Yellow Jack (1999) by Josh Russell

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Yellow Jack (1999)

by Josh Russell

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 12/28

    Josh Russell is the first 1,001 Novels: A Library of American writer I can remember who does not have  a Wikipedia page.  He is gainfully employed, as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Georgia State University.   I did take a creative writing class in college- it struck me as a borderline insane way to spend one's time and energy.  I don't have a ton of respect for the teachers or students of creative writing, beyond recognizing that teaching creative writing is by the far the best way for authors of literary fiction to support themselves and their families- you gotta do what you gotta do.

   Yellow Jack is set in dirty old New Orleans, about a protagonist who learns the tricks and methods of the earliest kind of photography in the studio of originator Louis Daugerre, and then flees to New Orleans, where he sets up the very first photography studio.  Russell does an excellent job of conjuring early to middle 19th century New Orleans- a place where summer inevitably bought death in the form of Yellow Fever.   Claude Marchand lives a life of passion and intrigue, juggling a mixed-race girlfriend and the sexually precocious (and way underage) daughter of a local bigwig.  Meanwhile, the mercury that was key to developing early photographs is causing his teeth to fall out and driving him not-so-slowly insane.  I wouldn't say Yellow Jack was a fun read, but it was interesting. 

The Book of I (2025) by David Greig

 Audiobook Review

The Book of I (2025)

by David Greig

   The Book of I is a fun, short novel out of Scotland set in the Middle Ages in the aftermath of a Viking raid of a British Church.  The Vikings murder everyone except a young apprentice who hides in the latrine and the wife of the blacksmith, who escapes by rendering her attacker unconscious with a glass of extremely strong mead.  So strong that his compatriots give him a half-ass burial and depart, leaving him for dead.  The remnant Viking wakes up the following day and has to figure out his next move.  It is low stakes fiction with a couple episodes of extremely brutal violence.  Very short.  I love books set in the Middle Ages that aren't historical fiction or fantasy, just literary fiction set in the past.  This is one of those books.

The Hard Blue Sky (1958) by Shirley Grau

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Hard Blue Sky (1958)

by Shirley Grau

Isle Aux Chiens, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/28

  I think the highest compliment I can pay a book on this particular list is when I look up the location on the map of the project and then open the corresponding Google Maps location- that shows that I am interested.  That's what I did while reading The Hard Blue Sky, an early novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Grau.  I think looking at an Ngram for William Faulkner is a good proxy for interest in southern literature- Faulkner himself was the subject of a revival that saw him peak in interest in 1960 and plummet after 1990.  Grau- a New Yorker short story writer who won the Pulitzer in 1965- seems like a beneficiary of that interest.  I surmise that the drop off in William Faulkner interest in the 90's relates to what I imagine to be a wholesale replacement of Faulkner in American Literature survey courses with writer like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.  If you draw another Ngram with Faulkner and Toni Morrison you see the lines cross in 1994, the year after Morrison won the Nobel.  Faulkner, who won the Nobel in 1949, required further help from American critics specifically Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry, who is frequently credited with helping Faulkner get the Nobel in '49, and made further efforts to ensure his books didn't fall out of print before that. 

 I mention that because I would say Grau is largely forgotten- her Pulitzer winner has over 6000 reviews on Amazon, which indicates some continuing interest, but her other books top out at 100 reviews, with some in double digits.  She got a New York Times feature obituary when she died in 2020 but he last NYT mention was in 2003.   The Hard Blue Sky is a good example of the promise of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project: Rediscovering a once prominent author who I would otherwise never encounter. 

  It's also hard not to wonder if this physical landscape might itself be on the way out as a result of climate change and rising sea levels- this is a place where houses have been built on stilts for decades and maybe for centuries.  Besides the locale, the book itself, centered on the life of a young woman coming-of-age after the untimely death of her mother, rarely rises beyond the tropes of the coming of age novel circa the late 1950's.   The lessons learned by Grau's protagonist are far more genteel than the lessons learned by her African American counterparts in this part of the country:  No one gets rapes.  No one is murdered by law enforcement for no reason.  No one has their house burned to the ground by marauding members of the Klu Klux Klan. 

1,001 Novels, A Library of America: Georgia

 1,001 Novels: Georgia

     I had high hopes for literary Georgia, particularly in the context of the other states in this chapter, but I was mostly disappointed.   As has now become a recognizable pattern, the older books were more interesting.  In fact, generally speaking the more recently a book has been published, the less likely I am to enjoy it.  That probably relates directly to the fact that almost all of the YA titles and chick-lit titles are of recent vintage and those are the two categories I enjoy the least.  Georgia is also the first state where I started limiting my exposure to Audiobooks in favor of checking out the hard copies from the library.  Again, this probably relates directly to the fact that YA and chick-lit titles published in the past 15 years are the MOST likely to have Audiobooks available in the public library.  One trend that begins in Georgia and has continued throughout the entire chapter is a lack of candor/realism about interracial relationships (besides those of masters raping slaving)- which surely must have existed throughout history.  I don't believe a single volume here could be described as an interracial love-story.

Published 4/15/25

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)

by Alice Walker

Eaton, Georgia

Georgia: 1/24

   I started the next two chapters of 1,001 Novels: A Library of America at once.  Chapter 4 is Mountain Home & Hollows, Smokies & Ozarks and it contains Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.   The Third Life of Grange Copeland is the first book from Chapter 5: Blues & Bayous, Deltas & Coasts and it contains books from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.   My sense is that Pennsylvania would have been a better fit in either the chapter with New York/New Jersey or the last chapter next to Viriginia, Maryland and DC but I haven't found a single interesting book yet in the Pennsylvania chapter and it is really slowing me down.

   Chapter 5, on the other hand, seems very promising, and more geographically aligned with the original sweep down the Atlantic coast that the first three Chapters seemed to promise.  I think I'll abandon Chapter 4 and do Chapter 5 first, then come back to 4.  

  Anyway, The Third Life of Grange Copeland was great- very dark but really good, and the first novel by Pultizer Prize winner Alice Walker.  The writing in Grange still seems fresh today- maybe more so today than it was back then.   Alice Walker is no stranger to the pages of this blog.  I read The Temple of My Familiar (1989) back in June of 2017- a book that was in and then out of the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list.   Of course, The Color Purple is a drop-dead banger- also read that back in 2017 as part of the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list.   I guess maybe Walker isn't considered to be as sophisticated as Toni Morrison, or maybe she is just a victim of The Color Purple's cultural success.  

 Unlike The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar is a historical novel served straight up with little deviation from a consistent timeline and narrative perspective.  What's amazing about Grange Copeland is that it almost seems like they are living in the 19th century all the way up until voting rights activists make an appearance.  Grange Copeland was also another example of Walker's theme of a deep and absolute hatred between black and white people, which I've noticed in her other books. 

Published 4/23/25

Dear Martin (2017)

by Nic Stone

Westbrook Academy, 

401 Lewis Braselton Road, Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia: 2/24

   Dear Martin is another YA title, by far my least favorite category in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.   This book is a good example of what I find so unlikeable about the whole category:  It's a book about a African-American high school student who is on scholarship at a prestigious Atlanta-area boarding school.   He has to deal with normal prep school kid stuff, then about 100 pages in, his best friend gets shot by an off-duty cop at a traffic intersection.  Then, of course, you get another hundred pages of him dealing with his emotions about the shooting.

 Despite this extremely adult subject, the rest of the book is written like the author is trying to PROTECT her audience from every other adult subject.  I.E.: Not one curse word, not one act of adult sexuality beyond holding hands and light kissing and no violence.  If you are going to write a novel about a teen being murdered in cold blood by an off-duty cop, doesn't the audience deserve the rest of adulthood?  According to the conventions of YA fiction, they do not.  Thus, it is a universe of books about rape without any sex, about murder without any violence and about complex emotions without complex characters.

Published 4/30/25

Sounder (1969)

by William H. Armstrong

Bartow County, Georgia

Georgia: 3/24

  I guess it isn't so hard to imagine at time when a book that uses the "n" word like a comma could not only be a children's book but also a prize winning children's book, is as the case with Sounder, about the son of share-cropper who is hauled off to a Georgia prison after he is accused of stealing a ham to feed his impoverished family.  Sounder is just a slip of a book, 116 pages, so it had that going for it, and also the fact that it wasn't a YA issue based novel published in the last decade, which are truly the most insufferable titles in the 1,001 Novels list. 

