Category: recent reading

À la recherche du temps perdu

at a forest crossroads where paths converge
— Marcel Proust. À la recherche du temps perdu.  Édition publiée sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, [2019].
I. Du côté de chez Swann [1913]. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Première partie) [1918].
II. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Deuxième partie) [1918]. Le Côté de Guermantes. [1920-1].
III. Sodome et Gomorrhe [1921-2]. La Prisonnière [1923].
IV. Albertine disparue [1925]. Le Temps retrouvé [1927].
[The picture below is the first page of the text of the second edition of Du côté de chez Swann.]
Yesterday 23 March 2024 at 21h07 I finished reading À la recherche du temps perdu, with a mixture of awe and admiration, glee and sadness, exasperation and wonder. And no regrets whatsoever : these characters will kick around in my head for years, and I now see traces and hear echoes of Proust in many books read earlier. I began reading Du côté de chez Swann on 30 October 2021 and at first made steady progress, even writing a preliminary essay, “Monocles, Hawthorn, and Memory, or, A Short Despatch on a Long Book”, for the final issue of Wormwood in the spring of 2022. The third volume was slow going for me at times, as the narrator’s spinning thoughts and whining self-involvement were sometimes too much. Part of the pattern, of course, and often leavened with flashes of humor. The fourth volume is a page-turner, and wrenching. The last 75 pages of Albertine disparue are filled with travel, diplomacy, weddings, deaths, deceptions : a whirl of exterior incident after the cycles of involution of the first two chapters ; and the movement across time, narrative time and historical time, when (for example)  the narrator suddenly glimpses Albertine’s Fortuny coat in a painting by Carpaccio in Venice. And then in Le temps retrouvé, the slow motion urgency is compelling. Proust runs up and down the scale from micro to macro, not quite Rudy Rucker transrealism but busy, and even veering toward cosmic materialism. The concluding metaphor of the forest crossroads  is a delight, and the transversales connecting all the rides, all the persons of the novel, are a glimpse of Borges’ garden of forking paths decades before that story. There are so many things to say about À la recherche du temps perdu, and I am sure that most of them have already been said elegantly by distinguished scholars. I would re-read this book endlessly if had no other obligations or were a tenured professor, But I am not, and I do have books to write and, like Proust’s narrator, I wonder if there is time or sufficient competence to complete them.
And yet there is one observation I have that might be worthy of relating.  In the descriptions of the air raids over Paris and the aeroplanes rising to the skies, Proust assimilates Wagner and the Walkyries into military aviation : « c’était à demander si c’était bien des aviateurs et pas plutôt des Walkyries qui montaient » [one might well ask if it were aviators or in fact the Walkyries who took off]. The book was published in 1927, years after his death, but those passages seem to have been composed close to the time of the events in 1916. Earlier in the passage, the doomed marquis de Saint-Loup talks to the narrator of the beauty of the planes flying in fixed formation (‘faire constellation’ in French), and the greater beauty when the engagements begin, “the moment when they ‘make apocalypse’ and even the stars no longer keep their place”. There was something in the air, certainly : in Images of War (1919), Richard Aldington, who was an early English reader of Proust, has a poem entitled “Barrage”, which begins : “Thunder / The gallop of innumerable Walkyrie impetuous for battle”. My observation is that Proust is the true antecedent of the helicopter cowboys blasting Wagner in Apocalypse Now! And that smell of napalm on the morning is a dark, diabolical, ironic madeleine.
I had better stop there.

recent reading : late march 2024

— Anne Varichon. Color Charts. A History. Translated by Kate Deimling.  Princeton University Press, [2024].
The French title of this beautifully illustrated book is Nuanciers [2023], a subtle and elegant term. After a brief nod to medieval knowledge with an illustration from a fifteenth-century manuscript Hortus Sanitatis (BnF Ms. Lat. 11229), the historical range of the book is from the late seventeenth century to the present. Fascinating, gorgeous and interesting. One very curious editoral decision was to give the titles of the sources of the illustrations in English translation, usually omitting the original title, which would make it next to impossible to cite or consult these works. A shame and a disservice to the reader.
The illustration above is from the second edition of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, with additions . . . by Patrick Syme (London, 1821).

