Books I Read

Happy New Year. I had some wins in 2022 and I took some lumps. I suspect you could say the same. I don’t predict 2023 being any easier on any of us. Hold on to whoever you have to and prop up whoever you can.

The Rat on Fire by George Higgins – Harried detectives pursue a miserable fixer who’s hired a detestable arsonist to rid his decrepit tenement of unsavory tenants. Nasty, smart, George Higgins at his more George Higgins-ish.

An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul – Naipaul visited India, a homeland which he had never seen, passed down through the decayed myths of his immigrant family, when he was 30, having already earned a reputation as one of the most astute critics of the post-colonial world. He didn’t like it. He thought it was unhygienic and overcrowded, he detested the subcontinental tendencies towards prevarication and insincerity. He felt, in short, that the interplay between native Indian society and Western imperialism had let to an intellectually and morally sterile landscape. Naipaul didn’t like India, but in fairness he didn’t like Trinidad (or anywhere else in the West Indies), he didn’t like Iran or Indonesia, he was lukewarm, if memory serves, on the American south. Naipaul spent 70-odd years staring at the world and, to judge by his writing, came away with the impression that he had seen little of beauty or value. I like to think (or I would like to think that I like to think) that he is wrong. I suspect Naipaul is destined to be forgotten by future generations; he stands in too dramatic counterpoint to the received wisdom of our well-meaning, guilt-obsessed age. But on the opening day of 2023, I find I can’t condemn a man for looking out over our burning planet with some honest measure of disgust.

Ti Amo by Hanne Orstavik – A chronicle of the death by cancer of the writer’s husband. Sad, lovely.

Brenner and God by Wolf Haas – A well-meaning quasi-moron provokes, solves a kidnapping. Good, fun, weird.

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay – A small-time hit man kills a small-time drug dealer on behalf of some small-time villains. Quick, low key, smart.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius – Hey man, quit bitching cause your fucking arm got cut off, OK? It’s no different than a clay pot breaking. Look at the big picture, if the gods had wanted you to have an arm they’d have let you keep your arm. You think you’re the only one who ever got his arm cut off?

Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy – Still really funny.

Books I Read December 5th, 2022

Took about 3 years but I finally got smacked with the plague this week. I didn’t have the energy to read anything difficult, but I did manage to plow through some light stuff.

Trust by George V. Higgins – A shiftless ex-con gets over-clever trying to pay back a favor to the mob. It gets kind of into the weeds on the specifics of selling used cars but the final act is top notch.

The Jesus Cow by Michael Perry – A cow with the a birthmark of the face of Jesus is born in a small mid-western tow. Light satire ensues.  

Kennedy for the Defense by George V. Higgins – The misadventures of a street-wise middle-class middle-aged lawyer, loosely based presumably on the writer. I liked it less than the other stuff I’ve read by Higgins.  

The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind – The arrival of a pigeon in his apartment building throws an idiot into existential despair. It was OK.   

Monkey Sonatas by Orson Scott Card – A collection of wide-ranging shorts. Uneven and sentimental, but there were some effecting and odd ones likewise.  

The Digger's Game by George V. Higgins – A thuggish bar owner tries to pay back a gambling debt. Brutish, short and fun.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card – I wrote a glowing book report on Ender’s Game in the second grade, and more than thirty years on I can say it stands up. Though the essential conceit – ‘super-special child gets chosen to go to a super special school to save the species’ – remains the most dominant plot in y/a, never again was it done with such poise, thoughtfulness, and above all, brevity. Card’s prose is simple but entirely lucid, the sort of simplicity which speaks of technical talent. His world-building is deft and his characterization effective. Ender’s Game is one of those rare books which both succeeds on and subverts its story. Page to page it is great, pulpy fun to watch our sympathetic protagonist defeat a series of increasingly more terrible enemies – bullies, teachers, space aliens – while the undercutting themes of co-operation and acceptance are delivered without mawkishness or sanctimony.

