What are you currently reading?

[AnotherSpin]

I've only just cracked open Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid, a mere few dozen pages in, and already it's clear this is no ordinary novel. The Romanian author weaves a hypnotic tapestry of the mundane and the metaphysical: a failed writer turned schoolteacher in Bucharest, haunted by dreams of levitating solenoids and the infinite regress of memory. The prose is dense yet luminous, each sentence a small detonation of imagery and thought, as if composed in the heat of a lucid dream.

I'm determined to see it through to the end; at over six hundred pages, it demands a certain devotion. If the rest fulfills even half the promise of the beginning, I'll gladly return with a proper reckoning.

[SimonNZ]

Finished:



Starting:



I hadn't heard of the formidable and hugely impressive Alice Paul before watching the 4-hour PBS documentary "The Vote" on the American suffragists, and they put her at the very center of the story. Glad to find that Oxford University Press have published this biography based on collections of oral history by those who knew and worked with her.

[LKB]

I decided to put my fancy edition of The Lord of the Rings to use a couple of weeks ago, but at a very leisurely pace. I expect Frodo & co. shall arrive at Imladris sometime in the Spring...

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Considering about buying the book.

[Florestan]

The title is misleading (Histoire du Romantisme). Portraits et Souvenirs would have been much more appropriate.

Anyway, Gautier was a man of taste and feeling, cultured, sensitive and with a fine sense of humor, including self-irony*. All these ingredients make for an eminently agreeable reading. Highly recommended for lovers of French literature and culture. @ritter @Mandryka @Papy Oli

* for instance, he writes something to the effect of: People say that at the premiere of Hernani I would menacingly clench my fists under the nose of the bourgeois. This is not true, not because I was lacking the wish to do so but because I was lacking large fists. And elsewhere: At a fair I hit a tin-made Turk with my fist, scoring a force of 320 lbs. It's the achievement I've been most proud of my entire life.

[LKB]

Perhaps this is OT, I am not quite sure.

A few years ago, Sir Patrick Stewart celebrated his arrival on TikTok by reading Dicken's A Christmas Carol, in twelve parts. I'm interested in this mostly because I admire his portrayal of Scrooge in the 1999 television production, and I am curious to see how he will bring it off. Here's the link to Part One:

https://www.tiktok.com/@sirpatstew/video/7177047417727094062

[Elgarian Redux]

I admire his portrayal of Scrooge in the 1999 television production ...

Likewise. I think he is stunning in that, and forever after seeing him for the first time,
(a) that is how I imagine Scrooge; and
(b) it has become an event every year in the run up to Christmas for us.

[LKB]

Likewise. I think he is stunning in that, and forever after seeing him for the first time,
(a) that is how I imagine Scrooge; and
(b) it has become an event every year in the run up to Christmas for us.

I agree that he's really quite good in that adaptation. Dicken's classic is so strong a tale ( and so perennially relevant ) that there will always be, at intervals, new opportunities for its retelling, but I suspect Sir Patrick's will remain as potent in the decades to come as it has been thus far.

I've now gone through about half of Sir Patrick's readings, and it's been ( unsurprisingly ) time well-spent.

[SimonNZ]

Knocked off in a couple of sittings:

[ritter]

Having been confronted with the enigmatic and potent images of the Apocalypse of John in last Sunday's concert performance of Franz Schmidt's The Book with Seven Seals, I've decided to at least skim through (it is 588 pages!) Paul Claudel's exegesis on the Book of Revelations, Paul Claudel interroge l'Apocalypse.



It's kinda nice that a book published in 1965 is still in print and can be bought new (at a price similar to that of a modern paperback), with uncut pages (as was the custom in France until not too long ago).

[Nostromo]

I first read this ages ago. After watching Guillermo del Toro's recent movie version, which was excellent,I bought a new copy (my old one has long disappeared) and just started reading it.

[T. D.]

Strange and gloomy novel. Much more explicit Roman Catholic discussion than in other Greene books I've read, but I haven't yet figured out all the implications.

[SimonNZ]

[Spotted Horses]

The Sundial, by Shirley Jackson.



This is a great book.

