The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Over the last couple of weeks, many frequent posters from the group have said, here or elsewhere (e.g. 21st Century literature group) that they would like to cut down on reading brand new titles, or from award lists or on subscriptions - and people are also planning their 2020 reading. Quite a few of us feel we have been neglecting other books too much in favour of titles that might be, or are, listed for awards. (Though I've already spent most of the year since the MBI reading older books, and others are also working through some TBR.)

The title 'The Mookse and the Gripes' is a reference from James Joyce, and the original blog wasn't only about new releases and prizes. Besides, this year there have been some small informal group reads quietly going on in 'Author Chat' threads about Richard Powers and Toni Morrison.

This thread is to start a conversation about books people haven't got round to, especially because of prizes, ARCs and other brand new releases - whether those unread books were published just a couple of years ago or hundreds of years ago. This is both as motivation so that you can stay active in the group while reading more older books and just dipping into the prizes, and so people who want to read the same older books or authors can find each other and consider 'buddy reads' (even if they hate that term as much as I do!) or read the same books soon after one another, as schedules allow. We will add more threads in the Author Chat folder for any writers people would like to read and discuss this way.

Would love to see a Jesse Ball thread.

I am very happy to see this; I am one of those wishing to avoid prizes this year and expected that it would be at the cost of losing track of the interesting discussions in this group, so this is perfect. Thank you, Antonomasia!

Yes, thanks Anto. I'm going to try not "keep up with the Jones" read this coming year. I have some big classics I want to read, some nonfiction books I've been waiting to read, etc, and this is great. Danke!

I tend to read mine the same way I'd read a longlist - except the lists are longer. There is usually a provisional plan for the month or next few weeks which I largely keep to myself because potential hubris, and then if/as things change I swap books. There are usually shorter/easier books on standby if I can't manage or fit in one which is long/complex. That is how I managed to finish a book by three new authors from the first list here every month so far from July-Nov this year. (It is very rare I get to achieve that kind of consistency with anything, let alone something I wanted to do for that long, so it's been really important to me.) The remaining target books will be too long for three per month soon anyway.

A lot of my targets are on this shelf: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
But not all of those are priorities that I'd read within the next year if conditions allow.
I also don't always add unread books to GR now if they are very well known or obvious, so there will be a few which aren't there which I want to read.

What I am maybe more aware of is that there are classics that most people active in the group *have* read, while I haven't. (This has partly been what's motivated me the last few months, that I don't really need to feel guilty about not reading prize lists, when at least some of what I've been reading was stuff many of you read years ago.) I would still stand a good chance of winning a round of David Lodge's Humiliation book game with stuff like The Odyssey (over 800 000 GR ratings at time of writing).

Doh, which is to say that for setting up 'buddy read' type things, I am more likely to do so when it's a short book and the read is not too far in advance. (If it's months away I might read it in the meantime, in lieu of a longer book that was my preferred objective.) Whereas if it looks like the right time for me to read, say, Moby Dick, that won't have much notice, and I'll just need to go with it when I can. It's not something it makes sense for me to schedule months in advance, and I wouldn't pretend I can guarantee to finish in one go. But if other people were reading it and it looked like an okay time for me, I would join in discussion once I'd started the book.

Also, Gumble - haven't forgotten about your Jesse Ball thread.

I truly fly by the seat of my pants w/ reading. If it catches my eye, I read it. If it looks like it will require me to sit and take notes and be really involved, I tend to push them off, which is why I decided 2020 will be my year of big books that have been waiting patiently for me. If I can get through Don Quixote in both English then Spanish, I'll be thrilled b/c I bought the Grossman translation when it came out (in paperback) - pretty sure that was over a decade ago, and I really have no excuse for not reading that book beyond "I know the story" and I'd read it in Puffin version as a child -- I was addicted to my Puffin library as a kid. I saved all my money for the Puffin book club (or whatever it was called.) So I've been very guilty of not reading books in their actual versions b/c I read some version as a kid. It's a bad excuse. I finally read The Count of Monte Cristo this year, and it was 1) better than the watered-down version I read as a child, 2) a fairly swift read given how fat the thing is, 3) pretty much ruined by trying to stick to a book club schedule. I finally gave up that idea & just read at my own pace - it was better that way. I can't put a book down and expect to actually pick it up a week later to carry on then stop again. So I tend to never be on schedule for my book clubs/ buddy reads. I stay in the groups though b/c I like to steal their ideas!

