December 2012
1 post
A Year of Reading
In 2012, I resolved for some reason to limit my reading solely to books published during the year.
I also resolved to be a vegetarian.
As it happens, aside from a preposterously expensive meal in London in September, I pretty much stuck with the vegetarian resolution. As for the books, well, I pretty much stuck with that too.
I read all or part of 67 books this year. (But who’s counting? It’s...
January 2012
5 posts
books read on an iPad in 2011
The Sly Company of People Who Care
True Grit
Fun Home
Open City
The Ice Trilogy
Hard Rain Falling
The Tragedy of Arthur
The Underground Man
The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers
A Taste for Death by P.D. James
Books I Read in Print in 2011
The Anthologist
She’s Come Undone (rereading this one)
White Noise
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Lord of Misrule
The Expeditions
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Flipping Out by Marshall Karp (dumb mystery)
Scorecasting
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders
Books I Read on a Kindle in 2011
Andes by Michael Jacobs
The Beast God Forgot to Invent by Jim Harrison
Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
A Buyer’s Market (Book Two of A Dance to the Music of Time) by Anthony Powell
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
A Cold Day in Paradise by Steve Hamilton
The Crimean War by Orlando Figes
Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola by Kinky Friedman
Funeral for a...
A Reading Plan for 2012
I often begin years or seasons with plans for reading. In 2010, I recall, I thought I would backfill my somewhat spotty knowledge of modern American and English playwrights — and in the end I did read a handful of titles but the reading was not programmatic and within a month or two I was back to my helter-skelter habits of old, picking up books as I came across them.
This year, then, my...
“LIfe has got a habit of not standing hitched. You gotta ride it like you find...”
– Woody Guthrie
December 2011
1 post
Not Gray in the Least
Some days the New York Times is simply extraordinary. Today was one of those days. I went from page to page (metaphorically speaking, as I only read it in digital format) in state of wonder.
On the front page was a profile Mohamed Abdulahi Mohamed, a Somali expatriate working as a contract analyst for the DOT in Buffalo, NY, who became, for 10 months, the president of Somalia. It was like a...
March 2011
1 post
December 2010
1 post
A Year in Books, Unblogged
I was fairly disciplined about writing up the books I read in 2009. I did fall behind a bit in the fall of ‘09, but by New Year’s Eve I had logged every last one of them.
Not so in 2010, alas.
Early in the year the blog kept up with my reading, but by spring I was slacking off and by summer I simply had stopped. I was still reading, but I couldn’t seem to find time to...
August 2010
1 post
Ah, France!
Total Chaos, by Jean Claude Izzo
A mystery set amidst the decay of immigrant-weary Marseilles, Total Chaos features a cop who is the very salt of the earth — so much so that he is most comfortable communing with humble fishing folk who live along the rugged calanques of southern France.
This noble (working class) cop also is blessed with an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, world literature,...
July 2010
1 post
Birthday Card for Jane!
May 2010
1 post
Gee, I Guess Everything Is OK, Then
“Quality newspapers still are doing O.K., quality magazines are doing O.K., quality television is doing O.K. There is something to the content that we’ve forgotten about, and we’ve gotten so carried away with the technology.”
— Michael Bloomberg, quoted here
April 2010
2 posts
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
The first page of this collection made me laugh out loud (“… and there was serious pain in his underpants”) so I shouldn’t be too critical.
But what the hell.
This is a perfectly respectable group of stories. Tower knows how to turn a phrase and he’s not afraid to reach for a good sentence.
Problem is that...
The Ask
The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte
A dark comedy set in a second-rate college in New York (the narrator calls it “Mediocre College in New York”, nice). The writing is tough and sharp and funny, ultimately it’s not fully readable (finishable) because the plotting is artificial and rickety. And because we don’t care about any of the characters, the thinness of the plot feels ever...
March 2010
2 posts
Nowhere Man
Nowhere Man, by Aleksandr Hemon
The Lazarus Project was one of my favorite novels last year, and The Question of Bruno was intriguing, so I opened Nowhere Man with high hopes.
Nowhere Man shares a lot of the strengths of Lazarus and Bruno, but it’s hard to read yet another consideration of the difficulties of being an unwilling Bosnian immigrant in America. The sheer sameness of the focus...
King of the Cats
Is it possible that John Irving is America’s greatest living writer of fiction?
Obviously, no. Philip Roth is the greatest living American writer.
(Slightly less obviously: No, Toni Morrison is the greatest living American writer.)
The thing is, Philip Roth has written precisely one great book in the last 30 years, and most people (myself excepted) actually found it pretty repugnant...
February 2010
2 posts
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
I don’t want to be a book-reviewing bore. The point of writing about books — at least for me — is not to recommend them or inveigh against them. I’m more interested in the way that books weave themselves into your (my) life than in persuading you, my imaginary reader, to read them yourself.
(After all, if I had my druthers I’d...
