E. C.'s bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:44:12 -0700 60 E. C.'s bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Speaking American: How Y'all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide]]> 48930316 From the creator of the New York Times dialect quiz that ignited conversations about how and why we say the words we say, a stunning and delightful exploration of American language

Did you know that your answers to just a handful of questions can reveal where you grew up? In December 2013, Josh Katz released an interactive dialect quiz in the New York Times that became the most viewed page in the paper's history. Now a graphics editor, Katz harnessed the overwhelming response to that quiz to create Speaking American, an extraordinary and beautiful tour through the American vernacular.

How do you pronounce "pecan"? What do you call a long sandwich with varieties of meats and cheeses? Do you cut the grass or mow the lawn?

The answers to these questions—and the distinctions they reveal about who says what and where they say it—are not just the ultimate in cocktail party fodder; they are also windows into the history of our nation, our regions, and our language. On page after page, readers will be fascinated and charmed by these stunning maps of how Americans speak as they gain new insights into our language and ourselves.Ěý

For fans of Eats, Shoots and Leaves and How the States Got Their Shapes, Speaking American is an irresistible feast of American regional speech.]]> 203 Josh Katz 0358359937 E. C. 4 4.17 2016 Speaking American: How Y'all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide
author: Josh Katz
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves:
review:
Back when I was still in the teaching game and got to the lesson about nations, states, and nation-states I trotted out a few heat maps depicting regional usage and pronunciation differences across America in an attempt to explain how large, formal, nominally unified groups (like states) can be viewed as a composition of smaller, less formal, practically unified groups (like nations). Or something like that. I’m sure the lesson never landed, but this was still the best part of the year because when those maps showed up I got my classes to engage for a glorious five minutes before going back to sleep. Those maps I pulled from the internet were, of course, the work of one, Josh Katz, a statistician and graphics editor, and the work that began as a semi-formal internet poll is displayed here in its completed form as the book, Speaking American. What you get here is just more of the same, a collection of colorized heat maps depicting funny usage and pronunciation differences across America, along with a few short essays describing the quirks specific to particular states and regions. Naturally, my eye consistently shot to where I grew up � New Jersey (where, incidentally, Katz is from too) � to see whether I met with the respective map’s statistical prediction, and, as I saw time and again in the classroom, my wife and daughter couldn’t help looking over my shoulder to see where they fit too. Though there may not be very many words on the page, there’s still as much to read here as you choose to afford, and as my beleaguered former students (and wife and kid) will tell you it’s all fascinating.
]]> In Persuasion Nation 28746 In Persuasion Nation are easily his best work yet. "The Red Bow," about a town consumed by pet-killing hysteria, won a 2004 National Magazine Award and "Bohemians," the story of two supposed Eastern European widows trying to fit in in suburban USA, is included in The Best American Short Stories 2005. His new book includes both unpublished work, and stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire. The stories in this volume work together as a whole whose impact far exceeds the simple sum of its parts. Fans of Saunders know and love him for his sharp and hilarious satirical eye. But In Persuasion Nation also includes more personal and poignant pieces that reveal a new kind of emotional conviction in Saunders's writing.

Saunders's work in the last six years has come to be recognized as one of the strongest—and most consoling—cries in the wilderness of the millennium's political and cultural malaise. In Persuasion Nation's sophistication and populism should establish Saunders once and for all as this generation's literary voice of wisdom and humor in a time when we need it most.]]> 228 George Saunders 159448242X E. C. 0 currently-reading 4.11 2006 In Persuasion Nation
author: George Saunders
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shades of Grey (Shades of Grey, #1)]]> 8725325
Eddie Russett is an above-average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane - a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed.

For Eddie, it's love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey...]]> 390 Jasper Fforde 0143118587 E. C. 2 4.17 2009 Shades of Grey (Shades of Grey, #1)
author: Jasper Fforde
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves:
review:
First, an anecdote. Because I had so loved the Nursery Crime and Thursday Next novels, when I saw what was at the time (around 2011) a new book by Jasper Fforde, I grabbed it up and waited for the time when I’d be able to indulge in some slightly-less-than-serious literature. Not long after this, everyone suddenly seemed to start talking about this book with “shades of grey� in the title, and I remember thinking “Wow, Fforde tipped and is reaching the audience he deserves.� Of course, they were talking about a different book. Well, so now my Shades of Grey stayed on the to-read shelf for, like, fifteen years while I dragged my ass through grad school and I got to the point where I felt it was finally time to come back to ol� Jasper. What we’ve got here, though, is not the typical fare of insider lit jokes and Pythonesque humor. Instead, this is Fforde trying out some serious themes in a dystopia-mystery hybrid. The novel is set in a world where society is arranged hierarchically by one’s ability to perceive color, where “greys� (who maybe only see in actual shades of grey? it’s never explained explicitly) are at the bottom and “purples� are at the top, and then also things that have color “in� them, like painted or dyed objects, are recycled so that the color isn’t wasted, and maybe also color is meted out to towns by the central government based on an unexplained merit system. Really, the whole color thing isn’t ever nailed down as far as I could tell. The story follows Eddie Russett, a red, who goes with his father, a “swatchman� (i.e., a doctor), to a lowly outlying town whose swatchman has died. It’s in this town that Eddie finds himself, what-do-you-know?, involved in a mystery that involves the nature of this other swatchman’s death, which, ultimately, leads him to question certain fundamental precepts of this world he’s in. And pretty much none of this works. It isn’t funny enough to be a satire, nor is it serious enough to play with even mediocre YA dystopic stuff. The story takes absolutely forever to unfold and then ends way too abruptly. And there’s just nothing here that seems to have any weight. At no point did I get a sense of Fforde pushing forward an argument or cultural commentary, and absent a sense of the novel’s world’s rules it isn’t possible to understand where the satire actually lives. My sense is that this was an experiment for Fforde, and I’m all for experiments, but after fifteen blessèd years of waiting, I just wanted some comedy. Apparently, the second novel in this series was published a few months ago. When I run into it at the bookstore, I think I’ll keep walking.
]]> <![CDATA[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)]]> 14
Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years.

Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time between wearing digital watches? For all the answers stick your thumb to the stars. And don't forget to bring a towel!]]> 215 Douglas Adams 1400052920 E. C. 3 4.12 1979 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)
author: Douglas Adams
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves:
review:
Recently, I felt compelled to return to this book, which I remembered for its wonderfully absurd humor and aw-shucks approach to the human condition, a sort of nihilism lite that Adams concentrates on in his work (I think I’ve read it all at least once at this point). And, so, I returned to it. And even though there were certainly funny parts throughout, this also wasn’t the homerun I remember it being either. The narrative is pretty loose for one thing, and then also there isn’t enough differentiation among the characters (this is something the movie adaptation does especially well) who all seem, you know, like they’re British. Perhaps the most interesting thing I considered on this reading was the question of language and translation since the Babel Fish (a clever narrative device) is making it possible for all of these aliens to communicate with one another (but this isn’t pursued at all in the text). At the end of the whole everything, the takeaway is, of course, that human existence is even more absurd than we’re even usually given to imagining and that the sense of meaninglessness that that occasions should be met with the mantra: Don’t Panic. This is a first novel, and Adams� work improves over time, but this one might have been better left to nostalgia.
]]> Ulysses Annotated 882850
The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures. Annotations are keyed not only to the reading text of the critical edition of Ulysses, but to the standard 1961 Random House edition, and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.]]> 694 Don Gifford 0520253973 E. C. 3 4.20 1922 Ulysses Annotated
author: Don Gifford
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1922
rating: 3
read at: 2017/05/11
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves:
review:
An indispensable supplement to Joyce's novel, and an incredible work of scholarship.
]]> <![CDATA[The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz]]> 51227088 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and The Devil in the White City delivers a startlingly fresh portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz

On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons (30,000 of them Londoners) and destroying two million homes. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally--that she was willing to fight to the end.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinksmanship but also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country house, Chequers, and his wartime residence, Ditchley, where Churchill and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, including recently declassified files, intelligence reports, and personal diaries only now available, Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their daughters, Sarah, Diana, and the youngest, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; her illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the cadre of close advisors who comprised Churchill's "Secret Circle," including his dangerously observant private secretary, John Colville; newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook; and the Rasputin-like Federick Lindemann.

The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today's political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when--in the face of unrelenting horror--Churchill's eloquence, strategic brilliance, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.]]> 585 Erik Larson E. C. 3 4.28 2020 The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
author: Erik Larson
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves:
review:
Larson set himself a very challenging task when he decided to start this project in that he had to retell a story � Churchill’s rise to PM and the Blitz � that has already been pretty well covered. It’s not like he has no experience with this (he wrote about the Lusitania in Dead Wake after all), but then this one still seems different to me. Churchill (unlike Lusitania) is still an instantly recognizable name; they’re still making movies that are both about him (The Darkest Hour) and that include him as a character (Inglourious Basterds, The King’s Speech). And so, as you already know, in order to make this more than just the repackaging of a famous story Larson needed an angle, which he got in the form of the private diaries of many of the principal players within Churchill’s ambit. Larson also does well to limit his scope by just covering the year or so between becoming Prime Minister and the US joining the war. This is, to my thinking, the best approach Larson could have taken, and it still doesn’t work for me. Since I already know the basic outline of Churchill’s time in office, the only new elements Larson introduces are from the diaries he quotes from, which means, for me at least, that what I’m reading is a lot of well researched and cited stuff that I don’t especially care about added to a story that I do care about but feel like I already know. On top of that � by simple virtue of the realities imposed by the blackout and Blitz � the writing becomes repetitive by default since Larson’s subjects are forced to behave repetitively (get up, write a speech, insult someone, drink copiously, stand firm in the face of peril, deliver a speech, go to sleep, get up and do it all over again). Based on the strength of The Devil in the White City I’ll continue to read whatever Larson writes, but know that this isn’t his best (unless you’re a Churchillophile who just has to know what his daughter wore to her eighteenth birthday, in which case this is excellent).
]]> <![CDATA[Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America]]> 18490657
Before he leaves for this bizarre adventure, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in the middle of a race, a gun-toting drunk terrorizes and holds him hostage, and a Kansas vice squad entraps and throws him in jail. So what really happens when this cult legend sticks out his thumb and faces the open road?]]> 323 John Waters 0374298637 E. C. 2 3.50 2014 Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America
author: John Waters
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
The weekend before I started coursework at Albany my wife talked me into going with her to visit her friend in Somerville, MA. While there I visited my favorite Boston-area bookery, the Harvard Bookstore, where, what do you know?, freshly signed copies of Waters� Carsick were on sale. Obviously, I had to get it, and, also obviously, when that Monday came and my second tour of grad school began, Carsick got shelved for a very murky future when I would have time to read stuff like this again. What this would up meaning is that Carsick took on a special kind of totemic power—it represented at once a goal and a prize and a life unencumbered by endless revisions and imposter syndrome and the perfect life I would inhabit when grad school finally ended. Well, here we are. Grad school is behind me, and even though life is not perfect yet I did finally get to read Carsick (although I was reluctant to pick it up at first lest the magic be lost). And in a rush of unsurprising cosmic irony, I didn’t really like it. This isn’t a new book anymore, so everyone else already knows that this memoir of John Waters hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco is actually preceded by two self-styled “novellas� imagining the best and worst possible scenarios of what would happen when he finally did the real thing. So, the first two thirds of this book are fictions written as memoir about what might happen, except they’re so ludicrous that they don’t even begin to work as fiction. Too, these novellas� chapters are broken up into different rides (as in, the rides he’ll get when hitching), and since he meant to give each ride a slightly difference flavor, the novellas read like magnificent corpses, as though the same writer wasn’t writing each of them. When I got to the non-fiction part (which is easily the best of what this book has to offer) I was disappointed by its monotony; after all, each day is Waters waiting for a ride, getting nervous that he won’t get one, and then getting surprised when he does, being sure to express his gratitude for how there are still decent people out there. The potential payoff, to me, is in how Waters might be able to relate something about American culture, something about its hostility and provincialism, or about its vast scale and regional heterogeneity. This kind of analysis never even comes close to happening. On top of which, Waters is not only recognizable, he frequently seeks to use his celebrity to cadge rides (this works quite often, actually) which means that the decency he experiences can’t ever be wholly sincere, which also means that the renegade, Thompsonesque quality of this project gets preundermined by the simple reality that Waters is a celebrity. A generous reader interprets those novellas as Waters unloading his anxiety over this farkakteh idea, and recognizes that a certain monotony is just baked into the memoir of a hitchhiker, and that there’s nothing he can do about being recognized, and that the weird symbolism that this book assumed for me personally unfairly burdened it was a responsibility that it could never fulfill, but still and all I don’t think this one works. Here’s what it is—the end of grad school was profoundly bathetic, and since the arrival of that conclusion was bound up in this book, this book read as profoundly bathetic as well. Memento mori.
]]> Infinite Jest 75786 A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie—as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel.

On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1079 David Foster Wallace 0316066524 E. C. 5
[Link to extended review: ]

]]> 4.30 1996 Infinite Jest
author: David Foster Wallace
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2016/06/21
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:
Covering what this book is about would probably require writing more pages than compose the novel itself, which means that this is an admittedly brief and inevitably shallow review of what has become my favorite book. Speaking generally about IJ is hard because it's both long and complicated, and speaking definitively about it is hard because there are exceptions, ambiguities, and developments throughout that make perfect certainty difficult (and at times impossible). That said, there are (arguably) three primary sets of characters - the Ennet House recovering addicts, the Enfield Tennis academicians, and Hugh/Helen Steeply and Remy Marathe - along with a large cast of secondary and tertiary characters, all of whom are loosely bound by the search for the mysterious cartridge titled (what else?) Infinite Jest, an entertainment rumored to be so engrossing that its viewers can't help but continue watching it until they die of dehydration/starvation days later. Most of the novel takes place over the course of about a week in November, although there are also regular chronological breaks to before and after the novel's ostensible present (see what I'm saying about definitive statements?). If the first of the superficial mysteries is whether the Master Cartridge of Infinite Jest is recovered by any of the political factions looking for it, then a few of the second- and third-order superficial mysteries are: Does Don Gately die? Does Orin Incandenza die? What is happening/has happened to Hal Incandenza? What happens to Mike Pemulis? Is C.T. Mario's father? and Is Joelle van Dyne deformed? Now the reason I refer to all of these mysteries as "superficial" is because even though they're what the novel is about they're not what the novel is ABOUT. These are the questions that seem important after the first read and in the second and third readings they show themselves to be more or less unanswerable and cease to be really important because in large part these mysteries are only the plot devices used to explore much grander issues having to do with living in millennial America. The point that comes through with greater and greater clarity in subsequent readings is Wallace's attempt to capture the post-modern zeitgeist of irony and sarcasm and sadness that has become ubiquitous within (and poisoned) contemporary American culture. This thesis is what takes Wallace the 1,000+ pages of the novel to argue. In good Maximalist style, Wallace goes about making his point not by cutting straight to the bottom line but rather by laying out his vision of post-modern America in detail so precise and minute that he almost lulls the reader into acquiescence. It's really a lot like a Euclidean proof; each step of his thinking is depicted (via narrative sections/fragments) by way of proving his vision of post-modernism as radically involuted, solipsistic, and soulless. While IJ may be read as a post-modern cornerstone, I for one submit that such a reading misses the deeper point. For while the novel utilizes many characteristics deemed pomo (multiple (semi-omniscient) narrators, footnotes, achronology, fragmentation, high- and low-cultural allusions, etc.) it is just as much an account of all that post-modern ethics has left demolished in its wake. Wallace writes about an American propensity for addiction (in all of its myriad forms) and a search for meaning in a world that rolls its eyes at any sincere reference to belief in anything like a majuscule-g God. This latter point kind of leads us to the rub: through his three sets of primary characters Wallace tries to show initially how a religious belief in a higher power is ridiculous and then why it's simultaneously critical to maintaining one's humanity. It's a paradoxical double-bind-type scenario that can be reduced to a human need to believe in something. He is at pains to underscore that this higher power (as in the AA maxim) equals "God as you understand him" and that the choice to give yourself up to whichever higher power offers you fulfillment is critical for a free society to remain free (this is pretty much what Steeply and Marathe talk about for like 300 pages). This may not sound like it has much to do with post-modernism until you consider the long term effects of irony on the individual. When ironic discourse and criticism becomes the lingua franca of millennial America, coolness/hipness is conveyed by never unveiling sincerity of any kind, by masking genuineness until, like Hal, one can no longer successfully emote. Sincerity is so frightening to post-modern aesthetics that Wallace's symbol for sincerity in the novel - Mario Incandenza - is described as a kind of comically naive spider-monster (possibly the result of incest) who is literally incapable of understanding figurative language or euphemism. His individual genius is his ability to perfectly empathize with any other person, and his physical grotesqueness is symbolic of Wallace's perception of how sincere belief is viewed in America today. The fact that he - the symbol of Sincerity - is (likely) the bastard child of the meta-cognitive, ever-receding, ever-expanding Charles Tavis - the symbol of post-modernism - only serves to emphasize Wallace's desired aesthetic for this century's literature. This novel rewards (requires?) careful reading (as an example the ever-shifting narrator signals his/her/its difference by the vocabulary and syntax and grammar of the narrating (as in in order to recognize that a new narrator is narrating you need to distinguish between "etc." and "& c.," "til" and "till," and "between" and "among")) and is remarkably prescient and has a huge buy-in and is absolutely worth it. There is nothing else Out There like this.

[Link to extended review: ]


]]> <![CDATA[Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own]]> 45754985
We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.

In the story of Baldwin's crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography--drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews--with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude's endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.]]> 272 Eddie S. Glaude Jr. 0525575324 E. C. 4 4.38 2020 Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
author: Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:
This was an interesting mix of literary criticism, biography, and contemporary cultural commentary. Here, Glaude follows James Baldwin’s mid- to late-career texts wherein Jimmy (as Glaude so often refers to him) becomes ever-more overtly political in his writing, about which Glaude seeks to make twin arguments: Baldwin’s work was never not political (as some critics espouse) and Baldwin’s work could just as easily be about our world today. Begin Again is, of course, a response to the 2016 presidential election, which, of course, was viewed by many as a major shock, but, of course, was viewed by Glaude � a Baldwin expert mind you � as merely the continuation of a white supremacy that was as prevalent in the 1860s as it was in the 1960s and as it is today. This once-explicit and now-(sometimes)implicit supremacy is what Glaude calls the “value gap� which is sustained in the popular culture by what he calls “the lie� (i.e., the web of tacit assumptions about the greater value of white lives over black lives that manifests as the value gap). At no point does Glaude’s thinking and connections feel like a stretch and so he somehow makes this project of interweaving readings of Baldwin’s work with explications on political events of the last eight years work to great effect. Glaude’s a killer. Read more Baldwin.
]]> <![CDATA[The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History]]> 55278284 This fascinating and bizarre collection compiles the most unusual, obscure books from the far reaches of the human imagination throughout history.

From the author of the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Phantom Atlas and The Sky Atlas comes a unique and beautifully illustrated journey through the history of literature. The Madman's Library delves into its darkest territories to hunt down the oddest books and manuscripts ever written, uncovering the intriguing stories behind their creation.

From the Qur'an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein, to the gorgeously decorated fifteenth-century lawsuit filed by the Devil against Jesus, to the most enormous book ever created, The Madman's Library features many long forgotten, eccentric, and extraordinary volumes gathered from around the world.

Books written in blood and books that kill, books of the insane and books that hoaxed the globe, books invisible to the naked eye and books so long they could destroy the Universe, books worn into battle and books of code and cypher whose secrets remain undiscovered. Spell books, alchemist scrolls, wearable books, edible books, books to summon demons, books written by ghosts, and more all come together in the most curiously strange library imaginable.

Featuring hundreds of remarkable images and packed with entertaining facts and stories to discover, The Madman's Library is a captivating compendium perfect for bibliophiles, literature enthusiasts, and collectors intrigued by bizarre oddities, obscure history, and the macabre.

� MUST-HAVE FOR BOOKLOVERS: Anyone who appreciates a good read will love delving into this weird world of books and adding this collection to their own bookshelf.
� DISCOVER SOMETHING TRULY UNIQUE: The Madman's Library will let you in on the secret and obscure histories of the strangest books ever made.
� EXPERT AUTHOR: Edward Brooke-Hitching is the son of an antiquarian book dealer, a lifelong rare book collector, and a master of taking visual deep dives into unusual historical subjects, such as the maps of imaginary geography in The Phantom Atlas or ancient pathways through the stars in The Sky Atlas.]]> 256 Edward Brooke-Hitching 179720730X E. C. 3 4.23 2020 The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History
author: Edward Brooke-Hitching
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:
This was a fun book about all manner of weird books and not-quite-book publications from antiquity to the present, across languages and cultures. Brooke-Hitching groups these curiosities into themes and then sort of just describes whatever stuff fits that theme, detailing eccentricities as he goes. If it’s like anything else I’ve read in full it’s like Henry Hitchings� The Secret Life of Words, which also makes groups out of themes and then goes from example to example. If you’re into books and minutiae, you’ll be well served. It sits rather handsomely next to Cabinets of Wonder.
]]> Cinema Speculation 55922488 The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino.

