The Avenue, Clayton City (1988) by C. Eric Lincoln

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Avenue, Clayton City (1988)

by C. Eric Lincoln

Clayton City, Alabama

Alabama: 4/18

  Alabama is something close to being America's official Heart of Darkness. If you want to know something about the history of Alabama that they don't teach you in class, look up the racial demographics in Alabama by county.  You will discover that there are many counties in Alabama with single digit African American populations.  How, one might reasonably ask, is that possible?  The answer, as the literature from this project makes clear, is that freed African American were essentially burned out of many areas by local white populations in the years following the Emancipation.  That terror enforced segregation persists to the present. 

   And yet, as The Avenue, Clayton City by noted Professor-Author C. Eric Lincoln makes clear, African Americans make the choice to live and work in these parts of the country.  Many leave, and many stay, and it is the interaction between these two populations that was the cause of much change in the south in the 20th century.  Specifically, the ability of northern migrants to return home via automobile- a phenomenon that Lincoln describes here, in a novel set in the 1930's.  One theme that resonates again and again is that resident African Americans need to make peace with the "way things are" or get out or suffer severe consequences.  

  Author C. Eric Lincoln is the sort of writer I relish discovering through project-based reading- he was a professor and theological scholar who taught at Duke University and wrote THE book on the Black Muslim movement, in addition to his fiction.  The Avenue, Clayton City is sure to be in my top five for this state.

2024 Books: September to December

 2024 Books: September to December

    I think this will be the last period of the golden age of reading books for this blog.  What happened is I was trying to relocate both personally and professionally to Los Angeles from San Diego.  The personal part was relatively simple; I found a partner who lived and worked in Los Angeles and committed to the relationship.  The professional part proved much more difficult, and I ended up essentially living in Los Angeles and working in San Diego for five years, and for five years before that, living and working in San Diego and making frequent weekend trips to Los Angeles.  In other words, lots of driving.   That reality was paired with the growth of Audiobooks as a side-effect of the ability to consume Audio media via stream vs having physical media OR a download of a file.  Specifically, the Overdrive Audiobook Library app was created in 2010.  I listened to my first Audiobook in 2014, which would have been at the beginning of my driving period.  In 2015 and 16, I was spending most of my drive time listening to Spotify.

   By 2018 I was in a groove, Audiobook-wise and there followed a golden age, the recipe was frequent, long drives and the Overdrive and then Libby library Audiobook app.  I also took full advantage of the nearly infinite reach of the Los Angeles Public Library system, particularly when it came to tracking down obscure titles from the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list and the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project.   Neither project was practical until the Los Angeles Public Library came onto the scene.

  For the past five years, I've been conscious about trying not to be *too* busy with work, on the theory that I would need to be available if and when I got the chance to transfer my legal career from San Diego to Los Angeles and reading and listening to lots of books was part of that- staying sharp without loading myself up professionally.  It obviously wasn't the best choice for my finances nor my professional profile but looking back at the decision-making process I remain satisfied with my choices.

This process came to an absolute height at the end of last year- I'd heard through the grapevine that my professional transfer from San Diego to Los Angeles was imminent and so I was purposefully trying to keep my caseload light in anticipation of all the work I'd be doing in Los Angeles.

  At the beginning of this year I had to actually start doing that work, as well as making fewer trips to San Diego (down from 2 to 3 trips a week to under one trip a week).   I think probably the reading of actual books will tick back up eventually as I adapt, but Audiobooks are done, I'm going to be listening to one Audiobook a month going forward.

Published 9/5/24

The Safekeep (2024)

by Yael van der Wouden

   The Safekeep is the first 2024 Booker Longlist book I've read since they announced last month.  A now common experience is realizing that some of the books haven't been published in the USA yet, particularly galling since that includes two potential winners- the new Rachel Kushner book and Richard Powers latest offering.  Before the longlist was announced, I'd already tackled There There by Tommy Orange and Jim by Percival Everett in my book club.  Another nominee, Knockout by Rita Bullwinkle is my next book club pick.  I'm unlikely to read a new Claire Messud novel, which means there are only a half dozen or so books to look at from the longlist- with two of those not being out in the US.

  The Safekeep got a great review in the New York Times in May, with the subheading describing it as "tricky [and] remarkable."  That is code for "this is a really good book."  I think I put in on my library request list- both the Audiobook and the book itself.  By the time my request was granted, the Booker Longlist had been announced (end of July) and The Safekeep was on it.  Enough time had gone by that I was initially confused about the very nature of the book- thinking perhaps that it might be translated from Dutch and maybe nominated for the Booker International Prize instead of the Prize itself.  As I now know, The Safekeep was written in English by a resident of the UK but it is set in and about the Netherlands in the post-WWII era. 

   Describing a new release of literary fiction as "tricky" tells a potential reader that there is something going on with the plot- as simple as a third act plot twist or as complicated as something that experiments with reader expectations in a modernist/post-modernist fashion.   "Remarkable" just means that it is really good without being specific about how or why.  After listening to the Audiobook I agree with both descriptions, though I would add that I was half way through the listen before I really got on board- which itself is a sign of a good book- one that draws you in.

   When I started listening to the Audiobook I was immediately struck at how little I liked the protagonist Isabel- a young Dutch woman living alone in the house her family retreated to during World War II.  Her Mom is dead, leaving her alone in the house, which is promised to her older brother- a man-about-town type.  There's also a gay brother who left home as soon as he could, and a shy maid that Isabel enjoys bossing around.  Isabel's careful equilibrium is ruptured when she has Eva, feckless Louis' lay-of-the-month thrust upon her when Louis is called away on business and Eva has just lost her apartment.

   At the most basic level, The Safekeep is a spicy LGBT love story set in 1960's Netherlands- and it works at that level.  But then there is the "tricky" and "remarkable" part of it, which defies the format of a blog post.  I'll say this much- I wouldn't be surprised if The Safekeep makes the Booker shortlist. 

  

Published 9/6/24

Audiobook Review

Mara and Dann (1999)

by Doris Lessing

   Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2007, which led to an early "viral" moment of her nonchalantly reacting to the news.   When she won, the Committee noted that her bibliography included 50 titles and several genres.  Lessing had four novels on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list, which was published just before she won the Nobel.  One of them, her 1979 book Shikasta, is from the science fiction portion of her bibliography, like Mara and Dann. 

   Mara and Dann flopped back in 1999- the New York Times called it flatfooted and tedious.  It's a picaresque about a brother sister duo who have to flee southern Africa in the far-future, after a new ice age has rendered the northern hemisphere uninhabitable. Unlike the New York Times, I enjoyed Mara and Dann, specifically the Audiobook.  Picaresque's are similarly well suited for the Audiobook format, since you are taken on a journey with the characters.    Lessing's future Africa, called Ifrik in the book, keeps the reader in the dark for the first portion of the book, these austere portions are the ones that work best.  As Mara and Dann work their way north the world becomes more familiar, and for me, less interesting.

 Still, I'd rather listen to Mara and Dann again before I'd listen to an Audiobook narrated by a precocious but confused adolescent living in difficult circumstances.

Published 9/11/24

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974)

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

by Robert Caro

Read by Robertson Dean

(2011)

   Lists like the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die commonly keep fiction and non-fiction books separate.  For example, in the two lists I just cited, there are zero works of non fiction.  At least with the 1,001 Novels project the bias is in the title, but the 1,001 Books list has no excuse.   One recent list to buck this separation is the recently published New York Times Top Books of the 21st Century, which combines fiction and non-fiction.   Such an approach might have benefited the 1,001 Novels project.   You can see why if you listen to the Audiobook of The Power Broker: Volume 1, which is just about as New York a book as one could possibly imagine.  Indeed, there is an argument that its inclusion is required if a reader wants to really know New York, city and state.  No single person has had a greater impact on how the entire state LOOKS than Moses.   

  Volume 1, which lasts 22 hours in Audiobook format, handles his rise, and takes us to the cusp of his monumental bridge, tunnel and freeway building projects that remade Manhattan in his image.  We learn that Moses came from a patrician upbringing- a key element of his success is that he never needed to make money from his work and that his vision was inspired by the idea of a non-partial bureaucratic technocrat, who overcame all obstacles to benefit "the people."  Caro presents it as an idea he came up with while he was doing post-graduate studies in Oxford University, and his school-child dreams of a core of highly disciplined, uncorruptible state employees was about as far from the facts on the ground in New York City as could be possible.

   After some early career missteps, he was rescued from obscurity by a friendship with Belle Moskowitz, a reformer and early supporter of future Governor of New York Al Smith.  Moskowitz recommended Robert Moses to Smith as a man who could get things done, as someone who could help Smith implement the progressive ideas he wanted to advance to distance himself from the Tammany Hall political machine from which he sprang and get him in the running for a run at President.  Smith and Moses were an odd couple to be sure, and the depiction of their friendship is the unquestionable highlight of the book.   

   In Volume 1, most of the action is stage setting, as Moses begins to develop his vision of parks and freeways to drive to those parks.  Most of the action takes place on the tip of Long Island, where Moses spent the 20's and 30's in endless litigation with the land barons who owned all the property out there.  Parks were really popular with the general public and the press, particularly when those standing in the way are wealthy captain of industry.  It's clear both from the action of the book and Caro's relentless foreshadowing that the combination of power and lack of public accountability would turn Moses into a monster, but by the end of Volume 1 that moment is still on the far-ish horizon.

Published 9/12/24

Nova Swing (2006)

by M. John Harrison

Read by Jim Frangione

   Nova Swing is a 2006 science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke and Phillip K. Dick awards.  It's the second volume in a three volume series that traverses the future-noir/new weird territory that readers associate with China Mieville, Jeff VanDerMeer, J.G. Ballard and the Stugatsky brothers from Russia.  Also the films of Tarkovsky.  Which is to say that it isn't as good as any of those reference points, but is in the same ballpark.  I found it because I plugged the name of Mieville and VanDerMeer into Facebook AI and this popped out as an option- I'd never heard of M. John Harrison, who is an incredibly prolific writer of both genre fiction and non-fiction

   Unfortunately, Nova Swing was not a great audiobook for a couple of reasons. First, it's the second book of a three volume set, so if you haven't heard volume 1, you don't know anything about the underlying scenario which is some kind of future universe where some kind of interdimensional incident has generated a set-off landscape where "tourists" bring back "artifacts" helped by tour guides, including the main character in the case and policed by local detectives who act like they are in the 1940's, even though it is set in the far future.

   The other issue with the Nova Swing audiobook is that all the name and proper nouns are made up gobbledgook words- the interdimensional locale is called the Saudade Event Site, the larger area is the Kefahuchi tract and the characters have names like Vic Serotonin and Liv Hula.  And even though I don't see the comparison anywhere, much of the vibe of Nova Swing reads like a straightened-out, genrefied version of William S. Burroughs non-sensical cut up sci fi landscapes like those in the similarly named Nova Express.   

  

 Published 9/12/24

Toward Eternity (2024)

by Anton Hur

  Before Toward Eternity was published last month I only knew Korean author Anton Hur as a translator of Korean Fiction into English.  Specifically, his translation of Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung's 2021 collection of short stories, put him on my radar.  Thus, when I read that his debut novel was a mind-bending work of science fiction, I had to have it and indeed I bought it during a recent visit to Powell's City of Books in Portland. 

