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This book is Tragedy Porn.

*** Warning: review contains more spoilers than usual! ***

There is no reason to read The Solitude of Prime Numbers unless you want to bask in the psychological agony of children suffering. There is no reason to read it unless you love to writhe and gasp at the possible deaths of innocents or--barring death--constant excruciating unhappiness. You must love not only tortured lives but specifically you must love tortured lives where both the self-inflicted and externally-inflicted torture of these lives can all be tied back to key mistakes from which no one can ever hope to be redeemed.

It reminds me of the first book I ever cataloged as part of my book tracking project: The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor, another master of Tragedy Porn.

My wife brought this little bundle of misery home from the library and I was snookered into reading it because of the presence of math in the title. Who doesn't love books with math in the title? The use of math as a framework from which to structure a novel appeals to me. Prime numbers are especially alluring. My wife, in fact, once determined that it would be her life's work to study prime numbers. This was at a very young age, however, and it has turned out not to be her life's work. And, indeed, it was after only five pages into the book that I turned to my wife and said, "You will not like this book, nor will you be able to get past the fifth page." My wife, you see, does like prime numbers but does NOT like to read about the inexplicably drawn out suffering of children.

BEWARE: Just because the title references prime numbers does not mean math is actually a metaphorical force in the text. Yes, one of the protagonists eventually becomes a mathematician, but he might as well have become a physicist or a chemist for all the relevance his career has to the story. The book jacket blurb has a lovely little bit about how, like prime numbers, the main characters are misfits who "seem destined to be alone." But this is more mathematical metaphor on the inside cover of the book than exists in the book itself. Oh, and let me spoil it for you: they do not just SEEM destined to be alone, they actually ARE destined to be alone. Because no one gets a happy ending in this piece of tragic manipulation.

Continuing the journey hoisted upon me by an unfeeling editor, I have completed the second book in the four part Land of the Long Sun series.

Two interesting notes unrelated to the text:

1) There does not appear to be a full sized image of the book cover on the internet, at least not one easily accessible by a Google image search. I have therefore dutifully scanned in the cover of my book, a mass market paperback I had to buy from a third-party seller on Amazon for 3 dollars. So henceforth I say: "Let this image be available to all!"

2) In my review of the last book, I described the series as a "quadrilogy." That turns out not to be a real word. The proper term for a four-book series is "tetralogy." My apologies.

Since I am reading all four books, responsibility will eventually force me to craft an overall theory of these novels--indeed, of the entire body of science fiction. But for now I rest. To speak too much too soon would be like the Academy having awarded a Best Picture Oscar to the second Lord of the Rings movie (to keep our analogies it in the SF/F genre).

But fear not: I do indeed have such a theory brewing. I will let it steep until the completion of book three. In the meantime, I will say this: the second book was better than the first. Less action and more talk, by which I mean: less meaningless plot and more character development. Plus: still lots of action. And it makes one wonder: how many colons can I work into one paragraph?

As sometimes happens when I obsessively read a lot of one author's books in a row, I take decreasing pleasure in each one. Is that because (a) I read the books in order of best to worst, since I start with the better known or most marketed texts and branch out from there, or (b) too much of a good thing? Probably a little of both.

At least it's my favorite cover! So simple yet such an impact.

Ghosts really covers all the different literature-metaphors I've discussed in Aira's past books: reality vs fantasy, the part making up the whole, and the inescapable influence of the past on the present. Like An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a different artform is used as an stand-in for literature, in this case it is architecture. Plus there are ghosts. But a lot of this literary content doesn't seem quite as well woven into the story. In fact, halfway through the book the text breaks for a treatise on the architecture of different nomadic peoples and how their arrangement of huts symbolizes their respective cultures. While it's interesting--especially when you read it as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the evolution of novels--I'm not sure what it's doing there, how it is connected to the larger story, and who the narrator is even supposed to be.

The thing is that aside from the ghosts and aside from the architectural asides, I think this is some of Aira's strongest writing. The description of the construction workers and then later the multi-layered activity and conversation of the large Chilean family is fantastic and engaging and alternatingly light-hearted and moving. The supernatural ghosts fit quite naturally into the story, even if they seem at times to exist solely so Aira can tackle grander themes than simple family interaction. But are simple family interactions beneath him? He demonstrates such an immense talent for writing about it.

This is the last available Aira book in English translation, so I guess I am done with Aira for now.

(As of today, according to Aira's Wikipedia page there is one other translated book called The Hare, but there is no mention of the book on the alleged publisher's website and I can only find it via third-party sellers for hundreds of dollars. I have trouble believing that 38% of the people who visit the Amazon page for The Hare end up buying it for over $500. Either that algorithm is counting sales from a time when it was available for a cheaper price or that algorithm is incorrect.)

Is everything published by New Directions a novella, or am I the victim of selection bias? The only books I've read from ND have been either (a) César Aira, an author who works primarily in novella form or (b) part of the Pearl series, a series dedicated to short works, so I have to conclude that the problem is indeed my own limited exposure to this particular imprint. I intend to broaden this view in the near future.

Also part of the Pearl Series, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico is really a long short story rather than a novella, perfect subway literature for those of us who don't own electronic reading devices. The title led me to expect something slightly absurd or surreal, but in fact the book is a piece of realist fiction. Actually, looking at the definition of literary realism on Wikipedia (a source I would never doubt), such fiction opts "for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences." Since Bad Nature involves Elvis, Mexico, and gangsters I wouldn't really consider the recorded activities "everyday" or "banal." So I don't know what to call it.

Brief diversion: Should I avoid posting such thoughts as above that reveal my ignorance? One day somebody is going to go back and read this blog (hello to that person!) and conclude that I never have any idea what I am talking about. Well, to that person I say (aside from the previous "hello"): You are correct, I do not.

Unlike César Aira, for whom only four or five books appear to be translated into English (the fourth which I am about to read), Javier Marías has many more titles available in my dominant language, most of them translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions. (Once again: thanks to New Directions for rocking the house!)

Also, part of Javier Marías' biography reads like fiction. Apparently, he is the King of Redonda, a half-imaginary/half-real kingdom on an uninhabited Caribbean island. Concerned that Wikipedia was playing a hoax on me (or had been hoaxed itself) I did independent research, and if you have access to and trust the Financial Times, then the story checks out. My new goal in life is to receive a Redondan title.

I'm tearing through César Aira novels. Around one hundred pages each, the more appropriate term would be novellas, so don't start thinking I acquired some kind of super human speed reading power.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is my least favorite so far, but that's not an insult. A better way to say it: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is my third favorite. Because they are all immediate favorites.

Let's also take a moment and thank New Directions Publishing Corp. for being an excellent press putting out (among other things) literature in translation that would otherwise be unavailable. I bought this book and Aira's Ghosts directly from them rather than through a third party and the books showed up in two days. How is that for service?

The book follows the artist Johan Moritz Rugendas through an eventful and calamitous trip through Argentina. It's told in the style of "over-researched biography meets stuffy travelogue" and yet I found myself glued to the page. The mock academic tone kept me smiling and made me think continuously of Borges, which is obviously the case for everyone else as well since few reviews on Aira fail to compare the two.

The Literary Conference uses cloning vs. sexual reproduction as a metaphor for literary evolution, How I Became a Nun looks at the blending of reality and fantasy in the creation of art, and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter has it's own related theme. This book's core statement is that any individual unit of art is a microcosm of the larger whole. All paintings are represented by one painting. One painting is represented by one figure in the painting. One figure is represented by a single brush-stroke. This translates to literature as well. The whole of literature is contained in one book, in one sentence, in one word. In the novel, the titular landscape painter actually follows an explicit school of art that actively attempts to capture the repetition across a painting, but I think it's fair to see this as a metaphor for a writer's unintentional duplication of all other literature and art. Essentially, the same theme as The Literary Conference but told in a different way.

In This Recording's epic and disputed countdown of The 100 Greatest SFF Novels of All Time, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun quadrilogy took the top spot. (Note that both the list and the dispute qualify as epic.)

TR's editor-in-chief asked me--the sporadically-contributing books editor for that blog--to provide a fresh perspective on the series. Actually, he handed me the first book and threatened me with ostracization were I not to read it immediately.

I will craft a full review on the series once it is complete, but in the meantime I have the following statements to make.

First: DO NOT READ THE PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW on the Amazon.com page for this book. It blatantly gives away plot points that are merely hinted at in this first novel of four. Part of the fun of reading science fiction of this order is the slow reveal of greater concepts. Thank you for ruining this for me in the first sentence of the review.

Second: This book feeds directly into my current internal conflict between genre vs. literary fiction. An epic post (there's that word again) will soon reveal itself on this site.

Third: While I enjoyed this book, I'd say a good third of the pages dwell on the protagonist's attempt to break into one particular house. That's way too much. It strangely reminded me of 7 pages in Beckett's Molloy where the protagonist tries to determine in which pockets to put his "sucking stones," in that I spent a lot of time reading something that could have probably been summed up in two sentences. In Beckett's case he is intentionally lampooning his reader, I think. Anyway, I hope for a little more character development in the next Long Sun book or at least a broader view of the world.

Fourth: This book demonstrates one of the major reasons I don't read more science fiction and/or fantasy: I can't stand getting involved in multi-book series. Which books do I read next? Does this series come before or after the Book of the New Sun series? What about the Book of the Short Sun series? Do I need to read those series before I read this series? And goodness forbid I start reading a series by a living author that is incomplete and then have to wait for years for him or her to publish the next book. Why can't SFF authors write self-contained novels (which Nightside the Long Sun is definitely not)?

I will get around to creating an MS Paint version of Gene Wolfe's head with a future book.

Oh, man, I am going totally gaga over César Aira. How I Became a Nun is dark and charming and fantastical and funny. If I had to judge it against The Literary Conference I'd probably put it in second place, but the first book one reads by an author always holds a special place of reverence so it's not really a fair fight. Regardless, I definitely need to read more of his work. I know I have a huge stack of books waiting for me, but the time comes when a man must drop his arbitrary reading list and focus on one wonderful author.

Like The Literary Conference, How I Became a Nun features a protagonist named César Aira. In this case, the fictional César Aira is a six-year old child of nebulous (or, really, of shifting) gender.

This novel is clearly fictional, though at least the critical opening event makes some reference to an actual wave of cyanide poisonings that occurred in Latin America in the 1950's. But a very intriguing discrepancy in the novel's description materializes between the publishers notes and the Publishers Weekly review.

The publisher's notes refer to the novel as:

...César Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel.

The Publishers Weekly review (at least as quoted on numerous book seller sites) refers to the novel as:

...this slim autobiographical novel.

Did Publishers Weekly misread the sarcasm quotes employed by the publisher and misinterpret this as an actual autobiographical novel? Did Publishers Weekly misunderstand the significance of quotation marks? Even if some of the events in the novel did happen to Cesar Aira it is clearly NOT an autobiography.

(Other note: This also calls into question the reality of the 1950's cyanide poisonings because my only proof that such a thing occurred comes from the Publishers Weekly review. To be fair, the possibility also exists that Publishers Weekly included the quoted word and at some point everyone else dropped the modifying marks.)

I'm not quite sure I understand the title and I'm not quite sure I understand the multi-sided gender perspective, but I love it all. The theme seems to be a blending of reality and fantasy, though I don't yet have an overall "theory of the novel" in the same way I did for his last one. The book (also like The Literary Conference) is short--only 115 pages--and can be consumed easily in one long sitting, especially if you have to sit in a large room waiting for a jury duty assignment.

Q: Is it a coincidence that I finished reading A Heaven of Others--a book by an author some refer to as the literary heir of James Joyce--the day before Bloomsday?

A: Yes.

I stumbled on Joshua Cohen's short novel by clicking on several levels of Amazon's "people who bought this also bought this" links. There I found a long reposting (masquerading as a review) of an article from TheRumpus, which itself emerged from a heated debate on htmlgiant. Justin Taylor, author of the recently-read Everything here is the best thing ever, voices one side of the Socratic review. With so many links in one paragraph, I just had to buy it. (But I bought it directly from Starcherone Books, not Amazon--the reason for which will be the topic of a future post.)

Joshua Cohen also authored Witz, published by Dalkey Archive Press (amazing how they keep coming up these days), but I could not select it as part of my Summer Sale purchase due to a post-April '10 publication date.

As for A Heaven of Others, you're probably better off reading one of the above linked articles. I've had mixed results with "difficult modernist novels." I love O'Brien, love-but-struggle with Beckett, haven't-made-much-headway-beyond-Dubliners with Joyce, and am having trouble even identifying who is considered a "modernist" writer and who isn't. In any case, I can't break down A Heaven of Others into one word banalities. Did I "like" it or "enjoy" it? I'm not sure. I can't really say I "struggled" with it, either. Any longer and I probably wouldn't have finished, but I did finish it and I didn't question finishing it. Am I "glad" I read it? At least to that I can say, "mostly."

At the moment I'm a bit down on novels told with a distorted voice. I don't necessarily means strange or difficult voices, but rather voices that are arbitrarily altered to account for the speaker's condition. The protagonist in A Heaven of Others is both a ten year old boy and dead, which I assume doubly accounts for the melted narration. And actually, at the moment, I am particularly down on child narrators and dead narrators, for whatever reason. And this is not really Joshua Cohen's fault.

This book also makes use of many marvelous Michael Hafftka drawings. But I also have mixed opinions about art in novels. Were the drawings selected to complement the text or made specifically by the author for this text? Or was the text written to fit with preexisting drawings? I don't know why I'm fine with the former but have a problem with the latter. Just because some art already exists and impacts the authorial choices doesn't mean the novel is following a prescribed path. And I know a great many writers have let images influence the direction of their novels. Yet it yanks me out of a reading experience when I look at an image and think, "Did Joshua Cohen just have the protagonist dragged forefinger-first through the air by two giant eagles simply because he saw a Hafftka drawing of two giant eagles dragging someone forefinger-first through the air?" And so what if he did?

It seems my problems with A Heaven of Others emerge from personal issues and not with the book itself. And that is okay. Reading and responding to literature (or art of any kind) is a personal experience, and I can't remove myself from the process. I am a person who DOES enjoy reading difficult modernist novels (I hope I am, at least, or else it will be a tough summer), but that does not mean I have to enjoy them all. Plus to enjoy reading something doesn't necessarily imply I enjoy the actual something. Maybe that's a ridiculously snobbish thing to say. But it's true. I enjoy challenging myself with a variety of difficult, intelligent literature even if--in the end--I decide I don't love the book.

I took a lot of notes and will write up a more formal review of this book soon. Actually, I have a very non-formal review in mind.

Compare the US cover:

to the UK cover:

Normally I prefer UK covers, but I think this time (despite the titillating poolside sketch) I am more intrigued by the US version.

This wonderful book is part of the New Directions Pearls series, "pocket-sized" "minimalist" editions that serve as "short introductions to the great 20th century modernist authors."

It definitely served as a great introduction to César Aira, an author now on "my list." Please note that being on "my list" is a good thing despite the ominous sound of it. Though in the scheme of good things and bad things, it is probably what one would consider to be an extremely minor good thing, and I suspect very few authors would list being on "my list" in the "awards and honors" section of their resume.

I'm not exactly sure how I discovered this book. I want to say (despite my recent anti-Amazon post about the Kindle) I was led to discover Aira via Amazon's "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?" As of today, 4% of people who viewed Macedonio Fernandez's The Museum of Eterna's Novel go on to buy The Literary Conference. HOWEVER, 4% also go on to buy Michal Ajvaz's The Golden Age. I recently bought that book from Amazon as well, and I know for a fact that I did NOT discover it via Amazon's references. (I was playing Dalkey Archive roulette, which is something I've decided to do when I need a book to read.)

Since The Museum of Eterna's Novel is from a small press and probably doesn't get too many page views in the grand scheme of Amazon page views, is it possible to think that I personally account for those 4% of people going on to buy the other two novels? The Literary Conference and The Golden Age are not what I'd consider entirely unrelated (both fantastical literary novels-in-English-translation published by small presses) but they are also not what I'd consider entirely related either (one is a slender Argentinian novella and the other is a lengthy Czech novel). It's a bit of a coincidence that they both show up in Amazon's "people who viewed this bought this" list right after I bought them both but when it's definitely not how I stumbled upon them in the first place.

In any case, Aira's novel is funny, dark at parts and light-hearted in others, quirky, moving, imaginative, and incredibly interesting. It's essentially about a mad-scientist author (named César Aira) who attempts to take over the world through his cloning machine. I won't go into details on the plot (the book is short enough at 90 small pages that you can read it yourself), but I do want to speculate on the meaning. If Shelly Jackson taught me anything, it's that all literature (especially "experimental" literature) can be interpreted as a metaphor for literature (a meta-metaphor?). And I really think that in this book, the concept of cloning vs sexual reproduction is used as a way to talk about the literary process and the influence of existing novels on future writers. I probably could write a short critical essay on the subject, but I will not.

Anyway, I got a few chapters into the previously mentioned The Golden Age when Martin Amis' new novel, The Pregnant Widow, arrived. This is a book I pre-ordered from Amazon about four months ago (which always makes for a fun surprise in the mail). The Amis took precedence, despite killing my momentum on the Ajvaz. Amis ranks as one of my favorite authors and this book already promises to be his best novel since a series of decent but ultimately disappointing departures. I'll get back to my random-literature-in-translation kick once I've dispatched The Pregnant Widow.

A friend of mine from grad school, Justin Taylor, recently published a book of short stories, Everything here is the best thing ever. (Actually, not just a friend... He's also the editor of the collection which featured my first published story.) He's a great writer with the ability to generate a gaping sense of longing in just a few pages. His characters are off in very moving and sustainable ways. Many of his stories are foreboding yet comforting, as if the end of the world is coming but that's okay because here we are. It's published by Harper Perennial which is a huge accomplishment for an early collection. So congrats to Justin!

Continuing my literature-in-translation binge (I consider it a binge if I read two books in the row with any similar attributes: author, theme, cover color) I picked up Jerusalem while browsing a Barnes & Noble. (I've linked to the B&N page instead of Amazon since that's where I bought it. Though, oddly, the cover image on the site is not the paper back cover I now own.)

Aided by some plane travel, I read the book in two days. (Based on my history of reviews you'd think that I judge the quality of a book solely on how quickly I can read it. That's not actually the case, but since I read a lot of dense literary fiction it is often pretty telling when I power through a text in just 48 hours.) This book is a sad, dark tale that follows the briefly intersecting stories of four or five characters. It doesn't really have a plot or a traditional ending so much as a brief glimpse into these lives. Despite the content, the tone is very light and humorous, almost as if it is laughing at its own characters.

I definitely want to read more by Tavares but none of his other books have been translated to english yet! It's published by the Dalkey Archive Press (which has got to be one of the best publishing houses ever) and it's the first in a five part series of translations of his work.

Open Letter is a literary publishing house that focuses on books in translation. My wife subscribed to their "Get the Next 5 Books for $60" dollars deal, and the first book to arrive was MacEdonio Fernández's The Museum of Eterna's Novel (or The First Good Novel).

Macedonio Fernández was apparently a friend and mentor to Borges, one of the greatest writers of the modern era (and any era). The Museum of Eterna's novel is a strange beast. The first half is all prologues, some of which are philosophical musings about the concept of The Novel and most of which are funny and self-mocking meta-discussions about this particular novel. It's hard to tell whether he is serious about his philosophy or whether it is a pseudo philosophy intended in jest. Or probably both.

The second half of the novel is the actual novel, which I had a harder time reading. It's not a traditional novel, of course, and in many ways is an extension of the prologue philosophy into prototypical characters.

Don DeLillo is probably my favorite living writer. His books have a strange magnetic pull for me, and I find whenever I'm reading him, his prose spills over into my life. Everything I write sounds like it comes from a dim reflection of his novels. (And I don't just mean my own fiction... my work e-mails start to take on a philosophical, cold voice.)

Point Omega is short, distant, unwilling to provide closure, loosely tied to modern politics but only enough to set up bigger metaphors, lonely, and spread out philosophically across the desert where it takes place.

At what point does our consciousness pile upon itself enough memories and thoughts and ideas such that it is now only capable of being conscious of itself. That is, as far as I can tell, the omega point.

