Books I Read February 15th, 2021

Happy President's Day. I am feeling uncharacteristically lazy this afternoon, bud I have forced myself to put up a list of the books I read last week, one day late.

The End of Me by Alfred Hayes – Hayes' authorial surrogate returns to New York a failed cuckold, gets involved with some sixties tropes, in what was not my favorite episode in this trilogy. Not that it was bad either, Hayes was a gifted writer but this felt maybe a little self-indulgent even at less than 200 pages.

Six Four Hideo Yokoyama – The press director for the police force of a Japanese province finds himself in the center of an elaborate power struggle between various factions within the mammoth bureaucracy that is the Japanese police force. Excellent – one of those rare genre novels which feels genuinely fresh, not simply because it transpires within a non-Western context but because the characters, issues, and narrative itself are genuinely original, concerned with motivations and events rarely dealt with in conventional crime. I dug it.

Memorial by Bryan Washington

Flowers of Mold Ha Seong-Nan – South Korean is revealed a trash ridden hellhole in this bleakly effective if one note collection of shorts.

The Mahe Circle by Georges Simenon – A vacation in southern France inspires in a bourgeois country doctor the instinct to reject his carefully constructed existence. Simenon's non-Maigret stuff is uniform in its excellence but apart from that they're all very distinct, and this is excellent, strange, dark stuff, breaking off in unanticipated and discomfiting directions. Excellent.