M. John Harrison Wins Booker Prize for The End of Everything

 M. John Harrison Wins Booker Prize for The End of Everything

    Stunning news today in the world of literary fiction!  The End of Everything, M. John Harrison's late career masterpiece, won the Booker Prize!   Harrison is the first ACTUAL genre science fiction author to win (as supposed to writers of literary fiction like Margrate Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro who dabble in science fiction).  This is a capstone of the fairly recent phenomenon of seeing Atwood/Ishiguro type sci-fi influenced titles making it deep into the content.  See, for example, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, which featured several what they call science fiction "elements" in a book that was anything but science fiction.

  After my listen to the Audiobook, I went through Harrison's bibliography to look for hints of this particular kind of weird lit influenced sci fi and came up empty, despite over a half century of continuous publication.  It makes this win even more extraordinary, though I can't help the thought that the Booker committee was not particularly familiar with the work of Jeff VanDerMeer or QNTM.  I think, if you've read the Southern Reach series and There is No Antimetrics Division, Harrison's achievement is less extraordinary, though he ALSO brings a Sebaldian sense of place that both VanDerMeer and QNTM lack.  I'm not saying that the Southern Reach series lacks a sense of place, only that it is not a Sebaldian sense of place.

  Really a stunning result for the issues that concern this blog, specifically the intersection of genre fiction and literary fiction. 

The End of Everything(2026) by M. John Harrison

 Audiobook Review

The End of Everything (2026)

by M. John Harrison

  I had my eye on The End of Everything when it made the Booker Longlist.  The Booker has shown an appreciation for sci fi/lit fic crossover that I appreciate, though I don't always love the books they pick.  Most of the writing I've seen about The End of Everything is written from the perspective of a reader of literary fiction, so I've mostly read about being confused about the plot and, what, if anything is actually going on.

  Mostly, The End of Everything seems like a book influenced by Jeff VanDerMeer and his Southern Reach series as well as the internet phenomenon QNTM and his book, There is No Antimetrics Division. I think it is fair to suggest direct influence, since Harrison has been publishing since the late 1960's, and there is little in his prior bibliography that would foreshadow a book as odd as The End of Everything.   There was also an element of Kazuo Ishiguro and his work in The Buried Giant and When We Were Orphans.  These references should give a prospective reader a better sense of what they are in for then "two people wander around a post-apocolyptic southeastern England."  

  A more substantial plot description doesn't help:  Aliens (the iGhetti) have arrived, though no one knows from where or what they want.  They have purposely? accidentally? destroyed human civilization but left humanity behind to cope with the consequences.   At times, the characters behave like they are in a reverse W.G. Sebald book, wandering the described landscape of southeastern England with a nary a coherent thought.

  The End of Everything is basically everything I'm looking for in a book, and kudos to M. John Harrison for coming up with such an interesting shift in tone so late in his career. Readers looking for satisfying conclusions are best steered elsewhere.

The Killing Ground (1982) by Mary Lee Settle

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Killing Ground (1982)

by Mary Lee Settle

Canona, West Virginia

West Virginia: 3/10

 Author Mary Lee Settle is an interesting lady- she won the National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie and she helped to found the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1980.  The Killing Ground is the last novel in her blend of historical and family based auto-fiction, The Beulah Quintet.  The five volumes traverse thousands of miles and hundreds of years, from the state sanctioned murder of religious dissenters in 17th century England, through the settling of this corner of West Virginia by white people, to the present of the mid 1970's, when the author stand-in returns home to her coal-mining family to unravel the mystery of what is called in the description of the book the "murder" of her brother, though FWIW what happens to her brother, who dies hitting his head on the metal toilet of the local lock up after getting sucker punched by a drunken hillbilly (and distant relative) is, at best, manslaughter, murder requiring intent. 

  I can't find any discussion of The Killing Ground as auto-fiction but it read that way to me.  An early chapter features the author character describing her previous Beulah Quintet works in front of an audience of locals, and the description she gives of rich kid boho life in the late 50's, early 60's sounds pretty familiar. 

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) by Breece D’J Pancake

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) 

by Breece D’J Pancake 

Milton, West Virginia

West Virginia: 2/10

   This is the only book by West Virginia author Breece D'J Pancake (he acquired the apostrophe when a copy editor at The Atlantic made a typographical error and he decided it looked cool that way), who killed himself (or maybe accidentally shot himself while he was drunk.)  He was 27 when he died, putting him in the literary annex to rock and roll's 27 club.  That kind of gives you an idea of the Breece Pancake vibe- bad boys and bad girls skulking around burned out derelict West Virginia river towns.  In one particularly vivid story, a river-rat-tugboat worker staying in a decrepit SRO for New Year's picks up an underage prostitute. beds her and then has to call the cops when he finds her with her wrists slit in an alley behind the only bar in town.  That is the scene, man.   Generally speaking I'm relieved to encounter any book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America written by a male author who isn't a coastal elite or a professor of lit at a university in some random part of the United States and Pancake here fits the bill.   Dying before he could write a novel, that's the real tragedy here. 

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. 

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.

The Breakup (2026) by Kurt Andersen

Book Review

The Breakup (2026)

by Kurt Andersen

  I've been a fan of Kurt Andersen since his Spy magazine days.  For those of you who don't know, Spy Magazine was a hugely influential title that lasted from the mid 1980's to the late 1990's.  It was known for its tone, generally called "snarky," which proved hugely influential in the early days of the internet, specifically when it came to Gossip-Culture websites like Gawker (RIP). I also enjoyed Turn of the Century, his last attempt at a zeitgeist-y style of literary fiction.  The fact that Turn of the Century was published in 1999 should tell you that he hasn't exactly been working to perfect his approach, with his recent works including a co-write with murderer Alec Baldwin about our unhinged Commander-in-Chief. 