Books I Read November 28th, 2022

Happy belated. Thanksgiving. I read these books last week.

Rainy Season by Jose Eduardo Agualusa – A semi-fictionalized account of the author’s experiences during Angola’s long and bloody post-war history intertwined with an also possibly fictionalized biography of Lidia do Carmo Ferreira, an Angolan poet and intellectual who disappeared in 1992, just before a resurgence in combat.  A compelling and peculiar attempt to make sense of a tragic epoch.

Autumn Rounds by Jacques Pouline – A recluse and some friendly hippies drive a bookmobile around rural Quebec.

Cogan's Trade by Eddie Higgins – The robbery of a mob-protected card game and the fallout thereof. Higgins’s was a crime reporter and defense attorney and it shows in his uncannily excellent ear for dialogue, which makes up the vast majority of the book. Higgins has a gift for conversation which is at once thematically perfect and feels completely authentic to the characters. Excellent.

The Middle Passage by V.S. Naipaul – A blistering investigation into the psychosis of the post-Colonial West Indies. I thought the stuff about Naipaul’s own island of Trinidad was stronger than much of the rest, but apart from that I’m still working through my larger thoughts on Naipaul. I know you’re all waiting with baited breath, just hold out another week please.  

Books I Read November 21st, 2022

So about six months ago I talked my way into a job in the bread department at a commercial bakery.

This is my excuse for falling off on writing these reviews and reading generally.

Magic Terror Peter Straub – 8 stories straddling the line between explicit genre thrills and the sort of quasi-nihilistic depictions of human despair which one might find in say, Ian McEwan. To be absolutely blunt I tend to prefer the genre end of these things more, a bit of the impossible makes all the darkness feel if not more palatable, at least a bit less tedious. Plus I admire the structural chops necessary to make a horror story work, it’s always easier to just let the thing careen into the general horridness of the human condition rather than come up with a genuine sting. Like I said there’s a bit of both here—his depiction of two monstrous, monosyllabled English thugs is genre enough that Gaiman wholesale lifted it for the heavies from Neverwhere, while the one about the horrific childhood origins of a serial killer reads like something from the darker end of Joyce Carol Oates. A talented guy anyway you look at it. RIP.

Party Going by Henry Green – A group of awful English elite get stuck in Paddington Station waiting for a train. It’s not Green’s fault that I kind of never want to read another book about the aristocratic England, or that I grabbed this without know what the plot was. That shit’s on me.

The Samurai of Vishogrod: The Notebooks of Jacob Marateck by Jaco Marateck – Cheeringly rambling reminiscences of life in turn of the century Poland for an unconventionally boisterous Jew. Odd and fun.

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap – Memories of a childhood and life spent in the shadow of the author’s family’s wartime efforts as Slovenian partisans. Intimate recollections of a bucolic rural existence shot through with grief and trauma and intertwined with uncompromising if sympathetic character studies. Good stuff.

Literary Occasions by V.S. Naipaul – A series of essays primarily interesting as offering a formal autobiography of the author’s Trinidadian background. I’m doing a Naipaul re-read, so far it’s been fruitful.

A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Fai Abasiyanik – A collection of short stories from the decades long career of (apparently?) Turkey’s most beloved short story writer. I really only have the back cover to speak to that but if it’s true, it’s not undeserved. These are really stellar, vibrant, curiously written portrayals of a lively, multi-ethnic, pre-WWI Istanbul, and of the long shadow left by the tragic loss of that existence. It reminded me a little bit of Robert Walser in its depictions of the strange of an urban setting, but there’s a seriousness and a darkness at play here which is very much it’s own thing. Lovely. Good on Archipelago books for bringing this, and a lot of other stuff I’ve been reading lately, to a larger audience.  

Books I Read October 9th 2022

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono – A charming ecological paean.

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya– Turns out Petrushevskaya came by her nightmares honestly, after a childhood spent as in postwar Russia as the outcast granddaughter of despised class enemies. A series of vignettes marginally less horrifying than her normal shorts.