— Sylvia Townsend Warner. T H White [1967]. With an introduction by Gill Davies. Handheld Classics 31. Handheld Press, [2023].
An exemplary biography (and great notes by Kate Macdonald in the Handheld press edition). Here she is suggesting the appeal of flying in the mid-1930s: “You went faster than in any car, you rose more dangerously than over any fence, and the people who flew, who had machines of their own, who arrived for lunch removing furred helmets and unbuckling quantities of little straps, spoke of it with phlegm, as though it were nothing to them to have come down from heaven.”
N.B. It is reported that Handheld Press will cease trading later this year. As of the present writing, the books are readily available in the U.S. from bookshop.org .

— Jonatham Lethem. The Collapsing Frontier plus Calvino’s “Lightness” and the Feral Child of History plus In Mugwump Four and much more. PM Press, 2024.
Funny tricky tricky funny stuff, and a great interview by Terry Bisson. Outspoken Authors series, no. 30. Just out!

— Michael Z. Lewin. The Enemies Within [1974]. Harper & Row, Perennial Library pbk., [1984].
——. The Silent Salesman [1978]. Berkley pbk., [1981]
——. Out of Season [1984]. Mysterious Press pbk., [1991].

— Michael Connelly. The Black Box. A Novel [2012]. Grand Central pbk., [2013].
——. The Dark Hours [2021]. Grand Central pbk., [2022].

— Bill Griffith. Three Rocks. The Story of Ernie Bushmiller the Man Who Created Nancy. Abrams ComicArts, [2023].

The Book Blinders by John Clute

— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. Norstrilia Press, [forthcoming 2024]. [Seen in proof state].
There has been a steady production of scholarship on the history of the publisher’s dust jacket in the past fifty years. These ephemeral pieces of paper encode all manner of information about the moment in time and both how publishers perceived their wares and how they wanted the reading and book-buying public to receive the newly published books. Much emphasis has been on nineteenth-century jackets in recent research, including in G. Thomas Tanselle’s Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (2011), which updates work he first published in 1971, and Mark Godburn’s Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (2016). And yet it is really in the early twentieth century that jackets proliferate and assume the form and function we now understand. Vast conceptual leaps in design and presentation of information occur between The Wind in the Willow (1908) to What Not (1918/1919) to In Our Time or The Great Gatsby (both 1925). And yet this is not solely the province of literary high spots. Across all types of literature, the dust jacket functions as the outer face of the book.  The title, The Book Blinders, is descriptive of the practical effect for the reader of a long-standing institutional policy of discarding dust jackets or separating the jacket from the book and storing them elsewhere, uncatalogued. This policy prevailed at the British Museum (later British Library) and at other depository libraries from the emergence of the dust jacket and continued for most of the twentieth century. With more than 100 examples of dust jackets not in BL (from the years of the first world war through 1990), John Clute documents the importance of the dust jacket and considers the implications of this vandalism from within. How about these three or four: Rose Macaulay, What Not (1918), a tale of eugenics and privilege, suppression of a libellous passage delaying actual publication until 1919 (Clute’s copy is Michael Sadleir’s own, saved from the memory hole); C. E. M. Joad, Priscilla and Charybdis (1924), “undeterred by the gruelling wordplay of the title, [I] took a look, and found found this this on pages 206-207; a seductive Joad-like protagonist is addressing a young woman on a train ride they are sharing: ‘Darling [he purrs], have you ever travelled without a ticket?’ (this one alone is worth the price of admission); or Ezra Pound, Make It New (1934):

Faber (which is to say Eliot) clearly thought it sagacious to wrap in sheep’s clothing the already notorious Ezra Pound’s new publication with its incendiary title: a ticking bomb that needed no bush. But the underlying message cannot be missed: Pound’s title, a modernist wake-up slogan he’d been using offhandedly since 1928, is manifestly inflammatory, once grasped; a challenge to his various enemies who (he maintains) clog the literature pews: an up-yours bombination clearly audible through the enfant-sauvage mask Pound wore until it was too late. This bomb needed to slip through the gates before exploding.

or Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), Tom Eliot again; or Lawrence Leonard, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980); or London Tales (1983), edited by Julian Evans. Clute’s selections are fascinating testimony to the breadth of his reading and collecting and his critical range; the text sparkles with his crunchy and apt vocabulary. It seems almost a homoeopathic distillation: “I’d reckon that out of every 8,000 or so books to arrive at the British Library complete with dust-jacket, I’ve commented here on a maximum of one”. (Excessive candor moment: John Clute is a friend of more than twenty-five years; I am the source for the images of the only jacket not from his own collection.) This is an important book.

recent reading : february 2024

Surtees at the End of the World

— White, T. H. Gone to Ground Or The Sporting Decameron [Cover title]. London: Collins, 1935. A remarkable book in a stylish pictorial dust jacket by J. Z. Atkinson.

Nominally a sequel to White’s Earth Stopped (1934), this collection of linked stories is indeed a Sporting Decameron as the dust jacket announces above a graceful line drawing of a fox descending. There are further allusions to the book as a Sporting Decameron throughout the text, but the title page reads simply : Gone to Ground. A Novel.

White briskly and offhandedly charts a descent into global war. Just like that! A small party of foxhunters (with a gardener and an old Etonian tramp) takes refuge in a well-appointed bomb shelter, built by the suspicioously wealthy and long-lived Soapy Sponge and Facey Romford, who had absquatulated to Australia and formed a bank. Members of the party tell a succession of fantastical tales of foxhunting and fishing, channelling Surtees and Norman Douglas and M. R. James, with nods to Buchan and Dunsany and jeers at Kenneth Grahame. Gone to Ground voices many of the predilections and literary preoccupations that would occupy White throughout his career (from The Sword in Stone to The Book of Merlyn). The world outside the storytelling party is left behind.

— — —

— Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire [1962]. Vintage pbk.

— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. Norstrilia Press, [forthcoming 2024]. [Seen in proof state].

— Kingsley Amis. Every Day Drinking. Illustrated by Merrily Harpur. Hutchinson, [1983]. Collected columns from the Daily Express, by a past master and a fun chronicler of his thirsts.
— Mark Tewfik. Gelatine Joe. Privately Printed, Lantern Rouge Press, 2024. Vignette of combat in Afghanistan, a “tissue culture” from a longer work in progress.
— Howard Waldrop. Flying Saucer Rock and Roll. Cheap Street, [2002].
— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023, but POD 8 January 2024].
— Ron Weighell. The White Road. Illustrations by Nick Maloret. Ghost Story Press, 1997.
— Gary Phillips. Perdition, U.S.A. John Brown Books, [1996]. Intense, hard boiled L.A. novel, a close third person narrative of the adventures of Ivan Monk, Black businessman and private eye.

— Rex Stout. Three Men Out [1954]. A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Bantam pbk., 9th ptg.
——. A Family Affair [1975]. Introduction by Thomas Gifford. Bantam pbk., 4th ptg.
— Dorothy Sayers. Murder Must Advertise [1933]. A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery. Harper pbk.

seventeen years of the Endless Bookshelf

Today marks seventeen years of reports of messing about in books under the sign of the Endless Bookshelf. I’m still at it, and glad to be reading and thinking about books, and occasionally writing or publishing them. What a delight to discover new books and writers or to find that a book published a century ago is fresh and nimble. I have a few essays in the works, either scheduled for publication or due this spring, and other things in progress. To my few readers, it is always a delight to hear from you, keep sending me your news.

— — —

current reading :

— Marcel Proust. Le temps retrouvé [1927].

— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924. This was Melville’s last book, unpublished at the time of his death and closely connected to his book of verse, John Marr and other sailors (1888). Billy Budd grew out of a note to “Billy in the Darbies”, the poem that concludes the book. The manuscript re-emerged in the early 1920s and first published by Constable as vol. 13 in the Standard Edition of the Works, a landmark in the rediscovery of Melville.  There will be an exhibition on Billy Budd and Melville at the Grolier Club in September and I am celebrating the centenary by reading the book. For now:

In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main path, some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson I am going to err into such a by-path. If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad.