   The plot starts out as a borderline philosophical inquiry into the nature of being: If you replace a sentient being molecule for molecule with something else (here the "something else" is called a "nanite"), is that new thing the same as the old sentient being, something different entirely, what?   Hur then abruptly shifts to a far future world where the sentient androids created by nanites have eradicated natural humanity- or close to it- the only thing standing between natural humanity and extinction being a dissident bloc of nanites who seek to preserve diversity in the universe.

   It is a... wild ride and a clear example of the result when speculative fiction and literary fiction collide.  I really enjoyed Toward Eternity and highly recommend it for the cosmic science fiction reader. 

Published 9/18/24

Hum (2024)

by Helen Phillips

  I like American author Helen Phillips- I read her 2019 book, The Need and enjoyed it. I thought it was a good example of a way domestic fiction can be made interesting by the use of techniques drawn from speculative fiction: Throw some robots on top of that tired domestic routine!   This is the same kind of deal- Mom has just been laid off from her job in a decrepit future metropolis where the AQI makes outside a no-go.  The kids are shuttled from indoor location to indoor location and Mom and her task-rabbit husband live in a windowless box apartment.  Life is grim.  Mom agrees to undergo anti-surveillance facial modification surgery in exchange for a healthy payment, and she uses part of it to buy her family a three-day trip to the walled botanical garden in the heart of the city.

   The "Hum" of the title are future ai powered androids that serve as replacement humans in various capacities- mostly as representatives of the future government or minders of the public peace.   Although the over-riding theme is still the difficulties of being mom in the present/future world, the speculative elements make it less tedious than a book sent in the present or recent past that deals with the exact same subjects. 

Published 9/19/24

Orbital (2024)

by Samantha Harvey

   The New York Times review of Orbital by Samantha Harvey was maybe the first book review I read this year.  The way it was described made me wince- it's set on the international space station and switches between the perspectives of the multi national astronauts onboard as the travel around the planet several times (each orbit is another chapter).  They think about stuff, and stuff happens on Earth- a strong tsunami in the Pacific is the major earth-bound event- and that's the book.

  In January I told myself I'd read it if it got nominated for the Booker Prize.  It did. And then I put it off again because, again, my feeling was this is an example of the uninteresting side of the coin that is combining literary fiction with elements of speculative fiction.  There is, to be sure, a "realist" non sci fi literature of near-earth travel, but I'm just saying setting a book in space is a typical element of science fiction.  In Orbital we've got that and then the thoughts of these astronauts.  I told myself, "I'll read it if it makes the Booker shortlist, and there you go.  I was able to check the five-hour audiobook out of the library the day the shortlist was announced and listened to it at the gym and running for a couple of days.

  I can see the perspective of the Booker committee.  First, it's short, 144 pages, which is an UNDENIABLE advantage in competing for the Booker Prize.  Second it's got an international perspective- the most international perspective, you could argue, which suits the favor that the Booker Prize shows to outward looking fiction.  Third, she's an English lit insider who draws comparison Virginia Woolf for her writing style and themes and her 2009 novel Wilderness was longlisted.

  Personally, I thought it was a good Audiobook because of the length and the different voices of the astronauts- Russian, American, Japanese.  There are also several "set-piece" style descriptions of the Earth itself which are distinctive and memorable. But Orbital is def an example of modernist-inspired fictions where "nothing happens."  I'm sure that statement would drive Harvey nuts, but that is my opinion.   Whatever my personal feelings there is no denying that Harvey has the literary pedigree and that Orbital has the kind of moxy the Booker Judges seem to reward every year so...who knows. Maybe the winner.

Published 9/20/24

Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2024)

by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Asa Yoneda

   I checked the latest book by Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami after reading the New York Times review a couple weeks ago.  The review ticked most of my boxes:  It's translated from a foreign language and combines literary fiction techniques with a science fiction story.  Under the Eye takes the form of a connected series of short-stories about a horrifying far-future scenario where the human population of the Earth has collapsed, leaving the remnants grasping for a means of survival.  For the first fifty pages or so, the reader has no perspective on the situation, and it makes for a strange reading experience.  For example, the first story is about a girl who lives near a clone factory where humans are made from the remnants of animals, leaving each human with a small bone embedded inside of them which resembles the animal from which they are constructed.

   About a third of the way through the book Kawakami fills us in: Earth is populated by clones, sentient AI and different groups of humans, watched over by two formerly human, now cloned scientists who have designed this plan to ensure human survival by promoting isolation in an attempt to press fast-forward on evolution and come up with a kind of human that can survive and repopulate the Earth.   It is weird, wild stuff, with a time-scale of thousands, even tens of thousands of years.  I really enjoyed Under the Eye and recommend it heartily to the literary fiction/science fiction cross-over crowd.

 Published 9/23/24

Audiobook Review

Outlive (2023)

by Peter Attia

    I'm not a big self-help guy but I'm always on the hunt for non-fiction Audiobooks and someone on my rec-league soccer team mentioned she was listening to this book.  I'm not a crazy bio-hacker nor obsessed with living forever but I do think it's useful to keep up on new developments in the world of health, exercise and nutrition, which is what this book is all about.  Attia IS very much one of these maniac bio hackers/ people who is obsesses with living forever.  He makes a living doing it- talking often about his practice where he advises healthy people how to stay that way.  There were frequent times in Outlive where Attia sounds literally insane, including the penultimate chapter on Mental Health where he recounts his pandemic era menty b that wound up with him having to do rehab for his feelings (that is not a joke.)   He is very much the kind of guy who spends twenty pages talking about how he is past forty when he realized getting enough sleep was important. 

   There is some irony in the increased importance of sleep to mental and physical health considering it is the medical profession itself that sets the professional standard for maniac sleep deprivation. You can't talk to a doctor for five minutes without them referencing it even if they are decades past that part of their professional life. 

   My take-aways from this book mostly reinforced what I've already learned in recent years.  First and most important lesson is that you need to do different kind of exercises- cardio, strength training and balance/stability work- it's this last category that was new to me.  It involves lots of supervised gym training- which seems like kinda bad advice, "Don't do this unless you can afford a personal trainer to closely instruct you" doesn't seem particularly actionable.  The idea is that it isn't enough to just build up your muscles, you also need to maintain and improve flexibility, balance and stability, since part of growing older involves losing these attributes.

  His nutritional advice also fell into the category of largely familiar but well developed arguments and explanations.  Sugar, of course, is public enemy number one these days and specifically the kind of "free sugar" or added sugar you find in soft drinks.  Heavily processed foods have largely replaced fat/cholesterol as enemy number two.  Attia goes to great lengths to defend dietary fat and cholesterol and gives frequent shout-outs to the meat-heavy keto approach based on his personal history.  He links together diet and exercise by arguing that the important thing about consuming carbs and sugar is that you exercise to use that energy up.  If you don't exercise, you can't eat those things, basically.   

   He develops a diet-agnostic approach to nutrition- it's not what specifically you eat but how much of it you eat of it, and what you do with the energy you take in.  That's one reason weight training is so important for long-term health- it's an easier sink for those calories than going for an hour and a half run every time you have a steak dinner.   Attia, for example, says he works out four times a week- just strength training.  He recommends "rucking"- which is walking with a full backpack on, over running for cardio. 

   I can see why this book was a hit.

Published 9/16/24

Brotherless Night (2023)

by  V. V. Ganeshananthan

Read by  Nirmala Rajasingam

   Brotherless Night is another great book coming out of the post-Tamil War Tamil diaspora. There's been a small flood of Sri Lankan authored books hitting the international market, typically by making it onto the Booker Longlist.  I heard about Brotherless Night after it won the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction-  I couldn't resist a prize winner about the Tamil War in Sri Lanka, which I think will prove to be one of the key current events from that period in world history- it lasted 26 years from 1983 to 2009, and Ganeshananthan's narrator and protagonist, Sashikala Kulenthiren is there to take us through it from the perspective of a young woman from a well-off Tamil family (one daughter, four brothers) who is destined to become a doctor.  

  There is nothing magical realist, post-modern or metafictional about Ganeshananthan's approach- which is so straight forward it often reads like a biography memoir vs. a novel.  Sashi is a bright, engaged young woman living in a momentous time, but hers is the only perspective we get from the book.  There's no secondary plot or skipping around in time- the reader gets Sashi's experience, having her normal life disrupted, losing all but her youngest brother to the liberation movement and then witnessing the horrors o the tamil's themselves, who were as ruthless to their own internal rivals and dissidents as the Sri Lankan government, the Indian Peacekeepers, who end up sowing more misery with their ill-considered troop deployment and of course the Sri Lankan government, which really seems befuddled more than anything else by a rebellion in a part of the country that was so thoroughly comprised of this one, rebellious ethnic group that middle ground became impossible to find.

  Ganeshananthan moonlights as a field medic at a Tamil jungle hospital and witnesses all manner of catastrophe before getting involved in an effort to document the atrocities committed on all sides.  This puts her in a rough spot with the Tamils, but her service as a field medic and sister of 3 Tiger brothers earns her a ticket to the United States, from where she witnesses the end of the war.   It is QUITE a journey- 100x more vital than ANY American author.  She's not particularly accomplished as a prose stylist but the story is so powerful it doesn't matter.

 It was also a fantastic audiobook because of the accents involved- all of which would be impossible for me to do in my head.  Fully recommend the Audiobook edition- 20 hours long.

Published 9/17/24 

Audiobook Review

Creation Lake (2024)

by Rachel Kushner

  I've been looking forward to Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner's new novel since I finished her last novel, The Mars Room, back in 2017.  Kushner is exactly the type of author I'm looking for:  A woman who doesn't write about women who are wives and moms.  Rather, her protagonists are women on the fringes of society, i.e. interesting subjects, and her books sparkle with life.   In Flamethrowers, the subject was biker gangs.  In The Mars Room, it was a woman doing life for murder.  Here the narrator and protagonist is "Sadie Smith"(a nom de spy), an American woman with a graduate degree in literature (or something like that) who has eschewed a life of academic stiving for work as, first, an undercover informant for the FBI (we call them "CI's" or confidential informant, in the biz) and then as a spy-for-hire.

  Creation Lake takes place during one of her gigs- an assignment to infiltrate a commune of rural eco-radicals who are "led" by Bruno Lacombe, a mysterious intellectual who lives in a cave.  Sadie is an interesting lady:  She's smart and funny and ruthlessly immoral. In quiet moments during the activities of this book, she reflects wryly on the case that got her booted out of the FBI CI program (she set up a young man and his older mentor in an eco-terrorism bust, only to see them both acquitted at trial on the grounds of entrapment).  She also enjoys reading the lengthy email missives from Bruno to his followers which have a distinctly Knaussgardian flair.  

  Equally at the center of Creation Lake is the French region of Guyenne- which is in the south-west of the country, with a rich tradition of Neanderthal cave artwork and rural despair.  Through the medium of Bruno's emails, Smith learns about the Cagot, a poorly understood caste of outcasts from the region.  Her contemplation of Bruno's emails and her own trips around the area in pursuit of her goal elevate Guyenne to supporting character status. 