In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans—and all movie lovers—could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT’s and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever.]]> 391 Quentin Tarantino 0063112582 E. C. 3 4.04 2022 Cinema Speculation
author: Quentin Tarantino
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/07
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Writing as a big fat stupid fan of Quentin Tarantino’s, this was great. It has, admittedly, been quite some time since my thesis on Pulp Fiction (so it’s certainly possible that there are publications about this that I just haven’t seen) but this is, for me at least, the first time I’ve read anything about his childhood and early life, about his mother, about his stepfather, about his male and female role models growing up, and about how he found himself engrossed by movies. His films hold such fascination for me that I just gobbled this first chapter up, and the rest of the book is QT writing about movies from the 70s that he found and finds significant. These chapters are often in defense of otherwise overlooked/underappreciated genre flicks (kind of like what Klosterman does) about which Tarantino (inevitably) knows everything, and the loose nature of his approach to these chapters means that I’m reading in a voice that I take to be very similar to Tarantino’s thoughts and speech, achieving an intimacy that would otherwise be impossible to attain (the guy just won’t take my calls). But then also, writing as a one-time academic and reader of a lot of books, this was a mess. My sense is that much of what this book is got sold to HP based of Tarantino’s name, meaning that the normal vetting and editing processes were drastically relaxed. The effect is a badly edited (e.g., lots of typos, inconsistent punctuation, illogical italicization, non-standard quotation formatting, et cetera) and incredibly disorganized book that reads exactly like what it is: the thoughts of an aging manic genius obsessed with cinema. Incredibly, I’m guessing that this really was cut down from manuscript length, and that when the director’s cut of Cinema Speculation comes out it will be ten-thousand pages long. Which I will also read because I can’t help myself. Great for movie buffs and really great for QT fans, but still and all a celebrication type of book.
]]> I Cheerfully Refuse 198276006 I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of Rainy, an aspiring musician setting sail on Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, he seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. After encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, he eventually lands to find an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, a crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. As his guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his wake.]]> 336 Leif Enger 0802162932 E. C. 3 3.95 2024 I Cheerfully Refuse
author: Leif Enger
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/17
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This was an odd little book that I am glad was written and am glad I read but am having a hard time placing. Rainy and Lark are a childless couple living in a post-apocalypse-lite small-town world of northern Minnesota where Rainy plays electric bass with a band and Lark runs a bookstore (and we’re made to understand that books are kinda-sorta considered contraband in this world, but the extent to which these rules are enforced � or what the consequences of their violation are � is never truly fleshed out). A stranger comes to town in the form of a “squelette� named Kellan who is missing a hand and seems very nervous. Naturally, Kellan comes to live with Rainy and Lark, and so we come to learn that Kellan’s nervousness is warranted, since he’s being pursued by malevolent forces. Those forces find the overcredulous Rainy and Lark on the night of Lark’s birthday during a party at their house in the form of another stranger-come-to-town, Werryck (the names in the book are weird (also unexplained)). And wouldn’t you know it, the following day the house is trashed, Kellan is nowhere to be found, and Lark is dead. The rest of the novel follows our hapless narrator-protagonist, Rainy, as he meanders north on a knackered old sailboat in half-hearted pursuit of Lark’s spirit (he doesn’t really believe that this is out there to be found) and-slash-or a woman he and Lark met on the water years ago who Rainy now think could maybe possibly have been the author of the book, I Cheerfully Refuse, Molly Thorn. He is, of course, eventually captured by Werryck’s henchmen and brought aboard a huge ship on which medical experiments on compliance are being conducted, and where Rainy is asked almost nightly to play his bass for Werryck to try to help Werryck sleep (yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds). The whole thing ends with a revolt, and the good guys go free. And, you know what?, it didn’t hook me in exactly the same way that Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts didn’t hook me—something about the not-quite-threatening danger of a not-quite-dystopian future fails to engage my sense of grand metaphor and the tectonic shifting of cultural thought. But having now read two such novels of relatively recent vintage I’m forced to consider that the problem lies with me and something I’m not successfully twigging to. The kind of world that these authors are conjuring is surely meant to look like our own not-entirely-Orwellian-but-edging-closer-by-the-year world that we occupy projected a few years into the future. And so my failure to get roused the ramifications of the logic of late-stage capitalism making it possible to create compliance medication in the bowels of a floating city in northern Minnesota is an example of the very complacency that stands as the true terrible villain in Enger’s book. Look out for bad guys in the coming years; they’re there if you look.
]]> <![CDATA[The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories]]> 1576188 The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.]]> 368 Bruno Schulz 0143105140 E. C. 2 4.16 2005 The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
author: Bruno Schulz
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/28
date added: 2024/10/15
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It is not possible to read this without already knowing something about Schulz’s biography since it’s his biography that has reflexively afforded Schulz some modicum of fame. Schulz, after writing and publishing two collections of short stories, and writing but not publishing a novel � The Messiah � was swept up during the Nazi invasion of Poland, served as a muralist for a Nazi officer, and was ultimately murdered during the war in an act of perverse spite. This is worth recalling since it is also not possible to read these pieces without the knowledge of his biography influencing how they’re read. And my sense of these stories � despite their having been published � is that they’re incomplete, that they’re the early works of an author not quite fully developed yet. (It should be noted that I am, of course, reading these in translation.) One of the biggest surprises to me here is how little dialogue there is—the effect is to force a ton of description, leading to a sort of prose impressionism (for whatever reason this writing put me in mind of James Ensor’s paintings). And at the end of the whole everything, and in spite of a huge dose of pathos, I didn’t enjoy these stories. With so little character development, there was little to anchor me to the world of Schulz’s fiction, which would be fine if those worlds were more complete. But they weren’t.
]]> Biography of X 60784729 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey E. C. 5 3.83 2023 Biography of X
author: Catherine Lacey
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
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I find that reading biographies of actual historical people can be tough because after the events transpire that make them bio-worthy � the discovery, the championship, the election � have passed, they’re lives are never as exciting, and the bio relates a slow decline to death (unless they’re a suicide, which are tough for other reasons). So, even reading about people I’m interested in can be hard to get all the way through. I was reminded of this about halfway through Lacey’s Biography of X, which is really a novel, as it occurred to me that I was growing only more fascinated with X, wanting to get to the next stage of her life and to learn what other historical events she was a part of—in other words, that anticipation is always better than realized potential. Anyway, Lacey’s novel is ostensibly written by C. M. Lucca, the widow of the acclaimed artist named “X� in the slightly skewed world these characters inhabit. Lucca’s purpose in writing this biography is to correct the errors of another biographer who so badly relates X’s life (naturally, this other guy’s bio does quite well, which only further invigorates Lucca). Of course, Lucca has much of what the other biographer is missing, namely access to the intimate aspects of X’s life and work, as well as a desire to accurately depict her humanity rather than crank out a hagiography to her genius. What makes this task so hard (and what leads the other guy down blind alleys) is that X was famous for her personae � she adopted many different names and looks in which she produced many different artworks � starting all the way back when she escaped from the fascist, Chrisitan nationalist, Southern Territory, a breakaway state in this parallel reality. What Lucca slowly reveals (and this is a large part of why the novel never reaches the point of diminishing returns) is how little she herself knew about her wife, and eventually how she may not have mattered in X’s life as much as she hoped, and then how they weren’t altogether happy in their marriage. Anyway, Lacey is working in a really high-concept mode here, and manages to not only write something entertaining, but something that realizes the adage that we all live many lives (and maybe also that no one’s life looks good under a microscope). I should have written this a week ago when I finished it. I loved this one.
]]> Hitchcock/Truffaut 393601 Rear Window ("I was feeling very creative at the time, the batteries were well charged"), his technical insight into Psycho's shower scene ("the knife never touched the body; it was all done in the [editing]"), and his ruminations on flops such as Under Capricorn ("If I were to make another picture in Australia today, I'd have a policeman hop into the pocket of a kangaroo and yell 'Follow that car!'"). This is one of the most delightful film books in print. --Raphael Shargel]]> 368 François Truffaut 0671604295 E. C. 4 4.51 1966 Hitchcock/Truffaut
author: François Truffaut
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves:
review:
This is, of course, a classic piece of film criticism that has become required reading for anyone interested in film history. Here, a youngish Truffaut conducts a fifty-hour interview with Hitchcock spanning the entirety of Hitch’s career, from the silents up to Torn Curtain, wherein Truffaut seeks to understand Hitch’s process and intentions with every one of his movies. Their shared knowledge of these works is so complete � so encyclopedic � that they’re often able to discuss individual scenes and sequences, which is not only comprehensive but also just really impressive. So, you read this to get the inside dope on how Hitch’s most famous movies were actually made (e.g., The Thirty-Nine Steps, Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho) which happen to be among the most famous movies ever, which is great on its own. But what comes through along with that stuff are their personalities � especially Hitchcock’s � and just how critical Hitch could be of his own work. The best part of this for me was Hitch’s sense of just how audiences of the sixties had changed, how the newer moviegoing crowds weren’t as easily moved by suspense and horror, or as critical of villains, as his earlier audiences had been, signaling an intuitive awareness of the culture’s transmogrification into the postmodern, and, more than that, how this meant that he had to adapt (not that everyone else failed to understand him). I wish that Hitch was willing to get more theoretical (a direction that Truffaut tries to go in several times and which Hitch resists), and that this was three hundred pages longer, but it’s great all the same. Now, Dr. Pressler, I finished the reading.
]]> Mood Swings 197522433
For fans of Patricia Lockwood and Marlowe Granados—a whip-smart, absurdly funny debut novel by a bold new talent in sad girl literature.

Everyone knows something’s off, but nobody can agree on just what it is. Maybe it’s the weather; maybe everyone’s just so damn sensitive these days. Or maybe it’s because the animals of the world have finally had enough, besieging towns and cities and terrorizing their human residents.

Jenlena and her best friend Daphne are two humanities grads in their early 20s, trying to find their way in a society that has just eradicated all animals for the safety of humanity. In the post-fauna world, Jenlena transforms from an aspiring poet to a gig worker, capitalizing on other people’s grief by selling house plants that have come to replace pets and cosplaying as dogs for pay. Meanwhile Daphne, a once-promising student, flounders in a deep depression, smoking weed and ditching work to hang out with her once famous, now canceled boyfriend. When Jenlena meets the California billionaire Roderick Maeve, and the two become romantically entangled, she is exposed to a new understanding of wealth, power, and the gender economy—just as the world hurtles toward its alleged salvation.

Marked with Frankie Barnet’s poignant intelligence and sly sense of humor, Mood Swings is a stand-out debut novel that imagines with pitch-perfect absurdity what comes after life as we know it.]]> 304 Frankie Barnet 1662602596 E. C. 3 3.56 2024 Mood Swings
author: Frankie Barnet
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves:
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This book was about a lot of stuff. It mostly follows Jenlena, a sometimes-student, sometimes-poet living in Montreal who basically just goes about her day amid the ecological crises of her slightly slanted world. In this world, the animals are starting to organize and revolt against the humans and “the weather� is an unspecified problem. And it’s in this world too that billionaire playboy cliché, Roderick Meave, sets out to solve the world’s problems as only a VC could, by throwing lots of money at it. Okay, so then pretty early on Meave sends out a worldwide soundwave at a frequency that kills all of the animals and thus ends the threat that they represent, which of course only brings on a new problem: how to live without animals. While the world sorts out how to manage an animal-less reality, Meave tries to fix “the weather� by sponsoring a time machine, through which specially trained technicians will introduce solar panels to eighteenth-century Britain. Throughout the ebbing and flowing of capital’s caprice, a cultish pseudo-religious group called the Moon Bethlehems grow in popularity with a not-quite-specified message of intentionally advancing entropy as recompence for humanity’s sins. Naturally, before the novel culminates with the first use of the time machine, Jenlena and Meave meet (preposterously) in Montreal and start seeing each other. Through this coming together we get a more intimate understanding of Meave’s privilege � his wealth, his staff, his notoriety, the animals he secretly kept for himself � as well as his banality � he’s boring, he’s insecure, he’s emotionally stunted. And so really, this book is about ecologically induced anxiety, and the violence of capitalism, and twenty-first century gender politics, and the gravitational pull of nihilism, and cancel culture, and if this sounds like a lot of stuff that’s because it is. Barnet’s book appears to me to have firstnovelitis (it’s not her first novel) and I’ll say that this apparent lack of a throughline made the novel feel distracted and unsure of what it wanted to be, even, gulp, fluffy and confused. But maybe that’s actually the point—we’re so used to bouncing from outrage to outrage and from crisis to crisis that the lived experience of our cultural present is distracted and unsure of itself, and also hoping for an amoral billionaire to get us out of the holes we dug for ourselves. This is often funny, sometimes loose, and not the worst book I’ll read this year.
]]> There There 43076988 292 Tommy Orange 0525436146 E. C. 4 4.05 2018 There There
author: Tommy Orange
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/26
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves:
review:
The question of identity is never as tenuous as it is for colonized persons. As Achebe, Fanon, Kinkaid, Narayan, and Thiong’o each attest in their respective works, the legacy of colonization is not just resource depletion and the implementation of borders, but also, in Thiong’o’s words, the “spiritual subjugation� that lingers long after the colonizers leave. Identity formation in the wake of colonization is therefore always a struggle to discern what is authentic and what is ersatz, what is true from what is false. And these questions seem to me at least to be irresolvable. How, for instance, can a Pakistani kid know that her love for cricket is authentic? The unpacking of this question of authenticity is at the heart of Orange’s novel, wherein a large cast of Native American characters each dwell on their own Indianness under the conditions of perpetual colonization. The novel’s plot centers on the dance competition of the inaugural Big Oakland Powwow, which has drawn the support required to become an annual event by announcing big cash prizes for the competition’s winners. The powwow, then, functions as a lodestar for many of these characters� identities, as its authenticity is, while obviously imperfect, as good as any are likely to find. Here, then, those looking to find their roots and decolonize their minds rely on the powwow to establish, if only for themselves, their Indianness. The news of these cash prizes, though, has likewise drawn a criminal element to the powwow in the form of a minor NA gang that plans to hold the place up. The novel’s conclusion � one that sees not only an attempted robbery but also a bloodbath gun battle � is so grizzly and offkey that it initially struck me as a poor choice, but it’s really a metaphor and an indictment rolled into one pyrotechnic scene. White culture is characterized by theft and murder, and so There There’s violent ending is just the inevitable result of living in a white world. This is a killer book.
]]> The Second Coming 198563704
When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has always struggled to see past himself. But then a call from his ex makes him fear their daughter's in deeper trouble than anyone realizes. Believing he's the only one who can save her, he decides to return to New York with a the whole of his life, its hard-won triumphs and harrowing mistakes...

So begins the intimate epic of Jolie and child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same. Their journey toward each other will face opposition from grandparents and siblings and friends. It will strain connections with roommates and benefactors and a probation officer desperate to help. It will push Jolie out past her depth with a mysterious admirer, and Ethan in over his head with his first love, Jolie's mom. But as father and daughter struggle to find their footing, new vistas from a surf break in mid-'90s Delaware to group therapy during the Great Recession, from an encampment at Occupy Wall Street to a HoJo on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge to horizons seldom seen in fiction.]]> 608 Garth Risk Hallberg 0593536924 E. C. 4 3.05 2024 The Second Coming
author: Garth Risk Hallberg
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
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My father used to like to tell me a story about growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, in the good ol� days of the thirties and forties. As I remember it, he’d take a quarter that he earned on his paper route, pay a nickel to take the bus into Brooklyn, walk to Ebbets Field, pay a nickel to see the Dodgers play, pay a nickel for a hot dog at the ballpark, pay a nickel to take the bus home, and still have a nickel left over. When I heard this growing up, I thought the point of the story was about how things used to be cheaper back then � what miraculous things a nickel could do � and also why I wasn’t going to the Mets game. But now when I reflect back on it, and now that I’m a father myself, I think that maybe the point was about independence, about how he was allowed to go and do these things without it raising any eyebrows, and maybe, beyond that, about how independence is the true telos of parenting and that I should just take myself to the Mets game already. I was put back in mind of dad’s nickel story as I read through The Second Coming, a novel about two people, Ethan Aspern and Sarah Kupferberg, who become parents too young, and who struggle to live up to their roles as parents, and who really struggle to allow their daughter, Jolie, to achieve independence. What we get here, delivered to us in a broken chronology, is Ethan’s story of drug use and addiction and fatherhood and escape right up next to Jolie’s pseudo–attempted suicide and drug use and burgeoning addiction and bottomless resentment and desire to escape. Of course, Hallberg’s idea is to show just how parallel these characters� lives are, and this is done in contrast to Sarah, the overachieving overbearing mother who neither forgives Ethan, who leaves them when Jolie is three to keep the consequences of his addiction from really ruining their lives, nor trusts Jolie. The dynamic, then, isn’t exactly caustic, but is certainly strained, and so when Jolie is rescued from the subway tracks and Ethan comes back from California to check on her, that strain is ratcheted up, and then when Jolie sees one of her teachers leaving the apartment she lives in with her mother (which we understand means that he, the teacher, has been seeing Sarah, which he has), she wigs out, stops speaking, and goes to stay with her grandparents uptown. Oh boy, so and then Ethan, who stays in New York and lives with a guy that his old probie puts him in touch with, wants to spend Thanksgiving with Jolie who hates him and is now not speaking, and he takes her across state lines (a big no-no) to Ocean City, Maryland, his hometown, where he wants to see his sister and her wife and their adopted son and go to a funeral service for their recently deceased father, everything comes to a head. Ethan, though now sober, is back where his addictions began, and his sister is none-too-pleased to see him and he has to keep Jolie way longer than what was agreed to, meaning that now Sarah is getting the old probie involved (oh yeah and he sends his nephew, who he’s never met before, into a diabetic coma at thanksgiving dinner), and he and Jolie accidently drop acid. All of this, all of it, is about parenthood, about how there comes a time at which, whether you’re ready or not, you have to let your kid be independent, which is also the time when if you resist and try to hold on too long or too hard that you start to cause the problems you imagine you’re mitigating by holding on—it’s the nickel story all over again. There are few weeks that pass that I don’t want to call my dad up to ask him something.
]]> <![CDATA[The Hundred Years' War on Palestine]]> 52960854
Accepted interpretations of the confrontation tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. Drawing on archival materials and the accounts of generations of family members—judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists�The Hundred Years' War on Palestine instead shows that this war has always been colonial in nature, waged against the native population first by the Zionist movement and then by Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.

Neither a chronicle of victimization nor a whitewash of mistakes made by Palestinian leaders, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine offers both a compelling family history and an original, illuminating view of the Middle East's most intractable conflict.]]> 319 Rashid Khalidi 1250787653 E. C. 0 currently-reading 4.44 2020 The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett E. C. 4 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
review:
With the relatively recent release of American Fiction and with his jump from Greywolf to Doubleday, Everett may now be reaching the audience he deserves. And here he wastes no time introducing himself to that audience, setting his sights on the canonical American author, Mark Twain, and Twain’s canonical American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by rewriting that classic text from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s pseudo-friend slash non-volunteer helpmeet slash slave. In Twain’s book, of course, the focus is on Huck, and so is about the boyish spirit of exploration and the excitement borne from courting danger that is meant to characterize Twain’s young America. What gets lost in a narrative centered on Huck’s many narrow escapes is the precarious social position of Jim who � in reality if not in the story � was facing a perpetual threat far beyond what the Huck-centered book’s perspective permits. This is what Everett’s novel seeks to rectify, contrasting Huck’s agency against Jim’s restrictions in order to highlight just how extreme and how constant the oppression Jim faces is. And so we get the major plot points of Huck Finn all over again from this alter viewpoint, which has the effect of replacing the familiar fun of Huck’s hijinx with the deadly serious threat of murder. Jim here is forced to constantly navigate the insane social mores of the antebellum South while subject to Huck’s whims and while attempting to avoid capture in order to maybe eventually shepherd his family to safety. The best part of this, though, is the emphasis placed on language, since language is the tool most obviously used to perform this impossible social navigation. Jim not only code-switches throughout the novel (alternating between his erudite thoughts and his caricatured slave-speech) but then also regularly remarks on the fact that he’s doing it and even teaches others to do it, and it is this coded language � bilingualism, really � that inverts the expectations established by the racism of lowered expectation (as established by, among other things, our culture’s literary canon) by showing Jim to be the most intelligent of all the characters in the book. Erasure is my favorite, but this is still very good.
]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 E. C. 5 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves:
review:
Wow wow wow. This is about Koroosh “Cyrus� Shams, a someday-writer and recovering addict alcoholic who was moved to Indiana as a baby by his father, Ali, after his mother, Roya, died as a passenger on the ill-fated Iran Air Flight 655 (shot out of the sky by the USS Vincennes when it was confused for a fighter jet) and who thinks he maybe wants to write a book about martyrs, a subject he’s interested in because of how they make not only their lives but their deaths meaningful. To this end, Cyrus travels to Brooklyn on a whim to visit the Brooklyn Museum where the artist, Orkideh, who is dying of terminal breast cancer, is holding her final art installation, Death-Speak. Across three fraught conversations, Cyrus tries to describe his idea for this book on martyrs as he hopes to include Orkideh in it somehow, only to begin wondering if she perhaps somehow knows something about his long-dead, never-met mother. Background to all of this is the story of Cyrus’s father and uncle, Arash, and his relationship art and his relationship with drugs and his relationship with his sort-of-boyfriend, Zee, and it all builds up to the idea of feeling like you matter when you’re alive, that abandoning a preoccupation with self-importance (to martyr oneself) in order to actually participate in your own life is what gives life, and death, meaning. This is such a fucking good book I’ve already bought it twice.
]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 E. C. 3 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/10
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves:
review:
This is something of a sister novel to There There in the way that The Candy House is sister to A Visit from the Goon Squad—the novels are related, yes, but one isn’t a sequel to the other either. And so here we get some more of Opal and Jacquie and Orvil and Loother and Lony’s story, but not before reading a prehistory of sorts that includes the Sand Creek Massacre (referred to throughout There There), Florida imprisonment, and Indigenous Boarding School. It’s with this early history that Orange more thoroughly lays out the foundation of his characters� biographies, making more explicit the weight his contemporary characters carry. Also like There There, Wandering Stars is largely about addiction and recovery, and so this earlier narrative assumes greater significance as we’re invited to consider how drug use as “medicine� (the term of choice that links the two narratives) has deep native roots and has also long been problematic. Here, then, recovery grows into a theme that refers immediately to drug addiction and metaphorically to historical oppression and violence and colonization. This isn’t as good as There There, but also if you liked that then you’ll like this and it’s not possible to not like that so just read both.
]]> Slouching Towards Bethlehem 424 The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.

It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

It contains Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That".]]> 238 Joan Didion E. C. 4 4.20 1968 Slouching Towards Bethlehem
author: Joan Didion
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2018/07/10
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death]]> 57010227
Poker culture, he discovered, is marked by joy, heartbreak, and grizzled veterans playing against teenage hotshots weaned on Internet gambling. Not to mention the not-to-be overlooked issue of coordinating Port Authority bus schedules with your kid’s drop-off and pickup at school. Finally arriving in Vegas for the multimillion-dollar tournament, Whitehead brilliantly details his progress, both literal and existential, through the event’s antes and turns, through its gritty moments of calculation, hope, and spectacle. Entertaining, ironic, and strangely profound, this epic search for meaning at the World Series of Poker is a sure bet.]]> 256 Colson Whitehead 0345804333 E. C. 2 3.57 2014 The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death
author: Colson Whitehead
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2020/06/15
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:
Colson Whitehead’s 2011 three-part feature article for Grantland has metastasized into a full book, The Noble Hustle, the audience for which is the thin segment formed by the Whitehead Completist circle and the People Who Don’t Know Enough About Poker to Be Bored by Reading a Layman’s Account of the World of Professional Poker circle. That describes me. But even though I am the audience for this thing, I still didn’t totally invest in it, and I think my problem simply boils down to tone. The Noble Hustle is Whitehead’s account of playing in the 2011 World Series of Poker after having been solicited (and staked the ten-grand entrance fee) by Grantland to write a feature. Whitehead, as we’re frequently reminded, is no pro, but has a longtime infatuation with poker and has played in various regular games for years. So, with only six weeks between taking on the assignment and the first round of the tournament, Whitehead works to tune up his game by hiring a poker coach and personal trainer and making weekly trips down to Atlantic City to get a sense for how real players play. On its own this would be fun, interesting reportage—sports reporting with a hook (i.e., what happens when a schmo is given a chance to play in the big leagues). However, this is at least as much about Whitehead’s sense of himself as a loser, his then-recent divorce, and how easily he succumbs to pessimism as it is about poker, and all that personal shit is the albatross hanging around this book’s neck, the emo tone of which just kept grating on me. As with all of Whitehead’s stuff, the metaphors here are poignant and deep � the affectlessness of one’s poker face becomes actual anhedonia, the tragic samsara-like fate inherent to gambling, the compulsive American desire to get rich by bluffing � but like much of Whitehead’s stuff these metaphors are also left for the reader to cobble together (which leaves me with a lingering suspicion that maybe Whitehead didn’t intend these and I’ve made more out of this than is really there). The section about the road trip he took to Las Vegas in 1991 with his college buddy Darren (who we later learn is Darren Aronofsky) should be its own book, all mentions of beef jerky should be cut (there must have been some endorsement deal between Grantland and Jack Links), and you should probably just stick with those original three articles.
]]> Salvador 125558951 112 Joan Didion 0679751831 E. C. 3 3.50 1983 Salvador
author: Joan Didion
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/11
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:
In a small series of journalistic essays, Didion provides a sense of the mood of El Salvador at the start of the Salvadoran Civil War. That mood, not surprisingly, is a potent mix of fear and confusion that Didion refers to throughout this little book as “the ineffable,� as she searches for an answer as to what constitutes “la solución� in a country rent by competing interests in a period of indiscriminate killing. Of course, there is no solution to find—she interviews members of the junta and the Salvadoran government and the US embassy and no one can even really face up to the problem they’re nominally working to discover a solution for. That problem, more to the point, involves a leftist revolt against an unpopular government born of a coup, and the intervention of the US that supported any and all anti-communist endeavors, no matter the body count. I found that I had to have this background information already in place in order to appreciate what Didion was doing here (this is a book written for an audience that was reading about El Salvador in the paper every morning, which isn’t me), and so if you’re looking for something comprehensive on the subject, you want something else. Or, rather, you want that one too.
]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 171681821
A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.� —Shannon Carlin, ,i>TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood� began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood� in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood� has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems� that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 400 Jonathan Haidt 0593655036 E. C. 3
I became a teacher eleven years ago when it was still possible to enforce a no-tech policy in class. The gradual integration of tech into all aspects of life (and, of course, COVID) has made this policy impossible to uphold, lest all of my students withdraw or I spend all of class time policing its use. In this most recent semester, I noticed an exacerbation of a long trend: students struggle to participate in open discussion as well as small-group discussion, students struggle to read works of literary fiction for theme and symbolism, students struggle to hazard interpretations of what they’ve read. Because of my highly biased relationship to tech, I’ve long been given to attributing these deficiencies to the effects of constant smart phone use.