Franny and Zooey
Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
I was unexpectedly moved by J.D. Salinger’s death last month. I was not one of those readers who still wondered if or when a new Salinger work might become available. I never dug up “Hapworth 16” from the archives of the New Yorker, nor had I chased down and read the uncollected stories that he published in the...
January 2010
4 posts
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays, by Martin McDonagh
Whoosh. This is a set of dark-ass plays. Unlike “The Pillowman,” I didn’t have the sense that I might titter nervously during a performance of this work (which doesn’t mean, in fact, that I wouldn’t titter, or that there aren’t threads of humor worked into the plays, just that the complexity of...
The Pillowman
The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh
The best book I read last year was actually a sprawling set of five loosely linked novellas, “2666,” about which here and here. It cast a long shadow over everything else I read that year, and one segment of the novel so frightened me that I had trouble sleeping and ultimately had to set the book aside for several months before resuming (without...
Not Charmed, Sorry
Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott
This is a perfectly good novel, or I assume it is — I ditched after maybe 75 pages.
The abandonment had nothing to do with the quality of writing. That was just dandy.
Here’s a nice paragraph, describing a group of Irish-Americans at a wake in a restaurant in the Bronx:
The selected desert was brought in: two scoops of vanilla ice cream in cold...
Blindsided
The Volcano Lover, by Susan Sontag
This book has been hanging around on my shelves for so long, in hardcover, that I no longer know how I came to own it. The slipcover long ago was sloughed off (possibly by me — I used to remove slipcovers because books tend to slide around in your hands if you read in bed) and for years the maroon-brown binding stood out notably amongst its mainly...
December 2009
9 posts
Best (and worst) books of the year
Of the 60+ books I read in 2009 (and counting only those that I read for the first time this year), seven stood out, basically in this order:
No. 1. 2666 (my comments are here and here, as I ended up reading it in two very separate sittings): Brilliant, brutal, complex, unlike anything I’ve ever read.
No. 2. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Also...
Some Resolutions
1: Play more music. In a band.
2: Play more sports. Games, not just working out.
3: But keep working out.
4: Spend more time with friends. See No. 1 and No. 2.
5: Wear more ridiculous clothing more often. See No. 1, No. 2., and No. 4.
6: Be nice, goddammit.
Famous People I Have Known
In 1982 I went to a lecture by the poet Dennis Brutus, one of the giants in the fight against apartheid.
I had thought the lecture was meant to be a discussion of ways to pressure South Africa to end apartheid, but instead it was more of an instructional session on forcing universities to divest — that is, to remove from their investment portfolios any securities that were associated with...
Fuggedaboutit
The Woman Who Can’t Forget, Jill Price
I had an idea for a novel about someone who could not forget. I mentioned it to J, and J thoughtfully bought this book for me when she happened to see it on a remainder pile.
The all-too-brief discussions of the science of memory are packed into an icky, TMI memoir. This is a woman who seems to have fought with weight problems (and her parents, it...
Mighty Fine Meatloaf
Second Tree From the Corner, by E.B. White
When I am feeling low and flocked about by things, I take myself over to the bookshelf and take down a volume of E.B. White. Adult essays, kids books, whatever, I just like to experience his sentences. It’s like standing under a perfectly tuned shower — you bathe in them.
“One of the advantages of surgery, to a man at loose ends in...
No Greater Disappointment
I often wonder if my reaction to a book is as much a reflection of my mood or receptiveness at that moment as it is any quality inherent to the book itself. It has often happened that a book that frustrated or bored or annoyed me on first reading proved to delight or at least engage me on second (or third) try.
What is unusual is a book that delighted on first reading disappointing on second.
...
This Is Just To Say...
… that I ended up finishing 2666 after all.
I won’t say that the final segment of the novel blew me away — I was already blown away in both negative and positive ways and there was no more need for that.
It required, no surprise, a brand new investment of time and effort, a learning curve of new characters and situations.
The best of it was the extraordinary storytelling...
Worlds Within Worlds
The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon The Resurrectionist, by Jack O’Connell The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
Does anyone other than a novelist truly like a story within a story?
The creation of multiple stories asks much of you as a reader. First you must inhabit the a fictional landscape. Then, once you have decided that you are sufficiently engaged to continue, you must commit...
“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a 20 percent...”
– Nick Bostrom, Philosopher at Oxford University, as quoted in the New York Times
November 2009
3 posts
Prussian Bodices Ripped by Jews!
Skeletons at the Feast, by Chris Bohjalian
This was recommended to me by my father. ”It reminded me of your career,” he said.
Here’s why the book reminded him of my career: It’s about a Prussian family at the end of World War II, running west, away from the advancing Russian army, through Nazi controlled German territory, toward the enemy lines of the allied forces.
So...
“Freedom of movement is the prime symbolic attribute of the Angel City.”
– The quote is Reyner Banham. Today is my fourth anniversary living in Los Angeles.
Not Absolutely True
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
OK. I liked this book a lot. Novels are the best way to get a viewpoint into the way other people live, because they are impressionistic and in that real, true to human perceptions, unlike most nonfiction reportage, which is tied to “facts” and ultimately misses the overall reality because the job is to accurately...