  If this wasn't a Rachel Kushner novel, I would have been waiting for Sadie to develop a conscience but that doesn't happen.  Rather, Smith becomes determined to see the plan out and we are invited to watch the proceedings unfold.  Creation Lake isn't a spy novel exactly, but it does provide those pleasures in addition to introducing a character who could possibly establish some kind of IP franchise. I checked out the Audiobook because it was read by the author, and I thought she did a great job. Creation Lake deserves the Booker shortlist and it could possibly win that award. 

Published 9/24/24

Held (2023)

by Anne Michaels

  Held by Canadian poetess/novelist Anne Michaels is the fifth of the six Booker shortlisted novels I've read this year.  The last, Stone Yard Devotional, is not out in the USA yet. I listened the live announcement of the shortlist this year on YouTube and one of the things the presenting Judge said is that REREADABILITY is an important characteristic of the Booker Prize since all of the Judges read all of the longlisted and shortlisted titles more than once in the course of the Judging period.  They start out with something over 100 books, which I have to believe they divide up, but after that the rereading begins.  I thought that was interesting because I almost NEVER reread books, and indeed, those books I've read more than once are basically books I'm OBSESSED with. 

 There are different ways to consider re-reading.  The first, is the passion for the book angle.  The second would be that the book is too complicated to be understood the first time, which also is congruent with the modernist-influenced prose favored by people "in the business" (i.e. English professors, graduate students) of literature.   So when I tell you that I would need to read this book again, like, immediately, to really get what was going on- take it as a compliment. I can tell you it takes place in several time periods, that the characters are related, that most of it takes place in England in the early 20th century, though several chapters take place in France during World War I. 

  Maybe that means Held is the winner- because it is the most difficult and therefore the most obviously re-readable book?   We will find out!

Published 9/25/24

Headshot (2024)

by Rita Bullwinkel

   Headshot, by American author Rita Bullwinkle was the most surprising Booker Longlist title this year.  It was also our last book club pick- a decision that was made before the Booker announcement so...kudos to my book club.  Headshot takes place over a single weekend at a boxing gym in Reno, location of the women's under-18 national tournament.  Each chapter is a different bout- four fights in the first round, then the semi-finals and the final.  Each bout is told from the perspective of each fighter with Bullwinkle moving forward and backwards in time to tell us where the individual boxers have come from and where they are going.

  It's audacious technique and even more impressive because Headshot is only 224 pages long.  Author Bulwinkel has history with McSweeney's, and the combination of subject matter and technique reminded me of other offerings from McSweeney's affiliated writers.  

Published 10/3/24 

Audiobook Review

Horror Movie (2024)

by Paul G. Tremblay

   I'm not a big genre fiction guy but I dip my toes in fantasy, horror and crime/detective fiction and read quite a bit of science fiction.  My usual rule for fantasy/horror/crime/detective fiction is that I'll read it if it gets a stand alone (vs. round-up) review in the New York Times book section.   Regardless of the content of the book or the tenor of the review, any genre title that gets a stand alone review means that it is well above the standard quality for whatever genre, and that it may, in fact, exceed genre standards to the point where it qualifies as literary fiction.

  Such was the case with Horror Movie, the latest from Paul G. Tremblay, one of a handful of horror authors who maintain contact with the literary fiction establishment.  The New York Times review for Horror Movie- written by a horror-industry stalwart, was sparkling, to the point where I checked out the Audiobook from the library.  Alas, I did not enjoy my listening experience, largely for the same issues I have with most horror books.  These can be expressed as follows:

1.  Every horror novel wants the reader to care about whether SOMEONE lives or dies, and I never ever do, not for one moment, care what happens to any character in any horror novel.  In my mind, a real horror story is a novel about the struggles of an unwed, poorly educated teen mom who gives birth in the rural south in the mid 20th century.

2.  Every horror novel is built around a ridiculous concept- that the world is filled with malevolent things- human or other, who are absolutely obsessed with murdering/ruining the lives of living humans, specifically the characters in this book.  This is the opposite of my lived experience, which suggests that the supernatural is largely a delusion caused by different kinds of mental illness and that the wider world does not care what happens to a specific person, no matter what they have going on in their life.

3.  I don't enjoy being scared.

    Although I was never in danger of being scared by the Horror Movie audiobook, the other two issues were front and center, since the plot: About the revival of an ill-fated cult horror film shot by a bunch of college-age students in the Northeast,  hits points 1 and 2 right in the bullseye despite the metafictional attempts by the author to spice up the timeline of the book.  Simply put, who gives a shit whether these people live or die, or how they go about it.  Not me.

Published 10/15/24

 Audiobook Review

The Third Realm (2024)

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

   We are now three books into Karl Ove Knausgaard's "The Morning Star" series, which combines his trademark close examination of the minutiae of everyday life and everyday thoughts with some kind of a supernatural thriller plot that revolves around a mysterious "new star" which appears in the sky over contemporary Norway and somehow stops all deaths.  Three books in and the general public is still unaware of the phenomenon.  To slow things down even further, Knausgaard uses the third volume to introduce an almost entirely new cast of characters, including a naive Norwegian teen and her nefarious black-metal boyfriend.  In fact, it is Norwegian black metal that takes an astonishing front-of-house position in this volume, as a Norwegian detective seeks to solve the gruesomely mysterious slaying of three members of a lesser Norwegian black metal band at the hands of forces unknown.

  There is also a neurologist who is called in to investigate brain activity in people who were thought to be brain dead, Tove a manic-depressive housewife and painter and Gaute, a teacher and husband to previously described character Katrina (a clergywoman with the church of Norway.) Still no idea how long this series will continue- could be endless?

Published 10/22/24

Annihilation (2024)

by Michel Houellebecq

  It's hard to be a fan of Michel Houellebecq in the United States- he's despised by the literary establishment, and the type of Americans who would be his fans typically aren't big fans of translated French literary fiction.  Thus, to read about Houellebecq in English language periodicals is to be subject to an endless stream of disdain with occasional concessions to his wit or powers of anticipation.  I wasn't surprised that the New York Times review for Annihilation, which is reportedly Houellebecq's last novel book?) struck this exact tone- using the cover of an opening about how an average American reader of literary fiction might become increasingly sympathetic to Houellebecq as additional drinks are consumed over the course of the evening. 

    Regrettably I agree with Dwight Garner's assessment, that this is far from Houellebecq's best work and it, in fact, frequently grim and nearly impossible to read.  The major theme here is end of life care and the issues surrounding euthanasia, interspersed with a strange and half abandoned techno-thriller angle and Houellbecq's typically fraught musings about relations between the sexes.   The inclusion of the techno thriller stuff gave me hope for at least some kind of mass market ambition, and it is impossible to know what to make of the fact that the plot line is abandoned two thirds of the way through the book.  Houellebecq's characters are, as always, hugely unlikable, that is nothing new, but there is a real lack of both wit and fun, which if you are going to put up with the rest of it, are what makes Houellebecq such a good read.

Published 10/23/24 

Audiobook Review

The Empusium (2024)

by Olga Tokarczuk

   Like many English readers, I hadn't heard of Polish author and Nobel Prize Winner Olga Tokarczuk until the release of Flights in 2018- a translation from the original Polish which was published in 2007.  Since then I've kept up with her new English language releases- like many I found the similarities between Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, published in 2019(in English and 2008 in Polish), and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (published in 2020). No one ever got to the bottom of it! I also read The Books of Jacob- which I thought was really great but had zero and I mean zero, commercial appeal.

  The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story arrived late last month and I quickly got the Audiobook(!) version out of the library of the Libby app.  At 11 hours it was much shorter than The Books of Jacob and more in line with the standard length of a newly published novel.   Like every book I've read of hers except for Flights, The Empusium is going to appeal to a limited audience, fans of cheeky, feminist historical fiction with genre elements, provided here by the promise of a "horror story" in the title.   Perhaps unsurprisingly, the horror is ever lurking and rarely front in center.  Instead, the reader/listener is treated to lengthy dialogues between the residents of a turn of the 20th century sanitarium which I believe is located in the Czech alps- or what would be a mountainous region of the Czech Republic today or maybe Austria.   

    I've actually learned a fair amount about sanitariums over the years from history and literary fiction- they played a prominent role in the settling of southern California vis a vis the dry client being ideal for sufferers of tuberculosis.  There's also the more contemporary understanding of the sanitarium as a predecessor/forerunner of the modern mental hospital/place to stash well-off people who are incapable of maintaining themselves in society- LGBT people, for example.   This sanitarium in this book makes use both of the tuberculosis model and the developing "science" of psychiatry- which- you don't have to be a Scientologist to point out issues with psychiatry. 

    So personally, I quite enjoyed it but it's another work of literary fiction which will have little, if any appeal to people who aren't already interested in fiction about turn of the century European sanitarium culture. Those showing up for the horror story will be left wanting.

Published 10/29/24

Father of Lies (1998)

by Brian Evenson

   The first Brian Evenson book I read was Immobility, his 2013 novel about a human-less post-apocalyptic scenario.   That was back in 2021.  Since then I've kept track of him- he's one of the few horror/sci-fi genre writers who commonly attracts attention from the literary fiction mainstream, which is enough for me.  Recently(2016 anyway), many books from his backlist were put back into print by Coffee House press, and Father of Lies (along with everything else he ever published) popped up on the Libby library app.  

  Father of Lies is an early work, a relatively straight-forward work of religio-horror about a psychopathic leader of a Mormon-like church (Evenson is from Utah and was raised Mormon).  In 2024, it sounds like a particularly sadistic retelling of the Catholic Priests vs. Young Boys saga of the past decades.  Unlike the Catholic Church, Mormons are still in full on refuse to acknowledge/cover-up mode, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the church which is depicted is only Mormon-like. 

  The horror is nothing you wouldn't read about in a newspaper story about Catholic priests abusing young boys- although he does murder one young parishioner after she confesses to being pregnant by her older brother.   This murder triggers a cascade of events which include a physical manifestation of Satan and lots of back and forth between him and his ever-supportive Church elders.  Events spiral when the mothers of three young church-members all come forward claiming that their young male children are victims of the protagonists vile abuse, and much of the horror comes from the support he continues to claim from the Church hierarchy who really stand by him all the way through the book.

Published 10/21/24

Playground (2024)

by Richard Powers

   I like Richard Powers but I don't love him.  In many ways he's one of the last old white men if American fiction- he's managed to avoid irrelevance by winning major literary prizes and writing fiction that is broadly appealing to the biggest possible audience for literary fiction while changing things up enough to avoid charges that he is repeating himself or running out of new ideas.  One hallmark of Powers' fiction is his repeated ability to introduce non-fiction subjects into his prose:  Ecology, AI or, in Playground, the wonders of the oceans.  The weaving together of science and literary fiction is the essence of Powers and his appeal.  For me, his books are hit and miss.  Yes, I enjoyed The Overstory, but only read it after it won the Pulitzer Prize because "Richard Powers writes about trees" didn't sound interesting.  Afterward, I didn't regret reading it but I never think about it, talk about it or recommend it to anyone.