But those big books - if I can get through 6 in the next year, I'll be happy with myself. Sometimes I have no problem reading 1000+ pages. Other times, especially w/ classics, I have this tendency to feel like "oh, that'll be around next week. I can read this other book now." In actuality, I'd rather have read a bunch of books that are already classics. I'll never read them all, but I do want to read the ones I bought for the purpose of reading!

I somehow missed a lot of the classics when I was in school. While I do remember starting the Odyssey, I have no memory of ever actually finishing it. I am lacking in Greek Myth, and I owe Edith Hamilton a ton for writing that little handy book she wrote about those gods. I'm tempted to buy it in audio & listen to it as I drive (hoping more will sink in.) I'm not sure I'll ever get all the way through the Iliad & Odyssey, but I do want to read the unabridged Dante trilogy b/c I'm constantly talking and thinking about what level of hell this feels like and where I might land. I should read the freaking books! What's so pathetic is that I've read enough books that depend deeply on these classics that, again, I feel I have the basic gist, but it would be nice to truly read them.

One thing I do wish is that I had a close-reading group of some sort for some books - that's part of why I've not ventured into certain classics and newer books as well. I've read most Pynchon & a lot of Delillo etc, but I'm so sure there is a ton more that I missed. I have desperately wished for a deep reading class or group, etc. I have taken advantage of a bunch of free classes on youtube etc from various units, but I feel woefully unprepared to do much more than recap or stick tabs in books. I feel like almost every book I read deserves more care and deeper reading than I give it.

My only real excuse is that I'm constantly reading at work, and I have to deeply read that stuff - also know it cold and quickly. So when I can sit and take notes, make deep evaluations etc, they don't land on goodreads. Nobody wants to hear why I think they should change certain phrases on neuropsych tests or what's happening w/ every new fMRI study. (Well, nobody here at GRs that I know.)

I keep my books tracked on a nice little web-based system called "libib" - it's cheap & very useful. I have one "library" for work reading, another for the books I own and actually plan to read, one for the ones my library owns & I want to read, a "wishlist" library (neither library nor I own - yet I still want to read them), and then a combined dumping ground library where I put the books I've read. It's invaluable to me. I don't know how I lived without it actually. I never was able to truly get my books on GR properly b/c I just scanned everything in the house when I signed up - and that is still, to this day, causing confusion for me on here.

Yanyhoo. I like this idea. I see a few books on your "light reading" shelf that hold a very similar spot on my TBR list. Also, I'm a bit plagued by the library's constantly changing e-book inventory. I have a real tendency to read the library books when I can get my hands on them so I don't miss the chance, and that - of course - leaves my own books waiting patiently.

Luckily, I got a lot of building done this weekend, and I'm starting to get the books out of boxes & onto shelves. I hope to be fully finished by summer, when I will have a lovely library and all my books will have a home, or at least that's the idea.

There is a first quarter group read of Dante's Divine Comedy in Catching Up On Classics, if you would like a thread to follow for that.

This was a close-reading group for Ovid's Metamorphoses whose posts you may find useful:
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
I wanted to join in with it by reading the book when they were around half way through, but I was on a roll with the books in the list above, and they had been waiting for too long for me to risk losing the momentum.

I think I default to something like close reading. (I can't remember whether you use a Kindle, so I don't know if these numbers will make sense to you - but since I discovered the notes function, I often average about 100 notes per 1000 locations of a book - though a good fraction of those are basically reactions that will be irrelevant later, though making them helps me take in the book.)

I would be interested in the neuropsych stuff, as all the stuff I studied is now a minimum of 10 years old. There are also a few working psychologists I know of on GR. But it sounds like it would create extra work typing it up for GR, and you don't need that.

The types of reading can support each other I think. A while ago there was some thread in which people were talking about the most challenging prose they'd read. I felt like, for me, this was in two books by Allan Schore and Peter Fonagy respectively, and I went back and looked at them and it didn't seem as much hard work as it had when I first read it; in the years between I'd read a fair few 'difficult' novels.

The reading challenge - I only really looked through them for the second time this year, this weekend - indicated you read over 200 books so there's no way you need to make any excuses for not reading non-work stuff. It's pretty phenomenal to keep up both like that.

You seem to me like one of the people who's read/catalogued quite a lot of the classics I haven't read. In particular I have/had gaps with American classics, though I have remedied a few of those the last few months.

