Books I Read: Jan - Mar 2025
I had a really slow start to reading books this year. I think in January I read all of two, and one was, as you'll see, a single short story published as a hardcover chapbook. But these are some good books!
Primo Levi, Flaw of Form (1971)
I'm continuing my slow tour through the big boxed set of all Levi's work. This is the last book in volume one. It's more satirical than his previous work, and features a running through-line of the science fictional escapades of a salesman who keeps dealing in more and more horrifying things. He begins with a machine that writes poetry for you, and ends with virtual reality tapes where you live through the memories of sky divers, mountain climbers, people having sex with famous actors, and so on. But in between are unrelated stories as well, like the slowly-building apocalypse where water's specific gravity is inexplicably changing, and nothing on the planet can process it properly any longer. It's a good book. He even dedicates a story to Calvino in there.
Bram Stoker, Gibbet Hill (1890)
You may have already read about this, but in short, a guy stumbled on a reference in an old newspaper to "last month's Bram Stoker story, 'Gibbet Hill'" and knew he'd never heard of it. He tracked it down in the archives and confirmed it had never been reprinted. It was a lost story.
It's pretty good! I like Stoker for more than Dracula already. Jewel of the Seven Stars and Lair of the White Worm are good, and his short fiction is too. This edition is from the Rotunda Foundation, and it's a nice hardcover. The extra matter is, uh, uneven.
The stuff from the guy who found it is good, he just details how he did it and what it means to him and to us generally. I'm very glad they gave him space to put it all in writing.
The bio of Stoker is bad. It's too long for what it's doing, doesn't really ever approach why his stuff was appearing in newspapers (that was normal at the time but they don't mention it), and they talk about his wife a lot. Given that Stoker is widely considered a queer author, this seems like a pointed move by an organization somewhat connected to his family estate (via his mother, who founded it) to straight-wash him. Skip it and read his wikipedia page instead.
Jake Stratton-Kent, Testament of Cyprian the Mage 1 (2014)
I don't know anymore if I can say that these books are good or bad. They simply are, and I simply read them now. Slowly.
JSK, as he's often called, embarked on this years-long project to mine out the pagan core of grimoire magic, and I think he successfully makes his argument early on. Solomonic and post-Solomonic grimoires in the European traditions bear striking resemblances to operations in the Greco-Egyptian Papyri (PGM), and it's fairly safe to assume, based on historical and academic data, that there was at least some continuity, some traditions being passed on and incorporated.
I saw someone on discord once say these books are basically JSK doing a neurodivergent infodump and that's kind of true, for good and for ill. For good, because there is a ton of fascinating detail and asides. For ill, because there's never any real indication of how we could use this stuff. Only one book is really necessary to prove that connection mentioned above; the rest is, well, stuff. In some books later in the project than this one, he tentatively indicates some ways he goes about practicing himself, but there's never really any clear statement of how one could be adapting this stuff to practice now. And it's clear he thinks he should just be providing the data and we should do that ourselves. But there's such a gap there, and so much data, that I've found it, in nearly a year of reading, impossible to do much with it. And I did the full working from the first book!
However, if you're, I don't know, less totally fucked when it comes to your magical practice than I've been the last couple of years, you might get more practical matter out of it. It's not bad, it's just infuriating the way he never, ever does the thing I kind of started reading all this stuff for.
Michael Moorcock, The Final Programme (1966)
This is the first Jerry Cornelius novel, and it's the one that somewhat famously retells the story of Weird of the white Wolf in the first half, but with mods wielding machine guns instead of willowly elf people wielding cursed swords.
What struck me this time is how deeply queer it is, especially for Moorcock, who by all accounts is straight I think. But he was and is a militant anti-fascist and was back then also an arthouse hipster, so I imagine he was running in a varied crowd. There are points where the narrator posits we're entering into a future time where gender ceases to exist, finally falling away as the foolish cruft it always was, and holy shit gang. Fuck.
This is a reread for me; I read this first back in undergrad, and even more than the other Moorcock I'd been reading, it totally rewrote what I thought of as good science fiction and fantasy. I've been a slut for the new wave ever since.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
I mentioned the Calvino name drop above and my partner and I, who are both big fans, discussed which books we'd read so far. She had a copy of Invisible Cities and once she learned I hadn't read it, she silently went into her room and returned with her copy, which she put next to me on the couch. She was correct.
This is a series of short descriptions of cities that don't exist, including cities that duplicate exactly the city of the living in a city of the dead, until they are no longer certain which is which; a city that is built over a lake so at all times everyone within can see their reflection below; and cities where people arrive every year to peer into a window until the streets and the room itself are jam-packed.
In between, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss the cities the explorer has seen and the emperor rules, sometimes with words, sometimes with gestures, and even once with a silent game of chess. The cities reflect the traveler, and the traveler finds he cannot reflect the cities.
Read this fucking book.
Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Mad and the Bad (1972)
I read Manchette's Fatale last year, and this one is almost as good, which is to say it's still great. A rich guy hires a young women straight out of a mental health institution to be the new nanny for his nephew -- the boy's parents died in a plane crash, leaving the rich guy as the head of the huge corporation, and the guardian of the child. The nanny, Julie, has less than a day on the job before she and and the boy are kidnapped, apparently for ransom. You'll be unsurprised to learn it's not really for ransom. Julie escapes, charge in tow, and begins a cross-country chase with one psychosomatically ill professional killer and his local hands behind her.
