Ply (2026) by Hernan Diaz

 Audiobook Review

Ply (2026)

by Hernan Diaz

   Hernan Diaz returns after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his last novel, Trust (2022). I read Trust in the because it made the Booker prize Longlist.  At the time I said, "I quite enjoyed Trust, though I'm not sure it's a (booker prize) short lister- it might be a National Book Award and/or Pulitzer Nominee- vibe-wise Trust reminds me of Richard Powers- a recent winner and author of a book- Gain, that really reminds me of Trust, in that it attempts to convey an economic narrative in a novel."

  Thus, when I read the negative review in the New York Times calling Ply a dud and specifically calling out his Ballardian cyberpunk future as Dead on Arrival, I wasn't particularly dissuaded.  I got a bump to the top of the Libby borrowing list and blazed through my seven-day rental window at 2.25 speed- faster than I prefer but fine for Ply, which, at 15 hours isn't shockingly long but IS at times tedious.  I largely agree with the New York Times review of Dwight Garner.  Ply, like Trust, again stuck me as resembling the technique of Richard Powers- introducing subject matter from science (here it is physics) and melding that with elements of both genre and literary fiction.  Garner critiques the lack of specificity in Diaz's description of this dystopian future but I think that was a very specific choice by Diaz to keep from alienating his potential audience, he wanted something familiar enough to a literary fiction audience to not be off-putting. 

  I thought the most interesting facet of Ply, and something Garner didn't mention in his review, is the depiction of social life within the dystopian future.  Diaz goes further in describing this part of his world than any other dystopian/literary fiction cross-over that I can remember.   The human relationship at the center of Ply, between a girl electricity thief called "the pincher" and a kooky mad scientist who needs her help, was interesting, to me.  Overall, though, yeah, hard to see an Audience responding to Ply. 

  An independent critical observation I want to lay out in brief is that Diaz depicts a world where living beyond 40 or 50 is unusual.  This appears to be based on a fundamental misapprehension about human demography before modern medicine lowered infant mortality from almost half to essentially zero.   This often takes the form of depicting these times as being almost devoid of old people and having characters muse on how few people live beyond their mid 30's or 40's.  That is not how shit worked.  The fact is that if someone lived beyond year 5, they had a reasonable chance of living to a "normal" old age- 60 or 70, and that there were plenty of old people around back in the day. 

  Not an issue that would bother me normally, but Diaz does include pages and pages of his mad scientist character discussing particle physics, and his mad scientist character is the only human over 50 in the book, and Diaz' Pincher constantly talks about how, as a 20 something, she only has a few more years left before she can expect to die.

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026) by Ken Liu

 Audiobook Review

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026)

by Ken Liu

   I'm a Ken Liu fan, if only because my guy doesn't respect high/low genre boundaries and he is committed to putting out work. I'm firmly ANTI the romantic ideal of the artist/visionary who can only produce under the influence of inspiration.  I'd rather take someone who puts out new product on a regular basis, even if that means working in areas that are more product than art.  I also like that Liu, unlike many writers of literary fiction has actually done something in his life besides write and teach. It's a subject that is rarely addressed in the world of literary fiction but screams out every week from the pages of the New York Times Review- for most writers of literary fiction, their biggest real-life achievement is either getting a full-time teaching position or a graduate degree... in creative writing.

  Specifically, I like this work in the field of "hard" science fiction. Regrettably, this collection sees him dabbling in genres like magical realism (the title story) and steampunk.  Part of the issue with this part of Liu's bibliography is that I never read his four-volume set, The Dandelion Dynasty- I just can't with the world-building fantasy. Like any collection of genre short fiction, there are hits and misses.  I thought the best stories in here were the two that had a cosmic point of view.  There is no theme more interesting to me in the realm of hard science fiction as the nature of time. Timekeeper's Symphony- which is just about time with no plot or characters, and Cosmic Spring, about a sentient spaceship living through the end of the universe, were the stand-out stories for me. 

The Hawkline Monster (1974) by Richard Brautigan

 Audiobook Review

The Hawkline Monster (1974)

by Richard Brautigan

       Richard Brautigan's literary career is a real rags-to-riches-to-drinking yourself to death 20th century tale.  Brautigan started out as a Bay Area poet publishing at the end of the 1950's to little critical or commercial acclaim. He struck mass-market and critical success at the exact same time with his back-to-back novels, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar in 1967 and 1968.  Brautigan was well positioned to capitalize on the aftermath of the summer of love with an already established publishing history (and publisher).  Unfortunately, the zeitgeist moved on and Brautigan, like many of the artists who achieved popular success in the 60's and post-60's era, faced questions of authenticity and relevance, and his commercial success guaranteed that critics would abound.  His two hits set him up, but he never stopped publishing.