Ferris' first novel, Then We Came to the End, was a brilliant debut. Funny, touching, etc. All those things one says when describing a book if one was so inclined to describe a book well.

His second novel, The Unnamed, was also good. Overall I think upon it positively. But it was interesting. It's emotional center (whatever that means) isn't really until the last quarter, and in some ways I felt that reading through the first three quarters was the effort that makes the payoff that much more enjoyable. Not that the first three quarters weren't enjoyable to read.

I guess I don't really know quite what to say. I've had a very, very busy week. I finished the book on the subway home from a meeting that ran over until 6pm. But I'm taking tomorrow off and going for a ski weekend in Vermont, so I can't complain!

These days I'm kind of tired of "interesting voices," such as the alternating chapters in this novel told from the point of view of "Slow Bones," the protagonist's "slow" brother. I call him slow because that's what the book calls him. It's never quite clear if he has a specific learning disability or is simply stricken with a form of narrative lethargy as a response to the author's literary needs. I also call him "the protagonist's brother" as opposed to "the protagonist," even though he narrates 50% of the book... and that's not quite fair. I think he deserves co-billing as a co-protagonist, and after I got used to the somewhat gimmicky way Carey represented his "slowness" in narrative speech, I liked Slow Bones as much or more than Butcher Bones, his brother and narrator of the other chapters.

The international art theft plotline is interesting enough, and I learned a lot about "droit moral" in art (though I'm not even sure how real a thing that is as presented in this book), but the arc that eventually captures my attention is the difficult but loving relationship between the brothers. The story, however, is too focused on the femme fatale and the climax doesn't leave enough room for a satisfactory conclusion to the real issue of the fraternal reconciliation. By the time I was at the end of the book I already got the idea that the female character is semi-crazy and manipulative (Peter Carey spends plenty of time making that clear) so I wasn't interested in a climax with the sole purpose of proving a point I already knew.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but because of these flaws it left me feeling dissatisfied.

On a side note, I bought the book in the first place because it was on super-cheap sale at McNally Jackson books in SoHo. That has got to be one of my favorite (if not my number one favorite) book stores in the city. (I almost qualified that by saying my favorite independent book store, but obviously my favorite book store is also an independent book store.) (Though the Barnes & Noble in Union Square has this one amazing table of selected indpendent/international fiction on the fourth floor that always leads me to something new.)

Go check out McNally Jackson if you are in the area. Or even make a special trip to the area to check it out!

It's been a long time since I've read a book that I absolutely loved. 2009 not a good year for my fiction reading. I averaged exactly 2 books a month according to BookTrack, which I suppose isn't bad (especially because it includes Moby Dick which took me a LONG time), plus I didn't really get that wrapped up in anything (with a few exceptions, like Moby Dick).

The History of Love is helping me start 2010 off right. I have always had mixed feelings about Nicole Krauss' husband's books (though that's really because of our long-standing rivalry), but there is no ambiguity about The History of Love. It's incredibly sad. Actually, I think the right term is bitter sweet. I hate to call anything bitter sweet, but that's what this book is. The happy moments make you want to cry more than the sad ones.

It's interesting that early books by both Ms. Krauss and her husband involve stories about the Holocaust in some way. Many books take place a few generations in the past, and I suppose for Jewish writers when you set a book or stories in this recent-past time frame (or have a current character in his 80s) the Holocaust by necessity becomes a key (it not THE only) event.

I have now read several early novels by current female authors that start with a chapter in the male point of view before switching to a female point of view. (Some of these books switch back and forth, some just switch permanently to female p.o.v.) (I may post about this more later, at which point I'll actually list the books rather than just expecting everyone to take my word for it.) (By everyone, I mean me.) I wonder if this is an intentional "trick" by female authors writing their first novel. Do male publishers gravitate towards books in the male point of view while female publishers have less bias? Couple that with the fact that writers are often told the first chapter is the critical one for selling a book to a publisher, and it makes sense to drop a male p.o.v. chapter to start off a novel even if the rest is narrated by a female voice. Or maybe it's coincidence.

At my wife's suggestion I read this American Book Award winner. It's not so much a novel as a series of interconnected novellas. The characters overlap, but it's not until the last third of the book that you really feel like you are reading one coherent story. While I liked each section, it was difficult having to start up again each time the novel shifted.

I also bought this at the Strand Central Park kiosk. For only $7.79! I've been seeing it on bookshelves for ages and it seems like an important hipster collection. I'm only partially through it and I'm not sure I'm going to finish it, so I figured I'd just post it now.

I like the writing, and, in many ways, I like her stories. I think I would have liked them more if I had read them individually rather than in one collection. Together, they are all a bit too obviously focused on "people who are so lonely that they reach out to any possible human connection they can find." That pretty much describes every story. One story, "The Sister", I think starts off quite brilliantly about a man who falls in love with this woman he has never met. It's a great, absurd concept. But then it ends with a message about him being a man who is so lonely that he reaches out to any possible human connection he can find.

Also, these stories are really obsessed with anal sex. Or, at least anal nuzzling. Nary a story goes by without at least a mention of such things.

I picked up another Waugh novel for a pittance at the Strand Central Park kiosk. Evelyn Waugh is very, very funny, though this one is not quite as deep or as moving as previous novels I've read by him.

This book is not a self-help guide. It's a novel about a a Jewish man in pre- (and post-) WWII Italy who marries into a Catholic family. I kept expecting it to be more about WWII itself (a Holocaust novel, as it were), but it's actually glosses over that period. It's about the family tension.

And now it's time to play "judge a book by its cover":

Despite the fact that this book features a male narrator/protagonist, the cover is pink and has a picture of a woman. Plus, it's called "The Jewish Husband" which puts the point-of-view of the title (if titles can have a PoV) with the wife. I find that a little odd.

My wife thinks that many people in publishing don't believe men read books written by women, and that this is an issue from childhood on. The issue being this mistaken belief. She's worked with teachers who will only assign books written by men and about boys because these teachers think that otherwise boys wouldn't read them (but, of course, they believe girls will read books by men and about boys). If there IS an issue as adults that men won't read books written by women (which I have no reason to believe) then perhaps it's the attitude of teachers like this who create the problem in the first place.

I borrowed this non-fiction book from my friend Sidey 3.0.

A blurb on the cover calls it a piece of "pop analysis", and at first I was skeptical. But that is exactly what it is, and in a good way. The important thing to realize is that the phrase "pop analysis" does not mean it is "faux-analysis" in the way that the term "pop psychology" has a derogatory implication about the described psychology, but, rather, the term "pop analysis" means that this book is an analysis of pop culture. And a brilliant, witty one at that.

Was this book literary or genre fiction? I suppose if one has to ask then it's pretty snobby of me to assume that it matters. But I kept going back and forth between really liking it and thinking it was amazing and being a bit annoyed by the satanic fantasy story.

Like another (completely unrelated) book I read recently, A Good and Happy Child, I find books featuring the seemingly all-powerful devil as an antagonist have a problem: I just don't buy it. I don't mean I can't suspend my disbelief that the devil is a character in the story, I mean I don't believe that a human character has any chance of actually tricking the devil in any way. Unless some other supernatural forces are thrown in, you are pretty much screwed.

I love Loorie Moore. Birds of America and Like Life are two incredible short story collections. Anagrams is clearly an earlier work, and it's a novel (though, really, it's a collection of short stories and one novella, but they call the whole thing a novel) and--while I did enjoy it--it's not as good as those other books.

I have her latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, sitting on my nightstand, and I will read it soon.

A book from the independent Ellipsis press. Interesting. Kind of gross.

Tibor Cseres is a Hungarian author. I bought this book in English translation from an excellent book store in Budapest, Hungary, and it is apparently not available on Amazon.com. This is a chilling fictionalization about some of the atrocities committed by Hungary during WWII.

From Cseres' obituary:

It evoked the massacre of Serbs, Jews and politically 'suspect' Hungarians which took place in 1942 at Novi Sad in Yugoslavia, an atrocity for which the responsibility fell not only on the commanding officers with Fascist leanings, but on those Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes who 'just carried out orders' and, by implication, on the passivity and the moral inertia of Hungarian society

I don't want to reduce it to its subject, however. It's also a very interesting and oddly-structured book with a Sarte-esque premise.

Apparently this book was featured on "Lost", but don't let that stop you from reading it.

I toiled with this book for years, an off an on affair, a love that hurt me but wouldn't leave me. It was--dare I say it--my white whale. (I shouldn't have said it.) My twitter feed spent a short while devoted to whale quotes. It was brilliantly written, incredibly moving, I loved it, and I am glad to move on.

This book made me realize I'm still quite not ready to read fiction about 9/11.

I was drawn in to Stone Junction at the book store because of the introduction by Thomas Pynchon. I didn't actually read Pynchon's introduction, I was merely convinced by the fact that Thomas Pynchon had written an introduction that this would be a worthy read. Unfortunately, as I later discovered after finishing the book, Pynchon's introduction amounts to, "This isn't a very good book. Don't buy it just because I wrote an introduction."

Ha, ha. Just kidding. Pynchon didn't say such a thing. And the book is fine, it just wasn't my cup of tea. The first three quarters of the book read like genre-influenced outlaw fantasy which I was entertained by but did not find enlightening. It includes about a hundred pages of poker playing, which, while interesting, seems unrelated to the real thrust of the novel and served as mostly adolescent entertainment. The last quarter of the book turns to metaphysical wandering, with interspersed sections of rambling bandit DJs, diary entries of an escaped lunatic, and Frodo-like staring into a large, spherical, magic diamond that "may or may not be the philosopher's stone." I put that last bit into quotes because it's what all the reviews say and what the book jacket says, but it doesn't actually mean anything to me or add any depth to the book.

I'm being a bit unfair, but the book just didn't gel for me. I wanted more substance in the beginning and, well, less "substance" at the end. For some reason I feel embarrassed at not having liked the book more. The book's fans will likely accuse me of not "getting it". But I'm afraid I did get it and I just don't like what I got.

Spoiler alert. (Not that every comment I make on a book does not contain a spoiler... but who am I kidding? I am the only one who reads the book notes, so why shouldn't I put spoilers into what is essentially my book diary?)

This book does not end well. Perhaps it's a little "pop" of me to want a positive resolution to a story. And, really, as can be evidenced of my reading habits, I do not insist on such things. (Heck, I even enjoyed the ending to Waugh's A Handful of Dust which is about the most horrific conclusion I could ever imagine.) But it seemed like some kind of (tiny, tiny) uptick was called for at the end of The Ministry of Special Cases and we didn't get it. Everyone ends in this kind of ruined, insane denial. I suppose that's the point, really. When someone is "Disappeared" by the government, there is no way ever to truly know what has happened.

Clearly this novel is channeling Kafka's The Trial, though really only when the characters actually visit the Ministry of Special Cases. There's a scene where the mother is directed through the halls of the building and it rises to a level of absurdity almost identical to the scene in The Trial where the protagonist tries to find the attic-based judiciary offices. I can't imagine Englander wasn't intentionally comparing the two, but I also suppose that this Kafka absurd terror has a become pretty basic authorial tool and it's possible to emulate it indirectly rather than directly. Heck, we actually have a word for it: kafkaesque. How many other authors get their own adjective?

I read at least part of this non-fiction book when I was much younger and it really left an impression on me. I've always been fascinated by "The Lost Mariner," about a man with severe Korsakov's disease (for the less clinically informed, that's the neurological condition from the movie Memento and 50 First Dates). I had always planned to write some kind of fiction about it until all those movies came out and made it mainstream. Anyway, I'm past strange-mental-condition-fiction at this point in my life anyway.

It took me a while to read it, not because it's long but because it always takes me a while to get through non-fiction. I'm back onto fiction right now, and already I see some serious progress. I've got a doctor's appointment today so I'll get some good waiting room reading in.

This comic Australian epic is dark and funny and exciting and has a wide span. It remains consistent even though some sections are authored by the protagonist's father rather than the protagonist himself, and it remains engaging even though some sections involve murders and fires and gang wars and other sections are about love interests and depression. A lot happens in this book and a lot of characters die when you aren't expecting them to, and in some ways it's a bit unsatisfying because not everything is resolved in the way you want it and some things are never resolved. But I was happy everything didn't get wrapped up in a bow for me, and real life doesn't always resolve perfectly either.

I've been in an on-again off-again relationship with this book for three years, and I'm happy it is finally read and shelved.

Okay, I didn't read EVERY story in this book. But I read the important ones.

See my review of the book here.

I bought and read this Brazilian Portuguese book while on my honeymoon in Portugal.

This clever novella poses as the deconstructed memoir of a literary theorist. The protagonist (the author of the title) is clearly based on Paul de Mann: he's created a theory of literary deconstruction that has an almost cult following, he teaches at a very Yale-like school, he is French, and he harbors the secret of having written hundreds of articles (some anti-Semetic) for collaborationist journals during WWII.

A Handful of Dust is funny, dark, horrendously cyncical, and has the most terrifying ending I could possibly imagine. I really loved it, but I had nightmares for days after reading it.

It's the story of a good, moral man whose wife cheats on him and he has to deal with the gossip and the fall out in proper British society. Then the novel moves to the African jungle where he goes to explore in an attempt to get away from his life for a while. In both places he is forced to deal with the irrationality of others.

As some may know, my greatest fear is being unable to rationally explain myself, either because (a) something prevents me from being able to speak clearly and plainly, or (b) even when I do speak plainly and clearly no one else believes or responds rationally to me. This was the problem with Kafka's The Trial, and it's also what makes the ending of A Handful of Dust so awful for me. I don't want to give away the ending, but let's just say that the irrational response from others means that he will be essentially tortured for the rest of his life. Of course, I think that's Waugh's point. Had he remained in England, he would have also been tortured for the rest of his life by the irrational society that decided to make him the villian for not more kindly accepting his wife's infidelity. Note that he accepted it rather kindly, just not kindly enough.

I'd been waiting The Brief History of the Dead to read this book for quite a while after a positive review in Slate. However, every time I went to the book store I could not remember the title or the author. Once I explained to the person at the information desk that the cover had a picture of a person wearing a trench coat, but that the trench coat was empty. She actually knew what I was talking about, looked up the book, and discovered they did not have a copy. Anyway, a few weeks ago I found it in the discount section of a Barnes & Nobles for seven dollars.

I enjoyed the first 75% of this book. It's essentially swapping back and forth between a strange, never-fully-explained afterlife and the Antarctic adventures of the solitary survivor of a Coca-Cola funded exploration/research group. It quickly becomes apparent what's going on in this world, as hints of a virus and rapid changes to the population of the afterlife give everything away rather quickly. Even after you understand this, the book is still very engaging. But towards the end everything starts to move with a little too much fated finality, and it went on a few chapters too long. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it and would be interested in reading more by Brockmeier.

While good, Amulet just isn't as amazing (or genre-defining) as The Savage Detectives. These days I'm a little less into the first-person stream-of-consciousness slightly-unreliable/delusional rant, a category into which this novel definitely falls. So I admit it's personal preference. The main character in Amulet, Auxilio Lacouture, the self-proclaimed "mother of Mexican poetry," recalls important events from her life, spiraling around the week(s) she spent hidden in a university bathroom when the military took over the campus.

There's a lot in this book that I didn't quite grasp the first time around. I think it would require me to read it at least one more time (if not two or three) to piece all the events together and understand how they fully impact each other. However, I didn't enjoy the book quite enough to go through that process.

There are a couple of funny stories about this book.

1) I left it in a hotel room while on a business trip and had to read the last thirty pages while standing in a Barnes & Nobles. That's the less funny/interesting story of the two.

2) I pre-ordered this book from Amazon.com after having read a short story by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker. I hardly ever finish reading the short stories in the New Yorker, not even the ones by authors I love. I loved her story, however. I loved it enough such that I (a) finished reading it, (b) checked out the author bio in the front of the magazine, (c) saw that she had her first book coming out soon, and (d) pre-ordered that book from Amazon.com. But then, AFTER having pre-ordered it, I re-read the description and thought to myself, "This book concept sounds very familiar. Eerily familiar. As if I've heard someone describe it to me before." So I sent an e-mail to a friend of mine and asked her, "By any chance, are you friends with Rivka Galchen and did I meet her at a holiday party in NYC thrown by your in-laws two years ago?" And, sure enough, I had met Rivka Galchen at the holiday party thrown by my friend's in-laws two years ago, and at that party Rivka Galchen described to me the novel she was writing.

Anyway, the book is excellent, and it's excellence has nothing to do with the fact that I met the author briefly at a party two years ago. I'm looking forward to reading more by her in the future.

I suppose I should write an actual review, but my blog hasn't really been up to reviewing books lately. It's hardly been up to tracking the books I've read.

You can read Galchen's New Yorker short story, The Region of Unlikeness, on the New Yorker website.

Having enjoyed Post Office, I picked up the next Chinaski book by Bukowski. I bought it in New Jersey when I went to visit my father for his birthday.
I'm not sure if it's supposed to a continuation/prequel to Post Office, or if it's just the same character imagined in a different life. I suppose I could look it up, and probably will at some point, but I don't really care. I also enjoyed this book (and read it in a day).

Having enjoyed Post Office, I picked up the next Chinaski book by Bukowski. I bought it in New Jersey when I went to visit my father for his birthday.
I'm not sure if it's supposed to a continuation/prequel to Post Office, or if it's just the same character imagined in a different life. I suppose I could look it up, and probably will at some point, but I don't really care. I also enjoyed this book (and read it in a day).

I left my book in a hotel room, and so, with nothing to read, I entered the airport bookstore with the slim hope that they would have something available that I could stomach. I picked up Bukowski's Post Office, as he is an author I've been meaning to read for a while. I loved it. It's a drunken view of a man's life in the postal service, but unlike so many other books that follow drunken, nihilistic, foolish characters, this one is actually good.

Here's the common problem books of this nature typically have: The protagonists are just buffeted along by whatever happens to fall in front of them. They are driven by dunken randomness and never take real action. An example of this is the book I now realize was obviously 99% influenced by Bukowski, For Fuck's Sake by Robert Lasner. (I read it last September but did not review it.)

Post Office, however, does not fall into that trap. Even in the lowest moments of his drunken stupors, Henry Chinaski is a character of action. He does things with a purpose, even if his purpose is to scrimp together enough money to buy more booze. He is the one making the choices in his life, and not the random hand of an author pleased simply to watch a character stumble forward. You have to love Chinaski.

My biggest problem with the book: My plane was delayed and I finished reading it before I boarded my flight! So I had nothing to read on the four hour trip home.

I left my book in a hotel room, and so, with nothing to read, I entered the airport bookstore with the slim hope that they would have something available that I could stomach. I picked up Bukowski's Post Office, as he is an author I've been meaning to read for a while. I loved it. It's a drunken view of a man's life in the postal service, but unlike so many other books that follow drunken, nihilistic, foolish characters, this one is actually good.

Here's the common problem books of this nature typically have: The protagonists are just buffeted along by whatever happens to fall in front of them. They are driven by dunken randomness and never take real action. An example of this is the book I now realize was obviously 99% influenced by Bukowski, For Fuck's Sake by Robert Lasner. (I read it last September but did not review it.)

Post Office, however, does not fall into that trap. Even in the lowest moments of his drunken stupors, Henry Chinaski is a character of action. He does things with a purpose, even if his purpose is to scrimp together enough money to buy more booze. He is the one making the choices in his life, and not the random hand of an author pleased simply to watch a character stumble forward. You have to love Chinaski.

My biggest problem with the book: My plane was delayed and I finished reading it before I boarded my flight! So I had nothing to read on the four hour trip home.

The Zuckerman Project is COMPLETE!

I finished Exit Ghost and can finally start reading something from a different author!

Exit Ghost returns to the style of the earlier Zuckerman novels. I read some reviews that called this a "new" style for Roth, as if because of his advanced age he was attempting to write more quickly, but really I think these books are much more in line with the earlier novels.

At some point I will write a large essay about my experience with the series.

The Zuckerman Project is COMPLETE!

I finished Exit Ghost and can finally start reading something from a different author!

Exit Ghost returns to the style of the earlier Zuckerman novels. I read some reviews that called this a "new" style for Roth, as if because of his advanced age he was attempting to write more quickly, but really I think these books are much more in line with the earlier novels.

