OK, it's that time of the year. What's the best book you have read in 2024?

Merry Christmas Bookworms!! 🎶❤️

gotta say that reading The Names and Finnegans Wake at the same time is a pretty sneaky mix *introducing the Finnegans Wake abecedarian doomsday cult

Zachary Issenberg includes Michele Mari's Verdigris in his Year in Reading for The Millions. From slugs to whales! 🐳 @andotherstories.bsky.social themillions.com/2024/12/year...

Today's #WaferThinBook (Nonfic Nov): Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ourednik, tr. Gerald Turner (2011, 122p.) Sometimes mislabeled a novel, Europe's violent 20th century told in "snapshots" by a master "photographer" and cynic. Creative nonfiction (that's not memoir).

The best colloquial Scottish phrase I've come across for describing someone who is boastful or conceited, heard in Aberdeen, is “he thinks he’s the cheese, but he’s only the stink.”

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part IV biblioklept.org/2024/11/29/d...

finished reading this 403-page long paranoid sentence—Krasznahorkai confirms that he is a peerless cartographer of our natural habitat: the apocalyptic state of mind don’t forget: ‘Hope is a mistake’

Some of my “volcanic” books. 💙📚 🌋 ⚒️

my cold take: Krasznahorkai's unbroken prose doesn't flow/trickle down the page, it rushes like a tightrope runner to the edge of something unnameable (perhaps a terminal freakness before the death knell) 🎡

Paul North: 'Time is a Word in Celan' www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/...

reading these waterfall-like pages for hours on end puts you into a kind of emergency trance: is an apocalypse, nothingness or a hypnotic collapse looming just around the corner? 🌡️

William Faulkner's Recipe for Curing Ham biblioklept.org/2024/11/25/w...

180 pages in and I am thisclose to sending a letter to warn Angela Merkel that the apocalypse is not only a lethal mirror image of reality but the natural state of life ✉️

Grande il monologo del Papa Francesco delle pagine 221-231. “… con le mie povere palle papali in mano …” #AntonioMoresco “Canto del buio e della luce” #booksky💙📚 @theuntranslated.bsky.social @henrirst.bsky.social

oddly disquieting isn't it? Krasznahorkai’s Herscht 07769 delves into the same subatomic chaos 👀⚛️

Okay select your favorite USA writer: 1) Gerald Murnane 2) Yoko Tawada 3) Antonio Lobo Antunes

finished my first reading of this paranoid novella; don’t worry flotsams carried by the waves of disaster, there are no sheltered places for us—we have to keep marching through the night, keep going, going, going ever onward…

I worked on A Silence Shared for too long to think of it as a novella, but I'll accept the label from @jacquiwine.bsky.social !😆 "Romano excels in creating an intimate, emotionally charged atmosphere... It’s a beautiful ode to stillness and silence, all expressed in Romano’s subtle, poetic prose."

been reading/annotating the Wake every night (still feel unsafe facing these nightwrunes)

didn’t really need a second copy of The Crying of lot 49, but then apparently i did (doubtlessly a Trystero conspiracy) 📯

The release of the season! @sevenstories.bsky.social @ryanruby.bsky.social www.sevenstories.com/books/4657-c...

just finished; highly recommended to all those who have never seen the Lord God but have seen Absalom alive in the tree, uninspired Southern Holy Rollers and other fanatics of world-creating monologues 🧏💯

Don DeLillo is 88 today!

today’s hope-is-a-mistake bookmail: Angela Merkel, quantum physics and world’s bleakness

Iconoclast William S. Burroughs researching his infamous novel Junkies. NYC circa 1955.

current state of p.16-17; what a hauhauhauhaudibble part! Guinness, Fiat Lux and Gut Aftermeal Finnegans Wake sailors! 🫡

Eco de un grito, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1937), MoMA.

220 pages in—sometimes I feel like I'm reading Flannery O'Connor on acid

A very rare picture of author Roberto Bolaño, circa 1973.

Mircea Cărtărescu presenta Theodoros (Il Saggiatore), con Bruno Mazzoni e Luigi Weber a Bologna www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbQ-...

unexpected side effect of this novel: reader’s inner voice gets slowly overlaid by the logorrheic jeremiad of a midwestern Iago (‘Furber is a sticky pill he will make you sick he will’🎶)

Cover from from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social is making the rounds on the other place. Cannot wait. (Kudos to @theuntranslated.bsky.social, always, for putting this on my radar.)

Off to Dublin soon and looking forward to some traditional Irish food…

this novel just sorta... hits different, you know? (from a haunted loneliness to unassailable squares, disloyal Logos, a doggerel and a Revelation all in one page)

Covers from our visit to A Capella books in Atlanta.

For the Almanac, I wrote about botanical and literary living fossils, and how the translator is like a flowerpot: www.paradise-almanac.net/p/famous-imps

reached the awaited part III (the bulk of this novel)—now let’s embrace the Southern Gothic stream of madness 🎺

think of a William H. Gass’ gem during my daily tuberide in the Wake: ‘It was like looking at a word until it melted’(p.18)—is there a better way to describe Wake’s thunderwords effect?

the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at White Cube is the reason i started reading Finnegans Wake; hieroglyphs, circles, skeletal sunflowers, DNA helix, Ouroboros, echoes-riddled Waste Land—to sum up all in a Wake word: ‘The obluvial waters of our noarchic memory’

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