What I Read in June 2026 – I don’t know, that’s all words, never wake, all words, there’s nothing else

Oh right, I can pretend I am writing something.  Some notes on books I read in the distant past.

NOT SHAKESPEARE

The Dutch Courtesan (1604), John Marston – Discussed long ago.

Poems (1594-1612), George Chapman – A superb, innovative poet, somehow an Ovidian and an anti-Ovidian, attracted to but also shocked by human sensuality, which may be a good part of why he had much presence for a long time.  I mean, compare to sexy John Donne.  Please see Chapman’s long poem Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) for a demonstration.  There is the other problem – rather than write sonnets and epigrams and other things we, for some sense of we, still like to read, he wrote long, complex philosophical about aesthetics.

FICTION

The Unnamable (1953), Samuel Beckett – The fragment in the post’s title is from the last page.

Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Evelyn Waugh – The second volume of Waugh’s trilogy about World War II, including a long account of the defense and retreat from Crete that is especially good, although the earlier scenes of pointless training on a remote Scottish island are outstanding in an older Wavian comic vein.  Put Out More Flags (1942), written immediately after the Cretan disaster, stills looks to me like the greater work of art.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Shirley Jackson – A neurotic young woman puts herself in an environment, nominally a haunted house, perfectly made to maximize her neuroses.  Not at all what I was expecting.  Not much of a reader of ghost stories, I long ago was surprised by how often they are comic, so it was not surprising when, about two-thirds in, this ghost story takes a huge comic swerve.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970), George V. Higgins – Checking in with my neighbors in Boston.

Nine Princes in Amber (1970), Roger Zelazny – Something I should have read when I was ten years-old, but I do not remember ever seeing a copy.  Superhero heroic fantasy.

A History of the Afircan-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond (as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid) (2004), Percival Everett & James Kincaid – That title (which is accurate).  It sounds like a satire of the racial politics of twenty years ago, but is really mostly a satire of publishing twenty years ago, and for both the jokes are either outdated or timeless; I am not sure.  It’s the funniest Evertt novel I have read so far.

 

SOMEHOW NOT FICTION

No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1953), Felice Benuzzi –  An Italian prisoner of war in Kenya is so bored that he and some pals break out of prison, climb a mountain, and then break back into prison.  Benuzzi eventually writes this marvelous book about crazy people, and becomes an important Italian diplomat.

 

POETRY

Pleasing the Diners (86-103), Martial, tr. R. L. Barth – Barth has been working on Martial for decades, his whole life as a poet.  These are the ones he thinks he got to work.  They do work. 

The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), James Merill

The Boy in the Well and Other Poems (1995), Daniel Mark Epstein – I read a poem in a magazine and then went to see what my library had.  Smart formal allusive poems.

 

ARTY

Research (2025), Charles Fort

Library of the Paranormal (2025), Jackie Gleason – More art book esoterica.

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

A Sereia Verde (The Green Mermaid, 1941), Dinah Silveira de Queiroz – Short stories by an author famous in Brazil for at least a couple of stories (not these) that have had multiple film and television adaptations.  A bit melodramatic for my tastes.  The title novella is about a pair of cousins who, competing for the affections of their grandmother, develop a lifelong conflict.  Or perhaps the one just hates the other.  The title refers to a sublime moment when the protagonist learns that a dream-like childhood memory was actually in some sense real.  Best part of the book.

Le square (1955), Marguerite Duras – Two characters on a park bench discuss the meaning of life.  Mostly dialogue.  Dry.  I find it dry.

Les trésors de la mer Rouge (The Treasures of the Red Sea, 1971), Romain Gary – A tiny little travel book to Djibouti and then Yemen.  The Yemen trip is mostly filler, but at that point Djibouti was the last bit of colonial French Africa, governed by Dominique Ponchardier, among other unlikely things author of dozens of spy novels starring “The Gorilla,” so there is a lot for Gary to do.  He visits the future setting of Beau Travail (Denis, 1999), for example.

Next month, meaning this month: more of the same.

What I Read in May 2026 – “These stories appeal to my sense of humor as well as my taste for formal constraints.”

NOT SHAKESPEARE

Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine sequence, with for example lines ending one poem and beginning the next.  For some reason Thomas Campion, a writer of the most beautiful songs, wrote an essay arguing that English poetry should exclude rhyme, inspiring Daniel’s great defense of rhyme.  Rhetorically great – the argument as such is something like rhyme sounds great and English poetry should sound like English no matter what the Romans did and isn’t poetry wonderful?  Simplifying a bit.

The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1604?), Elizabeth Cary – This one is over here.

All Fools (1604?), George Chapman – And this one over there.  One more play coming up soon, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, and I take a break for the summer.

 

FICTION

Tales of Hulan River (1942), Xiao Hong – A year ago I read Xiao Hong’s earlier novel The Field of Life and Death (1935).  Both her novels are quite short, so they are published together in English, and I assumed I would scoot through both of them, but The Field was so relentlessly violent and miserable that I took a break.  This later, superior, novel is about the author’s childhood in a small town, presumably fictionalized.  The child’s point of view vitiates the grimness to a small degree, yet the penultimate part of the book is I think the most awful child abuse story I have ever read in a novel.  It is not the narrator who is abused, but the twelve-year-old child bride purchased by a neighbor family.  Terrible, terrible stuff.