  Similarly,  I wasn't annoyed or uncomfortable reading Playground but nor was I ever compelled or emotionally triggered by the characters or the story.  Playground isn't a book I'll revisit and I really do doubt it's going to win a major literary award.  It got weeded out at the shortlist stage by the Booker Prize this year, which makes sense to me.  

Published 10/30/24 

Audiobook Review

William (2024)

by Mason Coile

    William is an AI centered horror novel and I checked out the Audiobook after the New York Times gave it a great review last month.  The mere fact that the Times gave that many column inches to a work of genre fiction that was published under a pseudonym, no less (Mason Coile is the "open pseudonym" of award-winning Canadian author Andrew Pyper.)  The set up is that a pregnant tech billionaire and her agoraphobic husband are living in their state of the art "smart home" in the Seattle area.  Henry, the protagonist, is an engineer who spends his days working on "William" a spooky ai powered android that has no legs and a fearsome hatred of Henry and all of humanity.  The reader knows things are not going to go well and indeed they do not, with events starting to pile up after Lily, his wife, invites to work friends over for a rare dinner. 

  Although William clocked in at under four hours, Coile manages to intersperse the gory horror scenes with philosophical musings and a very big twist at the end.  It's worth a listen for the Halloween season!

Published 10/31/24

 Audiobook Review

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)

by Mariana  Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

  I straight up loved Our Share of Night, the multi-generational novel about a group of Satanists operating in the UK and Argentina.  I'm by no means a fan of the horror genre, but Enriquez really nailed the cruelty of a fictional satanic cult and I still think about some of the scenes on a regular basis as an example of what good writing means to me- and just to think that this is a writer who has her words translated into English from Spanish.  I've more or less decided that for books within the close Indo-European sphere: English, Spanish, French, German the idea of losing meaning/beauty in the translation from one closely related language to another is overblown except on a poetic level. 

  Going in I knew that this volume of short stories wouldn't match her novel, but I still enjoyed this collection.  The title story, in particular, combines the elements of her style:  A spooky, LA-based story about an Argentinian journalist who convinces her editor to let her travel to  Los Angeles to do a story on the cultish group that has sprung up around the memory of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old Canadian student who died under extremely mysterious circumstances inside the Water Tower of the Cecil Hotel.  While in Los Angeles, she is forced to confront the memory of her dead lover who lost himself to schizophrenia and heroin and reconnecting with a lesbian couple who live in the Hollywood hill.   Most of the other stories are set either in Argentina or in an Argentina-like place and have similar but different combinations of spooks and personal issues.   Mostly, though, this collection was just a reminder for me about how much I loved Our Share of Night. Published 11/8/24 

Audiobook Review

The Last Days of New Paris (1998)

by China Miéville

  I'm a big fan of science-fiction, less so of fantasy.  Sure, when I was a lad I played by fair share of Dungeons and Dragons and read all the fantasy classics.  As an adult I enjoyed the Game of Thrones television series, but beyond that, regular fantasy just seems so tedious with its magical creatures that recreate the cultural preoccupations of whichever author is behind the keyboard.  I am, however, intrigued by the writers of the "New Weird" movement a genre that lands somewhere in between fantasy, science fiction and literary fiction.

  Chief among these is English author China Miéville.  The Last Days of New Paris is an alternate-history/fantasy novella about a group of surrealists resistance fighters battling Nazi's and otherworldly demons conjured up by a detonation of an "S-Bomb."  The thin plot, which involves running around a ruined Paris and fighting Nazi's who are seeking to capture control of the free-ranging apparitions wandering around post-war Paris with the help of Demons they've conjured from hell, is also an opportunity for Miéville to write about the history of the surrealist movement and animate some of those characters.

  I found it all pretty incoherent as an Audiobook, and I couldn't even make it through the Appendix, where Miéville pedantically explains all the surrealist references among his characters and his monsters- which often take their shape from the psyche of their surroundings(!?!).   The thing about fantasy is that you always know where it's going to end up- there is going to be some kind of a quest and the protagonist either does the thing or fails heroically.  It's like, people never sit down for a meal and a chat in fantasy novels.  

Published 11/15/24 

Audiobook Review

The Children of Men (1992)

by PD James

  I love the movie version of this book- I've watched it several times over the years, and I finally got around to listening to the Audiobook of the original book by PD James.  James made her name as a writer of detective fiction and it's one of three non-detective fiction books she published before her death in 2014.   I believe there are multiple versions of the Audiobook- I would imagine one before the film and one after to capitalize on the revitalized interest.  Whichever version I heard I didn't like the narrator, who had a stuffy, pedantic English accent (as befits the character in the book).  

  As one might expect, the book tells a related but different story than the film, which was obviously diversified in the hands of director Alfonso Cuaron.  In the book, the harsh treatment of would-be immigrants is mentioned as a concern  but not something encountered by the characters.  In the film, the immigrants and their treatment are at the center of the plot.  I found myself wondering about James and her motivation- my thought is that she was inspired by Margaret Atwood and A Handmaid's Tale, which was published in 1985, so it very well could have been in her mind when she first imagined The Children of Men.  I don't see anything in her detective fiction that would have triggered this dark, dystopian tale of a childless future (and neither did the New York Times, both before and after the movie was released.)

Published 11/18/24 

Audiobook Review

Absolution (2024)

by Jeff Vandermeer

   Reading the latest Southern Reach book from Jeff Vandermeer is an exercise in self-inflicted pain.  For those who aren't keep track, Annihilation and it's follow-ups were always referred to as the Southern Reach Trilogy up until this, the fourth book in the series, was published. The reach of Vandermeer's enterprise was expanded by the movie version by Alex Garland, which polarized audiences when it was released but has gone to enjoy a successful life in the stream-o-verse- I think I've watched parts of it on three or four different streaming platforms at this point.

 So three books in what do we know about The Southern Reach- we know something is going on in there, that the something changes and transforms DNA- turning peaceful bunny rabbits into crab eating monsters and possessing the capacity to create human-like doppelgangers.  We know that the investigation is being run by a shadowy government agency, or maybe even a shadowy government agency secretly ensconced within another, larger, shadowy government agency.

   Beyond that I don't really know, and frankly, I'm kind of done caring after this, the latest episode which mostly tells the story of "Old Jim" a washed-up, alcoholic CIA agent obsessed with his missing daughter who is posted to Area X prior to the time period covered in Annihilation.   There is also a portion told from the perspective of two different members of the all-male expedition that preceded the all female expedition of Annihilation.   Like all the other books in the series, Vandermeer never makes anything explicit, leaving the reader to ponder what to make of it all.   To be fair there were some heart stopping set pieces, like the aforementioned crab eating rabbits and a late scene where the Area tricks one of the male expedition members into eating the flesh of a dead comrade- which is, contrary to the rest of the series, described in such intimate detail that I had to turn the Audiobook off a couple times to keep myself from potentially throwing up in my vehicle. 

Public 11/22/24 

Audiobook Review

Harrow (2021)

by Joy Williams

    I take some flack in my book group for reading prize winners but I stick with the approach because ANY literary prize is handed out by a bunch of people who take literary fiction seriously and are trying to make a point by awarding a specific prize to a specific book.  Any work of literary fiction that can win a major or minor prize is worth taking note of, because the over-under on "number of people who think a random work of literary fiction is great" is roughly zero.   I had checked out this very same Audiobook back in 2021 only to abandon it a couple hours through the eight hour listening length.   I revisited it after coming across the information that it had won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction back when it was published.  The prize itself only dates back to 2014 but it's done a decent job of picking relevant titles. James by Percival Everett is their pick this year, Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was last year.  By those standards Harrow- a dystopian eco-thriller{?} and first novel by the well-known writer of short stories is a real left field pick. 

  What I remember from my first go-round in 2021 is that I had little idea what was going on- my number one indicator for gauging whether a book is "serious" literary fiction or not- lack of narrative guard-rails for the reader is the signal accomplishment of literary modernism.  But 2024 me would think that the combination of literary fiction and dystopian sci fi would have been appealing to 2021 me, so I wanted to unravel the mystery.   Second time through I had just as hard a time figuring out what was going on.  Like, sitting here right now I can't describe the third part of the book in relation to the first two parts.  Williams and her approach very much reminded me of the approach taken by George Saunders in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo- also a literary prize winner.  There, Saunders animated the graveyard with a polyphony of voices.  Here, Williams similarly throws voices like a short-story writer getting paid by the idea.  Her protagonist, Kristin, is a high-school/college age girl who is dismissed from her confusing boarding school situation after some kind of "final" collapse of civilization.

   She wanders in search of her Mother, who was last seen on the shore of a lake in what feels like Upstate New York at some kind of wellness conference.  When she arrives at her destination she doesn't find her mother but rather a run-down motel inhabited by a collection of elderly people who are each trying to commit a final act of terrorism against what is left of the world before they die, a quiet suicide now being somewhat de rigeur for Americans of a certain age.  There is also a 10 year old boy named Jeffery who constantly recites legal doctrines as a coping mechanism ("Before this he needed an inhaler") and his alcoholic mother. 

   But so far as anything happening in the book, there isn't a lot, just this girl Kristin talking to different people and those people relating their own stories before the focus goes back to Kristin.  There were passages where I could hear the greatness but getting that wrapped up in the listening experience would cause me to lose my grasp of the over-arching narrative- which is a very rare event in my reading life.  It really says something about the complexity of Harrow. 

Published 12/16/24 

Audiobook Review

My Name is Barbra (2023)

by Barbra Streisand 

  It is hard to do justice to the 48 hour long Audiobook of Barbra Streisand's autobiography. It is important for a prospective listener to know that the narrator is none other than Barbra Streisand herself AND that many of her recordings are used when they are mentioned in the reading.  The listener learns many, many things about Streisand and I'm sure that is the case whether you are an ardent fan or someone who only knows her as a pop-culture reference point (me).   Begin with her troubled relationship with her only surviving parent (her Dad died when she was a young child), her Mom.   Streisand and her Mom do not have a great relationship which is a frequent theme early in the book and continues to be a surprisingly robust sense of ire all the way through to the end.  Streisand delves heavily into her emotional relationship with Virginia Clinton, Bill Clinton's Mom, in the same chapter she is lambasting her own Mother for skipping her big Las Vegas anniversary show, Streisand is in her late 50's in this chapter.

   Next is her status as an actress, not a singer and later as an actress/director/producer, not a singer.  It's hard to overstate Streisand's lack of interest in her singing career despite it being her voice that leads her to nearly immediate fame as a teenager.  Streisand is not a song writer, nor an arranger of music, so most of the stuff about her singing are details about her relationships with different writers, arrangers and producers. As a result, those looking for some insight about music career might leave disappointed.  On the other hand, those interested in hearing about every damn details about every film she has ever made- get excited!

