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. 

Kentucky Straight (1992) by Chris Offutt

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Kentucky Straight (1992)

by Chris Offutt

Kentucky: 12/16

  At this point in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, any book that isn't a story about a sad woman, teen girl or girl child is a win.  This collection of short stories, filled with hillbillies doing dumb shit, is a breath of fresh air within the 1,001 Novels project.  Most of the protagonists (all?) are men at the margins of society, struggling with the daily humiliations visited upon them by everyday life. 

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (2023) by Hu Anyan

 Book Review

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (2023)

by Hu Anyan

Translated by Jack Hargreaves

    Years of Chinese lessons on Duolingo have brought me no closer to my goal of someday speaking Chinese, but it is an interesting hobby and certainly a better way to spend my screen time than watching TikTok's about buying giant industrial machines from Asia.   It has certainly given me a great deal of respect both for native speakers of the language and Chinese speakers who have learned English.  The major issue with Chinese is that there is no alphabet and no letters, only thousands and thousands of characters.  Each character represents a syllable, so in that sense, Chinese is easier than Western languages.  Assuming you know the character and the corresponding sound there is little that can go wrong.  Getting to that point is the hard part.

  As translator Jack Hargreaves explains in his introduction, translating Chinese prose into English presents complexities in that the literal translation of Chinese characters into English words inevitably dulls the poetics in a way that translating from one Western language to another simply does not.  On the other hand, the contemporary China depicted in I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is so close to life in a city like New York, Toronto or Chicago that potential confusions are mitigated. 

   The title is a little misleading in that the Author/protagonist's stint delivering packages in Beijing is one chapter in a longer narrative about a rootless young man struggling to find his place in contemporary China.   As the book progresses, the reader learns that the narrator has some familiarity with the western literary tradition and a desire to evoke some of the artistic traditions of the west- specifically the Kuntslerroman.   Perhaps it has something to do with my prejudice and ignorance of Chinese culture that I would expect the author to actually be what the title claims he is.

  

Trampoline (2015) by Robert Gipe

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Trampoline (2015)

by Robert Gipe

Cumberland Mountains, Kentucky

Kentucky: 11/16

   Another day, another coming of age novel about a teen girl growing up in difficult circumstances in an underprivileged American community.   One theme I've noticed about character in novels set in the rural south is the almost utter absence of any desire to escape one's surroundings.  Most likely that comes from the difficult/oppositional relationship many of these characters have towards formal education, even the smart ones.  The idea that a young, smart character living in rural poverty might reject advancement through education in favor of wallowing in the human misery of their surroundings is a strange one to me.  Before the 1,001 Novels I thought the idea of using formal education as a means of escape was essentially universal in the United States, but such is not the case.  It's not the case thus far in Kentucky, and it mostly was not the case in the deep south: Mississippi and Alabama in particular.

   Here, our teenage protagonist shuttles between her addiction adjacent mother and environmental activity grandmother who is focused on defeating the permit of a mining company to "de-top" a nearby mountain, a controversial stance considering the number of people who are employed by said mining company in the local community.  Gipe does a good job capturing the tumultuous inner life of an adolescent girl, but seriously are there any other types of adolescent girl in ya lit?

Every Bone a Prayer (2020) by Ashley Blooms

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Every Bone a Prayer (2020)

 by Ashley Blooms

Cutshin, Kentucky

Kentucky: 10/16

    I think Kentucky will prove to be my favorite state in this chapter.  It's either going to be Kentucky or Tennessee (It will NOT be Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arkansas or Missouri).  I was heartened when the jacket copy indicated that Every Bone a Prayer was a work of speculative fiction- a genre that is pretty much completely absent from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  I can only surmise that it has to do with the tastes of editor Susan Straight, who clearly sees this project as an opportunity to the tell the stories of impoverished and neglected women and girls as the priority in her selections. 

  Thus, the speculative fiction still involves a main character who is helpless and abused and spends the entire book in this one holler in Kentucky.  She also talks to crawdads, witnesses life size glass sculptures of people sprout the front yard of near by trailer and slips out of her skin and walks around a skeleton at night.  Other than as a metaphor for the disassociation felt by victims of childhood sexual abuse, I wasn't sure what to make of any of it.