The Family Moskat (1948), I. B. Singer – And then for a month I read Singer’s great, Tolstoyan family saga about Jewish Warsaw, beginning in 1913 and ending the minute before the Germans set foot in Warsaw. How to describe my sense of dread as 1939 approached, and then as September approached.  I tried to imagine the emotions of the original audience, reading The Family Moskat as a serial in the Forward, just a couple of years after the catastrophe, after the total destruction of almost everything in the novel, but I do not think I succeeded.  It is a bleak, bleak novel, and what else could it be?

Festival (2011), César Aira – So for a while I plan to read a lot of short, jolly nonsense, like another of Aira’s amusing explorations of the meaning of conceptual art, this time at a film festival.

Papa Bach & Other Stories (2026), Doug Skinner – The line in the title of the post is from “The Market for Typos,” p. 114.  Doug is a Friend of the Blog, often featured here, at one point, for his valuable translations of Alphonse Allais.  This is the first time I read his short fiction, and, well, see that line I quoted.

 

POETRY

Pigeons and Moles: Selected Writings (1945-72), Günter Eich – Damaged by Nazi ideas, striving for the mystic, a curious follow-up to Doctor Faustus.

Things My Grandmother Said (2026), Amit Majmudar – Perhaps a bit goopy and too wisdom-driven for my tastes, but this must be, formally, in its range, and perhaps even in its wisdom, this is an outstanding collection.  Majmudar is also a radiologist.

 

ARTY

Snapshots in Sound (2026), Tony Schwarz – More conceptual art.  Documents about an obsessive New York City tape recorderist.  The sample from his catalogue become a prose poem:

Holdup witness

Homage to New York

Home Remedies

Horse Sounds  (35)

The Fate of the Animals (2022), Morgan Meis – Here Meis writes about, or takes leaps from, a Franz Marc painting.  One more book to go in his trilogy before I write something about them.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

L'homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), Albert Camus – Too abstract for my tastes, but does Camus ever capture his moment, or perhaps the later rebels, Vonnegut’s hero ending Cat’s Cradle with a permanently frozen obscene gesture at the universe, are just cribbing from Camus.  Good literary criticism, anyway, even if the history has likely been superseded.  Go to Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty (2025), for example, for a better treatment of the Russian rebels.

Momentos de aqui (Moments from, or of, Here, 2001), Ondjaki – An early book by the Angolan writer, more difficult than some of the later ones I read, more slippery.  A number of the stories for my tribute to a story-telling grandmother, so with Majmudar’s poems that was two grandmother-centered books this month.  The grandfathers dominated he Xiao Hong and Singer novels.  What does it mean?

Next month: shorter, sillier books.

 

What I Read in April 2026 – And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart

Thomas Mann filled a lot of my time, alongside the non-Shakespearian stuff.  Just two plays to go in this round, George Chapman’s All Fools and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan.

NOT SHAKESPEARE

Selected Poems (1593-1630), Michael Drayton – The line in the title is from his sonnet 61, among the few that really stand with Shakespeare’s best.  How many great poems must one write to be a great poet?

The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – The best play I picked for this round of Not Shakespeare.  Next fall they will almost all be this good or better.  Discussed over here.

A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – Weepy melodrama, poked at here.

The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), anonymous – Simple-minded true crime on the London stage.

Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers (2026), Darren Freebury-Jones – Freebury-Jones is a leading scholar in the world of attribution – which bits of which plays belong to whom.  I have avoided looking too closely at the field, suspecting I would rather not know how it works.  I may have been right.  I should write about my doubts, but that could turn into work.

 

FICTION

The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt – A psychiatrist is flung into the world of the Norse myths, and then into The Faerie Queene.  The fun of these two amusing novellas, in a move away from pulp, is the modern hero’s attempts to figure out and apply the rules of magic in each world.  I enjoyed revisiting this book but I wonder if I should have waited longer.  I had last read them 35 years ago; maybe 45 would have been better.

An Inspector Calls (1945), J. B. Priestly – Looked at askance in this post.

Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann – Narrowly considered here and here.

 

POETRY

Studies for an Actress and Other Poems (1973) &

Selected Poems (1944-73), Jean Garrigue

The Static Element: Selected Poems (1955-79), Nathan Zach

 

ART CRITICISM

The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (2020), Morgan Meis – Now this book, the first of what is now a trilogy, an innovative piece of art criticism nominally about a Rubens painting, I will write about, once I have read the other books.  Strongly recommended to the kinds of people who enjoy Wuthering Expectations.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Dix ans sous terre (1933), Norbert Casteret – Casteret was a great French spelunker, an expert in the caves of the Pyrenees, who loved nothing more than plunging into an icy subterranean river to find out if it went anywhere.  Sometimes it did, giving Casteret credit for some superb discoveries of prehistoric art among other things.  My brittle, taped-up copy is in the photo.  Highly interesting and recommended to people who like books about madmen who do things I cannot imagine doing.  The English book Ten Years Under the Earth is, I believe, a somewhat abridged combination of Casteret’s first two books.

