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Y was the album for me - just felt like nothing else. 1979 and he cracked the whole of punk/post punk open.

Could have put the whole album on

Yep. Very much - reminded me of how promising a band they were. Really loved them and then I dunno why, I just stopped listening to them.

Yeah Mouthful of Birds contains some very unsettling stories. I read her novel as well about a kind of possessed kids toy/teddy bear kind of thing - it didn’t quite have the same heft but still very good.

I’m confused

If you stir the shit you must be prepared to lick the stick.

Yes. Yes I have read some

I think you’d really like it. I read it as it was just lying around and I had nothing on the go. Ten pages in and I was hooked. Taut, psychological convincing, slightly sexy. Like a modern Terese Raquin

One of the best ‘pulp’ things I read was Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain. Many writers could’ve learnt a lot from him

Along with Achebe, I’d make my repeated claim that Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes is required reading.

Yep - I re-read The Secret Agent recently and thought ‘if you can write nice and clearly like this, why did you make HoD so fucking hard!’

I’ve said it before but there can be a tendency with these things to just turn into “everything good is actually shit” often by people who haven’t actually done the reading. You wouldn’t put up with this lack of rigour in your ‘Javanese dubstep’ thread or whatever micro genre generates 480 pages...

He committed fully to the Blakean line and rhythm and on his day he pulled it off but reading some of it now can be a bit cringey. I think he was too self consciously trying to be a visionary - whatever that is. But Howl is still magnificent

Must agree with @you here. I think he’s pretty clear for most of the time. There’s a haunting that runs through his work which I think is about the persistence of memory and a duty/responsibility not only not to forget but to take that responsibility seriously. In that way I think of him like...

Telegraph Road

Yeah - on the one hand I thought Proust did this stuff all the time but when youre being a ventriloquist for a holocaust victims there are a whole bunch of ethical issues. But clearly a deeply troubled man. I didn’t like the over determined reading about the car crash - as if he’d been willing...

Best fact is that he worked on the same paper as Basil Bunting in Newcastle - guessing late 60s/early 70s

Both this and Jokerman are works of genius

On a bit of a Willa Cather splurge - I’d only read My Antonia but I think The Professor’s House is amazing - a story of the mid west with a fascinating story about a Native American settlement in New Mexico. Got Death Cones for the Archbishop lined up after finishing Alexander’s Bridge and a...

Great to see Blunden mentioned - often neglected or disparaged as hopelessly out of step Georgian swept away by the tide of modernism. one of the few good things that happened in my English lesson as a kid was an ancient teacher who taught a load of Blunden's poetry to us - Blunden had been in...