#waferthinbook — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #waferthinbook, aggregated by home.social.
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Today's #WaferThinBook: December, by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter, tr. Martin Chalmers (2010/2021, 118p.)
Richter's stunning photos of a snow-covered forest interspersed with 39 stories, 1-2 per day, some historical, some autobiographical, some fictional, all about the elasticity of time. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Fun! What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life by Alan McKee (2016, 125p.)
A serious piece of academic thought that quotes The Simpsons and Iain M. Banks in search of fun as influence for media makers and consumer choices. A few key quotes: 🧵 -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Double Hook by Sheila Watson (1959, 128p.)
In some of the sparest prose you'll ever read, Watson captures a few summer days in the thoughts and experiences of the people of a village in the Canadian Rockies. Sadly, almost unknown outside Canada. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard (1966, 144p.)
Sophie, half English, half Italian, meets Tancredi, separated (whatever that meant in 1960s Italy). Charmed, then suspicious, then in love (and he more so). If you love K. Hepburn's movie Summertime, give it a try. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Embalming Mom: Essays in Life by Janet Burroway (2002, 163p.)
"In August of 1972 I came to Tallahassee, Florida, in search of a gas stove. It was a propitious season for suicide..."
Man, if that doesn't make you want to read this, nuthin' I say will.
Oh...and Merry Christmas! -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Homecoming Party by Carmine Abate, tr. Anthony Shugaar (2010, 171p.)
Christmas Eve in a mostly-Albanian village in southern Italy. A father who spends most of the year working in France talks with his son, who resents his absences. Each hides a painful family secret. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Windows by J. B. Pontalis, tr. Anne Qunney (2003, 114p.)
Near the end of his career, veteran psychoanalyst Pontalis reflects on his profession, his clients, his neighbors, and himself in 50-some brief essays, each based on "a lexicon for personal use." -
Today's #WaferThinBook: MOTHERs by Rachel Zucker (2014, 155p.)
In what she's described as "Prose but so fragmented that no one but poets would want to read it," Zucker works through memories, emotions, and confusions about her birth mother and mentor mothers. Intensely personal, intensely literary. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: These Particular Women by Kat Meads (2023, 168p.)
A collection of essays about (mostly) literary women written not as critic or biographer or memoirist but as simply one person endlessly fascinated by how people are who they are. And hence, an endlessly fascinating book. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Famous Fathers & Other Stories by Pia Z. Ehrhardt (2007, 166p.)
"Yet why not say what happened?" This line from Robert Lowell opens and captures the spirit of this collection. Ehrhardt writes about recognizable people and families in all their failures and good intentions. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Bridge to the Other Side by Monika Kotowska, tr. Maia Wojciechowska (1970, 164p.)
19 brief stories told by Polish children of experiences—moments and incidents, really—during the Nazi occupation. Kotowska captures the child's perspective, its innocence and cruelty. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Palace of Books, by Roger Grenier , tr. Alice Kaplan (2014, 139p.)
Published when Grenier was over 90, these are reflections of a lifetime's reading. By that point, you *know* what you like. "I dare you not to fall in love," wrote the Daily Beast's reviewer. Me, too. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley (1955, 166p.)
A scientist relates the tale of his first romance & sexual experience with wife (Goddess) of his mentor (Genius). A novella on a par with solid magazine fiction of its time: good but not great. And it's a Xmas story. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: 1919 by Eve Ewing (2019, 88p.)
Ewing combines excerpts from a 1922 report, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, with period photos and her own poems to create a multidimensional view of a crystalizing even in Chicago/American race history. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust by Howard Moss (1962, 111p.)
One the briefest studies of one of the longest novels is also one of the best. Here, Moss is a guide merely helping the reader navigate and appreciate a book he loves by showing how much it's a book about love. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Ballad of Typhoid Mary by J. F. Federspiel, tr. Joel Agee (1984, 170p.)
A dying doctor tries to tell the story of Maria Caduff, the Swiss immigrant and cook who left disease and death in her wake for decades without making her the villain. A post-modernist experiment. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Girl from the Metropol Hotel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, tr. Anna Summers
Subtitled Growing Up in Communist Russia, but How Not to Die from Neglect as a Nonperson is more accurate. Born after family members were purged in 1937, she managed to survive: no small miracle. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Limits of Vision by Robert Irwin (1986, 128p.)
Marcia spends her day scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting: in eternal battle against dirt. She imagines dialogues with Darwin, Dickens, and Mucor, PR man for The Dirt. She escapes into a Dutch painting. Odd, fascinating & wise. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Comforts of Madness by Paul Sayer (1988, 128p.)
Peter has been catatonic for years. It provides a sense of security. Is it better to leave him alone or to try to "cure" him? One reader called it "a guide for how not to work within mental health services" (as Sayer has). -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (2014, 177p.)
Coupling, marriage, parenting, work: life told in ~300 fragments. It works because so many are dead on: the toddler asking, "Party now?" & then declaring, "No more party!" The early mothers who notice you're late and... -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Lightning of August by Jorge Ibargüengoitia, tr. Irene del Corral (1965/1986, 117p.)
A wildly comic satire of hagiographic biographies of petty dictators, a tale of a coup channeled through the Marx Brothers and full of Mexican political inside jokes. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Greene on Capri: A Memoir by Shirley Hazzard (2000, 149p.)
