Eratosphere - our reading

Eratosphere (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/index.php)

- General Talk (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/forumdisplay.php?f=21)

- - our reading (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=34797)

What are you all reading? My recent reading has been unusually rich in surprising discoveries, including:

Shooting Star by Steven Dietz
a poetic two-character play about the dreams of early adulthood
[I find the structure and details poetic; don't seek it out for literal poetry.]

Black Pearl Sings! by Frank Higgins
in which a character whom someone tries to dissuade from attempting a jail break replies
"Miss Susannah, I got a father in Hell, a mother in Heaven, and a daughter in Houston, and I’m gonna see one of ‘em tonight."

the essays of David Foster Wallace (whose short fiction I find impenetrable),
whose insight and eloquence make me enjoy reading about things that don't much interest me, like blockbuster movies and tennis.
Wallace uncovers surprising and illuminating connections, and his voice is both distinctive and clear. From now on, I intend to share with every writing class I teach his description of the goal of good prose as being "maximally considerate."

I'm currently reading Fuzz by Mary Roach -- sometimes I wish I were Mary Roach, she gets to go and do and write about such interesting things -- which is about human-wildlife conflict. I found out some wonderfully strange things about bears:

Quote:

Black bear hibernation isn't the same as sleep. They're just sort of slowed down and out of it. Surreally, black bear sows give birth halfway through their hibernation. They deliver a couple of cubs, snack on the placenta, then go back into hibernation, nursing and tending their cubs in a state of semi-alertness until spring. According to a scientist who has taken blood samples from hibernating black bears, they do not have sleep breath and their dens don't stink. They smell like roots and earth and that is all. (p. 31)

Now I want to write a bear poem (and I might steal that last sentence, which is in perfect IP).

The last two books I finished were Boys and Girls Together by William Goldman, and Leviathan Falls by James S. A. Corey.

Boys and Girls Together was blurbed as a coming-of-age story about five friends putting on a play in NYC. In actuality it was 600ish pages of thoroughly unlikable characters behaving horribly toward one another, and the only one worth rooting for (spoiler) kills himself in the penultimate chapter. I don't know why I finished it.

Leviathan Falls is the ninth and final full installment in Corey's sprawling space opera The Expanse (now a TV show also). I started reading this series last year and have really enjoyed it. The setting is an unusual one for sci-fi: there are many novels about humanity's life out among the stars, but I've read very few that deal with that middle period when we've settled throughout our solar system but not outside of it. The political and ethnic conflicts in the series are not drawn between racial or national groups as we know them now, but between "Inners" (citizens of Earth and Mars) and "Belters" (those who have grown up in space, either on stations or on low-gravity settlements on places like Ganymede). It's really well imagined and they're all big fat novels and completely engrossing.

Max, I LOVE DFW's essay about the week he spent on a cruise ship ("A Supposedly Fun Thing..."). So much fun.

I am slowly making my way through Mircea Eliade's three-volume A History of Religious Ideas. This near the beginning is great:

"For continuous reading reveals above all the fundamental unity of religious phenomena and at the same time the inexhaustible newness of their expressions. The reader of such a book would be given access to the Vedic hymns, the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads a few hours after he had reviewed the ideas and beliefs of the Paleolithics, of Mesopotamia, and of Egypt; he would discover Sankara, Tantrism and Milarepa, Islam, Gioacchino da Fiore or Paracelsus, the day after he had meditated on Zarathustra, Gautama Buddha, and Taoism, on the Hellenistic Mysteries, the rise of Christianity, Gnosticism, alchemy, or the mythology of the Grail; he would encounter the German illuminists and Romantics, Hegel, Max Muller, Freud, Jung, and Bonhoeffer, soon after discovering Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, the twelve Alvars and Gregory Palamas, the earliest Cabalists, Avicenna or Eisai.

Alas, that short, concise book has not yet been written."

There are a few books I'm excited to start, particularly Shahab Ahmed's Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam. It is not about the Rushdie Affair but about the Satanic verse incident, which early Muslims took seriously. This of course raises many theological questions, including how the Quran could be perfect if it includes a verse by Satan. It also clearly shows Muhammad's fallibility. And yet belief in the incident was not necessarily considered blasphemous during the first few centuries of Islam. Ahmed was an amazingly imaginative thinker (see his other great book What Is Islam?). He died rather young of leukemia. This is the first of what was supposed to be a three-volume work.

Also excited about The Book of Monasteries
https://www.libraryofarabicliteratur...f-monasteries/ (The Library of Arabic Literature in general is just great)

And apparently there is to be published this year the collected poems of David Melnick, which I'm thrilled about. Will be great to have a copy of PCOET that isn't thousands of dollars!