  The Breakup, on the other hand, got me excited based on the review in the New York Times book section.  Truth be told I'm a sucker for anything that combines post-apocalypitc/dystopian themes with any other literary fiction adjacent drama.  Here, the dystopia is a very well imagined Civil War 2 which has resulted in a bifurcation as imagined for the micro-targeting era, with cities functioning as "blue" enclaves in post-split "red" states and red portions of blue states splitting to start new states, etc.   The story is about as minimal as it gets: Jewish tech-bro executive and his red-state, Cuban immigrant, poetess wife breaking up and making up as they tour their non-gender conforming daughter across the post-split landscape.

 I fully agree with the New Times write-up: that the pleasure here is in the richly imagined details rather than any satisfaction with the loosely woven plot.   I devoured The Breakup over a vacation weekend on my Kindle and barely wanted to stop reading for any reason other than meals.

  To me, the most trenchant theme was one that was largely (though not wholly) unexplored: That the blue parts of the map would be more than happy to be shed of the red parts, or at least those red parts that feel so strongly about the issue.  In The Breakup, the capital of the post-split red state is Abilene Texas, the largest metro area remaining in red America.  The last current event type thing that happens in the book is a "recission" where the state of Montana realizes that they are going to be on the hook for paying a bunch of literal poor, white, trash and vote to go back to the United States (after voting to leave.)  In that way, The Breakup ultimately imagines Civil War 2 as a kind of post break-up revenge fantasy.

The Memory Seekers Daughter (2005) by Kim Edwards

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Memory Seekers Daughter (2005) 

by Kim Edwards
Lexington, Kentucky

Kentucky: 9/16

   The Memory Keeper's Daughter is about a physician father who gives up his Down's Syndrome afflicted daughter at birth, asking a trusted nurse to deposit her at a nearby institution (as was often the practice back then).  He tells his young wife that the daughter- the twin of a healthy baby boy, is dead and this lie becomes a sin that the couple can absolutely not surpass.  Of course, I knew on a variety of levels that once this Dad gave away his daughter with Down's Syndrome, everyone would spend the rest of their lives thinking about little else.  The new mother, of course, dedicates her entire life to fighting for this child.  The father is never really able to connect with his son or wife.  The actual mother never, ever, for one single day stops thinking about her dead daughter.  And we are talking 500 pages of this.

  The Doctor's wife, at least, has a little Betty Draperish vibe that entertains.  The Doctor himself is sad. 

As for the woman who raises this child as her own... I myself was the older sibling of a similar brother, someone who was not given away.  I've spent a lot of time living the experience that this woman went through, albeit not as a single mother in 1980's Pittsburgh.  I was interested to see how author Edwards resolve the question that I have (and still have not gotten an answer for):  Of course, it is great that parents devote their entire lives to raising special needs children instead of having them institutionalized.  But what about the fact that all this work is performed under the guide of someday generating an independent human being who can, in fact, exist without 24/7/365 support which is provided by these parents.  My personal experience is that this idea of adult independence for special needs folks is a bit of a sham.

 Of course, The Memory Seekers Daughter ends just when we might expect to see how everything works out, but who can blame the author.  She doesn't have an answer, no one does. 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

 by Mark Twain

Hannibal, Missouri

Missouri: 9/12

   Huckleberry Finn is as relevant as it has ever been by virtue of the controversy it continues to engender by being both a stone-cold literary classic for young people AND the biggest remaining bastion of the use of the "N-word" left in society.  Listening to the Audiobook made me think of the relationship of Twain to Cervantes and Don Quixote.  It also put me in mind of The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.  As to the former, Twain was surely familiar, as to the later, he surely was not- Melville being well forgotten and The Confidence Man having made no contemporaneous impression.  That got me thinking about Huckeberry Finn itself, and the publication history- turned out that Twain started his OWN publishing company and sold Huckleberry Finn, the contemporary equivalent of selling your fashion line on QVC or self-publishing on Amazon.   I know that the publication history of Don Quixote itself was somewhat complicated in the English language- it is an epic tale and translation standards in the 18th century were loose to the point of non-existent in terms both of care and fidelity of the source material. 

Schoolgirl (1939) by Osamu Dazai

Book Review

Schoolgirl (1939)

by Osamu Dazai

Translation from Japanese 

Allison Markin 2011

  Japanese fiction is interesting because it combines a centuries long tradition of native fiction- mostly literature of the court type stuff with mostly twentieth century developments in Western literature, with many published authors coming from a background in western literary studies.   The limit on absorption of these authors by western readers has been a lack of translation and the general lack of interest of English-speaking readers in non-English fiction, but times have been changing.  These days, there are well respected yearly literary awards on both sides of the Atlantic for best translated fiction into English.  Personally, I believe both the E-book and Audiobook format have opened some doors for translated fiction as publishers refine their ideas of what and how they can sell books not written originally in English. 

  I thought Schoolgirl was interesting because it is a kind of proto-existentialist text written from the POV of a young woman at a time (the 1930's) when the idea of a "youth culture" was still emerging in the west. This makes Dazai a trailblazer in this regard, and it is interesting that the English translation I read didn't even happen until 2011. It's a brief read and well worth the time for anyone interested in pre-World War II literature from whatever part of the globe

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek(2019) by Kim Michele Richardson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (2019) 

by Kim Michele Richardson

Sigman Road, Troublesome Creek, Kentucky

Kentucky: 8/16

   During the Work Projects Administration, the Federal Government paid women to schlep library books into the hollows of Kentucky.  Also, in Kentucky there was a family of "Blue People"- the Fugates, who due the chance marriage of a French immigrant to a local girl, inherited a recessive genetic trait that caused their skin to turn blue from a lack of oxygen in the blood.  The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek combines these two true stories into a single novel about a woman- called Bluet, who is the last, blue-skinned woman of her kind, and works for the WPA as a book woman.   Truly, author Kim Michele Richardson stuck some kind of thematic alchemy with her combination of the two subjects, making The Book Woman uncommonly affecting for a book of this type. 