Published 12/19/24

 Audiobook Review

Mobility (2023)

by Lydia Kiesling

  I checked the Audiobook of Mobility, the 2023 novel by American author Lydia Kieling after seeing it described as "the perfect novel for the Baku climate summit" in the New York Times last month.  I was intrigued at the idea that an American author, a woman, no less, had written a novel that was at least partially set in Baku- which sounded far more interesting than the usual:  books written about women struggling to live in America, either dealing with abusive fathers, husbands or partners, struggling with issues surrounding family, career and child-birth.   That is, in my experience, an accurate description of 90% of literary fiction written by American women.  My literary travels through the United States via the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project have left me with a profound lack of interest in the issues surrounding raising children in the USA.   Both in books in my experiences in real life it seems simply insane how OBSESSED "normal" parents are with every aspect of their child and its development, this despite the fact that basically every child is exactly the same (don't tell this to a parent!)

   Mobility, on the other hand is picaresque with a young woman, Elizabeth (or "Bunny" as she is known as an adolescent).  When we meet her she is a shy teen, the daughter of an American diplomat posted to Baku close to the end of the Soviet era.  Mobility follows her life as a young and then middle aged adult, where she works her way up the ladder of a privately owned "Energy Services" company while trying to navigate adult relationships and her Mom, who kind of falls apart after a divorce from her diplomat father.   It's not heavy lifting but it is nice to read about a female protagonist who has her act together.

Published 11/7/24

The Known World (2003)

by Edward P. Jones

  Pulitzer Prize winner The Known World by Edward P. Jones was the highest ranked novel on the the recent Best Books of the 21st century book that I hadn't read(#4).  I can't believe that editor Susan Straight didn't include it in her Virginia chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, perhaps because she picked one of Jones' other titles for the Washington DC chapter.   Having now read The Known World, I found the exclusion baffling and I can't explain it except as an example of the firm one author/one book rule that seems to be operative within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Similarly, editor Straight left off Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which is set in South Carolina and also seems to be a victim of the one author/one title.

  Surely the one novel in American literature that covers the experience of African American slave OWNERS in the upper south is worth including in a project that shows the different experiences of Americans?  Looking into Edward P. Jones and his legacy, I understand how I missed it the first time around- Jones has the lowest of low literary profiles and never wrote a second novel.  Having read The Known World, I can understand why.  If you totally nail such a huge subject and everyone agrees that you nailed it and it is the best book on the subject, why bother trying to top it?

\

Jealous-Hearted Me (1997) by Nancy Huddleston Packer

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jealous-Hearted Me (1997)

by Nancy Huddleston Packer

Montgomery, Alabama

Alabama:  3/18

   Finally, a novel from the deep south where no one is murdered by a hateful mob.  On the other hand, it is also a situation with no black characters, and so thoroughly de-racinated that I had to Google the author to figure out if the characters were supposed to be white or black.   This is a book of interconnected short stories about a woman and her relationship with her mother.  To put it simply, the daughter is obsessed with the mother and almost every story is focused on how the daughter yearns to spend more time with her elderly mom, while the mom goes about her business and lives her life.   Not for the first, time Jealous-Hearted Me gave me occasion to reflect on how sad the lives of those lived entirely within the confines of family appear on the printed page.  I'm not commenting on people who actually live this way, just as it appears as a topic/subject for art, specifically the novel.

2024 Books: June to August

 2024 Books: June and July

     When I was collecting the books from earlier in 2024 I noticed that most of the titles were contemporary and there was not much non-fiction- I can see how I responded to that in June, July and August- I see an effort to read older books and non-fiction titles.  My non-fiction issues improved when the New York Times released its Top 100 Books of the 21st Century, which had plenty of non-fiction titles I hadn't read.  That list was published in June or July of 2024. Looking back at it, I think 2024 is likely to be the last great reading year for this blog.  It seems like I'm going to be spending more intellectual energy on my job and less time driving around Southern California.  I don't think I read half as many books this year during the same time period.

Published: 6/3/24

Audiobook Review

The Way That Leads Among the Lost (2024)

by Angela Garcia

  Sourcing non-fiction consistently is tough. Mostly I rely on the Sunday Book Review section of the New York Times for ideas, but the number of potential titles is limited since I don't go in for biography, autobiography, memoir or books about current events.  I also don't like books about people travelling or books about subject I am actually interested in, but are pitched at a more general audience.  I also don't want to read books on subjects I'm actually interested in that are meant for specialists in the field.   The Way That Leads Among the Lost is an interesting work of non-fiction about the world of Anexos, semi-legitimate drug treatment centers that proliferate in the informal economy of Mexico and in the United States near the southwestern border.

   I checked out the Audiobook from the library after I read the New York Times book review, which was mixed but convinced me based on the subject matter.  I'd never heard about Anexos before despite 20 plus years practicing criminal defense on the southern border.  It seems like a phenomenon I would have read about in probation reports written about my Mexican national clients, many of whom have grappled with drug addiction. 

 Basically, in Mexico, if your kid has a drug problem and you aren't super rich, you pay a bunch of thugs to kidnap them and they are then locked inside a room with a bunch of other addicts, where they are forced to give lengthy testimonies about their history of abuse and addiction.  The stay is indefinite, but can go on for months and even years. The environment is complicated by the presence of the mentally ill, committed for their own protections, and some people who simply stashed by parents who need to be elsewhere.   It's all loosely based on the credo of alcoholics anonymous, particularly the part where you recount your sins in a group setting- testifying they call it here.

   Garcia presents herself as a Stanford trained academic doing field work in anthropology, but she also introduces a narrative involving her own experience, in which she was essentially abandoned by her feckless parents as a young teen and forced to find her own way in the wilds of New Mexico, where she experimented with drugs and homelessness but eventually found her way to Stanford.  In one particularly interesting chapter Garcia herself participates in a desert session of confession, which sounds like the camping part of Coachella without music, fun or food but with people forced to spend hours recounting their traumas.

  As one can perhaps imagine about a Stanford trained anthropologist, Garcia isn't here to tell us whether Anexos work or don't work, or whether they are good or bad.  They exist and they are described.  Overall the tone of The Way That Leads Among the Lost is more novelistic than academic which is a credit to Garcia.  Not every observation lands, and the whole thing doesn't tie together as tightly as it might, but the reader will come away with a firm understanding of the Anexos phenomenon . 

  

Published: 6/6/24

I Who Have Never Known Men (1995)

by Jacqueline Harpmen

   I was sitting in a dog cafe with my boo this week and we saw a woman reading Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh.   Naturally I asked her what she thought since anyone who takes out a copy of Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh is begging to be asked.  She said she loved it, loved Moshfegh, and the three of us sat there and chatted about books for a minute.  She recommended this book, I Who Have Never Known Men, translated from the French into English in 1998.   I managed to get an eBook copy from the Los Angles Public Library almost immediately.  It was brought back into print in 2020 and the edition I read was from 2022, so I think this would be in the category of "rediscovered classic."  It wasn't ignored back in the 1990's- the New York Times reviewed it (in two sentences, to be fair), and Kirkus compared it to The Handmaid's Tale, which is an apt comparison.

   Harpmen never had another book translated into English and I Who Have Never Known Men was decades ahead of its time.  We know this because The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985 and didn't really take off until 2016 when the first season of the increasingly ridiculous television show (which is still running!) reminded everyone that the fiction of feminist of dystopia was a pretty rich hunting ground for think pieces.   For me, the craziest part of the revival of Handmaid's Tale was that Atwood published a sequel, The Testaments, in 2019, and that this sequel actually won The Booker Prize- which has to be the biggest make up prize in the history of major literary awards.

  These days, feminist-tinged dystopian fiction could take up a book shelf- I try to read all of it, since the combination of genre and literary concern is a consistent theme on this blog.   It makes sense that I Who Have Never Known Men would be revived in this environment.  I found it a grossly compelling and incredibly dark read.   It's only 175 pages- you can read it in a couple hours.  I actually got up a half hour early to finish it up and I'm sure I won't forget it.

Published 6/6/24

Audiobook Review

Every Living Thing (2024) 

by Jason Roberts

   Every Living Thing is a non-fiction book about the history of the attempts by humanity to scientifically classify life by species. The most famous name is Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who is generally credited with the classificatory system of life:  kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.  Linnaeus was operating well in advance of the modern advances in chemistry and biology, i.e. the discovery of dna and genetics, and the major point Roberts makes about him is that he believes that once a species was established, it was immutable, and that renders his entire classificatory system faintly ridiculous.   His system is even more ridiculous today, where genetic analysis has made it quite clear that the scientific basis for up to one third of named species collapses at the genetic level. Roberts also makes the point that we as a species have likely catalogued less than one percent of the existing life on this planet.

 

   As the foil to Linnaeus, Roberts advances Georges Buffon, a French scholar who was making the same arguments that Darwin would raise a generation later, in other words, evolution, but was operating in an environment (Pre-Revolutionary France) where such ideas would have seen him killed.  Buffon argued that species were not consistent over time, that in fact they changed, and the idea of a fixed species through history was absurd.  He lost that argument, and even Darwin hadn't heard of him until he wrote a draft of Origin of Species and someone alerted him to the similarity. 

   Roberts throws in some interesting material about recent discoveries in genetics and DNA that call into question our somewhat settled ideas about those fields, but the meat of the book is devoted to exposing just how wrong, and successful, Carl Linnaeus was an inventor of the classificatory system of life that we still adhere to today.

Published: 6/7/24

Audiobook Review

East Goes West (1937)

by Younghill Kang

  Before I wrote this post I went back and looked at my post that collected books on 1930's American Literature.  Looking at the list of books- which is basically the relevant selections from the original 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die with an eye towards updating and revision, it's clear that the place to cut is from the books selected from the world of detective fiction/noir.  This category is hugely over-represented, 7 of something like 25/26/27 titled over all.  

   Looking at replacements... I'm sure I would put a book by John Fante in there though I couldn't tell you which.  East Goes West, the first novel by a Korean-American novelist, is another strong candidate to replace the fourth Dashiell Hammett novel in the 30's American lit canon.  Clocking in at a stout 400 plus pages, East Goes West is a picaresque of the American east coast from Boston to New York, written by the author, a Korean national who "slipped"(used by the editors of the book) into the country the year before the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 rendered legal immigration to the USA illegal for Asian nationals (Kang never obtained United States citizenship though he spent the rest of his life here after emigrating from Japanese controlled Korea).  

  I heard about Kang and East Goes West while reading A Man of Two Faces by Pulitzer Prize winning author and Professor of Literature, Viet Thanh Nguyen.  Kang was mentioned as a candidate for the American literary canon who had been nonsensically excluded based on racism- that was the argument in the book.  This is the second and last book from his list of a handful of titles- the other was America is in the Heart (1947)by Carlos Bulosan.  

  East Goes West does deserve inclusion for being a strong POV picaresque and a "first" for that particular POV (Korean-American.)  I thought Kang's observation of academic life in New York and Boston were interesting on many levels.   You would hope that the Asian-American experience would have some representation in the American literary canon starting the 1930's. 

Published 6/11/24

Audiobook Review

Clear (2024)

by Carys Davies

  I know I read West, the 2018 debut novel by Welsh author Carys Davies (She/Her, I think) but I never posted about it here.  West was about a would-be fossil hunter living on the American frontier in the early 19th century.  Hearing about the discovery of giant bones on the Great Plains, he leaves his family in search of his own discoveries.  The family notably includes his young daughter, who splits narrating duties with her absent pere.   Six years later we've got Clear, a slight 150 page novel about a Scottish minister who is dispatched to a remote island between the Orkney's and Norway to evict its sole tenant as part of the clearance movement in the UK.   Other than describing the fact that this guy goes to this island and interacts with this guy, there isn't anything a reviewer can say that doesn't function as a spoiler for the plot. 

