was funny and entertaining, and easily the best of three.

Point of Origin, Patricia Cornwell

The ninth book in Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series about the Chief Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The title refers to the spot where an arsonist sets a fire, although arson is mostly a red herring in this novel. Scarpetta is called to the stud farm of a wealthy and powerful newspaper proprietor, who was once Scarpetta’s political boss, which has burned to the ground, killing all the horses… and an unidentified young woman. Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, has left the FBI and joined the ATF, and is also assigned to the case. As usually happens in these books, the forces of law and order flounder about for a while, unable to make sense of the crime, or subsequent crimes which are clearly connected. But then an old adversary - in this case, the female half of the psychokiller duo who went on a murdering spree a couple of books earlier, and who has now manipulated herself free from the sanatorium for the criminally insane where she was being incarcerated. But as Scarpetta and the ATF discover earlier crimes by the same perpetrator, committed before the psychokiller escaped, it becomes obvious she has a new partner. The clues to his identity then come thick and fast, but he’s leading them around by the nose. So Scarpetta does what she always does and steps into the crosshairs, allowing someone to blow the two killers away. I’ve heard complaints these books go into too much detail with the forensics and autopsies, but that’s why I enjoy reading them. The plots are formulaic, the characters are often a little too good to be true, Scarpetta is always on an emotional rollercoaster from start to finish… but the science and pathology is fascinating. Only nineteen more to go.

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM AND OTHER POEMS by Wallace Stevens.

I've discovered I'm not a big fan of the early "modernist" American poets.

Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams et al leave me cold. The odd, good poem pops up, but my general reaction toward their work is befuddlement and/or frustration.

There must be some clarity in even the most abstract, experimental verse, otherwise the lines of communication between poet and reader are cut, the end result a muddle of incomprehension.

ARTIFACT SPACE by Miles Cameron.

REALLY great world-building, the detail is amazing...but the characters are pretty bland and the writing only okay.

Definitely one SF fans should seek out, for the sheer spectacle and glimpses of the far future, if nothing else.

>25 CliffBurns: I'm still not a fan of that title poem, but I recently (and coincidentally!) caught an episode of Poetry in America devoted to looking at it and "Motive for Metaphor"—the latter of which I did really end up appreciating! Here's a link if interested: https://www.poetryinamerica.org/episode/the-emperor-of-ice-cream-motive-for-meta...

Thank you for that link, I shall check it out.

I did like a few of Stevens' poems, including "The Snowman", "Anecdote of the Jar" and "13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird".

Most of the others...er, not so much.

>26 CliffBurns: I thought it a mixed bag - some good bits in the world-building (but selling upper class orphans into sex slavery? really?), but the heroine was just too good and too lucky to be credible. Still plan to read the sequel, though.

Absolutely & Forever, Rose Tremain

I’ve been reading Tremain's books for a number of years. I first encountered them in the Daly Community Library in Abu Dhabi, run by Jocelyn Henderson, the widow of Edward Henderson, “bin Hender”, the last British political agent in the area before the UAE was founded. The Hendersons had been in Doha at the same time as we had, and I asked Jocelyn once and she remembered my mother and father. Anyway, the Daly Community Library had only a small sf selection, so I ended up reading a lot of literary fiction. Including Tremain. But it was only about five years ago, when one of her books was on offer on Kindle, that I started reading her again. Including her most famous novel, Restoration. Forever & Absolutely is her latest, a short novel set in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, detailing the loves and lives of Marianne, who falls for, and is deflowered by, a neighbours’ pretty-boy son, and swears eternal love to him… But he goes off to Paris, marries a French woman and has a family. Marianne stumbles through a series of low-paid jobs, and ends up marrying another childhood friend, who she never quite loves. But pretty-boy blows it, losing both his family and his future. Marianne’s husband, who she eventually leaves, goes on to great success. But this is Marianne’s story, and her life does not go as she wished, or imagined, it would. Yet, she’s never really unhappy, and she accepts the setbacks with an unwavering faith that her desires will eventually come true. Tremain lards her story with brand names and products from the period, some of which I’m old enough to remember. It all feels like a 1960s-made fast-paced romantic drama movie, but wittier and meatier, yet just as well-grounded in its time and place.

MADLY, DEEPLY, excerpts from the diaries Alan Rickman kept from 1993 to his death.

Funny, bitchy, smart, just as you'd expect. Wish the various entries could've been longer, more detailed, but it's still an insightful peek into the inner workings of the man's mind.

77 FRAGMENTS OF A FAMILIAR RUIN, a very enjoyable and powerful collection of poems by Canadian author Thomas King.

King not known for his poetry but this one impresses from beginning to end.

Alternately laugh out loud funny and fearlessly astute.

Not to be missed.

A review of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again-m-john-harris...

>33 iansales: The curse of being a "writer's writer".

Just finished (under the wire) my last book of August, Ian McGuire's THE ABSTAINER. It's a novel about the attempts of British authorities to infiltrate and destroy a cabal of Fenian terrorists in Manchester shortly after the American Civil War.

McGuire's previous novel THE NORTH WATER made it on to one of my year end "Best of" lists--this one isn't quite as good but McGuire does a nice job evoking the era credibly and for that high marks.