At some point I will write a large essay about my experience with the series.

This book took me by far the longest to read in my Zuckerman quest. I skipped American Pastoral and I Married a Communist because I've read those books in the past (before I started the Book Track project), but as I recall, those two books also fit into the same category of The Human Stain.

The three are not like the others in the nine-book series, in that Zuckerman's character plays a much less significant role. In these books he is a background character, telling the life story of someone else. They are also much denser (more pages but also more difficult to read) then the other books.

This isn't much of a review, but I'm not quite ready to put down all my Zuckerman thoughts.

The most complex book so far in the Zuckerman series, at least in terms of metafictional elements. It contains stories within stories, all written or potentially written by Zuckerman, to the point where it is unclear when you are reading the actual story or a fabricated story.

The Prague Orgy is a slim novella and a slight departure for the Zuckerman series. In it Zuckerman travels to Prague in a search for a fellow writer's father's writings. As always, the novel deals with issues of writing, fathers, sex, and powerlessness. I didn't quite enjoy it as much as some of the other books. I'm constantly amazed by Roth's ability to extend a conversation or a speech for pages and pages and pages and have it seem like a forward-moving novel.

My Zuckerman reading project continues with the third book in the "series."

The Anatomy Lesson is funny and somewhat excruciating in its chronicle of inexplicable pain.

In this book, Zuckerman has been fallen by seemingly causeless pain. Everyone attempts to "explain" his pain through non-medical means: it's his feelings of guilt manifesting themselves, the pain is actually something he wants so he can regress into self-pity, etc., etc. But Zuckerman tells us again and again there is no meaning to the pain except pain.

In a way, it's a novel-length rant against those who would force interpretations onto literature. Perhaps that's a bit of an overly metafictional reading (and an overly simplified reading). It's hard for me to avoid overly metafictional readings of the Zuckerman books, however, since these books are all about an author dealing with people reading his books metafictionally. (It's also hard for me to avoid overly simplified readings of the Zuckerman books because I have an oversimplified brain.)

I've decided to read the entire Zuckerman series by Philip Roth, and I'm on book two. I read The Ghost Writer back in October (though I didn't write actual comments) and many years ago I read some of the later books in the series. (Is "series" the write term to use for Philip Roth novels? This isn't like an Orson Scott Card Ender's Game thing. Well, anyway, you know what I mean.)

I've been continually impressed by Roth's ability (especially in his earlier books) to write a novel where a quarter of the book is one extended conversation. He doesn't shy away from "transcribing" the whole of an event. For example, if a novel features a speech at a wedding, most writers will write around it, summarizing or avoiding altogether the actual speech. Roth, of the other hand, will write a seven page speech and put it into the book.

The Secret Sharer is really a novella, but it comes in book form.

It's funny, clever, exciting, mildly touching, and seems like it could have really happened. There are a lot of cold war era spy novels and movies that involve spies spying on spies spying on spies, either serious or spoofs. This one manages to be both. The only other Graham Greene novel I've read is The End of the Affair, which is also excellent, though with a very different tone.

Sometimes I have a problem with such prolific authors. Greene wrote 28 novels, 12 collections, and numerous other works. Even though I really like his books, how do I know which books to read? I'm overwhelmed with options. While in the book store I can't decide which book by him to buy. Let's say there are only three available... are they available because they are his best books? Or are they available because his best books were already purchased and these are the worst books? I usually end up going with someone else entirely. Fortunately, I took a shot with Our Man in Havana and it was a winning choice.

Amazing. I want to mock Safren Foer's blurb on the back of the book where he talks about how it is impossible to describe this book, but he does have a point. It's very hard to describe.

I'd say there are four major currents running through this novel:
1) The author's relationship to his current lover.
2) The gangsters.
3) The author's time teaching at a poetry school.
4) The author's first marraige and child.

All four of these currents intersect in various and strange ways. The novel is very "post-modern," whatever that really means. The world of the novel is set in the future (how far in the future, I don't know) where a group of gangsters terrorize the world (no American president has lived for more than a few days since the gangsters came into power), where aliens from Jupiter visit, and where the government sends you a postcard on the day you are going to die. But it's not just that the world is set in the future, it's also a few degrees off of normality. There are vampires living peacefully in basements, poets who have turned into kitchen appliances, etc.

If I had to say what I think this books "means," I'd venture that it's about a man who is so devastated by the loss of his child that his mind has crafted this shattered world around him and around his memories to protect him from his true emotions. Maybe that explanation is a bit too simple and banal for such a rich, funny, and emotional book. But dealing with the death of a child is very difficult to do in literature (and impossible to deal with in life, I imagine), and I think that tearing apart and rebuilding the entire world is an appropriate response.

Anyway, it's a beautiful book, and I read it in two days, thanks to plane travel and thanks to the fact that it's a really fast read (a quarter of the pages have no more than one or two lines on them). If you can get a copy of it (mine is from the NY public library and we had to wait a week or two for my branch to request it) I highly recommend it.

As always, plane travel for me means lots of books for book track. I almost abandoned Absurdistan a quarter-way through and then again half-way through. I just haven't been in the mood for satire. As far as satire goes, it's good satire. I mean, it's funny, it's well written. I'm not quite sure what the satirical point is, though. At first I thought it was mocking Halliburton and corporate greed, but, no, actually Halliburton is okay in this book. It seems to be mocking Hasidic Jews, but it's pretty clear from the beginning that the book is mocking the mocking of Hasidic Jews. I suppose it's really mocking the politics of fake minor ex-Soviet sattelite nation-states. Shteyngart may actually have a satirical point to make about the politics of fake minor ex-Soviet sattelite nation-states, but, really?

The real problem is that it doesn't even get to that level of satire until the halfway point. The first half of the book is spent in alternative US flashbacks and Russia, without even the mention of Absurdistan. I know the book is about the character of Misha (note that he has the same name as the penguin from the last books I read) and not about Absurdistan, but the book kind of dragged for me. If insteresting things didn't start happening when he finally got to Absurdistan (they did) I would have stopped reading for sure.

My fiancee ordered this book used and then told me to read it along with Death and the Penguin. As you can see in the previous BookTrack entry, I really loved Death and the Penguin. Unfortunately, Penguin Lost is not nearly as good. It's a cleverly written dark comedy, but it's lost the wonderful, slow surrealism that infused the first book. (Note: my fiancee hadn't read this second book yet, so her recommendation was based solely on the first one.) Penguin Lost seems very much like Kurkov was forcing out a novel to bank on the success of the first one, which, frankly, I totally respect. Novelists have so few opportunities to cash in that if you have a big hit I think it's fine if your artistic integrity suffers when you produce something you know if meant to rake in the bucks. The novel isn't bad, it's just so plot driven and arbitrary. Unlike the first novel, where the events seemed secondary to the protagonist's home life and musings, in this novel the events are so overwhelming (and somewhat unbelievable) that it lost some of the subtle charm.

Also, I haven't read any of Milton's Paradise Lost in a long time, but I'm pretty sure there are not many similarities between this book and that one. I expect a book that is called "Something Lost" will at least allude to the original.

I loved this book. Death and the Penguin moves swiftly from charming to dark, from death to penguins. The book is blurred by a level of surreality, but it's the good kind of surreal. The protagonist never quite knows what is going on, and he stumbles forward in the way of many absurd narratives, but the unexplained conspiracy never gets too overwhelming. Zolotaryov takes actions (a character trait unfortunately lacking in many surreal or abusrd novels) and he continues to pursue his own interests even when the conspracy around him is getting stranger and stranger. The book is highly accessible for English readers, but it is infused with Ukranian culture in a way that makes it different and wonderful. Perhaps it's just that Kurkov is a quirky writer and it would be just as different and wonderful if he was an American. But, still, it's nice to read something coming from another country that is both so accessible and so seemingly influenced by voices outside of the norm.

This collection of short stories is fantastic. I love the two about weird explorers. "Ancestral Legacies" are about a Nazi science team looking for the Yeti and "The First South Central Australian Expedition" is about a team of explorers going through the Australian desert. They are both so whimsical and touching. That combination of inventiveness and depth is what makes all of these stories so excellent. I highly recommend this collection and am planning on reading one of his novels soon.

If this book weren't a classic, I don't know if I could have forced myself to read the whole thing. It's not that The Trial isn't well written... It's just that it touches upon one of my great fears: trying to act rational when people around me are acting irrationally. I am terrified of the day I try to explain to my friends that something terrible is going on and no one believes me (or, even worse, no one seems to think that the terrible thing is so terrible).

In a way, I've seen too much of the absurdism contained in The Trial to really enjoy reading it. I recognize that this novel is from where this kind of absurdist terror originates, and I appreciate it for that reason, but that doesn't mean I necessarily like reading it more.

I don't quite know how to put this, but I thought this book was awful. I've liked other books by Jim Crace, but with The Pesthouse I had trouble getting through it. The plot was very sequential and ploddingly episodic, the characters moving from place to place with no real narrative reason. I suppose that's how many books work, but in this one I felt like nothing really tied the journey together, it was made up of arbitrary choices. It could have happened a hundred different ways, and no particular scene seemed necessary.

Joyce Carol Oates blasted the book in her New Yorker review. When I first read her review I thought she was being cruel. I apologize for doubting her.

I didn't quite read this whole collection, but I did read the title novella as well as a couple of other stories. I've got mixed feelings about the long distance runner. I'm not sure what philosophy to take away from it. It's about a petty thief who, in prison, trains to be a runner. The story is mostly his thoughts as he runs, and the lesson seems to be that it's better to be a thief and to be free than to be someone who follows the rules. I'm not sure if I am meant to take that at face value or as an ironic anti-revelation or as something else.

I'll probably read a few more stories from it later, but I was in the mood for more post-apocalyptic fiction.

Man and boy travel post-apocalyptic America with little food and sparse prose.

This the funniest, most difficult, and most brilliant book I've read in a long time. I really did love Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, but it takes one of the Irish Masters to show how humor and brilliance can be taken to a completely different level.

I've also read O'Brien's The Third Policeman, which I liked, but it didn't hold together quite as well as At Swim-Two-Birds.

I just haven't been in the mood to write lengthy reviews (or much of anything) since the revival of my blog. But I felt that this book needed more than a title, author, and date.

I read this debut novel because the NY Times listed it as one of the top five books of 2007, and they were correct. It's funny and sad, and I'll be posting about it soon on This Recording.

Read my review.

This is actually one of the three mini-books in short-short-fiction collection from McSweeney's, One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box.

Read my review.

I needed a break from Gravity's Rainbow so, in of Kurt Vonnegut, I reread Hocus Pocus, the first book I ever read by him.

It's not quite as great as I remember, but still pretty good. I read just about all of his books in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college. I had a job working in this multi-media lab called the "P.L.A.C.E." which stood for something like "Princeton Lab for Advancing Curriculum Excellence" or some ridiculous thing like that. It was a pretty boring job and, since I was mostly alone on campus, a pretty boring summer. My friend Shawn (bless his heart) stopped by to visit a couple of times and told me to read Vonnegut, so I did. And when I discover an author I like I keep reading his or her books until I get sick of them, but in the case of Vonnegut I never got sick of them, so I kept reading.

I didn't realize it at the time, but Hocus Pocus is set in a semi-dystopian near-future, though in this case the near-future is already the past (2001). In the book, America has pretty much fallen to the evils of capitalism, and the rich have sold off all the assets of the country to foreign interests. He could have just set this book in the real world (rather than this semi-real world) but I think his goal was to highlight that the wealthy "ruling-class" do not consider themselves countrymen with the poor and middle class -- not that they don't consider themselves Americans, but, rather, they don't consider everyone else Americans. I don't really think this adds that much to the book, though Vonnegut wouldn't be Vonnegut if he didn't present us a completely bleak and futile picture of the world.

Anyway, I'm slowly making my way through Gravity's Rainbow, which is funny and brilliant and impossible to read. I'm at the halfway point, which really is an accomplishment, because half of Gravity's Rainbow is the equivalent of reading four other good-sized books.

In a post-thesis high, I read the new Chuck Palahniuk book. Good or bad, I always plow through his books in a couple of days. This one, like most of his recent novels, was on the bad side of the spectrum. It's okay. Better than the last couple, I guess. Recently he's on this kick of building into his novels some meta-fictional justification of the novel, meaning he tries to "convince" the reader that this is not a fictional text but an actual history. I don't really get the point of that. It's never convincing and it comes across as gimmicky, usually underscoring the flawed logic of a fictional piece rather than making it more believable.

Like many of his novels, this one had a lot of plot twists. But in this one the plot twists didn't just alter the plot, they altered the entire novel. It was too jarring. Suddenly you're reading a novel about zombies. Then it's about class warfare. Then it's about the erotic thrill of car crashing ala Ballard. Then it's about TIME TRAVEL. I mean, what the heck? It was intriguing, but way too contrived. When plot twists get too radical they stop being clever and surprising but instead become concepts that the author is forcing onto the reader. I was never surprised because there was not enough setup.

I got the feeling that, like his last novel Haunted, Palahniuk was making use of existing short stories to beef up the text. They are slightly more integrated in this book, but still I'm suspicious. For example, every chapter is told via rotating view points (it's an "oral history") except for one chapter, which is a five page, single-view point discussion about some new direct-input-video technology. It's then mentioned later in the text and he tried to work it into the plot, but it's a weak connection. I feel like that chapter is just a way to either (a) make use of an existing short story, and/or (b) drop in one more clever plot point that doesn't really tie into the whole novel.

As always, I enjoy reading his books because they are fun and interesting and different, but if it took me longer than two days to get through them I wouldn't bother.

My first conundrum was what to title this book track blog entry: "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel" or just "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel." The first seems somewhat redundant. But it's certainly possible that some Author X could title a book The Collected Stories of Author Y. The "by Author X" is NOT implied. And since the official title of the collection includes the "of Amy Hempel," I decided that consistency demanded I write out the "of" and the "by" in full.

This is a great collection of short stories. I read almost every one... and there are a LOT of short stories in this collection. Reading so many short stories back to back allows the reader to notice certain "patterns." Three reoccurring themes or plot-points stood out:

1) Stories about women who really like dogs.
2) Stories about women who have been in accidents or are in a hospital.
3) Strories about women who live across the street from a graveyards.

My guess is that one or more of these three apply to Amy Hempel herself, though I can't really say for sure since I don't know her.

The stories are usually not quite linear, and move forward in semi-disconnected chunks. Thus the plots are often unclear and secondary to the characters and the relationships. Most of the stories are short, and a lot of them are very short, just two or three pages. The one novella was also written in this manner and I felt that this style didn't work as well (for me) in the longer form. It's the one piece in the book I didn't finish reading.

I became a big fan of Lorrie Moore after reading her book Birds of America. Soon after reading that book I ordered Self-Help from Amazon.com. Despite the fact that they claimed to have one in stock, it took them six months to finally give up trying to send it to me. Fortunately, Vintage just released a new edition though, as you can see from the post title, I ended up ordering the reprint edition of Like Life instead (based on preferable reviews). I did like Like Life, though it is not nearly as good as Birds of America. The stories don't have as much variety, and almost all of them seem to be about young, female artists who live in tiny, crappy apartments in bad NYC neighborhoods.

The title story, "Like Life," has some interesting sci-fi elements thrown into it, such as a city where no water is drinkable and televisions are manadatory, though these quirks don't seem to be essential to the story. I am pretty sure Moore is making a kind of pun. The story is not actually about life, it is LIKE life. Of course this reminds us that ALL fiction is not life but, rather, like life.

So I read this book a while ago but - as discovered during the previous post - I didn't write about it on BookTrack! This calls my entire BookTrack into question! The whole point is for me to remember what books I have read! If I skip books how can I count this as an accurate history of my reading life! Well, I'll have to hope this is the only oversight, and since I have no recollection of when I read this third book I'm going to have to post it now without backdating it.

As mentioned in the last BT post, I didn't enjoy The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil as much as I have enjoyed Saunders' story collections. Not that I didn't like it - I did, it was pleasurable to read - but I found the political satire a little too unsubtle. Not that I can say precisely what he was politically satiring, but the idea that the strange characters were clearly some kind of statement about "good" and "evil" never left me for a moment. Unlike his other stories where there is a layer of absurd humor and underneath that a hidden layer of real, important meaning, in TBaFRoP both the absurd and the meaning were on the top layer. Which, I think, is what George Saunders was trying to do, so in that I'd have to say I think he succeeded. And, I'm not saying it is a "bad" book, just one that I don't think is as great as his others.

An interesting side note... Here are some of the adjectives I have used to describe Saunders' writing and the man himself: pleasurable, charming, funny, endearing, entertaining, musical. I clearly have some kind of reader-crush on him. But, seriously, it's good stuff.

I went to see George Saunders read on Monday as part of The Story Prize presentation, an award exclusively dedicated to collections of short fiction. He was a finalist for his collection In Persuasion Nation which I later bought and read. I've read three of his previous books and really liked the two other story collections (though I was less enamoured of his novella, which I apparently didn't post). His reading was so charming - George Saunders in person is really funny and endearing - that I decided to get his latest work.

I liked it (and read it in a couple of days) though I didn't think it was his best. His past two short story collections have focused almost exclusively (and oddly) on near-future semi-apocalyptic history-based theme parks. It's been an extreme example of "finding a niche and sticking with it," and I wondered what his writing would be like if he left the theme parks behind. In Persuasion Nation he does move out of the theme park and into other areas of the near future, even - in certain stories - the present, though all with an absurd tint, and he does it successfully. His work is much more than funny absurd satire, underneath that layer there are universal stories of sadness and guilt and real emotion. In this particular collection I thought some of the stories had less of that undercurrent than others, though none failed to leave me laughing and scratching my head and thinking about life.

Reader's Block is a "different" kind of book, even more of an anti-novel then Wittgenstein's Mistress which I read for an MFA class last year (though apprarently still more of a novel than This is Not a Novel which I haven't read).

Wittgenstein's Mistress was about the last person in the world, who, overwhelmed with lonliness and insanity, rambled away into a typewriter about every fact she could muster and every thought she had, thoughts and facts which tended to focus on artists and writers and their untimely ends. In Reader's Block we still have the rambling facts, but we've lost the grounding of a real narrator. Instead there are one sentence mentions of "Reader" and "Protagonist" popping up about once every couple of pages, painting us just the barest of ideas that the "Protagonist" is a lonely old man and the "Reader" is, well, just as lonely. The facts focus primarily on various how artists died or committed suicide and which artists were anti-semites.

It's surprisingly an easy book to read, since there are only about 10 lines per page, so despite its density of (puportedly) non-fictional content, I zoomed through it. And despite its lacking of a real narrative I found the whole thing immensely sad. Even though you only get a few moments of "Protagonist," I felt like this whole book was his suicide note, his expression of grief over his lonliness and the world's cruelty to and by its artists.

Someone told me (and I have no way to back this up) that when Markson fills his books with thousands of trivia details about artists and the world that he doesn't actually look any of them up. Rather, he has spent his life jotting down these facts on index cards and that in his house he has thousands and thousands of index cards from which he pulls out these facts while writing. Pretty amazing if true.

Matt is a poker buddy of mine, but that doesn't change the fact that his book is excellent. It's interesting how you can know vague facts about your pal spending some time learning Kung Fu in China but not realize that he was essentially blazing a strange kind of trail for America/China relations. I don't read a ton of non-fiction and even less memoirs, but this read like a novel and (sorry for this, but it's true) I couldn't put it down.

Here's the text of my review on Amazon (it's important to post on Amazon to help pimp your friends' books):

"I just finished reading American Shaolin and it really is a fantastic book! I haven't been that engrossed in a book for a while (I missed my subway stop two different times while reading it). It is exciting, funny, and moving. Plus quite amazing - I could hardly believe some of the stories and I kept putting down the book to tell my girlfriend about them. Also, it's excellently written. This is not just a retelling of interesting stories; the book really respects the subject matter, putting the people at a higher level of importance then the events, and lets the reader find a lot of meaning and depth.

You don't have to be interested in (or know anything about) the martial arts to enjoy this book. You just have to be interested in reading about someone who goes on an unbelievable journey to learn about himself, find his limits and his potential, and discover how an ancient tradition has become part of the modern world."