— — —

[In September 2023, I left Twitter after nearly 15 years of marginal glosses and other ephemeral notes. I don’t miss it for an instant, though I do remember the days when it was a fun mode of quick communication. I post occasional announcements at @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu and send out semi-annual newsletters.]

— — —

recent reading :

— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue [1925].
— Michael Swanwick. Phases of the Sun [bound with:] Phases of the Moon. Dragonstairs Press, 2020 [i.e., 2024]. Text printed dos à dos,  leporello binding of yellow and blue boards. Edition of 19. Swanwick at his bleakest and most romantic in these two sequences of short short stories about writing and love.
— Howard Waldrop. The Ugly Chickens. [Old Earth Books, 2009].
— Ron Weighell. The Mark of Andreas Germer. Quire 13. The Last Press, 2022. Edition of 100. Original short yarn from the estate of Ron Weighell (1950-2020), moving nimbly from a thoughtful citation of Milton to the tale of a book with a dreadful effect upon its reader.
— Arthur Machen. The Three Impostors or the Transmutations [1895], in The House of Souls. Tartarus Press, [2021].
— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].

— — —

I am looking forward to receiving the Conway Miscellany, a collection of four books by John Crowley from Ninepin Press in varying formats, comprising: The Sixties, A Forged Diary; Seventy-Nine Dreams; Two Talks on Writing; and Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle.

recent reading : end of december 2023

current reading :

— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].

recent reading :

— Michael Swanwick and Sean Swanwick. Father Winter. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 120.
Five short shorts on snowy topics, including “My Dad Is an Astronaut” by Sean Swanwick.

— Arthur Machen. The House of Souls [1906]. Tartarus Press, [2021].

— Michael Cisco. Weird Fiction. A Genre Study [2021]. Palgrave Macmillan, [POD: 19 July 2023].
“The beauty and tranquillity of a place are no sign at all of safety, as might once have been true in pastoral literature.”

— Moncure Biddle. A Christmas Letter. Charles Lamb. December 25, 1938. Moncure Biddle & Co., 1938.
An old favorite, partly adapted from Hazlitt.

— Ernest Hilbert. Storm Swimmer. Winner 2022 Vasser Miller Prize in Poetry. University of North Texas Press, [2023].

recent reading : October & November 2023

— Howard Waldrop. H’ard Starts. The Early Waldrop. Edited by George R. R. Martin and Bradley Denton. [Subterranean Press, 2023]. Edition of 750 copies.
Collects nearly two dozen pieces described by Waldrop as “What I Wrote Before I Could Write” which is of course nonsense. “Lunchbox” was his first professional fiction sale, a Mars landing. “Onions, Charles Ives, and the Rock Novel” (an early piece written for Crawdaddy!), extrapolates from the posthumous production of Ives’ Fourth Symphony what would later become known as the “rock opera”. The four-part interview by Bradley Denton is great fun.

— — —

Max Beerbohm, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden’

— Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner. Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity. New York Public Library, 2023.
This handsome little book presents the exhibition labels for the Beerbohm show drawing on the NYPL collection, Lasner’s collection at the University of Delaware, and other lenders. The book (96 pp.) is rich and instructive, the exhibition is fabulous: Max’s drawing of the Devil proposing the bargain with Enoch Soames; a superb portrait of his wife Florence Kahn in six dancing poses like a Greek frieze; Rossetti’s courtship of Elizabeth Siddal; caricatures of Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and the red-headed Aubrey Beardsley; and “Mr. Beerbohm reading Mrs. Woolf”, a little sketch of himself falling asleep, in perfect imitation of the Vanessa Bell cover for her sister’s book; and more. The effect is a dense studio style hanging of drawings in a tiny room, and it works.

Max Beerbohm’s ‘improved’ copy of Zuleika Dobson

Go see it : https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/max-beerbohm (through 28 January 2024)
The guide is available online: https://drupal.nypl.org/sites-drupal/default/files/2023-10/MaxBeerbohm_PrintedGuide.pdf

— — —

— Kenneth W. Rendell. Safeguarding History. Trailblazing Adventures inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History. Foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Whitman Publishing, [2023].
Memoir by the eminent autograph expert and bookman, from humble origins to international success. The accounts of uncovering forgeries are case studies of self-delusion by those who wanted to believe, and of Rendell’s clear thinking and basic skepticism. To read the book is to hear the author’s cadences and manner of speaking, very nicely done. The chapter on forming the library of Bill and Melinda Gates (and the logistics of its installation) is really something.