Jonathan Haidt’s hypothesis is simple—the enormous explosion of internalizing disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety) in 10�20-year-olds starting in 2010 is being caused (not correlated to but caused) by the constant use of social media apps on smart phones. The rest of the book convincingly makes the case for this hypothesis (to be fair, I didn’t need much convincing) and suggests ways to reverse this trend. These suggestions are to A. keep kids off of social media until they’re sixteen and B. encourage more free play (which is playing without parental supervision or intervention). Haidt’s larger claim is that these trends in mental health follow a pattern of parents overcontrolling what kids do in the real world and undercontrolling what kids do on the internet, producing a feedback cycle where kids confront the world without confidence or grit while retreating into a virtual world that exploits that lack of confidence, producing, among other things, anxiety. To this end, Haidt writes a lot here about parenting � which was a surprise � encouraging parents to allow their children greater freedom to be out in the world on their own (which often means confronting their own anxieties about they’re kids getting hurt), and encouraging them to keep their kids from making their own social media accounts until their prefrontal cortex is developed enough to make conscious decisions about what they’re actually doing on those accounts, and then also encouraging them to be good role models by not looking down at their own phones all the time. I felt really queasy while reading this one, and angry that my students are victim to this stuff, and preemptively frustrated by the fights I know I’m going to have with my daughter about all this stuff, and vindicated for knowing better than to get involved with any of this stuff. It’s a pyrrhic victory though.]]> 4.35 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
author: Jonathan Haidt
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:
I have long resisted getting � and still have never had � a smart phone. I didn’t even want a cell phone, but was given one anyway when I started driving toward the end of high school in 2005/06 when all cell phones were still either flippers or sliders and none were smart. I don’t know what it was, but something about what looked to me like blatant materialism and an obsessiveness about constantly upgrading in order to give over yet more of one’s time to what was essentially a toy just seemed dumb to me, and then, given how in the minority I was (and am), my eccentric stance mutated and came to become part of my identity. My suspicions about phones � and really twenty-first century tech tout court (I also didn’t want a computer and was then given one of those when I started college) � haven’t waned much in the intervening two decades, during which time my stance has become harder and harder to maintain as the world gradually conforms itself to the assumption that “everyone has a smart phone.�

I became a teacher eleven years ago when it was still possible to enforce a no-tech policy in class. The gradual integration of tech into all aspects of life (and, of course, COVID) has made this policy impossible to uphold, lest all of my students withdraw or I spend all of class time policing its use. In this most recent semester, I noticed an exacerbation of a long trend: students struggle to participate in open discussion as well as small-group discussion, students struggle to read works of literary fiction for theme and symbolism, students struggle to hazard interpretations of what they’ve read. Because of my highly biased relationship to tech, I’ve long been given to attributing these deficiencies to the effects of constant smart phone use.

Jonathan Haidt’s hypothesis is simple—the enormous explosion of internalizing disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety) in 10�20-year-olds starting in 2010 is being caused (not correlated to but caused) by the constant use of social media apps on smart phones. The rest of the book convincingly makes the case for this hypothesis (to be fair, I didn’t need much convincing) and suggests ways to reverse this trend. These suggestions are to A. keep kids off of social media until they’re sixteen and B. encourage more free play (which is playing without parental supervision or intervention). Haidt’s larger claim is that these trends in mental health follow a pattern of parents overcontrolling what kids do in the real world and undercontrolling what kids do on the internet, producing a feedback cycle where kids confront the world without confidence or grit while retreating into a virtual world that exploits that lack of confidence, producing, among other things, anxiety. To this end, Haidt writes a lot here about parenting � which was a surprise � encouraging parents to allow their children greater freedom to be out in the world on their own (which often means confronting their own anxieties about they’re kids getting hurt), and encouraging them to keep their kids from making their own social media accounts until their prefrontal cortex is developed enough to make conscious decisions about what they’re actually doing on those accounts, and then also encouraging them to be good role models by not looking down at their own phones all the time. I felt really queasy while reading this one, and angry that my students are victim to this stuff, and preemptively frustrated by the fights I know I’m going to have with my daughter about all this stuff, and vindicated for knowing better than to get involved with any of this stuff. It’s a pyrrhic victory though.
]]> Tree of Codes 9583799 Tree of Codes is a haunting new story by best-selling American writer, Jonathan Safran Foer. With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first � as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life � as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.]]> 139 Jonathan Safran Foer 0956569218 E. C. 4 3.84 2010 Tree of Codes
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/29
date added: 2024/05/30
shelves:
review:
And, of course, the reason I was reading Schulz in the first place was in order to read this. It’s probably the case that you’d never hear about this, let alone hunt up a copy, unless you were a really big Jonathan Safran Foer fan (or a completist, or both) just as you’d probably only hear about The Street or Crocodiles unless you were a really big Foer fan, since that’s the work that this is based on. Or not exactly based on. What this is is the complete text of Schulz’s collection with almost all of the original words cut away so as to save only certain words by way of producing a new work from inside Schulz’s own. I suppose you could say that that new work is a short story, although it’s really more like prose poetry, and I think you’d also have to say that that new work isn’t very good. Which is to say that Foer’s story, carved out of Schulz’s own, doesn’t really stand up next to his other fiction, suffering from much of what I find Schulz’s writing suffers from—almost no dialogue, almost no character development, almost no world anchoring. And none of that matters. Reading this book is a wholly singular experience for how it makes the text’s form a manifest, tangible element of the work, makes, in fact, the text’s form the entire purpose and meaning of the work. Given what we know about Schulz’s biography � and Foer’s bibliography � I read this as a work of Holocaust fiction, which I likewise find conveyed by its form. Like Poland’s, or Europe’s, Jews, almost all of the words on all of the pages are missing. Like the survivors, those words that remain struggle, and largely fail, to find and convey logic and coherence in the fact of their survival. Like civilization, like humanity, the pages themselves are desperately fragile, always a moment away from tearing. And in West Asia the pages, of course, are tearing once again.
]]> <![CDATA[Just Us: An American Conversation]]> 50403499 Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation--Just Us urges all of us into it

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.]]> 352 Claudia Rankine 1644450216 E. C. 4 4.35 2020 Just Us: An American Conversation
author: Claudia Rankine
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves:
review:
It just so happens that this sits next to Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo on my bookshelf, which is, of course, a coincidence, and only worth mentioning at all because I see in these texts certain similarities. First of all they’re both formally, or perhaps generically, difficult to categorize. Reed’s book is a novel more than anything else, but it’s also a collage that includes pictures and quotations and newspaper headlines and telegrams and letters that together at least blur the edges of novelness. Rankine’s book � like Citizen � is, more than anything else, a collection of essays, but is also a collage that includes poems and pictures and metacommentary and passages of academic research. In fact most of the verso pages were dedicated to this metacommentary-cum-research which expanded on remarks made in the main text on the recto page. I think simply because we read left to right, I found myself reading the metacomments before the comments themselves, which might signal something about breaking up normal patterns of thought or habituated practices, which segues into the other way that this is like Mumbo Jumbo—they’re both about describing the mechanics of white supremacy. Just Us consistently illuminates and challenges contemporary American manifestations of not just racism but racism’s deeper logic, namely, the supremacy of whiteness. This comes about while waiting in line at airports, and at dinner parties, and in contemplation about dyed hair, and builds to a crescendo where everything from the consequential to the banal is infused with this racially coded supremacy. The way that I’ve always taught privilege to my classes is that privilege means getting to set the terms of normativity, where standards are established and reality is understood in relation to the norms set by the hegemony. I like this for its explanatory power, but it fails of course to convey the extreme consequences to those who fall outside of the hegemony’s aegis. Rankine conveys the extreme consequences. I hope she likes being neighbors with Reed. Jean Rhys is just two houses down.
]]> The Dimensions of a Cave 65215103 A virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist.

When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones's story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.

As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce--who, like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier--keep emerging.

Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave is a virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption. It explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.]]> 480 Greg Jackson 0374298491 E. C. 3 3.39 The Dimensions of a Cave
author: Greg Jackson
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.39
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/10
date added: 2024/05/12
shelves:
review:
This was a tough, philosophically driven novel about, well, just about every contemporary tech-focused question there is. The story follows an investigative reporter, Quentin, trying to track down the designers responsible for a virtual reality world, and who then finds out that his old buddy � who Quentin thinks died covering the war � is in this VR world and doesn’t want to come out again, and who then goes in to retrieve him, and then doesn’t, and this is all told in a frame narrative from the perspective of a friend of Quentin’s telling us what Quentin said. Foof. What this sets up is a means of exploring questions related to the nature and definition of reality, ethics in VR space and reality, definitions of life in VR space and reality, the meaning and consequences of death in VR space and in reality, and on and on. Jackson overdoes the exposition here, writes brilliant dialogue, and came up about two-hundred pages short for me. There’s a lot here but it’s work.
]]> <![CDATA[Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close]]> 4588
The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open?

So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives, and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him any closer to, or further from, his lost father?]]> 326 Jonathan Safran Foer 0618711651 E. C. 5 3.98 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/22
date added: 2024/04/22
shelves:
review:
This book is hard to write about. And not just because I’m a sap and find it deeply moving. Or because it’s about 9/11. That it’s hard to write about has something to do with being about so much, and the so much it’s so much about is invisible, intangible stuff like loss and absence and aporia and the thing not said. Ostensibly this is the story of Oskar Schell, a boy struggling to cope with his father’s death on 9/11. Believing his father to have orchestrated an elaborate citywide scavenger hunt (“Reconnaissance Expedition�) just before he died, Oskar follows what he believes to be clues toward solving the puzzle, which takes the form of Oskar seeking out every city resident with the surname Black to see if they know anything about a key Oskar found in his father’s closet. But then that’s only the ostensible story. This is really the story of the Schells, three generations who have been forced to contend with profound loss. To this end, the majority of the novel’s pages are actually dedicated to Oskar’s grandmother and grandfather, who, we read, are writing letters to those they’ve lost, and who are haunted by same. There are too many details to detail but they come from Dresden, survived the bombings, watched their families die (including Grandma’s sister, Anna, who was Grandpa’s betrothed (the trauma of the death of whom caused g.pa to go mute)), and accidentally found each other again in Manhattan years later and got married on the condition that they wouldn't have children, which condition was broken causing g.pa to return to Dresden and g.ma to raise Oskar’s father solo. Oskar, all the while, is on his quest and is met with predictable results: sympathetic ears but no knowledge of the key. In less than satisfying, deus ex machina fashion, the key thing gets solved and Oskar is left in front of his father’s dug up grave with his grandfather. And none of that is the thing that matters. Oskar’s plot � and all of the plot � is just a vehicle through which Foer can get to the true matter at hand. Postmodernism, in league with poststructuralism, renders all reality language, and tells us that nothing is ultimately knowable in a world of radical relativism. And Foer, well trained, writes into the novel his characters� attempts to write the world, to rejoin signifier and signified and fill the void at their centers. Really, writing is all over this book. But, of course, the poststructuralists were right and this isn’t possible and the writing can actually go on forever without a reconciliation with the sign, that most fundamental of voids. And it is precisely here that the novel hinges. The book uses 9/11 as a prism with which to reflect the unknowableness of reality, of our lives, and, in keeping with the New Sincerity, forces us to choose: optimism or pessimism, knowledge or faith? It’s to us to choose, and in choosing optimism we also choose to accept that Sincerity is a metanarrative and that we need it anyway in order to stabilize relativism and provide a center for our lives and society and culture. Foer forces the choice, and choosing demands an appropriately clichéd leap of faith; the leap is over the void dividing knowledge from faith, and it’s what pretty much everyone here is tragically lacking.
]]> The Fraud 66086834 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525558965.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith E. C. 4 3.25 2023 The Fraud
author: Zadie Smith
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves:
review:
The circumstances I found myself in when I read this meant that I read most of The Fraud in a state of pronounced distraction. The Fraud is telling something like three stories at once, each of which involves, what-do-you-know?, a fraud at its center. There’s the principal narrative about the hack novelist, William Ainsworth, who pals around with his fellow literati (including Dickens) in Victorian London while cranking out what turn out to be inferior novels (possibly thought up by a mysterious friend, Cruikshank). When I was reading this I was also doing final edits of my dissertation, which has taken me five years to write. The next major storyline involves a protracted court case concerning the true identity of a man who claims to be Sir Roger Tichborne, a nobleman presumed lost at sea after a shipwreck, but who might actually be a guy named Arthur Orton (this material is apparently drawn from the real-life Tichborne Case). News about the case’s progression through the courts is woven into the main narrative, and Ainsworth’s widowed cousin, Eliza Touchet, even attends at the courtroom to follow along and level her judgement on the matter. So I was writing all day and then distractedly reading a few chapters at night. From the court case we get the next narrative line—the curious history of one, Andrew Bogle, a former slave from Jamaica who claims to have come to work for Sir Roger and appears in court to testify that the man at the center of the case is who he says he is. Bogle fascinates Touchet � who already declared that Orton is an obvious con man � and asks to take him to dinner to hear his story. He obliges her, and spins the tale of his early years in Jamaica and the many intervening events that got him to England. What I mean to say is that I wanted to have a better review of this book (which I really liked) but wasn’t focused on it in that way that I normally am. Touchet finds herself torn after this autobiography, because she believes him and also knows that Orton is a fraud, and since she knows that Bogle benefits if Orton is found to be Tichborne, she’s forced to confront her ability to read people’s honesty and sincerity. I got it done though and sent the thing out two weeks ago to my committee and waited on tenterhooks to hear back, contributing further to my distraction. What we all know is coming finally comes when Orton is found to be Orton, Bogle lives out his days in England as a curiosity, and Ainsworth winds up having to move the family from London as his reputation gradually diminishes. None of this, in the end, is really the point though. The central issue, as the title conveniently announces to us, is the matter of fraudulence, which is being conveyed in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways. I find myself reflecting here on the metanarrative, and how Smith’s target appears to be not only the little lies we tell ourselves in a personal sense � Ainsworth blind to his mediocrity, Orton trying to be Sir Roger � but also the big lies we tell ourselves � race is scientifically real, social hierarchies reflect value � which we might refer to together as frauds. They got back to me yesterday to tell me that it had been approved, and so I’m finally done with grad school. This is where the novel really hums—Smith is writing about today’s social issues through this historical novel, molding questions about sincerity into commentary about the contemporary world, which happens to be just exactly what I write about in the final chapter of my diss. It’s nice to have my thesis confirmed like that. I’m pretty tired. I like White Teeth more but you can’t go wrong with ZS.
]]> A Frolic of His Own 1762601 586 William Gaddis 0671669842 E. C. 4 4.02 1994 A Frolic of His Own
author: William Gaddis
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2017/01/12
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Home Boy 6616312
But when they embark on a road trip to the hinterland weeks after 9/11 in search of the Shaman, a Gatsbyesque compatriot who seemingly disappears into thin air, things go horribly wrong. Suddenly, they find themselves in a changed, charged America.

Rollicking, bittersweet, and sharply observed, Home Boy is at once an immigrant’s tale, a mystery, and a story of love and loss, as well as a unique meditation on Americana and notions of collective identity. It announces the debut of an original, electrifying voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 288 H.M. Naqvi 0307409104 E. C. 4 3.46 2009 Home Boy
author: H.M. Naqvi
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Passenger (The Passenger #1)]]> 60581087
Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.]]> 385 Cormac McCarthy 0593535227 E. C. 5 3.58 2022 The Passenger (The Passenger #1)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2024/03/01
shelves:
review:
I distinctly remember coming away from The Orchard Keeper, my first McCarthy, with a very strong what-in-the-hell-was-this? feeling, which in retrospect I recognize was a result of just not being a good enough reader yet to read that book. (Ditto Gravity’s Rainbow (the first two times), The Satanic Verses, and Ulysses.) Of course, the immediate effect of this experience was me thinking that I didn’t like McCarthy, a misapprehension that has now been set right because The Passenger was brilliant and everything that everyone says about McCarthy is right. This is about a brother, Robert “Bobby� Western, grieving the death (a suicide) of his sister, Alicia Western, who he loved more than he was supposed to and who loved him more than she was supposed to. Bobby, now some years after her suicide, works as a salvage diver in and around New Orleans, and the novel proper starts with him on a dive searching a crashed plane which he thinks evidences an impossible circumstance—that there is a missing passenger who somehow opened the fuselage door from the inside after the plane went down. This mystery is never really explained � this feels a bit like a McGuffin � but initiates the plot, which has Bobby look for answers and then find himself in trouble with the feds for reasons they aren’t very forthcoming about (we’re meant to understand that the reason they give as to why they’re coming after him � false tax filing � is not the real reason). These federal agents seize his accounts and assets and force Bobby to flee the country, which is how the novel ends. Cut into this primary narrative are the mini-chapters focused on Alicia, which are set off in italics and which present her in conversation with her most dominant hallucination � she’s both a math genius and a schizophrenic � The Thalidomide Kid, who is described à la Mario Incandenza (happy 33rd birthday, Mario) as having flippers like a seal and scars and who talks in Leo Gorcey-esque malaprops as she gradually makes her way to the choice to kill herself (which is how the novel actually begins (when you’re done with this, go back and re-read that first bit over again)). The centrality of that mystery looks to me to be a metaphor for the ineffable central to all our lives � that which can never be known to us, or fully known to us, and which is supplemented in the text by references to quantum physicists and mathematicians � which refocuses the necessity of trust in our lives � conveyed through the relationship between Bobby and Alicia. Now, whether the guilt that Bobby lives with is borne from the fact that he denied Alicia the consummation of this love or denied himself the consummation of this love or actually did consummate this love or because she eventually kills herself and he can’t regain this love isn’t clear. But it doesn’t matter. This is stylistically and thematically brilliant and manages to somehow be funny and the ambiguities just make it better.
]]> Homesick for Another World 34915570 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time

Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel.
And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition.

But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.

Bettering myself --
Mr. Wu --
Malibu --
The weirdos --
A dark and winding road --
No place for good people --
Slumming --
An honest woman --
The beach boy --
Nothing ever happens here --
Dancing in the moonlight --
The surrogate --
The locked room --
A better place]]> 294 Ottessa Moshfegh 0399562907 E. C. 3 3.62 2017 Homesick for Another World
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/28
date added: 2024/02/29
shelves:
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If you’re in the mood, there’s something very enjoyable about seeing writers of enormous talent like Moshfegh just noodling around with their craft. It’s something like watching batting practice—you get to see all the skill and power of players in the context of much lower stakes. Anyway, this is how I felt while reading Homesick, a collection that has quite a lot of quintessential Moshfeghian eeriness, and includes two stories (the first and last ones, as it happens) the clearly contain the DNA of her novels-to-be, MYoR&R and Lapvona, but is not, on its own, super duper amazing. If there’s a throughline here, it’s the exploration of thematic bathos—these stories tend to explore some fraught relationship that concludes when the denouement is rendered ridiculous. I love this stuff, and I’ll read everything that Moshfegh writes, but this one should probably come last.
]]> Falling Man 2439025 Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.

There is September 11, and then there are the days after, and finally the years.

Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.

First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.

These are lives choreographed by loss, grief, and the enormous force of history.

Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, and heartbreaking.]]> 246 Don DeLillo 1416546065 E. C. 4 3.31 2007 Falling Man
author: Don DeLillo
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/28
date added: 2024/02/28
shelves:
review:
In his first novel, Americana, DeLillo's main character, David Bell, invokes "the true power of the image" in reference to a still from From Here to Eternity, and anyone following DeLillo's career knows that Don himself is in thrall with that power too. The image that holds so much power in Falling Man is Richard Drew's haunting "Falling Man" photograph, capturing for many the horror of September Eleventh, functioning in the novel both as symbol and frame at the same time. The novel begins with Keith Neudecker walking out onto the concourse of the World Trade Center minutes after the attack and into a new world, post-9/11 America. He returns, absent-mindedly, to his wife, Lianne, who he's been separated from for a few years. Following a trip to the hospital, Keith and Lianne begin to reconcile their marriage, a reconciliation that is complicated by Keith's tryst with Florence Givens, a fellow survivor who he meets when he returns her briefcase which he'd recovered on the way out of the North Tower. But just as America's relationship with 9/11 starts out very strong and gradually weakens, so too does K.'s relationship with F., and K. winds up sticking it out with L. And that's basically it. K. keeps on living as best he can, while occasionally, throughout the city, a performance artist, David Janiak, reconstructs the "Falling Man" photo by suspending himself from a cable in public places, to the outrage and consternation of onlookers. Determining what the artist's message is is the work of reading this novel, and one's answer develops along with the text whereby, by the end of the book, I've become really sympathetic to Janiak whose message seems to be not a gimmicky appropriation of a famous picture or some pomo shock gag, but a sincere attempt to engage with the fear and pain of 9/11's victims. This eventual reading of Falling Man's message is also my eventual reading of Falling Man's message, an artistic endeavor reckoning with the trauma of September Eleventh by confronting and exploring its traumatic nature. Too, this exploration demands that the reader come to terms with the function of art in the face of such an event: Should it keep the moment raw and painful or ameliorate the event's consequent psychic pain. DeLillo is all about the intersection of art and terror/pain, and after reading this (again) I'm not sure where I fall, since it seems to me that with healing comes a fair bit of pain. And, really, that's the answer. As we've seen, healing from the wounds of 9/11 has been painful and has taken time and suffers setbacks each time we're reminded of the trauma. Falling Man takes careful reading and is poignant and sad and totally worth it.
]]> <![CDATA[Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)]]> 61812836 Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.]]> 336 Colson Whitehead 0385545150 E. C. 3 3.82 2023 Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)
author: Colson Whitehead
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/13
date added: 2024/02/14
shelves:
review:
Here’s the second installation of Whitehead’s crime trilogy, Crook Manifesto, that, like Harlem Shuffle before it, follows the life of furniture salesman slash fence, Ray Carney. Also like Harlem Shuffle, the novel is broken into three parts each of which is split up by a few years and portrays another criminal episode in Carney’s life. And if the first novel was about starting a business and learning how to use the criminal underworld to one’s advantage, then this one was about keeping the business and learning how corrupt government officials are even more useful than mere criminals. The story here is, in three parts, the murder of a cop, the shooting of a blaxploitation film in Harlem, and the discovery of corruption in the city council, and what these vignettes offer is an exploration of maturity, of how to work smarter by wielding the levers of power. The argument here, which has been made before, is how at a certain point there is no distinction between the powerful and the criminal, which reflects, for one thing, a political moment of seemingly unrepentant criminality. Beyond the content, Whitehead’s novel is another instance of contemporary realism and the use of history in fiction as a tacit structure rather than a subject of deconstruction. Which would be more exciting if the prose itself was more exciting, but it remains at what is to my ears a pedestrian register. Read Whitehead, but start with John Henry Days.
]]> Eileen 27876745 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]> 260 Ottessa Moshfegh 0143128752 E. C. 3 3.66 2015 Eileen
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/23
date added: 2024/01/24
shelves:
review:
By now we all know about the origins of Eileen, about how Moshfegh used a how-to guide to write a work of commercial fiction in order to not have to starve to death waiting to get noticed, and so how this novel’s at-times hackneyed plot is deliberate so as to reach a wide audience. And next to, say, Lapvona, there’s a mediocre-ness to this in the plot’s predictability and in the archetypical characters and in the straight-ahead formal realism and and and. And yet, this is still a good novel. Eileen, our antihero, is a young woman living at home in a small New England town, X-ville, where she works at a juvenile prison and takes care of slash endures her alcoholic father, Charlie. Her sister, Joanie, moved out and her mother is dead and there’s nothing keeping her in X-ville and so she has a vague plan for lighting out and getting free of her crappy circumstances. Here, then, all Eileen needs is a little push. Enter Rebecca, the stranger from abroad, who has come to work at the prison as an education specialist. After a new inmate, Lee, is brought in for killing his father, things turn weird, and the action rises as we approach the climax, which has Rebecca holding Lee’s mother, Rita, hostage in the basement of her house in an effort to elicit a confession about how Rita’s been complicit in her son’s serial sexual abuse (which is why Lee kills his father). A confession is, ultimately, tendered to Eileen (while she holds a gun (the Chekov’s Gun device, of course) up to Rita) which is then related to Rebecca, after which they figure they have to get out of town (Eileen’s junker of a car is a Dodge, of course (as in, “get out of Dodge�)) which is just what Eileen does. The real fun here is seeing the DNA that this book shares with Moshfegh’s others, how within a run-of-the-mill thriller Moshfegh’s principal themes � addiction, the grossness of private human behavior, enduring low-key violence from family � come through, and the real point here seems to me to be a totally uncontroversial feminist comment about the need to interrupt the systems that support violent men. This is Moshfegh’s weakest novel, sure, but if it’s on purpose then how bad is it really?
]]> McGlue 39872917 The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition.

Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . .: the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.]]> 145 Ottessa Moshfegh 052552276X E. C. 3 3.25 2014 McGlue
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/16
date added: 2024/01/16
shelves:
review:
Another weird little tale from a great writer of the uncanny follows McGlue, a sailor and a drunkard, who is accused of murdering his best mate, Johnson, but, because he’s always drunk, doesn’t seem to have a clear memory of what happened, and so is left to turn over accusation and denial in equal parts in his mind while also constantly narrating his desire for a drink. As will happen with novellas, time and space get collapsed and distorted here, emphasizing the story’s true allegorical nature, meaning that McGlue’s tortured ruminations are left wide open to symbolic readings, and here (even before getting to the ending) his drinking felt compensatory or self-medicating in the manner of someone confronting profound denial. Drinking-as-compensation-slash-denial is given some support as his thoughts regularly drift back to the ship’s scullery, referred to as “the fag� or “the fagger,� whom McGlue can’t seem to help thinking about and teasing and threatening and performing for, which I took (even before the ending) to be a clue to McGlue’s not-so-latent homosexuality and self-loathing and inner turmoil (manifesting as depraved alcoholism). Too, he’s described as having some kind of grotesque gash or fissure on his head, which is at times infected and at times lets his brains come out, suggesting again (even before the ending) that he can’t quite keep his id hidden away, that his subconscious desires are slowly seeping out. And then, at last, we get to the ending, depicting a drunk McGlue stabbing (more symbolism?) a drunk Johnson while they kiss in an alley. Even if I did anticipate the ending, this is still a really good book that follows in a tradition of maritime homoerotica and has a trove of symbols hidden away and is begging to be brought into queer theory and psychoanalytic courses across America’s English departments. Put this at the end of your Moshfegh list, but read it.
]]> <![CDATA[Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World]]> 53240804 LAND 464 Simon Winchester 0062938339 E. C. 2 3.80 2021 Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
author: Simon Winchester
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/09
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:
I’ve read enough Winchester now to know that this one wasn’t quite up to par. Rather than using something like a consistent throughline or a blatant hypothesis or even just history’s implied chronology to catalyze the writing, this was disjunct and confused, more rhizome than arbor. The too-short chapters that make up this too-long book cover many many topics all to do with land � e.g., imperialism, land enclosure and clearance, mining, trusts, reallocation � all-the-while failing to manifest a compelling argument or narrative. Add to that this I was constantly distracted by the frequent, egregulous typos and this was a miss for me. Given how the book begins and ends, I think that Winchester actually wanted to write about was climate change, and how climate change is affecting the land, and will continue to affect how we use it and where we live and maybe even how we think about it, but that he didn’t have enough to make a whole book out of what would likely be a lot of speculating and thought experimenting (a la The World Without Us) or was turned down by the publisher (who was clearly busy that week looking for copy editors) and so we got this instead. Not the worst thing I’ll read this year, but not the best either.
]]> Umbrella 12383443 Ulysses

It is 1971, and Zachary Busner is a maverick psychiatrist who has just begun working at a mental hospital in suburban north London. As he tours the hospital’s wards, Busner notes that some of the patients are exhibiting a very peculiar type of physical tic: rapid, precise movements that they repeat over and over. These patients do not react to outside stimuli and are trapped inside an internal world. The patient that most draws Busner’s interest is a certain Audrey Dearth, an elderly woman born in the slums of West London in 1890, who is completely withdrawn and catatonically tics with her hands, turning handles and spinning wheels in the air. Busner’s investigations into the condition of Audrey and the other patients alternate with sections told from Audrey’s point of view, a stream of memories of a bustling bygone Edwardian London where horse-drawn carts roamed the streets. In internal monologue, Audrey recounts her childhood, her work as a clerk in an umbrella shop, her time as a factory munitionette during World War I, and the very different fates of her two brothers. Busner’s attempts to break through to Audrey and the other patients lead to unexpected results, and, in Audrey’s case, discoveries about her family’s role in her illness that are shocking and tragic.]]> 397 Will Self 1408820145 E. C. 3 3.16 2012 Umbrella
author: Will Self
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/15
date added: 2023/12/15
shelves:
review:
This is an example of what I sometimes refer to as double black diamond fiction. Here, Self is working at Modern stream-of-consciousness of a kind with Faulkner and Joyce and Woolf, meaning that this is just unforgivingly challenging writing. Before even getting to what it’s about, you’re dealing with a four-hundred-page novel with zero line breaks, and so no differentiation between exposition, dialogue, and internal thoughts. There’s also no typological distinction to indicate shifts in perspective across characters or shifts in time. Which is all to say that this is really really tough all around. The story follows a psychiatrist, Zack Busner, and mental patient, Audrey Death, in the Friern Barnet Psychiatric Hospital in North London, which, given the time jumps, means that we’re getting them before coming to Friern, during, and after. And so we get a lot of Audrey during WWI working at a munitions plant while one of her brothers, Stanley, fights in the trenches (and dies), and a lot of Zack after leaving Friern reflecting on what went so wrong with his patients there. The effect of s.-o.-c. is, of course, kaleidoscopic in a way that makes plot summary challenging, but the real heart of the book lives in the descriptions of the war and that war’s consequent madness. It’s in this that the novel’s argument is most clearly stated: modern technology since the Great War has served to make us crazier and crazier, muting the humanistic claims often asserted with the introduction of those new technologies. (The Jekyll-and-Hydeness of modern tech. is ever-realized by Fritz Haber.) As the story of periodization is usually told, it’s the failures of Western civilization as symbolized by WWI that led to the Modernist movement in the first place, and then it’s the combination of WWII and the failure of Modernism to truly “Make It New� that led to postmodernism, and so I’m left wondering why Self sought a return to Modernism � or, at least, Modern form � to write this novel, especially when the culture’s relationship to the First World War is, at best, a distant one, and also since our relationship to technology has evolved so greatly in the intervening hundred years. Since Modernism’s over, in other words. And the answer to that question is likely that the lesson we should have learned after the Somme and the Marne and Ypres and Verdun is one that we still haven’t learned. Civilization is a thin patina covering up the ugliness of human nature and the salvific promise of technology is either grossly overestimated or an outright sham. This is a position that I’m pretty sympathetic to, and the novel is brilliant and deserves a considerate audience. But it’s not exactly what I’d call fun either. Skiing is dangerous; wear a helmet.
]]> <![CDATA[Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2)]]> 60526802
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.]]> 190 Cormac McCarthy 0307269000 E. C. 4 3.83 2022 Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/29
date added: 2023/12/01
shelves:
review:
In this, the companion novel to The Passenger, McCarthy shifts the focus away from Bobby and concentrates on his math-genius sister, Alicia. And so really, Stella Maris is all the backstory and inner-life of this character who doesn’t feature so heavily in the first book. What we come to learn is just how gifted she really is, how quickly she got to college and then graduate school, how she started and then abandoned her dissertation, and how she would up in Stella Maris, a asylum that she’s checked herself into. As this biography unfolds in what are just a series of conversations with a single psychiatrist over the span of a week (these read like a bored Deep Thought from Hitchhiker’s Guide being interviewed), we’re also let into how her understanding of mathematics came to spill over into philosophy, which is what McCarthy actually cares about here. This kind of philosophical discussion will be familiar to readers of The Sunset Limited (another text that this put me in mind of), focusing on the nature of reality (mathematic or linguistic?), whether there is a tool (mathematics or language) to bridge reality with human perception, and whether our awareness of how much we don’t know permits the invitation of a deity. I am absolutely the right audience for this book and it was still inferior to The Passenger (if only just). Also, I wouldn’t read this on its own, so get both.
]]> <![CDATA[9-11: Was There an Alternative?]]> 10369388 170 Noam Chomsky 1609803434 E. C. 3 3.62 2001 9-11: Was There an Alternative?
author: Noam Chomsky
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/05
date added: 2023/11/06
shelves:
review:
This wasn’t the robust analysis that I was hoping it would be. What you get here is an essay, written post-Bin Laden assassination about the legacy of 9/11 and it’s historical reverberations, and then a bunch of transcribed interviews that Chomsky gave very soon after 9/11, and then a mini-essay about 9/11 originally published for a Swedish newspaper. Since the interviews all took place at roughly the same time (as in, like, only weeks apart) Chomsky gives very similar answers to what amount to very similar questions. All of this is to say that this is not the world’s most in-depth take on 9/11. It’s value, then, is simply how Chomsky frames the event and cautions against the retaliation that the Bush administration was pitching to the public at the time (i.e., a war with Afghanistan). Here, Chomsky urges that this be treated as a criminal matter rather than a act of war � arguing that the US should capture bin Laden and try him in court � since to start a war would be to deliver to al Qaeda exactly what they want. His framing gesture, such as I can make it out here, is to suggest that we resist a reflexive military response and think twice about how we want to define and then deal with terrorism (since, for Chomsky, we would fail our own definition and would never permit other states to respond the way we did). Since I know a little bit about 9/11 already, I wanted him to expand (a lot) on why we shouldn’t think of 9/11 as a reaction to globalization (he makes this point several times, but isn’t able to defend it in the space of these radio interviews), and hear what, if anything, he has to say about Islam in relation to terrorism (surely he has addressed this elsewhere). So, an interesting historical document, but not much more than that.
]]> Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma 61685822 From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.

In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.]]> 257 Claire Dederer 0525655115 E. C. 4 3.75 2023 Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
author: Claire Dederer
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/03
date added: 2023/11/03
shelves:
review:
“At the base of every great work of art is a pile of barbarism.� So sayeth the philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin, a guy who knew plenty about both art and barbarism, and so quoteth memoirist-critic Claire Dederer several times within her book about what to do with the art of monstrous men. Benjamin’s point, Dederer is quick to explain, is that the great artists that produce the great works are, at some level, quite often outwardly, terse selfish shitty people who take advantage of those they’re closest to in order answer to their respective muses. Those same great artists, Dederer is also quick to point out, are almost invariably men, whose great works often sit atop figurative piles of neglected abused abandoned women. ’Twas ever thus, right? And anyway, the New Criticism we were all raised on � specifically, here, the biographical fallacy � insulates the work from the artist—we must treat the art on its own terms and not permit what we know about the artist to invade our thoughts about the work. This New Critical sensibility, in my experience, has assumed an all-but-unimpeachable status of best practice and common sense. After all, it’s no good tossing aside Finnegans Wake as a testimony to a broken, deteriorated brain because we know Joyce was syphilitic. And the reverse is also true, and probably more important. We can’t treat artists as though they’ve done the things they describe in their art, the two must remain separate in our minds (Nabokov and Lolita present the most obvious example here). That New Critical lode star is, though, starting to fade, or at least the part about not letting biography color our assessment of artists� work. This, then, is the jumping off point for Monsters, a meditation on the now-pressing question of what to do with the art of monstrous men at a time, post-Internet, when artists� biographies are so well documented and known to us, and at a time, post-#MeToo, when the monstrousness of such men is not only widely recognized but also demands a response. Dederer’s response, evidenced throughout her book, is smart and nuanced and just pitch-perfect, especially given how challenging (impossible?) the question that animates this writing is to answer. I was hoping for something coldly cerebral, and secretly fearing a scorched-earth jeremiad, but what I got was neither, really. It was intellectual and honest; critical and vulnerable. I didn’t know this when I started (I hadn’t heard of her before I started this), but Dederer is principally a memoir writer, and this informs both her style and her approach to this question, which is so hard to answer in part because of the Liebe zur Kunst we feel about our particular favorites, which, of course, we’re loath to dispense with even after learning of the shitty things those Künstler have done (e.g., me and DFW). So, the thing that makes Dederer so adept here is not just documenting what artist did what monstrous thing (on this count I think that she assumes too much knowledge on the reader’s part) but how she captures the emotionally turbulent experience of grappling with the question. Predictably, there aren’t, at the end of this, any definitive answers about what to do with the art of monstrous men. But that isn’t a failure of the book or of Dederer. Rather, it’s an indication of how vexed the question is. Ultra-orthodox fealty to New Criticism isn’t the answer. Cancelling artists isn’t the answer. The tortured perpetual consideration of the answerless question is the answer.
]]> The Shards 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X E. C. 2 3.98 2023 The Shards
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/10/30
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves:
review:
Here, Bret Easton Ellis writes the story of Bret Ellis � a character who, coincidentally, has quite a few biographical details in common with the author � a closeted teenager living in Los Angeles in the early eighties. Bret’s only apparent motivation, at the beginning, is to keep up appearances at his private school, Buckley, through his senior year before getting to college and becoming a writer � he’s working on a novel called, what do you know?, Less Than Zero � and also not having his “secret� exposed to his girlfriend, Debbie, and the rest of the school. This totally achievable plan is interrupted by the arrival of a new student, Robert Mallory, who rearranges the social constellation of the school through the combination of mystery � he’s new, so we don’t know anything about him yet � and good looks. Bret, though, is immediately suspicious of Robert, who, Bret feels, is hiding something. In the background to this high school melodrama are the inexplicably grotesque exploits of the Trawler, a serial killer who appears to be targeting attractive teenage girls, the exact same kinds of girls who can’t help but fawn over Robert Mallory. After some unflattering details of Robert’s mysterious past get made known to Bret, he starts trying to determine whether Robert is, as he suspects, the Trawler. As the circumstantial evidence mounts, Bret becomes more and more certain the he’s right, while his obsession with Robert means that he’s failing to maintain the social façade that keeps his life on an even keel, meaning that he’s becoming more and more unstable and unpredictable and kind of dangerous until eventually he’s so convinced that he’s right that he confronts Robert and either assists in his suicide or kills him (depending on how you read the scene). Stylistically, this is a big departure from Ellis’s other fiction � it reminds me of the authorial voice from White � and fails to successfully capture the benumbed ennui of the eighties that I, for one, come to Ellis for. And then also the book is too long, and the dialogue is painfully stilted, and the autofictional mode that Ellis employs is distracting, and I just don’t think this book works. This put me in mind of Stephen Chbosky’s Imaginary Friend, which I hoped was going to continue what Perks of Being a Wallflower started, but which turned out to be an over-bloated horror novel. If there’s something here it’s the pain the gay characters endure in order to maintain a lie about themselves that keeps everyone else comfortable translated into an anonymous violence that permeates the setting as well as the absence of parents as a metaphor for postmodernism’s lack of guidance. This, though, isn’t enough to rescue The Shards. I’ll read his next one but I’m preparing to pinch my nose as I do.
]]> The Nickel Boys 43269446 This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner's conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead 0345804341 E. C. 4 4.34 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/29
date added: 2023/10/29
shelves:
review:
As a consequence of the War on Terror a lot of critical attention has been paid in recent years to liminal categories of citizenship (and, really, personhood) that attends to those who don't quite fit into an easily identifiable legal position. This interstitial position is called extra-legality (as in, beyond the bounds of the law), and, the thinking goes, it must be in place (both psychologically, in the minds of actants, and structurally, in the mechanisms of governments) before such extra-legal persons can be maltreated. The go-to example to illustrate this concept is extraordinary rendition and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp where habeas corpus and jurisprudence and due process are all suspended as uncharged enemies of the state remain imprisoned indefinitely and without legal recourse. This system is justified because the personhood of those kept in Guantanamo isn't legally recognized � they are citizens of no country, in a geographic territory outside the purview of law � but it is even possible in the first place because suspected terrorists aren't seen as people by either their jailers or by the governments conducting the renditions. So the extra-legal person is, as Colin Dayan has it, superfluous, and that condition of superfluity continues because the rest of us allow it to. Yet Gitmo is just the most immediate example of extra-legality; there are other more ubiquitous, less obvious examples to draw from. Like, for instance, the position of non-whites in America since pretty much forever. Now to some extent we've been talking about black extra-legality (albeit without using that term) in this country for a while; after all, conversations about equal rights from the three-fifths compromise to abolition to enfranchisement to desegregation have all orbited around the need to either construct or deconstruct the belief that blacks are less than whole persons who can legally be treated differently under the very laws that define them as different, that set them outside legal terra firma. The contemporary conversations about wokeness is only the latest instantiation of the larger political discourse on race, but, while this discourse has a pretty long history already, entering into this discursive sphere can be really rather treacherous indeed. It's my sense that holding the position that abolishing slavery was a good thing is, by now, not terribly controversial. But it's also my sense that discussions of race in America today � especially discussions of white perceptions of black humanity and the systematically enforced discrepancies between white and black wealth and privilege � are so politically charged that they have FRONT TOWARD ENEMY written all over them. Telling a white man that his privilege has afforded him innumerable unseen benefits, that, in fact, he has not worked hard for everything he's gotten, is a dangerous proposition in 2019. And that now-angry white guy isn't (necessarily) crazy for reacting negatively; no one likes to be told that they're not quite self-made and that they're complicit in a system designed not just to lift you up but also to keep others down and that, really, your success comes at the cost of others� suffering. Acknowledging this, though, is the crucial first step toward something like a sound demos. The next two far harder steps are recognizing the myriad sources of black extra-legality and then presenting this information in a convincing way that makes one's reader understand the problem without getting defensive about it. Colson Whitehead, who knows all this and who, throughout his career, has attempted to contend with this idea, writes in The Nickel Boys his clearest and fullest circumscription and criticism of black extra-legality in America to date, performing those two next steps by showing how the impossibly complex legacies of slavery and Jim Crow rendered black lives as less valuable and more manipulable than white lives by way of showing the structural inequality we continue to contend with, and by then packaging this message in a text delivered by a sympathetic narrator. Here, the narrator recalls the life of Elwood Curtis immediately prior to and following his stint at the Nickel School for Boys, a prison dressed up as reformatory. Elwood, a stand-up young black boy growing up in segregated Florida in the fifties and early sixties is bound for college and, as much as a high-school age kid can, participates in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Since his parents lit out for California when Elwood was little he’s lived with and been raised by his grandmother, who is proud of El’s accomplishments and wants to see him succeed in school, though she has misgivings about all this protesting business. Basically, Elwood is a smart, conscientious guy whose future is bright and who thinks that his righteousness will be his protection. On his way to his first college class he gets picked up by a man in a stolen car, and after getting pulled over, despite his innocence, Elwood is sent to Nickel. Nickel, the reader comes to find out, amounts to a labor camp that remains profitable due to its regular replenishment of labor and because of the outright corruption of the administration. Elwood, due to his intelligence, gets recruited into this corruption as he’s assigned to deliver the food meant for the black students (Nickel is still segregated) to the local businesses in town, the profits from which go to the admins who set the scheme up. But Elwood, due to his intelligence, sees in this assignment an opportunity—he records every detail of every delivery he makes so that some day he can give it to someone who might do something about Nickel’s depraved culture. His chance comes when the school is scheduled for a state inspection, and as the inspectors walk the campus, Elwood’s chronicle of malfeasance is handed over. This leads to a shitstorm for Elwood who, cutting out a lot of narrative, expects to be killed at Nickel, and who, therefore, attempts an escape with his friend Turner. Even though Nickel is based on a real place that really did murder children to cover up yet other iniquities, its power builds out of its status as metaphor. For Nickel functions in the novel as a means of concentrating a general condition diffused throughout America then as now: black extra-legality. This connects to contemporary issues of hyper-incarceration and police killings and diatribes about the nanny state subsidizing deadbeats, all of which are predicated on the sense � felt if not consciously recognized � that blacks aren’t whole persons and so can be harassed and manipulated and murdered without consequences equal to the harassment or manipulation or murder of whites. Whitehead’s brilliance here is how he delivers this incredibly nuanced argument without using dysphemisms like “extra-legal� and “privilege;� he uses his brain and goes for the heart. In doing all this, Whitehead also provides a kind of longitudinal study of how trauma and disenfranchisement get inherited just like wealth and privilege do, how the knock-on effects of our nation’s earliest sins continue to resonate and demand our attention. The Nickel Boys doesn’t solve racism and it can’t put right the heinous crimes committed in pursuit of racism’s perverse logic, but it does advance the culture’s awareness of the depth and breadth of racism’s fallout zone, and that’s something we badly need right now.
]]> The clang birds;: A novel 129630145 218 John L'Heureux E. C. 4 4.00 1993 The clang birds;: A novel
author: John L'Heureux
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/09
date added: 2023/10/29
shelves:
review:
Whenever I pick up a non-canonical postmodernist (ahem, Gilbert Sorrentino) I feel a little twinge of concern knowing that experimental excess gone wrong is a good reason for being left out of the canon. Which is to say, if it was any good there’d be more people talking about it, and since they’re aren’t it isn’t. My recent experience with Mulligan Stew is a case in point; the only people reading it are academics who read it to feel superior to other academics. Anyway, for all these reasons The Clang Birds was a very pleasant surprise. The story is about a group of Thomasite priests at Harvard (only ever referred to in the novel as “the University�) who decide to move in together to one half of a duplex in order to start their own order dedicated to “radical Christianity.� This radical Christianity, once they’ve moved out of their cloister and away from their Superiors, fails, predictably, to take any real shape, as we see them fall more and more into secular life. This means that they habitually take up with women � a few of whom are nuns � or think about women or think about how they’d rather be doing something that seems to matter since the backdrop to this narrative is the Vietnam War’s escalation in Cambodia and Kent State. By dint of flash forwards, we gradually learn who will and who won’t stick it out in the priesthood, and so also who among this group winds up with who. The heart of this thing is, of course, the nature of religion and the process of ordination, which is captured by the image of the Clang Bird, a bird that flies in ever-tighter concentric circles until it eventually flies up its own ass (scholars of Wallace will recognize this as the premise of one of his unpublished juvenilia), which in the story is paired with Natalie’s repeated criticism of “Catholic logic.� L’Heureux, who was laicized the year before this was published, clearly has a bone to pick here, and I’ll cop to being given to picking that same bone myself, but I am also far more interested in reading the Clang Bird as a model for postmodernism itself (what Wallace had in mind with his story (he eventually uses “the Kekulian serpent� in “Westward� to refer to this idea)), as an unsustainable aesthetic once it begins to comment on its own production (i.e., metafiction). This is a forced reading, sure, but I came to this novel in the first place through Wallace, so there you go. At the end of the whole everything this is a good little novel that has a lot to offer both as political commentary and as an aesthetic artifact.
]]> Zero K 30753723
Don DeLillo’s seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world against the beauty and humanity of everyday life. It is a glorious, soulful work from one of the great writers of our time.]]> 288 Don DeLillo 1501138073 E. C. 3 3.42 2016 Zero K
author: Don DeLillo
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/11
date added: 2023/10/11
shelves:
review:
Here we get DeLillo covering ground he’s covered before (and covered better (or, I don’t know, more flashily)). As usual, prevalent themes include the line dividing faith in the power of technology and religious faith, successful fathers and adrift sons, and (postmodern) bathos, and it’s the first of these that is easiest to contend with. Zero K is about Jeffrey Lockhart, whose father, Ross, arranged for his step-mother, Artis, to be cryogenically preserved until such time as she could be revived (resurrected?) and cured of her illness. (This preservation process, by the way, sounds a lot like the hibernation the astronauts on the Discovery One were put into before the launch in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) This site is in, like, Uzbekistan, and is called the Convergence and is a cross between a sterile laboratory, a day spa, and a cult’s headquarters. The Convergence is DeLillo’s vehicle for asking questions about when life ends and whether faith in technology’s salvific potential diminishes the human experience and how the wealthy get to live longer than the poor (this last one’s not really a question). Folded into this narrative, and juxtaposed against the Convergence stuff, is the memory of Jeff’s mother’s, Madeline, death, which Ross wasn’t around for and which was final (as in, no hope of resurrection). I always imagine Don writing with rictused face, head propped up by a single hand massaging his temple in front of a typewriter. And I imagine that because his tone is so disaffected and exhausted and strained. Zero K read to me like an older man’s version of White Noise, though it didn’t offer much in the way of pyrotechnic writing or urgent sense of significance. Rather, the novel just calmly describes one direction our technology will (likely) allow us to explore (longer artificial life), and how the culture will need to catch up to that reality (with a new vocabulary, if nothing else). Inasmuch as I got the sense that the promise of the Convergence wasn’t going to be met, there’s a lesson here about not affording too much trust in modern technology’s ability to rescue us from ourselves, but then like I say, DeLillo’s done that before, and better.
]]> Death in Her Hands 52878453
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body". Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to area, having moved her from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few people. And she's a little shaky even on best days. Her brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation, strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she seems be facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one - one that strikes closer to home.