Os Cem Melhores Contos Brasileiros do Século (The Hundred Best Brazilian Stories of the Century, 1940-59), various – A few months ago I read the earlier stories, through the 1930s, in this valuable anthology.  The stories from the next couple of decades seemed less original, more like what was going on elsewhere in the world, but also more difficult, so who knows how well I read them.  On to the 1960s, someday.

 

What I Read & Where I Went in March 2026 - the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich

London and Cornwall, St. Ives and Penzance and so on, is where.  I got some good Shakespearing in – The Tempest at the Wanamaker, the little candle-lit theater at the Globe, and a good walk around Shoreditch and northern London, tracking down various Shakespearean sites and monuments.  The Shakespeare Museum, built atop the excavated Curtain Theatre, surrounded, like, increasingly, everything in north London, by dubious modern high-rises, looks like it will open any minute now.

 

 

TRAVEL

The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), Ithell Colquhon – A painter who, like many, fell in love with Cornwall, Colquhon was also a genuine mystic, attracted to Cornwall’s almost unbelievable number of magical rocks, piled up or simply set on end.  Her book is a journey around Cornwall’s weirdness, extremely interesting while I was right there, presumably somewhat less interesting at a distance.  Some especially weird sentences excepted, Colquhon writes in the British house style of the time, light, witty, deft at quick sketches of people and places.  I saw some of her paintings at the St. Ives Tate, and would like to see more.

 

SHAKESPEARE-ADJACENT

The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Henry Chettle – Somehow I finally wrote about this one.

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990) – Highly useful.

 

NOVELS

He Knew He Was Right (1868-9), Anthony Trollope – His longest novel, perfect for international travel.  The A-plot, or really the protagonists of the A-plot seemed a little thin from the beginning, but soon enough other plots and characters tangle their way around the central story that I did not care much.  I sometimes have to resist the modern impulse to dismiss a tragedy by thinking “This guy needs a psychotherapist,” but that this novel is actually a quite early example of that notion, pathetic rather than tragic.  And, as is usual with Trollope, mostly comic.  Look at this beauty:

We are often told in our newspapers that England is disgraced by this and by that; by the unreadiness of  our army, by the unfitness of our navy, by the irrationality of our laws, by the immobility of our prejudices, and what not; but the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich,-- that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, and spiritless within, such a thing of shreds and parings, such a dab of food, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot.  (Ch. XXXVII)

Crome Yellow (1921), Aldous Huxley – Now this is what I meant by post-WWI “house style”; Huxley practically invents it with this talky, digressive little sad sack of a novel.  Virginia Woolf was not quite right when she wrote that everything changed in 1910 – 1920 is more like it.  I was surprised how much Huxley imitated Thomas Love Peacock’s talky, digressive novels, like Nightmare Abbey (1818).

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Vladimir Nabokov – In which the author, having written a Russian masterpiece, switches to English.  The narrator is writing the biography of his half-brother, a famous writer.  Many curious tricks are played.  I am reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), which given how different the books are is also weirdly similar.

The Singularity (1960), Dino Buzzati – The first third of this novella is a scientist’s journey to a mysterious research facility, devoted to shhh-it’s-a-secret.  Then the next two-thirds are – I guess skip this if you do not want to know the secret, but I now I cannot see why it matters – a good science fiction story about artificial intelligence.  Not a great one!  Minor compared to The Tartar Steppes or heaven knows The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.

Not to Disturb (1971), Muriel Spark – What  a strange book.

 

POETRY

Selected Poems (1818-48), Thomas Lovell Beddoes – Chettle’s Gothic, skeleton-filled play sent me to Lovell Beddoes.  The Carcanet collection is one-third excerpts from his crazy play Death’s Jest Book, which I should read again in full.

Selected Poems (1946-71), Salvador Espriu – A grim, mystical Catalan poet.

Archive of Desire (2025), Robin Coste Lewis – A recent poetic response to the poems and life of Constantine Cavafy.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Les chants du crépuscule (1835), Victor Hugo – It was Romantic poetry month, apparently.  This particular Hugo collection is highly political for the first half, Hugo haranguing or praising a range of French figures I do not know for reasons I do not understand.  I began to worry, but thankfully the second half takes a lyrical turn, and is full of beautiful French poetry.

Folhas Caídas (1853), Almeida Garrett – Another Romantic, this little book is nothing but love lyrics, mostly pretty pathetic.  Nice to be able to read this.

What I Read in February 2026 – Mouek mouek mouek… Ma-a-a-a… Ma-aa-a… said Saha

I am almost on my way to London.  Some Shakespearian and Not Shakespearian activities are on the schedule.

My reading, before this trip, was again  very British.

 

THE WAR OF THE POETS

Antonio and Mellida (1599?) &

Antonio's Revenge (1600?), John Marston – A remarkable pair of literary objects, discussed here and here.

Poetaster (1601), Ben Jonson – Jonson slags Marston, discussed here.

Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Post forthcoming.

Caelica (1633), Fulke Greville – Sonnets and sestets, fifty years of poems.  So many great poets from this period.  Unlike so many courtier poets, Fulke Greville dodged the executioner and lived to a good old age, although his death was still horrible.  Do not look it up.