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers by José Eduardo Agualusa – Dreamland visitations connects a disparate cast of characters in post-war Angola.

A Short History of Modern Angola by David Birmingham– A well-written overview of the grimly fascinating history of modern Angola. Among the other takeaways, as so often is the case, is that Henry Kissinger is awful.

Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg – A portrait of an Italian family torn apart by the rise of fascism, WWII. Deft, sympathetic, excellent; up to Ginzburg’s usual standards.

Kingdom's End and Selected Short Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto – Blunt stories of pre and post partition India as told by Pakistani letters’ first infant terrible. Manto was a hard-drinking atheist with an earthy, humanistic affection for the messy, multifaceted realities of his country(ies), one sadly out of step with the currents of his age. A fascinating voice, evidence of the universality of short fiction as a medium for conveying human experience.

A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jensen –Nordic housewives survive unruly children, sexless husbands, and lost loves in this spare but sympathetic set of shorts. I dug it.

Ennemonde by Jean Giono – Part satire, part epopee to the eponymous, a rural matron of enormous energy, drive and amoral courage. Every work by Jean Giono is distinct from every other work, his ouvre a patchwork whose thematic throughlines is a love of the uncouth and authentically wild, with all its blemishes, over the polished banality of the modern bourgeoisie. Among these works of genuine genius Ennemonde still stands out, as much for the brilliant lyricism of the language as for its unexpected and compelling narrative framework. Loved loved loved this.

Books I Read September 4th, 2022

I should have read more, given how much time I spent on the beach the last few weeks. Alas.

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka – Part satire, part noir, Nigeria’s favored son’s blistering rejoinder to the hopes of post-colonial African society, portrayed herein as having degenerated into an orgy of hyper-capitalist excess covered with a patina of national custom. Soyinka’s concerns are distinctly but not exclusively Nigerian, and while cannibalism and kola nuts may be foreign to a western audience, his essential thesis—that it has become impossible or perhaps only futile to live morally in modern society—will resonate with rational readers of any nation. (One recalls that in addition to being tormented by successive generations of Nigerian regimes, Soyinka destroyed his green card in 2016 after Trump’s election.)

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner – A precocious genius storms the 70’s NY art scene, meets some radical Roman revolutionaries. Of a type.

The Dunciad – Alexander Pope shitting on his rivals in rhymed verse. It was funny if unsurprising to be reminded of the universal pettiness of writers as a class, but in retrospect I’m not sure why I read this.

Books I Read August 21, 2022

Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy --  Collections of horror stories and loosely related pictures from a small town Wisconsin paper, intermixed with snippets of writing from the time. Felix Feneon did the first part better and Frederic Tuten the second. Unoriginal and uninspired. 

South Wind Through the Kitchen: The Best of Elizabeth David by Elizabeth David – Recipes and food writing from the grand madam of midcentury English cooking. Charming.  

The Widow by Simenon – A murderer takes up with a hard-bitten widow with a large house. Horror ensues, though never quite in the fashion one suspects. As usual, Simenon’s little noirs are masterclasses in sketching characters and developing tension—this one was really strong even by the standards, however.  

The Love Parade by Sergio Pitol – A historian investigates a 30 year old murder via interviews with a mottled cast of Mexico City literati, with the running joke being they’re all so self-obsessed as to be incapable of viewing the thing except through their own narrow prism—the historian included. I enjoyed it but I couldn’t say it was the first time I read something like it.

The Jungle is Neutral by F. Spencer Chapman – History’s most phlegmatic Englishman recounts his history as a guerilla in WW2 Malaysia. Engaging stories of daring-do.  

Books I Read July 25th, 2022

Still been too busy to read regularly. Hoping to change that in the weeks to come.

Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima – One of Tsushima’s spare, lyrical evocations of single motherhood, not that dissimilar from h ser other pare, lyrical evocations of single motherhood.

History of Italy by Francesco Guicciardini – A history of the Italian invasions by a man who helped cause some of them.  