   I heard about The Hawkline Monster from a random Instagram account which featured a slide show of alt-westerns.  I was intrigued, and became more intrigued when I saw that someone had made an Audiobook for this 1974 novel for the first time in 2016.  Anyway, I listened to the Audiobook via the Libby library app and I liked that the whole run time was four hours (216 pages long in print).  Listening to the Audiobook, it seemed like maybe history (and certainly contemporary critics) had been a little cruel to Brautigan- I went and read the New York Times review for the print edition and it was kill yourself awful.   I can see a real direct connection between the tail end of the hippy period- which was dismissed, as this novel was dismissed, as silly and inconsequential, and some of the thematic preoccupations of postmodernist, who were already well underway in the mid 1970's. 

  There seems to be a parallel to the way that disco music was written out of the history of electronic music because it wasn't cool, even though it was undoubtedly electronic music. 

Clay's Quilt (2001) by Silas House

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Clay's Quilt (2001)

by Silas House

Free Creek, Kentucky

Kentucky: 14/16

  I actually heard about Silas House before I started reading Clay's Quilt- from my girlfriend who keeps in touch with the Tyler Childers led contemporary music scene- House directed a recent Grammy nominated video of a song by Childers I think Silas House was made the official poet of Kentucky or something like that which is cool because he is LGBT and Kentucky is... Kentucky.  I'd actually have to say that Kentucky seems to me, on the basis of the books from this chapter, maybe the most intellectually interesting place on the map since I left New York.  

   

   Clay's Quilt was House's first novel.   Since then, he's kept up an impressive resume both as an academic, where he is a teacher at Berea College, author (five novels and an equal number of collections of poetry) and public intellectual.   He's won some regional prizes but hasn't really broken out nationally, which I guess is why I hadn't known about him.  He's a good example of why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project makes sense, introducing the reader to authors they may have missed. 

  Clay's Quilt is about Clay, an orphan child of a West Virginia mountain woman who is murdered by her vengeful ex when Clay is an infant.  I expected the quilt to play a bigger role given the name of the book, but it doesn't really work out that way.  Nor, for that matter, is Clay's Quilt about LGBT issues. Rather, it tells the story of Clay, a happy-go-lucky coal miner, who meets and marries a woman who plays a mean fiddle and has a nasty ex-husband.  

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010) by Glenn Taylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010)

by Glenn Taylor

Huntington, West Virginia

West Virginia: 1/10

    Of all the state thus far in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, West Virginia is a tie for last place in terms of my personal encounters with the state (Alongside Delaware (train ride through only), North Carolina (drove through only), South Carolina (no contact), Alabama (no contact), Kentucky (no contact) and Florida (flight lay over only).  The closest I've ever come was in college, when some friends of mine went to a college football game in West Virginia (driving from Washington DC.) They described a wild time, but it sounded like a pretty standard "big game" in a college town atmosphere to my college self. 

    These days, the only thing West Viriginia is likely to evoke in the national psyche is the lyric from the John Denver song, coal mining and opiate addiction.  Culturally, I'm expecting lots of continuity with the Kentucky chapter and The Marrowbone Marble Company seemed like a book that could have just as easily been set in Kentucky as it was in West Virginia.   I enjoyed the ambition of this book and author Glenn Taylor, about a man who comes back from World War II with questions about the unspoken rules of West Virginia life.  He marries the spinster-adjascent daughter of the owner of the glass factory where he works (Taylor uses the phrase "glass man" about a million times in the 300 pages of this book), reconciles with his long-lost hillbilly relatives who resides in a holler, and goes about building a marble factory.  I'm talking children's marbles here- which is something I didn't fully grasp until I was actually reading the book- I thought it was going to be some kind of quarry operation.

  Conflict comes from the judgments of "outsiders" who dislike the racially mixed, communal aspects of the protagonists' vision. There is also support, and Taylor does a good job situating the action in the national tide of integrationist activity in the1960's.   Certainly, The Marrobone Marble Company made a welcome respite from the standard sad, realist -girl/woman fare centered of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.

Wolf Worm (2026) by T. Kingfisher

 Audiobook Review

Wolf Worm (2026)

by T. Kingfisher

  The 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has me thinking a lot about regional American literature and fiction.   And about genre, and the relationship of genre fiction to literature, the border between those two subjects, and the relationship between that border and the geography/location/psychogeography of books. Clearly, the more specific the place of a work, the more likely that will move away from the world of genre fiction and towards the world of literature.  The presence of place-based details in a plot is a characteristic of literary fiction and less important in genre fiction, where the plot itself always assumes primacy.