The best part is that I'm being honest. I would have said good things about the book no matter what (at least I would have on Amazon, maybe not here) but it's even better when I can say it and mean it.

I always delay saying I've "completed" reading a book of short stories because I rarely read all the short stories in a collection. No matter how much you like an author it's difficult to read every single story, especially when there are sixty of them. Anyway, I've read at least 40 of these stories, and since that's enough to fill up a different Barthelme book, I'm going to go and log it now.

Barthelme is, of course, great. I've read The Dead Father multiple times and I've been flipping through his books of short stories for ages. I get a little tired of the stories which consist of nothing but disconnected dialogue, and while they can be very rewarding I started to skip them after reading 10 or so.

Some of my favorites are: "The Balloon," "The Dolt," "The Captured Woman," "I Bought a Little City," "Cotez and Montezuma," "The King of Jazz," and, of course, "The Zombies." Oh, man, it's so good.

Note: I linked to the 2003 edition of the book, I actually read the 1993 edition. That's because the 2003 edition has an introduction written by David Gates, who is my thesis advisor. Maybe I should buy that one instead. :)

I am always excited about the prospect of a new Martin Amis book to read. I've read everything he's written (some things twice) and eagerly await more.

House of Meetings is a story told by the a survivor of the Russian gulag, alternating between a present day journey back to the site and a retelling of his experiences in and out of the slave camp. It's about a love triangle between the narrator, his brother Lev, and the beautiful Jewish woman Zoya. However, at it's core really about the love and hate between the two brothers, it's about how the narrator, despite his almost impossible jealousy, saved his brother rather then let him die in the camps, it's about how he did terrible and unforgivable things but is perhaps redeemed by the fact that he was a good big brother. Being the little brother of a great big brother I am a sucker for stories about good big brothers.

While I didn't like this book nearly as much as I loved The Information, Money, Success, London Fields, or The Rachel Papers, I still enjoyed it. Plus I read it in three days, which is always a good sign.

I'm going to quote from the book here, but it's a quote towards the end, so if you don't want to read a quote from the end of the book you shouldn't read this quote:

"You towered like a god -- you straddled the ocean, you filled the sky. And I still feel that. Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers."

A friend of mine lent/gave me a paperback copy of Gombrowicz's Cosmos and Pornografia and now that classes are over I finally got around to reading at least the first novel of the two. There's not much story to it, it's more of a dense, philosophical mania. The protagonist is caught up in his own head and cannot help picking up every thing he sees into a larger and larger stew of connections. He lists and relists the items that have come to his attention (mouths, sparrows, sticks, arrows, pins, etc.) and that listing gets longer and longer as the novel progresses and there are more things to connect and reconnect. It's quite fascinating though not necessarily a brisk read.

There's a fascinating review on amazon.com that points out the failings in the particular translation. The reviewer provides his/her own direct translation of the first paragraph and I have to say it's much more dramatic and poetic than the one in the book. I'm interested in reading some more by Gombrowicz but I'm going to look for a better translation first.

Since I'm probably going to write my critical thesis on Borges I just reread his amazing short story collection, Ficciones. It is incredible. I've read just about all his fiction because I've gone through the big blue book of all his fiction, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. (I read it about a month before I started this book track blog.) Various people have told me that the Hurley translation isn't as good as some previous translations (despite the fact that Hurley collaborated with Borges) so this time around I read the original translations, though to be honest I couldn't tell much of a difference. Perhaps if I read them side by side.

Anyway, Borges is amazing. My favorite is still "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." Funny story about that: I first read this in a creative writing workshop (taught by David Levinson, who, among multiple other things, I will always thank for introducing me to Borges) and on the day we discussed the story most of the class said they couldn't find any books by Pierre Menard in the library. They did not realize that the Borges piece was fictional and so went looking for books by a guy named Pierre Menard.

Many of my favorite Borges stories are the ones told in essay style about invented authors. Reading his stories now I realize that every single one is actually about writing itself and about how context influences all fiction. Of course, I'm writing my critical thesis on context vs content in Borge's fiction, so the context of my reading these stories is influencing the content of what I'm reading... But that's the whole point! Or is it? I don't know.

I just finished reading Half-Life, the new novel by Shelley Jackson (a former teacher of mine) and I really enjoyed it. As a loyal ex-member of her class you'd think I'd have gotten to it sooner, but I read the first half before my Fall semester began and had to wait until classes were over to finish it. Though I suppose adding this additional layer of halving was appropriate.

Though this may be a strange thing for me to take away from the novel, there is a Burl Ives' song "What Kind of Animal Are You?" quoted in the book, and this song was written by my grandfather. I hardly knew him and don't know that much about him, but when my grandmother passed away and I went to clean out her apartment I discovered a box filled with 10 cent checks, royalties still coming in for the one song he wrote with lasting value.

Anyway, I really loved the book and know at some point I will go back and re-read it so I can attempt to decode the moments where the narrator's second head might be interfering with the narrative. (Did I mention that the novel is about a two-headed woman? No?) The writing is wonderful and I am so impressed by the way it explores the links between self and language while still managing to be incredibly entertaining.

Vertigo isn't so much a stream-of-consciousness novel as it is a stream-of-association novel. I enjoyed reading it, I suppose, though sometimes found it difficult to keep my focus on the divergent narrative, my own thoughts picking up threads and veering off on their own. Anyway, I haven't been much in the mood to blog lately, so I'm just going to leave it at that. I read it for my last MFA lit seminar. I've got one more semester to go, but it's all thesis work. No more assigned reading!

I loved this book. It's eerie and funny and profound and filled with deep thematic undercurrents about the nature of language. I've been trying to find the right direction to go on a longer fiction piece when I started reading this book and it was just what I needed. It helped me set a new tone in my work, it gave me a great example of how something could be gothic and still have room for humor, how it could be realistic but filled with elements of the occult. Thanks DeLillo!

This short, metafictional book is about a poor, uneducated, unattractive woman who lives a short, banal life. But it's metafictional, so it's also about the teller of the story, a man who wants to be moved by this woman but isn't quite. And Lispector is a feminist author, so it's also about the feminist subtext, about male dominated society and the struggle to be relevant.

What do I have to say about it? I don't know. I'm not in the mood to give opinions.

When I last read this book, I had the following to say:

"I have mixed feelings about the novel. It was a great read and I really connected with the protagonist. But even though I was enthralled until the end, I could feel things slipping away from me more and more. If anyone else reads this book, please give me a call, because more than anything else I need to discuss it with someone."

Well, my wish came true, because I read the book for my literature seminar and got to discuss it with the professor and the class. While I still have similar feelings about the disappearance of major characters halfway through the book, we talked about how this is a novel of doppelgangers and duplicates, how new characters served as almost identical replacements for old characters. I'm still not sure why that's necessary but I'll accept that it is an intentional move on the author's part. Anyway, I've already written about this book so I'll write no more here.

I've been spending the last three weeks reading "Swann's Way" for my literature seminar, and, I have to admit, I didn't quite read the whole thing. Yes, it's incredibly well written. But it's also really, really tiring to read. I've taken more naps in the last three weeks than I have since nursery school. I'm happy to be putting it aside for something else.

It seems I have a poor track record with some of the long, great novels of history. I am currently half-way through both "Anna Karenina" and "Moby Dick." But, in my defense, I have also recently read "Crime and Punishment" and Beckett's incredibly dense (but brilliant) "Molloy." I suppose I could have lied and said I read "Swann's Way" cover to cover, but really, what would be the point of this book blog then? I'm not actually writing this for YOUR benefit, it's for my own personal use. In fact, why are you even reading this.

One other note: Recently I realized that I've been putting all my book titles in quotes, which is actually incorrect. Short stories, poems, essays, etc. are all things that go in quotes. Book titles should actually be underlined. But I don't like underlines. So you'll just have to adjust.

I've read pretty much every story in Mavis Gallant's collection, "Paris Stories," despite the instructions in her afterward: "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait." I would have followed her advice (not because I didn't like the stories - but because that's how I normally read story collections) except I went on a trip to Austin and I forgot to bring a second book.

Anyway, I'd never read or even heard of Mavis Gallant before, but I really enjoyed her writing. She writes serious work but there's always a hint of the farcical lingering there, especially in the multiple stories about the cantakerous old writer named Grippes. She does a lot of introspective and eloquent exposition, which sometimes I dislike, but in her case it's the kind of focus on themes that pleases me. In my literature class I didn't have much to say about her writing (which - trust me - is unusual for me) and I'm not sure why that is. But for some reason, even though I enjoyed her work, it didn't really move me to speak for or against or about it.

Read this for my literature seminar with Jeffery Allen. It's Chekhov, so it's good. These are his stories from the period of 1892-1895 and you can see him playing with the conventional structure of the short story, even at a time when the conventional short story was still a new thing. He likes ambiguous endings, he has epiphanies that are not quite epiphanies, and he does weird things with omniscent narrators.

An interesting side note about this book. Barnes & Nobles includes this in their line of "cheap classics," but, quite infuriatingly, they choose to include DIFFERENT short stories in the collection. So they are publishing a book called of Chekhov stories called "Ward No. 6 and Other Stories" yet it only has two stories in common with the classic book of the same name that has been around for a hundred years. That is a lame move by B&N.

I bought "The Sportswriter" at a used bookstore in an airport (which airport I can no longer remember - but it was a great bookstore) and I read it. It's apparently the only book I've read this past month. I'm not sure what I've been doing with my time. Perhaps I've been out there living life the way life was meant to be lived! Or perhaps I've been doing nothing, which seems more likely.

Anyway, this - like most of the books I read these days - has been knocking around on my "to read" list for some time. I liked it, it's an interesting novel, not sad, not happy, just kind of floating there. If I had to sum it up in one short, pithy, nondescriptive way, it's about a man who is slowly becoming invisible and struggling to avoid it. Frank Boscombe likes to go on at length about "literalness" and "seeing around the edges of his life" and why New Jersey is so great and why Detroit is so great. He loves to label things that really can't be labeled, and his bull shit is both endearing, intelligent, and easy to see through. As a reader you both agree with what he's thinking and also realize that he is deluding himself.

Anyway, my MFA classes are starting again on the 6th so I am going to be reading all assigned books for the next few months. I'm frantically trying to finish reading Shelley Jackson's amazing new novel, "Half Life", before my first class, though I don't know if I'll be able to do it. My preliminary review: it's great! More later.

After reading and enjoying "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" I decided I wanted to read another book by Saunders both for the pleasure and to see if every short story he writes is set in a partially-dystopian near-future featuring guilt-wracked characters who work at run-down history-theme parks. Well, the title novella in "Pastoralia" is, inevitably but surprisingly, about a guilt-wracked man in a partially-dystopian near-future who works at a run-down history-theme park. Seriously. I guess George Saunders decided that he'd found his strange niche and was going to run with it. Not that I'm criticizing the title novella. Saunders has done a remarkable job examining every angle of partially-dystopian near-future stories featuring guilt-wracked characters who work at run-down history-theme parks, taking each one and making it different and entertaining. It's musical, it's variations on a theme. But still.

Thankfully (or not thankfully, depending on how much you desire to read partially-dystopian near-future stories featuring guilt-wracked characters who work at run-down history-theme parks) the rest of the stories in this collection branch out a bit more, revolving more around monologue-obsessive characters who live rich internal fantasy lives, who tend to be chained down to some even more depressing character, and who second-guess every possible choice and are therefore mostly terrified into inaction. Some of these stories end well. Some don't. Thank goodness for the ones that end well. It's not even like they end WELL, they just end on a slightly upbeat note, or they end with the character taking some action, which, even if it's a bad action it's better than no action.

Well, I wouldn't have written so much if I didn't really like the collection. I'll definitely read more of his work.

My girlfriend has a fellowship this summer to work with children and their parents, reading and discussing a variety of young adult fiction. She gave me one of the scheduled chapter books, "Skellig," which I read in a few hours of intense young-adult-like fascination. It's an interesting mix of spooky and sentimental, and I won't say too much about it lest I will give it away. But it involves strange figures in broken down shacks and attics filled with owls.

What distinguishes young adult fiction from adult fiction? There's definitely more of a black and white approach to literature written for young adults, but that's not to say something can't necessarily be literary. There are some fantasical/spooky novels that have a lot of critical respect. ("Skelleg" would fall solidly in the gothic category of literature.) At one point the children are having a discussion about pomegranates and their many seeds. They muse that if all the seeds in one pomegranate became trees and then all the seeds in the pomegranates that grew on that one tree became trees of their own the world would quickly become covered by pomegranate trees. Then there is a theme woven through the book about Persephone, the mythological figure who spent six months a year in the underworld due to her consumption of six pomegranate seeds. Both of these themes would fit right into a literary novel, and I think it's important as an adult reader of young adult fiction to recognize that (just like in adult fiction) some books are better than others.

Queneau is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. I didn't like "The Flight of Icarus" quite as much as "Witchgrass" and "Peirot Mon Ami," but it is still clever and interesting and explores some interesting literary concepts. It's about a character (Icarus) who escapes from a novel and the author's subsequent attempt to track him down. It would be easy to pass the whole thing off as farce but that would be doing Queneau a serious injustice. The book is mostly dialogue and I think would do well if performed by actors. I wonder if it ever has been... Now I have a hankering to get back into theater and adapt (ever so lightly) this novel for the stage.

Sometimes while I am reading a book where the protagonist anti-hero is depressed and disconnected and slow-to-act I feel like I take on his properties. So while this was a powerful book, I'm glad it's over. There's only so much about dying babies I can handle.

Like many of IBS's books, this one tells the story of a man wracked with feelings of doubt and guilt, a man who stumbles forward through his life, and a man who never really answers any questions for himself. The book (like "Enemies: A Love Story" and "The Slave") is very sad on the surface, but on a deeper level there is hope. Though the protagonist cannot find goodness in the world or in himself, the reader sees through the despair and knows that there is goodness in the protagonist. Singer is telling and retelling a story about the self-doubt of the holy man, and even if the character never sees it himself, it makes me feel good to know how clearly it is there. Perhaps there is hope for us sinners yet.

For somebody who minored in playwriting I've managed to miss reading a lot of the American theater classics, including anything by Tennessee Williams. Since my girlfriend is teaching "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in her Intro Lit course I decided to go ahead and rectify this gap. Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) it's good. That's all I have to say on the subject. I'm also in the midst of reading "Moby Dick" but decided I needed a break. There may be a few more books before I actually finish that whale.

A memoir about Elie Wiesel's experience as a concentration camp prisoner.

Read most of this while on the flight home from Berlin, finished it after getting over jet lag.

Read this while on the flight home from Berlin

Plus I also read this while in Berlin

And also read this while in Berlin

Also read this while in Berlin

Read this while in Berlin

I enjoyed the Raymond Queaneua I read for Frederick Tuten's seminar so I got another of his books.
I really liked this one too.

School's out, school's out, teacher let the monkeys out! Finally, I can read books on my own again!

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School.

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School.

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School.

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School.

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School.

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School.
I ended up writing my final paper on this book.

Read for Frederick Tuten's Saturday radical fiction seminar at The New School

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School

Read for Frederick Tuten's Saturday radical fiction seminar at The New School

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School

Read for Frederick Tuten's Saturday radical fiction seminar at The New School

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School

Read for Shelly Jackson's non-linear fiction seminar at The New School

The non-fiction winter break has been completed with a mad rush to finish "The Tipping Point." My first literature seminar of the semester is tomorrow night and I will therefore need to return to the hallowed halls of the novel.

This book, while interesting, ultimately disappointed me. The premise of the tipping point is to discuss and analyze how trends/epidemics happen. The book says it pretty much comes down to three types of people (Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen) and three basic rules (The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context). Then there are a bunch of examples, all of which are interesting. But I had two major problems with the book:

1) While I believed that most of these examples of trends/epidemics were influenced by the stated types or people and rules, I was not convinced that these people and rules were the only ways to spread trends/epidemics. Sure, all those examples were nice, but what about other trends/epidemics that have spread through the nation. Gladwell talks about how mass advertising isn't really effective if it doesn't follow at least some of the Tipping Point rules. But what about board-room developed, mass-marketed boy bands that sweep the nation. Am I to believe that they're success was really the work of some well connected teenage girls and not simply the pop-culture marketing machine? I'm sure Gladwell could point to different things for each boy band's rise to stardom and explain how there is the Tipping Point rule that clinched it for them. Which brings me to my second concern...

2) The laws are too easy to apply to any situation. Find me an epidemic and I can come up with some way of claiming the tipping point rules played a major part. Not because they really did but because the rules are vague enough that you can bullshit enough to get it to work. Frankly, the entire last case study about teen smoking, while very interesting, seems totally unconnected to the tipping point rules. Gladwell talks about how it is really just tiny things that make teen smoking tip into an epidemic, things like smoking being linked to depression and how chemicals lacking in some brains are reproduced by the effects of nicotine, and by just changing those tiny things we can curb teen smoking. But (and this important) THOSE AREN'T TINY THINGS. If we're going to describe ANY effect that causes addiction or "stickiness" as a "tiny thing," then, sure, the Tipping Point applies to every possible situation.

Anyway, now that my winter non-fiction break is over I can look back on it and see what I have learned. Did I get any good material for my fiction writing? At the moment no ideas are jumping out at me, but perhaps with time to sink in I will craft an amazing story about economics, split second decisions, and epidemics.

My winter non-fiction break continues with "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan. It's pretty much a straight out Econ 101 book except without use of graphs or formulas, it's good old fashioned explanation. The author has done a good job keeping the information interesting, though I admit you probably have to WANT to read about economics if you're going to enjoy it.

I learned a lot from this book but almost more importantly I also had a lot of my somewhat hazy concepts of global economics solidified. I knew (or, rather, thought I knew) a lot of the material in the book but didn't have the terminology to explain it or the facts to back it up.

Anyway, if you want a good broad review of global econ, this is the book.

Next in my non-fiction series is "The Tipping Point" and "Numeric Linear Algebra." But school starts on Monday so I don't know if I'll have the chance to finish them.

I've been debating whether to read this book since it came out... well, actually, I've known I'd eventually get around to reading it it was really just a question of when. Then two days ago I saw that David Foster Wallace was reading at Strand Books in NYC which is a few blocks from my apartment, so I figured I ought to read it before I went to see him talk.

For those who know my strange reading preferences, DFW is one of my favorite authors and while I don't go around recommending it to other people (for reasons that become abundantly clear if you see the immense length and density of the tome) "Infinite Jest" is one of my favorite novels. Not only do I think it's fantastic, I think he is one of the few authors today who is really doing something to change fiction, to move it in new directions. My bet would be he gets studied (or at least referred to) in college classrooms in the future.

"Consider the Lobster" is a collection of non-fiction essays which continues to demonstrate not only his uniquely funny and engaging writing style but also his obvious brilliance. He knows (or is able to research and write with authority) about seemingly every imaginable topic. It depresses me a bit because I know I will never be as smart as DFW. There's just no way. Lobsters, professional tennis, Kafka, John Updike, politics, PETA, grammar, and more. Note that last point (not the "and more," the point before that one). As any reader of my blog knows, I love mundane discussions on random grammar topics. DFW has a ~50 page essay (in theory a review of a new English language usage dictionary) where he goes into great detail about the historical and very political language usage debate. It's fascinating stuff. Seriously fascinating stuff, even if (I think) one doesn't love talking about grammar as much as I do.

The reading was okay. He chose a shorter piece from his non-fiction collection to read, one written in three days for a magazine doing a "where were you during 9/11" thing. It wasn't really as funny as his normal stuff (how can you write something funny about 9/11?) and it wasn't as well-researched and intellectually complex as his normal stuff (how can you do that in only three days?) so I was only mildly engaged. However, the Q&A session after the reading was great, and while nothing stood out as important enough to repeat here, he was funny and rambling and even when he's speaking off the top of his head you can hear the footnotes.