Books I Read July 4th, 2022

I know I been behind on shit but I been doing a lot of shit you don’t know about. Also, I wrote this article about the inspiration for Philip Marlowe.

Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford – The daughter of impoverished insane provincial parents discovers the stultifying madness of Boston high-society. Stafford is very smart and very mean and can’t stop being either for the span of a paragraph and it kind of steps on the narrative.    

Snow Angels  by Stewart O’Nan – Growing up in the 90s you kind of got the sense that the pinnacle of high literature were books by whiny middle-aged white dudes about their parents getting divorced in suburbia. I think this was a lot of the reason I was such a resolute fan of genre stuff at that point in my life, I just got so fucking sick of reading lists of artifacts in childhood bedrooms, and uncomfortable sexual revelations from unhappy men. Anyhow, Snow Angel admittedly resembles the above but more working class and less self-indulgent, a tautly sketched, sincerely felt depiction of love’s power to wound. Good stuff. 

Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes – The hippest mod in 60s London fights racist fascism. Energetic and fun.

Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis by Kenneth Paul Rosenberg – I kinda already knew how fucked our mental health system is but there’s some interesting stuff here, particularly about how the capitalist influence on the psychiatric pharmaceutical industry has meant that very little research goes into finding drugs to treat severe mental health issues.  

Ashe of Rings by Mary Butts – In WWI Britain, a precocious young woman grapples with a loveless mother, self-destructive lover, and a patronymic supernatural demesne. In theory I quite enjoyed Butts’ use of fantasy as a medium to explore personal and societal concerns. The writing is complex if uneven, and it was fun to imagine an alternate reality in which the genre grew up around more relatable tropes than Tolkien’s staid love of rural England and a bloodless Christ. But it was also one of those self-indulgent books where the protagonist is really obviously the author, and the romance in question a thinly veiled reworking of some previous relationship, the whole text obviously intended as a missive to an unfaithful partner. I guess I liked it less than I’d have liked.

Books I Read June 5th, 2022

It's been a busy few weeks, hence the lack of updates and small number of books read. I suspect the weeks to come might be even slower in terms of reading, I've got some other stuff going on, you will just have to get your brief, usually profane encapsulations of obscure foreign novels from someone else for a while.

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk – A thousand page panorama of a sect of apostate Jews in Central Europe in the early days of the enlightenment. It's...OK? Tokarczuk is a decent writer but the huge case of characters never really felt memorable or lively to me, and thematically it felt a little like contemporary literature Bingo – who had magical realism, the dual-monarchy, multiple POV's written in different styles...Congratulations, you won the Nobel!' I guess what I'm saying is, if for some reason you care what a handful of Swedes think about human letters, this award made more sense than Bob Dylan but less sense than Svetlana Alexievich.

God Sends Sunday by Arna Bontemps – A fictionalized biography of the author’s uncle, a reconstruction era jockey, vagrant and ne’er-do-well. A vibrant recreation of black America at the turn of the century and a charmingly amoral character study. Good stuff.   

The Homeless by Christopher Jencks – An attempt to make sense of the data leading up to the first explosion of modern American homelessness in the late 80s. As always, the longer you stare at the data the more perplexing it becomes, but Jencks is honest and thoughtful and comes to some interesting conclusions.

Red Moon, Red Lake: Stories by Ascher/Strauss – An oblique collection of interlocking tableaus exposing the explosive nihilism at the core of all human interaction, and possibly also a series of serial killings. Dark and nasty and funny and weird.  

City of Spades by Colin MacInnnes – A directionless cracker becomes fascinated by London’s immigrant black population. Like if VS Naipaul was a 60s hipster, a cynical if not heartless commentary on the difficulties and misunderstandings of interethnic interaction.

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzatti – A young soldier wasting his life at a garrison in the distant reaches of a fictionalized empire becomes a parable for our own half-hearted ramble through an indifferent existence, deluding ourselves as to the possibility of meaning, occasionally managing moments of courage despite the ceaseless movement of time and the fundamental isolation of the human condition. Beautiful, lyrical, a small but sharp masterpiece.  