  Most notably was her classification as a "colored' person alongside the only African American woman in the valley.  This part of the book seemed a little far-fetched, since I've made through the entire deep south with many not black but not white characters and it seems like a blue skinned woman of EUROPEAN ancestry would not be classified as "colored."  To me, that sounds more like a definition you would have come across in the urban north, where groups like the Irish and Italians were commonly discriminated against and referred to as non-white, in spite of their European ancestry.

The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette Arnow

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Dollmaker (1954)

by Harriette Arnow

Pulaski County, Kentucky

Kentucky: 7/16

  Calling The Dollmaker a Kentucky novel is a little misleading, in that the vast majority of this 500 page plus book takes place squarely within Detroit, Michigan.  It's about Kentucky as much as a novel about a New York City immigrant family from Italy is about Italy.  It's also a melodrama, a genre so down on its luck that it has become a pejorative adjective.  Arnow's heroine is a plucky housewife from the holler with a talent for whittling.   During World War II, her husband, a coal miner with a talent for "tinkering" finds work as a skilled machinist in a War factory.   The wife puts up a small amount of resistance before she whisks herself and her children off to city live circa World War II era Detroit.  Spoiler alert: It sucks and she hates it.

  The Dollmaker is squarely in the "protagonist never leaves the house" quarter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  This lady gets herself and her family to the apartment/townhouse in Detroit, and thereafter she leaves the immediate of the vicinity once for a visit to the school of her children, once to the hospital to accompany an injured child and that is it. End of list. Twice in over five hundred pages of text.  The Dollmaker reminds me of Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett.  Basically, all this lady does is worry and eventually she makes some dolls.  Her children adjust to urban life with varying degrees of success, and not for the first time in this chapter I am reminded that the "upward mobility through education" style American dream doesn't work for children who are taught to feel "less than" at school.

 Another theme from the Kentucky Appalachian area is that holler culture is not the product of degenerate's inbreeding, rather it represents a migration of a specific sort of people: white immigrants who mostly came from the borderlands of England and Scotland without much organization or forethought, settling where no one else wanted the land.  The whole point of mountain Kentucky was to escape elites telling them what to do and how to live, and that persists to today.  It wasn't like there was some well-organized period and then things fell out- Kentucky hill people were the same from the 18th century to the present in their cultural characteristics.

True Grit (1968) by Charles Portis

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

True Grit (1968)

by Charles Portis

Yell County, Arkansas

Arkansas: 1/8

   Arkansas has to be one of the least literary of the United States of America. True Grit is the only title out of the eight from this state I'd ever heard of before the 1,001 Novels project.  I listened to an Audiobook edition narrated by Donna Tartt, of all people.  As she explains in the afterword, True Grit is one of her favorite books, so she leapt at the chance to be the voice of Mattie Ross, the diminutive narrator and protagonist of the revenge tale best known for the movie version with John Wayne as US Marshall Rooster Cogburn.   Tartt wrote an interesting afterword where she speculates on why such a classic novel (I agree) is hardly read anymore- she places the blame at the feet of the John Wayne starring movie (there was a more recent version with Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross) for being a successful dumbing-down of the plot of the book. 

  True Grit was a real discovery for me- I raced through the Audiobook.  I thought Mattie Ross was a delightful character, and Donna Tartt fairly amazed me with her voicing of the text.  Surely the best novel from Arkansas in the 1,001 Novels project.

Weeds (1923) by Edith Summers Kelley

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Weeds (1923) 

by Edith Summers Kelley

Scott County, Kentucky

Kentucky: 6/16

    Author Edith Summers Kelley is the attraction here.  She was a Greenwich village hipster and was engaged to Upton Sinclair for a couple years.  Ended up marrying his roommate, that marriage fell apart, then she married another artist, they moved to Kentucky and cosplayed/larped as tobacco farmers for a few years.  They then relocated to the Imperial Valley desert outside of San Diego- one of my favorite places, where she wrote a second novel about pioneering out in the Imperial Valley.  The second novel was never published, the first fell out of print and was later rediscovered and republished, which also led to her other novel being republished.  Kelley ended up in San Diego- the postscript of the edition I read had an interview with her.

  In that sense, Weeds is just about as inauthentic as a book could be, but the fact that it was published in 1923 excuses the inauthencity, as does the proto feminist POV.   A theme I've noticed from the older novels in Kentucky is an attention to dialect that seems almost Joycean.  I'm almost distracted by the linguistic questions that "Hillbilly" raises.  These days, people recognize that the way people speak in the western Appalachians is not a degraded version of the King's English but its own dialect that is closer to the English of the colonial era than any other remaining.  Thus, a novel set in 1920's Kentucky can put us closer to the 18th century then a 19th century novel set in New England or New York. 

Finn (2007) by John Clinch

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Finn (2007)

by John Clinch

100 Center St, Hannibal, Missouri

Missouri: 8/12

    I was surprised that Jim, by Percival Everett wasn't included in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  I suppose Jim wasn't published until after editor had made her picks, but it is hard to imagine a world where the audience is better served by this book, a full-ass novel about Huckleberry Finn's disolute father.  As told by Clinch, Finn is the neer do well son of the local Judge, called "The Judge" from whom he inherits a virulent racism and little else.  Finn the elder is a knock-down, drag-out alcoholic, and the entire book is punctuated by his physical need to get drunk every single day of his life.  In this telling, Finn is of mixed-race, his Mother being a run-away slave that Finn the elder "rescues" after her father is caught in the attempt to hijack a paddleboat to freedom in Illinois.  The virulent racism of The Judge is notable, even after my sweep through the deep south of Alabama and Mississippi- it's long been observed that the worst racists are people who don't have many interactions with black people, and the Judge fits that description- he is known in the book for being alone in having a white servant family instead of black slaves. 

  Finn the elder can fairly be described as a horrific monster, based on his behavior in the book. I was surprised when I listened to an author interview that ran after the Audiobook, when Clinch said that readers he talked to found themselves rooting for Finn despite his notable flaws.  Not me.

