What are you reading now?

[gradus]

Osbert Sitwell's Tales my Father Taught Me, a book of essays that I bought s/h years ago and hadn't got round to reading. Entertaining as it was intended to be.

[Petrushka]

Just started Colditz by Ben Macintyre. I had it for Christmas 2022 but only now got round to reading it!

Just remembered that one of the directors of the company I worked for in the 1970s was imprisoned in Colditz during the war. I would have loved to have talked to him about his experiences but in those days it was unthinkable to ask something like that of one of your directors!

[Historian]

Sad to learn that Irwin died earlier this year.

I had missed this, thank you. No great age, 77. I worked with him when he was a part-time academic and author (not that that's particularly important)..

[vinteuil]

Every decade or so I re-read Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nightmare in the vain hope of disentangling the real from the dream worlds it creates, and fail.

... I haven't read it - but I understand it is based on Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Have you read that? - I've tried several times, but have been defeated several times. Perhaps I should give it another go...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manuscript_Found_in_Saragossa

I had an 'Arabian Nights' period when I was based in the Middle East - Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights : A Companion was invaluable

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[Belgrove]

Once upon a time he was a lecturer at SOAS and (briefly) taught me. However, he left to move on to greater things.

Sad to learn that Irwin died earlier this year.

[smittims]

Virginia Woolf : Between the Acts. Her last novel and I think one of her best. A comfortable companionable book with an interesting range of characters. I mean to re-read rhe Woolf canon every ten years but I haven't always managed it. There are few novelists I find as rewarding.

[Historian]

Every decade or so I re-read Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nightmare in the vain hope of disentangling the real from the dream worlds it creates, and fail. ... Irwin is a specialist of Arabian literature and has written a scholarly tome on The Thousand and One Nights, which is clearly a model for the novel’s nested dreamscapes.

Once upon a time he was a lecturer at SOAS and (briefly) taught me. However, he left to move on to greater things.

[Petrushka]

Just started Colditz by Ben Macintyre. I had it for Christmas 2022 but only now got round to reading it!

[Pulcinella]

More a case of NOT reading.

I gave up on the predicted Booker Prize winner, James (Percival Everett).
I just couldn't get my head around the idea that Jim would be aware of (and mention) concepts such as proleptic irony!

[Belgrove]

Every decade or so I re-read Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nightmare in the vain hope of disentangling the real from the dream worlds it creates, and fail. But the attempt is always entertaining, not least to enjoy the exquisite quality of the writing. Set in an atmospheric medieval Cairo, we follow Balian of Norwich down a rabbit hole of fractal complexity. He may have contracted the Arabian Nightmare, a distressing, appalling and dangerous contagion, causing vivid nightmares of ‘infinite suffering’ that cannot be remembered upon waking, but which culminate in an explosive nosebleed. Thus the sufferer becomes progressively weaker, spending more and more time being tortured in disturbed sleep. Then again, he may simply be dreaming that he’s contracted the disease. It’s horrible, but it’s also drolly amusing and is populated by a cast of colourful, fantastical, sexy, sinister and (possibly) outright dangerous characters who want to track down Balian for their own reasons (or are they the products of dreams?) Irwin is a specialist of Arabian literature and has written a scholarly tome on The Thousand and One Nights, which is clearly a model for the novel’s nested dreamscapes.

A cooler read next, Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, which promises to reassess his dissolute reputation. It’s handsomely illustrated.

[richardfinegold]

Just about to start 'Overlord', which is one of the few books by Max Hastings that I have not yet read. His integration of the experiences of individuals into the larger picture and his detailed yet commendably clear explanation of the latter are masterly.

I enjoy most Hastings books, although I can’t remember anything about Overload that particularly separates it from other accounts, such as Anthony Berber or Stephan Ambrose D-Day.
On the subject of WW II I am reading Guadalcanal Diary, I book that I have seen referenced repeatedly but never got around to reading.
Also somewhat OTT I am in Lyon today and just toured the Resistance Museum. An interesting place but one that doesn’t address the issues of French Collaboration or or sort out the differing roles of the Communists (and their initial passivity until Hitler attacked Stalin) and the De Gaulle affiliated groups. As for the British operatives who worked with the Resistance there isn’t a mention.

[DracoM]

'Marches' / Rory Stewart.

[vinteuil]

.

... Wilhelm Raabe, Stopfkuchen. In an English translation, Tubby Schaumann.

It'll be the third time I read it : each time I get more out of it.

At the age of 72, I suppose I have half-a-dozen major regrets in life : bigly among them, not having acquired German. I would love to be able to read Raabe, Storm, Stifter, Fontane, &c in the original. Precious few of their works are available in English : fortunately quite a lot have been done into French, and I can get some of them that way ...

.

[smittims]

Turgenev, A Month in the Country.

A favourite play which I can now read in Isaiah Berlin's splendid translation, which I found yesterday after many years searching . I've long regarded it as one of the most lovable and profound works of literature, and indeed it is internationally-acclaimed as one of the finest plays ever written, yet curiously Turgenev himself repeatedly disparaged it in correspondence .

[french frank]

Once done that idea couldn't very well be used again!

There was some anger and cries of "cheating' from people reading "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" for the first time. My idea was more of a cliché: the story within a story to induce readers into making false assumptions about what they were being told. I don't have much interest in straightforward fiction (that's for factual narrative). But then, I've never had any of my fiction accepted for publication