‘I adjusted the glasses to the front of each of us and reflected on the solemnity of the occasion.’ Flann O’Brien, ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ [I know porter≠ Guinness stout. Perhaps in Dublin I can have ‘my first taste of porter’.]

‘A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity.’ Flann O’Brien

Nineteen degrees and overcast at Derrynane. Perfect beach weather.

Unable to reconcile my need to read with the insatiable demands of chess, I've retired from the latter. Currently in Ireland with the rather wonderful Flann O'Brien (my first).

I'm very pleased that @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social are bringing Hélène Bessette into English via Kate Brigg's translations. 'Lili is Crying was one of last year's favourites and I expect no lesser experience with 'Twenty Minutes of Silence'.

Rereading for the first time since 2023.

Look, foot to forelock, how all things suit! he / Is strung by duty, is strained to beauty, / And brown-as-dawning-skinned / With brine and shine and whirling wind. Gerard M. Hopkins

Long harboured an ambition to read the Zibaldone cover to cover, following every allusion and reference to its source. Tried and failed, and tried again.

“A month before his death in April 1936 he described himself as an ‘egoistic hedonist’, adding that while George Eliot said she was a meliorist, he was a pejorist. And ‘pejorist hedonist’, with its English blend of Latin and Greek, fits him well enough.” Frank Kermode on A. E. Housman

Sunday: Josef Koudelka’s diaries (to accompany Melissa Harris’s visual biography). ‘DON’T OWN ANYTHING; DON‘T BUY ANYTHING. DON’T BE A MATERIALIST.’

No religion survives the descent: the parting of knowledge is reversed. Gregory Leadbetter

No sign yet of J. H. Prynne's two-volume Collected Prose "forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York)." Very much looking forward to this collection.

Extraordinary how the shape of this story emerges, to the extent that it does. It might be quite brilliant. I’m going to read it again immediately.

‘To set literature as the principal aim of a life is in many respects an extraordinary, if not pathological, pursuit.’ — William Marx, ‘A Scholar’s Life’.

Beginning Volodine Radiant Terminus took me somewhere I didn't want to leave. Like Thomas De Quincey in the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis, Volodine treats landscape as a state of consciousness, though stripped of De Quincey's grandeur. In the endless taiga time dilates, nights last…

Attention and (time).

Paul Delvaux, Solitude, 1955

But next, another Antoine Volodine, being read in the order I track them down.

One of my Much Anticipated 2026 books: 'East of Dreams' by Nastassja Martin, author of the brilliant 'In the Eye of the Wild'.

Pleased that Granta 175 features excerpts from Lars Norén's five-volume diaries, translated from the Swedish by Sigrid Rausing. (Hope for a selected diaries volume at some point.)

Auerbach 'had to melancholically embrace the idea of the disappearance of libraries in order to find within himself the power to write a book that would be able to outlast all libraries.' —William Marx, 'Libraries of the Mind'

Irresistible.

'We had no explanation when we interrogated ourselves about humanity's bad choices." — Antoine Volodine

Sorting Volodine’s Plants Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus (2014, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2017) names dozens of plants growing on its irradiated steppe. A few are real. Most are not. The list below is an exercise in botanical glossolalia: French folk-naming, Russian loanwords,…

Starting this on strong recommendation: Volodine's major novel, apparently the fullest entry into his 'post-exoticism' universe. (Zuckerman's translation much praised.)

Even now, what I love above all else, is form, provided it be beautiful and nothing beyond it. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 1846

‘Oh well, I am not a philosopher at all; I just teach philosophy . . . . Second-rate philosophers are dreary, really dreary beyond belief, and how many great philosophers are there?’ William Gass, in the ‘Dutch Quarterly Review’

Happy birthday, David. I enjoyed the Kate Briggs episode very much. I’d love to listen to a conversation with Alice Oswald. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/b...

Borges’ Longwinded Catalog 'We haven't changed a bit, I thought.' Jorge Luis Borges, whom William Gass described as 'a man made civilised by the library'. I could spend a life in patient study of his stories. In The Other from The Book of Sand he offers a 'longwinded catalog'. All his lists are…

‘My work is probably best characterised as late or decayed Modern end of the road sort of thing, last gasp.’ - It seems I’ve taken a liking to the voice of decayed modernist William Gass.

The contents page of Denise Riley's 'Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect' suggests an ideal companion to follow James Elkins' brilliant 'A Short Introduction to Anneliese' (what words do to us and fail to do). It was either that or a cover-to-cover reading of Fowler's (still tempting).

What chances a translation into English of Hans Haider’s forthcoming biography of Friederike Mayröcker? @wordkunst.bsky.social

‘Writing to A.R. Ammons in 1972, Bloom said, “I’m not an artist or a critic, or a hybrid of the two, but something older and less, a reader.”’ [From Henry Oliver, The Common Reader’s latest email.]

Thought-Whelmed Reading James Elkins, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, Unamed Press. It is the second volume of Five Strange Languages. Elkins explains, 'You can read each book by itself. They are entirely independent of each other. Each is different, with its own style, mood, and stories',…

James Elkins: “A Short Introduction to Anneliese: the fascination and insanity of complex books. Begins with a 200 page rant. . . . At its center is a hundred-page chapter in which Anneliese talks about long books.”

Easter plans.

Reminded of Larkin’s poem ‘Coming’ today with the longer, lighter Spring evening

The Late Arrival

When you look back on the works that have moved you, you find that they have always been written out of some kind of necessity. There's something calling out to you, some human call, that makes you want to listen to the work. In the end, it probably has very little to do with literature. Paul Auster

Another pastoral English classic, paired well with 'Cold Comfort Farm', though Lee is sincere where Gibbons is subversive.

Stella Gibbons prose is genuinely accomplished. A bit of an outlier for me, but it is very good at what it does. Wonderful control. I'll be rereading, I imagine.

M. Boissonade.

‘Thought-whelmed’. A word Stella Gibbons coins in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’: His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. . . Humanity left him abruptly.

I enjoy thinking through Lydia Davis’s Essays. I catch her mind and follow.

the fascination of trifles; the enchantment of frivolity; the spell of worthless things; the seduction of nonsense; the charm of idle pursuits; the lure of empty pleasures; the enticement of meaningless diversions; the allure of trivial things; the spell of slight things

There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely. Stella Gibbons, from the foreword to ‘Cold Comfort Farm’

Contact When I began writing here I believed reading was collaboration. Sartre's word. The writer offers and the reader completes. What I didn't anticipate was how much of reading is loss. Books I loved that left nothing behind. Books I discarded that lingered unexpectedly. The unread shelves that…

Solitude and Gathering, Revisited I once wrote a post about King Alfred's translations, and I have been thinking about it again. Not because I have changed my mind, but because I now stand closer to the thing I was describing. Alfred began his translations in middle age; when I wrote about him I…

The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces. —Virginia Woolf, from 'The Common Reader'

Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I write the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice. — Virginia Woolf