You are here. You made it. There is another month of books. I read some weird stuff. I will jump in here soon, but I wanted to say thank you for reading along with me. If you have any comments on what is happening, let me know.
I also wanted to let you know that there is Youtube Channel where I post reaction videos as soon after reading as I can record.
I have also picked up my posting on Instagram so check out what is going on over there.
There is also a Pango Book Store where you can buy reading copies of the books I have read for the project so far.
Joshua Cohen – The Netanyahus
I did not love this book. I won’t take much time with this review or reaction or whatever it is that I write here. I was utterly befuddled by this book. Honestly, it felt like a prank. The daughter wanting to change her nose so badly that she takes a door knob to the face is so bizarre that I couldn’t really understand where this was coming from. Then at the end of the book she is caught having sex with one of the Netanyahu boys is just a whiplash that I really couldn’t get my head around why any of this was happening. It is well written at points but there is a grand standing that the author does at moments that I found really difficult to read. There is a moment that happens with the issue of Romeo and Juliet that the author hangs a cathedral chandelier on that then redounds to the end’s wackiness that really just hurt my stomach as I got to it. I don’t know what happened with this book. Joshua Cohen is a gifted writer and there are some deep tensions in the text that I think work very well but then there are some strange choices that he makes that I just really didn’t enjoy. There is some element that this text is meant to make you uncomfortable which I got and actually enjoyed, but then there is some material that doesn’t work and frustrates to no end.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Lady Audley’s Secret
I drew Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s book Lady Audley’s Secret from the Big Book List. As is common to this project, I had never heard of it. It probably made the Big Book List because of the Penguin Classics edition. Once I pulled this name and set about to find anything more about it than the title, I found that this is a famous text that had a professional treatment through Audible of a famous actor reading its lines. Olivia Poule read the version I listened to and did a phenomenal job so if you are in the market for giving this a spin, it is free on Audible and a pure delight.
I also bought a copy and followed along at points but the story itself is very easy to follow. It makes for a very enjoyable audiobook as the plot points are dramatic, the tension is palpable at points and weirdly there are a few moments where Robert Audley recaps what he has discovered which honestly was helpful. The story is retold in a few different ways by multiple characters which gives me the impression that it was serialized at the time. I didn’t do any research on this text because it was just straightforwardly enjoyable. I got lost in the mystery though I felt like I knew what was going to happen from the outset. I was surprised by how much of a detective Robert Audley becomes but really enjoyed it once it clicked in for me what was happening. The back cover mentions something about this being a Sensation novel which means next to nothing for me and did not help influence or introduce my reading of this text.
There are several moments that I loved in this text that I felt pounding through the pages of the book. The first moment that Robert Audley confronts Lady Audley in the cemetery near the estate I thought was entrancing, spellbinding that I felt a little gasp escape my lips as I fell into a reverie in this moment. The next moment is the plotting of the burning of the tavern by Lady Audley. I think of moments such as this as a screaming in the mind where there is just noise that surrounds you and every thought you have comes in like a shout to rise above the din. The only thought that occurs to her is to burn the tavern to the ground and kill everyone inside including Robert Audley happens so logically and forcefully that you beat her to the conclusion and are horrified to think it. It is a masterful move.
I have not read many books like this but I can see why reading literature like this popular. There are several scenes in this text that I do not think work nearly as well as these two that I mention, but the entire work is enjoyable and moved me a long rapidly with its thriller pacing. I would read this book again if I could, and will recommend it widely as a classic of this genre.
Post Rock Jukebox
It was hard to pick this week which band that I have discovered recently should get the spotlight. I did want to say that two friends of mine and I got to talking about Post Rock and both them asked to see the spreadsheet that I pull from when I want to find new music. I emailed them copies of the list so if anyone is interested in looking at a list of over 300 post rock albums from dozens of bands to see if you are up on all the post rock database, I would gladly send you a copy through the email wave lengths.
Octavio Paz - The Labyrinth of Solitude
I loved this book though I don’t have much to say about it. I think I kicked over a rock here with the Small Works List where I want to read everything else that Octavio Paz has ever written. I have read this work which according to my slim research suggests is a masterpiece for Paz and one that is often recommended. What’s unusual about this is that at times it feels very narrow and very specific and that I think is unusual for works that garner such acclaim. The Labyrinth of Solitude is Paz’s poetic treatment of the history and psyche of Mexico. At times the things he is grasping for are so overbroad and general that it think his observations are meaningless, but other times are so lyrically and beautifully written that I think it doesn’t matter what he is talking about - the sentence is true and beautiful and I think that is all that matters.
Many of the things that I find interesting about this book are how underdeveloped my knowledge about Mexican history and culture is. As I was reading this, I thought many times that I do not know nearly enough about Mexican culture or history. I was confronted by this at the Richard Penn Smith To the Alamo entry with Davy Crockett fiasco. I am glad to have read this document but there is some sense to me to worry that I have just interacted with a very narrow view of Mexican culture and history and that my vantage point here might be skewed by Paz’s characterizations. This is one of my worries about reading secondary literature before I read the primary source first. I really wanted a brief history of Napoleonic Era European history while I was read War and Peace. I was nervous to venture off the page of Tolstoy because I wanted to see this war and this time period through his eyes but I was missing crucial context as to when is any of these happening. Who was Napoleon to Europe at this point in the campaign? How does this episode figure into the rest of European history in the time period and after this point? What were some of the events that happen that lead up to this moment where War and Peace begins at the Battle of Austerlitz?