Published 5/5/25

The Atlas of Reds and Blues (2019)

by Devi S. Laskar

Roswell Road and Johnson Ferry Road, Marietta, Georgia

Georgia: 4/24

   The Atlas of Reds and Blues is yet another novel on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that is focused on the police shooting an innocent person for little or no reason.  I think I might be up to a half-dozen books with some variant of this plot out of the 200 novels I've read from this list.  So we are talking about 3 or 4 percent of this Library of America centering around police shootings of innocent citizens.  Here, the victim is the narrator, a Bengali-American woman living in suburban Georgia.  She is a Mom of three, she holds down a part-time "Mommy track" job at her local newspaper and her husband is away on business almost always.  The story is told in flashback perspective, which made it refreshing in a literary merit kind of way. 

  Unfortunately, her experience doesn't add much to the tapestry of American Lit this project represents.   This narrator is America, through and through, other than her complaining about the way she is treated by white people in suburban Georgia, you wouldn't even know she was Bengali-American.  The open, thoughtless racism she recounts had be checking the publication date to make sure I was reading something contemporary and not from the 1970's (though some of the racism was from the girlhood of this narrator.)

   And not specific to this book but to all of the narratives that involve people being shot by the cops.  Look, I've worked in criminal justice for my entire career. I am nothing is not empathetic to innocent victims of police brutality but what consistently amazes me about these narrative, fictional and real life, is that the victims never seem to understand what the Cops are thinking about before they shoot.   Like, don't you know it's a bad idea to make sudden movements and/or generally disregard what Cops are asking you to do, especially when they raise their voices?  People should have some awareness of how law enforcement reacts in stressful environments and try not to do those things.

Published 5/7/25

The Darkest Child (2005)

by Delores Phillips

Cassville, Georgia

Georgia 5/24

   The Darkest Child is a real cabinet of horrors, about a light-skinned African American prostitute and her brood of 10 children, written from the perspective of one of the daughters.  It is a one-off by an author who never wrote another novel, I'm assuming based on that fact, that this was a thinly veiled work of auto-fiction.  If it wasn't, it is an incredibly fucked up work of imagination, if only because large portions of the plot revolve around the Mom forcing her various, very underage daughters, including the narrator, into acts of prostitution with men from the town.  Mom is, as one would expect, both mentally ill and a substance abuser- she is frequently depicted clawing invisible bugs from her face in times of distress.

   Anyway. I thought The Darkest Child was dark, indeed.

Published 5/8/25

Crossing Ebenezer Creek (2017)

by Tanya Bolden

Ebenezer Creek, Georgia

Georgia: 6/24

  Crossing Ebenezer Creek is a YA novel based on a horrific real-life event during Sherman's March to Georgia during the Civil War.  Basically, a corps commander under General Sherman, ironically named Jefferson C. Davis, destroyed a pontoon bridge that was crossing Ebenezer Creek in Georgia, allegedly because he was concerned about Confederate soldiers.  The destruction of the bridge stranded hundreds of freed slaves who were following the Union army on the wrong side of the river, and many (tens? hundreds?) drowned, those who remained on the far bank when the Confederates arrived were either killed or re-enslaved. 

   Pretty heavy subject for a YA novel, amiright?  But basically, the horror only happens at the end, and the rest of it is just a YA book written from the perspective of a freed slave following Sherman's army to Atlanta, so it gives a good sense of that experience, and it was interesting to learn about this little known historical atrocity in Civil War era Georgia- perpetrated by the Good Guys, no less!

Published 5/9/25

Bull Mountain (2015)

by Brian Panowich

Dahlonega, Georgia

Georgia: 7/24

   Brian Panowich had the audacity to open his debut novel- a genre thriller/noir, with a quote from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.  I think I actually gasped when I heard it on the very decent Audiobook.  Of course, no serious author influenced by Cormac McCarthy would open their book with a quote from a Cormac McCarthy novel- it's ridiculous.  For a genre writer to do it, on the other hand, certainly telegraphs a literary level of ambition.  I'm not a huge detective fiction/regional noir guy outside of the Coen Brothers, but in the context of the 1,001 Novels project I love the detective fiction/noir titles and seek them out in Audiobook form.  

   To the author's credit there are some genuinely shocking passages that do, indeed, evoke some of Cormac McCarthy's roughest moments.  There's also some troubling content that seems positively retro by the "trigger warning" standards of contemporary authorial license to depict trauma in the context of genre fiction.  I can't really get into it without spoiling the major plot reveal, which is the only twist on a conventional shoot em up double cross type scenario involving a rural crime family which dominates the titular Bull Mountain, where they have evolved from moonshine to weed to meth over the course of three generations.  Along the way they have made common cause with a Jacksonville motorcycle gang with a sideline on what we would today call "ghost guns."  Enter a mysterious DEA agent with a dark secret, and you've got a book that won the International Thrillers Award for best debut.

Published 5/14/25

The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts(2015)

by Tiya Miles

Diamon Hill, Georgia

Georgia: 8/24

  The subtitle, A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, made it hard to take The Cherokee Rose seriously, and there is no mistake that is a work of fiction written by a historian, but I can see why editor Susan Straight would pick it because it talks about a little mentioned group: people with mixed African American and Native American lineage.  As recounted by this book (and something I knew independently before reading this book, but presumably something the "average" reader would be learning for the first time by reading this book), the Cherokee tribe had gone a long way to assimilation before they were forced off their developed lands in the southeast and forced west at gun point.

  The conventional whoa-is-me narrative surrounding the trail of tears does a particular disservice to the Cherokee nation by focusing on the least fortunate among them.  Wealthy landowners, often of mixed Cherokee/white heritage (but identifying as Cherokee) were able to relocate with their possessions, including slaves, intact.    After the removal, some African American slaves with mixed parentage were left behind for various reasons, and then the convention became to identify as wholly African American.  Finally, in the 20th century, there was a double reckoning, first among the remaining Cherokee people in Oklahoma, who had taken affirmative steps to disenfranchise those of mixed African America/Cherokee blood AND by African Americans in the Southeast who "rediscovered" their native roots in the 20th and 21st century.

  Miles awkwardly accommodates all these experiences in the context of a novel about a wealthy but frivilous African American woman from Atlanta with "mixed roots" who buys the plantation of a famous Cherokee landowner who left as part of the removal process.  There, she reconnects with a childhood friend with her own racial identity issues and a Cherokee journalist who mixed racial identity.  There is also, yes, a ghost, and an appropriately menacing white local.  Besides the very real and interesting historical perspectives, The Cherokee Rose is basically an LGBT friendly Hallmark movie plot.

Published 6/19/25

Kira-Kira (2004)

by Cynthia Kadohata

Chesterfield, Georgia

Georgia: 9/24

   Kira-Kira is a YA book about the experiences of a Japanese-immigrant family living and working in rural Georgia.  In some ways Kira-Kira is different than the vast amount of immigrant struggle narratives in the 1,001 Books project, in that the family here works hard and doesn't spend the entire book complaining about how hard it is to be an immigrant in America, which, if you take the books in this project as the sample-set, constitutes about 90% of the immigrant experience.   It is similar in that, like other books told from the perspective of a young child, the protagonist doesn't go anywhere or do anything for the most part, just sits around and thinks about her family circumstances.    The benefit of that approach in the context of this particular project is that the narrator in these situations has plenty of time to slowly meander through whatever American setting is involved.  Here, it's rural Georgia, which is on no one's list of top places to visit.   At least the racism and discrimination experienced by this Japanese immigrant family is leavened by their unfamiliarity to locals.  

Published 6/20/25

The Love Songs of WEB Dubois (2021) 

by Honore Jeffers 

Eatonton, Georgia

Georgia 10/24

  I love a writer with some ambition, even if I don't love the book.  That's the case here with The Love Songs of WEB Dubois, a debut novel with some gusto written by author/professor Honore Jeffers.  It would be fair to call this book "over-stuffed" in that it covers multiple generations (and multiple characters within each generation) of a mixed-race but basically African-American family that has done well in 19th and 20th century Georgia without getting into any trouble.   The main protagonist is Ailey Pearl Garfield, one of three sisters and the daughter of a medical doctor and his wife.   She is pretty clearly a stand-in for the author herself, as her experiences and physical description mirror that of the author. 