Divine Punishment by Sergio Ramirez – A mix of close reporting and fictional recreations of the trial of a cad and serial poisoner in pre-war Nicaragua in the days before the first Somosa dictatorship. At once a riveting true-crime mystery, a political satire, and a slapstick comedy, Divine Punishment is a unique work by a genuine talent. Ramirez is one of the favorite discoveries I’ve made this year.

Books I Read May 15th, 2022

It was my birthday this week and so rather than read a lot I went on some day trips and baked some amazing fucking bread.

Nuts, right? Anyhow, in between that I still managed to get through...

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier – The lovestruck misadventures of a melancholic Peter Pan as written by his chief lost boy in turn of the century rural France. An odd, elegant paean to friendship, melodrama, and lost youth. Good stuff.

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas – One afternoon some years ago I found myself at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. I was driving south from Victoria Falls and wearing a J Dilla Changed My Life shirt. From what I can recall from that byzantine immigration procedure you needed a stamp certifying that your car was up to snuff, and a stamp agreeing that you personally should be allowed to exit the country. The line for the first was three people; the line for the second stretched out the door and looped the large building. I had settled in for a long wait when a security guard called me over. A lot of my time in Zimbabwe had been spent being touched for bribes so I was expecting the worst, but instead the guy asked me 'How Did J Dilla Change My Life?' Thinking he wanted me to to explain the shirt, I went on a quick shpiel about Dilla – your favorite producer's favorite producer, birth of Neo Soul, yadda yadda. Nodding approvingly, the security guard told me to give him my passport, then walked me to the front of the line and had the official stamp it.

I also strongly suspect I am the only person to ever work Dilla into a major work of published fantasy—perhaps a dubious tribute, perhaps, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, Charnas does a good job of explaining how Dilla earned such veneration during his brief career while also exposing many of the myths which sprung up around him before and after his premature demise. What emerges is a complex, contradictory figure, brilliant and mercurial. I found the book immense fun, and suspect even less vigorous devotees will enjoy it.

Books I Read May 8th, 2022

Actually, I have good reasons for being a few weeks behind on these but they're private so quit asking.

Engine Summer by John Crowley – A wistful post-apocalypse doubling as a 60's elegiac. I first read this when I was like 11, at an age when the only books I read had people hitting other people with swords. I didn't get it but it stuck in my mind ever since. A re-read reveals a lot of strange beauty mixed with the interminable wank which seems to have struck Crowley somewhat in old age (see: Aegypt, or maybe don't.) Still, it's odd and unique and worth a read.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger – A depressing if not entirely accurate discussion of California's homelessness crisis. I'll have more to say about it in another forum.

The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams – Gnostic fantasy from a lesser known Inkling. No part of that sentence appeals to me, I'm not sure why I read this and not surprised I didn't like it.

Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei – The daughter of exiled rural gentry becomes embroiled in revolutionary activities in turn of the century China. An esoteric, almost fantastical depiction of the impossible necessity of revolution and the recurring failures of humankind. Very good.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor – Mrs. Palfrey brings her stiff upper lip and dated English reserve to old age, a shoddy hotel London hotel inhabited by other elders in her position. As always, Taylor's prose is quiet, mean, and masterful.

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman – The vast tableau of the misery that was Western Europe in the 14th century as revealed by one of the best popular historians of the 20th. Tuchman's prose is lucid and clever, and she moves effortlessly between broad trends and minor anecdotes. Lots of fun.

Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood by Danny Trejo and Donal Logue – I needed something light after the brick that was Distant Mirror, and who doesn't love Danny Trejo? Like Malcolm Braly but with more celebrity gossip.

High Spirits by Robertson Davies – Not actually ghost stories but rather very tepid academic/Canadian satire. No idea why I finished this.

Books I Read April 18th, 2022

Back in Baltimore for a thing, seeing old friends and eating too much food. If you're interested, I'm over at the LA Review of Books talking about bitching about homeless policy.

Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Ghost stories, fever dreams, pederasty – you kinda know what you're getting into.

The Blue Room by Simenon – A man pays for his infidelity. Simenon is always fun.

Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny – Picked this up from off my father's shelves for old times' sake. (Time's sake?) It moves quick and doesn't waste a ton of time with explanations.

Books I Read April 10th, 2022

I kind of half-assed it this week and I couldn't really tell you why. It was hot? Anyway...

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg – Schulberg's classic send-up/poison pen letter to his beloathed father tells the story of Sammy Glick, whose complete lack of morals and energetic self-promotion make him the perfect Hollywood functionary/archetype of capitalist ruin. It's the kind of book that's so influential it ends up seeming kind of obvious, but its effective and funny and sharp and worth its place in the canon.

The Dead Girls' Class Trip and Other Stories by Anna Seghers – A diverse collection of short fiction which, along with Transit and The Seventh Cross, firmly establish Seghers as a brilliant and original writer. The range here is really extraordinary – there are a few which are basically straight horror/fantasy that work beautifully, though the excellent eponymous and most of the rest are ruminations on the Holocaust/the collapse of civilization in Central Europe. Strong stuff.

A Thousand Deaths Plus One by Sergio Ramirez – Knowing nothing about Ramirez when I read Deaths of Our Fathers a few weeks back I was surprised to discover that he had been the VP of Nicaragua under the early Sandanistas. His work is complex, contradictory, unheroic and resolutely non-didactic. That his most recent book has been banned in Nicaragua, and Ramirez himself having fled his homeland, is more tragic though for more believable. Anyway, this, like Deaths of Our Fathers, is excellent if very different, a rumination on the nebulous boundaries of identity and the subtle repetitions which guide human existence. A peculiar, erudite, and lovely work.

Mr. Hire's Engagement by Simenon – It took me about 20 pages to realize I'd read this a couple of years back, but I kept going because its so mean and sad and fun. A harmless, pitiful, tragic fat man is destroyed by a world which reflexively if unfairly loathes him. Excellent.

Books I Read April 3rd, 2022

Selected Journalism, 1850-1870 by Charles Dickens – I have this rule about finishing books that I start. Mostly, I think this is a good rule, I often find that difficult books can get more enjoyable as you work through them and even in bad books there is usually some value in figuring out what's bad about them. Every so often it does end up becoming a miserable exercise in intellectual masochism.

The Crows of Deliverance by Nirmal Verma – A collection of ruminative shorts about melancholic exchange students and disobedient sons. I quite like Verma, these were very good.

The Waste Books by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – Aphorisms from everyone's favorite Enlightenment German.

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

Books I Read March 27th, 2022

I will tell you a secret: sometimes, I make myself read books even when I don't really want to.

Every Man a Murderer by Heimito von Doderer – A conventionally minded young German man finds a new sense of purpose in investigating his sister-in-law's death. About a 100 pages into this, and despite there being nothing directly anti-Semitic in the text, I got the (later confirmed) impression that Heimito was a Nazi. Apart from it being the only apolitical book I've read written in Central Europe between the wars, there's a lot of that strand of German self-obsession which runs through Nietzsche and back (at least) to Goethe, a style of writing/thinking in which enormous and elaborate attention is paid to one's moods, as if they were storm clouds seen from a leaky vessel. At its most extreme this becomes a form of introversion which mythologizes selfishness, and, imagining genuine morality to be conventional and common (when of course it is nothing of the kind), assigns unjustified weight to ethical transgressions. All that said there's some sharp and funny stuff in here, the book is structured in a really interesting way, with the first 2/3 being sort of a backwards bildungsroman turning abruptly into a murder mystery. So, yeah, some mixed feelings on this one but I couldn't honestly say I hated it.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy – A month-long dance marathon (apparently a real thing during the Depression) reveals the degradation of the human condition. The sort of noir which makes Andre Gide look like Mitch Albom.

Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness – TK

The Silentiary by Antonio di Benedotto – A highly strung middle manager is driven insane by urban noise/modernity. There are five different housing projects being erected within a two block radius of my house (no foolin'), so I was sympathetic to this one, and it certainly sets out what it means to do, if, you know, somewhat predictably.

Little Snow Landscape by Robert Walser – Collected short fictions by everyone's favorite eternal innocent. I like Walser in small doses but honestly after a couple of pages it feels like being force fed bonbons. Maybe that's me.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams – A competent if dated commercial thriller.

Books I Read March 20th, 2022

This week I read these books.

The N'Gustro Affair by Jean-Patrick Manchette – A morally reprehensible Frenchman plays a minor role in the morally reprehensible politics of a morally reprehensible world. Manchette applies his noir sensibilities to the spy novel with predictably excellent effect.

A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner – An engaging work of popular history.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler – Yeah he's pretty good.

Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess by Hannah Arendt – Arendt sets out to write the biography of a a prominent if largely forgotten figure of the German Romantic-era in the Romantic style, which is to say, with enormously self-indulgent melodrama. Its a fascinating exercise that elicits some interesting points about Judaism but also I really can't stand Rahel Varnhagen or the Romantics generally so I had to kind of drag myself through this.

The Netanyahu's by Joshua Cohen – A fictionalized retelling of the time Bibi Netanyahu's father met Harold Bloom while applying for a job at Cornell. Funny and sharp, though I suspect a lot of the humor would be lost on a goy.

Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk – A fantastical re-imagining of Poland's tumultuous 20th century/the grand and inescapable tragedy of human existence. The weird parts are weird, the scary parts are scary, the sexy parts are sexy, the sad parts are sad. I dug it.

Books I Read, March 13th 2022

I didn't read as much as usual this week but I baked a hot ton of bread, some of which came out OK.

See?

I also read the following...

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner – I was supposed to read this in high school but didn't, laziness masquerading as rebellion, I suppose. Anyway my memory is that my AP English teacher (who was a tedious, self-important Faulkner-obsessive) saw in Quentin some sort of sensitive, sympathetic surrogate, which gave me the wrong impression of the book going in, since he (like all the men in this) is a sackless (sometimes literally), simpering coward. But that's personal history and neither here nor there—I always enjoy Faulkner's riddles and linguistic mysteries, and this one's great for that, but I also found the parade of grotesqueries which is the hallmark of southern Gothic a bit...I dunno, shlocky? This is coming from someone who has read pretty much everything Faulkner wrote at this point, and regards him as one of the best English writers of the 20th century, so, you know, degrees of genius, but still I'd take Absalom, Absalom.

Love, Anger, Madness by Marie Viuex-Chuavet – A triptych of novellas obliquely describing the nightmare of living in Haiti under the rule of Papa Doc Duvalier. In Love, an embittered, sex-maddened spinster obsesses over her brother-in-law and the brutalities of the coming regime; in Anger, a girl sells her virtue to save her family. Disturbing, erotic, insightful, excellent. Worth a read.

The Open Road by Jean Giano – A melancholic vagabond befriends a self-destructive con artist in a bitter rural French winter. There is an element of menace to everything that Giano wrote, some intrinsic understanding of the nebulous membrane between beauty and death, love and hate. I enjoyed the hell out of this one.

The Ship of Fools by Cristina Peri Rossi – Fantastical vignettes loosely linked by the presence of a its central character, a wandering hero archetype re-imagined for a feminist age. Kind of like if the Night Town chapter of Ulysses went on for 200 pages. Which, thinking about it now, it nearly does. Anyway, I thought this was uneven.

Books I Read March 6th, 2022

I sell bread now, if you live in east LA get at me on instagram @insufferablebaker or email me to get on the list. That's an actual sentence I just actually wrote. Strange world. I read these books this week...

