What new(ish) fiction are you reading?

[buttgammon]

Currently reading Boulder by Eva Baltasar, which I think is the first Catalan book I've ever read (in translation obviously). It's beautifully written and really gets into the emotional space of its protagonist, but is very short, basically novella length, and I know I'll be left craving more when I finish it.

[Vodkafone]

Greek Lessons, the new Han Kong translation, is a fantastic little novel.

How much more/less cheery than The Vegetarian is it?

[buttgammon]

How much more/less cheery than The Vegetarian is it?

There'a arguably a bit more hope in this one - that main thing is that the focus flits between two characters this time, so that changes things a bit.

[Vodkafone]

There'a arguably a bit more hope in this one - that main thing is that the focus flits between two characters this time, so that changes things a bit.

Cheers. Don't get me wrong, I thought the Vegetarian was great but something a little different would also be good. There were some very potent images in the Vegetarian that have stayed with me.

[Scarlett Tangible]

Took a punt on The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore (having read a teeny bit of her poetry before but not really connecting with it) and I'm so glad I did. It's brilliant! So vivid, like every scene you feel like you're there, in it. And the pacing is perfect, chapter after chapter of snowballing drama. One of the reviews on the cover calls it 'addictive' - it really is! It really drags you along with it.

Here's the synopsis from the back:

"England, 1643. Puritanical fervour has gripped the nation. In Manningtree, depleted of men since the Civil War began, the women are left to their own devices and Rebecca West chafes against the drudgery of her days. But when Matthew Hopkins arrives, asking bladed questions and casting damning accusations, mistrust and unease seep into the lives of the women. Caught between betrayal and persecution, what must Rebecca West do to survive?"

Also:

"Fear and suspicion take root among the women of Manningtree when the Witchfinder General comes to town."

It uses some old language, which anchors it to its time, yet it feels wholly modern. The use of language, by the way, is brilliant - gorgeous, disgusting, captivating - and the main character, Rebecca West, is a really likeable and fun and relatable heroine (though she has a 'dark side'). All in all it's a fantastic, cinematic* debut, and makes me want to give her poetry another go (I will also definitely be reading her next novel, The Glutton, which comes out in September).

If this has 'conjured' even a glimmer of interest - buy it, you square! You heathen! Thou witch!



_{*I can easily see it being made into a film}

[holyzombiejesus]

Just read Kala by Colin Walsh. Was getting a lot of praise in the reviews I read and it was quite gripping but was surprised how formulaic and cliché ridden it was. I did enjoy it for all of that though.

A gripping literary page-turner from a rising Irish talent in which former friends, estranged for fifteen years, reckon with the terrifying events of the summer that changed their lives.

In the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland's west coast, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They - Helen, Joe and Mush - were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group's white-hot centre. Soon after that summer's peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.

Now it's fifteen years later: Helen has reluctantly returned to Ireland for her father's wedding; Joe is a world-famous musician, newly back in town; and Mush has never left, too scared to venture beyond the counter of his mother's cafe. But human remains have been discovered in the woods...

A dark coming-of-age novel, this is an impressive debut from Irish author Colin Walsh, winner of several awards for his short stories and named in 2019 the Hennessy new Irish writer of the year.

[bgmnts]

If only it was northern Ireland it could be set in Derry!

[buttgammon]

I'm having a bit of a difficult patch with reading for the first time in ages. I know my own taste well enough that it's rare for me to start reading something I dislike but my judgement catastrophically let me down and I've recently given up on one of the worst books I've ever read: Brian by Jeremy Cooper. It's about a middle-aged recluse who starts going to BFI and becomes a cinema obsessive as some kind of salvation; the bits about individual films sometimes work but the characterisation is paper-thin, the writing is ridden with cliches and there is an offensively reductive portrayal of Northern Ireland in certain flashbacks and reflections. I made it about three-quarters of the way in largely because it was so bad it actually became quite funny.

It now seems I'm about to give up on another book. I really liked Mark O'Connell's first two books, so I raised an eyebrow when he announced A Thread of Violence, which is a non-fiction work about a murderer in 1980s Ireland (I suspect he'd be touchy about it being called true crime but so far, that's basically what it is and it's a genre I see as having no merit; I don't care if that makes me elitist or whatever, I simply find stories about real-life murderers and the like exploitative and boring). His humanity at dealing with literally inhuman issues captivated me in the first two of his books, but there is a superiority and hypocrisy at work here that I find absolutely baffling. Talking about the upper-class murderer in question, he tells us 'had the murderer been an addict from the inner city, or even a member of the professional middle class gone berserk, it is unlikely that the killings would have made anything like as deep and lasting an impression', before proceeding to write an entire book about this guy. He ridicules the tabloids for their salacious and obsessive reporting on the man's daily life and opinions on things like the covid lockdown but then writes an entire book about him. Unless something massively changes, I'm going to have to give up on this because it's genuinely revolting.