 

  At 816 pages, the plot resembles something like a 19th century Russian novel written by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy but the subject matter is distinctly modern, with a strong current of child-sexual abuse and its consequences running through the family from start to finish.  I thought The Love Songs of WEB Dubois wasn't perfect, but it was interesting, and it will certainly be a top 5 book from Georgia and top 10 for the Chapter (Georgia/Florida/Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi). 

Published 6/26/25

Gold Diggers (2020)
by Sanjena Sathian

1400 Dunwoody Village Pkwy SUITE #1406

 Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia 11/24

    You'd think there would be more novels written by the sons and daughters of the Indian diaspora in America but one gets the sense that writing fiction is secondary to becoming a doctor, scientist or venture capitalist. The post World War II South Asian immigrants to the United States mostly arrived as graduate students in hard-science/technical subjects- they had top degrees from elite Indian universities.  There's a much smaller subset of small-business owning immigrants who were fleeing turmoil- your NYC cabbies and gas station owners, but mostly the South Asian experience in the US has been small families: Dad, Mom and one or two kids.  Dad works as a scientist or doctor or in computers, Mom stays at home or has some kind of home business.  Kids are under intense pressure to do well.  

   In that regard, what must be mildly embarrassing for Sathian's own parents (she went to Yale for undergraduate and then went to, sigh, the Iowa Writer's Workshop), is great for readers.  Sathian's magical realist/coming of age drama is a rare depiction of the inner lives of two families of reasonably well off Indian American immigrants living in suburban Atlanta.  Sathian's protagonist is feckless male high school student who moons over his more successful neighbor-girl, also Indian American.  One night he stumbles over her neighbor's secret:  Her mom is creating a drink out of stolen gold as a way to harness the ambitions of others.   Sathian goes light on the lore- I sense the hand of the market at work, but that doesn't detract from a lively tale. 

  I could actually identify somewhat with these characters- some of the action takes place in the Bay Area and some of Sathian's high school portraits reminds me of Indian American girls who went to my own, highly selective high school in Oakland.   I was glad to get this window into a world that had always seemed opaque to me as a high school/college/law school student.

Published 8/6/25

Jubilee (1966) 

by Margaret Walker

Lee County, Georgia

Georgia: 12/24

  Almost half-way through Georgia, and it has been a bit of a slog.   This is the last Audiobook- it's all reading hard copies of books without Audio options, YA titles and coming-of-age books from here on out.  Jubilee is sure to end up in my top five for this state simply because it wasn't written in the past decade from the perspective of an adolescent. Vyry is the iconic protagonist and frequent narrator, she is born a slave, and lives through the Civil War and aftermath as she tries to forge a destiny as a newly emancipated woman.  I thought the Ante-Bellum chapters were particularly interesting, and by that I mean "savage" because I simply can't get over the cruelty of the ante-bellum slavery system.  Of course, all American slavery was an abomination, but there were better or worse situation, and the late-period, plantation based cotton growing economy of the deep south was the worst of them all.

   The chapters on reconstruction are also interesting, giving the account of a newly freed African American family of some means, relatively speaking, and their struggle to simply exist in a world where they were surrounded by white supremacy. 

Published 8/21/25

Appalache Red (1978) 

by Raymond Andrews

Muskhogean County, Georgia

Georgia (13/24)

     This is the half-way point for the Georgia chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Currently I'm reading around the south of Georgia.  Muskhogean county is closer to Tallahassee, Florida than Atlanta by hundreds of miles.   This southern part of Georgia contains peach and pecan trees and swamps as well.  I enjoyed Appalache Red, the first of a four-part series about the goings-on in this part of Georgia.  It's more about the town than the eponymous Red, a Caucasian looking, African-American Entrepreneur who manages to turn a humble black-owned diner into a sprawling sin-embracing bar and casino.   I like the novels from the south that don't sugar-coat the cruelty and violence of this part of the world, and Red fits that bill, with plenty of rough talk and triggering behavior that probably explains why this book, and the author, are mostly forgotten today.  It even says that it won an award: The James Baldwin Prize, that the internet says doesn't even exist.

Published 8/25/25

Gone With the Wind (1936)

by Margaret Mitchell

Clayton County, Georgia

Georgia: 15/24

  I read Gone With the Wind back in 2015. I considered listening to an Audiobook version but decided against it. 

Published 1/30/15
Gone with the Wind (1936)
by Margaret Mitchell

   Gone with the Wind is a brick, first of all.  The hard back version I checked out from the San Diego Public Library was full 8.5 x 11 dimensions and close to a thousand pages.  A thousand pages! Gone with the Wind is both a top ten novel and film in terms of popularity for those art forms. Gone with the Wind was the first and only novel that Margaret Mitchell wrote. In 2015, more people are familiar with the 1939 film but the book has sold 30 million copies.  It's the second most popular novel behind the Bible with American audiences.

  Make no mistake- Gone with the Wind is racist as HELL.  It is UNBELIEVABLE how virulently racist Gone with the Wind is.  Annnddd.... even though Gone with the Wind is written about the 19th century, it was published in 1936 and everyone LOVED it.  I don't know that GwtW is defensible in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin- a book written during the 19th century by an ardent abolitionist.

  In terms of literary antecedents, Scarlett O'Hara most resembles Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair.  The amount of literary merit one accords to GwtW is likely to tie closely to ones opinion about the literary merit of Vanity Fair.  If you haven't read Vanity Fair, you should probably read that book before you read this book.

Published 8/22/25

Silver Sparrow (2011)

by Tayari Jones

Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia: 14/24

  Tayari Jones had a breakout hit in 2018 with her novel, An American Marriage, which was an Oprah's book club selection, a sales hit and a literary prize award winner.  I read it when it was released- a good example of a book that I would only read based on the attention of people like Oprah and the Prize Committee's, i.e. not a subject matter (race based injustice in the criminal justice system in the south) that I would seek out given my day job as a criminal defense attorney.   But I did read it, and I thought it was a well-written book.   Susan Straight, editor of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America did not select An American Marriage to represent Jones, but rather picked her third novel, Silver Sparrow, about the experience of two children growing up with a bigamist father.  

   I know Jones is a good writer, so I wasn't dreading Silver Sparrow the way I might have been, in light of the number of novels in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project that stick to the viewpoint of pre-adolsecent children who are stuck in a shitty living situation and never go anywhere or do anything while getting abused by their family members.  No one gets physically or sexually abused here, but the psychic scars of both families are front and center.  

   Like many of the novels that deal exclusively with family issues, I was left wondering why people bother with having kids and relationships if it is just going to bring them misery.  I know the answer: because every human being thinks things will work out for THEM.  Here, the Mom of the side family is particularly vexing as she copes with a situation that she walked into with eyes wide open.   Girl, I wanted to scream, don't do it.  

Published 9/3/25

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) 

by Flannery O’Connor

Milledgeville, Georgia

Georgia: 16/24

   Flannery O'Connor would be one of a handful of authors from this chapter that I would group with "best American authors."  Faulkner, of course, he's the going-away number one. Elmore Leonard representing Florida.   Percy Walker from Louisiana and Flannery O'Connor in Georgia.  Really, it's only Alabama without a single top-flight writer.  I'm pretty sure I read Flannery O'Connor in an American Lit class in college.  In 2013 I watched the John Huston movie Wise Blood, based on her novel- that movie is so, so good. Really underrated/forgotten. Then in 2015 I read the novel and her other novel, and in 2016, this book.

  More so than Faulkner, O'Connor is the beating heart of "Southern Gothic."  Compared to Faulkner, she is easier to enjoy, the literary equivalent of the critic-directors of the French New Wave.  Faulkner, on the other hand, is like the last apostle of the high-modernist/modernism-for-modernism's sake of Joyce and Proust.