River of Earth (1940) by James Still

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

River of Earth (1940)

by James Still

Knott County, Kentucky

Kentucky: 5/16

   I don't think there has been a single work of art talking about the benefits of working in a coal mine. Similar to the art surrounding factory work, contemporary readers might wonder how places like coal mines and nineteenth century factories found anyone to work at all.  The truth is that work that now has a terrible reputation represented an upgrade for most people, like the seasonal coal miners in this book, who work in the coal mine when its open and tend to their hardscrabble family patches when it is not. 

  Something I've noticed is that precious few works of art dealing with this subject actually take place INSIDE the mine or factory, rather what you get is the impact the work has on the workers and their families outside the work environment.  I'd be more interested to read a novel about what it is like to work in a coal mine then what the experience is like seeing one's dad work in the mine, which is the situation here.

  I give extra points for any book in the 1,001 Novels project that is published before 1970, but other than the dialect, I wasn't a huge fan of River of Earth.

Somebody Else’s Mama (1995) by David Haynes

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Somebody Else’s Mama (1995)

 by David Haynes 

River Ridge, Missouri

Missouri: 7/11

  The closest geographical neighbor to Somebody Else's Mama is Winters Bone, but tonally the books couldn't be set farther apart. Somebody Else's Mama is set in River Ridge, Missouri, an all-black town near the Mississippi River.  This is a multi-generatonal family saga with a husband/wife/2 teen sons set up reflecting the present and past relationships with their mother's.  Specifically, the plot centers around the wife taking in the mother of the husband, moving her from St. Paul, Minneapolis, to this town in Missouri, where her husband was the longtime mayor and himself the son of an almost unbelievable founder figure who owns most of what counts in the town.  So soon after reading The Warmth of Other Sons I found myself wishing for more information about this founding grandfather, but alas, most of what we get is the wife complaining about their life together.   

  The wife of her husband has her own interesting story- the only daughter of a wealthy St. Louis area insurance agent and his widowed wife.  Their complicated relationship in the past is contrasted wit the complicated "sandwich generation" dynamics of the present.  I do find that the plight of the upper-class American housewife strikes similar notes regardless of the era and ethnicity of the housewife in question. 

The Weight of Blood (2014) by Laura McHugh

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Weight of Blood (2014)

by Laura McHugh

Henbane, Missouri

Missouri: 6/11

  It is hard for me to read Ozark set noir without thinking about the Netflix drama, Ozark, with Jason Bateman.  There is a strong connection between Ozark noir and Appalachia noir: characters who live in or around a "holler."   Few non-white people of ANY kind in evidence. Generally speaking, a world where the lives of people, particularly children are cheap. The Weight of Blood ticks all those boxes, with a story about an attractive Iowa orphan who "ages out' of the foster system and unwittingly signs a labor contract with a man who is going to turn her into a prostitute.  She thwarts his scheme by marrying his brother.  They have a child, who is the central protagonist, interspersed with flashback chapters from the POV of the Mom (now gone) and the two brothers, as well. 

  I think the plot is meant to be a thriller in terms of finding out what actually happened to the Mom of the protagonist and solving the gruesome murder of a local wayward teen.  Normally I'd take a shot along the lines of these characters are uninteresting because they don't do anything or go anywhere, but that is not quite the case here- probably because the central mother/daughter pair are outsiders (half outsider) and the two brothers are well off and reasonably sophisticated about the world.

Corregidora (1975) by Gayl Jones

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Corregidora (1975) 

by Gayl Jones

Lexington, Kentucky

Kentucky: 4/16

     Gayl Jones was a Toni Morrison protege in the 1970's who disappeared for over 20 years before recently returning with new work. Corregidora was her fiery debut, about a Lexington, Kentucky jazz singer with a tangled personal history (slave owning great-grandfather who fathered her great grandmother AND grandmother.  Written decades before the phrase "intergenerational trauma" became common, Corregidora is nothing but an expression of the theme. Surely the best book in the Kentucky chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- arguably a classic of 1970's American lit.   Something I've noticed is that precious few works of art dealing with this subject actually take place INSIDE the mine or factory, rather what you get is the impact the work has on the workers and their families outside the work environment.  I'd be more interested to read a novel about what it is like to work in a coal mine then what the experience is like seeing one's dad work in the mine, which is the situation here.

Earth 7 (2026) by Deb Olin Unferth

 Audiobook Review

Earth 7 (2026)

by Deb Olin Unferth

Daunt Publishing

  The idea of "book-tok" is not something I take seriously, probably because it favors genres like Romantasy.  The major exception to this stance is the phenomenon of Jacquelline Harpman, the Belgian author who struck Tik Tok gold a couple years back with the English language translation of I Who Have Never Known Men (1995).  I had that book recommended to me by a random woman at a dog friendly cafe in Eagle Rock, but when I searched up the title, it seemed clear I would like that book, and I did. Earth 7, which is published by Daunt Publishing, seems to mine that same literary territory: minimalist science fiction and strong feminist themes with an end of the world vibe. 

  The protagonist of Earth 7 is the lonely daughter of a single mom who happens to be a gifted scientist/programmer, working in the aftermath of "Depop" which is pretty much how it sounds- the causes being many and varied.  Dylan Stein is her name, and she is raised by her mom inside a living habitat at the bottom of the ocean.  Originally planned as a community, Dylan's mom ends up being the last hold out, which leaves Dylan, naturally, dreaming of escape.  Unferth works with a light touch as far as the genre stuff goes- there are no chapters of exposition where recent history is explained by a thoughtful professor or authority figure.   Rather, Earth 7 more or less resembles a bildungsroman as Dylan escapes her undersea mom prison for life on the dry n' dusty surface, where she works for an obscure corporation plodding forward in the wasteland. 

  Eventually she falls in love, with another woman, of course and that sets in motion the rest of the book- Dylan and her love living in obscurity in the desert until death do us part.  Stuff happens, but it is low impact plot and mostly what the reader is left with is atmosphere of the dying Earth. 