Greene and Hazzard first met in a cafe on Capri when she finished a poem by Browning that he was trying to recite to a friend. So, yes, this a portrait of v. literate people in v. literary world probably now vanished. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Chinese Garden by Rosemary Manning (1962, 173p.)
"She entered an exotic world where she breathed pure poetry. It had the symmetry of Blake’s tiger. It was the green thought in a green shade." An account of one girl's experiences at an odd, grim, at times magical school. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Refusing Heaven by Jack gilbert (2009, 92p.)
A good collection to read right now, in a world full of pain and dread. "To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat/ comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth/ all the years of sorrow that are to come." -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Strangers: A Family Romance by Emma Tennant (1999, 182p.)
Tennant rummages through old family photos and weaves a set of stories—some true, some imagined—about her long-gone relatives. "There is no way of saying that what is true to me is not also history." -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, by Norman Malcolm (1958, 100p.)
I will never claim to grasp much of Wittgenstein's philosophy, but ever since reading Ray Monk's superb biography I've been fascinated with him as a personality. Malcolm's sketch is sensitive & at times, amusing. -
Today's #WaferThinBook: A House in Order by Nigel Dennis (1966, 120p.)
A Kafka-esque tale about a man stranded in a greenhouse as a (civil?) war rages around him. A parable about being in the midst of a crisis, unable to act, compelled to survive. Abstract but powerful. -
December's #WaferThinBook is The Promise by Silvina Ocampo, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine & Jessica Powell (2019, 88p.)
Is it about a woman who falls overboard? Or a woman struggling with dementia? Or about the fallibility and fluidity of memory? If you miss Ocampo's clues, you'll find yourself at sea(!) -
Today's #WaferThinBook (Nonfic Nov): Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ourednik, tr. Gerald Turner (2011, 122p.)
Sometimes mislabeled a novel, Europe's violent 20th century told in "snapshots" by a master "photographer" and cynic. Creative nonfiction (that's not memoir). -
Today's #WaferThinBook (Nonfic Nov.): My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe (1985, 138p.)
Howe employs superb scholarship and poetic sensibility in revealing just how much is going on underneath Dickinson's surface simplicity. "Loaded Gun," e.g.: the Civil War, Fenimore Cooper, Browning, family conflicts -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff by William Inge (1970, 169p.)
Evelyn Wyckoff is 37, single, sad, stuck teaching Latin in a Kansas town in the 1950s. Then she is found having sex with a young black man. Near-perfect but for terrible sex writing🧵
#SpinsterSeptember -
Today's #WaferThinBook: Miss Abby Fitch-Martin by Kataryn Loughlin (1952, 179p.)
A fascinating portrait of a Puritanical monster who did everything she could to deny material and emotional comfort to her orphan nieces. Grim but gripping.
#SpinsterSeptember
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=10391 -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair (1922, 183p. but really shorter)
A case study in how being a good and proper Victorian daughter could ruin your life without your even knowing it.
#SpinsterSeptember -
Today's #WaferThinBook: The Plum Tree by Mary Ellen Chase (1949, 121p.)
A #SpinsterSeptember book: Emma and Angelina work to put a positive spin on the imminent transfer of three residents in their older women's home to a state asylum. Grim and uplifting at the same time. -
Today's #WaferThinBook for #WITMonth: Frozen Time by Anna Kim, tr. Michael Mitchell (2010, 125p.)
A Red Cross researcher in Vienna works with survivors of war in the Balkans to locate missing relatives and becomes obsessed with the case of a Kosovar man and the wife he lost. -
Today's #WaferThinBook for #WITMonth: A Family Failure by Renate Rasp, tr. Eva Figes (1970, 126p.)
Uncle wants to turn young Kuno into a tree. Literally. Amputation is just the beginning. A savage allegory for what Germans did to a generation of children. -
Today's #WaferThinBook for #WITMonth: Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, tr. Julia Sanches (2014/2022, 122p.)
Reflections on home and away and the transitions between them—particularly the idea that such transitions are sometimes losses, sometimes gains, sometimes simply changes. -
Today's #WaferThinBook for #WITMonth: La Douleur by Marguerite Duras, tr. Barbara Bray (1987, 183p.)
Texts drawn from Duras's experiences in 1944-1945—occupation and liberation—the most powerful about the return of her first husband from Dachau.
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=10366 -
Today's #WaferThinBook for #WITMonth: Happy are the Happy by Yasmina Reza, tr. John Cullen (2013, 148p.)
Starting with a hilarious spat in a supermarché & ending with the scattering of ashes in a river, Reza weaves through the lives, loves, and thoughts of 18 Parisians: Marvelous -
Ten #WaferThinBook candidates for the #1937Club. Simon and Kaggsy's semi-annual reading exercise is focusing on books from 1937 next week, so here are some suggestions to help you take part without overloading your TBR stack.
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Another possible #WaferThinBook for the #1937Club (15-21 April) is a little book dear to my heart, Herbert Clyde Lewis's Gentleman Overboard, rescued by the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press.
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If you're looking for a #WaferThinBook to read for the upcoming #1937Club (15-21 April), I can recommend Wallace Stegner's Remembered Laughter, a subtle novella about family secrets that might remind you of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. (1/2)