Worldly Goods (1996), Lisa Jardine – A diversion into the non-English Renaissance with this superb classic of material history.  To think that this approach, looking at contracts and printers and so on, was once controversial.  I would love to read an England-centered descendant, which I am sure exists.  Recommendations welcome.

 

NOVELS & POETRY

The Ill-Made Knight (1940), T. H. White – We will visit Cornwall, so here is a gesture towards Cornwall, White’s Lancelot novel.  The shift in tone from The Sword in the Stone, from a boy’s book to something with sex and tragedy, is impressive.

The Moving Toyshop (1946), Edmund Crispin – We will visit Oxford, so here is a gesture towards that, although given all of the chase scenes down specific streets I perhaps should have saved it for after.  Among the British mysteries thought of as great classics, this one must be the silliest.

Eighty-Five Poems (1959), Louis MacNeice – A “selected poems” chosen by MacNeice.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

A Abóbada (1839) &

O Alcaide de Santarém (1845), Alexandre Herculano – The Walter Scott of Portugal.  The first story, The Dome  or The Vault, is much much much taught to, I believe, 10th graders.  If you take the bus tour north out of Lisbon you will visit the setting, the spectacular Batalha Monastery.

La chatte (1932), Colette – A couple marries young and gets to know each other, resulting in uncomfortable, realistic friction.  Plus the husband has a cat who he understand better than his wife, who hates the cat.  Almost plotless, but the one thing that happens is a doozy.  That’s the cat, Saha, up there in the title.

La Jalousie (Jealousy, or The Window Blind, 1957), Alain Robbe-Grillet – Talk about plotless.  The precision and repetition and playing around with the narrator is all very much to my tastes, but still I do not understand the brief delusion that this sort of thing would be the future of the novel.  The image is from a 1937 edition of Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré.

Comedias para se Ler na Escola (Comedies to Read in School, 2001), Luis Fernando Verissimo – What a dreary title, but this was a good book, a collection of newspaper shorts, stories and gags, by one of Brazil’s best comic writers.  He appeared on Wuthering Expectations long ago as the author of the entertaining Borges and the Eternal Orangutan.  Some of these crônicas have a light Borgesian touch.

What I Read in January 2026 – Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic.

I will be in London in early March, so my reading has been v v British, more so than usual.  If only I wanted to write anything.

 

NOT SHAKESPEARE AND ALSO SHAKESPEARE

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), William Shakespeare

Every Man in His Humour (Italian version) (1598) &

Every Man in His Humour (London version) (1616), Ben Jonson – discussed here.

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – More of London on the London stage.  I will write this one up momentarily.

Poems (???, earlier than 1618 anyway), Sir Walter Ralegh

Nothing Like the Sun (1964), Anthony Burgess – Shakespeare via Joyce via Burgess, with everyone enjoying their puns.  Not quite my Shakespeare, but convincing enough.  My recent reading demystified Burgess’s novel – oh, he read G. B. Harrison’s Elizabethan Plays and Players (1940), just like I did.  The quotation I the title is from Ch. IV, p. 26.  Young Shakespeare has been drinking.

 

FICTION

Men at Arms (1952), Evelyn Waugh – The British at war, but it is the Phoney War, when no one knew what was going on.  Easily worth reading for its humor and details, but post-war Waugh is a more conventional writer than the author of, for example, the outrageous Put Out More Flags (1942).

The Sound of the Mountain (1949-54), Yasunari Kawabata – please see this post.

The Kindly Ones (1962), Anthony Powell – More of the same.  The war begins in the next novel, thus my turn back to Waugh.  Addendum: more of the same, but the first long chapter moves back to the author's childhood, and could with tiny changes be published as a separate novella.  It is easily my favorite part of the series so far.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), P. D. James – A fine Cambridge-set mystery often taught by Rohan Maitzen.

 

POETRY

The Shield of Achilles (1955), W. H. Auden

For the Unfallen (1959), Geoffrey Hill

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

L'Ignorant (1958), Philippe Jaccottet

O Hóspede de Job (The Guest of Job, 1963), José Cardoso Pires – Perhaps about the exhaustion of a dictatorship.  Not available in English.  Possibly slightly too hard for me but I fought through it. The Ballad of Dog’s Beach (1982) is easy to recommend to readers of Leonardo Sciascia and similar anti-mysteries.

Les mots (The Words, 1964), Jean-Paul Sartre – Sartre’s childhood memoir, with long sections on his love of reading and writing.  The classics came from his stern grandfather, rather more trashy stuff from his indulgent mother.  In a different life he would have been a pulp adventure writer.  Sartre, the adult, is often a repulsive character, but the childhood version is a sympathetic, charming little fellow.

I also read, while listening, the lyrics to Caetano Veloso 1968 and 1969 albums, both titled Caetano Veloso.  The former is especially rich in classics.  A valuable exercise I should do more often. 

What I Read in December 2025 – We ain’t gonna eat that.

I am not so interested in writing a longer summary of my year in reading, so I will put that here.  Finishing the massive The Story of the Stone and reading the monstrous Finnegans Wake (here, continuing, ending) were solid accomplishments in reading, if there are such things.  The worst book I read was the instructive I, Robot.  I do not know what the best was. 