  I was thinking about those things as I listened to the Audiobook of Wolf Worm, a work of regional horror (North Carolina woods) set in 1899.   Author T. Kingfisher is a pseudonym for children's author (and webcomic creator) Ursula Vernon.  I can see where she wouldn't want her diehard fans picking up this book, about parasites and the people who study parasites, being picked up by a 13-year-old fan because...yikes.  

  I found Wolf Worm pretty slow through the first two Acts- it's basically a straight up work of historical fiction about a young woman who agrees to be an illustrator for a reclusive entomologist who studies bugs with an emphasis on parasites in the woods of North Carolina.   Things get weird in the third act when the protagonist finds a hidden shed on the property, and of course, she can't leave well enough alone.

Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) by Bobbie Ann Mason

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)

by Bobbie Ann Mason

Kentucky Lake, Kentucky

Kentucky: 13/16

  Another short story collection from the 1,001 Novels project that left me with nothing but vague impressions.  It didn't help that I read this title off the Kindle App on my phone.  Mason seems squarely from the "everyday life among the losers" school of American lit, but this collection was published in 1982, so she was at the leading edge of that movement.  This book is also mapped at the far western edge of Kentucky- a location closer to southern Illinois and western Missouri than the rest of Kentucky.  

Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson

 Audiobook Review

Anathem (2008)

by Neal Stephenson

    I love me a 30 hour plus long Audiobook version of a Neal Stephenson novel.  Stephenson is the epitome of an author I want to read, but not necessarily deal with the bulky, physical book itself NOR the equally lengthy E-book edition.  The physical version is 937 pages plus another 17 pages of foreword. 954 pages!  Once a physical book goes over 600 pages it becomes an actual, physical burden to read so if I can avoid that experience I will.  It took me months and months to make it through this Audiobook, mainly because the first two thirds of the book is almost unbelievably boring, just hours and hours of low-tech monks on some kind of earth like planet using a language that Stephenson concocted himself.  As the title of the book might suggest, Stephenson's made-up language mostly sounds like an iteration of Latin which makes sense because the protagonist is a member of this alt-Earth monastic order that lives apart from the secular world.

   The plot is slow- so slow- to develop but eventually a spaceship shows up around Arbre and the "mathic orders" and secular authority compete and combine to figure out WTH is going on.  Only the third act, with a roughly improvised trip to space and engagement with the aliens on their spaceship, really meets any criterion for "exciting" and I can def see why there has never been a film or tv version of this book but the last few hours of action made me glad I had suffered through the rest of the Audiobook.

   

Filth Eaters (2026) by Ito Romo

 Book Review

Filth Eaters (2026)

by Ito Romo

  I've been getting more book recommendations from social media recently.  I found out about Filth Eaters from the Instagram account of the publisher; Deep Vellum Press out of Texas.  The social media post promised a vampire yard with an Aztec twist, which sounds great to me.  I'm interested in any work of fiction that takes a stab at pre-Columbian characters, a group largely absent from historical fiction as a genre.  This slim volume flips back and forth between a dystopian near-present where a vampire scion uses drones to post his kills to an adoring.world-wide audience in a flooded New York and the post-conquest Mexico where an old world, Spanish vampire emigrates to the new world and meets his new world counterparts, who have survived the fall of their Aztec partners and arrival of the Vampire-hating Spanish, but only barely.  Like many Vampire narrative, both the plot and the characters suffer from ennui.  The life of a vampire, super powerful but limited in their range of activity, seems exhausting, so it is no wonder vampire characters are so often exhausted. 

 I enjoyed the scenes set in the past, but the dystopian New York material felt uninspired.

The Invincible (1964) by Stanislaw Lev

 Audiobook Review

The Invincible (1964) 

by Stanislaw Lev

  This 1964 work by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lev got an Ebook editions last year and after a year of checking it out of the Libby library Audiobook app and returning it unlistened-to I finally finished it.  I've found myself drawn to science fiction, particularly "hard" science fiction ever since I started the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, as a counterweight to the poverty/geography bound realism that editor Susan Straight favors.  I'm sure the Audiobook happened in 2025 because The Invincible was one of the first books to deal with ideas like microrobots and swarm intelligence.

  It's a straight forward set up, space ship arrives at a distant planet to figure out what happened to the last space ship and discovers a planet seemingly devoid of all life...or is it.