[holyzombiejesus]

North Woods by Daniel Mason. So good. Describes the ongoing history of a small woodland in New England. Starts in the 1760s with a couple fleeing the Puritans and continues through to the present day and forward in to the future. Told in the form of diary, casenotes, letters, so on. Enjoyed it so much.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

BM is one of my pet hates! Up there with David Keenan. When he wrote his end of year review for Caught by the River, he included Rachel Reeves in his 'Impressed by' list. When CBTR tweeted it, I commented "Imagine being impressed by Rachel Reeves", and Myers not only blocked me but shut down his twitter account, the stupid Green Day liking arse. 

Hope you like the book though.

Hi I really hate this cunt now haha

[Blinder Data]

The Glutton by AK Blakemore

about a french peasant who loves eating. dark, vivid, beautifully written. it's short but such a captivating world that's built. I could see this being adapted into a film by somebody like Yorgos Lanthimos quite successfully. the involvement of real historical figures towards the end stretched credulity slightly but overall a bloody good novel. memorable

Brian by Jeremy Cooper

about a bloke who goes to the cinema. that's it. one of those slice of life novels where it's just stuff happening but it's mostly him watching arthouse films. I like that sort of stuff and at 180 pages it didn't outstay its welcome, but I could see readers struggling through the copious information about films and its plain style, and come away thinking "was that it?" at the end

[AllisonSays]

Over the Christmas break I've read Tamarisk Row by Gerarld Murnane and Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones (the latter isn't very new, I guess, so I hope it's permissable in the thread; Tamarisk Row was first published in 1974 but only recently published in the UK.)

I wanted to mention them both together because they feel connected, in an aleatory way, in that I picked them both out of my 'books to read' shelf before stopping work in December. Tamarisk Row is a series of short chapters, sometimes less than a page long, about the actual and dream life of a young Australian boy whose dad is part of a horse-racing syndicate. The boy is kind of making sense of his life, his father's life, his school experiences and his confused but intense interest in sex via a kind of paracosm or dream life that's focused on an invented racecourse and on glass marbles that he races around this fantasy racecourse and writes complicated dossiers on.

It's a really compelling account of the weird investments and constructions of childhood and how they relate to what's going on a child's life, but also much weirder and funnier than that trite-psychoanalytical reading makes it sound. It made me think a little bit of one of my favourite novels, A Chancer by James Kelman - I think gambling and betting and so on are playing a similar role as metaphors for, basically, the problems of life and living.

Then Pilcrow, which is a very long and very granular story about a child with a debilitating autoimmune or arthritic condition called Still's disease. He doesn't leave his bed for a good 200 pages of the book, which might test your patience depending on what kind of thing you enjoy (I love this kind of shit). Like Tamarisk Row, a lot of what you get out of it is a child's perception of adult life via various fantastical ideas, but this is much more explicitly ironic because it's narrated from the point of view of the child as an adult, if that makes sense.

I liked it a lot and found it very charming and often very moving - and I like Adam Mars Jones as a reviewer, and liked his recent novels - but it maybe felt a little mediocre compared to the strange and luminous intensity of Tamarisk Row.

[AngryGazelle]

The Dumb House by John Burnside

A bloke who probably wanted to shag his mum decides to experiment on his new born twins to test the innateness of language.

Cosy setting, creepy narrator (I did enjoy getting in his head, I must admit) an interesting idea executed very well. There is some unnecessary violence which I felt was entirely superfluous but otherwise a tightly written book, elevated by some beautiful prose.

[FeederFan500]

Read The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer, I was a bit disappointed and there were times I was really skipping through it just to get to the end. It wasn't as funny as I'd hoped, and there was a bit too much silliness that wasn't entertaining to me. More of a comedy in the classical, things turn out all right in the end way.

[elliszeroed]

Just got the new Jeff Noon novel, Gogmagogg, looking forward to it.

Before that, got to finish The Plains by Gerald Marnane.

[Mister Six]

Ooh, a non-Nyquist Noon book with Gormenghast vibes. I'll check it out! In about 10 years, knowing me.