— John Howard and Mark Valentine. Possessions and Pursuits. Sarob Press, 2023.
Short novel by Howard, Fallen Sun, and two short stories by Mark Valentine, “Masque and Anti Masque” and “The Prospero Machine”. Third volume of tributes to the metaphysical novels of “Inkling” Charles Williams.

— — —

— Maureen Kincaid Spiller. A Traveller in Time. The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Spiller. Edited and with an introduction by Nina Allan. [Foreword by Paul Kincaid]. Academia Lunare | Luna Press Publishing [i.e., POD printed in U.S.A., 8 September 2023].
An excellent memorial volume assembling essays and reviews from her website Paper Knife and from Strange Horizons (chiefly 2010-2022, with a handful of earlier pieces), arranged thematically. The section on British author Alan Garner is fascinating as it shows her thinking about his work over decades (the earliest is from 1987; and the most recent is the last piece she published, in 2022). From the preface: “It was this notion, I think, this sense that everything we read is part of an ongoing and unending exploration, that convinced her to start reviewing. It was certainly the guiding principle behind the criticism she did write.”

— Jean-Claude Izzo. Chourmo. Une enquête de Fabio Montale [1996]. Gallimard [Folio policier, 2022].
Marseille crime novel.

— Sarban. The Doll Maker and other tales of the uncanny. Peter Davies, [1953].

— Cyril Connolly. The Modern Movement. One Hundred Key Books from England, France and America 1880-1950. André Deutsch / Hamish Hamilton, [1965].

— Charles Renouvier. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, qu’il aurait pu être. Bureau de Critique Philosophique, 1876.

— Alexander Ames and Mark Samuels Lasner. Grolier Club Bookplates Past & Present. With contributions by William E. Butler and Molly Dotson. Illustrated. The Grolier Club, 2023.

a pair of Swanwicks

— Michael Swanwick. Red Fox, Blue Moon. [16] pp. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 69 copies. Stitched in blue wrappers with a photo on front wrapper.
Another world in miniature from the deft and prolific Mr. Swanwick, a history of the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia, replete with fox lore and subversive whimsy from what archy would call the “under side”.
[Swanwick is a master of the short short story and more than fifty of these have appeared in the ephemeral Dragonstairs books (the tally of fiction is more than 30 titles to date).]

— Michael Swanwick. The Best of Michael Swanwick. Volume Two. 530 pp. Subterranean Press, 2023. Edition of 1,000 copies, signed by the author. Evergreen cloth and pictorial dust jacket by Lee Moyer.
Includes the beautiful and devastating “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again”, the oh-so-tricky homage of “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin”, “The Beast of Tara” (“a story idea I came up with in the mid-seventies and finally wrote last year. So if you’re wondering how long it takes to write one of these things  and many other fine tales”), and many more. “Libertarian Russia” is filled with  a sense of wonder and loss and deep nostalgia and reads like a despatch from another lifetime though it dates from 2010.
[The Best of Michael Swanwick, “predecessor to the current volume” (as the jacket panel notes), was published by Subterranean in 2008 in an edition of 150 signed copies.] 

a few pamphlets (new and old)

a few pamphlets that have come across the desk of the Endless Bookshelf in recent months :

Old apple tree, old apple tree
Keep the secrets that you see

— Cardinal Cox. The Folk Show 3 : Fan Mail for a Film [Cover title]. [16] pp.  [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2023]. Edition of 100 copies, (to be given away at the 2023 Whittlesea Straw Bear festival*). Self-wrappers.
——. From the Hercynian Forest [Cover title]. [16] pp.  [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2019]. Edition of 100 copies. Self-wrappers.
——. London Particular [Cover title]. [16] pp.  [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2019]. Edition of 100 copies. Self-wrappers.
These three chapbooks of poems and vignettes of English folklore draw from deep wells, mixing gritty observation of daily life with literary allusion, wit, and punk pop culture tricksters. Cox, who invokes the name of John Clare more than any other living writer, I suspect, was poet-in-residence for the Dracula Society, and seems to share a fascination with The Wicker Man. These resulted in a good old fashioned ’zine exchange (I sent alonga couple of the productions of Temporary Culture).