Apologies To The Iroquois, Edmund Wilson
The Heart Of The Catskills, Bob Steuding
The Journal, Henry David Thoreau (ed, Damion Searls)
The Georgics, Virgil (trans, David Ferry)
How Like An Angel Came I Down, A. Bronson Alcott (ed, Alice O. Howell)
Thoreau: A Life, Laura Dassow Walls
A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, Henry David Thoreau
The Eclogues, Virgil (trans, David Ferry)
Snow At 5PM, Jee Leong Koh
The Rose Garden, Sa’di (trans, Edward Rehatsek)
The Faces Of Love, Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (trans, Dick Davis)
Bewilderment, David Ferry
Of No Country I Know, David Ferry
Gilgamesh, (trans, David Ferry)
The Odes, Horace (trans, David Ferry)
Gilgamesh: The Life Of A Poem, Michael Schmidt
Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau
John Barleycorn, Jack London

I've been reading Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series to my nieces via Zoom. We're near the end of the third book, my favorite, The King of Attolia. They loved this bit:

Quote:

The meeting on wheat production seemed to be a recitation of the yield of every wheat field in the country in the last year. Costis tried unsuccessfully to pay attention. They were a half hour into the list when the king asked, "What's the difference in the wheat?"

"Excuse me, Your Majesty?"

"The different kinds of wheat you keep mentioning. What's the difference?"

The two men looked at each other. The king waited, leaning back in his chair with one booted ankle crossed over his knee.

"Pilades would be most helpful. If Your Majesty would excuse us?"

The king waved one hand, and the two men hurried away and returned with Pilades, a bent older man with wisping white hair and an expression of delight on his wrinkled face.

"If Your Majesty would like to see, I have samples here." He reached into a variety of small bags that he was carrying and dumped handful after handful of grain onto the table. Dust rose in a cloud, and the king winced, waving his hand in front of his face. Pilades didn't notice. He called the king's attention to the formation of the seeds, to the number of the seeds, to their shape. He dumped more piles onto the table and explained the advantages of each, which one yielded the largest crop, which survived the most inclement weather, which could be planted summer or fall. Many facts Costis knew, having been raised on a farm. Some were new, and the lecture, once begun, was clearly unstoppable.

The king, who normally wandered away to a window during meetings like this, sat immobilized. He had little choice. If he so much as shifted in his seat, Pilades moved in closer, hovering over him with zeal. No doubt he rarely got a chance to expound to this extent and was reluctant to lose the king's attention. The king made a few abortive attempts to escape but was ultimately forced to sit and listen.

Over the king's head, the counselors and the attendants exchanged glances of awed delight. When Pilades finally wound down, the king, his face blank, thanked him. He thanked the two men he'd begun the meeting with and suggested that perhaps they could finish their business at another meeting, or better—they could just give him a written summary and he would look it over sometime himself. They nodded; the king rose and escaped into the hall. Once there, with the door closed, he put his face in his hand.

"Thank gods I didn't ask about fertilizer," he said.

I'm still howling like a twelve-year-old!

Julie, Megan Whalen Turner is a favorite of mine, too.

I recently finished reading Ann Drysdale's excellent Feeling Unusual, and I am currently reading Dick Davis's Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations. In terms of fiction, I've recently read Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Richard Osman's The Bullet That Missed, and Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders, The Word Is Murder, and The Sentence Is Death. Though I am not a huge fan of mysteries, my mother is, and I am staying with her at the moment, so we have been sharing books from the local library.

Susan

Currently, I am rereading all of Seamus Heaney, something I have done several times since first meeting him in early 1966, fifty-seven years ago now; at the moment I am reading Field Work (1979). I am also reading James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire by Tim Clayton (2022). In parallel, I have just begun rereading Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by P. G. Wodehouse (1974).

Clive

I'm reading Ali Smith’s Summer, the 4th in her series of seasons. I picked up Autumn soon after it came out, read the first few pages, and thought Meh, not my cup of tea. But then last year I realized Ali Smith is actually someone I was a student with at Cambridge – she and her partner directed a women-only Footlights comedy show I helped out with, called Daughters of England. I was encouraged to think there might be some fun in the books and gave them another try. And they are humorous, in a Kafkaesque way, as well as lyrical and wise. There is a moment towards the end of Autumn that is one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever read, touching but lightly handled. That was my favorite of the books so far, but Summer is probably next-top for me, and all have been worth reading.