A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, 'Death in Her Hands' asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, only this time the stakes have never been higher.]]> 259 Ottessa Moshfegh 1984879359 E. C. 5 3.25 2020 Death in Her Hands
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/16
date added: 2023/09/16
shelves:
review:
There’s something indefinably eerie about Moshegh’s novels—there’s an emotional disconnection that is matched by a not-quite-real setting that paints the text with allegorical colors. And this, like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, seems to be taking aim at language and narrative as the subject of a book that is obviously composed of language and narrative, meaning that the allegorical tone (or whatever it is I’m sensing here) of not-quite-reality allows me to read meaning into every word and character and action. Anyway, the story is about an old woman, Vesta Gul (pronounced “gull� but everyone says “gool� (as in, ghoul)), a widow who lives with her dog, Charlie, in a former Girl Scout camp on a lake in an isolated part of Levant, the town she’s recently moved to. On a walk with Charlie one morning she finds a note weighted to the ground with pebbles that reads, “Her name was Magda. No one will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.� These, in fact, are the opening lines of the novel, and, since there actually isn’t a body present, the rest of the book follows Vesta as she attempts to solve the mystery of Magda’s apparent murder. To do this she looks up how to do this (on a library computer, using Ask Jeeves) and is directed to, what do you know?, guides for how to write murder mysteries. Taking this advice, Vesta fleshes out character names and profiles, giving names and backstories to suspects and accomplices of her own invention so as to make sense of this bizarre note that she found on a path near her house. As we move through the novel, Vesta runs into people who she realizes are the people involved in Magda’s death � not exactly characters come to life, but Vesta’s prescience realized � while also bickering with her now-deceased husband, Walter, in her mind. And here, through these conversations she has with Walter, we realize how lonely she is, and how unhappy she was with Walter, and how, at the end of her life, she’s not so sure she’s used it well, and maybe she’s also getting a bit dotty, and how, just maybe, she wrote the note that she found and is involved in solving a non-existent mystery of her own design. Just exactly as a murder-mystery novelist would. Here, then, is how the novel comes off as allegorical, and, moreover, an allegory for the very writing process that allegories and novels and everything is a part of. And this all sounds, on its face, like postmodern Lazarus awake from the dead (death in her hands?), but, again like MYoR&R, the ending makes clear that this is not a text about text to the exclusion of the real world (à la pomo), that, in other words, the real world is still solidly, stubbornly here. We can still metacogitate about writing without getting pulled into an ontological abyss. Moshfegh is a killer.
]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 E. C. 5 3.62 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/13
date added: 2023/09/13
shelves:
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This novel puts in mind of Alicia Ostriker’s poem, “The Window, at the Moment of Flame.� It’s a short poem, and worth reading in its entirety, but the first line in this elegiac response to September Eleventh is, “And all this while I have been playing with toys.� What I find so haunting about that poem is how succinctly it captures the pre-9/11 American disposition of privileged obliviousness that was, along with the World Trade Center towers themselves, made to fall that Tuesday morning. This part of the 9/11 story � American excess serving to blind us from the rest of the world � is often avoided since it’s suggestive of American complicity in the attacks (an argument that Baudrillard explicitly makes), and therefore uncomfortable if not dangerous. This novel, though, is about that privileged obliviousness. Here, the unnamed first-person narrator describes the circumstances leading to her decision to attempt to spend a year in near-constant sleep, waking only to eat a little, drink a little, occasionally bathe, and then take another combination of pills that will put her back down. In her somnambulant haze, she describes her fraught relationship with her on-again-off-again boyfriend-slash-hookup Trevor, and her fraught relationship with Reva, her neurotic best friend (who she really doesn’t like very much), and her fraught relationship with her Parents, both of whom are dead (to cancer and suicide respectively) and both of whom were, in life, emotionally distant (bordering on abusive). Little by little, as the details of these relationships are rendered, we come to understand that she’s not only unhappy but depressed � perhaps to the point of suicide herself � and using sleep to cope with the emotional pain of those deaths. If that weren’t enough, this is all happening across 2000 and 2001, with Trevor and (thanks to a promotion) Reva working in the Twin Towers. It is, of course, this aspect of the book that forces us to read this as (at least in part) a comment on 9/11—as a 9/11 novel. And so I’m put in mind of Ostriker’s poem, and how Moshfegh is working to portray that quality of oblivion that the culture was in thrall to ahead of the attacks. Like the narrator, it was sad, yes, and pitiable even, but also frivolous, and only possible by virtue of a relatively outsized privilege, and manifested through a willful ignorance. That the narrator snaps out of it just as the attacks are about to transpire evidences the greater effect the attacks had on the culture. No longer asleep; no longer not aware of what’s going on. “Welcome to the world,� Arundhati Roy tells us. This book was amazing.
]]> Mason & Dixon 413
We follow the mismatch'd pair—one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic—from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.]]> 773 Thomas Pynchon 0312423209 E. C. 2 4.12 1997 Mason & Dixon
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1997
rating: 2
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:
Foof. This one was a slog for reasons that weren’t entirely the fault of the book. But then, as anyone whose read long-form Pynchon knows, his stuff can take some time to get through. Okay, so here Pynchon offers his take on American mytho-history by telling the story of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, a couple of surveyors who came eventually to determine the line dividing Pennsylvania and Maryland, and so settle a long and bitter land dispute. If there’s anything especially remarkable about this it’s that M&D were both British and their work in America transpired just ahead of the Revolutionary War. The novel fills and fills and fills in the details of their working lives and relationship across a few decades in the late-Eighteenth century. And this detail-filling is conducted in the form and style of contemporary Eighteenth century novels (it’s actually a frame narrative being told by one Wicks Cherrycoke to his nieces and nephews) which is really what this novel is all about. Exactly in the same way that Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor works (and there are a bunch of references to Barth in here), Pynchon’s parodic use of old-timey language and form is in itself a comment on language and form. Obviously, both authors and texts are exemplars of postmodern lit., which is itself pretty much all about demonstrating the interplay of language on form—and so here, the work I see Pynchon doing is to present, as much pomo fic does, a self-evidently unreal world through the deployment of language that calls attention to itself. I’m too burned out on writing about form to give the full lecture on what I mean, so suffice it to say that Pynchon takes the pomo premise that everything is language and that language is at best the afterimage of reality and applies it to the world and comes back with a world that isn’t really real. Which is what makes his stiff so hard to get through. As you already know, all Pynchon comes with a double black diamond Surgeon General’s Warning. Readers beware.
]]> Between the Acts 46105 224 Virginia Woolf 015611870X E. C. 3 3.64 1941 Between the Acts
author: Virginia Woolf
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1941
rating: 3
read at: 2019/06/03
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves:
review:
This novel reads like a not-quite-intentional parody of a novel of British manners. Between the Acts, as the book's jacket copy reads, follows the lives of the residents in a provincial English village over the span of a single day in June, 1939, during which the townsfolk gather to take in a pageant. This pageant, both an annual tradition and a fundraising effort, is viewed as a chore by most of the audience, who have come to expect little by way of entertainment or edification based, it would seem, not on experience but on popular opinion about such experience. This year's particular pageant is a kind of history of Britain in review, each act constituting the miniature dramatization of a discrete period of British history. As the jacket copy will also tell you, the story is more about what occurs between the acts of this pageant than it is about the pageant itself. And it's between these acts that all the ellipsis and aposiopesis and furtive thoughts and belabored internal querying about behavioral tics and peccadilloes gets spun ever outward. And so it is here that the reader slowly cops to Isabella's jealousy of the attention her husband, Giles, pays to Mrs. Manresa, and to how Lucy would rather be reading this history than see it performed, and to how the pageant's author, Miss La Trobe, laments the limitations of her production (in terms of stage, costumes, and skilled actors) and of her audience (in terms of attention and sophistication), and to how everyone's worried that it might rain. The pageant concludes with the present with the act titled "Ourselves" that features, in a moment evocative of Beckett (or J. O. Incandenza), a collection of mirrors set before the audience who are left to behold themselves and are consequently freaked out by it. This culmination of tale and frame-tale is the novel's triumph, compounding, as it does, the point of the pageant and the point of the novel. Set three months before Britain's declaration of war with Germany (and published two years after that declaration), Between the Acts - a novel, recall, in which everyone is looking to the horizon and worrying about an impending storm - dramatizes Britain's anxiety about the second World War at a moment just between the "acts" of those two wars when the events of the present were about to enter history. Yes, it's a little contrived, and, yes, it's a little on-the-nose, but Woolf portrays the ineptitude of the emotional constipation that characterizes British social discourse in the face of looming disaster. I never felt as plugged into the consciousness of any of the characters as I did with Mrs. Dalloway, and wanted a fuller exposition of Giles and Isa's marriage, but this remains a fine novel by a canonical writer.
]]> <![CDATA[The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed]]> 18222676
Weaving her own experience with remarkable new discoveries, Grandin introduces the advances in neuroimaging and genetic research that link brain science to behavior, even sharing her own brain scan to show which anomalies might explain common symptoms. Most excitingly, she argues that raising and educating kids on the autism spectrum must focus on their long-overlooked strengths to foster their unique contributions.

The Autistic Brain brings Grandin’s singular perspective into the heart of the autism revolution.]]> 256 Temple Grandin 0544227735 E. C. 4 4.35 2013 The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed
author: Temple Grandin
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/09
date added: 2023/06/09
shelves:
review:
Part–scientific review, part-advocacy, The Autistic Brain is an easy-to-read primer on the biology of autism. Here, Grandin walks through the history of the autism diagnosis � from a poorly understood condition, to a psychological disorder engendered by frigid mothers, to a proper DSM designation � on the way to reviewing the most up-to-date studies being done on autism at the time of the writing. This allowed Grandin to discuss trials that she participated in, using her own autism to anchor discussions about what autism is like and how her own experiences have occasionally led her to misunderstand the broad spectrum captured in the single word “autism.� Woven throughout is Grandin’s gentle call to action for a re-thinking of autism as a problem that needs to be corrected for to a circumstance like any other that comes with positives and negatives. Her experience, which seems to remain the norm, is that autistic people, especially kids, don’t typically get praised for what they excel at, since so much of their daily life is taken up by corrective interventions of some kind or another. Grandin’s biography, which she regularly cites as an exception, evidences what may result from encouraging the talents of autistic minds in combination with whatever interventions are required to get along in the allistic world. Grandin is pragmatic, which will grate if you’re inclined to burn it all down and start again, and the book is for laypeople, which will frustrate if you’re looking for something technical on the order of a scientific journal. But if you’re like me � i.e., simply interested in learning more about how autism works � then this is a fine start.
]]> <![CDATA[You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American Fiction)]]> 45633 You Bright and Risen Angels is the work of an extraordinary imagination. In this free-wheeling novel of epic proportions, William T. Vollmann has crafted a biting, hilarious satire of history, technology, politics, and misguided love.]]> 635 William T. Vollmann 0140110879 E. C. 3 4.04 1987 You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American Fiction)
author: William T. Vollmann
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/05
date added: 2023/06/06
shelves:
review:
This is one of those weird evolutionary experiments that occur in the transition between major periods. Like Pleistocene megafauna, this novel sits between postmodernism and its then-yet-to-be-named successor, and so, as with, like, giant beavers and ground sloths, Vollmann’s book is strange and ungainly and doomed to extinction while also carrying certain traits, like metametafiction and sincerity, that are recognizably contemporary. What this is is a story about a war between insects and modernity (conveyed throughout by the invention and use of electricity), between the insect allies, the revolutionary Kuzbuites led by Bug, and their more powerful antagonists, the reactionaries, led by Mr. White and Dr. Dodger. In broad strokes, Bug, a picked-upon boy, becomes allied with the insects at a young age and ultimately grows up to lead the Kuzbuites in service to the Great Beetle, leader of bugdom, while Bug’s tormentors, Wayne and Parker especially, grow up to serve the seemingly all-powerful White (infinitely wealthy administrator) and Dodger (inventor of electricity and everything else) in this war. The novel doesn’t really offer scenes of battle as one might expect in a book “about a war,� focusing instead on the conflicting ideologies and political posturing done in service to that war. What this means is that we get a lot of description about preparations made for battle and description about clandestine action taken to gain advantage in battle and description of how the truly powerful manipulate their pawns so as to ensure victory. So, taken at face value, this is an intricate, and exceedingly dense sci-fi novel without anything more to recommend it than that it reminds me of giant beaver. But by focusing on the nature of the conflict between insects and modernity � and by considering that Vollmann started this following a stint with the mujahedeen during the Afghan-Soviet conflict � the true depth of this novel’s comment begins to resolve into view: This is, first, an allegory for the Afghan-Soviet Conflict, where the bugs are the mujahedeen, in that they’re both relatively powerless, but also undefeatable in any real sense; This is about the digitization of the world, which goes a long way in explaining what all this business about electricity and “blue globes� is about, but also in explaining the threat presented by bugs, as bugs thwart and undermine all tech./computer systems; This is about “bugs in systems� more generally, meaning that the novel is about the endless, anonymous wars waged against flawed systems (e.g., economics, government, the internet). As with these real-world conflicts, the victor in the novel isn’t really clear, as these conflicts don’t really have conclusions, and so maybe this all just reduces down to violence, the violence of progress, the violence of globalization, the violence of economic oppression. This is seriously challenging fiction that I’m not quite convinced gives back what it asks of its reader, but there is something here if you’re willing to look.
]]> Mulligan Stew 155159 446 Gilbert Sorrentino 1564780872 E. C. 2 3.83 1979 Mulligan Stew
author: Gilbert Sorrentino
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/25
date added: 2023/05/25
shelves:
review:
Okay, Mulligan Stew is a novel by avant-garde, experimental novelist, Gilbert Sorrentino, about a self-proclaimed avant-garde, experimental novelist, Antony Lamont (yes, O’Nolan’s Lamont), who is struggling to write a novel, Guinea Red (later, Crocodile Tears), which is about the murder (maybe) of Ned Beaumont (yes, Hammett’s Beaumont) at the hands of Martin Halpin (yes, Joyce’s Halpin) over the affections of Daisy Buchanan (yes, Fitzgerald’s Buchanan) and (maybe) also because Beaumont has been embezzling money from the publishing house that he and Halpin co-own to sponsor the pornographers Corrie Corriendo and Berthe Delamode in their endeavor to open Club Zap. The pages of Mulligan Stew, then, present a collage of texts, including: chapters from the novel-Guinea Red/Crocodile Tears-within-the-novel-Mulligan Stew; letters by the author, Lamont, of the novel-within-the-novel; journal entries from a character, Halpin, of the novel-within-the-novel; inventories of texts found within the world of the novel-within-the-novel; book reviews for books by Lamont’s contemporaries; editors� prologues for books by Lamont’s contemporaries; interviews of Lamont’s contemporaries; snippets from Lamont’s early short-stories; notes on plotting the novel-within-the-novel; heavily footnoted mathematical treatises; revised chapters of the novel-within-the-novel; letters between characters from the world of the novel-within-the-novel; et fucking cetera. What happens in the novel-within-the-novel isn’t entirely clear, as Lamont continues to alter details and re-plot after considering the constant criticism he receives for his terrible writing and after stewing in the jealousy he feels over the success of other “lesser� talents. And what happens in the novel isn’t entirely interesting, as Sorrentino doesn’t seem to have control over what he’s wrought. The reason to read this is for the formal play that Sorrentino engages in—the embedded texts, the diegetic layering, the metacommentary, and the intertextual references are what makes mid-period pomo lit. fic. And while that kind of thing � Barth’s Chimera, Coover’s The Public Burning, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow � is work, it should also be transgressive and exciting. This, though, just felt like work. I got to this because it’s cited in Federman, and McHale, and McGurl, but unless you’re really really into postmodernism, reach for something else.
]]> Pricksongs and Descants 156194 ]]> 256 Robert Coover 0802136672 E. C. 4 3.76 1969 Pricksongs and Descants
author: Robert Coover
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/17
date added: 2023/05/17
shelves:
review:
This has all the experimental verve and anything-goes attitude of early pomo metafiction, which means that it’s both fun and taxing to read. Coover messes with voice, narrative p.o.v., form, and structure in a collection that easily sits next to Barthelme and Barth’s Funhouse. And like those other authors� works, not all of these are hits � I’d even say that there are more misses than hits � but the hits hit hard, and return me to the themes and concepts that I so love about pomo lit. fic. Probably more than any other thing, Coover comes back a lot to ontological ambiguity here—whether it be through straight-up metafiction or, like in “The Babysitter,� an array of ever-more-diverging plotlines, these stories repeatedly build worlds without clearly defined borders, diegetic levels without a normative “reality.� This kind of writing just lights my brain on fire. So, if you’ve acquired the taste, this is a lot shorter than The Public Burning.
]]> Trust 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 E. C. 5 3.77 2022 Trust
author: Hernan Diaz
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/04
date added: 2023/05/05
shelves:
review:
This might be a book about realism in the postpostmodern age. Modernism’s realism was led by Pound’s dictum to “Make it new,� which led to novels (e.g., Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, The Sound and the Fury) that didn’t superficially seem realistic but were, of course, more deeply “real� than the mannered, bourgeois junk that it replaced. This was the period of the stream-of-consciousness narrative and the exploration of the desire and the expression of repressed thoughts and urges. Modernism, in other words, understood there to be a real more central and profound than that which had been permitted to be expressed in prose up to that point, and it simultaneously sought new means through which to convey that reality. Postmodernism does something like this too � especially when it came time to experiment with ways to compose and structure novels � but it turns in on the very question of reality—postmodernism distinguishes itself by positing that reality is the phantasmagoric manifestation of language, something fundamentally unreal that we’re trapped by and which is incapable of managing anything like a representation of consciousness. Realism during postmodernism becomes a vexed notion, a mise-en-abyme reflecting sign and referent into a distorted metafictional mess. And it’s in this period too when truth and reality get relativized into “truth� and “reality,� and when trust becomes a shibboleth for naïveté since trust implicitly acknowledges that the authority of a given source is neither absolute nor universal. Ferreting out the absent foundations of authority is really just coextensive with the practice of proving the absent foundation of language, and so postmodernism winds up becoming about realizing its own antifoundational view of the world, which then makes realism a crazy thing to even try to talk about, let alone try to set down on the page. Here, Barth and Coover and Pynchon are doing realism just as DeLillo and Gaddis and Roth are—when the concept has no limits all difference reduces down to nothing; everything is realism and nothing is real. This version of realism, then, is an effect of relativism and relativism’s disarticulation of absolute quantities, most especially truth. Given these rather grave epistemological conditions, much of the work of the postpostmodern period is, as with every new literary period, the development of a new realism, which, given the consequences of relativism, means constructing a model for truth that navigates around the matter of absent authority inherent to the principle of relativity. Enter, at long last, Diaz’s Trust. The thing that I see this novel doing is working through the question of truth post-postmodernism and post-relativism, which is a truth that must be negotiated, since its existence is only ever conditional, rather than discovered, since it isn’t “out there� somewhere to be found. And Diaz takes this on is two ways at once: formally and conceptually. The novel, Trust, is composed of four independent texts: a novel by Harold Vanner titled Bonds, an autobiography by Andrew Bevel titled My Life, a memoir by Ida Partenza titled A Memoir, Remembered, and the diary of Mildred Bevel titled Futures. Bonds tells the story of Benjamin Rask, a financier who grew up wealthy only to become really really wealthy in the twenties through a succession of prescient investment choices. This novel-within-the-novel includes Rask’s courtship and marriage to Helen Brevoort, an accomplished, if quiet, young woman from Albany who eventually succumbs to the same madness that took her father. Through Andrew Bevel’s autobiography, we come gradually to learn that Bonds is fictionalizing Bevel’s real life (or “real� life, since Bevel is also a character in a novel), that the world we’ve just invested so much into is one that we must reconsider and remake with new information from a new perspective. Bevel, as one might expect, has a far different perspective on his wealth and seems especially keen on redrawing the portrait of his wife, Mildred, that Vanner so grievously distorted in Bonds. Here, Bevel paints himself as a self-interested capitalist whose very self-interestedness served the people (ahem, Adam Smith) and would have saved the people from the Depression had the Federal Reserve Board only not interfered. But then we get Ida Partenza’s memoir, wherein we learn that she was hired as a young woman to ghostwrite Bevel’s autobiography, and, further, that much of what we’ve just invested ourselves in was also, what do you know?, not exactly factual. Bevel, in Ida’s telling (and she’s the most reliable of the bunch to my reading) was not only humanly flawed, but possessed of the need to aggrandize himself in perpetuity, to set the record straight on who he was and what his motivations were and how his success was the product of his hard work and determination alone. And it’s with this in mind that we come to Mildred’s diary, which provides the final word on Bevel’s great success: it was all up to her. Mildred, and not Andrew, was the brains of the operation, and his great need to present himself as something he was not was a consequence of a complete self-delusion. Here again, we receive another perspective that forces us to adjust what we know to be true. And this is precisely the point. The formal work that Diaz is doing here � the collage of forms that come together to produce a single text, the same story told in four different ways � is the means by which his novel makes its greater conceptual point that what is real and true is conditional, a negotiated quantity and that can only be arrived at through narrative. There is no episteme, postmodernism was right about that, but there is, nevertheless, truth, even if it will forever be written with a lowercase “t� or be forever suspended in the tenterhooks of quotation marks. And so I think that this is about postpostmodern realism, which we might now expect to be the product of many overlapping narratives (as we see in John Henry Days and Goon Squad and Candy House and Extremely Loud and Incredible Close and Quichotte and Crossroads and The Marriage Plot and and and), as a way of conveying the truth that is still now available to us even though postmodernism worked hard to cover it up. It’s also just a good book.
]]> John Henry Days 16276 John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come.]]> 400 Colson Whitehead E. C. 5 3.64 2001 John Henry Days
author: Colson Whitehead
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/26
date added: 2023/04/26
shelves:
review:
This was brilliant. Whitehead’s second novel is a fantasia, a perspectival text that draws from a large cast of characters from different eras and different places to compose the story of John Henry. Among these characters is J. Sutter (he’s really the main character), a junketeer and soft news reporter who’s attempting to break the record for most consecutive junkets attended, and Pamela Street, the daughter of the man who accrued the greatest collection of John Henry miscellany in the world (a collection housed in his Harlem apartment which no one cares about). Their paths cross at the first annual John Henry Days festival, a weekend celebration in Hinton-Talcott, West Virginia, culminating in the unveiling of the John Henry commemorative stamp. It’s to this town that Pamela will donate her father’s JH collection and it’s this event that J. is covering for a travel site and it’s this event that Alphonse Miggs, collector of railroad stamps and troubled little soldier, has come to die. Also woven throughout the novel is John Henry himself, shown in short glimpses at the work camp in front of Big Bend Tunnel, where, as legend has it, he beats the steam drill. So this is about myths � small ones like Bobby Figgis (who sets the record for longest unbroken junkets attended), large ones like John Henry, destructive ones like race, and productive ones like reputation � how myths get produced and promulgated by art and literature and word of mouth, and how reliant we are on myths of all sizes and textures (ahem, Lyotard). Read this.
]]> The Rules of Attraction 43810048 Librarian's Note: this is an alternate cover edition- ISBN 10: 067978148X (ISBN 13: 9780679781486)

