nohoperadio's reviews
262 reviews

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

3.5

This left me with the feeling that I’d really like to read a better Elizabeth Bowen novel than this one. I like characters who overanalyze themselves and each other, who are a bit too theoretical about life, and these characters are very much that. But they’re rather too eloquent about it with too little struggle, so that I often feel like I’m just reading Elizabeth Bowen’s thoughts about her own creations and not the creatures themselves. I am intrigued though, I’ll probably be tempted into at least one more book of hers before I die. 

Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill, George Sher

4.0

Read on Wikisource. I find Mill very enjoyable to read even though he’s not a particularly dazzling stylist because there’s so little ego in his writing. He addresses the reader as you imagine he would write to a friend: he wants to convince you, but feels no impulse to bully you into being convinced. You don’t realize how sadly rare this quality is in a philosopher until you encounter it. I never find myself doubting that the reasons he gives for his beliefs are the actual reasons he holds those beliefs; there’s never an attempt to make opposing views seem ridiculous or dishonest; he seems genuinely comfortable assuming his readership is roughly as intelligent as himself. It’s a beautiful thing. 

The Trees by Percival Everett

2.75

I was excited to read this, and I can tell Percival Everett was excited when he had the idea, but eh. The book’s central mystery was hampered in its power to grip me by my suspicion–planted early and vindicated late–that the mystery’s resolution would be more poetic than clever. Which I’m fine with in theory, but it does mean that the actual experience of reading the book consisted mostly of following a bunch of detectives discussing clues and theories that I kinda knew would amount to nothing, but didn’t know quite confidently enough to feel like I could ignore any of it. The promise of a detective novel is that you will be rewarded for paying attention to details, and this book isn’t interested in following through on that promise.

Also, people kept telling me it was funny and it wasn’t that funny! I liked the joke about the diner’s rush hour but most of the comedy here is just the various interchangeable jaded detectives being interchangeably dry and sardonic.

Props to the graphic design team though obviously. 

A Plea for Vegetarianism, and Other Essays by Henry Stephens Salt

3.5

The first book in a little Wikisource kick I’ve gotten on. Interesting as a document of how the vegetarian movement was positioning itself intellectually in the early days, fun to see the overlap as well as the differences compared to today’s debates. Fun to see that Mr Salt’s Victorian interlocutors were already worrying about what would happen to the millions of cows and sheep wandering the land if we suddenly stopped eating them. Fun also to see how much emphasis he puts on the aesthetic superiority of vegetarianism: the great painters and poets love to use imagery of fruit and other plants but wouldn’t dream of depicting pork joints and the like, so we all must know on some level that this stuff is unworthy of a refined sensibility. That’s sure some kind of point! Easy to make fun of obviously, but why do that, the real point of books like this is to breathe in a good whiff of that pastness and then be on your way. 

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

5.0

Okay, obviously I was always going to love this, no surprises here, except actually it’s still like a thousand times more interesting than its reputation. 

I’m a lover of Woolf’s somewhat neglected first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day which both already have the full weight of her intelligence in them but come before her ambition to write in never-before-attempted forms emerged with Jacob’s Room (or possibly with the Monday or Tuesday stories? which I’ve not yet read). I admire both Jacob’s Room and The Waves, but I also find them frustrating because Woolf is so much better than anybody else at the novelist’s humbler duties, at simply observing life and recording it in elegant sentences, that the formal innovation often feels like a distraction from that. 
 

Orlando feels like the best of all worlds: here, the content is so wild that it takes the pressure off the style. This is (of the ones I've read so far) the mature-period book where Woolf is most comfortable being merely the greatest writer in the English language, and not on any kind of search for something bigger than writing.

As for that wild content, well, this is her Weird Gender Stuff novel obviously, we all know that. And yes it is, but what people don’t talk about so much is that it’s also her Everything novel. This is a historical novel that covers five centuries of English history, which is also a künstlerroman about a young poet finding their way, which is also… there’s like a whole interior decorating interlude at one point? The funniest thing about the world’s most famous Weird Gender Stuff novel is that you could remove all the weird gender stuff from it completely and it would still be completely unique and better than anything you or I or anyone else could even vaguely conceive of ever creating. 