Published 6/12/16
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
by Flannery O'Connor

    The genre of literature known as "Southern Gothic" is essentially William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.   A major difference between Southern and other iterations of literature known as Gothic is the absence of the supernatural as a major motif.  Instead, "Gothic" in the context of southern literature refers to quirky characters and dark plots.   Everything That Rises Must Converge was the last book published by O'Connor before she died of Lupus at 46.

  Everything That Rises Must Converge is a group of short stories, nine in total, six of which were published in various publications prior to their collection.  The characters and themes are familiar: racist mother's, religious fanatics, disappointing sons, class and race conflict.  The pairing of a disaffected, failed, intellectual son and an elderly, widowed mother reoccurs in multiple stories.  This is also a frequent dynamic in the work of William Faulkner, and it is a combination that foreshadows the dynamic between conservative parents and their more liberal offspring for decades to come.

  Flannery O'Connor was herself no hipster, she was a practicing Catholic and remained so until her untimely death.  Her appeal to hipsters is a combination of a little bit of the dead-before-their-time rock-star, a little bit of the consanguinity between her concerns and the concerns of 1960's youth culture and a little bit of the darkness and weirdness of her vision, which spread so far, particularly in the worlds of film and tv to the point where her influence isn't cited.   Whether cited or not, her influence on the artistic concept of "weird small town America" can be traced back to her work.  For example, it's hard to imagine David Lynch or Tom Waits without Flannery O'Connor.

  

Published 9/11/25

The Member of the Wedding (1946)

by Carson McCullers

Columbus, Georgia

Georgia 18/24

  Mildly surprised that this is Carson McCullers first appearance on this blog.  I would have thought The Heart is a Lonely Hunter would have been something I'd read at one point or another.  Alas, here we are.  I was unaware until after I read her Wikipedia page just now that McCullers was closeted lgbt during her life- she got married, unhappily, and suffered from many of the classic symptoms of mid-century American closeted queendom.   It's impossible to read McCullers without thinking of O'Connor- on the actual, literal 1,001 Novels map they are about 120 miles apart from one another.  If you wanted to map Southern Gothic, I think it would encompass the north-central parts of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Move too far north, and it's Appalachian goth, too far south and it's either N'awlins or the swamps of Florida- both with gothic aspects in those right but not *real* Southern Gothic.

   If you look at her Amazon product page, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the clearly canonical pick, making this an selection of editor Susan Straight making an "insider" pick for a well-known writer.  This will probably be enough impetus to get me to track down a library Audiobook of Hunter, since, in my heart I know I am a southern Gothic gentleman. 

Published 9/16/25

Baby of the Family (1989)

by Tina McElroy Ansa

Macon, Georgia

Georgia: 19/24

  I guess this would be a minor classic/candidate for revival type pick by African American author Tina McElroy Ansa, it has many of the conventions the reader associates with the magical realist, African American writers of the south.  This plot involves a little girl who can talk to ghosts.  At least this particular southern African American family isn't desperately poor and riddled with ptsd and trauma.  The ghosts the little girl speaks with certainly are though.

Published 10/22/25

The Wind Done Gone (2001)

by Alice Randall

Clayton County, Georgia

Georgia: 20/24

   I'm looking forward to closing out Georgia and the other states in this chapter- so much poverty, racism and abuse between family members. The more titles I read from this portion of the United States, the more aware I am of the role sexual violence very explicitly played in the social development of this state. One theme that recurs so frequently in this chapter that it has become repetitive is the ability of a white man to force a black woman to have sex with him without her consent.  There is also a less frequent but just as strongly expressed principle that any proof of sex between a white woman and a black man is certain to result in the extra-judicial torture and murder of SOME perceived offender- not necessarily the right person.

  The Wind Done Gone is a riff on Gone With the Wind- a narrative told from the perspective of Scarlett O'Hara's mixed-race sister.   Much of it takes place in the heady atmosphere of Reconstruction Washington DC, a period when the white political class was disenfranchised and a temporary political class, including African American and mixed-race people, replaced them in the national government.

   It is described as a parody/satire, but if that is the case, I didn't get it.  To me it read as a comic novel about the nuances of racial identity in reconstruction era America. 

Published 10/28/25

Welcome to Braggsville (2015)

by T. Geronimo Johnson

Braggsville, Georgia

Georgia: 21/24

   It took me 3 attempts to complete Welcome to Braggsville, which is putatively a satire/comic novel about the misadventures of four Berkely undergraduates who return to the small southern town where one of them (white) was raised to stage a performative protest at the yearly Confederate Day's Re-Enactment festival.  First, I checked out the Audiobook, which was insufferable.   Then, I checked out the E-book, which I didn't even attempt.  Finally, I got the hardback version from the library.   I found the entire novel insufferable, although I do see why it got the National Book Award longlist and won some minor awards.  I'd have to include Johnson in a literary cohort with other African American/satirical/funny authors like Paul Beatty and Percival Everett- both of whom have won major literary awards in the past decade. 

  I am in favor of African American authors who have moved beyond the poverty-porn, childhood abuse drama that publishers continue to favor- any attempt to move beyond that milieu is interesting to me.  Here, however, I found the characters flat.  Johnson's main character is a white southerner- he has some good quips but generally is an uninteresting guy, as are his friends.  It's a difficult book to describe without wrecking the plot but I will say I did not laugh a single time reading this comic novel.

Published 10/30/25

Strange Fruit (1944)

by Lillian Smith

Clayton, Georgia

Georgia: 22/24

   Lillian Smith was an interesting lady, and 100% the type of author I like to learn about through projects like 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Smith was a southerner who stayed, a liberal and a closeted lesbian.  She was better known as a writer of non-fiction and someone who was focused on social issues, but Strange Fruit about a doomed (is there any other kind?) interracial relationship in the South, was a best-seller at the time.   Seems like this book, like other works of Southern literature from this time period, have suffered from its frequent use of the n-word.   Tracy Deen, the white male protagonist, belongs to the suffering white scion department- a man-child who can't break away from his family, come terms with its legacy or generally do anything.   It's a character type that I associate with Percy Walker's The Moviegoer, call him the southern proto existentialist. 

   Tracy doesn't get up too much of anything, except boning Nonnie, an African American woman from a high-achieving local black family who has been to college and returned with the goal of living down to her family history.   Despite being a college graduate, she is excited about her unexpected pregnancy.  On almost every page, I expected Nonnie to have more insight into her situation, but alas.  Nonnie's book length fantasy about quietly having her mixed-race child and having her white partner stand by her and acknowledging the birth is more fantastical than if the characters had flown to the moon together.  Surely, surely this woman was aware of the tragedy she would provoke.  No, she is not.

  

Published 11/12/25

The Twelve-Mile Straight (2017)

 by Eleanor Henderson

Ben Hill County, Georgia

Georgia: 23/24

    All things being equal I'll always prefer a historical novel or whatever merit to a contemporary work of fiction within the precincts of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Even if I don't care for the novel, I frequently learn about the history, particularly in the rural and neglected (from a literary perspective) portions of the country.  In rural Georgia I'm reading about the intertwined system of turpentine camps and liquor stills- first, an area will be a turpentine camp and then, after the environment is degraded, you use the same area for a liquor still.  The Twelve-Mile Straight, set in the 1930's, revolves around the life of a rural producer of still liquor and his daughter, a whore.  When the daughter is impregnated by the grandson of the local bigwig, Dad takes the opportunity to conceal the paternity of the child of his African American servant (him.)

  This leads to a series of very unfortunate events that involves murder, small-town sensationalism and of course, race.  I listened to the Audiobook, it took forever.

Published xxx

The Wonder Book of the Air

Cynthia Shearer

Ice (2026) by Jacek Dukaj

 Book Review

Ice (2026)

Jacek Dukaj

  Ice, arrives as a bit of a Polish-language literary sensation, and English language audiences have been waiting for the translation since 2017, when London based published Head of Zeus acquired the rights.  The translation, by Ursula Phillips finally dropped in January and of course I had to purchase this 1200 page alternate history fantasia as soon as I learned it existed.   Ice is hard to describe properly for a number of reasons.  I've seen it described as a cross between science fiction and alternate history and steam-punk lit, but we all know that steampunk isn't a literary thing and alternate history is, in fact, a sub-genre of science fiction.  