 I listened to the Audiobook, enjoyed the accents and the whole thing was over in a little over 3 hours.

Published 6/11/24

Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande (2024)
by Raymond Jonas

  It's a chapter of Mexican history that Americans miss out on because it happened during our Civil War, but for a brief, shining period there was a Hapsburg monarch who purported to rule over the "Empire of Mexico." Emperor Maximillian was the younger brother of the head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  After his brother the Emperor produced a male heir, he dropped out of the line of immediate succession and found himself dispatched to Milan to run things for his brother, but he wasn't, you know, satisfied.  Meanwhile in Mexico, the Mexicans had created a republic that, among other things, confiscated and sold church property, which upset the Catholic church and Mexican conservatives.  

  This all led to Napoleon III floating a French "intervention" in Mexico designed to place Maximillian on the throne as a "legitimate" monarch of Mexico.  Needless to say, there were, many, many, many flaws in the plan including:

 1,  The existence of the legitimate government of Mexico, which simply retreated and waged a decade long campaign of guerilla warfare designed to wait out the invading French army.

2.  Trying to take over an existing country using borrowed money and mercenary troops.

3.  The general uselessness of Maximillian

4.  An inability to win over the population of Mexico to his cause.

   I could go on.  I had many thoughts during the course of Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande but my major take-aways were that this would make an excellent comedic prestige television show AND that it really makes American capitalism look good, because while the US was building a continent wide industrial powerhouse, the French, decades after their own revolution, were spending their money in this insane fiasco. 

  Maximillian was not without his positive attributes.  He was an avowed fan of the indigenous population and they actually provided the bulk of his Mexican supporters, including his two top generals.   He himself was not a cruel or rapacious guy, although the soldiers in his employ did get a little out of hand as they tried to suppress the guerilla tactics of the Republic.  There are plenty of indelible moments in Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande, but my favorite was the afternoon that Maximillian spent collecting butterflies while his Mexican Empire was in a state of utter collapse.  How 19th century European monarch!

  

Published 6/12/24

Audiobook Review

The Last Murder at the End of the World (2024)

by Stuart Turton

  I checked out the Audiobook of The Last Murder at the End of the World by English mystery writer Stuart Turton after reading a favorable Guardian review which referenced Never Let You Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's clone book.  The theme sounded interesting- the last humans on earth try to survive on a Greek island owned by a (female) tech billionaire trying to resuscitate the human race after a mysterious fog (black, with insects inside that eat you) destroys humanity.  Turton comes from a detective-fiction genre background, where his books have been well received, but this book sees him determined to escape the genre restrictions while still keeping important lessons he learned succeeding with that audience- i.e. keep the story moving/everyone loves a murder mystery. 

  Of course, the murder mystery at the heart of the book is the trigger for a much deeper, more interesting book a la Never Let You Go.  Like many authors, Turton is experimenting with a non-human narrator, here its a "bio computer" implanted in the cell structure of the island residents that allows it (Abbie is its name) to control the behavior of the people on the island and function as a voice in their head.  Needless to say, "unreliable narrator" klaxons are going off on page one, and that is part of the beyond genre moves that Turton makes as the author.

  Interesting themes aside, the core of The Last Murder at the End of the World is a standard who-done-it, and I felt like the machinations that Turton engineered to make it plausible within this scenario detracted from the reading/listening experience.  Also would recommend the printed book over the audiobook, since it is narrated by an AI, the audiobook voice reflects that authorial choice.

Published 6/20/24

Audiobook Review

Fire Exit (2024)

by Morgan Talty

   Morgan Talty's debut collection of short stories came out in 2022.  I read it when it was released, but didn't write a post about it till last year when it popped up in the Maine chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where I had it at #3 for Maine, #5 for Northern New England and #12 for all of New England.  I liked The Night of the Living Rez but didn't love it, probably because it was a collection of short stories and not a novel.  Here, then, is the novel that the public demanded.  It covers much of the same physical and mental territory:  The Penobscot nation of Maine, it's people and landscapes and the intergenerational trauma and social disfunction that links his narrative to those of other Native American writers and writers from other disadvantaged socio-economic groups. 

   Anyone who read The Night of the Living Rez:  Drinking, smoking, getting on the wagon, falling off the wagon, snowy landscapes, sleepless nights, etc.  Charles Lamosway, the narrator, is a white guy who was the stepson of a Penobscot nation member whose death got him kicked off the reservation.  He fathered a child with a Native woman but she chose to disguise this fact and has raised her with a Native partner who has assumed her patrimony. Charles' Mom is suffering from Alzheimer's or Dementia or both and doesn't recognize him, even though he spends most of his time in this book taking care of her.  Charles is himself a recovered alcoholic who spends his free time hanging out with an active alcoholic who has no other friends.

   Lamosway has become determined to tell his daughter "the truth," that he is her biological father for reasons that remain somewhat unclear.  Eventually, he articulates the idea that he needs to tell her "his stories" so that she understands her history, but I am frankly unclear, and this after reading the book, what he possibly had of value to tell her.  

  

  What I did find very interesting is that Talty is an author who wrote a first novel that IS NOT a thinly veiled take on his own experience.  Talty is actually a member of the Penobscot nation, so Charles, a white guy raised on the res,  can only be a creation of his.  This marks him out as being more advanced then the great majority of first-time authors who are either writing a thinly veiled book about their own experience growing up, or their own experience as a young adult or their own family history. 

  Like Tommy Orange did in There There I yearn to see Talty move back in time- to retell the Native/European encounter from the perspective of the Native side.  It's a POV that has been sorely neglected by the American publishing industry and we could do with a shelf full of historical fiction from the Native perspective, authored by Native writers. 

   It was just happenstance that I listened to the Audiobook instead of reading the e-Book (though I might buy a copy if I see it on sale inside Maine)- the Audiobook makes sense because it is a first-person narrator, single voice novel.  On the other hand, the subject matter is depressing and I would have personally preferred to grapple with this work on the printed (or e-printed) page.  I would recommend actually getting a copy of the physical book.

Published: 6/24/24

Permutation City (1994)

by Greg Egan

   Diaspora, Australian author Greg Egan's mind-blowing 1997 novel about life, post-life, the universe and everything, really intrigued me when I read it last month.  Intrigued me enough so that I immediately turned around and checked out his 1994 novel, Permutation City, about the idea that at some point we will be able to scan ourselves "into the cloud" and live forever.  It's a concept that is at the heart of Diaspora, and Permutation City can be seen as a kind of prequel- how the world got from the present circa 1990 to his post-human world of the future in Diaspora. 

  Permutation City has its moments but I found it almost impossible to follow.  Egan labels the scanned people "copies" but much of the book involves scans who think they may be people and people who think they may be scans and the narrators include both the scans and the original people and different scans of the same people. Keeping track of it required the same level of effort I usually reserve for experimental literary fiction.  The whole book is built around the idea of a limited amount of computing power in the world that prevents the copies from running at the same speed as the real world. It's a concept that has aged poorly- an impossibly advanced virtual world whose creation obsesses the main characters basically sounds like Minecraft or Roblox.  In 2024, I play Minecraft on my phone and it certainly doesn't require a worlds worth of computing power to function.

Published 6/26/24

Vengeance is Mine (2023)

by Marie NDiaye

Translated by Jordan Stump

  Actress Teri Hatcher physically handed me the hardback copy of the English translation of Vengeance is Mine, the most recent novel by French author and 2009 Prix Goncourt winner Marie NDiaye, so of course I had to read the book.  I hadn't heard of NDiaye but reading the book flap was enough to convince me of NDiaye's merit as a writer.  First of all, the Prix Goncourt is a top-shelf literary prize, and while the English translations are not always forthcoming, the handful of winners I've read are among my favorite French authors and/or titles- Houellebecq won the year after NDiaye, and Littell won for The Kindly Ones- one of my favorite books from 2000-2010.  I also loved The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier (2020 Winner).  What I'm saying is that I will automatically read a Prix Goncourt winner in English translation given the opportunity, even if the opportunity isn't Teri Hatcher handing me a copy.

   Truth be told, I was expecting a fragmented, elliptical tale that intertwined questions of class, family and professional intrigue, and that is exactly what I got.   This was a "true crime" novel about a lawyer and her relationship to the client's family in the same way that French Nobel Prize Winner Patrick Modiano writes "detective stories." I.E., not really at all by American genre standards.  Honestly, I'm super curious about why this book got a big run by AAKnopf in the first place- it looks like they signed her up after she won the Prix Goncourt but it has been pretty quiet since then.  The New York Times had reviewed only one of her books- in 2016- before this book was published last year.  Mysterious.  I certainly would be down to check out another book by her but I wonder how much I would appreciate it, if Modiano is a clue the answer is, "not much, probably."

Published 7/11/24

Sudden Death (2016)

by Enrique Alvaro

   I convinced my book group to read Enrique Alvaro's last novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated from the Spanish, a fantasia of a book, re-imagining the counter between Cortes and the Aztec empire in a way that evoked Roberto Bolano and Quentin Tarantino at the very same time. The rest of my book group didn't care for it, but I thought it was amazing.  It spurred me to buy Sudden Death, his 2016 which is built around a 16th century tennis match between the painter Caravaggio and a Spanish poet, which I read on my recent vacation to the East Coast.   There was a surprising level of continuity between this book and You Dreamed of Empires, even though the two books mostly take place thousands of miles apart (scenes from Sudden Death do indeed take place in post-conquistador New Spain).

  What's funny about reading this book in the context of my book club is how far a book like this one- which I really loved, is from the taste of the average reader of literary fiction-like forget about the general reader- people who read romance novels and Jonathan Kellerman books- I'm talking about the audience of people who consider themselves "serious readers"- even that group is not going to read this book, simply based on the description.  And yet,  both books arrive courtesy of Penguin Random House and this book arrived in paperback with pages and pages of positive reviews from English reviewers.  Clearly, the critical/editorial community at the highest levels of American publishing agree with me.  But none of this can make normal people read and like Enrique Alvaro.  It just isn't going to happen.

Published 7/16/24

The Singularity (1960) 

by Dino Buzzati

Translated from the Italian Anne Milano Appel

New York Review of Books Edition 2024

    Italian author Dino Buzzati isn't a household name, but his  1940 novel, The Tartar Steppe (f/k/a The Stronghold) is well known to the sort of people who care about the world literary canon (i.e. me) and it serves as a major point of departure for the very well know J.M. Coetzee novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, which was turned into an absolutely insane movie starring Johnny Depp.  I bought The Singularity off the new release pile at an indie bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire because it looked interesting and promised a prescient look at ethical issues surrounding AI- this from a book published in 1960, when AI was barely a thing.

   Also, it's a novella so it was good for vacation reading.  The story is about an Italian professor who is called away by the government to a mysterious military-type project in the Italian mountains.  There, the protagonist is introduced to an AI that fills an entire valley and a cast of interesting characters.  Everything is not as it seems, perhaps he faces great peril, etc.  If it was published today it would be tame stuff indeed but for 1960, and in Italy, wow.