* Plough Monday in January, “between Christmas and fen-skate party”,  is the traditional date of the Straw Bear festival, one learns from an aside in From the Hercynian Forest. This reminds me of the excellent exhibition of modern British folk art at the Barbican in May 2005, and the accompanying book, Folk Archive. Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, by Jeremy Delter and Alan Kane (Book Works, 2005), which I lent to a friend or otherwise I would do more than wonder if I can bring back some photos from the dark age and a cheap plastic cell phone, such as this label (the photograph of the object described won’t migrate) :

— — —

— [Bernadette Mayer]. Midwinter Marie. [16] pp. [James Walsh, 2023]. Second edition, one of 25 copies. Wrappers.
Selections by James Walsh from Midwinter Day (1982).

— — —

— Meghan Constantinou. The Daniel Press. Pioneer of the Private Press Movement. Illustrated. 26, [2] pp. The Grolier Club, 2021. Card covers, printed grey wrapper. Design by Kerry Kelly.
Catalogue of an exhibition of the Daniel Press, the print shop of  Charles Henry Olive Dance (1836-1919), who printed some 50 books (chiefly poetry) between 1874 and 1906, and revived an early type face (the catalogue is set in the Fell type). Daniel is described by Colin Franklin as “an independent figure, outside fashionable taste and movements”. The books are generally small and handsome, and the press  “has had a rich afterlife in multiple sense of the term”.

— — —

three black cats

— Christopher Barker. Plagiarism & Pederasty : Skeletons in the Jamesian Closet. In which the source for ‘The Ash-tree’ by Montague Rhodes James is identified. By Christopher Barker. Together with The Three Black Cats. By the Rev. A.D. Croke. Illustration of a George Cruikshank plate. Unpaginated, [28] pp. The Haunted River, 2003. Edition of 100 copies. Printed wrappers.

“The Three Black Cats” is a short antiquarian tale of horror published in 1888 in a collection of stories by A.D. Croke. Barker notes very strong similarities between the nucleus of Croke’s tale and “The Ash-tree”, which appeared in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), and takes James to task for plagiarism and hypocrisy and more..

It is sometimes fruitful to knock two ideas together to see if something new arises. Not in this instance, however. I know nothing of Barker, but this little book seethes with such resentment and outrage at the “honeyed images of the man as presented by Jamesian scholars” that a moderately interesting insight drowns under a bubbling hostility.

— — —

— Timothy d’Arch Smith. Montague Summers. A Talk. 25, [2] pp. The Tragara Press, 1984. One of 25 copies (edition of 110).
Talk presented to the Society on Montague Summers as bibliophile and aesthete.

 

recent reading : february to june 2023

current reading :
— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue (1925) & Le temps retrouvé (1927). À la recherche du temps perdu IV. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.


— M. John Harrison. Wish I Was Here. An Anti-Memoir. [Serpent’s Tail, 2023]. Signed by the author 23 May 2023. [Gift of MLV].

— — —

recent reading :

— S. Barkworth. The Nijmegen Proof. Holmes Publishing Co., 1988.

— George Sims. The Terrible Door. The Bodley Head, [1964].
— —. The Last Best Friend [1967]. Carroll & Graf pbk., [1988].
— —. Hunters Point. Gollancz, 1973.
— —. The End of the Web. Gollancz, 1976.
— —. The Keys of Death. Macmillan, [1982].
George Sims (1923-1999) was an antiquarian bookseller, specialist in literature and literary manuscripts, and author of The Rare Book Game (1985), a memoir in the form of essays, and its several sequels. His crime novels are full of the most granular detail of the byways of London in the early 1960s, and Hunters Point is partly set in a San Francisco observed with similar care. Sims was a long-time friend of Julian Symons (I have his Death’s Darkest Face inscribed to Sims), which sparked my interest. H. R. F. Keating  included The Last Best Friend in his  Crime & Mystery The 100 Best Books and noted that the “exactitude of the poet” and “peripheral elaborations” are “simultaneously his triumph and something like his downfall” and mark him as an amateur writer. Sometimes the digressions are the voyage.