October 2009
2 posts
“When things become peculiar, frustrating and strange, I think it’s a good time...”
– James Rosenquist
Something Completely Different
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Holy shit, this is a good book.
I would have said Victor Pelevin was the undisputed king of post-Soviet fiction, but now I know who the queen is.
Petrushevskaya is like some kind of crazy transfiguration of Poe, Gogol, and the Brothers Grimm. The stories feel like classic fairy tales —...
September 2009
3 posts
And the Loser Is...
The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann
Proust, Faulkner, James, and Mann.
For years, these were “the unfinished.” However many times I tried, however many different titles I dipped into, no matter how committed I was, no matter how short or long the novel, the novella or even the short story, I could not read through to the end anything by Proust, Faulkner, James, or Mann.
I’m a...
Hitting New Lows and Posting About It Just The...
In the interest of completeness and full disclosure I will say that I read this book.
Why?
Because it was on the bookshelf and I had nothing else to read one night.
But why was it on the bookshelf?
I have no idea. Possibly a houseguest left it here?
And you read it all?
Yes, I’m so ashamed.
By the Author of...
Run, by Ann Patchett
Wow, this is a terrible novel. It’s based on a cringeworthy premise — a pair of black children adopted by a white family — and it just piles the cringeworthy details on and and on. Just for example, the boys’ father lives in Boston and has political aspirations for his sons, so he names them “Teddy” and “Tip.” Get it?!?
The...
August 2009
3 posts
A little dry
The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, by Norris Hundley Jr.
Well, I’d be lying if I said this was a riveting tale. On the other hand, it answered most or all of my questions, such as “Where does my drinking water come from?” and “How much of the movie “Chinatown” was based on history?” and “What’s the story with the Salton Sea?”
...
Never Trust an Ad Campaign
Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon
I think this must be the first time I ever bought a book based on an ad — a brief video ad, of all things, on YouTube.
I was never a hardcore Pynchon fan. In fact, I wasn’t a fan at all. I couldn’t get through “V” or “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The one book I did finish, “The Crying of Lot 49, was merely a novella.
...
Wait for the Play
Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sara Ruhl
Ultimately it’s less than satisfying to read a play rather than see it performed, and that was the case with this play. I think I “get” why Ruhl is the queen bee in the theater world these days, but reading this text gives only a shadowy sense of her intelligence and the offbeat cadences of her sentences.
I knew that would be my...
July 2009
3 posts
Horse Stories
Decider, by Dick Francis
Wow, have I read a lot of books by Dick Francis. It’s a guilty pleasure.
This isn’t one of his best (“Whip Hand” tops them all, I think) but it’s not bad because it’s set in the racing world from which Francis hails, so it’s at least a decent read.
As Francis has grown older, his books have become sort of baroque, and I...
Another Classic Passed By
Orientalism, by Edward Said
There are certain books that become cultural touchstones and that you can almost discuss intelligently without ever having read them. “The Communist Manifesto,” for instance. I’m sure that somebody has read this, but I have not. ”The Wealth of Nations,” likewise, and in the same vein of economics. (I have read some but not much of...
No Kind of Life
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
The Los Angeles Times blurb on the front cover of my edition describes this book as “A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction.”
Uh, if you say so…
I would have said this is a book to make me believe in watching TV, or taking the dog for a walk. It certainly wasn’t a book that made me believe in the narrator, or his boring and simpleminded...
June 2009
8 posts
Damned Faint Praise
Super America, Anne Panning
I picked up this story collection without any advance knowledge. Something about the first paragraph appealed to me:
My father picked me up from my college after my Acting II midterm. He passed me a smoke. It was spring break, which in Minneapolis meant old glacial dung clung to the curbs and sides of houses. Course, used snow lay scattered like margarita salt on...
Without Jeeves, Life Is Not Worth Living
Life With Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse (of course)
As I dug further into the horror of “2666,” I began to reread for the umpteenth time this fat collection of Jeeves stories. Ultimately I gave up on the Bolanos and stuck with the Wodehouse.
Geniuses of two very different types!
Could Bolanos have written the following? I think not!
“It seems rummy that water should be so much...
Another Day, Another Mystery
One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich
A sort of a palate-cleanser after the horror show of “2666.” This is a nice, frivolous little mystery told in the style of Robert Parker (on a perky day) and set in Trenton, New Jersey. Nice, fun, and it doesn’t spill over into cloying. Well done.
2666
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
This is a work of genius. It’s almost certainly the best novel I’ve read in years… and I think it may well be the best novel of the past decade.
But I couldn’t finish it. I had to set it aside about two-thirds of the way through the fourth of the novel’s five segments. That fourth section, “The Part About the Crimes,” catalogs in...
“A cold blooded gang of cigarette-smoking cultists plunge a Nigerian university...”
– Product description on Amazon.com of “The Corpse,” a presumably self-published novel 