  The catalyst is that the object that crashed into the Earth and caused the Tunguska event in June 1908, transformed the landscape in some poorly understood way, causing a novel kind of ice to shoot out from the epicenter and spread across the world.  Presumably as a result of the consequences of this event, there was no World War I and no Russian Revolution, meaning that the alternate history of the book is essentially a world where the 20th century didn't happen in Europe but the industrial revolution of the 19th century did.  The protagonist is a Polish national (Poland is/was part of the Russian Empire), who is set a task by the Czar's secret police:  Locate his long-missing father who is rumored to be an agent for "the ice." 

  They then put him on the trans-Siberian express- a journey which consumes at least half of the 1200 pages of the book, and he is then buffeted by mysterious forces, some who support the ice and some who want it gone forever.  The supporting cast includes real life scientist Nikolai Tesla, here an agent of the Czar sent to defeat the ice.  The train is hundreds of pages of philosophical debates which is surely meant to remind the reader of 19th century Russian author-philosophers, while at other times the tone is decidedly Pynchonian minus the songs and laughs.

  By far the most challenging aspect of Ice is the fact that Polish allows authors to write in a kind of second person singular style where the narrator is the protagonist, but the author is not using personal pronouns.  I've had the same experience reading other Polish authors- most recently Olga Tokarczuk, but here it was particularly hard to follow.   Not hard to follow- hard to appreciate, I guess you could say.

Louisiana Power & Light (1994) by John Dufresne

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Louisiana Power & Light (1994)

 by John Dufresne

Monroe, Louisiana

Louisiana: 10/28

   One fact I've learned about the geography of the South from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The top of Louisiana is not in line with the northern borders of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  That particular line runs through the middle of Arkansas and Louisiana doesn't start until about the middle of Georgia/Alabama/Mississippi.  Likewise, the vast major of the population of Louisiana lives south of the southern borders of those states- some of it lines up with the Florida panhandle, but most of the important part of Louisiana (New Orleans and environs) lines up with north-central Florida. 

   I mention this because the northern half of Louisiana only has three titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and Louisiana Power & Light are one of those books.  That makes Northern Louisiana one of the great underrepresented regions of America in this project, alongside Northern Alabama and Northern New York/Vermont/New Hampshire.  This novel is about the last of a line of inbred swamp dwellers who is orphaned by his criminally insane father and half-wit thirteen-year-old mother and raised to become a priest, only to abandon that goal when he meets the first in a series of women.

 I had low expectations for Louisiana Power & Light, but I was pleasantly surprised by the story.

Band of Angels (1955) by Robert Penn Warren

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Band of Angels (1955)

by Robert Penn Warren

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/28

   Robert Penn Warren is an American author who is perpetually present on my "soft" list- like, I definitely know who he is and would say I "want to" read All the Kings Men, his big hit, but I haven't actually read it, or anything else by him.  I think Warren and other prize-winning authors from the 1950's and 60's in the South have suffered because the wave of African American authors, especially women authors, that emerged in the 1970's and 80's, culminating with Toni Morrison getting the Nobel Prize in 1993.  I'd wager that every time Morrison got added to a 20th century literature syllabus Warren or his ilk got dropped. 

  Reading Band of Angeles- about an Oberlin educated woman who is surprised when her father dies, and she is sold into slavery to settle his debts- I was struck by the stylistic similarities between Warren and Cormac McCarthy- and learned they shared a publisher!

  In many ways Band of Angeles is as daring as anything written about this subject from this time period- in that he deals frankly with the sexual aspects of slavery in a way that authors shied from prior to the aforementioned African American authorial revolution in the 1970's.  But it also pulls its literary punch by having the protagonist's purchaser be a total gentleman... at least to her.

  Band of Angels also goes on for far too long- carrying the protagonist into reconstruction and emancipation and pairing her off with a well-meaning white husband who turns out to be a total dud.  After the fall of the Confederacy, my interest level took a precipitous dip, but this is still a top five title from Louisiana.

Capitalism and Its Critics (2025) by John Cassidy

Audiobook Review

 Capitalism and Its Critics: A History:

 From the Industrial Revolution to AI (2025)

by John Cassidy

    I read about Capitalism and Its Critics in the New York Times, where Jennifer Szalai wrote an excellent review.  Cassidy is best known as a writer on economic topics for the New Yorker.  Both the review and Cassidy's pedigree gave me the idea that this would make a great Audiobook and sure enough, nine months later, I was able to check out a copy of the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library.

  And reader, I was rewarded.  Capitalism and Its Critics is as accesible as it is interesting, and while Cassidy treads no new territory, he does an excellent job of summarizing centuries of economic thought while sparing the reader/listener from reading any of these often-obtuse authors.  More then once while listening to Capitalism and Its Critics I was struck by the thought that it is the eternal fate of the most famous economists to see their work mis-understood and applied by people who haven't read their work.  I'd wager most readers would associate criticism of capitalism with the "Left" as defined by a line of thinkers following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, but Cassidy reveals just as many critics from the "Right." The major difference is that most of the critics from the left, at least up until the time of Keynes, were persecuted, whereas critics from the right tended to end up in power or see their acolytes in power.

  Two themes that Cassidy hammers home are:

1)  Capitalism lives in a perpetual state of crisis.

2)  The idea of a Capitalism existing outside of a State made legal framework is ridiculous.

   Thus, his major criticism of critics from the right is that they live in a fantasy of the free market that is nothing short of fantastic, while at the same time allowing Dictators and Authoritarian strongmen into their tent under the guise of limiting state action in the economy (see Chile).  Meanwhile, he accurately points out that critics from the left have simply been wrong in that they start from a premise that the contradictions inherent in capitalist activity will inevitably lead to the collapse of capitalism.

   He also breathes life into figures I would have considered minor players before reading this book- Karl Polanyi and Joan Robinson to name two and he also develops time periods that don't get much attention in the west- specifically the period of Russian economic thought between the Russian Revolution and the ascension of Stalin.   Even if, like me, you are largely familiar with the history of capitalism without being a specialist or expert, you will find the writing engaging.

    

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (2020) by Stephanie Soileau

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (2020)

by Stephanie Soileau

Bayou d’Inde Drive, Sulphur, Louisiana

Louisiana: 9/28

   The Gulf coastline between New Orleans and Houston is a bit of a petro-chemical nightmare, filled with petroleum processing plants and related businesses and supervised by state governments that are hostile to business regulations.  It's also a region that is very exposed to the consequences of climate change, particularly the increased number and intensity of hurricane's making landfall from the Gulf.  This double whammy of environmental degradation makes it entirely possible that whole communities will simply cease to exist, and soon.

  This, I presume is what the title of this book references. Another layer is the weakening of the traditional Cajun community- French speaking Acadians who came down from Newfoundland after the French lost control and the English took over.  From the perspective of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Soileau rates as a minor find.  Certainly, a book of interconnected short-stories about folks on the margins of life in such an interesting area rate higher than YA titles and chick-lit.   Beyond that, however, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights, continues to explore the lives of the losers in American society, by far the most frequent subject of titles that aren't YA or chick-lit.   Where are the folks in this book going? Nowhere.  What are they doing? Nothing.

  The first story, about a teen mom who is bummed about the consequences of her actions and not that into being a Mom, really sets the tone.

Medicine River (2025) by Mary Annete Pember

 Audiobook Review

Medicine River:  A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools (2025)

by Mary Annete Pember

    I listened to this Audiobook because I am interested in the subject of Indian Boarding Schools.  Basically, for decades American authorities took Native American children away from their families and put them in boarding schools where they were taught to deny their heritage, speak English and frequently were subject to abuse and ill-health.  After returning home they frequently suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and a perpetual feeling of estrangement from their community.

   Pember blends some of this history with her personal experience as the daughter of a woman who went to an Indian Boarding School.  Spoiler alert, there is a lot of family trauma in this book.

