OK, I thought I’d share my recent and current reading. Starting with fiction.
Youth Without God (thanks Jono C-S for the recommendation) is fascinating read. Somewhat driven by ideas at the expense of character depth, it’s nonetheless powerful and evocative. Historically interesting too, and a disturbing window onto human behaviour as the Nazis gained power. Plenty of lessons for today.
Reading Youth Without God made me realise how little German literature I’ve read. Quite a few plays I suppose, but not many novels. Anyway… The Tin Drum has been on my reading list for yonks, so I finally got round to it. And yeah, what a wild ride. Incredible. Disturbing. Epic. Definitely joining its compatriot The Magic Mountain in my informal and unnumbered list of favourite ever books.
That leaves the third volume of the secondhand book-buying spree which lead me here: HPL and his weird stories, which I’m a few pages from finishing. The blurb promises a showcase of his development and that’s certainly true; some of the early work is very slight and predictable. The longer, later works are very enjoyable though. Not as scary or disturbing as I expected. Horrific for the characters involved, sure, but the reader is kept at a remove by the narrative style and its constant preempting. And I’m fine with that because how the horrors work on the narrators’ minds is as engaging as the weird flights of fancy. One downside is that the stories are riddled with Lovecraft’s prejudices. I gather he was up for confronting his bigotry and trying to do better, which makes that aspect of the work much easier to digest.
Anyway, with all that’s going on these days, maybe we should feel a bit more positive about return of Cthulhu.
Now for the non-fiction. (Why do we call it that as opposed to factual and non-factual?)
It’s early days for The Spell of the Sensuous, so no grand pronouncements. But I’m loving it so far. Very excited to find a book that connects language and ecology. I suspect it’s going to be as good as the other two… which are both utterly brilliant.
Entangled Life is fascinating. If you haven’t read much about the amazing world of fungi and roots and the soil – and I’d only read some articles – it’s mind-blowing stuff. It will leave you even more in awe of Nature than you are (I hope) already. Very easy to read too.
Being Ecological is also an amazing read but is as abstract as Entangled Life is (literally) down-to-earth. It did two main things to me. It took a lot of my current ideas and slotted them into an intellectual framework I was largely unaware of – I love it when books do that, when you’re in the hands of a writer/philosopher who’s done the thinking you don’t have the time/ability/training/headspace for but you feel you were kind of stumbling towards a bit anyway. The other thing is that it helped me understand why a lot of what we’re doing in the environmental movement isn’t working. I really think this slim volume is essential reading and I’ll be getting my head round more of Morton’s work for sure. All Art is Ecological (a point I’ve made myself, though with none of his intellectual clarity) is probably next on the list.
Paul Burgess 