Lost World (2026)by Patrick Wyman

 Audiobook Review

Lost World (2026)

by Patrick Wyman

  I love the subject of "pre-history" or the history of pre or semi-literate peoples.  The frontiers of linguistic history have been joined with incredible advances in DNA science and LIDAR ground-scanning technology to produce a new knowledge about complex cultures in pre-history outside of those who developed writing.  Wyman has a podcast, but he is well versed on his linguistics.  I'm not as sure of his grasp of the underlying science of dna and human genetics- a historical pitfall for linguistics trying to stretch historical identity back into non-historical times.  But there is no denying that DNA is a big improvement over 20th century nonsense about "blood" and "race," neither of which exist as they relate to identifying human cohorts.

  Wyman does an excellent job traversing the recent work in these various fields and harnessing them to a narrative that roughly tracks the theoretical outline of scholar James C. Scott and his successors like David Graeber, i.e. not taking for granted that the concept that we know as "civilization" through Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Mediterranean somehow represents the ONLY way for humans to organize complex society.  As recently as a decade ago this was mostly speculation, but the confluence of DNA science and LIDAR archeology has really pushed back the frontiers of knowledge in non-western places like Bronze age Ireland, the Amazon, the Andes, China, etc.  Even if we don't know what DNA specifically represents, we can use it to track the kinship of people we find in archeological settings.  

  Lost World is at its least interesting when it gets into the familiar proto-indo-european game- although it's clear that genetic evidence has borne out the truth of the traditional thesis of horse writing redheads who came and conquered Europe, especially in the north and west.  More interesting to me was the less familiar material- firming up the Anatolian Farmers vs. the European Hunter-Gatherer groups and showing how they persist in modern DNA despite the loss of their culture.    His description of the expansion of the Malay-Austronesian language group from a small patch of land in present day Taiwan to a present geographic territory encompassing everywhere from Malaysia to Hawaii is a welcome counterpart to the western intensive PIE hypothesis. 

  I also thought the archeological evidence was interesting- here he mostly discusses recent discoveries in modern day Turkey and Ireland, making the case that pre-bronze age Earthworks (think Stonehenge) were not a product of elites and enslaved a la the Egyptian pyramids but rather a more cooperative, voluntary endeavor. 

All the Living(2009) by CE Morgan

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

All the Living (2009)
by CE Morgan

Berea, Kentucky

Kentucky: 3/16

   Like Strangers Here Below, All the Living is set in Berea, Kentucky.  Birds of Opulence, the first book in the Kentucky chapter, is also set nearby. I gather from all three books that this whole swath of Kentucky was settled from the north, and settled late, and settled without a landed class of plantation owners, which allowed for alternative ways of life: Interracial schools, communities of free African American.  Here, we have a young man who inherits his family tobacco farm and then moves in to his family home with a local girl he meets at an orphanage.  They live together "in sin" which is surely unusual but the farm they live on is so isolated that literally no one knows.  She finds work as a pianist at the local church- piano being her only skill (something she reflects upon frequently.)  All the Living is another example of the "Go Nowhere, Do Nothing" novel which becomes about the place where it is located because that is the only setting.  Great for the purpose of the project, but these protagonists, white, black, young, old- blend together over time in terms of the limits of their insights about the human condition.

Stangers Here Below (2010) by Joyce Hinnefeld

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Strangers Here Below (2010)

by Joyce Hinnefeld

Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Kentucky: 2/16

   Two books in and I can already tell you that Kentucky had a different racial vibe than the deep South.  Take Berea College, which was founded as an interracial institute of higher education in the 19th century. It had to abandon that mission for a half-century when Kentucky made interracial education illegal in 1904 but then went back to being interracial before such a thing was widespread.  This book details the history of that school as seen through the eyes of one white student and one black student and folds in the story of a nearby Shaker colony that was hanging on by virtue of a single resident into the mid 20th century.   Strangers Here Below is a perfect pick for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project because it is specifically about a specific place on the map, but I also liked the underlying history itself- of which I was unaware. 

Rum Punch (1992) by Elmore Leonard

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Rum Punch (1992)

by Elmore Leonard

Miami, Florida

Florida: 21/21

  I've long been interested in Elmore Leonard as an example of an author who writes genre books which maybe transcend genre.  I think the standard is wait for the death of the author, give it 20 years, and see if anyone is still reading or writing about said author.  By any standard, Elmore Leonard has achieved canonical status, whether you are measuring by his four Library of American volumes, including an entire volume dedicated to his western era, or the activity on his Amazon author page.  

  After that, the question is, which works best represent the author- pick an early work, a mid-career work and a late career work.  With Leonard, I think the early career pick is Mr. Majestyk (1974) which is an early example of his crime fiction and takes place in Detroit, not Florida or California.  It also leaves out his whole western career which spans 1954 to 1970.  Mid-career and late career kind of blend together with Leonard- he continued publishing until 2012 but you'd be hard pressed to pick anything after Out of Sight (1996).  You've also got Get Shorty, Maximum Bob and this book- all of which were hits, well reviewed and got memorable movie/tv versions (Jackie Brown for Rum Punch.)  

  I would probably go with this book over Get Shorty because of the "inside-Hollywood" angle of that book.  You want an Elmore Leonard Florida title on the short-list.  Rum Punch is a good pick because Jackie Brown, the weary stewardess at the center of the familiar double-cross heavy Leonard plot, is as memorable a heroine as you are going to get.  As for the rest: guns, drugs, murder- you know the drill.

The Perez Family (1990) by Christine Bell

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Perez Family (1990)

by Christine Bell

Miami, Florida

Florida: 20/21

  I had to buy a copy of The Perez Family- a movie edition copy, no less.  The movie was made by Mira Nair, Mayor Mandani's Mom, and starred Anjelica Houston and Marisa Tomei.   Her Amazon product page only has five listings- one is a Japanese translation- none appear to be in print.  At this point, I think I'm good on the Cuban immigrant experience at least as far as it extends through South Florida.  Many people found the move hard, particularly those with a limited skill set.  The inability to speak English as an issue- which frequently arises in immigrant novels of all types, does not appear to be a problem for the Cuban immigrants, nor does categorical racism/blanket discrimination. Due to the circumstances in Cuba almost all (all?) have some kind of lingering PTSD from their Cuban experience, and family and friends who were left behind. 