  

Murderland (2025) by Caroline Fraser

 Audiobook Review

Murderland (2025)

by Caroline Fraser

  Murderland has an interesting and persuasive thesis: That the spike in serial killing in the 60's and 70's was directly related to industrial activity poisoning children with lead and other toxic substances.  Fraser combines this narrative with capsule biographies of famous American serial killers- Ted Bundy gets most of the ink in Murderland. Fraser also intertwines her own memories of a girlhood in the Tacoma era- the epicenter for factory pollution and serial killers.  The business part of the story is familiar- Mid 20th century capitalism pursues profit at the expense of the environment.  I presume those who are interested in serial killers will know much of that stuff to- I'm not, and I don't know much about Bundy, so I found that bit interesting- Bundy was an audacious killer- he kind of embodies every stereotype that parents fear and his targets were anything but women on the margin of society.   Fraser's memoir material didn't do much for me. 

Seascaper (2025) by Benjamin Wood

 Audiobook Review

Seascraper (2025)

 by Benjamin Wood

  I'm sure I only heard about Seascraper, by English novelist Benjamin Wood, because it was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.  It was a good pick for an Audiobook because it is set in seaside village in the English countryside, so you get some good regional accents.  There is also a strong musical element in the plot, and in the Audiobook you actually get to hear the song that the protagonist writes in a moment of inspiration.  The setting is literally atmospheric- with dense, wet fog playing a key role in the development of the plot.  And, winningly, Seascaper is brief enough to be considered a novella, thought personally I would go with short novel.

Run Away Home (1997) by Patricia C. McKissack

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Run Away Home (1997)

by Patricia C. McKissack

Mount Vernon, Alabama

Alabama: 20/20

   Run Away Home is an actual children's book, not a YA Novel, which is refreshing in the context of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.   The line between children's and adult fiction is actually thinner than the line between YA fiction and adult fiction.  Literature is filled with children's books that have reached canonical status in the adult lit world, whereas YA fiction has provided many films and television shows with material for adaptation.  Run Away Home is about an Apache boy who escapes from a train taking his people from Arizona to Florida, where they were held for several years in the late 19th century.

   The young African American girl who finds him becomes attached, and the story, about the girl's father struggling to maintain his piece of land in the face of white resistance, is a familiar one. 

A Hall of Mirrors (1967) by Robert Stone

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Hall of Mirrors (1967)

by Robert Stone

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 8/28

  I decided I can't handle Mississippi straight up so I'm going to alternate with Louisiana and Florida. I'm also done with all the Mississippi/Louisiana Audiobooks I can handle, so it's hard copy library books from here on out.  A Hall of Mirrors was Stone's first novel- he won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers in 1974.  Stone was a finalist for the National Book Award three more times, but I would put him the "mostly forgotten" category- writers like Pynchon and Delillo took similar themes of paranoia and corruption at the heart of the American Dream and came up with something that appealed to critics and professors, Stone reads more like a linear descendant of Hemingway.  I did enjoy A Hall of Mirrors, about an alcoholic radioman who stumbles into a nefarious ultra-right-wing conspiracy to... do what I don't know exactly.  Some kind of a Civil War 2 plot I suppose, though the scheme remains hazy. 

  No question that A Hall of Mirrors stands out against the field of YA lit, chick lit and trauma-porn favored by editor Susan Straight. I enjoyed the depiction of down-n-out New Orleans circa the 1960s.  Cool.

Miami Blues (1984) by Charles Willeford

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Miami Blues (1984)

by Charles Willeford

Miami, Florida

Florida 1/23

    Charles Willeford is a genre writer of crime-fiction who was elevated after he died to canonical status. His publication history spans decades with hits from the 1950;s, Pick-Up(1955), Cockfighter from the 1970's and his hobo-memoir I Was Looking for a Street, published in 1968.   Miami Blues also got a successful movie version, starring Alec Baldwin as the villain.  Blues was the first book in his late career series Sergeant Hoke Moseley of the Miami Police Department.  I guess you could call Miami Blues his sell-out book, since Willeford's reputation is/was as a writer of crime-fiction, not police procedurals.  Miami Blues still represents a half-way point between a true expression of the police procedural genre since Moseley splits his protagonist duties with Freddy Frenger, the casual California psychopath who has relocated to Miami after being released from a California prison.

  Also memorable is Susie Waggoner, who was equally memorable in the movie as depicted by Jenifer Jason Leigh. Like all Willeford books, the casual brutality and it's equally brutal consequences- fake teeth, fingers chopped off, eyes gouged out, retains the capacity to shock after decades. If Miami Blues was published today it would still impress.

Forrest Gump (1986) by Winston Groom

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

\Forrest Gump (1986)

by Winston Groom

Mobile, Alabama

Alabama: 19/20

  It was back in August of 2025 that I tackled my first title in the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Now, here we are.  Most of the work was done in November- what stands out is that this was the first state where I decided to eschew Audiobooks on the theory that it would be insufferable having to listen to most of these titles.  I don't regret the decision, which means that I'm running three states ahead in Audiobook titles right now (Florida) while physical books are stuck back in Mississippi and Louisiana.   My Audiobook consumption is dropping precipitously- a trend which started last year but is really apparent this year.

   Forrest Gump is, of course, the source material for the Tom Hanks film.  I was surprised that the book Forres Gump is described more like John Cena, to use a contemporary example, than Tom Hanks.  He is depicted as six foot six and heavily muscled, which, we all know Tom Hanks is not.  Wouldn't call myself a fan of the film (who is?) but of course I saw it like everyone else.  As is to be expected, the book is sharper on the edges than the Ron Howard directed film.  Gump is no racist, but the amount of n words thrown around was disturbing in a book published in the 80's that had little or nothing to say about racism. 

  There's also little of Mobile Alabama in the book- as the movie depicts, Gump appears Zelig-like at many of the most important events of the late 20th century. 

Chicken Dreaming Corn (2004) by Roy Hoffman

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Chicken Dreaming Corn (2004)

by Roy Hoffman

Mobile, Alabama

Alabama: 18/20

   This is the first book wholly centered on the "Jewish experience" in this Chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I myself have family who settled in Atlanta and later in Florida, so I have some idea about Southern Jews (I'm Jewish), but Chicken Dreaming Corn is a fairly conventional first-generation immigration novel about a family of Romanian Jews living in Mobile Alabama immediately before and during the Great Depression.

  Other than physical location there isn't much to distinguish the events here from similar titles from the New York chapter. Historically, Jews were prevented from owning land in much of Europe, and often physically restricted to urban environments, meaning that few Jewish emigrants became farmers in the United States.  In rural areas, they were travelling salesman and shop keepers.  The frontier nature of the Deep South/Cotton Belt in the early 19th century meant that successful Jews did become plantation owners, and the vice president of the Confederacy was Jewish.  Additionally, Jewish merchants and bankers played a key role in financing crops like cotton and getting them to domestic and foreign markets.

  This book though is just a narrowly depicted family history with none of that complexity of the Jewish experience in the South. 

Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) by Antonio Munoz Molina

 Audiobook Review

Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) 

by Antonio Munoz Molina 

  I really enjoyed To Walk Alone in the Crowd (2021), the English translation of Munoz' 2018 book- not quite a novel, not quite non-fiction, about the pleasures of walking a city i.e. ode to the flaneur.  Personally, I love strolling through a city, even if my chosen city, Los Angeles is not on anyone's list of top cities to perform this activity.  By contrast, Your Steps on the Stairs, is clearly a novel, even as it shares the same digressive DNA as Crowd.  It's about a late-middle aged Spainard, who, at the beginning of the book, has been "forcibly retired" from his corporate job in New York City, and is engaged in preparing a Lisbon apartment for the arrival of his partner, a female scientist.   From page one, any reader is likely to suspect what I suspected- something is amiss.

   As the plot slowly winds, Munoz treats the reader to all sorts of observations about Libson, New York City and contemporary relationships.  There are some surreal moments, such as when the narrator attends a terrible party given by a pop star who has recently purchased one of the mansions on the edge of Lisbon and realizes that most of the attendees are hired for the night- by his own handyman.  It makes for great Audiobook listening- ideal really, I highly recommend anything you can find by Munoz in translation.