Set at a small affluent liberal-arts college in New England in the eighties, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future—or even the present—who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle. Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College and treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance.]]> 283 Bret Easton Ellis E. C. 4 3.89 1987 The Rules of Attraction
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/23
date added: 2023/04/24
shelves:
review:
I’ve got this sense, I don’t know, I’ve got this sense that I don’t like Bret Easton Ellis. As in, personally. I don’t think I like him as a person. I don’t know him, of course, and have never met him, and only know about him what I read in his autobiography, White, but, still, I have this sense. And perhaps in line with this, I don’t like his characters, or the world in which his fiction is set. The whole experience is withered and empty and unredeeming. But I keep coming back to his novels because they’re just so goddamn good. Ellis� fiction takes place within the ambit of the trust-fund kid and the Wall Streeter and the yuppie. It’s the kind of writing that Wallace rightly called Nieman-Marcus Nihilism. Reading this stuff is like walking into a void. But it’s all to such an effect that it amazes me even as I seethe. The Rules of Attraction follows, primarily, three characters � Paul Denton, Sean Bateman (little bro of Patrick), and Lauren Hynde � as they make it through the Fall term at Camden College (Ellis� fictionalized Bennington), during which they respectively begin and end romantic relationships (at times with one another and at other times with secondary characters). A neat device that Ellis employs in this novel is the multiple first-person perspectives of Paul, Sean, and Lauren, who serve as the novel’s three equally biased narrators, and who regularly offer to the reader the inner thoughts unavailable to their interlocutors, meaning that we keep getting both sides of the same story from two perspectives. Backdrop to all of this (as with Less than Zero) is excessive partying and drinking and drugging and not a whole lot of class-attending or paper-writing or book-reading. And then also, little surprise, there’s a whole lot of very very casual sex that transpires across these pages. This, it turns out, is what the book is about, but in a sneaky way. The experience that Ellis is curating is, of course, intentionally empty and nihilistic, which is something we see across his oeuvre. Yet here more than elsewhere (or here for the first time that I’ve noticed) his characters seem to desire the very emotional connections that they continually eschew out of habit and the collective force of postmodern cultural mores. By virtue of the fascinating narrative shifts in perspective, we repeatedly have conveyed to us the missed signals and hurt feelings and unspoken thoughts of characters who are, on the outside, totally deadpan and unflappable. And so I get the sense in this novel of a yearning that manifests as sexual but that is actually emotional welling up in these young adults who are seemingly without any framework for how to cultivate and maintain a meaningful, intimate relationship. The position, then, that Ellis appears to be staking out is, rather surprisingly, a moral one—this is an argument against hedonism and for a thing that at the time had yet take a shape or receive a name. Now, no one here seems to learn anything or get better or find satisfaction or anything like that. But more than the other early Ellis I’ve read, I see his going for something beyond exaggerating late postmodernism’s insidious vapidity. I still don’t think I like him though.
]]> Blood and Guts in High School 36133479 'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs

This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It's a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker's breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon.

Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Kathy Acker's untimely death, Blood and Guts in High School is published for the first time in Penguin Classics, acknowledging the profound impact she has had on our culture, and alongside the authors her work pulsates with the influence of: William S. Burroughs, Cervantes and Charles Dickens, among others.]]> 165 Kathy Acker E. C. 3 3.20 1984 Blood and Guts in High School
author: Kathy Acker
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1984
rating: 3
read at: 2018/08/02
date added: 2023/04/19
shelves:
review:
Any reasonable accounting of postmodern fiction has to include Kathy Acker because of Blood and Guts in High School. Acker's novel-cum-screenplay-cum-poetry anthology-cum-dream journal is, obviously, composed through collage, suggestive of Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, while also remaining staunchly anti-narrative, akin to Burroughs' cut-up stuff. But then that's the superficial pyrotechnic display that distracts from a tortured, if protean, narrative voice that is, perhaps rightly, distrustful of everything. For Janey (the most prevalent narrator) interpersonal relationships are always founded on uneven power dynamics - here between men and women (or, in Janey's case, girls (which seems to me to be symbolic of the unevenness of the power dynamic (as in: women become reduced to girls))) which extends to the heady realm of language theory, whereby the patriarchy remains hegemonic so long as we're all forced to employ its language (since language constitutes reality blah blah blah). This seems then to speak to Acker's larger motivations; to write a novel that disrupts the patriarchy by disrupting formal standards and expectations. It's often argued that pomo lit. is without politics - that it's too preoccupied with theory to engage politically - but it seems to me that B&GiHS addresses the political directly. And here might be its downfall: its experimentalism (a handle that itself speaks to my relationship to the hegemony) obfuscates its message, which message can't be understood lest it be written in the hegemony's language, reinforcing that which Acker would destroy. Like the punk scene of which it is a part, B&G is pained and desperate and decadent and demands attention that it simultaneously resents. I've given it my attention and feel, now, a little gutted.
]]> The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 485803 297 Michael Chabon E. C. 3 3.65 1988 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
author: Michael Chabon
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1988
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/10
date added: 2023/04/11
shelves:
review:
There was a moment in Maps and Legends when Chabon mentions having fallen in love with a man in early adulthood, which I remember taking me by surprise. He had been talking about his wife and kids after all, and I kept rereading the line to make sure I had it right. This book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, seems to tell that story. Here Art Bechstein, recent graduate trying to make the most of his “last� summer before entering the real world (an entry that remains vague throughout the novel), falls in with a new crowd made up mainly of Arthur (there are two Arthurs here), Cleveland, and Phlox. Cleveland is an alcoholic, motorcycle-riding bad boy, Phlox is a comely librarian, and Arthur, who works alongside Phlox, is a bon vivant and is also gay. The tale being told here is one of intersecting relationships under the artificial clock of summer’s gradual conclusion, and so we see these characters hasten into physical relationships since they think they can hear the music stopping at the party. This looks like Art going out with Phlox, even though Phlox doesn’t like Cleveland and really doesn’t like Arthur, while Art continues to hang out with Cleveland and Arthur to Phlox’s consternation, and then eventually Art and Arthur start going out, leading to Phlox’s apoplexy, before Art eventually goes back to Phlox while also being in love with Arthur. It’s a mess. Uh, let’s see, and then also Art’s dad is maybe an accountant for an organized crime outfit in Pittsburgh, which is why Cleveland, a nogoodnik, is so keen to meet him, which Cleveland does, but breaks mobster rules of etiquette to do it, which is why maybe Cleveland gets set up to take a robbery job as a set-up, which leads to his death. Like I say, a mess. What I think Chabon is going for here is a metaphor for standing at the precipice of something dangerous—the moment when one enters adulthood. So here I find the mafia subplot gratuitous, since the real heart of this novel � is it possible that Chabon doesn’t see this? � is the Art-Arthur relationship (the names cry out for a psychoanalytic reading), which I find is taken away from with the addition of Cleveland and Art’s dad and the sketchy gangland world they supposedly belong to. I can see this being a landmark novel in 1988, but it just reads like a first novel to me today.
]]> The Crying of Lot 49 2794 The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness, and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the Crying of Lot 49.]]> 152 Thomas Pynchon 006091307X E. C. 4
[After Second Reading]

Well, this may yet be the paradigm of pomo fiction. Although, it's certainly not postmodern in the way that, say, Barth's fiction is (by which I mean highly self-aware, meta-fictional prose). Rather, The Crying is a far more nuanced, aesthetic version of postmodernism that hinges of themes instead of hijinks (save for the Looneytuneishness which is hijinksy (recognizing, though, as we're told, that there's "high magic to low puns")). Themes here include (information) entropy, the order/chaos binary, distrust, conspiracy, and, most prominent of all, paranoia. Oedipa, in trying to execute Pierce's will, stumbles onto a mail-carrying conspiracy that spans centuries and continents. Or, has succumbed to an elaborate practical joke. The truth here is indeterminate, which may be unsatisfying, but is also the point. The instinct to make patterns out of chaos (and to refer to that pattern as reality) will occasionally produce some strange results. The trick - and this is what makes Pynchon's work so good - is that the strangeness of these results doesn't invalidate them, and, moreover, at a time when assassinations weren't uncommon and the youth generation in America was rejecting "the most beloved of folklores" (read: grand narratives), conspiratorial/paranoid thinking was a pretty logical response to the chaos of the moment. And then also, in a way I'm not sure I can describe yet, the plot turns in on itself while also spinning out (as in, like, the Trystero conspiracy gets larger (Oedipa keeps uncovering layers) as the plot nears completion). The image that comes to mind is Wallace's description of Uncle Tavis, who is both "openly cross-sectional and free-associating," and also, at times, "seems, perspectivally, to grow." This characteristic seems unique to postmodernism and is how this text's plot looks to me, simultaneously ballooning and shrinking.]]> 3.70 1966 The Crying of Lot 49
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/29
date added: 2023/03/29
shelves:
review:
This was my second go-around w/ Pynchon and I'm still only lukewarm. This was another instance where I was reading a book because it's a book that everyone just has to read (like Ulysses only 600 pages shorter). According to so many critics this is the paradigm of post-modern fiction; and pomo it was. The plot - which goes, inevitably, only-too-predictably, unresolved - is driven by mystery and intrigue and paranoia, and it closes in on itself until it becomes so tight that it no longer has any room for itself, which is when the book ends. And then also the characters are modeled after Looney Tunes, which is something I think one needs to be in the mood for. This same Looneytuneishness paints The Crying with absurdist colors, which for me was at times delightful and at times frustrating. But then the frustrating nature of that absurdism is what makes this a pomo masterpiece in the first place.

[After Second Reading]

Well, this may yet be the paradigm of pomo fiction. Although, it's certainly not postmodern in the way that, say, Barth's fiction is (by which I mean highly self-aware, meta-fictional prose). Rather, The Crying is a far more nuanced, aesthetic version of postmodernism that hinges of themes instead of hijinks (save for the Looneytuneishness which is hijinksy (recognizing, though, as we're told, that there's "high magic to low puns")). Themes here include (information) entropy, the order/chaos binary, distrust, conspiracy, and, most prominent of all, paranoia. Oedipa, in trying to execute Pierce's will, stumbles onto a mail-carrying conspiracy that spans centuries and continents. Or, has succumbed to an elaborate practical joke. The truth here is indeterminate, which may be unsatisfying, but is also the point. The instinct to make patterns out of chaos (and to refer to that pattern as reality) will occasionally produce some strange results. The trick - and this is what makes Pynchon's work so good - is that the strangeness of these results doesn't invalidate them, and, moreover, at a time when assassinations weren't uncommon and the youth generation in America was rejecting "the most beloved of folklores" (read: grand narratives), conspiratorial/paranoid thinking was a pretty logical response to the chaos of the moment. And then also, in a way I'm not sure I can describe yet, the plot turns in on itself while also spinning out (as in, like, the Trystero conspiracy gets larger (Oedipa keeps uncovering layers) as the plot nears completion). The image that comes to mind is Wallace's description of Uncle Tavis, who is both "openly cross-sectional and free-associating," and also, at times, "seems, perspectivally, to grow." This characteristic seems unique to postmodernism and is how this text's plot looks to me, simultaneously ballooning and shrinking.
]]> <![CDATA[Something to Do with Paying Attention (McNally Editions)]]> 59441851 The Pale King.

But the unfinished King did contain a finished novella that Wallace had already considered publishing as a stand-alone volume. It is the story of a young man, a self-described “wastoid,� adrift in the suburban Midwest of the 1970s, whose life is changed forever by an encounter with advanced tax law. It is, as Sarah McNally writes in her preface, “not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.”]]> 152 David Foster Wallace 1946022276 E. C. 5 4.14 2011 Something to Do with Paying Attention (McNally Editions)
author: David Foster Wallace
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/28
date added: 2023/03/29
shelves:
review:
This section of The Pale King, read as a standalone text, reminded me in ways of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.� That latter novella is great for a lot of reasons, among which is how it defers the plot’s ostensible action for ages before concluding with what seems like the beginning (just getting to the gathering at Collision, IL), which happens here too (just getting to the beginning of a career in the IRS). “Westward� pulls this trick as a comment on pomo narrative strategies of deferring and structures of involution, but I don’t think he’s doing the same thing for the same reason here. Here, I see Wallace marrying form and content, which is always really impressive to see done well. The story is about a young man overcoming a prolonged period of adolescent sloth � being a “wastoid� as it’s put in the text � and joining the IRS. Given the structure of the story, though, the Bildung part of the Bildungsroman is the entirety of the narrative—it’s all build-up via the first-person narrator’s rococo embellishments that concludes with his decision to endure the recruitment process for “The Service.� What makes this so impressive, then, is the emphasis Wallace places on the endurance of boredom, which is referred to as “heroic� here, and how we are meant to push though a story without much rising or falling action, or page or section breaks, just as the accountants being described and scrutinized in the story push through the tedium of their daily labors. Enduring boredom, in other words, is what this is about and what this ABOUT. This position isn’t likely to win many converts, but in a world where our attention is sought after and fought over and quantized and manipulated and wrested by all that distracts and entertains in this, our twenty-first century, the choice to endure boredom is the choice to be free. It’s impossible to explain to people in under five hours why I choose not to have a smart phone, but this is why. Your phone hates you. Read a book.
]]> Our Missing Hearts 60149573 A novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture� in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.]]> 335 Celeste Ng 0593492544 E. C. 3 3.74 2022 Our Missing Hearts
author: Celeste Ng
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/16
date added: 2023/03/17
shelves:
review:
Margaret Atwood, as many people now know, has this thing at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale where she explains how all the crazy things that she describes in the book have historical precedents. Like, the subjugation of women and denial of education and weird sexual rituals all happened somewhere in the world at some time in the past (if not also continuing into the present). And, of course, if you’ve just had the experience of reading that book (hopefully without the TV series already in your head), that note strikes you as incredible—that somehow this wasn’t entirely fiction, that the emotional response demanded by that novel can and should be channeled into real-world action. I see Ng doing something similar in Our Missing Hearts, including adding a note about the contemporary inspiration for some of the plot’s details. Here, that refers primarily to the abduction and relocation of children by the state as a punishment against “subversive thought,� as well as the passage of Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT Act), the legislation that allows for these abductions to occur legally in the world of the novel which has the whiff of the PATRIOT Act about it (as well as the Nuremburg Laws and Native American Repatriation Act and current border policies). But, unlike with Atwood’s novel, I’m left unmoved here. The story is about Noah “Bird� Gardner, son of Margaret Miu, a poet, and Ethan Gardner, an academic linguist and etymologist. Bird, we quickly understand, lives with his father in a dorm on campus and spends his days in school, ostracized because of something his mother supposedly did (which is why she doesn’t live with them anymore). Margaret is persona non grata at home, and we come to find out that her leaving has something to do with some unpatriotic behavior, which, after The Crisis and under the laws of PACT, could mean that Bird will be taken at any moment and relocated, as happened to his only friend at school, Sadie. So there’s a bit of tension hovering around Bird—he’s an outcast because of his mother and his Asian features (East-Asians are overtly threatened in this book), his safety is in question for the same reason, he can never put a foot wrong lest he get hurt or abducted, and he’s not allowed to even ask about his mother since he can’t know how others will react to even hearing her name. This has all of the makings of a solid dystopia. The haunting presence of unspeakable, verboten knowledge permeates the atmosphere of the first third of this novel. But then (skipping some plot) after Bird finds his mother we’re made to endure about a hundred pages of exposition from Margaret (rather like what Dagny does in Atlas Shrugged) explaining the circumstances of The Crisis and how it was that she made the agonizing decision to leave. I know that there’s a bit more to it than this, but what I find is that that oppressive atmosphere of sinister authority is allowed to dissipate, and so what follows all feels underwhelming, including Margaret’s big final guerilla protest. So, I guess this ended too quickly for me. I wanted to see overt violence committed by the state � someone in the government fomenting anti-Asian prejudice or threatening abduction � and what happens to Margaret and whether there are more guerilla protests against PACT. Anyway, the novel ends on an up note. But this is a book about the world today, right? This should be a feel-bad book. Make it hurt.
]]> Cosmopolis 406
Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of the spectacular downfall of one man, and of an era.]]> 224 Don DeLillo 0743244257 E. C. 4
[After second reading]

Yeah, I was right about being wrong; this is great. I think that a full appreciation of this novel means reading “In the Ruins of the Future� beforehand � and maybe also Falling Man � in order to see how Cosmopolis is about 9/11 in the sense that 9/11 is a response to globalization. “In the Ruins of Future� is DeLillo’s 9/11 essay and it’s in here that he lays out his impression of American culture as one that has allowed itself to be transported into “the future� through cyber-capital and stock markets and the trading of futures—essentially that we’re exactly the materialist, heretical people that we’re accused of being, and that we’re so privileged by our technology that we can’t even see that there’s another way to live. “Ruins� is an indictment of globalization, in other words, and that is exactly the spirit that DeLillo carries into Cosmopolis. Packer is the embodiment of capitalism/globalization in how he’s shown to be ruthless and violent and obsessed with consumption (which includes people, which is represented metaphorically by all the trysts he engages in). And then so too is Benno Levin/Richard Sheets the representation of globalization’s resistance; aware of this ubiquitous iniquity, determined to do something about it, but also deeply confused. There’s something beautifully tragic about Levin � which speaks to the contemporary moment � in that whoever he decides to visit his righteousness upon will no doubt be only glancingly responsible for the global system that he’s desperate to fight against, and so he too becomes a monster (a murderer) by trying to fell a monster (a capitalist). With “Ruins� in mind, DeLillo brings it home by having Packer witness his own death in the future on his technologically advanced watch. So, Cosmopolis is a first draft of Falling Man, DeLillo’s first attempt at capturing the 9/11 moment by showing globalization’s and technology’s and capitalism’s inherently destructive nature, producing, as it did, and does, actual cultural conflict. Always read DeLillo twice.]]> 3.23 2003 Cosmopolis
author: Don DeLillo
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/27
date added: 2023/02/27
shelves:
review:
The concept of the millionaire trapped within the fortress he built to display his wealth and power is a successful one, and the moral is satisfying if a little easy: money can’t protect you from the big bad world and eventually your shrine to capital becomes your tomb (DeLillo writes this theme to the extreme (to death?) in Zero K). Think Xanadu, think Otranto, think Scrooge’s lending house. Through this device we see the affluent suffer for their exorbitance and greed, for their ostentation and callousness, by gradually copping to the desperate isolation they’ve forced upon themselves. Readers enjoy the self-induced torment of the rich man’s contumely, all of which is concentrated because whatever cage they’ve put themselves in is inescapable. Okay, alright, so then here we get the high-tech digital mausoleum of Eric Packer’s limousine. He’s made it so that he never has to leave, and has the dough to get whoever he wants to talk to to come to him. And, better still, he’s stuck in traffic in Manhattan, surrounded by the other limos. This should have been the novel, the slow torment of the man who can’t escape. But, instead of pinning Packer down to suffer himself while stuck in hellacious gridlock, DeLillo has him leaving constantly and so then lets the tension escape. He gets out and meets up with his wife for lunch and has a tryst with a bodyguard and shoots his head of security and just isn’t made to feel the weight of his lucre. He’s eventually killed by a disgruntled former employee whose diary punctuates the novel’s sections, which should have begotten some kind of epiphany, but this comeuppance is only as revelatory as learning that the bizarre fluctuations in the yen that compose much of Packer’s conscious thoughts over the course of the book are mirrored (and foretold) by the asymmetrical shape of his prostate. The pattern I find myself in with DeLillo’s novels are that after the first read I don’t see what all the fuss is about and then after the second read I do, so maybe there’s something here still waiting to be found, but I don’t think I’ll be reading this again for a while.