The same can be said here for Paz’s treatment of the essence of Mexico. He references some deep aspects of Mexican history that I do not know but also is not writing a brick by brick history of Mexico but is trading on a deeply contextual knowledge of the subject to interpret and celebrate and illuminate the history. I don’t have the starting or middle pieces here to understand what I need to know about these figures or events he is mentioning and building off of and so I just have to trust his interpretation or his history.
All of this to say that I think Octavio Paz is one of the most gifted writers I think I have read so far for this project. His writing is clear and forceful, clever and brilliantly insightful, restrained and lyrical. He also wrote a book called Paz on Poets which mocks all the words that I have ever written about writing by its brilliance. I will purchase a copy of this book and read it as I read some of the authors he touches on int his book. He has written about Breton, Michaux, and another that I have already read. He mentions Valery in Labyrinth in a way that makes me want to re-evaluate Valery. His entry on Michaux makes me believe that I did not read Michaux because if I had actually read Michaux then I would have seen what Paz sees and I don’t. In comparison to Paz, I am blind and have only heard Michaux read aloud a sewer grate. While Labyrinth may not be the book I would point a reader to for the simple enjoyment of reading, I have The Monkey Grammarian still on the Big Book List to contend with. I believe if you are alive right now and reading this document, you should stop and go read Octavio Paz.
Edmund Waller – Collected Poems
I drew Edmund Waller’s name from the Small Works List number 3, English authors from 1600 to 1800. I don’t know anything about him and then found out quite a lot about him all at once. It was not clear what to read from him. There was a Penguin Classics compilation of his writing that included the poetry of John Denham and Abraham Crowley. I did not read anything by them. I was not able to get my hands on a copy of this text while reading Waller, and so I found a Project Gutenberg pdf that I copied and read from. Often times for poets I make a spreadsheet with all of their poetry in it so that I can keep track of which poems in the collection I like. I will put a little asterisk next to one if I like it up to 3 asterisks if I think it is a poem that I should
It’s hard to know what to say about an author like this. I really disliked having read Edmund Waller’s poetry. Unlike reading Valery or Michaux which I feel like there is too much context and also language removed from their audience and reception for me to get what is happening, I thought Waller’s writing was very upfront for the era of poetry that it is. The themes are obvious to the point of tedium and the symbolism and language used bored me to tears. The verse that Housman talks about in ‘Terence this is stupid stuff’ about rhyming your friends to death I always thought was hyperbole – which in the poem it is – but even the sort of thought process that would have a poet puts this concern in the head of an unenlightened person seemed to be a reach for hyperbole in and of itself if that makes sense. Here Waller bored me to distraction many times during the process of reading his work. But then something started to happen, a feeling of resentment began to grow in me as I continued to read not only terrible poetry but also tonally awful poetry which is where I want to bring this section for a moment.
At one point, I laughed out loud because it seemed that Waller was going for the sort of record books of bad takes of history. There are a number of poems from the Miscellaneous section that find Waller writing poetry on many different occasions, many of which were the death of someone famous or that the king or the queen had gotten ill and recovered weirdly enough. In addition to this, there are poems about the English winning an important battle or that the legacy of the king was questioned or that Duke or courtly entertainers who Waller referred to as dwarves were getting married. The poetry is not funny, not in the slightest – deathly serious in fact – but the pure parody of the work drove me to humor often enough. But then it came to the historical takes that Waller makes that seem ludicrously terrible at times.
Here is the hit list of bad takes from Waller: he wrote a poem in favor of whaling, he was against the Irish and the Scottish in despicable ways, he was in favor of imperialism which makes sense for him at his time but for clearly objectionable reasons, he celebrated the marriage of the court entertainers referring to them as dwarves but in addition to that was incredibly patronizing to them, and takes to task John Suckling’s poetry which is fair enough but does it in a pro and con list which just seems like poor show no matter what the item to be derided. Just start to finish, this was not an enjoyable read.
I got to near the end of this collection of 150 poems or so which is a great deal more literature than I have read for many other poets in this project and felt that I could not go on. The last section of the collection that I read was the Divine Poems which I think was mentioned in other literature about Waller’s work as some of his best. My mind could not take any more of this writing and I had to put it down. I read 195 of 205 pages and had to walk away from this work as it was exhausting to continue. There was one interesting note that may give some context to the nature of the writing. One of the poems which includes the tone and scope of the poetry is entitled “On the Repairing of St. Paul’s.” Apparently, during Waller’s life there was a major renovation to the famous St. Paul’s cathedral. Yup, that was occasion enough for a poem that would be remember for 400 years. Its weird to think that this building that Waller commits to classic literature in 1632 will be the same place that Isaac Newton will stalk about London conducting his experiments and will drop hog bladders off the roof of St. Paul’s to work out some of the most important science in the history of humanity. This is what classic literature is for.
Currently Reading
I am currently reading Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. I am not super far in it at the time of typing this and so he is still talking about the mineral deposits of the state. That is actually happening and so I am just along for the ride.
The other text that I am investigating at this point is the Hittite Military Oath which was surprisingly easy to find in its entirety online and had some decent commentary that surrounded it. It was a lot easier to get to a place where I feel confident that I am reading and interacting with the information that this Small Works List note is asking of me to find. I wish they were all this straight forward.
If you have read to this point, and by whatever dark ambitions you hope to gain by that act I wish you well, then I want to thank you. I appreciate the company on such a long journey.