Reading Don Quixote in the original Spanish is awesome; that must be some gold standard of reading fluency in a second language.
I read an English translation in my teens, and it's one of the really big books I was so glad to have ticked off before things got more difficult and also I had less time because of university and work. (There are also plenty I didn't.) I love the idea of a DQ re-read in theory, but there's too much I haven't read once yet. I listened to an audio lecture about it this year at least.

I have found audio is good for mythology. I listened to one on Greek myths on Scribd by a Prof. Peter Meineck, in the Modern Scholar series. Classical Mythology: The Greeks They were excellent lectures - and I've been noticing some of the points he made in other books since - but there was just a bit too much new info for what I'm comfortable with in audio and I spent a lot of time making notes.

As long as I have the to-read shelf full enough for a month or two and reasonably under control, I don't feel the need to plan my reading beyond participating in discussions that interest me and following some of the prize lists. I have stopped adding more than a few books a year to my long-term wishlist because I know that at least half of the books on it are ones I will never get round to, and at least half of the books I buy were never on it in the first place.
I do like the idea of adding a counterweight to the group's focus on prizes, but expectations of participation levels need to be realistic - we would all like to be able to read more, and human time is finite.

I think, rather than reading more in quantity, this is mostly about changing proportions, e.g. if someone read 80% newly published/ award-listed books in 2019 (to take a fairly extreme example) and would prefer that to be more like 40% going forwards.

(I said in the 21st Century Lit thread I would ideally like to read 25% new, 75% older, but unless I read more books than I did this year, 25% wouldn't add up to two whole longlists.)

Jesse Ball thread now exists.

Thank you for this thread, Antonomasia. I appreciate it.

Thanks for this.

I studied English Literature, but I still feel like I've barely made a dent in the classics (it's no help having read three Hardys if the one under discussion is Jude the Obscure) in my own language, let alone in other languages. The classic I definitely want to read next year is Crime and Punishment. I haven't read any Dostoevsky! And I've only read an abridged Odyssey and half of the T.E. Lawrence translation (abandoned because the Emily Wilson version came out and I suspected I'd rather read that, bought it and then didn't). So if anyone wants to read either of those in the coming months, let me know.

I also want to read more Catalan classics, in the original or translation, since I've been here over a decade and read, erm, just In Diamond Square and a few contemporary works.

And I do love the New York Review of Books series, which isn't very original of me, but I feel they are excellent at finding truly satisfying books that wouldn't otherwise be on my radar.

I have found much less time for classics since getting seriously involved here too, but I have read 6 Dostoevskys, of which Crime and Punishment is only my fourth favourite. I started with the Brothers Karamazov, which is still my favourite, but it is very long. The Idiot is very good too.

Hugh wrote: "I have found much less time for classics since getting seriously involved here too, but I have read 6 Dostoevskys, of which Crime and Punishment is only my fourth favourite. I started with the Brot..."

That's what a few people have told me. But I got sucked into buying a nicely designed edition of C&P a couple of years ago, so reading it would kill two birds: a classic and reading a book I already own....

Karamazov is another one that is surprisingly widely read on here, though not as much as the Odyssey - 220 000 ratings. (I made a list of these a while ago, the books I had shelved but not read which had the most ratings.) And it is not one that tends to be abridged a lot, as far as I'm aware.

I will probably be reading the Odyssey, but I usually read poetry a lot more quickly than prose so I may not match pace. (Most people say they read poetry a lot more slowly than prose but I'm the other way round and I don't really understand how this all works.) On the other hand I'd like to read both Fagles, which I first got in the early 00s, and Wilson depending what else I've got going on.

I think this whole idea of spreading out in this group is a wonderful idea. I am always so excited to see what this group thinks of all kinds of books.

The Iliad and Odyssey are two of my favorite reads, but I haven’t read the Wilson translation. I’d be happy to read it with others.

Oh yes please - I bought the Wilson version for myself just recently b/c I do plan on actually reading it & I sold my old copy to the used bookstore. So I'm up for doing a read w/ anyone. Just give me a week or two of notice & I will make the time.

Anto - thanks for the links to other discussions! Those will be very helpful. I went to Catholic school, and I have started to think they purposely left out anything myth-adjacent. It's not an excuse, but it is a huge gap in my reading.

I've only read a lot of classics b/c when I finally decided to read something other than spy novels, I found myself some list of classics and read ONLY them for a while. Then I lived in NYC when Paul Auster, DFW & the other boys started to make noise, so it felt almost criminal at times not to have read whatever big book was out right then (and back then, it was mostly men.)

I've been trying to fill gaps in books written by women, so I read Middlemarch & a bunch of Jane Austen & the Bronte sisters etc in the last ~decade?