   At 136 pages, it won't keep you up late, but the pay off is likewise minimal. Fun book to have available if you run into a fellow fan of The Tartar Steppe but probably not a book a general reader would seek out for any reason. The Singularity is also a good example of the type of books I'd like to be reading constantly but I just can't string them together in any meaningful way, in a way that relieves the incessant burden of deciding what to read next.  

Published 7/17/24

Audiobook Review

The Language Puzzle:

 Piecing Together the Six-Million Year Story of How Words Evolved (2024)

by Steven Mithen

   If you want to skip reading this book I can give you the ultimate thesis in a nutshell:

  "When you get right down to it, fully modern language got over the hump after humans managed to tame fire, which led to them sitting around a fire at night, and listening to one another talk.  The humans who were the best at telling stories around the campfire did better in the natural selection process and became the leaders of early humanity, leading to the development of modern, human language."

   Mithen really takes the long view- he is very serious about the six million year timeline, if only to emphasis how late in the game what we know as language actually developed.   Mithen pieces his story together using a variety of disciplines that typically operate in silos: archeology, genetics, linguistics and zoology.  His references to modern languages are mostly limited to their use as illustrations of shifts that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago, or deep characteristics of language that have been there from the beginning.  

  Even with the "this is going to be obsolete before its published" disclaimer that all popular authors writing about advances in genetic science give, the chapter related to genetics was particularly intriguing.  I think I had heard that we had managed to sequence a Neanderthals genome, but I certainly didn't know the things Mithen writes about how those differences influenced language development.  I gather, from this and other books, that even post-sequencing DNA genetics remains complicated because the way genes interact is complicated and it is highly unusual that you can trace anything to one exact gene.

I enjoyed the Audiobook because I actually got to hear all the different noises reference in the book instead of having to puzzle everything out on my own.

Published 7/18/24

River of Shadows: 

 Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003)

by Rebecca Solnit

   This is going to sound crazy, but I actually had the idea to write this exact book, or something like it, then I went and looked to see if anyone had already it, and found that Rebecca Solnit had written precisely the same book I had considered writing, in 2003.  I'd never heard of it before I looked it up after having the same idea myself (20 years later lol), but it won the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism in 2004 as well as some lesser literary awards, so it isn't in any way obscure.

   I had the idea during a recent visit to the important locations of the Modoc War in Northern California/Southern Oregon between several bands of Modoc Native Americans and the United States Army(!) between 1872 and 1873.  During that war, the US Army hired San Francisco photographer and pioneer in the field of moving pictures, Eadweard Muybridge, to document the war, and he came up and took a series of photos.  It was while looking at one of those photos in the Fort Klamath historical site that I had the idea for this exact book that Rebecca Solnit wrote (with the support of a Guggenheim grant!) over 20 years ago.

  Of course, the Modoc War is just a chapter in this much longer book about the intersection of capitalism, photography, the American West and the motion picture business, and Muybridge is involved enough to keep the whole book interesting.  In fact, I'm surprised this book hasn't been turned into a biopic or prestige TV piece- it has the action to support it- including Muybridge murdering his wife's' lover in cold blood, spectacular photography trips all over the western hemisphere and a supporting cast of characters ranging from Leland Stanford to Thomas Edison.

  Published 7/22/24

Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969)

by John A. Williams

  I would not have read the excellent Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light by John A. Williams if I had not already Night Songs, also by John A. Williams, as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Night Songs is about a drug-addicted jazz musician and his compatriots, while Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is about the steps taken by a mild mannered college professor and civil rights activist to incite a race war by using a Israeli hit man to murder a NYC cop who himself murdered a black high school student.  It seems almost unfathomable to me that this book was published by a major publishing house, during the fall of 1969, and basically no one noticed or cared.   It certainly isn't popular today, despite being the earliest example I know of the post-World War II, post-Vietnam American Civil War scenario in literature.

  These days we associate a race based Civil War with the right, but Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light tells it from the other side, down to a group of militants in South Los Angeles who are depicted collaborating with the John Birch society for a common end.  It isn't a perfect novel, and it is a bummer that he cuts the narrative off right at the beginning of the race war itself, but still, shocking for its time and still shocking today, no wonder it's been "forgotten."  

Published 7/23/24

Good Material (2024)

by Dolly Alderton

  Good Material, the new novel by English writer Dolly Alderton, is our book club pick for tomorrow night.  While I'm not fundamentally opposed to a relationship/break-up novel it's not a genre I typically engage.  I've experienced by own relationships and break-ups over the years and it doesn't seem like a particularly interesting topic, categorically speaking.  But there are exceptions to every rule- just look at the rise of Sally Rooney, who became a literary icon based on little more then whimsical and witty banter between two young Irish people.  I really liked her first novel- or maybe it was her second- the one that catapulted her to global notoriety. 

  Based on some positive reviews I'd read and what I know about the author I had an inkling this might be a better than average example of this category- the mere fact that it got released in the United States by a big publisher is a clue, because if you go to London you will see they have their own domestic versions of the type of books that mirror ours but which never get released in the United States.  The ones that have made it across- Bridget Jones,  the Nick Hornsby oeuvre- are inevitably softened and transposed as they make their way up the American cultural stair case.   

  Fundamentally a break-up novel,  I found the first 80 percent of the book (I read it on my Kindle) extremely tedious and occasionally funny and the last 20 percent pretty gripping.  Specifically, we get the whole book from the perspective of the guy in the relationship- a balding, semi-failed stand-up comedian who supports himself picking up shifts at his friend's cheese stall and mc'ing and performing at third-tier corporate events and weddings, that for some reason, want to book a stand-up comedian.  Andy, as it turns out, is less interesting than Jen, but Alderton keeps us from her thoughts until the end of the book. 

  At various times as I made it through Andy's post-break travails, it occurred to me that Alderton might have constructed a male version of the manic pixie dream girl- a whimsical figure, typically sporting bangs and a very louche attitude to the necessities of adult life.  In fact, if I could ask the author one question about this book it would be to what degree she was aware of the trope/character and whether it influenced her writing of this male character.

   At the end I was gratified by the fact that Jen's observations about Andy matched my own assessment- maybe that is the point?  But certainly Good Material really pulls itself together with the third fact.

Published 7/26/24

Audiobook Review

Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

by Ted Chiang

    I am a big fan of the movie Arrival about the efforts by humanity to decode the language of aliens who arrive on Earth (in the story they are on ships in orbit, in the film they hover above the ground in giant ships).  Arrival was based on the title story of this collection of short-stories by American author Ted Chiang.   After finishing the book- the audiobook- I was surprised to learn that this collection was published way back in 2002.  Science fiction sometimes ages poorly, particularly short-stories which may become outdated with rapid changes in technology.  That was not the case here- all of these stories hold up, particularly Tower of Babylon, his first story, which is a take on the Biblical tale and Seventy-Two Letters, which draws on Victorian technology and Kabbalah.  Like many authors working in this genre, Chiang is strong on ideas and less strong on the mechanics of fiction, with stories that feature lengthy exposition, inner monologues and extremely limited casts of characters, but the ideas are so strong that they overcome any weaknesses.  Sad I didn't read this collection decades ago.

Published 7/31/24

Pink Slime (2024)

by Fernanda Trias

   I confused Uruguayan author Fernanda Trias with Fernanda Melchor (Mexican), but I read Pink Slime because it is another excellent example of the wave of speculative/realist fiction emerging out of Latin America.  I could name a half dozen books just from my blog- Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina), is one of my favorite books of this decade.  Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2023) by Agustina Bazterrica, who also wrote Tender is the Flesh, one of my favorite books from 2019.  There is You Glow in the Dark (2024)by Liliana Colanzi, and I'm sure, others that I've missed.  These books exist alongside their non-speculative counterparts- authors like the aforementioned Melchor, and Brazilian Ana Paula Maia.

  I was so anxious to read Pink Slime that I read it on my phone, on the native reader for the Libby library app, which was a major sacrifice.  Pink Slime takes place in an unnamed Latin American or possibly Southern European nation- there is a coast line, towns further inland and geographic features of the city that evoke specific cities- la rambla (Barcelona) and barrio alta (Lisbon) but appear to be used generically here.  The narrator and protagonist is unnamed, working as a caretaker for Mauro who has the syndrome where he never feels full from eating and is essentially constantly hungry.  Mauro's wealthy parents are absent for a reason unexplained, and the narrator is housebound as the coastal city is beset by a killing red wind that flays humans alive after infection.  Respite comes in the form of a thick, bad smelling fog that allows transit around the increasingly deserted city.  Food, the pink slime of the title, comes from a chicken processing plant, newly constructed amid dwindling food supplies.

   Pink Slime is a novel of pre-apocalyptic survival and I found it compelling, worth picking up from the library for sure.

Published 8/6/24

Audiobook Review

Exhalation (2019)

by Ted Chiang

  What is crazy about author/intellectual Ted Chiang is that he has 125 reference in the New York Times data set and none of them are a full-length book review of Exhalation, his 2019 short-story collection.  Only five years later he's been hailed as a genius-level thinker about the potential impacts of AI on our society.   I believe Chiang's real break-through outside the science-fiction community was the success of Arrival, based on a short story from his first collection.  Arrival hit theaters in 2016, so that makes it doubly surprising that Exhalation didn't rate a full New York Times book review.

  You'd have to chalk it up to the double prejudice against genre fiction and short stories.  It's interesting to me that Chiang is known as an AI expert, because I think his most interesting stories are the ones that deal with religion.  In this collection Omphalos- which won a Locus Award in 2020- is a good example.  Omphalos takes place in a world where "young earth creationism" was proved true and accepted as scientific fact in a world that is otherwise similar to ours.  Basing science fiction stories on religious concepts or themes is a particularly interesting approach to science fiction- and you could almost call it a different genre, one I think that Chiang may have invented?  I certainly can't think of another example- maybe Chabon's alt-history The Secret Yiddish Police-Man's Union.  But the AI stuff is good too- in this collection The Lifecycle of Software Objects was a particularly interesting take on the after life of digitally created "pets."  That story caused me to think more about AI then I have in months.

  Published 8/8/24

Audiobook Review

The Book of Elsewhere (2024)

by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville

  Back in 2021 Reeves launched his personal IP project of BRZRKR or "beserker"- a comic book series about a deathless eternal warrior who is 77 thousand years old. I like Reeves well enough, but I haven't been a regular reader of comic books since high school and the logline didn't sound particularly inventive. Then, last month, The Book of Elsewhere was released as a "Keanu Reeves novel actually written by China Mieville."  That description caught my eye, as did several reviews which came to the conclusion that The Book of Elsewhere was way more interesting than one would expect.