The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt

4.75

Haha hell yes. So fictional texts-within-the-text are a well-known Byatt thing, her two big commercial successes Possession and The Children’s Book use that pretty heavily, but this is her seeing how much fun she can have pushing it to the limit and it’s glorious. The narrator is trying to write a biography of a fictional biographer of a fictional Victorian explorer/scientist/novelist/etc., discovers a pile of notes by said biographer that seem to be towards an unwritten work covering the lives of three non-fictional European intellectuals of no obvious connection, tries to glean biographical insight from these notes even though most of them seem to be just verbatim quotations from other people’s biographical works of which I frankly don’t know which are fictional and which not. 

This is a slim novel compared to the other two I mentioned but boasts much higher quantities of metatextual fuckery than either. I’m pretty sure more than half the wordcount here is at least one meta-level deep. If that sounds boring and frustrating, it is, but only just enough for it to be very very funny. And somehow she still fits a whole entomology subplot in there towards the end that’s like barely related to the biography stuff but still narratively satisfying! One could argue that Possession is the better A S Byatt novel, but The Biographer’s Tale is without question the A S Byattest A S Byatt novel. That’s very much a compliment. 

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

4.5

The things people need from each other are varied, arbitrary and highly specific, and there’s no benevolent force ensuring that within a particular social group these needs will line up in any kind of convenient patterns that everyone (or even anyone!) can be happy with. If there’s a single theme or thesis I can distill from the three and a half Elizabeth Taylors I’ve read so far, that’s probably it.

This book is that but in a retirement home, as a result of which it’s both bleaker and funnier than the others.

Free idea for the Virago people: consider publishing editions of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels that don’t look like complete dogshit! She’s really good and deserves it! 

Goshawk Summer: A New Forest Season Unlike Any Other by James Aldred

3.75

My standards for nature writing are quite simple: if the author is knowledgeable and is invested in the lives they’re documenting as lives and not as a metaphor for their dead dad or whatever, I’ll probably be entertained. This book meets both criteria passably enough. Not that the author is absent from the text: James Aldred is a wildlife cameraman and this is presented as a diary of his half-year making a film that follows a Goshawk pair (plus some other critters) in the New Forest through the breeding season, and much of the book concerns the nitty-gritty of trying to study animals in a way that’s minimally disruptive. This is not easy to do because most animals are naturally wary of raising young in a place where a huge ape keeps showing up to watch. Aldred’s project sounds like a massive pain in the ass and I respect it. 

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

4.25

An absolutely wild little book that’s content to pretend to be normal for a hilariously long stretch. Starts off as a very quaint comedy of manners about a middle class English family, our protagonist is a basically happy nature-loving woman whose main eccentricity is a lack of interest in men. We’re halfway through when she decides, for psychologically murky reasons, that she has to leave her family to live alone in the Chilterns; we’re about 3/4s through when she realizes that what she went there to do is to, very literally, worship Satan. And I can’t emphasize enough–keeping in mind that this book was published in 1926!–how little the book allows you to interpret this as a bad decision. Like, she meets Satan at the end and they hang out and have a good long pleasant chat about life and stuff. 

If I were going to sum up the moral, it would something like: “obviously loving Satan is crucial to the good life, but you’ve gotta be wholehearted about it, don’t be a fucking nerd who’s only in it for cheap edgy thrills”. Warner is on my shortlist of buy-something-else-by-thems. 

The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor

5.0

A perfect novel. I was extremely excited to learn this isn’t even her best-loved work and immediately purchased several more Taylors after I finished, but so far her better known books are nowhere close to this level. But still good!

Not easily summarizable. The cast is a large loose cluster of friends and acquaintances who each very much exist in their own individual universes of yearning and selfhood, but who together form a complicated network of mutual dependence and interference. Some of these characters are loveable, some of them are not, and I loved them all. The person the title is referring to–an important but by no means the “main” character, there is no main character–is the happiest among them, also the most modest and unassuming, the most generous, the one who thinks more than anything else about how to make her friends happy. She is also, and precisely through those things, the novel’s vision of evil. If this sounds dumb, I promise you, that’s my fault.