As for my Spanish, I've worked very very hard on it, but I speak Latin-Am Spanish, so we'll see how I do w/ my Spanish reading group & Don Q en español. Luckily they're all very kind to me.

I also have a copy of the Wilson translation of the Odyssey waiting to be read. I'd participate!

Drop a note if you start the Wilson Odyssey. I also bought it when it came out and haven't gotten to it.

I also have a copy. I would be happy to read it in any time after early January.

It looks like we have something then. What about scheduling it for a period of a couple of months so that people can fit it in as suits them? I'm thinking maybe start of Jaunary up to Booker International announcement. (which still doesn't have an exact date) And of course people can always post later if they want to.

not having read the Odyssey has meant I've put off other things that are related to it so I would like to read it sooner rather than later, having finally decided to

the Women's Prize Longlist is announced on 3rd March. So maybe the 2nd would make a good finish date?

thread

Every year I vow to read The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, and Edith Grossman’s Don Quixote (we probably all have this edition ), and all of my dad’s Greek classics, and at least a few Shakespeare plays a year, and finally get around to Brothers Karamazov. I did read Crime and Punishment, but that is the only great Russian novel I’ve read. I would love to be able to opine on the difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but that won’t be happening any time soon.

I’m terrible at buddy reads because I’m far too fickle and too much of a mood reader to plan ahead, but I would like to fill in the gaps of my classical readings.

Wendy, do you have the option to take any classes near to where you live? I took a few classes in the last few years at a literature school. Not every town has one of these (!) but a university course on the Russians or whatever could still be fun. I used this method to read the kind of texts I'd usually have to do secondary reading for: Joyce and Woolf, mostly.

Wendy, if you want to join me for a very LONG read of Don Q, I'm planning on reading him twice in 2020, so I'm sure I'll be reading it at many points through the first 6 months of the year. I have the Grossman trans and I just landed my spanish copy - the original with loads of notes (TONS of notes. It's far fatter than the English ed.) I'm also bad at group/buddy reads, but since I plan on diving fairly deeply over a period of time, it could work maybe?

I will join you in your English read!

And I’d love to join you too with this! I’ve wanted to read it for many years and now that I have Quichotte on my TBR, feel the great original has to be read first!

Perhaps make it a flexible buddy read; I am going to read on audible and start right away then head straight into Quichotte.

Somewhat related to this topic. The old Penguin Classics design seems to be making way for a new one: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/28518...

I’m amused by how strong a reaction I had when I learned about this change. It’s not even hugely different, but it will take time to get used to it!

On another note, I decided on a whim to finally tackle The Canterbury Tales although in modern translation. I don’t know how many times I’ve begun reading it in the original in The Riverside Chaucer but always abandoned, and I’ve had the Wright translation for 4 years too. I got a fever yesterday (of course that always happens during the holidays) and this book seems a suitable endeavor to finish off the year with.

Tommi, I also want to read The Canterbury Tales soon, not least as I am 2/3 through the new biography Chaucer: A European Life on audio. But I would like to read, at the very least, the Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses first (Both of which must come after the Odyssey). The biography may well be my last book of the year but not the Tales themselves.

When I was younger I always expected myself to read the Middle English and it depressed me having to conclude that I'd left it to a point where I wasn't really going to be up to it - until a GR friend who reads most of the most difficult novels around, and gave Finnegan's Wake 5 stars, said that he was reading The Canterbury Tales in translation, same as he wouldn't learn German to read Goethe.

The Nevil Coghill translation seems utterly definitive in the UK - I don't think I've heard anyone here say they read anything other than Coghill or the original.

Penguin Modern Classics seem to have been messing about with their designs a lot over the past two years as well.

This subtle shift with the black classics reminds me of the one that happened with them in my teens, when they removed the border.
Edition with border (80s-style design, but which was still on sale for some titles into the late 90s):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
In the newer 90s ones, the pictures sometimes simply had no border while retaining the cream background, as here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
or the picture took over the whole cover, as here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...
The mixture of old and new designs on sale meant they couldn't be a matching set, which was a little frustrating.

I still miss the old spines which had the colour coding at the top, which as far as I can gather based on books I owned was red for English literature, yellow for European medieval, and green for Middle Eastern and Asian. I didn't own any copies of translated European 19th century, and the Don Quixote I read was a library copy in a 1970s edition, so I can't remember for sure whether red was also Continental European or when it started chronologically.

