#allenderreadinglist2019

[robinallender]

Last book of the year (and decade) is Toy Fabels, a collection of poems by Cass McCombs – gnomic, weird, funny haha, funny peculiar. 

Malverde, blessed Saint of Sinaloa! I kiss your image again! and pray your spirit finds rest on the other side of the legendary borderline between evil and green

[robinallender]

This is an extremely dated and often quite nasty novel parodying the boom in self-help and psychotherapy in the 1970s. In some ways it’s fascinating to read because it’s often hard to work out what Amis is satirising! It’s like hearing a very drunk man tell you the punchline to a joke having forgotten the set-up. 

As always with Amis there are bits that made me laugh, particularly the chapter titles. Chapter 9: Guilt and Shame. Chapter 10: Wanker! And the description of Jake’s bowels ‘emitting moans of poignant grief’. But overall the experience reminded me of visiting a house where people still smoke inside. Curiously nostalgic, but not altogether pleasant.

[robinallender]

It’s hard to explain how seeing a mundane thing cast out of the grammar of daily life can suddenly alert you to the irruption of violence.

[robinallender]

From ‘In Blackwater Woods’ by Mary Oliver (from the American Primitive collection). 

[robinallender]

Going through the treasure trove of Dad’s poetry books. How beautiful is the design of this 1968 Faber edition of Ted Hughes’s debut collection? ‘The Horses’ absolutely blew me away when I read it as a teenager. 

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,  May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place 

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews, Hearing the horizons endure.

[robinallender]

This new Google assures its actual customers that it will do whatever it takes to transform the natural obscurity of human desire into scientific fact.

[robinallender]

What a lovely day for a trudge through the woods. Currently rereading The Crystal Prison, the second volume of Robin Jarvis’s Deptford Mice trilogy. A childhood favourite! There’s a lot going on in these books: paganism, hidden London, folk horror, green man (mouse) mythology. 

‘I see you walk a dangerous rope midshipmouse. Reality and memory ought never to entwine so closely! Beware your dreams and forget what has passed.’

So says the Greenwich Starwife (a squirrel).

[robinallender]

Rereading John Burnside’s incredible Waking Up in Toytown on a beautiful wintry morning in Newcastle –

the dead who never belonged to anyone, not even themselves, will go on forever, or some element of them will, folding endlessly into rain and leaves and new animals hunting in the first grey of dawn.