My time with Elizabethan writers and books about them has continued to be rewarding.  For example, in December:

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Edward the Second (1592?) &

The Massacre at Paris (1592?) &

Hero and Leander (1593? / 1598), Christopher Marlowe – On Edward II; on The Massacre.

The Old Wives Tale (1593?), George Peele – An hour of fairy tale fluff, a patchwork perhaps written for a wedding.  A cousin of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; just the kind of thing I like.

Edward III (1595?), ??? – One great act.

Titus Andronicus (c. 1593), William Shakespeare

Elizabethan Plays & Players (1940), G. B. Harrison – Well written and outstanding in its use of evidence.

The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), various

Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), Taylor Mac – Okay, now this thing.  Three minor (although they all have lines) characters murdered in Titus Andronicus turn out to have survived, and are given the task of cleaning up the results of the last act (“[t]here is the appearance of at least one thousand corpses on the stage,” 5).  A series of outrageous and disgusting events ensue, ending with “one of the more spectacular moments ever to be seen in the history of theater” (4), which may well have been true.  How I would love to see this travesty.  The line in the title of the post is said by Gary, played by Nathan Lane, p. 70.

FICTION

Lucifer (1654), Joost van den Vondel – Covered overhere.

Sod and Stubble (1936), John Ise – A novel of pioneer days on the Great Plains, set about 45 miles due south of Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, and globally close to the setting of Little House on the Prairie.  Strongly recommended to anyone who loves Cather and Wilder for the details of ordinary life.  It is really Ise writing up his mother’s oral memoir, as close to a primary source as fiction gets.

The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), W. E. Bowman – A magnificent parody of the Himalayan mountain climbing genre in a classic Wodehouse or Douglas Adams-like English style.

My Death (2004), Lisa Tuttle – A fine little paradoxical time-shift novel.

MEMOIR

Girl to Country (2025), Amy Rigby – One of our greatest living songwriters tries to make it in Nashville, and succeeds, after making it in New York, as covered in the earlier Girl to City (2019).  Making it, succeeding, artistically.  The first volume of memoirs likely has more interest to people who are not already fans, but I will testify that it has been highly rewarding, for more than thirty years now, to be an Amy Rigby fan.

POETRY

On the Slaughter (1891-1933), Hayim Nahman Bialik – Peter Cole’s new translation of Bialik’s poems, an outstanding addition to Bialik’s presence in English.

Five Senses: Selected Poems (1963), Judith Wright – Australian, full of surprises.

That Swing: Poems, 2008-2016 (2017), X. J. Kennedy

The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson (2018), Percival Everett – “So, I kept saying to myself I was gonna write a novel entitled Percival Everett’s Long Overdue Slavery Novel, but this is what came out.”

The Khayyam Suite (2025), Charles Martin – Last seen here as Ovid’s translator.

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Le Château des Carpathes (1892), Jules Verne – I have gotten used to Verne rewriting Poe, but this is more of a Balzac novel, or an adventure novel with a sudden, surprising intrusion of Balzac.  Slow-paced, diffuse, thin in scientific ideas, yet highly entertaining.

L'Effraie (1953), Philippe Jaccottet – The war is over and Surrealism is over, so finally, some fresh ideas in French poetry!  Some resemblance to Rilke, maybe to James Merrill.  I read his second book, too, but it will show up in January’s list.

Uma mão cheia de nada outra de coisa nenhuma: historietas (1955), Irene Lisboa – Tiny little stories about children and their visionary moments by an important figure in Portuguese pedagogy.  These will be easy, right?  Ha ha ha, no, no.  But I guess that is good for me.

Cahiers de l'été 1944 (2025), Jean-Baptiste Duroselle – An angry essay written just before the liberation of Paris by the young man who would become the great historian of 20th century French diplomatic history, author of gigantic (“magisterial”) volumes I will likely never read.  This newly published book is an interesting companion to Marc Bloch’s L'Etrange defaite (1946, written 1940), which he could not have known.

What I Read in November 2025 – The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike

I only have one Marlowe play left to revisit.  I should start thinking about a set of plays for this winter.  I will likely read up to 1603, 1604, the end of the Elizabethan age.  Please suggest favorites.

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Astrophil and Stella (c. 1580), Philip Sidney – Kicking off the sonnet craze.

The Jew of Malta (1589?), Christopher Marlowe – I will point you here.

Henry VI, Part 3 (1590?) &

Henry VI, Part 1 (1591?), William Shakespeare – A bit on Part 3 over here.  Part 1 is as weak as I remember.  An early quickie prequel, perhaps slapped together while Shakespeare was working on Richard III.

Arden of Faversham (1591?), ??? – Quite good, really.

Doctor Faustus A (1592?/1604) &

Doctor Faustus B (1592?/1616), Christopher Marlowe – Some notes back here.  The line in the title is from Faustus’s great last scene, the A text.  The B text replaces the commas with periods – also good.

Richard III (1592?), William Shakespeare – Some weaknesses, but so many great scenes.

Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays (2014), Lawrence & Sally-Beth MacLean Manley – I had planned to look at this book, but it was so interesting that I read it.  The use of evidence is exemplary, meaning cautious.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival (2025), Stephen Greenblatt – Briefly reviewed.