Oxford have little red bands at the top of their editions which reminds me of this. :) Their editions quite often have better content these days, I'm finding, so I am more drawn to them. I used to lean towards Penguin with a few Oxfords, now it is the other way round. (I wish I had got the Oxford for Pamela, which I'm reading in the Penguin at the moment, but that is already in the status updates.)

Even the penguin modern classics overhauls are frustrating: I grew up with the green editions, which became grey then evolved into white AND in the late 90’s penguin released edgy Cover designs of their modern classics in tandem with the green and grey ones appearing on bookshelves

Anto, I hadn’t noticed you’re reading the new biography, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it (and am atm reading your status updates), as the recent LRB review partly inspired me to pick up the Tales. I’m considering reading the biography as a physical book, since I’m not sure if I’m up for a 20-hour audiobook (which is attractively available on Scribd).

Interesting to see the development of the Penguin covers. I’ve preferred Oxfords over Penguins, the ratio on my bookshelf being c. 60/40. What I don’t like about the former is how easily the spines crack compared to some of the Penguins, but the white spines w/ the red band do look good on my shelf!

The biography is in large part a history book and I wouldn't especially recommend it unless someone felt comfortable with being parachuted straight in to an honours level module on post-Black Death England (with a side helping of Western Europe). As that is something I would have loved to study at university, but which wasn't available, it's perfect for me in that respect. But the level of assumed knowledge is likely to be a bit much for those looking for a purely literary focus, and without that background, especially in the audio format.

There are some great bits analysing the poems, however, so it would be well worth dipping into for those (and which can, I think, be grasped without all the preceding detail about the Wool Staple and so forth), maybe as a university library copy?

Thanks, the historical emphasis may indeed put me off at some point since it’s over 600 pages long. The hardback is a bit pricy so I need to look out for a library copy, but alas the university does not have one. (I could request it though – the number of titles they carry on Medieval and Renaissance lit in English always amazes me considering there are relatively few people interested in such things here, or so I believe at least.)

Antonomasia wrote: "When I was younger I always expected myself to read the Middle English and it depressed me having to conclude that I'd left it to a point where I wasn't really going to be up to it."

I studied a fair bit of Chaucer at uni, and I think the best approach is to read the original and a translation in tandem. Much of the difficulty of the original is just a hump to get over (rather like reading The Wake), and it also really helps to read it aloud, with some basic pronunciation rules (like the seeming silent-e endings are actually Germanic -uh sounds) to make the rhythm an rhyme make sense. I liked reading it aloud in a Yorkshire accent -- one of my parents is from Yorkshire -- as many of the speech patterns existing there are reminiscent of older English and it helped me hear it as less archaic sounding. A good translation is invaluable anyway, to help the modern reader feel engaged.

I’d like to revive this thread for books worthy of note that aren’t on Prize lists.

I just read Season of the Shadow by Léonora Miano, translated from the French by Gila Walker, from Seagull books and don’t feel ready to start another book yet.

Set in pre-colonial Cameroon/Nigeria at the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade this is stunning, heartbreaking, fascinating, beautifully written and mythic in feeling.

Léonora Miano said she based the lives of the Sub-Saharan clans and villagers on her research on the Central African Bantus who are, “implicated in the transatlantic slave trade, even though they seldom speak of it.” She credits the mythology, beliefs, clothing, and ritual practices in Seasons of the Shadows on The Descendants of the Pharoahs across Africa: The March of the Kara or Ngala Nationalities from Antiquity to the Present Day.

I absolutely loved this book. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Another book worthy of mention although published in 1998 is Götz and Meyer. I read it this weekend in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was an incredible book and my review in no way does it justice.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I did read that 7 years ago it seems and gave it 3 stars - although I think I approached it differently as I was expecting something closer to Leeches which is more "a cerebral adventure" (the blurb)

Most books suffer from comparison, elevated expectations, or expecting different style or tone. I’ve done that too many times.

I went into Götz and Meyer with no expectations, I had forgotten that I bought it after hearing about on a podcast a year or so ago and just picked it off my shelf while looking for a Holocaust novel. I’m not surprised that you’ve read it, I thought you or others probably had, but I am surprised you gave it only 3 stars.

Tell me I'm crazy if you wish, but I have been quite surprised at the absolutely zero mention of Noah Hawley's Anthem
Anthem
It was released Jan. 4, 2022, and it seems books that come out at that time of year often get overlooked. It reminded me a good bit of Stephen King's The Stand. I thought it would at least get attention from the YA audience.