What book are you reading, ιf' - Iff you read books

[Kyriakos]

More Father Brown stuff, but the lesser known stories in the collection are more like turnips - not that bright :/
Anyway, a few left to read the entire first collection.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

More Father Brown stuff, but the lesser known stories in the collection are more like turnips - not that bright :/
Anyway, a few left to read the entire first collection.

You mean you're reading the first book, or the complete short stories?

EDIT: Never mind, I got it. The other collections are worth reading too, in my opinion, in particular The Secret of Father Brown

 

[Kyriakos]

Yes, I am (at least aspiring to) reading all the collections, but in order.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Finally finished The Return of the King. Read the second half in a rush, but at last it's done, I've dawdled over it for far too long

 

[Smellincoffee]

Anxious People, Fredrik Backman. A story about suicide and a bank robbery gone wrong. Really enjoying it so far.

 

[schlaufuchs]

Ive been reading A short history of trans misogyny, by Jules Gill-Peterson. It’s very good, I highly recommend it. This passage I just read was particularly striking:

"Queens are fooled more often than they admit," observes the narrator solemnly. 4 As powerful as the street queen's promise of turning a man's body into a woman's might be, that brush with the divine is always haunted by the threat of its reversal in a cruel world of trans misogyny. Destiny's depression makes her a tragic figure one destined, perhaps, to fall into hell instead of ruling the gay world as its queen.

Maybe. But then again, maybe not. The peculiar dilemma of trans womanhood-having two bodies-keeps the story ambiguous. And Miss Destiny wields that ambiguity better than any. She suddenly shifts the scale of her speech. She tells them that sometimes, "when Im very high" and sitting at one of the bars, "I imagine that an angel suddenly appears." This angel has come to signal Judgment Day in the gay world. "And the angel says, 'All right, boys and girls, this is it, the world is ending, and Heaven and Hell will be to spend eternity just as you are now, in the same place among the same people— Forever!"* This, Destiny knows, is a very dangerous gamble, for the gay life has been a miserable one for them all, exiled and discarded as the deviants of America. But the risk of the angel's game is highest for her. If she stays for eternity in Pershing Square, she will never resolve the dilemma of her two bodies. She will never succeed in her quest for transubstantiation. Since a young age, her fate has been to transcend the mortal world, become angelic herself by becoming a beautiful, real woman. She can't become real if she is forced to live in the limbo of her life as a street queen. Heaven the angel's announcement is not. Though it is a kind of hell, it is perhaps better read as purgatory, where trans misogyny and poverty would rule her existence. Forever.

Knowing this, Destiny tries to run away from the angel. "But I cant run fast enough for the evil angel, he sees me and stops me and Im Caught." The reign of the queen has played out its fate as a Shakespearean tragedy. Because realness isn't really under her sovereignty but belongs to the judgment of an evil world, there will be no escape for Miss Destiny.

Miss Destiny's tragedy is a seductive parable for what really happened to street queens. As Esther Newton observed and Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson experienced firsthand, the gay world really did betray its queens in the wake of Stonewall.

It was first and foremost a political betrayal, selling out the queens for a new gender normative version of gay. But given the divine importance of the street queen's two bodies, it was also a spiritual betrayal. Miss Destiny's fate was seemingly written in advance, leaving the narrator of City of Night to watch on helplessly as the evil angel's prophecy came to pass. He could do no more than offer her the image of Desdemona in solidarity. Yet the better reference would be Shakespeare's Richard II, which tells the story of the king falling into the depths of human corruption precisely because he has a man's body attached to his divine body, making him vulnerable to being deposed. Miss Destiny seems to suffer the same fate, replaced by the masculine gay men on the horizon. So, too, for Sylvia and Marsha, kicked out of the gay movement for which they had put their lives on the line. The problem with tragedy, however, is that it lets the real culprits off the hook by casting the queen's fall from grace as foretold by the fates. The evil angel is a symbol of judgment,
but in truth he is merely the mouthpiece for the severe oppression that street queens face, including from their gay subjects.

What is holding back Miss Destiny from being real, from being happy and living as a woman, isn't divine judgment; it is the mundane world she lives in. Indeed, I9 50s America treats her as unreal and undeserving of anything other than a criminal existence in the underworld. That she has made of that situa tion a life worthy of the title Queen testifies to her tenacious magic. But, in the end, the street queen cannot transubstantiate without a world that believes in magic. She may know herself to be real, but if no one around her believes it-and if men keep beating her, the police keep arresting her, and the medical establishment keeps hormones out of reach—her exalted femininity won't matter. The art of appearance, the work of the queen, cannot be made real without concrete political struggle. If her gay subjects abandon her to the judgment of a cruel world, even the queen cannot rise above their sin.

Tragedy, that very Christian narrative of the predestined fall from grace, creates a difficult narrative situation. After all, tragedy can only be remedied by redemption, as when Christ, who bore the cross of the human world of sin, comes again.

And indeed, the idealization of street queens today has that messianic quality to it. If only we celebrate Saint Sylvia and Saint Marsha properly, the second coming of the trans women of color of Stonewall will redeem us all. Our politics will be saved by invoking trans women of color and acting in their name. We will rescue them from their betrayal in the 1970s by idealizing them.