  Here, we have a character who spent 20 years in a Castro prison for being an opposition newspaper editor, he is sent to the US during the Marielito boat lift- at the tail end- and has difficulty reuniting with his family, but he makes new friends along the way. The New York Times called it "oft maudlin" and I would concur, but I would also say that maudlin is a very Cuban mode and that the shared experience of this group as a class of people has maudlin attributes that you would expect to see in fiction.

  One more Florida title to complete the chapter! And a book from blog-favorite Elmore Leonard. 

Stoner (1965) by John Williams

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Stoner (1965)

by John Williams

St. Louis, Missouri

Missouri: 5/11

  This is a good pick for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  As I noted when I read it back in 2019, it had a bit of a revival at the end of 2010's:

Published 10/6/19
Stoner (1965)
by John Williams

  Stoner is not about weed, it's about a guy named Stoner.   I've been aware of Stoner since the New York Review of Books put out a paperback version- that was back in 2005- and then in 2012 it was Waterstone's book of the year, which spurred more interest in the United States- for the last few years I've seen it everywhere that carries New York Review of Books Editions.  Sadly, New York Review of Books doesn't do Audiobooks, but I guess someone else got the rights and BOOM- I'm listening to the Audiobook.

  John Williams spent most of his life in Denver as a tenured assistant professor at the University of Denver.   He wasn't unrecognized in his lifetime- his 1972 novel, Augustus, about the life and times of Caesar (of ancient Rome) won the National Book Award, but he isn't what you would call "canonical."  If he is, it is because of this book- Stoner, his anti-bildungsroman slash existential hero, about a character who bears a marked resemblance to the Author.   William Stoner is what you call a "tragic hero," born to a pair of Missouri dirt-farmers who decide to send him to the then brand new University of Missouri (Columbia) with the thought that he will learn agricultural science and return to the farm.

  Instead, young Stoner- who is, it must be said a "square"- he represents the polar opposite of of Kerouac's Sal Paradise in On The Road- falls in love with English literature and abandons his planned course of study to become a university English instructor.  What follows takes place almost entirely on or near the University of Missouri, making Stoner a charter member of the first generation of the "campus novel" of American literature.

  The pathos really starts to build when Stoner makes the ill-advised choice to court and wed Edith, the mentally ill daughter of a wealthy St. Louis area banker who is affiliated with the university.   Edith is literally the first woman that Stoner dates, so a modern reader won't miss the warning signs, and the use of a third part narrator makes sure that the reader is aware of how bad things are likely to get.   Edith is a memorable character, and the miseries Stoner experiences at her hands are only exceeded by the misery he experiences in his job as a tenured assistant professor- he has a lifetime job, but no guarantee of when or what he will be teaching, a hitch that comes to the fore when Stoner gets into a spat with his department head over the progress of a student.

   Stoner is a sad book, very sad.   It's certainly a nice counter-point to the beat influenced/classic 60's era American books from this period.  One thing that Stoner is not is experimental, nor is it difficult to read.  My understanding of books reprinted by the New York Review of Books is that they are often experimential/modernist/difficult to read, and that was not the case here.

The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) by Isabel Wilkerson

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: The New York Times

The Warmth of Other Suns (2010)

by Isabel Wilkerson

#2

   The Warmth of Other Suns is my 66th read from the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list from the New York Times.  Most of those reads proceded the publication of the list, but I found there were a good dozen non-fiction titles on the list that seemed like books I really *should* read.  At Number Two, Isabel Wilkerson's monster work of history on the African American migration is the last major title on the list that I handed tackled.  I ended up reading it on my Kindle because it is 622 pages long and I didn't fancy it as an Audiobook or a hard copy.  Mostly I read it on my most recent vacation on the East Coast.  The subject matter blended nicely with the recent chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- each of the individuals Wilkerson focuses in on could be characters from a novel from Mississippi, Alabama or Louisiana. 

  These are the people that left, a viewpoint largely missing from the map-based approach of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, which essentially guarantees a roster of losers from nowhere who do nothing- I mean almost by definition.   Wilkerson clears up many questions I had about why EVERYONE didn't leave.  Turns out, the local authorities and employers made it difficult on top of the fact that many black southerners lacked the resources to do anything besides simply existing. 

  What I've seen in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is that most people just want to be left alone to try the best they can.  For example, I haven't read a single novel involving poor people in rural America waiting for any government to do anything for them in any way, shape or form.  Mostly what I've read is about scenario's where the local power structures actively interfere with the ability of certain groups to simply exist without being actively oppressed in ways subtle and less subtle. 

  I'm not just talking about the rural south- the poor of New England have a thing or two to say about being forced into particular modes of life.  Wilkerson follows he subject through their entire lives, and it becomes clear that no one but no one "gets over" the experience of the systemic racism as practiced in the deep south in the early 20th century.  Even if you cut off the actual period of slavery- which for the characters in this book represented their GRANDPARENTS, the Jim Crow period was in many ways crueler because it held out at least the hope of a semblance of the ability of black Americans to go about their business, but the reality was anything but that. 

Breaking Out of Bedlam (2010) by Leslie Larsen

 1,001 Novels: A Library of Ameri ca

Breaking Out of Bedlam (2010)

by Leslie Larsen

Joplin, Missouri

Missouri: 5/11

   Breaking Out of Bedlam is a 1,001 Novels: A Library of American mainstay, about a 300 pound, 82-year-old mother of three who has just been confined to an assisted living facility by her "loving" children.  Surprisingly, the narrative structure takes the form of narrator Nora Sledge deciding to tell her story by writing in a journal.  Author Larsen thus avoids the central dilemma of the entire 1,001 Novels project: How to write an interesting book about a character or characters with little or no formal education and never go anywhere or do anything.   As Sledge herself makes perfectly clear, she fits this description.  It's unclear if she has ever read a book.  But she is a lively and engaging narrator, and the low-stakes plot about assisted living shenanigans kept me engaged.