The first Mr Halloran somehow came into enormous wealth and built a garish mansion on a huge plot of land, enclosed by a stone wall. His descendants live there, including his son in declining health, his sons' wife (Mrs Halloran) her daughter in law and granddaughter. The book opens after the funeral of Mrs Holeran's son Lionel, with the insinuation that Mrs Holeran pushed him down the stairs to claim ownership of the estate. The household is completed by the first Mr Halloran's daughter (Aunt Fanny) and some servants. A cousin of Mrs Halloran (Gloria) joins the party and Mrs Halloran invites Mrs Willow and her two daughters to stay at the house. The tyrannical Mrs Halloran's plan to expel everyone from the house now that she has come into full ownership is disrupted by an apocalyptic vision that Aunt Fanny has after getting lost in the gardens. In what follows it is difficult to distinguish between supernatural events and delusion or hysteria. A great book, dark but full of humor.

[ritter]

Starting Enzo Siciliano's novel La notte matrigna ("The Stepmother Night"), published in 1975.



Siciliano (1934 - 2006) was an influential figure in the Italian cultural milieu of the last quarter of the 20th century, with close ties to the state broadcaster RAI, of which he was appointed chairman for a couple of years in 1996.

This novel is inspired in the life of the author's mother-in-law Hilde Brat, a German jewess who managed to escape Germany in 1934, leaving her husband behind and remarrying a well-known fascist architect.

So far, rather interesting (we get flashbacks of events prior to Hilde' birth), but I must confess that with age I am less tolerant of graphic sexual descriptions in prose...oh well  ).

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Montaigne: A Biography. Donald M. Frame.

[Mandryka]

I can't get over how wonderful the title story, The World of Apples, is. Certainly one of the best short stories I've ever read.

[Henk]

'Minor Ethics: Deleuzian Variations Paperback – 15 april 2021

Alongside the major narratives of ethics in the tradition of Western philosophy, a reader with an eye to the vague and the peripheral, to the turbulent and shifting, will spy minor lines of thinking - and with them, new histories and thus new futures. Minor Ethics develops a new approach to reading texts from the history of philosophical ethics. It aims to enliven lines of thought that are latent and suppressed within the major ethical texts regularly studied and taught, and to include texts and ideas that have been excluded from the canon of Western ethics. The editors and contributors have put Gilles Deleuze's concepts - such as affect, assemblage, and multiplicity - into conversation with a range of ethical texts from ancient thought to the present. Rather than aiming for a coherent whole to emerge from these threads, the essays maintain a vigilant alertness to difference, to vibrations and resonances that are activated in the coupling of texts. What emerges are new questions, new problems, and new trajectories for thinking, which have as a goal the liberation of ethical questioning. Minor Ethics takes up a range of canonical ethical questions and thinks through concrete ethical problems relating to drug addiction, environmental responsibility, xenophobia, trauma, refugees, political parties, and cultural difference. The responses to these concerns demonstrate the minoritarian promise of the opening up of ethical thinking.'

[Todd]

National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November 2025

Section IV.3 is all Elbridge Colby.

[JBS]

[crosspost from the Shakespeare thread]
Almost finished reading this


The opening and closing chapters, which use Shakespeare as a vessel for talking about anti-Blackness in society and literary scholarship in general, are a bit generic. The examinations of Shakespeare's use of race and racial stereotypes in Othello*, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet, on the other hand, are highly original and thought provoking. It would be nice to see productions of the latter two that incorporate his ideas (that Shylock's Jewishness is a stand-in for Blackness in a Venice where anti-Blackness is already part of the social order and Antonio is the paradigmatic white man, and that Hamlet uses the trope of the violent Black man in portraying both Claudius and Hamlet).  The only cavil I have with his presentation is the manner in which he implies Shakespeare was critiquing/examining/subverting anti-Blackness, whereas he may have merely been using/shaping early racial stereotypes and tropes.
He limits himself to those three plays, plus a few comments regarding Titus Andronicus

So recommended, at least for the portions relating to what Shakespeare wrote.

*A bit confusingly, his discussion about what is in Othello is not in the chapter ostensibly devoted to Othello.