FICTION

The Death of Virgil (1945), Hermann Broch – Why make art?

The Heat of the Day (1948), Elizabeth Bowen – London during, or just after, the Blitz.  A bit of a spy story, surprisingly.  Bowen’s mix of Flaubert and James, or what I think of as Flaubert and James, is always interesting.

The One That Got Away (1992), Percival Everett & Dirk Zimmer – A picture book about cowboys and numbers, written and illustrated for little children.

Vaim (2025), Jon Fosse– Look, a new novel!  The Fosse seemed slight to me, the characters much simpler than the artist I spent so much time with in Septology.  This is the first of a trilogy, so maybe it is all going somewhere.  I enjoyed the voice of the characters; Damion Searls is an ideal translator.

Shadow Ticket (2025), Thomas Pynchon  - Another new novel.  Against the Day (2006) was the last big book I read before starting Wuthering Expectations.  I guess it exhausted me, and my interests wandered elsewhere, so I skipped the next two novels, but I am now well-rested and, since Pynchon is 88, I am amazed this book exists.  Talk about simpler, compared to, say, Gravity’s Rainbow, with which it has many connections, but anyone sympathetic to what Pynchon does should be happy with this book.  It features a number of things that glow in the dark; quite a lot of cheese, and cheez, and lots of information about the American cheezscape.  Biblioklept has put together some useful and entertaining annotations.  I hope someone from Milwaukee is doing the same for all of the Wisconsin-specific detail.  It amuses me to think of 80-some year-old Pynchon spending his time making sure he squeezes all of the good details out of 1930 Milwaukee.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Os cem melhores contos brasileiros do século (The 100 Nest Brazilian Short Stories of the Century, 1903-38), various – I read the first thirteen stories, through the 1930s.  Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Graciliano Ramos – plausibly among the best Brazilian short stories of the century, yes.  And just hard enough for my Portuguese study.

Les gommes (The Erasers, 1953), Alain Robbe-Grillet – I read Robbe-Grillet’s fussy, screwball anti-mystery ages ago in English.  I enjoyed revisiting it, although I have less of a clue than ever why so many people thought this was going to be the future of the novel.  I would not have complained, but why, why?

 

What I Read in October 2025 – What a simple daily pleasure.

October was so long ago.  It is almost December.  Why do I write these.

MARLOWE AND SO ON

The Famous Victories of Henry V (1580s?), ??? – Some notes over here.

Tamburlaine, Pt. II (1587?), Christopher Marlowe – Righthere and also here.

The Spanish Tragedy (1587?), Thomas Kyd – This away and that away.

Henry VI, Pt. 2 (1590?), William Shakespeare – Just click here or here.

English Tragedy before Shakespeare (1955), Wolfgang Clemen – A deceptive title.  The focus is narrowly on the evolution of the set speech in early Elizabethan plays.  A topic of enormous interest and a book of great insight, it turned out.

POETRY

Brides of Reason (1955) &

A Winter Talent and Other Poems (1957) &

A Sequence for Francis Parkman (1961), Donald Davie

Night Watch (2025), Kevin Young

 

OTHER BOOKS IN ENGLISH

Platero and I (1914), Juan Ramón Jiménez – It occurred to me, returning from my French donkey expedition, that I had many of the classics of donkey literature but not this one, a hundred-some prose poems by the future Nobel Prize-winning poet about his beloved donkey friend.  Way too sentimental for my tastes, but with many fine moments of fine beauty or irony.  The line in the post’s title is from LVII, Promenade, p. 95 of my edition, translated by Austin, Texas, high school Spanish teacher Eloise Roach.

The Plague (1947), Albert Camus

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass (2025), Dave Barry – The American humorist.  I assume non-Americans have no idea who Barry is.  One’s taste for his humor is obviously central to enjoying this book, but this is an actual memoir, not a humor book, and the long central section about his newspaper career in the 1970s and 1980s is an extremely interesting depiction of a lost world.  We were better off back then, although there is nothing to be done to bring it back.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Primeiro Livro de Poesia (First Book of Poetry, 1991) – Poetry suitable for children from around the Lusophonic world, assembled by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.  I read this book three years ago when I was just starting to read in Portuguese.  Was it easier now?  Did I understand it better?  I guess.

Le coffre (The Cartopper, 2019), Jacky Schwartmann & Lucian-Dragos Bogdan – An artificial novel for the Lyon mystery festival when Romania was the special guest country, with the French author writing the Lyon chapters and the Romanian writing the Romanian writing those set in Romania.  The detectives do not share a language and can only communicate by email.  This should be a throwaway book, but it is actually pretty good.  The central mystery was all right and the characters were developed and enjoyable.  Both authors were digressive, relaxed.  The Lyon details were a treat.  Not bad, not bad.  The book was a thoughtful gift – thanks!

Retour à Birkenau (Return to Birkenau, 2019), Ginette Kolinka avec Marion Ruggieri – Birkenau survivor Kolinka became active in French Holocaust education when she became a widow in her seventies.  She accompanied groups of French schoolchildren on tours of Birkenau, thus the Return in the book’s title, an extraordinary piece of bravery.  Her 100th birthday was last February.