  The 1,001 Novels project has this book mapped but it is hard to say why.  The nursing home where 100% of the action takes place is in suburban San Diego- it sounded like the Clairemont Mesa area to me.  The written flashbacks to Sledge's past live must be happening in or around Joplin, Missouri though Sledge doesn't tell us much about the place other than her own story- getting pregnant as a teenager and then tricking her husband into marrying her to give the illegitimate child a home.

Mrs. Bridge (1959) by Evan S. Connell

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mrs. Bridge (1959)

by Evan S. Connell

Kansas City, Missouri

Missouri: 4/11

     Mrs. Bridge was a genuine pleasure to read and Connell a genuine discovery for me, one of only a limited number of authors thus far in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.   Mrs. Bridge is a really well-done portrait of an upper-class matron in Kansas City, Missouri in the early-middle 20th century- apparently based on Connell's sister, who was an upper-class matron in Kansas City, Missouri.   Connell was raised there, though he resided in San Franscico and later New Mexico as an adult.  I couldn't find any information about him being a member of the LGBT community at any point, but his romantic history is limited to a single woman who sounds like a beard to me.  He never got married, never had any kids and shunned publicity.  Sounds pretty LGBT to me!

    Mrs. Bridge works because he tells the story of this objectively uninteresting woman in the form of a hundred little episodes, leaving the reader to piece together the more prosaic moments of her life.  What is fantastic about this technique is that it transforms an uninteresting subject into an interesting subject without demanding an excessive amount of time from the reader.  Surely, Connell was ahead of the curve in that regard.  This approach wasn't characteristic of all his books- later in his career he wrote a 450-page non-fiction book about the life of General Custer that was his biggest commercial hit.

   

Audiobook: Civilizations (2021) by Laurent Binet

 Audiobook: 

Civilizations (2021)

 by Laurent Binet

  I'm really warming up to the Spotify feature of having every Audiobook for free.  My hunch is that this is mostly new releases and classics, but I wait FOREVER to check out new release Audiobooks in the Libby library app, so this Spotify feature is welcome.  Right now, I'm going through and looking for Audiobooks of books I've already read.  The first one I picked out was The Kindly Ones, Civilizations, by Laurent Binet was second because I bought the English translation in hardback, read it, and thought that I would have been better off with the Audiobook because of Binet's textually based approach to the plot.  Part I is a faux-Viking saga, Part II is written in the style of Early-Modern/Middle Ages prose, etc. 

  I was really excited when this book was published- in the original French.  I thought for sure it would prove a sensation, but such was not the case.  It seems like a natural for a tv version and the rights were published but there have been no updates since then. 

How to Leave Hialeah (2009) by Jennie Capo Crucet

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

How to Leave Hialeah (2009)

by Jennie Capo Crucet

Hialeah, Florida

Florida: 19/21

   Hialeah, Florida is a western suburb of Miami and the most heavily Hispanic city in the nation, with over 95% of the population claiming Hispanic background on the last US census.  Of that 95%, just about 75% claim Cuban ancestry, compared to 30% for the city of Miami.   One important aspect of the post-Castro Cuban diaspora is that it blended with a smaller but still present pre-Castro Cuban-American population, and that it came in waves, with the original wave being largely economic and cultural "enemies" of the new Cuban state (I.e. rich people, their families, and intellectuals who weren't getting with the program and then a second wave of the Marielito's, which, by design contained criminals and maniacs but was mostly just working class Cubans and the relatives of those who had already made the trip.   Those who traveled as part of the Marielito wave have suffered prejudice by association, but they also represented a less well-off social-economic cohort. 

  Author Jennie Capo Crucet is a good example of second-generation Cuban diaspora, a novelist with good reviews, some prizes and no hits, working as a professor at a midwestern college (Nebraska).  Some of the set ups here are familiar- I found myself trying to remember where I had read about the practice of paying people to read to Cuban cigar rollers- one of the stories here.  The title story I'm assuming is auto biographical since it mirrors her actual biographical details.  The experience of coastal Latinos whether they be from NYC of Miami, attending midwestern universities is almost a trope at this point in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- as I've learned (and knew beforehand) it is never, ever easy for students to do well in unfamiliar/collegiate settings, particularly when they are visibly members of a minority group.

  Whether that actually applies to Cubans is a good question.  Most Cubans present as white and come from a place in the United States (either South Florida, NYC area or LA) where they are either the dominant group or just one of many.  The experience of students at Midwestern universities is highlighted by so many authors because their "minority-ness" in the rural Midwest is assumed and the more challenging minority groups are often excluded by lack of interest from these parts of the US.  I'm just saying it's a particular circumstance for Cuban Americans vs other groups.

The River of Kings (2018) by Taylor Brown

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The River of Kings (2018)

by Taylor Brown

Altamaha River, Georgia

Georgia: 25/25

  I missed The River of Kings my first time through Georgia- so make this novel 25/25 for that state. The River of Kings is interesting and kind of a mess as well- a head scratching combination of settler-fiction with a contemporary tale of two brothers searching for the truth behind their father's untimely death at the hands of a sturgeon on the river.  For the life of me I couldn't figure out the thematic connection between the two tales- besides the shared geography of the river.   The settler tale was of the moder variety, where the western "conquest" of the new world is shown to be much more precarious than history would have it.  The inevitability that constitutes the modern world view would have been a shock to the French settlers of the 16th century who figure in The River of Kings.