Country By Ways by Sarah Orne Jewett – Lovely, thoughtful nature writing and some slightly mawkish short stories of the sober New England variety. Someone could (has?) do a thesis on the connection between Jewett and Marilynne Robinson, which, if you don't know what I think of Marilynne Robinson, is a compliment.

The Friend of Madame Maigret by Simenon – How Maigret is this Maigret? I would give it three, maybe three and a half pipes, maybe four.

Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives by Benjamin F. Henwood, Deborah Padgett, and Sam Tsemberis – An overview of the current housing model by which California and most of the rest of the country/Western world operate. This isn't really the place for a longer discussion of the merits of this policy, though I will say in brief that it probably works really well in places that have places to put homeless people. Alas, LA is not one of those places.

Flight of Ashes by Monika Maron – A GDR journalist struggles with censorship, her obligations towards the communist state, etc. Maron's first work, it's not bad but I thought her later stuff worked this ground more effectively.

The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green – The back text of my Penguin edition suggests this as a precursor to Sherlock Holmes, but it's not really—it's a Gothic romance in the 'which beautiful sister with the dark secret will inherit the fortune' mold. I don't really love those, and I didn't really love this.

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boine – A revisionist history of a riot in Rome presenting Alaric and his followers as responding to the religious and ethnic intolerance of the then Christian state. One ought always be cautious of work which purports to see in some vastly different context contemporary political trends satisfactory to one's own political sympathies. The paucity of documentation about Alaric allows the author a degree of latitude to interpret the behavior of the man in a way which seemed to me inappropriate. Most of it was fluff, an occasionally interesting but fundamentally pretty scattershot discussion of the culture of 4th century Rome, and what remains is unconvincing by virtue of the fact that we actually don't seem to know almost anything of relevance about the man in question.

Books I Read February 27th, 2022

I wandered through Kiev about 12 years ago when I was playing itinerant, and thought it was big and fascinatingly weird and unwelcomingly charming. No one needs to hear any of my thoughts about politics. I read these books this week...

The Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola – A razor sharp critique of capitalism and the burgeoning consumer culture then taking root in Paris, marred to the sort of mawkish romanticism common in literature of that era. A mixed bag, but worth the time.

Dead Boys by Robert Lange – Short stories in the 'meth-addicted Angeleno returns to his mother's house in Pasadena to obsess over his ex-wife' vein. Well-executed but predictable.

Ride on the Whirlwind by Sipho Sepamla – A fictionalized retelling of the 'Children's Revolution' in Apartheid-era Soweto. Fascinating if uneven.

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade – An exploration of America's economic and culturally abandoned. Most of the folks chronicled in this are a few steps up the ladder from the unhoused with whom I associate, but the essential injustice of the society which Arnade depicts, one which penalizes anyone incapable of or uninteresting in becoming a stockbroker, resonated. Good stuff.

Me, Detective by Leslie White – The inexplicably forgotten autobiographical adventures of a pre-war LA policeman is the ur-text for Chandler, Ross MacDonald, etc, creating almost full-form the image of the upright two-fisted detective, struggling to hold the line against a fundamentally corrupt society. Somehow this book hasn't been reprinted in 80 years, and to read it I had to go down to the LA central branch and collect it from the reserve stacks, but it was as project worth the effort and one I'd like to write more about soon.

The Axe by Ludvik Vaculik – In the days leading up to the Prague Spring, a dissident journalist returns to his village to ponder the life and career of his father, a sincere if imperfect communist. Excellent. A profound and sincere meditation on legacy, morality, family, all the important things. Vaculik was a great talent, and this is a gorgeous, complex, thoughtful book. Worth your time.

To Bury Our Fathers by Sergio Ramirez – A non-chronological, mythologized retelling of Nicaragua's bloody dictatorships. Fucking fabulous. Lurid, lyrical, bloody, fierce. Definitely a Bolano precursor, with lots of long monologues about tragic past misdeeds interrupted by really exact descriptions of a checker board or whatever. Anyway, excellent.

The OK End of Funny Town by Mark Polnzak – Short fiction.