Avec les fées (With the Fairies, 2024), Sylvain Tesson – Travel writer Tesson tours the Celtic coast – Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, western Ireland, western Scotland, as far as the Shetlands – by sailboat, foot, and bicycle.  I enjoy his voice and humor, but this is a minor book compared to his crazy Russian adventures.  Perhaps a bit too gooey, rhetorically, but how much is there to say about the pleasures of sailing without a little goo.

What I Read in September 2025 – A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme

My writing on Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great plays has been hampered by an apparent post-France short circuit in my ability to write.  So I will put up some easier posts to remind myself how to write.

I had two major projects this month, one ongoing, one returned to its stable.

 

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Songes and Sonettes Written By the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt the Elder and others (1557), various – Better known as Tottel’s Miscellany, an enormously important poetry anthology that was much-looted by the great Elizabethan poets.  Thomas Wyatt brought the Petrarchan sonnet into English, in a mix of translation, imitation, and original poems.  Henry Howard was also a superb sonnet writer and basically invented English blank verse, although you will have to go to another book, like the invaluable Five Courtier Poets of the English Renaissance (1969), to see his blank verse Virgil translations.

Howard is a romantic, novelistic figure, who is presumably more famous now than he has been for a while because of the interest in the reign of Henry VIII as a subject for novels and television soap opera.  I hope that has sent some people to his poems.  The bit in the title of the post if from Howard’s epitaph for Wyatt, “Wyatt resteth here…”

Gorboduc (1561), Thomas Sackville & Thomas Norton – We covered this one here.

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587) &

Tamburlaine the Great, Pt. I (1587? / 1590), Christopher Marlowe – A post on Dido is over here; something on Tamburlaine is in slow progress.

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600 (2000) – Always more to learn.

 

TRAVELS WITH THREE DONKEYS IN THE CÉVENNES

The three donkeys, enjoying having their packs off, as was I.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson

Le Chemin de Stevenson (2023) &

Le Jura... à pied (2023), TopoGuides

Tomorrow I will put up more donkey photos.  Some people may have seen them on Twitter or Bluesky.  It was a good trip.  The Jura book was for the post-donkey wind-down.

 

NOVELS

Guilt (1936), László Németh – This Hungarian novel looks like some kind of social realism but then wanders into stranger visionary territory at times.  The protagonist is a version of the naif character that László Krasznahorkai often uses.  The prose style is utterly different but Krasznahorkai readers will find many interesting things here.

The Ponder Heart (1953), Eudora Welty – Pure Welty comedy in a short novel I had for some reason not read before.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Ishmael Reed – Highly, highly recommended to Percival Everett readers.  Well, not to most Everett readers, now that there are so many.  Not as rich a book as Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) but how many are.

The Poacher's Son (2010), Paul Doiron – A Maine detective novel, the first in what is now a long series, featuring a game warden “detective.”  For most of the book, it is barely a detective novel at all, but rather a story about a complicated father-son relationship that takes a turn when the difficult father becomes a murder suspect.  It is quite a sad book, actually.  To my limited knowledge, it captures the landscape and ethos of its portion of Maine quite well.

 

POETRY

How the Stones Came to Venice (2021), Gary Lawless – Lawless owns a bookstore, Gulf of Maine Books, in Brunswick, Maine that features an astounding wall of poetry.  He is also devoted to rescue donkeys, although they do not feature in this curious hybrid book.

Blood Wolf Moon (2025), Elise Paschen

 

IN PORTUGUESE

Zilda (1924), Alfredo Cortez – An important piece of Portuguese theater, I am told.

What I Read in August 2025 - But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling

I have been learning a lot about Elizabethan literature.  Next month we will see what good it does me.  I am enjoying myself.  The title quotation is from Ralph Roister Doister.

I plan to put up a post about Marlowe’s first – probably his first – play, Dido, Quen of Carthage, on September 29, and in the meantime will write about some plays preceding Marlowe.

 

FICTION

Ralph Roister Doister (1552, perhaps), Nicholas Udall – enjoyed over here.

The Loved One (1948), Evelyn Waugh – amusing and minor.  Waugh briefly visited Los Angeles and imagined Disneyland (as a cemetery), just a few years before it was built.  Perceptive.

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier – Outstanding debut novel about the Haitian Revolution.  Or about the failures of Surrealism.  I should write a longer note on this one.

Franny and Zooey (1955 / 1957 / 1961), J. D. Salinger – I enjoyed Nine Stories (1953) and enjoyed “Franny” (1955) all right but boy “Zooey” (1957) was a real nerve saw.  I am amazed that New Yorker readers had so much patience for Salinger’s dialectical Buddhist fiction.

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Samuel R. Delany – I found Delany’s first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), creative but clumsy and I suppose this novel, his fifth, is the same, but the level of creativity is even higher.  It was mostly written over four days and sometimes feels like it, but it is overflowing with exciting conceits.  The basis of the plot is literary criticism, the interpretation of the title ballad.  To do literary criticism, the protagonist must visit ruined spaceships and befriend a space monster. Delany was – let me go look this up – 22, 23 years-old.