I didn't stick around to get my copy autographed because it would have been an extra hour of waiting. I was kind of amazed by all the people with multiple copies of hard-back versions of "Infinite Jest." Obviously people buy up original copies and bring them to get signed so they can resell them for more money. Kind of depressing, though I guess it's cool that DFW's autograph is so sought after. I really wanted to stay and get my book signed just so I could tell him how much I love his writing and how it's really inspired me as a writer but somehow I convinced myself that I shouldn't really waste my time and that he didn't care about hearing that and I'd just embarrass myself and it was too hot and why don't I just leave instead of standing around with all these people trying to make money from his autograph. I do that to myself sometimes. I start feeling awkward about something because somehow it's like I don't know the proper etiquette of a book signing as if it's particularly difficult. Oh well.

This was my first J. M. Coetzee novel and it is, undoubtably, a good one. It follows a white South African university professor who refuses to publically apologize for sleeping with a student and is forced to leave his post. He goes to stay with his daughter who has taken up simple farm living and there he lives a simple life and works in an animal shelter - that is, until they are attacked and robbed by three black men.

It's both a short, simple story as well as a complex tale of emotion, disgrace, history, and politics. It's also very tiring to read... not tiring, but saddening (depressing would be the wrong word). I felt very drained when done, the protagonist is so distant and the subject matter is so gray. I couldn't go to sleep after reading it so I had to go online and read "The Onion" first to cheer up a bit. I'm a tiny bit tired of ultra-distant narrators who move slowly through life and seem unable to control the events around them. That's the literary high-brow equivilant of independent films starring Philip Seymour Hoffman going through a alcohol/drug/gambling/other addiction downward spiral. It's usually really, really good but it gets kind of wearying.

Anyway, I'm not really complaining about this particular novel, because, if anything, this is the best of that kind out there, or at least one of the best. Definitely deserving praises. I just feel the desire to read something slightly more uplifting, or, at least something where the narrator is a bit closer and my emotions aren't deadened by the experience.

I decided to use my break to delve into a little non-fiction reading and breezed through the bestselling psychology primer by Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink." It's about how our subconscious mind makes decisions in the first two seconds or so of processing. This includes both brilliant observations on art and people and surviving desperate situations as well as biased judgments about people or things.

While the examples and research is interesting, it doesn't seem particularly filled with content. You learn some cool things about how your mind works, but it's mostly just that: learning some cool things about how your mind works. Since I'm not actually in this field I probably wouldn't enjoy reading a dense text book on the subject, but I expected it to have a little bit more technical information.

The book has an interesting quirk of repeating itself every couple of pages. Once Gladwell has referenced an example story, he brings up that story again in little summary sections the next time he tells a story. Of course, as the book goes on and he's told more stories this means he's repeating more and more stories each time. For example, let's say he's telling story D, when he's finishing it up he'll say something like, "And now, in story D, just like the man in story A and the woman in story B and the two women in story C, the three men in story D did this..." Towards the end of the book each section has at least a full page or two of listing out the previous stories. Seriously. You'd think I'm exaggerating but I'm not. At first it's an annoying quirk but then, actually, it gets pretty funny, it's so predictable.

I decided to read this book because it has occurred to me that, at least in my own opinion I'm decently skilled at weaving technical subjects (insurance mathematics, database programming, etc.) into my fiction such that the theme of the technical concept also resonates with the literary theme. Well, instead of saying "decently skilled" let's say I enjoy trying and probably failing to do such a thing. For example, in a story about a database analyst, the character is going through a personal situation where she needs to look at the "data" from her life and reevaluate... hopefully that doesn't seem as banal in the story itself. Anyway, both "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" seemed liked interesting topics that I could later take on in fiction. "Blink," unfortunately, has not provided a ton of story ideas. It's certainly an interesting concept but, frankly, the book just isn't that substantial. I'm still going to read "The Tipping Point" and hope for more material. I've been told it's a little bit weightier and, also, I've already got ideas for a story based on "Tipping Point" concepts. "Blink" is a very internal-only kind of thing, but "The Tipping Point" works (I think) on both an internal/personal and external/social level.

In what will probably become a MFA-break tradition for me, I read one of the novels of my upcoming workshop instructor, "Jernigan," by David Gates. It's a dark tale about the downward spiral of Peter Jernigan, who drinks himself into stupors, fails to connect with his son, ponders the deaths of his father and wife, shoots a hole in his hand, and seems to continually almost die himself. I'm not sure exactly what moral to take away from the novel, though I think taking away a moral would be missing the point. Peter Jernigan is a hyper-intelligent failure with lots of wit and self-destructive analysis, and its hard not to care about him as he wrecks his life.

I took David Gates' literature seminar last semester and I'm really looking forward to his creative writing workshop this coming semester. He dissected and discussed books and stories in the literature seminar with intelligence and wit, breathing new ideas even into novels I had read and discussed before. I'm hoping he's able to do the same thing with student-written works.

I read two short Loorie Moore stories from "Birds of America" for my literature seminar and thought they were great. I ended up reading the whole book cover to cover, which I rarely do for a collection of short stories. But she's got such a clever voice, it's a mix of sarcasm and sincerity, and I loved just about every one of her characters. The second to last story, "People Like That Are The Only People Here," with its combination of humor and personal tragedy, is about the second saddest short story I've ever read. (The first being "No One Writes to the Colonel" by Marquez.)

I'm working on a short story of my own right now that has been heavily influenced by this collection. Though, really, I think my style has alwasy been a bit along the lines of Loorie Moore, with a slightly absurd world and a cynical viewpoint that covers kindness. Or, at least, that's what I TRY to do and what I think Moore does successfully. Anyway...

For my last class-assigned book of the semester I read "The Dead Father" by Donald Barthelme. I've read it before and found it enjoyable though I didn't quite understand it, and, to be honest, I had a similar reaction this time. Though it's not a book that is grounded in any reality or meant to be understood. It's about a bunch of people dragging a giant dead father (who is at times very much alive) through the countryside by means of a large cable. It's an abstract emotional story about what it means to be a father and what it means to be a son. But, also, (as we discussed in class) it is Donald Barthelme's discussion about the plight of the writer trying to throw off previous, better writers he both admires and envies. Donald Barthelme's dead father was Samuel Beckett, whose dead father was James Joyce. In an attempt to do more than just a pale mimicking of a previous, better author a writer has to create something new while still giving credit to the old. And eventually become a Dead Father himself. It's something I really struggle with. A lot of my writing at this point is influcenced stylistically by other writers I'm currently reading, and I do this intentionally. But at some point I have a desire to really do something new and different, to somehow make a tiny dent on literature by not just adding a couple of good stories but by changing something. How? I don't know. For the moment I'm working on the couple of good stories part, and then if I can get that down I'll work on doing something that's really new.

I'm currently working on a novella/novel that is half art history and half spy story. Someone from my class recommended I read the novel "Fletch" because it too is an odd take on the spy novel genre. It's a little bit more whimsical than what I'm going for, though, then again, whenever I'm not trying to be funny everyone else seems to think I'm at my funniest. Anyway, I did get something out of the book, maybe a reminder not to take my character too seriously as he prances around Eruope looking for stolen Nazi loot, perhaps. Plus, "Fletch" is a quick read, I pretty much zipped through the whole thing on a train from Pennsylvania to Washington, DC.

I first read King Lear back in high school and I've always claimed it to be my favorite Shakespeare play, but recently I remembered that I didn't actually read the play in high school, I only read the Cliff Notes. Now, let me be clear: I was a good high school student and usually did all of the reading. I was, in fact, the only person in my class to actually read "Great Expectations" all the way through. Everyone else claimed the book's surprises were "obvious" and said I was dumb if I couldn't have guessed them, and I was pretty annoyed when I found out that no one else actually read the book. Of course the surprises are obvious if you read a summary of them in the beginning of the Cliff Notes! Anyway, my point is, I finally got around to actually reading "King Lear," and, lo and behold, it has been upheld as my favorite Shakespeare play. The ending is a bit anticlimactic, mainly because a lot of the exciting stuff (a battle between France and England) happens off stage, but back in Will's day there weren't special effects.

I've always been a bit conflicted about Shakespeare. Sure, he's the greatest writer who ever lived, but ever since having read "Merchant of Venice" I sort of look at him in a different way. "Merchant of Venice" is anti-Semitic. And I don't just mean anti-Semitic. Considering this is Shakespeare, it's the greatest (or worst, depending on how you want to phrase it) piece of anti-Semitic writing in the history of the English language. "King Lear" is probably one of the greatest pieces of anti-bastard writing in the history of the English language, but, to be honest, I don't care as much about bastards as I do about Semitics.

Raymond Carver's short stories, in dust jacket terminology, are classics of the form. Minimally emotional characters find themselves in financial or relationship trouble and sense but can't quite put into words the moth-ball stirrings of creaky machinery in their hearts and heads. It's hard not to admire Carver's writing and at the same time I have no desire to write like him. Well, okay, it's not that I don't want to write like Carver, it's that there are other authors who I would rather write like. Or, really, I don't want to just emulate and reproduce another authors writing, of course, but I want to follow in the footsteps so to speak. You know what I mean. Anyway... Carver: a classic of the form.

For my literature seminar I read "Molloy," the first book in what is Beckett's strange and mostly unconnected trilogy. I've read and seen a lot of his plays, but this was my first venture into Beckett fiction. "Molloy" is a difficult but incredibly rewarding novel. The first 100 pages consists of one very long paragraph written by a partially-crazy, mostly-crippled old man which asks the big question: will Molloy get to his mother's house? While the second 100 pages at least contains paragraph breaks and has slightly more of a plot, but doesn't make too much more sense.

The novel is, surprisingly, hilarious. The ridiculous ramblings of Molloy are so absurd that I constantly laughed out loud. At one point he spends seven pages wondering how he can arrange his 16 "sucking stones" (pebbles he keeps in his pocket for those times he wants to suck on something) in such a manner that he can suck them in order. Finally he realizes he doesn't care about sucking them in order, doesn't really need more than one stone, and doesn't even really care about sucking on stones anyway. The whole novel is like this.

I felt like I really "got" a lot of the novel. It's partially a commentary on the futility of writing (at least the futility of traditional writing) and it contains a lot of similar concepts as "Waiting for Godot." Including what I think is some interesting images of circles vs. lines, which, in the theater world means comedy vs. tragedy.

Unfortunately I'm going to miss next week's class when we will be discussing "Malone Dies," the next work in the trilogy, but I will probably read it anyway.

Being Halloween it seemed like a good day to finish rereading the Shelly classic, "Frankenstein." I read this once before in high school and now, in my advanced old age, I looked at the book with an entirely different kind of cynicism.

The sort of amusing problem I had while reading the book is I just couldn't get myself to swallow the science of the thing. I was willing to accept that Victor Frankenstein was able to animate this creature, I was even able to understand that the monster was actually strong and able to survive in the wild. But when it came time to build a female companion for the wretch, Victor decided he couldn't do it, he was too concerned that the two beings would procreate and breed a race of monsters to eventually wipe out all humans. I kept thinking to myself, "if you're building the female companion from discarded body parts, just build her without ovaries, you idiot." Anyway, I suppose that's not really the point of the book.

The other point where I have to struggle to quell my disbelief is when the monster takes shelter in a little wood shed outside of a house and coincidentally inside the house the occupants are teaching a foreigner to speak the language. By observing this education Frankenstein's monster gets to learn to speak, apparently like a college educated classics major. It's a little too convenient, though it would be less of an interesting parable and more like the horror movies you see on television if the monster just wandered around groaning all the time instead of engaging his creator in philosophical debate.

Aside from these issues it's a good book. Victor Frankenstein is sort of a schmuck, and I have a lot more sympathy for the monster than for him. Victor spends at least half the novel in a stupor, either caught up in the frenzy of science, collapsed out of fear and exhaustion, or rambling in fever and remorse. Sometimes you just want to slap him and say, "Go be nice to the poor wretch you created for like ten minutes and maybe you'll stop having all these problems."

It's interesting to note that the monster as described in this book sounds a lot SCARIER looking than the traditional Frankenstein's monster we see in movies and television (you know, the one with a big flat-topped head and bolts in his neck). The monster in this book has translucent skin which reveals all the blood and muscles working beneath it, and apparently is so horrible looking that no human can look at him (even his creator) without totally freaking out.

It's also got me wondering: if an eight foot tall monster speaking with the diction of an english professor walked into my apartment and pleaded for a moment of my time, then proceeded to explain his difficult situation and made no other request than for my friendship, would I listen to his plight or would I run screaming from the room? I'd like to think I'd at least give him a chance, but who am I kidding? I'd run away screaming.

I was only supposed to read four Hemingway short stories for my class but I managed to misplace my notebook where I'd written WHICH four short stories. So instead I jumped around the book reading any short story with a title that sounded in any way familiar and might have been one of the titles I'd written down. Finally I found my notebook and discovered I'd not read a single assigned short story, but at least I found it in time to read the correct short stories. Fortunately Hemingway stories are pretty short. Anyway, I've probably read at least half of the book by now, and with short story collections I consider that enough for BookTrack.

My biggest takeaways:
1) I can see how Hemingway is considered a master craftsman
2) I waver between thinking these are fantastic short stories and thinking that I really don't like them.

I have a very un-Hemingway writing style, with a lot of long sentences and, more importantly, with a lot of intentionally embedded and linked themes and symbols.

After discussing three of his short stories in class ("Indian Camp," "After the Storm," and "The Light of the World") I have some more respect for the work. There is an incredible amount of depth and characterization that Hemingway gets across in very few words. While he may not be doing the sort of things with themes and symbols and words that my favorite authors do (Rushdie, Marquez, Wallace, DeLillo, etc.) he is doing something else entirely. My great uncle is a minimalist painter, with large whitewashed canvases focusing on small items (trash cans, mailboxes, etc) in the middle. I really like his work though I still appreciate other, less minimalist types of painting. I guess it can be the same thing with Hemingway.

Well, I had to read "To the Lighthouse" for my literature seminar, and I know just about every write loves this novel and talks about how its their inspiration for writing and everything but I just didn't like it. It's stream of consciousness gobbledygook with no coherent plot, it's high-handed musings on death, and it plays obnoxious but too-obvious tricks on the reader, and the point of view flows from one mind to another with no change of voice.

The plot of the book can be summed up as follows:
1. They don't go to a lighthouse.
2. There is a brief interlude where parenthetical expressions let you know that some people died.
3. They go to a lighthouse.

Other things that annoyed me about the book:
- Since you spend so much time in people's heads, conversations of four sentences literally take twenty pages.
- The characters are essentially psychic, reading each others' minds rather than having actual dialogue. In fact, Woolf often points out how the characters seem to know other characters are thinking as if by "ESP." These are not characters, they are metaphorical shells with which Woolf plays literary games.
- I don't actually believe any of these characters. Everyone seems to talk about how this book is soooo realistic because you're so deep in the characters' heads, but I didn't buy any of it. Everything was so artificial.

Anyway, those were just a few of my problems.

I had to go online and find some summary notes of the book because I thought I must have completely missed the whole point. It turns out I understood it quite well, and, in fact, even got most of the important symbolism, even though I skimmed half of the thing in frustration. (Yes, okay, to be totally honest I have to I admit that I skimmed a lot of it, but I went back and made sure I'd read all of it later. I read at least 150 pages before I started skimming.)

After discussing the book in class my opinion has only wavered slightly. My instructor, David Gates, is fantastic, and he can dissect a book or short story with the skill of a literary surgeon, but not even he could convince me to like a book I didn't like. He did convince me, however, that "To the Lighthouse" is an important book for a writer to read and understand. The fact that the construction of the book is so apparent and Woolf's hand is visible in every line was the intention. I guess that's why so many writers like the book - you can practically SEE the writing process - but to me it just makes me think Woolf was a pretentious writer and thought she was better than everyone else. Which, apparently, is true.

After I enjoyed "War Trash" so much my girlfriend bought me Ha Jin's earlier novel, "Waiting." It too is an excellent book and I really like Ha Jin. I've been reading it for a week or two though I put it aside to read "Sense and Sensibility" for class. It was interesting to read the two novels at the same time because there are some strange similarities. One is about early 1800s England and one is about contemporary China (or China in the 1960s through 1980s). But in both the obligations and duty regarding relationships that binds the characters is so much stronger (and different) than anything in modern American culture. The main character in "Waiting" (Lin Kong) could be another version of the character Edward Ferrars is "Sense and Sensibility," both are quiet, well-meaning, and proper men who love one woman but are bound by an obligation to another.

Actually, the book that this REALLY reminds me of is "Enemies: A Love Story" by Isaac Bashevis Singer, which is also a fantastic novel. The plots are actually quite similar, and the main characters are truly cross-continental dopplegangers. I feel like I could write a paper comparing the two books. I read "Enemies: A Love Story" because my brother recommended it to me, and I feel my brother should read "Waiting" to round out his literary review of quiet, duty-bound, partially-empty men bound to multiple women.

My first assignment for graduate school was to read Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility." It was the first book I've read by Jane Austen and it was quite good. I'm not running out to read all her other books but I would certainly not complain if I had to read more. It's sort of like early 1800s chick lit, but, you know, the high quality chick lit, not one of the pulp paperbacks.

I found it particularly amusing that in the novel characters use the phrase "making love" to refer to a man having an intimate conversation with a woman. But I suppose that's actually a more literal use of the words because it is when a man is making a woman love him.

I probably would have more to say but I am sort of lightheaded with allergy medicine right now. Apparently my NYC allergies are reacting to something. Maybe I just have a cold. Anyway, I just finished another book I have to record here as well so I'm going to get on with it and then go to bed.

What is there to say? David Sedaris is really, really funny.

Okay, actually I do have something to say about it. Sometimes the short essays in the book are good for a chuckle, sometimes tremendous laughter. Sometimes they are poignant and funny, moving stories about a family that after reading four of his books I feel like I know and care about a great deal. And sometimes I finish reading a piece and I realize that if I were to take away all the background information I've collected over the course of his books and just consider it a story about a gay man and his father (or something like that) then it would simply be an excellent short story. Just because Sedaris is writing personal humorous essays doesn't mean he isn't also an excellent crafter of fiction. I think I'm going to try to study some of his essays and use them as a guide to writing a fiction piece. He consistently balances on the edge of letting us care about him and his families without actually giving away too much of the emotional. It's good writing. I want to give an example, but that would be too much effort. You'll just have to trust me.

Delillo is one of my favorite authors, or, at least "White Noise" is one of my favorite books. Since "Mao II" is (a) on the potential reading list for one of MFA classes this term, and (b) I claim that I love Don Delillo is one of my favorite authors, and (c) I needed something to read, I decided to read it. Well, as it turns out: (a) it's a great book and (b) I've read it before. I suppose you might think the book isn't memorable if I'd already read it and forgotten about it, and you'd kind of have a point, but it still is really good. And, frankly, I pretty much remembered the whole thing as soon as I read the first page. I kept thinking to myself, "Oh, is this the book where such-and-such happens" and then I'd be right.

Do I want to say anything about the book? Well, not really. Lately I've felt more like discussing the arcane circumstances surrounding my reading of a book rather than the actual book itself. The plot is about someone who clones thousands of Mao's to create a giant Mao army that threatens the world. Just kidding. It's about art and terror. I don't like it as much as "White Noise" but I still like it. My ranking of Delillo books so far is "White Noise" at the number one spot, "Mao II" at the number 2 spot, and then everything else.

Well, damn it, I was forced into reading the next Harry Potter book. My girlfriend pretty much shoved it into my hands and said, "Read!" She's getting her PhD in comparative literature, so normally her book suggestions are slightly less mainstream, but Harry Potter appears to be a unifying force for pleasure in the literary world. I must admit, the book was good, and about a million times better than the snoozer that was number 5.

Anyway, since I'm apparently the last person in the world to have read this book, I'm not going to discuss it. Instead I'll talk about the fact that I've linked not to the amazon.com copy, but to the amazon.co.uk "Adult Edition" of the book. By "Adult Edition" I don't mean the pornographic version, I mean that in England there is one printing with a cartoonish cover for the kids and one with a classy cover for the adults. My girlfriend prefers those nice, classy covers. I too enjoyed the adult edition cover because I was able to read the book on a plane without everyone knowing I was reading Harry Potter. But since 75% of the plane was also reading Harry Potter I guess I should just get over it and admit that I like the teenage wizard.