Or so it seems.

 

[Kyriakos]

First collection of the Father Brown stories read.
Can't say I found those I didn't already know to be interesting.
Maybe there will be some of that type in the other collections, though. Arguably the only memorable story in the first one was the Invisible Man.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Summer of 49, David Halberstam. Story of the Yankees-Red Sox pennant race.

Also, about to finish The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age. A look at a club that included the aforementioned, plus David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith. Interesting cross-section look at British intellectual society in the 1700s.

 

[Quintillus]

I took a break from my WWII theme, and read the (mostly) lighthearted Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke my Heart by William Alexander. It's about a 57 to 58 year old (the author) learning French, roughly 40 years after quitting French after 10th grade. But it also goes a fair amount into the history of the French language, as well as the pedagogy of learning languages, including the differences between when a baby or toddler is learning a language, versus an adolescent, versus an adult. Fascinating stuff, and while it may have originated as procrastination on his goal of learning French, what he learned about those areas rounded out the book nicely.

It's also a hilariously-written book. The author sees the humor in the various situations brought on by his mediocre (if improving) French and atrocious accent, and has a good attitude on continuing on despite the challenges.

Knowledge of French not necessary, although it may enhance one's level of amusement; for example, you'd spot the mistake in cheerily announcing Je suis fini even before the explanation.

Spoiler Explanation :

The author meant to announce to his French immersion class that he was finished with a dental procedure he had just returned from. "fini" = finished, thus "I am finished" = "Je suis fini", non?

Alas, it's the classic non-native mistake of using an être conjugation instead of an avoir conjugation. Je suis fini means something along the lines of "I am dead", or perhaps "I am ruined". J'ai fini means "I've finished."

How to know that without making the mistake first? Your guess is as good as mine!

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Started reading Butts: A Backstory, but it's not as compelling as I figured it would be. Baby don't got back.

Sadly not the same ass, but what a wonderful title for a book

 

[Kyriakos]

There's the Golden Ass, also titled Lucius or the Donkey. It includes sexual themes, featuring the homophone.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Narrative Economics is a book about "How stories go viral & drive economic events" by Robert Shiller, one of the winners of the 2013 Nobel Memorial Economic Prize in Economic Sciences. While the book has some important ideas such as the effect of public opinion on economic events and the applicability of epidemic models to the spread of narratives, the author spreads himself too thin trying to cover too many examples and barely explains them, much less properly establish a causative connection. In addition, the research examples in the book appears to rely on a simplistic text analysis that relies on exact phrases, which might not completely cover the entirety of an economic narrative.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Still working on The Club, but I remembered I wanted to read Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, so I've started that. A hundred pages in.

 

[Kyriakos]

Halfway through the second collection of Father Brown stories.
Nothing much here either. The story The Head of Caesar could imo have been more notable. If it wasn't constructed as an elaboration on why blackmail can only take two people (instead of more than two).

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Proust with another banger of a sentence:

The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot, making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am waiting for a few more possibly good Father Brown stories. Maybe they will be in the third collection, where imo one of his best stories is from (the Oracle of the Dog). But getting near the end of the second collection, there are just way too many happy coincidences with Brown being in the right place in the right time - people waited for years for the moment to kill someone, and they do just when Brown randomly goes there for the first and only time in his life
Maybe Brown is Satan after all.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Usually those sort of happy coincidences bother me in detective stories (and do in fact fall within the realm of bad detective writing), but they never did in the Father Brown stories, I don't look on those stories as conventional detective stories where the main point is the whodunnit, but the detective story only acts as a vehicle for what Chesterton wants to say, a means to an end rather than the end itself

 

[Kyriakos]

Usually those sort of happy coincidences bother me in detective stories (and do in fact fall within the realm of bad detective writing), but they never did in the Father Brown stories, I don't look on those stories as conventional detective stories where the main point is the whodunnit, but the detective story only acts as a vehicle for what Chesterton wants to say, a means to an end rather than the end itself

Well I can accept some such stories, for example the Arrow of Heaven, because indeed there you have other things to enjoy. But typically those other things aren't there
The dog story, on the other hand, might have worked if people were careless enough (the culprit never bothered to retrieve the cane, iirc).

The form of the entire series is certainty stylized. Already in the second ever FB story, one protagonist becomes an antagonist, and a few stories later the first antagonist becomes a sidekick.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I am waiting for a few more possibly good Father Brown stories. Maybe they will be in the third collection, where imo one of his best stories is from (the Oracle of the Dog). But getting near the end of the second collection, there are just way too many happy coincidences with Brown being in the right place in the right time - people waited for years for the moment to kill someone, and they do just when Brown randomly goes there for the first and only time in his life
Maybe Brown is Satan after all.

Well, he's doing the Lord's work, so it may be deliberate but weak deus ex machina.

Halfway through Elizabeth's London by Liza Picard. Social history that's more informal than Ian Mortimer, who was about on par with the Gies as far as medieval social histories go.

 

[Spidernova]

I've been reading Dan Simmons's The Terror. It's actually kind of incredible, I've been having demonic polar bear related dreams.