 

POETRY

The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), William Carlos Williams

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1948-89), Yehuda Amichai

Every Sound Is Not a Wolf (2025), Alberto Rios

 

PURSUIT OF THE SUBLIME / MADNESS

Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951), Maurice Herzog – enjoyed back here.

 

IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Os Escravos (1865), Castro Alves – Three abolitionist poems by a Brazilian teenager who wanted to be Victor Hugo and/or Byron and died young after introducing Romanticism to Brazilian poetry.  I have little idea how good these poems are, but this is pretty exciting.

Les voix du silence (1951), André Malraux – A work of imaginative art criticism by French literature’s great con man, in effect his successful application to be French Minister of Culture.  I really should write a longer note about this book, some of which is highly interesting.

Um estranho em Goa (2000), José Eduardo Agualusa – An Angolan writer’s autofiction about a visit to Goa, a place about which I knew nothing, which is why I read the book. Plus it is at my language level, plus it is a reasonable length, plus, I suppose, many other things.  The travel writing aspects were of high interest, the fiction less so, but fine.  I hope the plot line where Agualusa halfheartedly tries to buy, mostly out of morbid curiosity, the living heart of the local saint is fiction.  Some of Agualusa’s books have been translated into English recently but not this one.  I hope to read another someday.

 

 

A readalong of Christopher Marlowe and friends - I fear they know we sent the poison'd broth

Please join me this fall in reading the plays of Christopher Marlowe and some of his contemporaries, if that sounds enjoyable to you.  The more I have thought about it, the more enjoyable it sounds to me.  I have many questions.

Below is an attempt at a schedule, with a play every two weeks, slower than when we read all of the Greek plays.  In September, though, I will blow through some early plays the precede the commercial London theater.  They are a bit shorter and frankly I doubt that anyone else will want to read them, so let’s get on to Marlowe, right?  Marlowe is outstanding.

I hope to put up a post every Monday (the dates below), with the alternating posts about some related topic: another play, perhaps even one by Shakespeare, or poetry, or criticism, or even in theory a performance although that does not seem likely.

I think of these works more as poems than as plays; this will mostly be an exercise in poetics and literary history.  But there is no reason anyone else has to read along for that.

Early Precursors
Sep. 1	1552	Ralph Roister Doister	Nicholas Udall
Sep. 8	1553	Gammer Gurton's Needle	authorship much disputed
Sep. 15	1561	Gorbuduc	Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville
Marlowe & Co.
Sep. 29	1587	Dido, Queen of Carthage	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 6	1587	Tamburlaine, Parts I & II	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 20	1587	The Spanish Tragedy	Thomas Kyd
Nov. 3	1589	The Jew of Malta	Christopher Marlowe
Nov. 17	1591	Arden of Faversham	???
Dec. 1	1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 15	1592	Edward the Second	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 29	1593	The Massacre at Paris	Christopher Marlowe

The years are all from the chronological table in the back of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 1990, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway.  Most of these years are marked with an asterisk meaning “best guess” so please use them skeptically.  The year of The Spanish Tragedy is especially convenient – plausible but convenient – because paired up with Tamburlaine it creates a handy Year When Everything Changed, a concentrated explosion of theatrical innovation.  But maybe it did not happen.

The first London commercial theater (The Theatre) opened in 1576, the next few in 1577.  One of my puzzles is what happened in the ten years before the Tamburlaine / Spanish Tragedy revolution.  Barely more than a dozen plays survive from that period, a number of them closet dramas, not written for performance.  What the heck was on those stages?

Some of what else was going on:

1580s	Astrophel and Stella	Philip Sidney
	An Apology for Poetry	Philip Sidney
	Caelica	Fulke Greville
1590	Henry VI, parts 1 to 3	William Shakespeare, et. al.
	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	William Shakespeare
	The Faerie Queene I-III	Edmund Spenser
1591	The Taming of the Shrew	William Shakespeare
	The Comedy of Errors	William Shakespeare
	Richard III	William Shakespeare
	Titus Andronicus	William Shakespeare
	Complaints	Edmund Spenser
	Summer's Last Will and Testament	Thomas Nashe
1592	Delia and the Complaint of Roasmund	Sanuel Daniel
	Pierce Penniless	Thomas Nashe
1593	Idea: The Shepherd's Garland	Michael Drayton
	Venus and Adonis	William Shakespeare
	Hero and Leander	Christopher Marlowe
	The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia	Philip Sidney

 

The sonnet craze – Sidney, Greville, Daniel, Drayton – is at its peak.  Lots of great poetry of all types, really, but oh so many sonnets.  Then there is the upstart, catching up with Marlowe fast.  I remind myself that Shakespeare was two months younger than Marlowe.  The theaters are closed because of the plague in 1592, which is why Shakespeare and possibly Marlowe switched from plays to best-selling narrative poems (although Hero and Leander was not published until 1598).

Please feel free to offer corrections, major or minor omissions, or really any comment at all.  I have read a lot of this stuff before but have no other expertise.

In December I will think about what happens next.  But in the meantime let’s have some laughs with the hilarious comedies of Marlowe and pals.  The title quotation is from, where else, The Jew of Malta, Act 4, Scene 1.