  Meanwhile the modern tale of two brothers- one a college student, the other a damaged veteran of the war in Afghanistan, never really sparked to life. Perhaps because they don't do anything except try to figure out their dad's death over a couple of days "on the river."  Author Taylor Brown did a decent job capturing the sophistication of the Native Americans- as we now know, the early European settlers were incorporated into the existing political-military landscape and were far from being the dominant player for hundreds of years.

The Old Man and the Sea (1951) by Ernest Hemingway

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Old Man and the Sea (1951) 

by Ernest Hemingway 

Gulf Coast, Florida

Florida: 18/21

   I like Hemingway TBH.  He gets a bad rap because he was such a cartoon of a human being, but there is no mistaking the impact of his prose- the only idea of minimalism.  I think you can really only appreciate it if you've struggled through the morass of the high modernists.

Published 10/3/15
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
by Ernest Hemingway

  The Old Man and the Sea is a slim hundred and thirty pages in length.  Generally considered to be Hemingway's last good book, it also won the Pulitzer Prize and was a staple of courses in American literature for decades after publication.   Today, it's popularity has been eclipsed, a victim of the quest for other (non white, non male) voices, particularly when it comes to tales about Caribbean fishermen.  Let the fishermen speak for themselves, in their own language, is what contemporary teachers of literature would most likely say.

 The story concerns an old fisherman and his quest to bring in one last giant marlin.  It is a journey that takes him far out into the gulf stream, off the coast of Cuba.  The Old Man and the Sea is one of those narratives that has burrowed so far into the popular consciousness that you can almost write the damn thing.   Reading Hemingway outside of the constraints of school has been a delight.  I find his restrictive prose soothing, a welcome antidote to the stuffy English and European upper classes of most early 20th century fiction.  Like other Anglo-American authors, he moves into fraught territory with Latin American characters, but you can't really hold him responsible for wanting to write this story and feeling like he was competent to do so.

The Old Man and the Sea, a man, a fish, some sharks, the water and a boat.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020) by Deesha Philyaw

1,001 Novels: A Library of America 

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020)

by Deesha Philyaw

Sugar Hill, Jacksonville, Florida

Florida: 17/21

  Deesha Philway has her first novel dropping in a couple months, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, and it was cool to see The Secret Lives of Church Ladies on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Also, a very obvious pick given editor Susan Straight's predilections.

 

Published 1/18/21

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020)

by Deesha Philyaw

    The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was the last of the 2020 National Book Award finalists in the fiction category I was able to secure- the LA Public Library finally picked up the Audiobook version, though I certainly would have bought a copy if I'd seen it in a bookstore.  The publisher is West Virginia University Press, and I'm pretty sure I've never read another book from that imprint, and it makes me wonder why this obviously sharp collection of short stories about the lives of African American women in the rural/suburban America didn't pique more interest from an established publisher.

    It was an enjoyable listen- Philyaw has a sharp eye for domestic detail that reminded me of Alice Munro.  I look forward to future books from her, hopefully a novel, but there is no doubt that the National Book Award nomination will ensure that she has a greater choice of publishers for her next book.

Winter's Bone (2006) by Daniel Woodrell

     Map of the Ozarks

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Winter's Bone (2006)

by Daniel Woodrell

Ozark Hills, Missouri

Missouri:  3/11

    I associate the Ozark mountains with Arkansas, but as the map above clearly demonstrates, most of the Ozarks are in Missouri, as in Winter's Bone, which is just about as Ozarks a book as you can get.  The movie version is mostly remembered for introducing Jennifer Lawrence to audiences, and it was hard not to listen to the Audiobook without picturing her as the narrator, a high school student trying to locate her meth-cook Dad after he skips out on a court date, and the bond attached to that court date, comes due.

  Ree Dolly, of the Ozark Dollies, is forced on her own Odyssey, in the dead of the Missouri winter, taking her from valley to valley, with little help from anyone.  Along the way she is exposed to plenty of bad behavior, though the proceedings can be described as PG 13 for violence, swearing and drug-use. God knows there are moments in the book where a darker turn seems in the card, but Woodrell keeps an element of nobility among his backcountry meth cooks and welfare frauds that is charming to this hardened criminal defense lawyer.

Hard Aground (1993) by James W. Hall

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Hard Aground (1993)

by James W. Hall

Miami, Florida

Florida: 16/21

  I can see why editor Susan Straigh picked this James W. Hall 90's noir- it's the "Chinatown" influenced history of Miami plot line that backstops the otherwise forgettable tale of a mentally ill "boat bum" brother trying to solve the cold-blooded murder of his urban archeologist(!) brother.  Cringe inducing plot points abound, from the depiction of the schizophrenia suffered by the protagonist to the trans-hitwoman.  Along the way you get an absolutely inexplicable mother-daughter relationship and some mid sex scenes.  But the material about the history of Miami is welcome, and rare within the parameters of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, mostly because most of the books about poor people with grade-school educations who don't know much about history.  History is largely communicated through works of historical fiction with those sorts of characters, rather than the presence of any characters who know about historical context, as is very much the case here.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories (2006) by Karen Russell

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories (2006)

 by Karen Russell 

Everglades, Florida

Florida: 15/21

  I wish editor Susan Straight had picked Swamplandia- which I think is a book length version of one of the short stories in this volume (also called Swamplandia).  Straight has a fondness for the short story collection that I do not share, though they fit in nicely with the theme of the 1,001 Novels project in that each collection of stories presents something like 10 different perspectives/locations/etc instead of one set up.   I just feel like with short stories I can hardly be expected to have a connection to ten different situations when it takes me 20 minutes to get through each one.  The approach that I see most frequently is either to restrict the review to a single paragraph and make it a thematic review with some story DETAILS or for a longer wrtie up, you talk about 2 or three separate stories and try to situate the style of the writer in the context of other, better-known writers of short stories. 

  Near as I can tell, Russell favors the swamps imbued with magical realism. With many of the individual stories containing more than a whiff of whimsy.   Russell would probably say she is influenced by folk tales, I'm guessing.  I would have rather read one of her novels instead.