  English author Chine Mieville has been on my radar for years but I haven't really honed in on him, maybe because this is his first novel in twelve years, or maybe it's because he has been categorized as a writer of fantasy instead of being properly categorized as a writer who bridges fantasy/science fiction/social science literature.  If I'd know what he was actually about I would have read through his bibliography years ago.  Based on The Book of Elsewhere, I immediately went to start with his back catalog.  \

   Somewhat confusingly, The Book of Elsewhere is described as taking place in an "alternate universe" of the BRZRKR comic, which suggests it's non-canon, but since canon is a twelve issue comic book about an immortal warrior who is also sad, my sense is that the alternate universe conceit isn't important.  The set up is that  B or UNrat- who you have to imagine as Keanu Reeves, exists in the present day as a "super soldier" for the US government.  He goes out on Black-ops, where due to the vagaries of his bezerker state, he sometimes kills both friend and foe indiscriminately.  When he comes out of his fugue state he is often sad about what he has done.  He is also sad about being unable to die.   Part of the back story here is that human civilization is actually tens of thousands of years old, and we just haven't found out about the part that came before ancient Mesopotamia.

    The book shifts between the present and the past.  Besides the main dude, there is the cast of contemporary characters, soldiers he fights with and scientists the government has recruited to study him.  There is a similarly eternal pig who has been trying to kill him over and over again for centuries. There is a "life-based" cult who worship the pig and seek to kill B/UNrat- again for millennia.  

   The main Audiobook narrator is Edoardo Bellerini who is also the Audiobook narrator for the My Struggle series by Knausgaard, which is pretty insane- just writing as someone who listened to the Audiobook for My Struggle.  This was actually a killer Audiobook because of the shifting voices back and forth through time.  As other reviewers have noted, it is, indeed, way better than it has any right to be.  I hope they make a movie/tv show out of this book rather than the comic.

Published 8/13/24

A Visionary Madness (2003)

by Mike Jay

   I heard about this book on Instagram, via an account of an academic I follow.  Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that the internet makes everything available forever, this simply isn't proving to be the case.  A good example is the journalism written during the internet era for outlets like Vice Media or the Gawker blog family.  All that stuff is just gone.  I've observed this interesting dynamic between the operation of copyright upon the ability of audiences to spread a given work vs. the dynamic of public domain materials which conversely effects the ability of publishers to generate interest in a given work.   This dynamic tracks the release cycle for a specific work, with the former dynamic operating at the beginning and the latter taking over after a certain number of years.

   I mention that because I'd never heard of The Air Loom Gang before I saw it on instagram.  It's a good example of a book that exists as a cult classic, though not a particularly succesful example of that genre.  Jay writes about James Tilly, a real person who lived in the UK (with short trips to France) around the time of the French Revolution.  He showed up in London after said Revolution and demanded an audience with Lord Liverpool and when he was refused he made public accusations that Liverpool was a traitor to the crown.  He claimed he was part of a secret mission to France to broker a peace between the UK and revolutionary France.

 At Lord Liverpool's request, he was committed to the then new insinuation of the insane asylum, known as Bedlam where he spent the next couple decades loudly proclaiming his sanity.   The book delves into the nature of his madness, which is revealed as the first technologically driven episode of paranoid-schizophrenia.  He makes this argument because Tilly claimed to be the victim of a secret influencing machine that was hidden below the streets of London.  He sketched the device, which was equally intricate and insane.  As Jay makes clear, Tilly was insane, but in a very interesting way.  It's a book that deserves to be on any shelf where Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault resides but I'm pretty sure finding a hard copy outside a library is rough.

Published 8/15/24

The Hasheesh Eater (1857)

by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

   The Hasheesh Eater is generally considered to be the first book that extols the "drug culture" of America.  Obviously, it was written decades before such a culture actually existed, and was then revived by writers from the Beat Generation and so forth.   To be clear, Ludlow was a fan of "hasheesh" which is a concentrated form of cannabis- not a form of opium.  Despite a professional career in the criminal justice system I was still fuzzy on the distinction going in to The Hasheesh Eater.  Ludlow's frame of reference is assuredly classical in terms of his subjective experience- the hallucinations and so forth.

   The hallucinations he describes sound more like what a modern person what associate with hallucinatory drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca.  He also describes a level of psychological dependence that reads as ridiculous in 2024, more in line with how marijuana was depicted at the height of the War Against Drugs of the 1980's.  Even though we now live in a country where marijuana is legal in half the states (and all the important states) in America it is still hard to imagine the state of  American society BEFORE marijuana prohibition- when marijuana was legal, as was cocaine and opium. 

Published 8/19/24

On Such a Full Sea (2014)

by Chang Rae Lee

  I read Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee's 1994 debut as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list, where it is part of the New York/Manhattan chapter.  I enjoyed Native Speaker, so when I saw he had written a dystopian-fiction/literary fiction cross-over book a decade ago, I checked out the B.D. Wong narrated Audiobook from the library.   I enjoyed the listening experience and I guess I would call On Such a Full Sea an interesting failure- again my own feelings were echoed by the contemporaneous review in the New York Times, by now Pulitzer Prize winning author Andrew Sean Greer.  I actually wanted to quote his paragraph of the state of dystopian sci-fi, literary-fiction cross over circa 2014:

Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood (in her recently concluded MaddAddam trilogy) have all tackled this genre. Doris Lessing’s “Mara and Dann” is a classic, as is Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange.” Further back in time, one has only to think of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, even Jack London and Mary Shelley. -New York Times(paywall)

   Amazing that Greer would single out the MaddAddam trilogy at the expense of The Handmaid's Tale, but otherwise that's a good summary. I think you'd have to put Kazuo Ishiguro in there in 2024, but besides those two things.  

  If I had to focus on one reason On Such a Full Sea wasn't a hit, it would be the choice of the author to use a collective second person tense to narrate- as in the, story is told from the collective perspective of the citizens of B-more, a post collapse Chinese colony occupying the ruins of Baltimore.  The protagonist is Fan, daughter of B-more and a "tank diver"- someone tasked with maintaining the aqua-culture tanks that Bmore uses to cultivate fish which they then sell to the "Charters"- enclaves of wealthy post-Americans who exist largely cut off from both colonies like Bmore and the unorganized "counties"- which is a mild take on the Mad Max/The Road idea of society in the aftermath of a total collapse of government. 

  Fan's adventures start out after she leaves Bmore in search of her disappeared boyfriend, whose child she is carrying.  Because of the second person narrator, we never get inside Fan's head and her twin desires- to find her boyfriend hopefully via her brother, one of the few colonists who have been elevated to charter life, never separate out.   Time is a little imprecise because of Fan's adventures, but there is no denying that at the beginning of the book she knows she is pregnant, and by the end she is still pregnant and not one person has noticed, so we're talking a couple months tops. 

  But I thought the world building was interesting, and Lee is a no-doubt writer of literary fiction, so the overall quality level of the prose was very high. Not a book I would go around recommending, but I personally enjoyed the Audiobook experience. 

Published 8/21/24

Brat (2024)

by Gabriel Smith

   I've run into people who join multiple libraries so they can get popular books faster, on the theory that people living in dipshit Arkansas aren't going to be interested in the latest- not sure if that actually works or not, but I think about every time I have to wait three months for the latest work of hot literary fiction. Such was the case with Brat by English author Gabriel Smith, which had the good fortune to be released at essentially the same time as the Charli XCX record of the same name.  He even faked an email which purported to say that Charli XCX named Brat after the novel, but that has been debunked.  Still, google this book and the first 10 returns on Google all mention the serendipity of sharing a title with THE album of the summer.

 The numbers haven't been great in the US- I imagine they are better in the UK.  Gabriel, who I surmise is the titular Brat- though the only reference is to a shirt his ex-girlfriend owned that had brat written across the front- is a writer, in his 20's.  He owes his publisher a novel, his Dad just died and his brother and sister in law want/need him to clean up the house for sale in the aftermath of Dad's death, Mom being in the later stages of dementia and confined to a home.

  Gabriel is grief-stricken, handling everything badly, and to make matters worse, large sheets of his skin are peeling off.  It sounds grosser than it actually is: the skin peels away to reveal...more skin. Gabriel haphazardly tries to figure out what is going on with his skin while he deals with a couple of neighbor teens with bad attitudes, a frightening deer-man who may or may not be stalking him with grievous intent, and his bitch sister-in-law.   There's also his Dad's marijuana grow in the attic to attend to, manuscripts and video tapes that change their content with every reading/viewing, black mold and a collapsing roof. 

  In the end there is plenty of atmosphere but only the loosest outline of a plot.  Smith is not concerned with a cohesive narrative, plainly.  It's a fun, hipster-type read and enough to keep interested in his next book, which is hopefully neither a short-story collection nor a memoir, but not a fantastic book.

Published 8/22/24

Beautiful Days (2024)

by Zach Williams

   Beautiful Days is the debut short-story collection by American author Zach Williams.  I checked out the Audiobook from the library after reading the New York Times review earlier this month referred to him as a "genuine young talent...who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyche." while at the same time making many of the same points I've made here about the difficulty of writing about short-story collections.  My favorite was "Ghost Image" about a divorced dad type slouching towards the end of the world at  Disneyworld type resort.  I also liked "Wood Sorrel House," a riff on the Groundhog Day theme featuring a terrifying infant toddler and some fine descriptive work.   The Audiobook I read was well done- most of the stories (all?) feature a narrator/protagonist type with a single point of view expressed in each story, which makes for a good listening experience.  I wouldn't exactly recommend Beautiful Days to all and sundry, but if you are someone who likes short stories and edgy milieus then Zach Williams is going to be your guy!

Published 8/26/24

Daughters of Shandong (2024)

by Eve J. Chung

   A recent publishing trend I do appreciate are these historical novels that tell grandmothers/grandfathers story.  It's an approach that gives an Auto-fictional vibe to work that otherwise might be construed as genre historical fiction.  It's also great to see American authors who write books like this one instead of starting off with a bildungsroman about a character that resembles the author.  As a best-seller, it's fantastic and more power to it.  It's not particularly sophisticated beyond the concept itself- taking Grandma's origin story and turning it into a compelling work of historical fiction.  The experience itself: the wife of a wealthy local landowner is left behind with her two "worthless" daughters when the Communist's come to town, she plots her escape out of the nascent Chinese Communist state, is very interesting.

  As the author points out in her Afterword, in which she makes the "grandma's origin story" plot clear, she also points out that the major players in post-Communist victory China:  The Chinese Communist Party, the British, who governed Hong Kong and the Nationalist Government of Taiwan, all had their own reasons to keep the refuge misery caused by the Communist victory quiet.  You can add to that the United States, which was fighting the Korean War nearby, thus it truly isn't well documented or well understood.

  I can forgive Chung her concessions to appealing to a broad, YA level audience.  One point that Chung does not soften is the ingrained sexism/prejudice against daughters in Chinese civilization. It's not exactly something one can point out in polite society but it comes up all the time- Chinese families face a lot of pressure to produce a male heir and are daughters produced BEFORE sons are considered bad luck and worthless.  Not something I learned about from Daughters of Shangdong but it's rare to see a work of fiction that centers this practice so squarely in the narrative.   That's also either the greatest strength and or weakness- Chung's plucky grandma-as-a-girl narrator sees the world through the eyes of a strong American feminist circa 2020 alternately acknowledging subservience to and criticisms of the strong tradition of deference to elders in Chinese culture.   Surely a "historically accurate" narrator would not  have such a sophisticated critique.