Train Whistle Guitar(1974) by Albert Murray

 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America

Train Whistle Guitar (1974)

by Albert Murray

Gasoline Point, Alabama

Alabama: 17/20

    I know I've been saying this since I reached the halfway point, but I will be glad to see the end of Alabama.   Train Whistle Guitar, by noted African American critic and novelist Albert Murray, was a real discovery.  I'm not a jazz guy, so I haven't read any of his criticism, but I was vaguely aware of his influence on multiple generations of subsequent critics and scholars, and the fact that he lived long enough to see himself canonized.  Among his works of criticism, Train Whistle Guitar was the first in a series of novels following the childhood and adulthood of a Murray-like character named Scooter, who Wikipedia describes as an "alter-ego."

  Train Whistle Guitar is the rare 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that shows any kind of interest in modernist technique, specifically, there is no third person narrator voice giving the reader explanatory paragraphs- you are just in the world with Murray.  Reading this book in Court and at jail, it was clear I should have taken more time with it, so that I could focus on the technique, but alas. 

Slavery's Capitalism (2016) edited by Sven Rickert

 Audiobook Review

Slavery's Capitalism (2016)

edited by Sven Rickert

   One of the interesting by-products of the state-by-state, geographical approach of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, is that it really awakens an interest in the underlying history itself.  Since I've been reading about the south now for almost a year, naturally I've become interested in the history of the region, and specifically the economics of slavery.  The economics of slavery were a central to concern to both pro and anti-slavery forces until the matter was settled during the Civil War, and then after that both sides continued to make use of their propaganda-type arguments, which further obscured rational discussion and investigation of these issues.

  Both sides played their part.  Obviously, proponents of the Southern side do not want to dwell on the real economics of slavery- the whole idea is to drape the past with a gauze that softens the edges.  However, the North also did it's part, in that generations of Northern scholars have ignored or hidden the dramatic links between slavery in the American south and Northern capitalism.   I can attest to that based on my own trips to the Northeast, where I've visited a variety of history museums and read a handful of economic history books looking for scholars who make what seem like obvious connections. 

  Mostly what this book does is say these obvious things in print.  The format is uneven- it reads like a graduate level seminar where each participant submitted one chapter- many of the individual essays read almost like school projects, so mostly the value here is seeing the broad themes outlined in economic terms.  Specifically, you've got the economic ties between the slave holding south and northern (and European capitalism), they dynamic inside the south, namely the shift that occurred when the FOREIGN slave trade was abolished in 1808.  This book reveals the black line marking one era from the next.  Most Americans- and I'm talking the educated ones here, not the idiots, think only of this first part- the slavery of transatlantic importation of slaves.  Crucially though it is the second part- where slaves moved out of the older societies of Maryland and Virginia southward, culminating in the Cotton Boom of the early 19th century in present day Alabama and Mississippi.

 This is the distinctly American slavery this is more important to most African Americans, novelists and scholars. Both of modes of slavery where insanely cruel, but it was the trade within the United States that has really been highlighted for me both by this book and by the books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.

The Last Hotel for Women (1996) by Vicki Covington

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Last Hotel for Women (1996)

by Vicki Covington

Birmingham, Alabama

Alabama: 16/20

   I think Alabama is probably the worst literary state thus far.  They don't even have a good detective novel/police procedural down here. The Last Hotel for Women is interesting by the standards of its Alabama mapped compatriots, in that it features historical villain Bull Connor as not just a major character, but sometimes narrator of this story of the Freedom Riders.   It's struck me reading books from this part of the country that there is no one epic novel of this period that goes day by day, month by month, year by year and that learning the nuts and bolts of how this all went down requires non-fiction titles.  Covington, at least, brings some insight to the less sympathetic side, as embodied by Connor, who was a staunch segregationist. 

  Bull Connor distinguishes himself as a rare type of villain in the deep south- an urban villain, ruling over a mixed population in an industrialized city, of which I believe Birmingham is the only one- in the sense that we use that term in reference to locales like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Cleveland circa the mid 20th century.   He is sophisticated enough that the n word is used less frequently in this novel than in almost any other from this state, and the contention here is not whether some people should enslave other people. As Connor himself says multiple times in this book, he loves his black brothers and sisters and just wants them to thrive separately from whites.  

 I hadn't heard of Convington before this book.  Looking at her Amazon product listings, I would probably put her as "forgotten."  

Little Bosses Everywhere (2025) by Bridget Read

 Audiobook Review

Little Bosses Everywhere: 

How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (2025)

by Bridget Read

  I try to keep at least one non-fiction Audiobook in my Libby mix at all times.  Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, has been on and off my metaphorical libby loan shelf a half dozen times over the past year, and I finally knocked it off during the break.  I've had an interest in pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing since I started work in the world of federal criminal defense as an attorney.  One of my first tasks was reviewing physical documents at the Boiler Room Taskforce in Mission Valley, San Diego, CA.  This was for a telemarketing scam, but the documents I reviewed contained "training materials" that led me to explore this nefarious world.

 Multi-Level Marketing, as Read details exhaustively, is here to stay, and the second and third generations of some of the founding families of MLM are familiar to anyone who knows Cabinet level appointments in the Trump administrations, one and two.  The roots of multi-level marketing are in the idea of the pyramid scheme, which is an actual event that happened in the US, and not just a generic term to describe a type of scheme to defraud.  The history, in fact, goes quite deep, and spans the country, and, in fact, the entire world at this point.

  I knew many of the details, and found the personal stories of the victims (Read doesn't talk to many winners, if any) pretty tedious, but Read, despite her stated thesis that all multi-level marketing is scam, does point to the reason that MLM's endure despite their scam status- which is that people drop out, in fact, everyone who isn't a "winner" under the system drops out, and the winners maintain their status because they can source new people to recruit.  That is 100% the key to success in any MLM, finding new leads and converting them.

  There was an interesting chapter near the end where Read discusses the newest iteration of this world, the growth of "life coaches" or "mentors" as entrees to the MLM business.  Certainly, this seems like something that would be facilitated greatly by all Social Meida platforms, and it strikes me that is more or less a valid way for such people to make money.

All That We See or Seem (2025) by Ken Liu

Audiobook Review

All That We See or Seem (2025)

by Ken Liu

  Chinese American author-translator Ken Liu is known equally well for both- my introduction to him came through his role as translator of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.  He also has a fantasy series that I'll never read.  I checked out All That We See or Seem because, despite the hackneyed "girl hacker" premise and obvious IP/multi art form pitch and description of the first book as being part of a series, I was pretty sure that Liu would have some interesting things to say about hacking and computers and, god help me, AI.

 In that sense, Liu delivers- the actual hacking type stuff is amazing, the rest of it, is, at best average and often bad- like the characters, the back story, the overall predictability of the plot. I think that's the idea though, so who am I to say it isn't good.  I listened the Audiobook, but I wish I hadn't- the teen hacker main character is not particularly interesting, so you end spending much of the listen on her tedious backstory.

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025) by QNTM

 Book Review

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025)

 by QNTM

    I happened across this title perusing the shelves at a Burlington, Vermont bookstore, where it had one of those handwritten "employee recommends" cards attached.  I don't know about you, but I always take the time to read these- whether it's a Barnes & Noble or what, because I think you can really tell about a specific Bookstore based on whether the employees can identify books that I a) don't know about and b) want to read.    There is No Antiemetics Division jumped out to me on a couple levels, first, what the employee wrote on the card was interesting. Second, it was clearly a horror-science-fiction genre title that was placed in the wider "new releases" shelf at the front of the store, that shows me the book or author already has escape velocity from the genre shelf.  Last, the cover promised "cosmic horror" AKA Lovecraftian horror without the not-so-subtle racism.  

  You can describe the plot easily enough, a secret government agency labors against the horrors of the unknown, but that doesn't do the material justice.  Specifically, it doesn't describe the role that memory plays in the horror aspect of the plot, thought there is also non-memory based actual horror along Lovecraftian lines. Unlike most first gen cosmic horror, QNTM (a nom de plume for an English author/programmer Sam Hughes), does describe said horror, rectifying a major issue with that genre (how long can an author keep describing a nameless, unknowable horror without actually describing said horror.). 

  I found There is No Antimemetics Division really mind-blowing in the way of most great genre fiction.  The fusion of memory-language sci-fi and cosmic horror was revelatory in a way similar to the initial Matrix movie- genre but transcendent, classic genre.   Worth reading for sure.