[Blinder Data]

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

billionaire and community gardening organisation team up for hijinks in New Zealand. it's been termed a thriller but it didn't feel like one to me - more like Franzen-esque character-driven fiction with some exciting bits happening towards the end. it was decent but i wouldn't rush to recommend it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Just finished Adania Shibli's Minor Detail, only about 100 pages long but thought it was incredible.

[buttgammon]

Just finished Adania Shibli's Minor Detail, only about 100 pages long but thought it was incredible.

A great book. I'm glad attempts to censor and disparage Shibli and her work have backfired, as there's a power and humanity in the book that its detractors presumably find quite frightening.

[poloniusmonk]

I just read By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar. It's a weird, profane, funny, violent reimagining of the Arthurian myths, carried along by a gleeful, giddy narrative voice. I thought it was outstanding. Recommended.

[bgmnts]

Currently going through Alan Moore's Illuminations and I'm quite enjoying them, although I'm mostly looking forward to the Thunderman novella in there obviously.

Not Even Legend seems the pick of the bunch so far.

[Dayraven]

Thought Thunderman was well-executed but evidently bitter, and even in a story that's satirically negative some of the roman à clefs seemed specifically unkind. Managed to predict the decline of the DCEU before it had definitely happened.

[bgmnts]

Yeah I'm expecting it to be bitter, having listened to Moore talk about comic books for five minutes. Glad to hear it's well done though.

I skipped forward just to see page numbers and saw one called American Light, and, as someone who has recently read a fair few classics, I am very appreciative of the hilariously frequent and lengthy footnotes. Moore can genuinely be quite funny I think.

[bgmnts]

Finished Illuminations by Alan Moore: some duffers but overall great. I'd say Not Even Legend, Hypothetical Lizard and the Boltzmann brain were highlights, Cold Reading being a low point.

A ramble on Thunderman:

Spoiler alert

This is the culmination of decades of anger, bitterness - and perhaps projected self-loathing - one could argue, but I think it's one of the best things Moore has ever written, and it hit me emotionally and personally on quite a few levels.

To get it out of the way, his hatred of the industry, how it exploits (particularly lower class and vulnerable) creators, and the dysfunctional talent is hammered home big style. As too, is his theories on the parallels between the infantilisation in our society and the growing hyper-capitalism and blurring of fiction and reality, reaching an apex with the ubiquity of marvel mcu and the resurgence of a far right appeal to simpler times. I know most people would chuck this theory out as dross, but I find it compelling.

I think on a personal level it hit me, as someone who probably is the kind of socially stunted adult child Moore hates. I think the one thing Moore perhaps is wrong about is the idea that one chooses to get into these hobbyist fantasy escapist worlds. I may be an outlier, but I escaped into video games or Star Wars or what have you because I had nothing else really. I think Moore would or should understand that. Now that these once niche cultural landscapes are pop culture, I wonder what children of today have.

In fact, the part of the book that almost reduced me to tears was Porlock's absolute reverence of these books and five year old dreams of superheroism and how, as a child, it indeed seems pure and powerful and means something. You can tell that Moore clearly understood that, and maybe felt that as a child himself. Yes, these were lower class doggerel for bootleggers, but for many of the creators and audience, it meant something. It was loving creation; in a perfect world would be shared and owned by all, in an imperfect world, it would be owned by its creators; in this horrid world, it's owned by greedy criminal capitalist cunts.

I suppose the main thrust of exploitation is the hardest bit to read, even if you're already aware of it.

I still love the medium of the comic book, and I feel I've been relatively untainted in that I don't particularly care about creators or fandom or conventions or whatever, so I feel I can take them as what they are, but I don't really feel like reading a superhero comic book ever again. I think I'd end up just thinking about miserable Moore, destitute Ditko or conned Kirby.

In terms of the story itself, it was obviously well written, delightfully funny, evocative and well observed.

As a side note: I get the feeling that Moore must feel genuinely gutted at how he feels about the industry he was so instrumental in legitimising. It's clear his anger stems from anger at general exploitation and what the art has led to in modernity, I don't think he's just bitter at his own expense (as he seems like a relatively good egg?). Must suck.

And side note II: what do kids have now that gives them that sense of wonder and has a sense of meaning and purity and an escapist fantasy? That Santa Claus suspension of belief in something better? Internet and smartphones has maybe ruined that? If so, that makes me saddest of all tbh.

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