I talked about this on bsky, but I'm convinced Julie is a trans woman and that is, in terms of pure plotting, totally unimportant. It's just an interesting fact. Julie never says what she was in the institution for, even though we learn she wasn't committed and could have left whenever she chose. The close-third narrator says -- twice -- that she looks like a "post op transsexual," once in the context of Julie rooting through her clothes and hating how she looks. She buys a copy of Vogue and agonizes about how she doesn't look like the women there.
I am not typically the kind of person who does the fandom thing where I purposely choose to decide someone in a book is trans or gay or what-have-you. I am often startled that women in stories are straight, simply because I can't imagine deciding you'd want to write about that. But I'm not looking, you see. So I'm pretty sure Manchette, a noted loud leftist who used his noir to accuse post-war corruption, fascism, and greed, simply decided this lady was trans and left it at that.
It does help one to understand why Julie would avoid the police when she's on the run, as she does -- would you approach the police with someone else's kid in hand if you were a trans woman?
If you like noir, you'll like Manchette.
Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom (~1986)
I heard about Suzuki from this article, and I could just end this section here, it's a great review of the book and information on the background. But in short, Suzuki was a 70s feminist in Japan. Her stories are strange science fiction pieces that anticipate modernity better than a lot of the SF of the time, including stories about a world of lesbians who keep men locked away and another where young people sometimes just randomly die because they're so bored and have nothign to do (the title story). They're very good, tight, laser-focused pieces. I picked up her other two books that are in English translation already if that tells you anything.
Kári Pálsson, Galdrabok (~1600-86; 2024)
The only available translation of this before Pálsson's was by Stephen Flowers, a fucking nazi shit who is also famous for introducing bullshit into his books and working to make it look like it was in the historical sources. You'll see a continuity in the two problems I have with the fucker. He mostly gets away with it because he's got a doctorate, but I have a doctorate, it doesn't fix anything.
Anyway, this book is mostly by people who do not appear to be nazi fucks. There is a random six or eight page section by someone who doesn't seem to have any expertise in the history or the language, who ends their section by saying people are coming back to their traditions in the face of the homogenization of globalism... I recognize racist dogwhistles when I hear them, thanks. But the rest of the book is fine, just skip that section.
This is basically one of those medieval magic texts that are quick instructions. Many amount to saying something and that's it, though one presumes there were probably magical operations involved. So for instance, in the one that is only a record of words to say, some of the words are "I wash myself." That probably means you're meant to lave yourself while praying the text. It's a fascinating short text (actually two, it also translates another lesser known Scandinavian text), in an ok edition.
The apparatus isn't that good. It doesn't translate any of the Latin for some reason, except sometimes it includes them in the glossary all the way in the back. This is both inexplicable and inconsistent, as not all the Latin phrases are back there. The publisher seems to have an aesthetic going, so footnotes may have been off the table, but end notes for each section would still have worked. Putting them in the glossary, amid actual glossary entries like god names and such, is just an asshole move.
Arthur Machen, Collected Fiction v2: 1896-1910
Machen is one of my research interests. I've technically had an invitation to revise and resubmit a paper on Machen for years and years now, but I kind of burned out, you know how it is. This collects some of his odd middle period work; it's a great collection.
This has "The White People," one of his best short pieces (fairies, not a race/ethnicity thing). It's a frame narrative where the main story is evidence that "positive evil" exists in the world, and the main narrative is the journal of a young girl in a rural area who appears to be in contact with fairies, and it's deeply devoted to her point of view; things are obscure and unclear because she doesn't have the language to describe them.
It's also got "Ornaments in Jade" and "A Fragment of Life," two very strange pieces. The former is a collection of prose poems; the latter is a story about a mild mannered man, relatively newly married, who slowly, through reading his ancestors' books and his nature walks, comes in contact with a presence that's never defined. He and his wife become worshippers, slowly, in a really fascinating slow boil "initiation" story.
This also has his two novels, both somewhat autobiographical. The Hill of Dreams is about a rural youth who writes a novel, only for it to be stolen by one of the publishers who "rejected it," and the way he falls into a solipsistic fantasy that he's constructing of ancient Roman Britain. There's some interesting psychosexual stuff happening too, as he falls in love but thinks actually, you know, seeing his girlfriend and making out would spoil it too much.
The Secret Glory is a satire skewering the abuses in the traditional boarding school system crossed with Machen's love of the Holy Grail story. What if a rural kid beheld the Holy Grail and then had to go learn how to play Sports and recite things in class? It's kind of like the positive flipped version of Hill of Dreams Ambrose does some of the same things in Glory that Lucian does in Hill, but he doesn't lose himself in them. In fact, part of this book's thesis is that the world is a sacrament, putting Machen into opposition with a lot of the popular Christianity of the time.
I'd read everything but Secret Glory before. This is a decent edition -- sadly, it's the best edition we have, but Machen still doesn't have good critical editions of most of his works around. I own a Broadview of Three Impostors but I haven't read it yet. I think there's been a revolution in Machen studies just as I fell out of academia, which is frustrating personally, but, well, you know, I don't do work I'm not paid for anymore.