Books I Read March 31, 2020

Right—so I'd like to blame the slow start to this year book wise on the apocalypse, and whatnot, but that's got nothing to do with it, really. I had a friend here for a while and apart from that I was pretty much spending all my energies on pushing through a first draft of a new WIP. But that's with my agent and we can't go outside and my weight set hasn't arrived from Amazon and there's nothing else to do but read and mull, mull and read, with a dash of despair for seasoning. Anyway. Here were the sad handful of books I read the last two months, while I was wondering about LA and then stuck inside my cell-like apartment, very resolutely not having a cigarette.

All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe – A detective investigates a woman's disappearance, the corrupt credit system of early 90's Japan. It was kinda slow.

Birth at Dawn by Driss Chraibi – A brutal warlord leads the Muslim expansion into Spain, dreams of a better world, is disappointed in its reality. Lyrical, violent, short, excellent. I liked it and will pick up more by Chraibi.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion – A morally bankrupt Hollywood hanger on commits to her self-destructive decay. Didion can write, this is sharp and mean, but also kind of one note? I appreciate that life is often an open wound, but still I wish so much of contemporary literature wasn't dedicated to poking at it. That said it's a quick, well-written and funny if you've got a nasty sense of humor—which, if you don't, maybe you shouldn't be reading Joan Didion.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson – A collection of short stories about death, drunkenness, bad decisions and generalized regret. Johnson's novels don't do a shit ton for me but his shorter stuff is generally very strong, if maybe a little bit one note.

You Are Free by Danzy Senna – Short stories about motherhood, race, gender, modernity, yuppies, etc. Which, frankly, could be the description of about 100,000 collections released in the past ten years, although very few of them are anywhere near this good. There is a sympathy and complexity to Ms. Senna's writing which marks her as a cut above her fellows, and these stories are genuinely thoughtful rather than overtly didactic. Good stuff.

Last Friends by Jane Gardam – The final installment in the Old Filth trilogy sees us explore the peculiar life and end of Terry Veneering, who's bitter childhood tragedy drives him into a career in law in the orient. Gardam has a peculiar talent for plotting, with lots of obfuscations and seeming irrelevancies revealed ultimately as being critical to the narrative, and basically I enjoy reading anything she's written. Can't help but think this would have been stronger as a single novel, though, rather than chopped up into thirds.

Havoc by Tom Kristensen – The very model of a bourgeoisie intellectual makes a more or less conscious decision to devolve into a drunken lout. An existentialist trope that frankly I'm kind of tired of by this point, so maybe I wasn't the best audience for this. Anyway, didn't do a lot for me.

March Violets by Philip Kerr – A private detective tries to find some jewels during the Berlin Olympics, as the growing Nazi menace makes questions of personal morality largely irrelevant. Swift, engaging, a decent enough potboiler in an interesting setting. Occupied my mind briefly during our bubbling apocalypse.

The Medieval Castle by Phillip Warner – A book about castles. I dunno, I can't really remember why I read this.

Triple Jeopardy by Rex Stout – My first foray into the apparently gigantic history of Nero Wolfe, a lazier, rotund Holmes, and his Watson analog Archie Goodwin. These were breezy and fun, I imagine I'll work my way through a few more while I'm stuck in my cell-like apartment or an indeterminate amount of time.

Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck – Contrasting tales of a medieval saint's adoration of Christ with the author's own obsessive affection for a younger man. Is this a clever idea or is kinda on the nose? Hard to say. It's also the kind of book where some of the lines are really fabulous and some of them are just total duds. But it's quick and it's weird and I thought it was kind of funny and ultimately this was firmly in the like column.

A Journal of the Plage Year by Daniel Defoe – Thematically appropriate!

A Theft by Saul Bellow – I've been going back and dipping my toe into Bellow to see if he holds up 20 years after I was obsessed with him and I...still can't tell? He manages to imbue his creations with a great deal of mythical energy, but sometimes this gets a little bit much, with every side character being an oil magnate or a faded drunken ex-Hollywood star, you get the idea. This is one of the few of his that I can remember reading with a woman as the protagonist and it didn't work absolutely perfectly for me. I dunno, now that I'm quarantined maybe I'll have time to read something more significant by him.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler – Like all of Chandler's work it's disjointed, kind of incoherent plot wise, racist, sexist, and a little mawkish. It's also got some of the best prose you're ever going to find in literature—there's a bit about a pink bug crawling across a police desk which is pretty marvelous. And for that matter Marlowe's brief adventure with Red, the beautiful, violet eyed ex-cop is indisputably the most potent romantic interaction in Chandler's oeuvre. I think it's a ton of fun, for all his faults Chandler remains at the top of the heap.

The Inferno by Dante (Longfellow Translation) – There are a fair few classics of world literature that I can genuinely claim to enjoy but I just do not give the slightest shit about Dante. I appreciate his role in making Italian an acceptable language to write poetry in, but basically this book sucks, sorry. The best you could say for it is that it effectively depicts medieval Catholic morality, but as this is an utterly contemptible philosophy by the standards of most people reading it I'm not really what the point is other than to feel superior to our ancestors. Even trying to be forgiving it just doesn't make a shred of sense. Why are counterfeiters worse than rapists? For that matter, why is the 7th level as big as all the rest of them combined? Dante himself is the original Mary-Sue, a tiring asshole who's just so gosh-darn special that all of Heaven and Hell have to make way to show him a good time. A thousand pages of biblical fan-fiction the point of which mostly is to get back at old associates. It's like if you wrote a book about going to hell and kept putting in people you knew from high school getting their heads ripped open or whatever.

So, you know, that's my take.