— — —

— Robert Sheckley. The Game of X [1965]. Jonathan Cape, [1966]. Excellent send-up of the espionage genre and a love letter to the city of Venice, with Sheckley’s characteristic wit bubbling up at odd moments and with perfect timing.
— —. Crompton Divided. Holt, Rinehart and Winston,  [1978]. Scent and memory and an interplanetary question for personal integration made literal. Expanded from an early novella, “Join Now” or “The Humors”, with a cock-eyed nod to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.

— — —

— Julian Symons. The Man Who Killed Himself. The Crime Club, Collins, 1967.
— —. The Man Who Lost His Wife. The Crime Club, Collins, 1970.
— —. The Players and the Game. The Crime Club, Collins, 1972
— —. The Detling Murders. Collins, 1982. The Detling Secret. Viking. 1983.
— —. Something like a Love Affair. Macmillan, 1992.
I have long enjoyed the crime novels of Julian Symons which also serve as examinations of middle-class British life. I had read one or two of these a long time ago, and re-reading them was as interesting as charting new territory.

— — —

Dorothy L. Sayers. Clouds of Witness [1927]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Strong Poison [1930]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Gaudy Night. Gollancz, [1936].
— —. Busman’s Honeymoon [1937]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.

— James Clarke. Sanderson’s Isle. Serpent’s Tail, [2023].

— — —

— Arthur Machen. Far Off Things. Martin Secker, [1922].
— —. The London Adventure. Martin Secker, [1924].

— Iain Sinclair. Agents of Oblivion. Swan River Press, 2023.
Four short stories on Blackwood, Machen, Ballard, Lovecraft.

— Paul McAuley. Fairyland [1995]. Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback.

— Avram Davidson. AD100. 100 years of Avram Davidson. 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories. Volume I [II]. [xii], 635, [9]; [xii], 548, [8] pp. [Or All the Seas With Oysters, 2023].
A monumental collection of tales, for the Avram Davidson centenary!

— — —

— Christopher Fowler. Seventy-Seven Clocks [2005]. Bantam Books pbk., 19th ptg.

— Nicola Upson. Nine Lessons [2017]. Faber pbk., [2021]. Crime story rooted in adolescent privilege, with reference to the ghost stories of M. R. James.

— Mark Valentine. The Peacock Escritoire with At Dusk. Tartarus Press, [2024]

— — —

— Herman Melville. Moby-Dick ; or, The Whale. University of California Press, [1981]. Illustrations by Barry Moser. California edition, reproduced from the Arion Press edition.

— Ling Ma. Bliss Montage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2022]. Winner of the Story Prize.

— Janwillem van de Wetering. The Japanese Corpse [1977]. Soho paperback, [1996].

— Michael Swanwick. Transits of Venus. Dragonstairs, 2023.

— — —

— Lord Dunsany. Lost Tales Volume VI. Illustrations by S. H. Sime. [Foreword by Randall, baron Dunsany]. Pegana Press, 2022 [i.e., 2023].
Finely printed collection of 7 stories, including an unpublished Jorkens yarn! Concluding a decade-long project, the first volume of which was the Endless Bookshelf  book of the year in 2012.

— John Crowley. Little, Big or, The Fairies’ Parliament. Art by Peter Milton. Afterword by Harold Bloom. Incunabula, 2021 [i.e., 2022].

— Joanna Russ. The Adventures of Alyx. Timescape | Pocket Books, [August, 1983].

Tales from Gavagan’s Bar. Frontispiece by Tim Kirk

— L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt. Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (Expanded Edition). Owlswick, 1978.
“rhymes with ‘pagan’”

— Peter Kafer. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Univ. of Penna Press, [2004, i.e., POD 26 Dec. 2022].

— Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey [pbk, 7th ptg, 2021].