Dogfight and Other Stories (1996) by Michael Knight

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dogfight and Other Stories (1996)

by Michael Knight

Mobile, Alabama

Alabama: 15/20

   This was a good one- sadly a book of short stories. The Gulf Coast of Alabama seems pretty interesting- sometimes people go there on the house hunting shows on HGTV and this is the first novel where you get a sense of that white, upper-middle class existence, also white working-class existence, no non-white characters in this book.  The sense I got from Dogfight was lonely white guys, looking out to the Gulf of Mexico-America. 

Mudbound (2008) by Hilary Jordan

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mudbound (2008)

by Hilary Jordan

Mississippi Delta, Mississippi

Mississippi: 6/18

  Mudbound is a classic Susan Straight 1,001 Novels: A Library of America pick, a book that won some award that Barbara Kingsolver made up for unpublished books- it then got published and sold a bunch of copies.  The version I checked out from the library was the Ebook version of the Netflix cover version of the book from the Netflix version I'd didn't know about.  It's about a well-off but "spinster adjacent" white woman from the upper south who marries a youngish widower- she meets him because he is an engineer travelling around for Government projects during the Great Depression (I think).  Little does she know that it is his lifelong dream to go back home (the Mississippi Delta) and become a farmer.  It's "little does she know" because he does not bother to tell her during their courtship. 

 Nevertheless, Laura McAllan (her married name) is cognizant of her incipient spinsterhood and loves the old lug besides, so she agrees to the thing.  The title of the book is her somewhat whimsical name for the farm that Henry (the husband) takes over.   Henry has a damaged (by service in World War I) younger brother who is a manic pixie dream boy circa the 1940's.  The farm has several sharecropping families, some white and some black, and Jamie (the younger brother) befriends the oldest son of one of the black families, Ronsel, also a veteran, and a tank operator to boot (Jamie being a pilot). 

  If you've been reading this blog, you know how this is going to end up, not well for the African American World War II veteran.  And reader, it does not. 

The Next Step in the Dance (1998) by Tim Gautreaux

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Next Step in the Dance (1998)

by Tim Gautreaux

Morgan City, Louisiana

Louisiana: 7/28

    It is rare that I actually really enjoy reading a book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Part of that derives from the fact that I've read, essentially, all of the "classics" that Susan Straight has included in the project- we are talking about canon level titles from 19th, 20th and 21st century American literature here, and let's face it, the list isn't that long.  Part of it comes from the fact that Straight needs to rely heavily on chick-lit and genre fiction to actually populate large swathes of the American literary map.  And I guess the last part of it is the lack of thematic variety within each particular state- I really should be going through and doing one book at a time from each state instead of staying within a single region/chapter of the project to avoid that particular phenomenon. 

  Which is all a preamble for saying that I actually enjoyed reading The Next Step in the Dance on its own merit, and Tim Gautreaux is an author who I would be interested in reading outside of a project-based title.  I know for sure the reason I liked this book is that the main character was blue collar (a Cajun machinist) and part of the book actually deals with his work life and the things he has to do as part of that life.  It's an issue that extends well beyond the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to all precincts of American literature and most of American fiction- which is that books are written by authors, and most authors- particularly writers of literary fiction- haven't done shit in their lives except write fiction.  This means they can't believably write about work, let alone make a whole novel about it, which means that all fiction is inevitably domestic fiction, family fiction, and that world gets boring as hell year after year.

  I would love to read a work of fiction about a farmer where the author actually knew something about the business and practice of farming, and writes about that,  instead of one of fifty novels in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where the events take PLACE on a farm but are ABOUT the abuse a young girl suffers at the hands of her father or family trauma generally. 

  

The Houseguest (2018)by Amparo Dávila

Mexican author Amparo Davila

 Book Review

The Houseguest (2018)

by Amparo Dávila

  I'm not sure how I came about reading this 2018 New Directions edition of English translations of Mexican author Amparo Dávila's work.  She was writing between the mid 1950's and the 80's, dying in 2000, and I think this two sentence "Work" description from Wikipedia captures her vibe nicely:

  Davila is known for her use of themes of insanity, danger, and death, typically dealing with a female protagonist. Many of her protagonists appear to have mental disorders and lash out, often violently, against others. Many times the women are still unable to escape from their mental issues and live with the actions they have taken. She also plays with ideas of time by using time as a symbol of that which we cannot change.

  In other words, she is a forerunner of the recent wave of mostly woman authored weird lit coming out of Latin America and Mexico in particular. Reading this collection had some of the same energy as reading I, Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman which is basically, "How have I made it this far with no one ever mentioning her or ever hearing about her independently despite being directly interested in her work and the writers she has directly influenced?"

  It further points to the importance of publishing entities like New Directions and The New York Review of Books, where the goal is often "resurfacing" "lost classics" or raising a lost work to canonical status in part by republishing it.  This is by no means an insignificant phenomenon, and I can confidently say that both Jane Austen and William Faulkner were direct beneficiaries of this same process, going back centuries. 

The Far Edges of the Known World (2025) by Owen Rees

 Book Review

The Far Edges of the Known World:

 Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization (2025)

by Owen Rees

   If there were more books in this category: general reader level history books about ancient history, I would for sure read them, but the fact is that the underlying research doesn't require more than one new book a decade in most subfields.   Reading everything there is available to a non-specialist about events on the fringes of so-called western "civilization" in English, in the United States, is not hard.  Rees summarizes recent research in areas on the margins of the ancient greco-roman world.   He also includes a section on Europe, and some of the most interesting material is written about modern day Ethiopia. Like all books published in American on this area of interest, the lack of foreign language knowledge condemns the author to reinforce the very historical near-sightedness he seeks to correct.  To take the example of ancient Ethiopia, he doesn't appear to have read anything in Ge'ez.

  Anyway, it is interesting to be sure but nothing mind blowing here, like, I kinda knew what was coming.

The Gone Dead (2019) by Chanelle Benz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Gone Dead (2019)

by Chanelle Benz

Money Road, Greenwood Mississippi 

Mississippi: 5/18

  It isn't often that the titles on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America raise questions about the role of authenticity in fiction, but such was the case for The Gone Dead, by British American author Chanelle Benz. The plot concerns the interracial daughter of a dead-before-his-time African American poet (her father) and what can only be described as her severely misguided attempt to "get to the bottom" of the "mysterious" circumstances surrounding the death of her father.

  Clearly, the protagonist has not read the same books I have about this part of the country because it is just about 100 percent clear that any "mysterious" death of an African American man in the deep South is caused by white racists who are then protected by the local law enforcement and political establishment. I could have told this lady that in a five-minute conversation over a cup of coffee. Fair to say that I didn't linger on The Gone Dead, because reader I knew where this was headed. It was either the cops, friends of the cops or the cops when they were off duty that killed your daddy and you don't need 283 pages to tell the story.

Where the Line Bleeds (2008) by Jesmyn Ward

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Where the Line Bleeds (2008)

by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Mississippi: 4/18

   Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward would have to be at the very top of any serious list of American authors of literary fiction in the 21st century.  Her presence amidst the detritus of YA and chick-lit titles stands out like a beacon from a proverbial light house of literary fiction.  I checked out the Audiobook because I was wondering if I could seriously tell the difference between an Author with such widely regarded literary merit and the run of the mill titles, I've been suffering through for the past couple years.  Where the Line Bleeds was her first novel, and then she dropped Salvage the Bones four years later- that book won the National Book Award.  She won again in 2017 with Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I read during a period where I was reading all the National Book Award finalists.  It's a good book, obviously, but it didn't spur me to go back and read her other titles.

   I could tell the difference between Ward's prose and the run of the mill stuff on a couple of levels.  First, she was able to turn an otherwise prosaic landscape (the unheralded Mississippi coastline) with real grandeur.  She did this in a couple different ways.  First, she was a close observer of the physical landscape- her descriptions of crack houses and swamp parties sparkle with life.  Second, her ability to depict all five senses marks her out from the pack.   Great writers of literary fiction imbue the reader with a feeling that there is depth beneath the surface of the human activity being depicted, but they also provide a many-splendored surface, pairing stylistic flourishes with economy.   She does all these things in Where the Line Bleeds, which is sure to be my top title from Mississippi and a likely top five for the entire chapter.