Thursday, May 8, 2025

What I Read in April 2025 – Have we cherished expectations?

I should make that the new official slogan of the blog.  It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of the books I recently read.

FICTION

The Sword in the Stone (1938), T. H. White – I for some reason did not read this as a youth.  It is wonderful, full of anachronism and parody and outstanding British nature writing in the tradition of Gilbert White (mentioned in the novel) and Richard Jefferies.  It turns out that the most important thing in the education of a king is to know what it is like to be a fish.

Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce – begin Here and Continue to the End.

The Big Clock (1946), Kenneth Fearing – A jittery Whitmanian poet of the 1920s and 1930s finally cashes in with a jittery multi-voiced semi-mystery.  The “detective” is the staff of the equivalent of Time Inc., making the killer Henry Luce.  The detective is deliberately not trying to solve the mystery.  The single best part is narrated by a cranky painter.  Odd, odd book, but I see why it survives.

The Mountain Lion (1947), Jean Stafford – A Boston writer, but this sad descendent of What Maise Knew is set in California and on a Colorado cattle ranch.

The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Samuel R. Delaney – His first novel, clumsily constructed but stuffed with imaginative conceits.  I’d never read Delaney.

God's Country (1994), Percival Everett – Almost every Everett novel and short story I have read has a similar voice and narrator, a PhD with a savior complex.  James in James does not have a PhD, but might as well.  In this Western, however, Everett’s narrator is an idiot and another, non-narrating character fills the usual role, which is a lot of fun.  Thirty years older, God’s Country is a companion novel to James (2024).  I urge anyone interested to read them together.  It is time to get the James backlash going.  I have seen a couple of interviews where Everett himself seems to be trying to get the backlash going, but it has not worked yet.  I have read eleven of Everett’s books now and hope to read many more.  James is the worst one!

POETRY

Blues in Stereo (1921-7), Langston Hughes – It is like a gift book, a pointlessly tiny volume that could and should be expanded to include all of The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), both of which are in public domain, which seems to be the limiting concept.  But for some reason this book does include the pieces of a never-realized collaboration with Duke Ellington that is a fantasy refraction of The Big Sea (1940), Hughes’s first memoir.  I do not think the theater piece has been published before.  Worth seeing.

Collected Poems (1940), Kenneth Fearing – High-energy Whitman mixed with advertising=speak and business lingo and gangsters.  So sometimes it’s kitsch.

Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) &

Autumn Sequel (1953) &

Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice

Chord of Light (1956) &

Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), Zbigniew Herbert

What Rough Beasts (2021), Leslie Moore – An earlier book by a Maine poet and artist I read a year ago.  She specializes in prints, and poems, about birds and other animals.  About an hour after reading her poem about grackles invading her yard and establishing a grackledom the grackles invaded my yard and ruled for several days.  That was enjoyable.

MISCELLANEOUS

Lexington and Concord: The Battle Heard Round the World (2018), George C. Daughan – Preparation for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which is another thing I did in April.  Here I am at the Concord parade, the library in the background.


Sound May Be Seen
(2025), Margaret Watts Hughes

Lecture on Radium (2025), Loie Fuller

No Title (2025), Richard Foreman – Three little collectible conceptual art books.  I will just point you to the website.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto: Aventuras extraordinárias dum português no Oriente (The Pilgrimage of Fernão Mendes Pinto: Extraordinary Adventures of a Portuguese Man in the Orient, 1614), Fernão Mendes Pinto – The real book is a 900-page semi-true account of a Portuguese wanderer in the 16th century Far East who, in the most famous episode, joins up with a patriotic privateer, or a bloodthirsty pirate.  The book I read is a rewritten abridgement for Portuguese 9th graders.  How I wish I knew how it was taught. 


La femme partagée
(The Shared Woman, 1929), Franz Hellens

La Cité de l'indicible peur (The City of Unspeakable Fear, 1943), Jean Ray – I plan to write a bit about these two novels, my excursion to Belgium.

Navegações (1983), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

13 comments:

  1. How nice that you discovered the Further Reading Library! Since I've commented here before, I'll recommend the other two volumes, on Richard Shaver and Thomas Wilfred, and add that I wrote the introduction for the latter.

    What a. month! "Finnegans Wake" was only one of the books you read!

    Doug Skinner

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  2. I have the other two volumes to my immediate left. I should get to them soon.

    I am not much of a collector but these are just the kinds of books I am sometimes tempted to collect. Unusual and worth owning as physical books.

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  3. How do I know which member in the parade is you?

    Plus, I would like to read The Sword in The Stone. I, too, missed it as a child.

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  4. Ha ha ha. I even cropped my shadow out of that photo. Maybe I should have put up my photo of the Sons of the American Revolution color guard getting their coffee at the hotel earlier that morning.

    The Sword in the Stone is even more fun than I expected, just a delight. My understanding is that White rewrote and darkened the book for the big Once and Future King volume. I have no doubt that is good, too, but I can easily recommend the jolly, goofy earlier version. I think you'd be very happy with it.

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  5. I trust your word, I’ll pick it up this Summer.

    So often “books for younger readers” are better than most annything else.

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  6. I too have never read Sword. But since I own Once and Future I will probably read that first.
    Delaney: there's someone I ought to try. But maybe start elsewhere?

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  7. Now you're gonna have to watch the 2 adaptations of The Big Clock.

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  8. I’d never read Delaney.

    Boy, have you got some good reading ahead of you! He got more and more interesting with every book. (With the caveat that he went a little too far for me eventually -- I quit reading Dhalgren somewhere in the middle and never read any of his later stuff. But lots of people love it!)

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  9. White apparently cut Merlin's duel with the witch, the most famous part of the Disney film, from the later version. Too silly!

    Delaney's first nine novels, written by time he was 25, are currently available in attractive paperback bundles. Two of the novels are published head-to-toe, for example, which I could not resist. So that is why I started with the first one, because I bought it along with some others. I hope to read a couple more this summer.

    Hardcore Delaneyites likely say start with Dhalgren, plunge right in, but there are a number of well-known, prize-certified, less difficult novels in that set from the 1960s. Amazing how young he was.

    I hope to watch the 1948 Big Clock soon but honestly my impulse to watch movies comes and goes.

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  10. Happy reading! You have made excellent choices.

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  11. Do you read all your books in paperback? Share your bookshelf clicks some day?

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  12. I (re-)discovered T.H. White when homeschooling my boys. We did a series of Arthurian books (White, Twain, some of Steinbeck) and it was probably the most engaged I ever saw them.

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  13. I wondered if I had read White long ago, but no, I saw the duelling scene from the Disney movie several times and read the more somber Mary Stewart novels about Merlin. Too bad for me! I would have loved Sword in the Stone and am not at all surprised that you had success with it.

    Schools should do Arthurian units! What a good idea.

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