After reading "A Prayer for Owen Meany" I was excited about reading some more John Irving, so I picked up "The Fourth Hand" and managed to blow through it in a few days. (Lots of delayed plane flights helped speed along the reading.) While I consumed the book quickly and enjoyed reading it, I can't really say I think it's that good. It lacks the depth of Owen Meany and it has a few continuity problems. The book can be described as

1) 55% weird love story about a one handed man and a widow.
2) 35% exposition about how the media over report tragedies while ignoring the context.
3) 10% tangent about a doctor who does hand transplants.

My biggest problem is with item number 2. Writing a novel that really explores today's media frenzy for tragedy and oddity is a good theme. However, I just didn't feel it fit naturally into this book. The protagonist is a reporter who lost his hand to lions on television during a broadcast and later becomes the news network's reporter for all other bizarre tragedies and events. He constantly is thinking or talking about his dislike of the news coverage and how he'd like to change it, but all of this seems to sit on top of the novel rather than work as an essential part of it. The commentary doesn't drive the novel forward and has almost no interaction with the love story. And the chapter about the doctor is simply out of place, the doctor and his life is so thoroughly introduced but then pretty much dropped from the novel, though I admit it was one of my favorite chapters.

I also bought "The World According to Garp" (both books were on sale at Borders) but I think I'm going to hold off on reading it for a while.

WARNING: SPOILERS. Don't read this if you plan on reading the novel and will be upset by vague spoilers.

Grad school starts soon so I'm running out of time to do leisure reading. Ah, college, when all your reading is assigned. Since I'm studying creative writing instead of computer science I should, in theory, be reading lots of interesting and well written books instead of, for example, computational geometry. The good news is I have $125 worth of Amazon.com gift certificates saved up to buy my books.

The point is I just finished one of the last books I'll get to choose myself, Ian Mcewan's "Atonement." I enjoyed it, and one day I hope to read more by Mcewan, though that probably won't be for a while (see above). The book's different sections are truly different, not only spanning decades but taking on very different narrative styles. The whole thing is a bit meta-fictional, and though it is meta-fictional with a point (i.e. being meta-fictional actually drives the novel's plot and theme) I always tend to get a little uncomfortable during direct meta-fiction (by direct, I mean fiction featuring characters who are writers potentially writing the fiction you are reading). Actually, I shouldn't say "always," since I used to be crazy about it. These days I'm a little down on meta-fiction, at least direct meta-fiction. Currently I prefer my meta-fiction to be inconspicuously vague.

My other concern about the book is the title: Atonement. To me this was more about the crime than the atonement for the crime. Or, rather, it was more about the crime and then wondering about how to atone for the crime than it was about the actual atonement, though I suppose approaching the topic of atoning for the unatonable is worthy of the title atonement. But so many novels are about crime, repentance, and redemption, that I think you are asking for it when you name your novel thus. A book like "The Story of Lucy Gault" seems more like an "Atonement" to me. Though I suppose the title could be said to be a description of the novel rather than the title. The novel itself is the atonement. And bearing that in mind I suppose it works.

I start classes at the New School in September and I had
to select my preference for workshop instructor. On the advice of a friend, New School alumni, and former creative writing instructor (all the same person) I read the book "The Liberty Campaign" by one of the New School teachers, Jonathan Dee. Well, it was excellent and I have signed up for his course, so hopefully I'll be taking it in a month.

It's a very introspection heavy novel, focusing on the thoughts of a soon-to-be-65 year-old marketing executive. He reconsiders his life when faced with his looming retirement, his son's waning career as a professional baseball player, and the discovery that his long time neighbor may or may not be a former Brazilian torturer in hiding. Though the last item in that list might seem a little shocking it actually gets about the same page count as the other two topics, which is highly appropriate. The very fact that in the suburbs people can sit around and inactively contemplate the fact that a neighbor might have once hung people by their toenails is one of the revelations the narrator sits around and inactively contemplates. The book asks and doesn't quite answer questions about our ability to know evil and judge others and about the things that make someone's life successful.

Reading the book I ran into the problem of "knowing too much" about the author. The funny thing is I don't know anything about the author, really (though I hope to learn from him soon) aside from the fact that he teaches from the New School and that he isn't what you'd consider a household name yet. And just knowing that I'm reading a relatively unknown author who might be teaching me puts a different spin on my reaction to the book. Though I really enjoyed, I couldn't help looking at everything with a critical eye. Somehow it seemed a little less polished or perfect than books by more famous authors (and by "more famous authors" I mean GOOD more famous authors, of the kind that I have reviewed in previous book track entries). But I'm not sure if this is simply because I know that Dee is "less accomplished" or, rather, less universally acclaimed. If Jonathan Dee were a household name who had written twenty books, all considered to be masterpieces, would I still notice any "roughness" in this novel? Well, in my defense, I did recently read Rushdie's first novel, "Grimus," and I thought it was pretty bad despite the fact that he is one of my favorite authors. I suppose since I expect to be studying with Jonathan Dee I had to look very closely at the writing itself as opposed to just reading the book, which may account for my more nit-picky feelings.

Maybe all books should be published without names so that we can be completely free to read without any potential author-based bias. Though somehow I feel that would be impractical for the reader. And since I want to be a famous author, it would also be impractical for me.

I'd been thinking of reading Ha Jin's "War Trash" for a while since it is so highly acclaimed. It's one of those books that I'd spend a little more time staring at while shopping or would keep popping up in my Amazon.com recommendations but I just never really got the urge to take the relationship any further. Then I found myself at the King of Prussia Borders browsing their buy-two-get-one-free section with "War Trash" as my potential get-one-free. I read the first two pages while standing over the table and didn't put it down until I finished on a train ride last night. (Okay, that's not quite true - I put it down to pay for it, and to go apartment hunting in NYC, and to travel to Washington D.C. for interviews.)

Needless to say, I really enjoyed it. It is a story about a Chinese POW during the Korean War. Yu Yuan is not a communist but out of a sense of duty to his mother and his fiance he wants to be repatriated to communist China after release. This makes him an outsider in a camp of outsiders. He is caught between the pro-Nationalist Chinese POWs who hate him because he doesn't want to go to Taiwan and the Communist Chinese POWs because he isn't a Party member. As an intelligent, educated man and the best English speaking POW, he forges relationships with American GIs and is often used as a translator. He tends to go where fate takes him, with the difficult goals of protecting his life, returning to China, and not doing anything that would show him as a traitor to China (therefore causing harm to his family back home).

Because of Yu Yuan's situation he is both wrapped up in all the intriguing politics of the POW camp but also remains what he considers to be objective. But the reality is he is completely subjective. Rather than being partisan to one group he judges everybody harshly, reading into the motives of the prisoners and guards even when they do seemingly noble or brave things. He is truly a solitary man who is separated from others because of his position and because of his own thoughts.

The book, while attempting to show the horror of war does what many other well-intentioned war books and movies do, which is actually glorify it instead. "Saving Private Ryan" is still one of the only war movies I've seen that actually manages to make me pray that I'm never a soldier. Every other war movie or book awakens the fifteen year-old boy in me, at least a little, to think that war is a place for man's nobility and honor to shine through. I guess it's because despite a lot of people dying needlessly and cruelly, we are always following the story of a man who rises above it all. Maybe someone should write a war novel where the main character gets shot in the head halfway through the book or dies of dysentery or something.

[Note: On my normal blog these posts go into a separate section for personal viewing. However, until my normal blog is repaired everyone will have to deal with my book tracking alongside other posts.]

Despite my failure to ever finish reading "Anna Karenina," I have proved my ability to get through long Russian classics by reading "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I have mixed feelings about this novel, though I can see why it is a classic. It kept me engaged throughout, except for the second quarter of the book where the main character, Raskolnikov, wanders around and thrashing around in a delirious haze. That section dragged on a bit, there's only so much I can read about a man lying in bed, ranting to himself, and shouting at people to leave him alone, but once he was up and about again it got really exciting. A lot of this is a crime drama, and I loved the scenes where Raskolnikov is talking with (or, really, being talked at by) the detective. Part of the tension is wondering whether and when Raskolnikov will crack.

The story tends to get bogged down by discussions on the main character's belief in a Nietzschean ubermensch philosophy. This does serve to create a fuller picture of the mostly unrepentant Raskolnikov, but I didn't think it added that much to the novel. If you want to read about Nietzschean ubermensch philosophies you should read Nietzsche.

As for the albatross around me neck, "Anna Karenina," while I'm not willing to say I've officially abandoned it, I'm at least putting it off for the forseeable future. I've got a list of other books to read that are going to come first, including "The Liberty Campaign" by Jonathan Dee, a potential instructor of mine at the New School.

Feeling a bit nostalgic after seeing the movie, I decided to reread the entire "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy. I've been zipping through the five books (plus one short story) included in the "complete" edition over the last month or so, whenever I needed a break from "Crime and Punishment" or one of the other books taking up my time recently. (I decided to wait until I finished the whole set rather than post about each individual book, especially considering the series is shorter than the aforementioned Dostoevsky work.)

Though I only ever read the books once before during my adolscent days, I remembered almost every detail. I felt that the second book ("The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe") is actually both funnier and a better social commentary than the first. The series does drag down a little bit after that, but it is still funny and clever and a decent read. (The only first-time reading for me was the included short story "Young Zaphod Plays it Safe," which, unfortuantely, is sort of dumb and is just a thinly veiled commentary on Adams' dislike for then-president Ronald Reagan. Oh, well.)

Anyway, hopefully I'll finish up "Crime and Punishment" soon. Unlike "Anna Karenina" I actually will finish this lengthly Russian novel in a reasonable period of time.

I bought "Nine Stories" specifically to read the short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which is the first (bibliographically) and last (chronologically) story about Seymour Glass, the often mentioned character in Salinger's novels, novellas, and stories. I didn't get around to reading the rest of the stories until now (five months later) but I'm glad I did. It's concise and well written, in the Salinger style of super-intelligent children and ultra-distant adults. My favorite story is "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," which is the tale of a disaffected teenager who pretends to be an accomplished thirty year-old artist and moves to Canada to work in an art correspondance school. It's funny and touching and I really loved it.

I bought this book Wednesday afternoon at the airport and finished it by the time I arrived in Austin. However, due to poor weather it took me 24 hours of travel time, so reading a whole book is not actually that impressive.

"A Long Way Down" is Horby's latest, better than "How to Be Good" but worse than his other books. It tells the story of four potential suicides who meet right before the attempt, alternating narration between each character's point of view.

I do care about the different characters, even though each only gets a quarter of the air time. One of the four is this incredibly annoying and dense 18 year-old girl. She occasionally gets on my nerves but that's what she's supposed to do. She serves an interesting purpose in the novel, which is to make sure it never gets too maudlin, and in a novel about four suicidal strangers finding a reaffirmation of life through each other you can imagine that overly-sentimental prose is always lurking around the corner. The best example of this and I think also one of the best moments of the book is when the group is discussing how if they hadn't suffered then they wouldn't be who they are today. One of the characters is saying that she doesn't wish none of her suffering happened because then she'd be somebody different. The annoying young girl doesn't get it. When someone asks her how she'd feel if she were an entirely different person she replies, "That would be fucking excellent." It doesn't quite translate here, but it's a good moment. It takes a moment that is getting a little too heavy and gives it a humorous twist and it also forces the reader to confront what is a standardly accepted piece of cliche philosophy.

One of the four characters is an American (if you don't know, Hornby is British and all his novels take place in England, despite the Americanization that occurs in two of the three movies based on his books). The American guy mentions or thinks about 9/11 about ten times in the novel, which I found pretty amusing. I guess the rest of the world assumes Americans constantly talk about 9/11. I guess we sort of do, especially our president.

I'm always excited when I find a new author I enjoy, especially when that author is critically respected and has a lot of books available for me to read, so good news about "A Prayer for Owen Meany": I loved it! It made me laugh, it made me cry, etc. I will definitely read more Irving. Plus I want to watch the movie, "Simon Birch," which was based on this book (though it looks like the movie changed things significantly, including all the character names).

I want to discuss something that may be a bit of a spoiler for the book, so if you don't want spoilers don't read any more. Since I don't think anyone reads my book track except for me I'm not going to worry too much about spoilers, but you've been warned.

It's always interesting when there are "miracles" in books or movies. It's no surprise that this book ends with a miracle because the narrator discusses it for the entire book. But how do you get the reader to "believe" in the miracle.

Miracles in books (or movies) can be either be predicted or a surprise.

A surprise miracle is one that occurs out of nowhere. For example, an angel appears or somebody who was going to die ends up being healed. Sure, it's a miracle, and you might believe it is happening simply because you believe the writing, but there's no real reason to believe the miracle other than the fact that the book tells you to believe it. This depends highly on the writing and the tone set by the novel, and if it is done well you will believe that in this world miracles can occur, if done poorly you don't believe in it. In a book anything can happen, so writing about an angel appearing isn't really creating a miracle for the reader.

A predicted miracle is one where the reader is told ahead of time that a miracle is going to happen and given clues as to how the miracle is going to happen, such that when the miracle happens the reader knew it was coming all along. This is like the miracle in "Owen Meany" or the one in M. Night Shyamalan
"Signs." A made-up example might be a character who, let's say, lost a leg in an accident and has a false leg, then years later is able to escape from some tough situation (everyone is chained by the foot?) and save a bunch of people because he is able to remove his false leg. It's a stupid example and seems more like a coincidence than a miracle, but with enough moving parts like that a novel can make it seem like a miracle. To do it well it must be both a surprise and inevitable, the signs must be there the whole time. Done poorly it is contrived (like my example) and the reader/viewer either predicts it ahead of time or says to himself at the time of the miracle, "Well, of course that guy had a false leg and was able to escape, the author wrote it that way so it would seem like a miracle." To seem like a real miracle the author's hand must somehow dissapear from view, the reader needs to feel that all the pieces 'fit' just right to make the miracle, that all the clues were simply natural details from the story. The reader must feel there is no other way the story could have gone.

"Owen Meany" does this perfectly. Even knowing that a miracle was coming and knowing essentially what the miracle would be it wasn't until perhaps the sentence before it happened (when it was already happening, really) that I gasped and realized what was going on, realized how all the facts that had been given to me over and over were suddenly shifting to create a miracle. It's almost like a solution to a good mystery, and is incredibly hard to do.

I want to explain the miracle in "Owen Meany" but (a) that would ruin it and (b) there's no way for me to do it right anyway. Any explanation I would give would make it seem contrived. You have to read the book, essentially be told what the miracle is ahead of time, and then still find yourself surprised at the end. That's the only way to understand it.

I have other things I could say about this book but I've already rambled on for too long.

Ah, Tom Stoppard. Surely one of the best playwrights of our time. I've been sort of down on theater lately and haven't been reading as many plays as I used to, but every time I pick up something by Stoppard it makes me want to write for the stage. It's all about language and words and how we abuse and misunderstand and talk through each other. Good stuff.

The newest book, "Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk is, first and foremost, perhaps the most digusting thing I've ever read. Really. The first short story made me sick to my stomach, and, unfortunately, I read it just before boarding a plane for an eight hour trip (there was an unplanned three hour wait before takeoff). Was it disgusting in a "this is brilliant how an author can bring literature to such a disgusting new low" sort of way or in a "this is disgusting for the sake of being disgusting with no literary value" sort of way? I'm not quite sure.

The book is made up of about twenty people (semi-voluntarily) trapped together in an abandoned theater and woven between the main plot are individual short stories about each person. The short stories are quite good (though note that the first one of the bunch is the "most disgusting story ever") but the main plot is pretty bad. First of all, I just could not believe it. All these characters are doing terrible things to themselves and each other so that when they are finally "rescued" they will become famous for thier ordeal. It's an interesting premise and it is an interesting extension of our current mass-media culture of capitalizing on our own suffering, but it just didn't really work. In fact, reading this book made me think that some of the antics you see being played out on the news aren't so bad after all - most people would probably (hopefully) prefer to keep family tragedies private and nothing like this book's plot would ever really happen. Second of all, the characters, even with the individual stories, never get any of my sympathy, perhaps because the individual stories are so disconnected from the actual book. I've never agreed so much with Amazon.com reviewers before.

The biggest problem I have with the book is that the character short stories, though individually excellent, are really inconsistent with the main plot. I suspect that Chuck Palaniuk wrote them as what they are, short stories, and then only afterwards decided to weave them together into a novel. Some threads go through each short story, some do not. In fact, it is mentioned multiple times how each character has killed somebody in their story, but, well, that's simply not the case. Plus there is one science-fiction story that, while good, does not fit here at all, and if we are to accept its premise as true in the universe of this novel, it completely negates any sense or reality the novel might have had.

Anyway, great short story collection, interesting but insubstantion and inconsistent main plot. Since I'd have recommended the book if it were simply a short story collection, I still would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes Chuck Palahniuk or overly disgusting narratives. But it's better if you sort of pretend the main plot is distinct from the interpersed stories so as not to lessen the value of them.

I loved this book. Long ago I attempted to read Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" and gave up about a third into it because the book was just too dense with historical names and facts without enough plot. While "The Name of the Rose" is similarly dense with information I felt the balance with characters and mystery worked great. There are some beautiful Borge-esque descriptions of libraries and labyrinths, there is very interesting historical discussions about Christianity and the Inquisition, and there are great theological and philosophical debates. All this in the middle of a compelling murder mystery.

I don't think everyone will like this book. It definitely has as much (or more) straight exposition as actual narrative, and it can be a little hard to follow at times. But if you're the sort of person who will read the whole book and not give up after the first 100 pages, you'll probably love it.

Well, I have officially stopped reading "Vernon God Little" half-way through. This won the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and I couldn't even get through it. My girlfriend read it before me (and, actually, sort of warned me not to read it but I did anyway because I had no other books available) so she was able to tell me how it ended. I'm glad I stopped.

It's told from the point of view of a fifteen year old boy who has been accused of being the second shooter in a terrible school shooting spree. It's riddled with curse words and disgusting moments (not normally a problem for me - I love that sort of stuff when done well, such as by Martin Amis). The main problem I have with it is that it is totally and completely unbelievable. The evil and stupidity of the characters is completely one-dimensional and unrealistic, way past my point of disbelief suspension. I could probably go on but don't really feel like an extended review of a book I didn't like and didn't finish.

Note: Despite the fact that I haven't yet finished reading "Anna Karenina," I still plan on completing it eventually. Unlike this book it has not been abandoned.

The recent death of legendary gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson inspired me to read his iconic work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." I enjoyed it immensely, though it is somewhat disconected and never really gets around to the subtitle's promise of "A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream." The whole theme is pretty minor and is barely mentioned apart from a few tongue-in-cheek references and one slightly unbelievable scene where he asks some credulous diner staff where to find the "American Dream" and they send him to an old dance club. Otherwise the book is really a criticism about both the American anti-drug culture and the American pro-drug culture. Finding himself completely high and acting as a journalist for a law enforcement drug conference he shows us how off-track the police force and anti-drug policy is, but at the same time he doesn't condone drug use. It seems like his message is that no one should tell people not to use drugs, but all the same those people would probably be better off if they decided on their own not to use them.

The best moments of the book are when he slips into an almost prophetic self-loathing, such as when he describes his destroyed, drug filled hotel room and says that he can't even try to pretend that it is some sort of "druggie display" for the law enforcement conference because no one would ever have so many different drugs and refuse in their room. But, of course, this is his actual room, and he does have all these drugs and refuse, and he is telling us he has sunk lower than the lowest drug user.

One interesting note: I knew that the Duke character in the Doonesbury comic stip (originally) represented Hunter S. Thompson (check the character FAQ a few questions in) but until reading "Fear & Loathing" I didn't realize that Thompson's alter ego is actually Duke.

Well, I finished all my books while traveling to NJ/NY an had to buy one in the minimal airport bookstore for the ride home. I ended up with "Bringing Down the House," the journalistic non-fiction story of some MIT students who learned how to do "team counting" in the mid-90's and took the casinos for millions in blackjack.

It's actually quite interesting if not a little overdramatic. I enjoy it when mathematicians take center stage and it was fun to see a bunch of MIT students fall into the seedy Vegas lifestyle. The ending never quite comes through with the dangerous explosive ending the blurbs on the cover lead you to expect, though there is a bit of rough housing and some ominous smoking figures in alleyways.

