Books I Read June 17th, 2024

Time passes—did you hear?

The Crooked Man by Philip Davison – A low ranking MI6 stringer gets embroiled in some nefarious deeds above his pay grade, is forced to consider the moral ramifications of doing evil things for the government.

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford – Five lives unlived. A marvelous meditation on the complexities of the human experience by a writer with a rare gift for prose and thought. One hesitates to use the word luminous given the title but it is appropriate. I really loved this. There are few things I find myself more grateful for than an optimistic work of art.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – Haven't touched this in going on two and a half decades, but picking it up again it remains a marvelous and insightful text. Past 40 and I'm still beating my way against the current, alas. Also, fascinating homosexual subplot that somehow most people miss even though it's obvious and indisputable. I remember seeing someone had labeled a recent book 'the queer Great Gatsby' and I remember thinking 'that's just called The Great Gatsby.'

The Gutter and the Grave by Ed McBain – The kind of classic men's noir in which every female character gets a paragraph long description of their breasts.

A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories by Victor Pelevin – Surrealist post-Soviet shorts. Weird and impossible and thoroughly enjoyable.

The Enormous Room by e.e. Cummings – Cummings's slightly fictionalized depiction of the time he spent in a French internment camp for writing scathing things about the allies in private letters. A lot of this is enjoyable and a lot of it is really elaborate descriptions of the physical properties of the people he met in prison and I was kind of lukewarm on the thing as a whole.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang – Gnomic East-Asian literature. Reminded me of Yuko Tsushima, and not in a way I entirely loved.