@jenks I hear you, but I'm only moved to discuss things I'm really interested in, i.e. intensive luka-style poetry discussion for one passes me by
I wasn't around a lot for along so I may have missed some of your attempts - what literature are you interested in? why are you interested in it?
these are my last three posts in this thread:
Anita Brookner - A Friend From England (working my way through her oeuvre chronologically)
T J Clarke - Sight of Death (art critic looking specifically at two Poussin paintings)
Re-reading Stendhal's Scarlett and Black (love nineteenth century french novels - just finished an 25 hour audiobook of the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle by Zola)
Tolstoy's Short Stories (cos he's something else)
A collection of early English poetry (comfort read i return to over and again and i need comfort at the moment)
happy to chat about any of them if anyone wants.
…Just finished Lahr's massive biog of Tennessee Williams which is brilliant and depressing in equal measure - final 100 pages watching a talent burn out and screw up is particularly unedifying.
Reading The Five by Hallie Rubenhold - a book about the five 'canonical' victims of the Ripper. What i like about it is that it is not interested in how they died but in how they lived - it reclaims their lives and describes how they lived, yanking the narrative away from the myth and ripperology, instead it is a story of women's lives in the nineteenth century. It's really a book about unwritten lives - working class women who have ended living in the shittiest places and how it came to that.
Also re-reading Stendhal because he has the unflinching cycnical eye which focuses on middle class hypocrisy so well and Julien Sorel is just a brilliant character to follow through nineteenth century France.
…Lockdown reading;
Marion Turner's new biog of Chaucer - really an examination of public and private spaces as the world moves from a medieval world into the early modern era - great on the slow and subtle changes Europe was undergoing.
Re-issue of Vivian Gornick's The Romance of american Communism - an oral history of american communism from the twenties to the sixties - a seemingly erased era of history - would fit well with Vineland and Vonnegut fans.
Re-reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Perpetual Orgy which may well be one of the best books on a single book by another novelist - in case Flaubert's Madame Bovary - the section on the technical side of the novel is masterclass.
New novel Mr Beethoven by Paul Griffiths - just started it about a commission Beethoven received to write an oratorio in Boston.
Finally a really heartbreaking and brilliant non fiction book about how a father tries to communicate through music with his severely autistic daughter: In Her Room by James Cook.