The book falls into the "random metaphor" trap with sentences such as "the casino would take more money than a NYC rental agent" that are a little out of place. I kept feeling like the author was trying to hard to take an interesting gambling story and make it clever or literary.

For those interested in the cheating method rather than the story, I'll explain it here. Counting cards at blackjack is actually pretty simple, there is a standard simple method called "HiLo" where you essentially just keep track of high vs low cards in your head. It lets you know when the remaining cards in the deck are statistically more likely to be in your favor. If you do this perfectly you get about a 2% edge over the house. There are two flaws with it: 1) It's really hard to make a lot of money this way because you have to keep betting even when the deck is not in your favor, and 2) it's really easy for the casino to spot. When a guy bets 5 dollars, 5 dollars, 5 dollars, 100 dollars, 5 dollars, etc., they know something is up.

The team strategy they came up with works by having "spotters" at the black jack table who keep count and always bet the minimum even when the cards are good. What they do is signal for another player to join the table when the count is good. This new player joins and bets really heavy, then leaves when the spotter tells them the count is no longer good. The player will then go to another table with a different spotter saying the count is good. This way you get rid of flaw (1) by always playing the maximum bets at tables with good counts and only blowing very low bets with the spotters when the count is bad. And you get rid of flaw (2) because it is much harder for a casino to catch. The player making big bets is ALWAYS making big bets, so he doesn't seem to be inconsistent and doesn't look like he is counting cards. In fact, he isn't counting cards, he's just coming to a table when someone else calls him there.

Anyway, most casinos won't let you join a table in the middle of a blackjack shoe (what you call the six decks played until reshuffling) anymore so this doesn't couldn't work. But it's pretty crafty. Quite simple, actually.

"The Final Solution" is an interesting combination of the mystery genre and literary fiction. I haven't read a lot of mystery novels, so I can't comment on how well or poorly it maps to the genre, but it does a decent job of being literary. Pulitzer-Prize-winning Chabon really likes to play with genre... he wrote what IMDB.com calls the "screen story" for SpiderMan, for example.

This novel is set in 1940s and tells the story of an old and formerly famous detective coming out of retirement for one last case. (The old man is suspiciously similar to Sherlock Holmes, though his name is never mentioned.) The title of the novel refers both to the detective's last case and the fact that the mystery involves a young boy who survived the Holocaust. The old man is a very complete character, he has not aged well and is struggling with the loss of his mental acuity, at the same time he is trying to pull it all together and not just solve a mystery but recapture some of his past glory. The rest of the cast does not quite make the leap from one to two dimensions and appear more like stock mystery characters.

While I won't give anything more away, I wasn't that satisfied with the mystery's conslusion. I actually liked the story's conclusion well enough, but not the mystery. For a novel that both elevates and emulates the mystery genre, the solution was a bit too cliche and a bit too easy.

I decided to give some more Lightman a try after reading "Einstein's Dreams." "Reunion" is written with a very light, quiet tone. It's about an older man who is overwhelmed by a flashback to a lost love while at his college reunion. The story is really resolved but it shouldn't be. It's less a complete plot and more like a witness to an intimate moment in his memory. There are a few things that don't fit together, mainly the build up to the flashback when he prepares for the reunion and starts meeting a few old friends. There is a great section about the strange biography written by an old acquaintance, but it gets dropped and doesn't really tie back into the story. I realize how it thematically fits in with the larger work, but the placement stuck out to me. All in all it was a good book and I'd like to read his other novel, "The Diagnosis."

Note: I've got four books to enter here since I've been traveling and haven't had time to update BookTrack. I'm entering them in the order of completion, but not the specific day completed.

So have I mentioned I really love Steve Martin? How could I not love him? He's a comedian, he's a novelist, he's a playwright... I suppose with all that going for him one can forgive him for the acting thing.

Anyway, a wonderful friend of mine gave me this book of plays for my birthday. It was an entertaining read, though I think perhaps I'd enjoy it more on stage. These remind me of plays that I would write, though despite my unlimited pride that's not exactly a compliment. There are some moments that just seem a little immature to me, and by immature I mean in a theatrical sense, as if the playwright is playing some meta-games not because they are essential to the work but because the playwright is still exploring with the medium of stage. For example, at one point an actor grabs a playbill from an audience member to point out that someone entered the stage in the wrong order of appearance. It's funny, but it also seems a bit too silly, out of place in the larger work, and a little amateur... like I said, something I myself might write.

I've got a lot of books to catch up on in BookTrack so I'm going to skip commenting on each of the individual plays.

Like many else who have read this book, I did so because it is Salman Rushdie's first novel. Rushdie is one of my favorite authors, and I place "The Moor's Last Sigh," "Satanic Verses," and "Midnight's Children" among the best books I have ever read. "Grimus," while well written (in terms of language and style) and showing hints of Rushdie-to-come, is really a jumble of a work and difficult to read.

The plot can (loosely) be summed up by the following list:
1) Boy becomes immortal
2) Boy goes to find man who made him immortal
3) Boy stumbles upon an island of immortal people and weird stuff happens until it stops.

I've pontificated about good/bad genre science-fiction and good/bad literary science-fiction before, but this book is hard to characterize. It's definitely got the traits of genre science-fiction, in that it invents a new universe with its own rules and then the books ends through a manipulation of that universe. You can't look at the ending and think about how it reflects upon our world, because it's purely invented. But it doesn't have the satisfaction of an Asimovian logic puzzle because the universe Rushdie creates doesn't have any sort of consistent explanation. In fact, this book ends almost literally with a deus ex machina, or, in this case, an "alien ex machina," because some alien characters that were mentioned only briefly and tangentially (maybe 5 pages out of 400) suddenly show up at the end and help set things straight.

As for literary science fiction, it's hard to really call it that either. It definitely explores the themes of being outcast from your peers and longing to belong, plus the concept of free will, plus the abuse absolute power and knowledge. It also has the beginnings of trademark Rushdie wordplay. But the characters aren't really compelling and I don't see them as particularly multi-dimensional (aside from the fact that they often travel multi-dimensionally). (That was a little trademark Rushdie wordplay for you.) So it's hard for me to call this good literary science-fiction or good genre science fiction. I suppose it is just mediocre literary and genre science fiction.

Anyway, don't read this book unless you've read everything by Rushdie and you want to complete the set (like me). And please don't read it first if you've never read his other books.

My girlfriend gave me this book for my birthday and I've been reading through it in small doses (e.g. in the bathroom) ever since (I quickly learned that reading it before bed was a bad idea). It's a clever survival guide to surviving a zombie attack, and, supposing that zombies do actually have the characteristics described in this book, it would make quite handy reading. The interesting thing is that at no point in this book does it ever break character. The entire book is written as if it is a totally serious survival guide. I want to call it "funny" but it isn't really funny. It's kind of meta-funny. It's one big joke and it's funny because it takes itself so seriously, but each individual part is not actually funny. Probably it was meant to be read in bits and pieces to joke about, however, being obsessed with zombies, I read it cover-to-cover.

Since I finished reading my last book on the first leg of my plane ride to New York, I had to buy some new books for the trip home. I got "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" at the Barnes & Nobles near Times Square, and then finished THAT book on the first leg of the plane ride home. Fortunately I had the foresite to buy TWO books, so I had a back-up for the second leg.

My sister-in-law recommended this book to me and I thank her for it! It's a "mystery" novel about an autistic child trying to solve the murder of his neighbor's dog. It's interesting because the child notices things that a normal person wouldn't, but also misunderstands the most basic of clues. It's really not a mystery novel, but a story about an autistic child struggling to deal with his family, his schoolmates, and the confusing non-autisitc world around him. It's great, especially if you love novels with obsessive-compulsive narrators who label chapter headings with prime numbers, as I definitely do.

Now I'm halfway through Salman Rushdie's first novel, "Grimus", so it looks like Tolstoy will have to continue to wait.

With cleverly diminishing linguistic wordplay, "Ella Minnow Pea" follows the island of Nollop as the totalitarian town council systematically bans letters from the English language as each of those letters falls one-by-one from a statue in the center of town. The statue is honoring the man (Nollop) who created the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." The plight of the oppressed villagers is hysterical and moving, and as the letters fall from the statue so to do they disappear from the book itself.

This is the author's first novel, though he's written over 25 plays, and you can tell this is a playwright's work. It's composed entirely of letters (as in mail) which, really, is just an extended dialogue made up of letter-based monologues. Plus it's obsessed with language, and playwrights are all obsessed with language. Because of the letter-format, it does lack descriptions of people and places, though while that may be a problem for some it wasn't for me.

I read the whole thing in about two hours (on a plane) and, alas, was left stranded without another book to read (I forgot "Anna Karenina" at home - will I ever finish it? Who knows?). Being that it is such a clever and quick read I definitely recommend it, especially to anyone who likes word play (which includes most of my friends). Thanks to Lucy for recommending it!

So it did bring up one question... Why is the famous sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" not "The quick brown fox jumped over A lazy dog" instead? It would cut out two letters, still hit all the letters in the alphabet, and still being perfectly grammatical.

I've been a bit frantic lately (what with the mass layoffs and all) so I didn't enter this book when I finished it and now I've forgotten what day I actually read the final words. We'll just have to accept "a few days ago" as the completion date. I bought this while in the Portland, Oregon airport from Lowell's, which is apparently a really nice independent book store chain in those parts. Obviously the airport terminal branch isn't quite as nice, though it was, in fact, the nicest airport bookstore I've ever perused.

"Homeland" is Sam Lipsyte's second novel. His first was "The Subject Steve", which I apparently read before Book Track was started. The first novel was quirky and funny with real touches of social commentary, so when trapped with nothing to do in an airport I decided to get his new book.

This new novel is written in the guise of one charming loser's "update" to his highschool alumni bulletin, including his retelling of interactions with various former classmates, his strange new freindship with his now-deprincipaled-principal, and his dealing with the long-past circumstances that got him the unfortunate nickname "Teabag." He's a burnout and he's somewhat of a pervert and, of course, is hard not to like. The novel doesn't really wrap up all the issues that he has in his life, rather it watches him watching other people deal with their issues, and through that we think that maybe Teabag (or, properly, Lewis) will finally do something about his own.

I was pleased to read this second book, it was as funny, quirky, and socially commentarilicious as his fist novel, and I'll definitely be following up on new Lipsyte novels when any are published.

So I continued to slack from my Tolstoy and finished reading the remaining five Earthsea novels, three of which I hadn't read before. Each took me about a day to read, the last of which was read on a plane ride to Portland, Oregon where a smarmy 7-year old boy traveling alone and sitting next to me said that my book was "easy" and that he could read at a 4th grade level. I told him that he should go back to watching "The Incredibles" and next time I'd share Anna Karenina with him. (Actually, the kid was quite funny. He was also, to overuse a term, quite precocious.)

Anyway, the remaining five novels in the series were good but not great. Essentially, "The Wizard of Earthsea" is not just great fantasy, but also a great book. The rest of the novels are just really good fantasy. As the series goes on the reader learns more and more about the world of Earthse and the "rules" that govern life and magic there. The stories start revolving around that world. A lot of really good fantasy and sci-fi creates a universe, defines that universe, and then crafts a story which works as a challenge within that universe. It's more of a logic puzzle than character development, and while it makes good genre it doesn't necessarily make good literature (Asimov's robot stories are the perfect example).

A notable exception was the fourth book, "Tehanu," which involved almost no magic at all. It wasn't as good as the first book, certainly, and it fell into the pattern of trying to define the rules of the Earthsea universe. But, aside from that, it was actually just a story about a widow who had grown estranged from her children and an old man who was dealing with the loss of his former fame and power. It was a story about dealing with age and loss that, with only a few changes, could have taken place in a normal country town with no magic whatsoever.

Now, back to Anna...

Instead of watching the apparently "unmitigated disaster" that is the Sci-Fi channel Earthsea mini-series, I decided to take a break from "Anna Karenina" and reread the Ursula K Le Guin novels. I'm really enjoying Tolstoy, but it's a looong book (the longest I've read since David Foster Wallace's brilliant but slightly wordy "Infinite Jest"). I loved "A Wizard of Earthsea" when I was younger (and when I read primarily fantasy and science fiction), but this book has always stuck in my mind as one that really influenced me creatively. I hadn't realized it until I read about the Sci-Fi channel mini-series, but apparently a lot of other people feel the same way about the Earthsea Cycle, and it seems to be universally compared (in scope and accomplishment) to the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia series, the fantasy genre big boys. I've read LotR (but not Narnia) and think that, at least for the first Earthsea novel, the accolade is justified.

Instead of comparing Earthsea to LotR, however, I'm going to compare it to a more contemporary wizard series, Harry Potter. "A Wizard of Earthsea" is also about a young boy wizard who (for part of the novel, at least) goes to wizard school and who faces great evil, but aside from that Harry and Ged (Le Guin's protagonist) are complete oppisites. In fact, when considered against some of the negative attention Harry Potter has gotten for either promoting anti-Christian occult or for teaching kids to disrespect their parents, "A Wizard of Earthsea" is even more starkly contrasted. The novel is almost a morality tale about how pride is wrong and can lead you down the wrong path towards great evil, how one should always listen to elders, how study, humility and respect for life are the ways of a good person. I'm sure there are some religious people out there who would object to Earthsea simply because of the presence of magic, but, in reality, the magic in the novel is all found through the understanding of the balance of the world (which is very religious) and through the "true names" of things, which, in my opinion, is very much like the word of God. Le Guin is not heavy handed and she is not preaching religion (unlike, as I have heard, the Narnia books do) but there is no lesson in Earthsea that can be said not to align with a Judeo-Christian morality.

Harry Potter and religion aside, it is a wonderful story and a wonderful book. I started reading it at dinner and stayed up late to finish it because I couldn't stop, and it's always nice to feel a little bit guilty and excited about staying up past your bedtime to read, probably the way I did the first time I read this book. (Not that Anna Karenina isn't a page turner...) I'm looking forward to reading the whole series when I'm done with the Tolstoy.

Continuing my reading series in "classics I should have read a long time ago", I just finished "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway. Instead of my standard rambling I'm going to do a comparison of this book with the last one I read, "The Pleasure of My Company" by Steve Martin.

Similarities:
- Both involve male protagonists
- Both are relatively short, quick reads

Differences:
- One involves an old man and the sea, one doesn't.
- One involves an obsessive compulsive, one involves eating raw fish.
- One has sharks.

Okay, seriously, it's a good book, though I'm not sure if I consider it as great a book as history seems to make it. The back cover raves: "Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century." I always thought that distinction went to James Joyce. Or was all prose Joycean before Hemingway had the revolutionary concept of writing tersely? I don't know.

One of the best sentences (well, two sentences) from the book, in my opinion, is:

"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

The old man says this when he sees some sharks coming. It's one of the deeper moments of the story, when the words touch upon a deeper metaphor as opposed to simply (tersely) describe the action. As a reader I cling to those few moments.

This is a really good book. I respect Steve Martin, I think he is a brilliant guy. The whole celebrity worship culture upsets me and I rarely give even a nod of my head to actors, but I make an exception for Steve Martin. And, I suppose that my typical celebrity-revulsion is only for actors: I am awash with fondness for writers and directors. Plus, I tend to think that the comic actors are for some reason not given the same respect as dramatic actors when, in my opinion, it's a hundred times more difficult to be funny, so therefore I'm more lenient to the funny ones. Anyway, Steve Martin is all of those things, good and bad, but if you can forget about his celebrity for a minute you'll find that he writes very well.

"The Please of My Company" is about an obessive compulsive recluse and his claustrophobic adventures in love. He can't step down from curbs and he needs to have 1125 watts of light bulbs on in his house at all times. As I've stated before, I love novels about obsessive compulsive characters, and much of my writing has to do with the obessive, if not the obsessive compulsive. The protagonist is just shy of believable (sometimes he is able to overcome his obsessions just a bit too easily) but quite endearing, and I was definitely pulling for him. The novel took some unexpected turns and did a good job of taking characters you thought were inconsequential (because of the protagonist's somewhat tainted view of them) and then building them into real, kind people.

There were a few red herrings and loose ends (whatever happened to that whole crime show thing?) but all in all it ended well. Perhaps one could say it ended too neatly, but sometimes I want a book where everything is happily ever after.

In Steve Martin's first book (that I know of) "Shop Girl", the first four fifths are great and then suddenly he changes pace and ends the book in about 5 pages of summary. It's as if he had a deadline or got bored and decided to wrap it up and move on. This latest work is not that way and he takes a nice slow almost-biblical journey to bring the book to a turning point, which turns out to be sort of a fake climax, and then eventually the end. Despite a few flaws, I really like the main character and I really like the book. I will continue to read Steve Martin's novels (if he writes any more) even though I hate celebrities.

It took me a lot longer to read "Heart of Darkness" than one might expect, considering its low page count. To be honest, I've been distracted by the highly addictive World of Warcraft game, though I've made sure to set aside at least a little time to progress on the classics.

My girlfriend got me this book as one of many Hannukah/Christmas presents. I expected "Apocolypse Now" and for anyone out there who has seen the movie but not read the book, there really is very little connection except for a guy named "Kurtz". I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. It's interesting, but it seemed anti-climactic. The protagonist becomes obsessed with Kurtz before he even meets him, and when he does meet him its for all of about two pages in the total story. Obviously the events of our protagonist in Africa have deeply affected him for the rest of his life, but I just didn't quite see how (I could understand why... just not how he'd been changed by it). Maybe I spent too much time swapping back and forth between the book and my computer game to really get deep enough into the novel. I'm normally a pretty astute reader and think that perhaps I didn't give this book the attention it needed.

Anyway, maybe I'll read it again one day, though for now I have a lot of books ready to go that I'm excited to read and I'm afraid Conrad will have to wait to get his proper review.

I've been reading a lot of J. D. Salinger in the last couple of years, making up for time lost. (Well, I use the term "a lot" loosely, since there isn't much by him to read). It's hard to read much J. D. Salinger, especially these two novellas, without starting to wonder how autobiographical it all is. Is he Seymour? Is he Buddy? So much of Salinger's writing is obsessed with Seymour Glass that, at the very least, you have to assume he himself is obsessed with Seymour Glass.

The first novella "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is excellent. It has the odd Salinger style of being more like a play than prose. The action all takes place in one or two locations with very little movement and it's almost all conversation. Definitely the sort of thing you'd expect on stage. Despite this (or perhaps because of it) the main character (Buddy Glass) is deep and troubled and intriguing. Every image in the novel seems multi-layered and symbolic, especially the strange, smiling, deaf-mute top-hatted man. If you don't see some sort of religious symbology in that sort of character then you have a very different take on literature.

"Seymour: An Introduction" just wasn't as compelling. It's essentially a monologue about Seymour by Buddy, the younger brother. At first I thought it was a story about Seymour, but as a story about Seymour it's just a rambling description and not very interesting. Then I realized it is actually a story about Buddy and about his obsession with Seymour, which is actually more interesting, because suddenly the rambling prose has a second meeting. But then I realized that Salinger himself is obsessed with Seymour, and that therefore the story actually is just about Seymour. There's a difference between a story about an obsessed character and a story by an obsessed author. Actually, no matter what the reality is, I just couldn't get into "Seymour: An Introduction". It didn't have any of the almost biblical parable feel of his other Glass-family novellas.

I went to do a little research on Salinger, which consisted of me typing "J. D. Salinger" into Google and hitting "I'm Feeling Lucky". (Whenever appropriate I like to use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, though it isn't often.) I didn't really learn much and then I decided that since I'm a firm believe in the author's life having nothing to do with the quality of his or her work, I left off my quest. I did discover that J. D. is not Buddy, which is what I wanted to know.

My girlfriend got me this book for our one and a half year anniversary, a date I unfortunately forgot. She knows I'm a big fan of previous Lethem novels, and, as you can see by the completion dates, I managed to read "Men and Cartoons" very quickly, which was a relief after the incredibly long "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell".

These short stories are good, though don't have the same depth as his novels. Though, frankly, not all his novels have the same depth as his novels. His two most recent publications (excluding a short illustrated novella and a book of book reviews), "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude", are really fantastic and I definitely recommend them.

Thoughts on Lethem:

1) Lethem is one of a few authors who made the transition from science fiction to critically acclaimed literary fiction, though even his science fiction was always strange and philosophical rather than mainstream.

2) He likes comic books, and there seems to be a trend with some 30-something authors and comic books (Chabon, Moody, and Lethem for a few examples). I suppose that the glory days of comic books were the 60s and the 70s and those authors are relying heavily on comic book themes in their writing. It's brought on somewhat of a renaissance of narrative fiction, mostly lead by Chabon. It seems like a bit of a rejection of the semi-comic-absurdist McSweeney's movement, which itself was a rejection of the super realistic unplotted New Yorker literary scene. Though, it's interesting, because Chabon launched his first "plot" offensive through an issue of McSweeney's he edited, because McSweeney's is apparently self-aware enough to host its own counter-movement. Anyway, Lethem is riding this wave (well, he's a part of the wave, not just a rider) as it is the perfect time for plotted, narrative fiction to critically excel, and critics who would not have previously given the time of day to anything even remotely sci-fi or fantasy are now willing to consider things like "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell", the "Lord of the Rings" movie, "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales", and the like.

3) Some authors are just better at long fiction, some at short. While Lethem's short stories (as I said) don't have the same depth of character and meaning as his better novels, they are still well done and worth reading. Lethem has the interesting technique (in both his novels and short stories) of showing a character at three different points in his life. So you get a glimpse of childhood, and then college, and than post-college (which often involves working at a college - I wonder what sort of non-college life experience Lethem has). These three glimpses obviously are connected, usually because these are the three times the protagonist interacts with some other (metaphorical?) character. It doesn't quite give a whole portrait of the protagonist, but what it does do is paint three strokes across time as opposed to one. I kind of imagine that all the protagonists in these stories could be one person, just a combination of three moments pulled from the same person's life and leaving the rest blurry. It works and I like it.

This book came highly recommended by the esteemed Sidey.com. Okay, actually, that's not true. I borrowed it from him one day when I saw it sitting on his coffee table and I believe he specifically warned me that he was not recommending it because it was a little slow. Well, my final judgement of the book is as follows: it was a little slow. Really. It's very, very long. Much longer than necessary. And while I found the story very interesting and thing it was well written, I didn't really find myself significantly engaged or excited by the book until the last third. Perhaps the excitement of the end of the book was due to the immense amount of build up in the first two thirds, but I just can't say it was worth it.

Two interesting things I want to discuss about the novel. First of all, I kept reading reviews of the book that referred to it as "Harry Potter for grown-ups". I find that sort of a strange thing to say, because based on the number of copies of Harry Potter books sold (i.e. more than any other book ever), the reality is that Harry Potter is Harry Potter for grown-ups.

Second, it's gotten universally good reviews, and while I don't necessarily have a problem with that, I just feel there is this weird fantasy double standard going on. This novel is, clearly, fantasy, though it is literary fantasy. And I just have this idea that critics are enjoying the chance to give a fantasy novel positive reviews, because they feel that it's okay that it is fantasy because it is dull fantasy. Anyway, I'm reading to much into it, I know.

Anyway, I tend to finish whatever I start reading beginning to end (with the exception of short story collections) though I may not have gotten through this book had it not been the only thing I'd brought with me to read on a business trip.

I haven't quite finished reading all the short stories in this collection but I've moved on to other books so I'm going to post here anyway. The fact that I only ready 13 out of the 16 short stories is not because of a problem with the book - sometimes it is simply difficult to plow through an entire short story collection in order regardless of quality.

Helprin's work is stately and grand. His characters are almost always stirringly dignified, with impeccable memories of weighty pasts and the most honest of intentions as they try to keep the world pure. Sometimes I feel as if he is writing of a world as he would like it to be rather than the world as it is, and sometimes I feel that he is simply capturing the more beautiful parts of the world other writers ignore. Either way, in a day when literature tends towards the baser parts of society it is nice to read something of such unabashed nobility.

For example, one story follows a group of builders and painters and stonemasons, etc., who refurbish a woman's apartment for free because she lost her husband on 9/11. It's a quite wonderful story. Is it believable? Well, the way Helprin tells it, I know I at least want to believe it. This story showcases another element that makes his writing impressive, he manages to describe the detail of everything in such a way that it seems immense and beautiful. The woodwork and the stone carving and the carpeting and the doors... he wants to make it perfectly clear how perfectly perfect this universe is and he succeeds.

In the past I've loved his novels told from the first person (such as "Memoir from Antproof Case" and "A Soldier of the Great War") but I've had problems with his novels told from the third person (which I won't list here because it is too much effort and, besides, I don't like them). Since his writing is sometimes just too much to believe, when a novel is in the first person there is always the fine line between reality and the narrator's perception of reality. In third person there the reader loses that justification and the prose often comes across as arrogant. I don't have that problem with his short stories mainly because there isn't enough time for his stretches of reality to get to me.

No one writes to the colonel. Seriously, no one writes to him. Why can't just one person write to him? I'd be so less depressed. I'd write a goddamn letter to the colonel if it would do any good. "No One Writes to the Colonel" has got to be up for some sort of "most depressing novella" award.

I have a problem with GGM. You see, I first read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" back in 1999 and I was instantly struck by the novel, convinced it was the best book I'd ever read, no, the best book anyone had ever read. I still sort of feel that way about it, actually. I then read "Love in the Time of Cholera", also a wonderful book, but not quite as brilliantly amazing as OHYOS. And, alas, it was all downhill from there. No other Marquez book could live up to OHYOS. This is not because Marquez is an inconsistent writer, it is because, let's face it, he managed with OHYOS to write ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN. When you have the synergy of an amazing author and the right moment and the perfect inspiration/muse/luck/whatever you want to call it, literature can transcend genre and become something like OHYOS. This doesn't happen often. You can't fault Marquez for not writing the best book ever written every time he writes a book. But, despite that, I'm always a little disappointed when I read one of his books and it isn't the best book ever written.

Suffice it to say, "No One Writes To The Colonel and Other Stories" isn't the best book ever written. It's not bad. It's just not the best book ever written.

The title novella is, as implied earlier, quite depressing. The Colonel who no one writes too is an old man who has been abandoned by his government. He played some sort of crucial role in some sort of war (I'm not exactly sure I understand the history) and has been owed a pension his whole life. He is convinced that one day the pension will come. The only thing more important to him than surviving is his honor. All this combines to an even more depressing conclusion.

The rest of the stories are good, though not entirely memorable, as it has been about a week and a half and I can't think of much to say. The picture he paints of South America is pretty amazing and I should probably, at some point, learn something about South American history or else my entire knowledge of the continent will be bits and pieces I have gathered from Marquez's magic realism.

Chronologically I can't quite remember when I finished this book, since I read a lot of books over the New Year's vacation. I have mixed reviews for "The Ice Storm". I plowed through reading it, which is always a good sign. But at first I really didn't like it, and I was considering moving on to another book until I realized I'd consumed a third of the novel already. There was a disparity between my supposed tepid response to the book and how oddly compelled I was to continuously read it.

My biggest problem with the novel is that the side plot about the son. There are about three dedicated chapters to that character which are totally unconnected to the rest of the novel. Perhaps there is a thematic connection (everyone's life sucks?) but it seemed almost an afterthought. It really distracted me, and as I put the book down my first thought was, "What did that have to do with anything?" rather than, "That was a good novel."

Aside from the problematic prodigal son, I did like the rest of the novel. It was about a wealth suburban family in simple surburban crisis, about cheating and coming-of-age and marital strife, but more it was just about these characters interacting in the midst of these problems. And the writing was good even if the novel structure was troubling. Sometimes a book can be about nothing more than family angst.

I've been getting a lot of reading done, mostly because of time spent on airplanes. I borrowed my girlfriend's copy of "Kissing in Manhattan" and managed to read the whole thing in one day... Not because it's an easy book (though it is a relatively fast read), but, rather, because I spent 10 hours in airplanes or waiting for airplanes.

The book is sort of chick lit meets brainy contemporary fiction. It's a collection of short stories which become more and more interspersed as the book goes on, until really it's a novel. So it's a little different than most reading experiences. For some reason I don't feel like getting into it in detail. I'm tired today from too much being sick on my vacation. Perhaps I'll revise this entry later to give more opinion. But for now: good book, quick read, smart and surreal.

"Einstein's Dreams" was recommended to me by a friend and indeed was a good book. It's not a traditional novel. It's more a collection of prose poems. The whole book is comprised of two-four page glimpses into worlds where time works in different ways, plus a few very brief interludes that frame everything as dreams Einstein is having as he works out his world-changing theories. The book is really about how tiny moments in people's lives can be emotional and moving. In just three pages Lightman paints a picture of a world and shows us nameless characters who are known only by their emotional state, lonliness or happiness, or by their simple actions, buying bread or hugging a loved one goodbye. But by changing the rules of time in that particular world he makes an embrace last forever or a whole life pass in an instant, and we get a sense of heightened passion and sorrow. It's a really very beautiful book, and since it is made up of such unconnected fragments it can be read at any pace.

It looks like now I'll have to find another book to read on my vacation though. I've borrowed my girlfriend's copy of "Kissing in Manhattan" by David Shickler, which is supposed to be very good despite the fact that its title sounds like chick lit.

So. "How We Are Hungry" by David Eggers. That's a good question. How ARE we hungry? I, for one, am hungry for a novel that is funny, poignant, clever, genre-stretching, and at least a few times makes me laugh so hard I snort something (milk, preferably, but it could be anything) through my nose. I'm talking about a book like "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", of course, which "How We Are Hungry" is definitely not. I suppose an author isn't required to follow one book up with another of the same vein. However, an author is expected to stick to a certain level of quality, and if you burst out of the gates with a brilliant first novel subsequent novels are always highly scrutinized.

Perhaps my problem is that I know TOO much about Eggers himself. Since his first novel was a memoir and since I pay attention to his McSweeney's Press and related ventures (which lately has been as much a pulpit for pushing liberal agendas as a literary outlet) it is hard for me to separate Dave Eggers from his fiction. 1) I cannot help seeing Eggers in every one of his fictional characters and thinking each story sounds like something Eggers experienced and then translated directly to the page with a different name. 2) I cannot help noticing that half of his short stories are thinly veiled attempts to push liberal anti-Bush agendas.

I realize that EVERY story is actually something the author experiences and then translates to the page with a different name. That's fiction. However, there's a problem when you can't stop thinking about it. Also, I have no problem with a liberal anti-Bush agenda, but there's a place a liberal anti-Bush agenda DOESN'T belong. An example of a place it doesn't belong is an Academy Award acceptance speech. Another place it doesn't belong is literary fiction. Especially thinly veiled anti-Bush liberal agendas. If you're going to do it, it shouldn't be thinly veiled. It should either be thickly veiled or not veiled at all.

Okay, but all this is sort of secondary to the fact that the book just wasn't that great. There are some clever moments, but unlike his previous works the clever moments aren't funny, and clever without funny is just annoying and pretentious. There are short-short stories that are two pages long and serve to be nothing other than voice experiments. There are five blank pages entitled "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself" that don't serve to evoke a second thought or even a grin as the reader flips immediately past. None of the characters seem to have much at stake. None of them even seem that compelling or emotionally complex. There is one story about a man who is desperate not to die alone and it's one of the few stories that could have possibly been emotionally deep, but instead Eggers tells the story as NOTES ABOUT A STORY, which is clever, but it ends up distancing the reader from the whole thing and making it more of an workshop exercise. Had the story been a real story, it might have been overly sentimental and sappy, but sometimes a good author needs to tackle such subject matter and prove himself to be a good author by dealing with such material well.

I realize I'm being very hard on this book, much harder than I would be on a first book or on any other book whose author hadn't previously written something I loved so much. Sorry, Dave Eggers. I'll still read your next novel.

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author who mixes Western literature with Eastern culture, history, and mysticism. "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" is the second book I've read by him, the first a collection of short stories called "The Elephant Vanishes". Oddly, one of the short stories in "Elephant" is actually the first chapter of "Wind-Up Bird", so I guess Murakami decided that particular short story was worth more exploration.

The first half of this book is great; Murakami is adept at using fortunetellers and dreams to weave a wonderful magic realism. The main character is passive but likable, and he sort of wanders from one strange event and character to the next. The second half of the book devolves somewhat into magic surrealism, more time is spent in a dream world, the characters get even stranger, and, in the end, I just didn't feel like enough loose ends were tied up. Now, I have no problem with questions being left unanswered in a novel, but in this case there were too many questions left unanswered, or, rather, the wrong sorts of questions. It sometimes seemed like I was reading a collection of interwoven short stories, and that one particular short story wasn't necessarily bound by the previous stories. Characters just dropped out of the novel halfway through. Entire side plots seem to be abandoned. But, anyway, I still enjoyed it, and it definitely held my interest.

Note: Normally I hate dream sequences in stories. When a dream sequence starts I just use the italicized text as an indication of what not to read. But once I got used to the fact that the dreams in this novel are actually real events taking place in another world and having some limited influences on the real world I had no problem with it.

I admittedly don't know much about Japanese history, and was quite enthralled by the stories Murakami wove into this novel. There are some fascinating "flashbacks" about Japanese atrocities during WWII as well as atrocities faced by the Japanese in Siberian labor camps. (And while these history lessons work thematically, they were one of the subplots hardly even tangentially connected to the main story. Though, they were so interesting I don't really care.)

In summary, I have mixed feelings about the novel. It was a great read and I really connected with the protagonist. But even though I was enthralled until the end, I could feel things slipping away from me more and more. If anyone else reads this book, please give me a call, because more than anything else I need to discuss it with someone.

My friend Colin has been recommending I read Geoff Nicholson's "The Food Chain" for years. I was on a public library kick when I first attempted to read this and the Austin library system didn't have this book, so I had to settle for "Everything and More" at the time. Anyway, I finally bought the book on Amazon.com.

Interestingly, for the last month I've been reading four books at the same time, which is not something I usually do, but every once in a while I'll end up with multiple novels in hand until one of them sticks. In this case "The Food Chain" won and I put the others aside to concentrate on reading it.

Okay, enough historical information about the saga of reading a book. I think G.N. is a very engaging author, who tackles quirky and bizarre subject matter in such a way that it is enjoyable to read. Though his books are complex I'm able to pour through them very quickly. I didn't love it, but I did like it, and I'd like to read more by him. I thought the ending wasn't predictable, but semi-predictable, in the sense that early on in the book I thought, "This is going to have a surprise ending and that surprise ending is going to be something about such-and-such" and while I was kind of surprised I wasn't very surprised when the ending came. However, this book isn't really about having a surprise ending, it's about being a good, interesting book. My biggest complaint is that this book never seems to rise from clever to brilliant, and you can tell that it's trying oh-so-hard to be brilliant. But there's nothing wrong with clever. Plus, I'll forgive a book many flaws if it is a) enjoyable and b) intelligent, and this was both of those things.

My brother suggested I read Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" and so I did. I approached it with some skepticism, being that my previous Steinbeck experiences weren't that great, though, admittedly, I haven't read any since high school. In any case, my concerns were baseless, as "Cannery Row" was not the monolithic tome I feared, but rather, a short, unplotted, loosely connected grouping of character studies that read quite easily. There really is no story line, just some brief glimpses into the lives of various bums, shop owners, prostitutes, artists, and a scientist who prepares sea creatures for research. I enjoyed reading it, and it does paint a very interesting portrait of a specific place and time, but I don't feel I got as much out of it as I am supposed to get out of it. If you want to get your Steinbeck on, but don't want to sit through through 600 pages of dense, symbolic material this is the way to go.

During a long day of inter-state plane travel I read the obnoxiously-named "Don't Dead This Book If Your Stupid" by the strangely-capitalized TiBor FiscHer. At his best I think he's a really great author, though when not at his best he is sort of annoying, sexist, and a little bit like that guy who gets you to laugh once in a while but only because he makes so many dirty jokes that eventually one of them works. This short story collection was decent, and I think his best piece was the shortest one, where a reporter crosses into Romania to view a brief and bloody revolution.

FiscHer's best book by far is "Under the Frog" about a couple of traveling basketball players in communist Hungary on the eve of revolution. Really good stuff. His worst book so far is the most recent "Voyage to the End of the Room" which, frankly, was terrible. FiscHer is completely unable to write from a woman's point of view. His female characters are sex-starved and sleep with strange men, constantly thinking or talking about large male genitalia, and totally incapable of making any concrete decisions about anything. I suppose this is sort of how his male characters act and think also, except that his male characters are always thinking about women but don't manage to score quite as often. I don't know if FiscHer thinks this is how women actually think/act or if he's envisioning that a female character with the same attributes as one of his male characters would end up having sex all the time because they'd be dealing with men rather than women. Whatever. It just doesn't work.

"Nobody's Fool" is the second Richard Russo book I've read, the first being the Pulitzer Prize winning "Empire Falls".

Both books are set in previously-bustling-but-now-poor New England towns, feature primarily an older, somewhat bumbling, divorced older man haunted by his own refusal to forgive his awful father (though the third person omniscient narrator often dives into other characters' minds for long sections as well). While both books were excellent, the descriptions of his other books sound remarkably similar so I'll probably take a break before reading Russo novel number three.

Russo has a tendency to take physical objects in the story (a house, a factory, a woman, a diner), use them as a huge metaphorical symbol of how the protagonist cannot let go of the past/forgive his father/achieve true independence/etc., and build up this giant expectation and desire for the protagonist to overcome those obstacles, both phyically and metaphorically. However, in both novels I felt a little bit let down at the end, where it seemed either unclimactic or unresolved when the protagonist finally got around to doing something about it. So as not to spoil anything, I'll provide a made-up example: Let's say a woman's son was killed falling out of a tree in her neighbor's yard and she's subsequently spent the rest of her adult life wondering whether to chop down the offending tree because she stares at it every day thinking about her dead son, and then one day she is out of town to visit a friend and when she comes home she discovers that her neighbor chopped the tree down to make room for a new gazebo and she shrugs and says, "That's a nice gazebo." This did not happen in any of his books, but you get the idea. I kept wondering to myself why Russo had focused 400 pages on creating such a huge obstacle/metaphor for the protagonist if he was going to have some random unfufilling resolution.

In addition, because of his (excellent) ability to dive into the mind of almost every character in the story and make them sympathetic, I felt "Nobody's Fool" didn't actually tie up all the loose ends. But I suppose in "real life" not everybody ends up happy and some of the people you have grown to care about just end up driving off unresolved and you don't know if they ever get to deal with their inner demons or not.

These concerns, however, are somewhat secondary to the depth of the stories and characters, and I think Russo is definitely an author deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. A book doesn't have to be perfect to be great.

Like "The Story of Lucy Gault", I read "Jesus' Son" for my creative writing class. In fact, I finished it before "Lucy Gault", so this is out of order, but I don't care.

It was a very good book, plus I read the whole thing in about two days. It's fairly short. It's a collection of short stories featuring the same narrator (known only as "Fuckhead"). I feel the stories work better as a whole and this really functions as a novel, though since I never read the short stories individually I suppose I'm not qualified to judge. The protagonist (or anti-hero, really) is pretty much just a drugged-up loser in Iowa hanging out with drugged-up loser friends and all he wants is to be liked. I tend to really put myself into the position of the narrator when I read a novel and therefore when other people say things like, "I just hated this guy" I find myself a little confused and/or strangely insulted. My point being that I really cared about the narrator, and felt that his day-to-day existence was very touching and that there was something more to him than what there seemed to be on the surface level.

I read "The Story of Lucy Gault" for my University of Texas Extension Program creative writing class. (In fact, I finished reading it three weeks ahead of the class schedule. I needed something to read because I was traveling and I was bored.)

It was pretty good, an Irish story of tragedy and life-long suffering, with some star-crossed romance thrown in. Not typically my thing, and I probably wouldn't have read it if I hadn't been assigned the book, but I'm glad I did. It's probably something my girlfriend will like, so I'm going to recommend it to her. Oh, poor Lucy Gault, doomed for her whole life because of one childhood mistake. In some ways she reminded me of Hester Prynne from "The Scarlet Letter", her stigma slowly changing throughout time. Though I haven't read "The Scarlet Letter" since high school, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.