[After second reading]

Yeah, I was right about being wrong; this is great. I think that a full appreciation of this novel means reading “In the Ruins of the Future� beforehand � and maybe also Falling Man � in order to see how Cosmopolis is about 9/11 in the sense that 9/11 is a response to globalization. “In the Ruins of Future� is DeLillo’s 9/11 essay and it’s in here that he lays out his impression of American culture as one that has allowed itself to be transported into “the future� through cyber-capital and stock markets and the trading of futures—essentially that we’re exactly the materialist, heretical people that we’re accused of being, and that we’re so privileged by our technology that we can’t even see that there’s another way to live. “Ruins� is an indictment of globalization, in other words, and that is exactly the spirit that DeLillo carries into Cosmopolis. Packer is the embodiment of capitalism/globalization in how he’s shown to be ruthless and violent and obsessed with consumption (which includes people, which is represented metaphorically by all the trysts he engages in). And then so too is Benno Levin/Richard Sheets the representation of globalization’s resistance; aware of this ubiquitous iniquity, determined to do something about it, but also deeply confused. There’s something beautifully tragic about Levin � which speaks to the contemporary moment � in that whoever he decides to visit his righteousness upon will no doubt be only glancingly responsible for the global system that he’s desperate to fight against, and so he too becomes a monster (a murderer) by trying to fell a monster (a capitalist). With “Ruins� in mind, DeLillo brings it home by having Packer witness his own death in the future on his technologically advanced watch. So, Cosmopolis is a first draft of Falling Man, DeLillo’s first attempt at capturing the 9/11 moment by showing globalization’s and technology’s and capitalism’s inherently destructive nature, producing, as it did, and does, actual cultural conflict. Always read DeLillo twice.
]]> <![CDATA[But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past]]> 33024262 New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or weirder still widely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we overrate democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we ve reached the end of knowledge?
Klosterman visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who'll perceive it as the distant past.Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If We re Wrong? is built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkers George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Diaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It s a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It s about how we live now, once now has become then. From the Hardcover edition."]]> 272 Chuck Klosterman 0399184139 E. C. 4 3.75 2016 But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
author: Chuck Klosterman
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/21
date added: 2023/02/22
shelves:
review:
There aren’t too many other writers whose natural resonant frequencies match as closely to mine as Chuck Klosterman, and this one especially (the seventh of his I’ve read) resonated. The premise of the book is to consider how the present will look from the perspective of the distant future and therefore to consider how the self-evident truths we take as given might be, or are even likely to be, totally wrong. The first part of making this argument is easy—recognize all of the instances we, the humans, have been totally sure about something that then turned out to be wrong (e.g., geocentrism, Platonic gravity, miasma theory) and then imagine what we’ll know in another hundred years. It takes no effort at all to accept that the people of 2123 will view some part of our present social or scientific or philosophical or political or economic landscape as totally bats. The next part of the argument � and the one that Klosterman is really getting to � is to suppose just which of our entrenched concepts � the ones we don’t spend any time thinking about because they’re just so obviously correct � will turn out to be wrong. So we get chapters on sports (will Americans still play football in a hundred years), gravity (is gravity a universal force or an emergent force), democracy (is our understanding of freedom as good as it could be), among other things. This kind of practice � considering what might be wrong with the very most ordained thoughts � is one I highly value, and even try, in my own small way, to emulate. If there’s something to be critical of here it’s that the idea, it seemed to me, that Klosterman kept orbiting � epistemology � was one he didn’t quite get his arms around. Several times throughout the book, Klosterman walked up to the highest of our contemporary hurdles � the postmodern heritage of relativism and the consequent vexed status of truth � before backing away, which I would have liked to see him address. Also, he doesn’t even give a passing mention of religion. But that’s small beer next to what Klosterman does get up to here, which is to endeavor to improve the present by imagining how we’re holding ourselves back.
]]> <![CDATA[Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime]]> 51472193
As you read these words, copies of you are being created.
Ěý
Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of twentieth-century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything.

Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable Physics has been in crisis since 1927. Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps—which have come to be simply ignored. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand. Academics discourage students from working on the "dead end" of quantum foundations. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. There are many, many Sean Carrolls. Many of every one of us.
Ěý
Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second. The Many-Worlds theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Step-by-step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established.
Ěý
Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. We are on the threshold of a new understanding—of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of.]]> 368 Sean Carroll 1524743038 E. C. 3 4.16 2019 Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
author: Sean Carroll
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/09
date added: 2023/02/10
shelves:
review:
Probably because I’m exactly what you think of when you think of an English teacher, and probably because I can’t do math, it surprises people to learn that I entered college as a declared physics major. As my grades attest, this wasn’t a good fit. But before I got wise and switched into English, I was working toward a better understanding of quantum mechanics. Like everyone else, I find QM fascinating, and although I never learned how to do it myself (it turns out that physicists need to be able to do math) the fascination that came with me to college remains. I think that the thing I find so fascinating is the repeated conclusion that, at their most fundamental level, things are not as they seem. This absent epistemological foundation speaks to so many other philosophical points, that I can’t help but think of QM as the scientific confirmation of all manner or antifoundational arguments. And so I continue to dip into this well, with Carroll’s being the latest of these kinds of books on QM directed at the layperson. I found myself here, though, feeling a bit too far out at sea, like how I felt reading Wallace’s Everything and More on Cantor and Gödel and set theory, which I want to blame on the respective authors but is really just my lack of facility with this stuff. More than other QM books I’ve read, Carroll lobbies hard here for the Many-Worlds hypothesis, spending a lot of time explaining why this isn’t science fiction and how it simply conforms to an austere reading of the Born rule. I was, naturally, most drawn to the moments when Carroll allowed himself to extemporize on philosophical questions about the nature of reality and even epistemology versus ontology, but these moments were the exception to what is, at the end of the whole everything, a book explaining our most up-to-date understanding of QM.
]]> The Last Novel 195603 The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") announces that since this will be his final effort, he has "carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases."

Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists � their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.

As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.]]> 200 David Markson 1593761430 E. C. 5 4.16 2007 The Last Novel
author: David Markson
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/29
date added: 2023/01/30
shelves:
review:
Markson’s Notecard Quartet novels work the way impressionistic music works; you glean the general mood from the sounds you’re hearing but are left alone to work out the story. Here, as with his others, Markson tells the story of the Novelist by way of an unbroken succession of facts and observations about other artists and philosophers and celebrities with the occasional reference to what the Novelist is thinking or feeling or doing. The theme that the Novelist circles here is aging and death, and in this reading it was clear that the mood, which moved through themes of playfulness and vice and family, was, by the end of the novel, quite lachrymose, which, in a way, characterizes much of the rest of the quartet (I read these as meditations on legacy, and thus, death). The thing to get is how each of the notes that compose the novel are meant as reflections on the Novelist in some way, and so how this is a long “semifictional semifiction� that has Markson at the center of it. I wish these were ten-thousand pages long so I would never have to stop reading them.
]]> <![CDATA[Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America]]> 59808500 A groundbreaking investigation into the digital underworld, where far-right operatives wage wars against mainstream America, from a masterful trio of experts in media and tech.

Memes have long been dismissed as inside jokes with no political importance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memes are bedrock to the strategy of conspiracists such as Alex Jones, provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, and tacticians like Roger Stone. While the media and most politicians struggle to harness the organizing power of the internet, the “redpill right� weaponizes memes, pushing conspiracy theories and disinformation into the mainstream to drag people down the rabbit hole. These meme wars stir strong emotions, deepen partisanship, and get people off their keyboards and into the streets--and the steps of the US Capitol.


Meme Wars is the first major account of how “Stop the Steal� went from online to real life, from the wires to the weeds. Leading media expert Joan Donovan, PhD, veteran tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss, and cultural ethnographer Brian Friedberg pull back the curtain on the digital war rooms in which a vast collection of antiesablishmentarians bond over hatred of liberal government and media. Together as a motley reactionary army, they use memes and social media to seek out new recruits, spread ideologies, and remake America according to their desires.


A political thriller with the substance of a rigorous history, Meme Wars is the astonishing story of how extremists are yanking our culture and politics to the right. And it's a warning that if we fail to recognize these powerful undercurrents, the great meme war for the soul of America will soon be won.

]]> 432 Joan Donovan 1635578639 E. C. 4 3.99 2022 Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America
author: Joan Donovan
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/27
date added: 2023/01/27
shelves:
review:
File this one under I Didn’t Know How Much I Didn’t Know. Even as a member of the Millennial generation, anyone who knows me knows how out of touch I am with trends and gossip and pop because of how offline I live, and it’s even to the point where it’s become a running joke that since I don’t have a TV or a smartphone, I have to stare at my walls every night for entertainment. Obviously, I think that there’s an advantage to this tech-unsavvy lifestyle, but then in reading books like Meme Wars I’m forced to concede that there’s a whole lot of the world that I’m missing right now as, it turns out, a whole lot of the world hangs out on the internet. Now, I know about memes, and even know a bit about Richard Dawkins� efforts to establish the meme as the building block of information (the genes of data), but I had no idea about the world of incels and 4chan and shitlords and Groypers and how so much of what came to be called the alt-right was fashioned in the crucible of anonymous message boards. What the authors, Donovan, Dreyfuss, and Friedberg, present here is the decade-long history of what they call the meme wars, starting with OWS in 2011 and ending with the Capitol insurrection in 2021, by way of memes, or, more specifically, how the use of memes on the internet (the wires) eventually manifested in real-world action (the weeds). The memes themselves are interesting, in an academic sense, and so I would have liked even more than the ones published with the book, but the really interesting part is, as Dawkins would have it, how successful the meme is at achieving its goal of convincing someone of something. As you likely already know, the danger in this comes from how memesters � who have agendas, who mean to convince people of something (often something hateful) � are so good at convincing otherwise neutral parties that the position espoused by the meme is true and real and the entry point for a conspiracy known only to the internet’s mysterious anon community. This process is called “red-pilling,� and is the stuff of nightmares. As is often the case, the thing that I was most interested in reading about was the disposition of the meme creators and the anons who continue to gobble them up—meaning, whether they were sincere in their behavior or not. This is something that Catherine Cross wrote about a while back now, but the answer seems to be that some dress up their actual sensibilities in irony to make those sensibilities more palatable and therefore more effective in the memesphere while others no longer need to as their audience has already been red-pilled, an answer I find to be both frustrating and instructional. There were more than a few typos here, as well as times when the writing read like the work of several authors, but this was compelling reading and, for me at least, highly informative.
]]> Inherent Vice 7285355 Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon � private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era

It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .]]> 369 Thomas Pynchon E. C. 2 3.79 2009 Inherent Vice
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2023/01/20
date added: 2023/01/20
shelves:
review:
This is easily the most readable Pynchon I’ve gone in for and that may be to its detriment. Pynchon’s at his best for me when he’s letting loose with the narrative pyrotechnics and pomo hijinx of TCoL49 and Gravity’s Rainbow (still his best work), doing the kind of stuff that is really hard to read and make sense of and that puts a lot of weight on the reader’s shoulders. Here, except for some goofy names, Inherent Vice felt like a stock-standard crime novel that was, well, easy, and also kind of boring. The story is about the apparent abduction of crime boss Mickey Wolfmann and the always-slightly-out-of-his-depth p.i., Larry “Doc� Sportello, who sorts through the matrix of criminals and crime-adjacent characters to find Wolfmann and uncover the secret of the Golden Fang. Like any p.i. narrative, Doc has one foot in the crime world and one foot in the law enforcement world, which usually makes for a conflicted anti-hero type who we’re meant to pull for as they navigate those two world’s tricky intersections. And like any p.i. narrative, Doc keeps finding himself in trouble with agents from both of these worlds who would see him, at times, killed for his meddling. But then, knowing this stuff ahead of time also kills whatever narrative tension might otherwise have been built, as does the goofiness that permeates the novel. I get the sense that Doc’s constant drug use was meant to be funny and-slash-or add texture to his character, but this ultimately read to me as one-note and then predictable and then boring. At any rate, if Pynchon’s swinging for anything here it’s a comment on capitalism. The thing that gets Wolfmann abducted � and this isn’t exactly fleshed out � was his intent to use his lucre to build enormous housing complexes where people could live for free, upending the landlord-tenant relationship and possibly freeing some people from economic subservience. To be sure, for a novel published within the fallout of the subprime mortgage housing crisis, this message is welcome and important, but then the message also just gets drowned out by all the other noise in this book. I don’t know, this one just wasn’t for me.
]]> Strong Motion 56269033 Franzen's dazzling follow-up to The Twenty-Seventh City is about earthquakes, pollution, love, and abortion rights.



Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.]]> 528 Jonathan Franzen 1250823986 E. C. 3 3.95 1992 Strong Motion
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/18
date added: 2022/12/27
shelves:
review:
Woah boy, this book is a mess. Let’s see, the protagonist, Louis Holland, is the twenty-something son of a well-to-do Chicago family who is now scraping by as a radio technician for a station in Boston that is about to get bought out by a pro-life evangelical, Philip Stites. His sister, Eileen, who he doesn’t especially like since he thinks she’s spoiled since she has “always� gotten whatever she’s wanted from their parents, also lives in Boston, is getting her MBA from Harvard, and is dating (soon to be engaged to, eventually to be married to) Peter, the son of a chemical corporation (Sweeting-Aldren) executive. After a freak earthquake kills his grandmother, Louis meets Renée, a seismologist working at Harvard and studying the spate of seismic activity around Boston. After another run-in, Renée reluctantly agrees to go to a disaster-themed party at Eileen and Peter’s apartment, where she overhears a drunk Peter excoriate his father for Sweeting-Aldren’s criminal pollution practices. (Sweeting-Aldren just so happens to be the company that Louis� mother, Melanie, has just received twenty-two million dollars� worth of stock in from her now-dead stepmother.) This gets Renée curious about the possibility of forced seismicity explaining the unusual concentration of earthquakes in Eastern Massachusetts, and so she begins to research whether any of what Peter said is true. Meanwhile, Louis moves into Renée’s apartment and unknowingly gets her pregnant, after which an old pseudo-girlfriend from Texas shows up and declares her love for Louis and convinces him to go out with her. Okay, so now Renée’s feelings are understandably hurt and she becomes self-destructive and no longer hides that she’s looking for evidence that Sweeting-Aldren is surreptitiously pumping chemicals into secret mile-long wells north of Boston proper, which gets the attention of Sweeting-Aldren security thugs who first follow and then threaten her. Now with the knowledge that she’s pregnant, Renée goes to an abortion clinic where, what do you know?, Reverend Stites� pro-life cadre are protesting, and after she gets her abortion Renée, still self-destructive, grabs a bullhorn and makes a speech about women’s rights. Just after this, while walking home at night, Renée is shot in a drive-by and we all think it’s the pro-lifers, but is actually the Sweeting-Aldren thugs, but, anyway, seeing this on the news Louis comes around to try to help Renée, who gives him what he needs to implicate Sweeting-Aldren. So, then, Louis, Peter, and Eileen go to Peter’s parents� house to confront his father with the evidence and then the big one hits and a bunch of Sweeting-Aldren’s secret chemical stores blow up and get exposed and Renée recovers from her wounds and she and Louis wind up living together again. (And even this ungainly synopsis is leaving out Louis� undergraduate years at Rice and Renée’s weird business deal with Melanie and Louis� father’s academic background and fellow Harvard seismologist, Howard Chun’s, biography and Renée’s visit to Stites� church and all the rest of the plot that got shoehorned into this very long novel). One of the thing’s to see going on here is the antagonism inherent to the relationships between these wealthy, college-educated, upper-middle class children and their even wealthier parents. Like what we get in Burgess� Clockwork Orange or Salinger’s Catcher, I tend to read generational conflict of this kind in periodic terms, which is to say as metaphor for a new literary period’s vexed, difficult realization and differentiation from its established, greying parent. In the case of Strong Motion, it isn’t clear to me at all whether Franzen has a clear sense of what comes after postmodernism � as, say, Wallace absolutely does in Infinite Jest � but, nevertheless, Louis, Eileen, Peter, and Renée all strike me as the indignant, spoiled, not-quite grown up offspring of postmodernism, searching for something like love without any map because their parents were too busy ironically undermining social institutions and depleting the culture of affect and getting divorced. Teasing this out a bit more, we might read the earthquakes as this periodic shift as well—a break from one cultural dominant to another that is felt and represented as a paradigm “shift� or a “ground breaking.� Here again, the new ground of postpostmodernism isn’t, for me at least, clearly defined in the text, but in the moments where Louis is meditating on love I see an inkling of an idea. It’s in these moments when he explicitly recognizes the vulnerability inherent to love and then claims to want to overcome his reflexive resistance to vulnerability in order to arrive at a disposition of faith inherent to the trust required for love, and this is the New Sincerity all over. This isn't consistent, though. The moments in the novel where this stuff happens comes in fits and starts, and so I find Strong Motion to be something like an evolutionary predecessor to the better fiction to come. There are no memorable, or even likeable, characters here, the plot is overwrought, the corporate conspiracy stuff is exactly the kind of thing that Franzen doesn’t excel at, and it’s too long, which means that if this is for anyone it’s for Franzen completists and graduate students (and you can bet that there’s a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram).
]]> The Final Solution 16696
What is the meaning of the mysterious string of German numbers the bird spews out - a top secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case - the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot - beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth?

A short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story.]]> 131 Michael Chabon 0060777109 E. C. 2 3.35 2004 The Final Solution
author: Michael Chabon
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2022/12/07
date added: 2022/12/08
shelves:
review:
This one feels like a pub. contract fulfiller, with a little added emphasis on filler. Here, Chabon writes an homage-com-pastiche of Sherlock Holmes in WWII England where an unnamed retired detective (Holmes?) searches for the missing parrot (see: cover) of a mysterious boy, Linus Steinman, who happens to be a mute, German, Jewish refugee. The parrot, Bruno, unlike Linus, talks a lot, and either invents or repeats long strings of numbers in German (again, see: cover), much to the interest of those in the village where Linus turns up. Once a body is found with a caved-in skull in our quiet town, suspicious is aroused and the game afoots. It turns out, what do you know?. that the guy that everyone thinks did it didn’t do it and the guy that no one suspects is guilty is guilty, which, given the fidelity to genre here, we already knew before we’re filled in on the details. The premise of a mute Jew linked with a loquacious parrot, along with the book’s title (which I’m none too sure about), asks for a narrative contemplation on silence � the silence demanded of secrecy during wartime, the silence born of the untranslatability of experience, the tacit silence of a people perpetrating a genocide, the silencing of a people subject to genocide, the silence that cannot be permitted as a result of that genocide � but what we get is a story about a bird. Okay, to be fair to Chabon, he ends the thing with a thought about whether meaning exists objectively or is the invention of human minds, which, I’ll grant, is philosophically apposite, but, still, there’s better stuff out there.
]]> Liberation Day 60471573 Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose--wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

Love Letter is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the not-too-distant future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and each other. Ghoul is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado, and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his "reality." In Mother's Day, two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. And in Elliott Spencer, our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed--his memory "scraped"--a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters.

Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.]]> 256 George Saunders 0525509593 E. C. 4 3.99 2022 Liberation Day
author: George Saunders
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/30
date added: 2022/12/02
shelves:
review:
A George Saunders short story is a thing to behold. More than plot or narrative design, Saunders� use of voice to convey character data, especially states of mind, is masterful and exciting and more than worth the price of admission. What he provides so often � both here and in his other collections � is a world in which some form of indentured servitude/mind control is the norm and has become the norm by virtue of the logic of late capitalism, which Saunders carries into the near future in his fictional pieces. What this looks like here, in “Liberation Day� and “Ghoul� especially, are instances of employees being forced to uphold the mock-real world desired by their employers, and thus exist, in the real world of their employers, as playthings or as brainwashed automatons. Given when this was written and when this was released, it’s hard not to read into Liberation Day our contemporary moment and how we are often inveigled � by political party, by news apparatus, by religious orthodoxy � to maintain some not-quite-real sense of reality, and thus to live pseudo-voluntarily as one among a population of automata. There is no way to be outside of mediated reality � I’m in it too � but to know that we’re in it is a way to avoid following the lead of the people who have had an outsized role in designing, and therefore benefitting from, the it that we’re in, which is the lesson that Saunders keeps offering us ways to learn. This guy’s still got it.
]]> The Novelist 59147138 Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll. —Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten

In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.

The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor’s embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.

The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.]]> 196 Jordan Castro 1593767137 E. C. 5 3.37 2022 The Novelist
author: Jordan Castro
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/12
date added: 2022/11/12
shelves:
review:
The Novelist is about an unnamed novelist trying to write a novel about an earlier stage of his life when he was addicted to drugs and got in trouble and endured withdrawal and became a novelist. The Novelist’s unnamed novelist can’t make any progress on his novel because of the myriad enticements that unceasingly beckon him, fashioning yet another grotesque cycle of dependence that stalls his life just exactly as drugs once did. These enticements are, of course, of the Internet-slash-Social Media variety, and the distractedness exhibited by the novelist is, of course, a consequence of his socially mediated life, and this distractedness, also of course, spills out into the pointedly mundane aspects of his life � making tea, making coffee, going to the toilet � that likewise interfere with the very processes of cognition. So, like, the whole first half of the novel is the novelist sitting at his desk to work on his novel and getting no work done as he compulsively checks Twitter and Instagram and Twitter and Twitter and Instagram, all the while relating how he feels guilt and self-loathing for not actually getting any writing done. The rest of the novel is about the novelist imagining, and then even beginning to write, a bad version of Bernhard’s Woodcutters about a different writer-turned-activist, Eric, whom the novelist allows to stand in for everything wrong with the world today. Note that he’s still not getting anything done, but getting into the Woodcutters project allows him to reflect on the real novel, and so he relates to the reader a bit from that never-to-be-finished book, and the scenes that he calls to mind and shares are about uncontrollable withdrawal shits that paint the walls (apparently drawn from the novelist’s own experience) and “speckle the banister.� However gross this looks on the surface, this to me is the point of the novel, The Novelist. The novelist’s novel, to the extent that it's presented to us, is about shit � shit that is unbidden and destructive and violent and wretched and cannot be stopped � and Castro’s novel is therefore about figurative shit � shit that surrounds us and interrupts our thoughts and distracts us and addicts us and keeps us from getting work done and convinces us that crafting clever barbs about others counts as work when it really just adds to the shit. The metafiction stuff Castro does here � embedded narratives, self-reference, roman-à-clef-icizing “Jordan Castro� to frustrate ontological hierarchy � is subtle and highly effective, and because these hijinx only serve to embellish a really good book, The Novelist is a really really good book.
]]> The Last White Man 58885796 From the New York Times -bestselling author of Exit West , a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change.

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.
Ěý
In Mohsin Hamid’s lyrical and urgent prose, The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.]]> 192 Mohsin Hamid 0593538811 E. C. 4 3.43 2022 The Last White Man
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/02
date added: 2022/11/04
shelves:
review:
On the face of it, this one is all wrong. The character development is light � really serving only to drive the novel’s concept � and the whole thing is exposition (Gaddis in reverse). The novel’s spare-ness felt rather like DeLillo’s last effort, a novel that read like an outline for a novel, and so shouldn’t have worked. And yet, I liked this. Like with Gaddis, the limitation Hamid placed on himself here was both stylistically interesting and expressive of a larger thematic point about voice and the control of narrative(s). The story here is pretty simple—in an unspecified town (presumably in the US) white people start to turn black, and then there’s tension among the population, and then there are riots, and then everyone is black and things settle down. The main characters, Anders and Oona, endure the death of their respective parents (unrelated to the riots) and slowly fall in love as newly minted black citizens while their world breaks down and then recovers. The drama here is all muted (in part due to the expository style) and so the focus is less on the characters and more on the meaning of the plot. And the plot seems directed at both the pandemic and the post–George Floyd racial reckoning in America. What drama there is lives in the space of the characters� minds, who are forced to confront their racial prejudices as the matter of race is now literally unavoidable. This, it seems to me, is what the book is about, and the trick that Hamid pulls is to show white fragility without telling, and by so doing conveys an unsubtle message subtlety. Maybe you’re looking for a bit more vitriol, but this little book is doing good work.
]]> Lapvona 59089897 In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot in a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did for many of the village's children.

Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine.

But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.]]> 304 Ottessa Moshfegh 0593300262 E. C. 4 3.54 2022 Lapvona
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/28
date added: 2022/10/29
shelves:
review:
Comrade Marx wrote in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.� Even if you don’t know anything about Marx you’ve still run into this line before (likely abbreviated) since it has been repeated so often. But, just as the profundity of the cliché gets lost in the repetition, some of the meaning of Marx’s line has been lost to overuse and misunderstanding. It helps, of course, to see the lines in full, since doing so immediately reveals a sympathy with religion that is absent from the abbreviated version—while Marx has no truck with religion, he recognizes how it functions as a salve (like the opium of Marx’s day) to the people most susceptible to its messages (the proletariat) and, maybe more importantly, how it demonstrates an inherent desire to overcome suffering. Were the proletariat only to realize that the suffering they’re treating with religion and calling Evil/Satan/God’s Mysterious Ways was actually a product of class oppression, the revolution would be the work of a day. Such a realization is hard (bordering on impossible) however since, as Nietzsche explains in the Genealogy of Morals, the nobility fashioned religious dogma in order to ensure the continued compliance and subservience of the proles. Hence, again from Nietzsche, meekness is construed as good (as in morally good), and so is self-sacrifice, and the acceptance of unfairness/tragedy/evil in this world as a test or part of a greater unseen good, and the anticipation that one’s reward for enduring all of this shit will come after death (this one is probably the most insidious of all). This � the interrelationship between the ruling class and the clergy, and the effects that this conspiracy has on the people � is what Lapvona is about. The story follows a father and shepherd, Jude, who is raising his deformed son, Marek, in Lapvona, a town vaguely located in Europe in an unspecified Medievalish time. Jude, along with the rest of Lapvona, is unkind to Marek owing to his deformities, and is not above abuse when Marek inevitably screws something up. Marek, for his part, seems to welcome the abuse, as in his mind the endurance of such suffering brings him closer to God and ensures his place in heaven. He is, then, the picture of meekness and Christian charity, which is also to say that he is exactly how not to behave in the situation he finds himself in. Anyway, Lapvona is ruled over by Lord Villiam with the help of Father Barnabas and Villiam’s son, Jacob. Things get complicated when Marek causes Jacob to slip and fall to his death while he was out hunting. When Jude and Marek go to the manor to relate what happened, Villiam (a very bizarre character indeed) decides that he’ll take Marek from Jude as a trade, a replacement for Jacob. And so suddenly Marek � who, like Jude, smells of sheep shit and doesn’t bathe and eats no meat and sleeps outside most of the time � finds himself enveloped by a luxury he has never known or could even imagine. We see Marek’s personality consequently change, becoming more spoiled and less meek and less charitable as his need for religion has been removed. Now inside the manor, we learn that Villiam is a ne’er-do-well, and that Father Barnabas is a con artist, and that they think about the villagers who support their lives and lifestyles not at all. The crisis point in the novel is reached when a drought finds Lapvona (a village known for its rich soil). The villagers who have to pay tax to Villiam have no food or water and are dying in droves. This while those few in the manor feel neither the effects of the drought nor the weight of their lucre, as it turns out they have access to a reservoir as well as an unending reserve of food. There’s plenty more plot, but this is enough to see the message: the villagers should have collectively stormed the manor and ousted Villiam and Barnabas and even Marek but they didn’t, choosing instead to suffer and die while believing that such suffering would be repaid in the afterlife. But then it’s not really a “choice.� The point here is the same one Marx tried to make; that it is not possible to choose, to even think, to storm the manor when oppressed by a ruling class that uses religion to dope the people into accepting a life of thankless servitude. In a rather unsubtle metaphor, the novel ends with Marek, no longer recognizable as Jude’s one-time punching bag (i.e., no longer meek), takes over (i.e., inherits) the manor and becomes Lord of Lapvona. A working-class hero is something to be.
]]> What Technology Wants 7954936
Gilbert Taylor, Booklist]]> 416 Kevin Kelly 0670022152 E. C. 4 3.72 2010 What Technology Wants
author: Kevin Kelly
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/14
date added: 2022/09/15
shelves:
review:
My first encounter with Kevin Kelly was in college. I read Out of Control after learning that the principals of The Matrix had to read it before they were allowed to see the screenplay and decide whether they wanted to move ahead with production. I was (and, I’ll admit, still am) enamored enough of that movie that I checked out Kelly’s book, and, no surprise, it broke my brain apart. Kelly was writing about technology in ways that were very strange and I had a lot of trouble reconciling his picture of the world with the one that I had up to then occupied. That world was, let us say, as tech.-free as I could make it—I had a cell phone, but didn’t want it, I had a laptop, but didn’t want it, I didn’t have an iPod/MP3 player or GPS or digital watch. I am decidedly analogue and don’t balk at being called a Luddite. Of course, given the world I had curated for myself, I didn’t realize at the time that I was at least ten years behind the technological curve, and so wasn’t able to participate in a lot of what Kelly was writing. As Out of Control was extracurricular reading for me, his work, however memorable it was for being difficult, didn’t get attached to much of the other stuff I was reading and learning and so remained for a long while just a weird thing I got into a long time ago. Fifteen years later, after being tossed into teaching a class on technology, I returned to Kelly to immerse myself in the (relatively) recent conversation about technology as we experience it in the twenty-first century. And I’m glad I did; What Technology Wants was a really smart, and quite extensive, discussion on technology, which, no surprise, tied into his earlier work. Kelly’s view of tech., to put it simply, is that it functions as the seventh kingdom of life, and as such it exhibits preferences and seeks improvement and expansion just as any other life form does. Given how fully we humans have integrated technology into our lives, humanity and technology share coextensive evolutionary trajectories, which is fascinating. The big takeaway here might be how Kelly suggests that tech. is NOT a violent, life-sucking force BUT ALSO that not all tech. is good for us either, the determining factor being whether the technology in question expands our choices or not. All the way through, Kelly is even-keeled and honest and smart and objective, and I find myself coming away from this book more open-minded than I’ve ever been w/r/t using technologies that I have seemingly always kept at arm’s length. Kelly changed my mind, which is a pretty big accomplishment for any book.
]]> <![CDATA[Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism]]> 2299257 159 Stephen J. Burn 1847062482 E. C. 4 3.64 2008 Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism
author: Stephen J. Burn
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/15
date added: 2022/08/28
shelves:
review:
Burn’s Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism sits nicely next to Herren’s The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo and Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace, as all are works that concentrate on a single author (i.e., a monograph) and extrapolate how that author’s fiction indicates a movement in literary thinking and so then also registers a change in cultural thinking. If Herren’s task is hard because he has to deal with so much material, Burn’s and Boswell’s tasks are hard because they have so little material to work with. And then, whereas Burn � it would turn out � was dealing with Wallace’s best work, I think Burn had to work hard to glean the meaning from Franzen’s first two novels (The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion) which were, shall we say, uneven, before getting to his longest chapter on Franzen’s best early novel, The Corrections (I’d love supplementary chapters on Freedom and Crossroads). Burn argues that Franzen’s fiction, along with his contemporaries, Wallace and Powers, indicates a simultaneous indebtedness to postmodernism and desire to transcend certain tendencies of postmodernism. Burn refers to this aspect of Franzen’s fiction as double vision, and so locates in Franzen’s first three novels how this double vision translates into highly intricate formal demonstrations of literary fiction’s gradual entry into “post-postmodernism� (a term that Burn unenthusiastically supports here). It’s in these latter chapters that Burn touches on two of what I see to be major aspects of popomo fiction (let’s not call it that, okay?): the balance between traditional realism and recent experimentalism (what Smith calls “compromise aesthetics�), and the more radical shift in ontology away from the language-oriented view of the world that postmodernists endorsed and toward an intuitive material sense of the world. I think that Burn is right on the money here, and I also think that there are more obvious authors/texts to illustrate these ideas than Franzen/The Twenty-Seventh City/Strong Motion. For my own purposes, Burn’s first two chapters were the most useful, but, altogether, Burn offers a solid critical stepping-stone that helps us out of the pomo morass.
]]> <![CDATA[Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights]]> 24292310
Inspired by 2,000 years of storytelling yet rooted in the concerns of our present moment, this is a spectacular achievement--enchanting, both very funny and terrifying. It is narrated by our descendants 1000 years hence, looking back on "The War of the Worlds" that began with "the time of the strangenesses": a simple gardener begins to levitate; a baby is born with the unnerving ability to detect corruption in people; the ghosts of two long-dead philosophers begin arguing once more; and storms pummel New York so hard that a crack appears in the universe, letting in the destructive djinns of myth (as well as some graphic superheroes). Nothing less than the survival of our world is at stake. Only one, a djinn princess who centuries before had learned to love humankind, resolves to help us: in the face of dynastic intrigue, she raises an army composed of her semi-magical great-great--etc.--grandchildren--a motley crew of endearing characters who come together to save the world in a battle waged for 1,001 nights--or, to be precise, two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.]]> 304 Salman Rushdie 081299891X E. C. 2 3.36 2015 Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
author: Salman Rushdie
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2022/08/25
date added: 2022/08/26
shelves:
review:
This is Rushdie leaning into two of his perennial bugbears: the friction between East and West, and religion. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is, of course, an allusion to One Thousand Nights and One Night (a.k.a., The Arabian Nights), and here Rushdie mimics the looping, recursive dialogue-less narration of those canonical tales in his contemporary novel. This sort of thing is, for me at least, a bit of a slog, since the introduction of each new character necessitates an interruption to the principal narrative that takes many many pages to get through by which point you can’t remember where you were when the story was interrupted. Clearly, this is by design, but it’s still frustrating (and, worse still, my being frustrated might be the point). The story itself is about the thousand-day-long period of the great War of the Worlds between the jinnia (a.k.a., genies) and the humans, during which a lot of fantastical shit happens to people in the real world and the two philosophers, Ibn Rushd (an actual philosopher from the twelfth century) and Al-Ghazali (an actual philosopher from the eleventh century), who are introduced at the beginning of the novel continue to bicker about whether or not the world is chaotic and whether or not God/Allah is real long after they’re dead. Here, obviously, is where Rushdie gets into what this book is about, namely whether religious belief is ultimately destructive and dangerous or not, which Rushdie works to convey through this grand metaphor (the presence of jinnia is the presence of religious belief, is this reading). The novel, though, is so overplotted and so involuted that this message is all but totally obscured. When I was about halfway through this book, Rushdie got stabbed a dozen times on a stage in western New York ahead of a talk on exiled writers and freedom of speech, presumably because he dared to criticize Islam in Satanic Verses. I didn’t like this book, but everything about it is important.
]]> <![CDATA[The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason]]> 29501 The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs—even when these beliefs inspire the worst human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic.

Winner of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.]]> 348 Sam Harris 0393327655 E. C. 4 3.89 2004 The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
author: Sam Harris
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/08
date added: 2022/08/09
shelves:
review:
If you’ve read the Dawkins-Dennett-Hitchens group of pro-atheism/anti-religion books then you have a good idea already about what you’re getting with Harris. Sometimes described as the fourth of the Four Horsemen, Harris is as enthusiastic an acolyte for atheism as the other three, and so they all share quite a lot in common when you read them. This is not to say, though, that they’re identical. Harris, more than the others it seems to me, argues that religious thinking in not only its extreme forms (which everyone can agree is hard to defend) but also, and perhaps especially, in its moderate forms is bad for us, since it’s this baseline casual religious belief that both makes those slightly more extreme forms acceptable and creates social pressure to conform and perpetuate the whole enterprise. His position, it comes as no surprise, hinges on rationality, and how in the absence of absolute knowledge � that is to say, in a world without a diagnostic for proving absolute certainty about any hypothesis/fact/theory � we must rely on empirical consensus-achieving techniques that (and this is the key) are falsifiable and can be adjusted to account for new knowledge. Religion, as Harris makes plain, does not fit this model as it both nonfalsifiable and uneditable by its very nature—how, after all, can one edit a perfect text? improve on omniscience? And since it can’t be updated, it should be dropped. Here’s where it gets challenging. Given that we wouldn’t countenance claims free from evidence in any other part of our lives, Harris advocates that we should stop being polite about expression of religious faith, and should even challenge religious claims on the basis of their illogic. The idea here is that the only way to make it socially acceptable to confront the nonsensical beliefs that people labor under is to do it, after which it will hypothetically be harder to hide behind religious belief when it comes to opposing, say, stem-cell research and therapies or abortion or non-cis/hetero marriage. It’s this sense that religion is something to be embarrassed about rather than grudgingly respected that leads to the next, even more challenging part of his argument. There is an urgency to start this process since religious conflict has now come home in the form of 9/11 (this was written shortly after 9/11 happened, so it’s a recent event in the book). Be in no doubt, 9/11 was motivated by religious belief, and Harris takes this a step further by saying that Islam is actually predisposed to violence in ways that other religions are not (and here is where he loses a lot of his readers). The larger point here is that we lose sight of what fundamentalist terrorism is when we try to understand it in secular terms as we would other varieties of crime. For Harris, trying to shoehorn Islamism into any of those secular models is really an effort to avoid confronting their religious beliefs, because doing so would necessitate a similar confrontation of our own (and maybe also admitting that we're fighting religious wars in West Asia). The final part of his argument, provided you’re still reading, is poised to lose hardline atheist readers as Harris discusses the place that “spirituality� (a vexed term that he concedes is vexed) has in a rational, secular world. Here, he gets into meditation practices, which require no supernatural beliefs and open onto spiritual planes otherwise unavailable (or so he contends). My sense here is that he’s preempting the humanist “need for spiritual sustenance� argument by reminding his readers that atheism doesn’t preclude a spiritual life (again, this isn’t really the right word). At the end of the whole everything, you won’t read this if you’re not already convinced of most of this stuff already, but it’s worth it if only to remind yourself that you’re not the only one out there.
]]> Human Blues 59366184 From an author whose writing has been praised as “blistering� (The New Yorker), “virtuosic� (The Washington Post), and “brilliant� (The New York Times) comes a provocative and entertaining novel about a woman who desperately wants a child but struggles to accept the use of assisted reproductive technology—a hilarious and ferocious send-up of feminism, fame, art, commerce, and autonomy.

On the eve of her fourth album, singer-songwriter Aviva Rosner is plagued by infertility. The twist: as much as Aviva wants a child, she is wary of technological conception, and has poured her ambivalence into her music. As the album makes its way in the world, the shock of the response from fans and critics is at first exciting—and then invasive and strange. Aviva never wanted to be famous, or did she? Meanwhile, her evolving obsession with another iconic musician, gone too soon, might just help her make sense of things.

Told over the course of nine menstrual cycles, Human Blues is a bold, brainy, darkly funny, utterly original interrogation of our cultural obsession with childbearing. It’s also the story of one fearless woman at the crossroads, ruthlessly questioning what she wants and what she’s willing—or not willing—to do to get it.]]> 416 Elisa Albert 1982167866 E. C. 4 3.25 2022 Human Blues
author: Elisa Albert
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/02
date added: 2022/08/02
shelves:
review:
Aviva Rosner is a successful-but-not-mega-famous punk-folk singer-songwriter touring her fourth album, Womb Service. She’s married, to everyone’s not-quite-encouraging bemusement, to a teacher, Sam, in Albany, NY. She’s in her mid/late thirties and desperately wants a kid. She can’t seem to get pregnant. The tensions and anxieties and competing interests inherent to these plot lines catalyze the novel, which depicts Aviva in conflict with seemingly every aspect of her life: she loves her husband but doesn’t want to live in Albany; she loves her husband but regularly entertains having affairs; she loves music but can’t stand the music industry; she wants a kid but won’t consider anything other than “natural� pregnancy. It’s this last part that animates most of the front-of-mind narration and dialogue in the book, as this is what Aviva is thinking about and discussing and scrolling through so much of the time here, and so is also the direction that Albert seems to be pointing the reader in. The pressure that Aviva faces � from her mother, Barb, from her religious community, Judaism, from her culture, us, from herself via her mother and religious community and culture � to get pregnant by any means necessary is massive and beyond all reason. But what Aviva is facing is the normalization of the extreme lengths (rich) people are willing to go to meet these expectations. What this means is that when Aviva resists what looks to her (and maybe to us too) like a dangerous gamble with scientific methods so new that we don’t fully know their long-term repercussions � with experimentation on and with her body � it is SHE who comes out looking crazy. This is like being gaslit by the whole world. Aviva can mostly see through it, and when she does she often gets angry (which again makes HER seem crazy). The cycle of desire, concession, resolve, fear, hope, and disappointment that Aviva goes through here is matched narratively with cycles of Aviva’s periods, which come to mark time in the text and which also integrates theme with form in a clever way. The novel concludes with Aviva still not pregnant, and maybe on her way to being okay with this. Though Albert doesn’t play this up, there’s something here about artistic production � something Aviva finds both “natural� and “easy� � and motherhood, which is to say not just that the results of artistic endeavors are like an artist’s children (this is something of a cliché), but that all the pain and heartache that goes into “birthing� an album or a novel results in an album or a novel that the artist must let go of to live elsewhere (with the audience), which is the truly difficult part of parenting. This helps to shed light on Aviva’s book-long internal consideration of Amy Winehouse and her music, something that holds great meaning for Aviva as a cautionary tale about the danger of giving too much of oneself to one’s children or to one’s art. Albert uses profanity with virtuosic, Mozartesque acuity, the narrative is unrelenting, and the novel forces the reader to confront our culture’s eagerness to acquiesce to scientific intervention. If riot grrrl is a lit. genre then this is a riot grrrl novel.
]]> <![CDATA[On the Genealogy of Morals (Penguin Classics)]]> 18079618 For the first time in Penguin Classics: Nietzsche’s accessible exploration of key ideas in his landmark Beyond Good and Evil—in a lucid new translation

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that the purpose of On the Genealogy of Morals was to call attention to his previous writings. But in fact the book does much more than that, elucidating and expanding on the cryptic aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil, and presenting a coherent discussion of morality in a work that is more accessible than much of his previous writings.]]> 167 Friedrich Nietzsche 0141195371 E. C. 3 4.05 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals (Penguin Classics)
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1887
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/20
date added: 2022/07/20
shelves:
review:
Even if you’ve never read this before you know what it’s about since Nietzsche’s stuff is so diffused throughout the culture at this point. Nietzsche � who, recall, declared that he was the antichrist � is not impressed with Western morality, which is, of course, to say Christian morality. And so, what do you know?, he finds here that Christian morals are a perversion of the good as they inveigle the herd to behave counter to their interests, to live in subjugation, by leveraging a fairy story to incredible ends. For Fred, interrupting the will to power is the outcome of this slave morality (die Sklavenmoral) which, being born from Christianity, exists everywhere we look, and so in order to set things right again we need to embrace master morality (die Herrenmoral) and drop Christianity (which, again, for Nietzsche, is a religion developed by history’s losers). The genealogy part of this is the philology/etymology business that Fred gets up to where he makes his case by showing how class-inflected words (e.g., noble, base, villain, well-born/low-born, mean) belie a moral rationale of the master that is counter to what we typically think of as moral behavior. (You see here how incompatible Marx and Nietzsche are.) I find Nietzsche’s prose poetry style of philosophy to be an agonizing slog, and can easily see why the German National Socialist Party liked this guy so much, but we still can’t do without Nietzsche.
]]> <![CDATA[Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith]]> 1894
At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 399 Jon Krakauer 1400032806 E. C. 4
I can’t remember reading a book that frustrated me more than this one. Krakauer, by way of reporting on the Lafferty murders, widens the scope of his investigation quite a bit and winds up telling two stories: The nineteenth-century founding and growth of the LDS church, and the contemporary culture of fundamentalist Mormonism that has begotten crimes ranging from polygamy to kidnapping to incest to rape to murder. The idea here � and I think that this is both smart and judicious � is to show how Dan Lafferty is the product of a religious faith with (like pretty much all religions) a history of violence, and thus that these murders were not so anomalous. What’s frustrating about this, to me at least, are the apparently unchangeable conditions of possibility � American cultural respect for religious beliefs, LDS culture, FLDS doctrine, constitutional protection of religious practice � that lead to such crimes when changing those conditions should be as easy as reading this book.

Perhaps the aspect of Mormonism (shared with many other major religions) that is A. most violent and B. most easily tolerated (since it’s so common) is the tacitly understood inferiority of women inherent to this arch-patriarchal worldview. To read the early history of Mormonism, it looks to me as though Joseph Smith wanted to have sex with women who were not his wife and introduced a self-serving revelation from God that polygamy was ordained in order to get what he wanted while upholding nineteenth-century moral standards. Of course, this revelation was so crazy (even by the standard that Smith had by then set) that he chose not to share it with the group right away, testing the water first to see how it would go over. It turns out that a lot of other Mormon leaders could get behind the revelation, and so it became codified as LDS doctrine until a future LDS president rescinded it about fifty years later in 1890. Rescinding one of Smith’s revelations didn’t go over well with the faithful, however, and so fundamentalist sects splintered off in order to continue the practice of polygamy, first not-so-secretly and then secretly. Brenda Lafferty married into a fundamentalist clan without knowing it, and instantly became a focal point of patriarchal disquiet because she had gone to college and could think for herself and wasn’t going to be totally subservient—she threatened the worldview of insecure men who were in effect made insecure through the same ideological process by which Brenda was understood to be inferior. As part of the religious practice of Mormonism is direct communication with God, and so at times the receipt of revelations, it’s little surprise that Dan Lafferty received a self-serving revelation decreeing that Brenda and Erica should be murdered. The method through which Dan verified that this revelation was authentic was to pray.

Among the many many interesting parts of this book, the most interesting part for me was the legal case against Dan Lafferty. The state sought to prove that Dan should be put to death because he was fully aware of what he was doing at the time of the murder and that he remained fit to stand trial—in other words, that he did not meet the legal definition of insanity. The defense sought to reduce the sentence down from execution to something lighter. Neither side was willing to argue that claiming to hear the voice of God, and to even receive direct instructions from God, constituted insanity, since such an experience is reported to be so common and a part of the religious practices of so many. This was so aggravating that I found myself actually raising my voice at a book (perhaps not the picture of perfect mental health). In a 2011 interview with Bob Schieffer, Michele Bachmann stated that she received a “sense� from God that she should run for president after having prayed. That was not then, nor would now be, an unusual statement.

While reading this, I couldn’t help but return in my mind to Tara Westover’s Educated, which also involves a fundamentalist Mormon family (though not a polygamous one). Through that book as through this one I feel forced to face up to uncomfortable truths about myself—my sense is that fundamentalism is the only way to practice religion and so that I am by nature a fundamentalist. If not for the milquetoast, namby-pamby, weak-tea Protestantism I was brought up in (and could easily get out of), who knows what havoc I would have wrought? Being given to extreme behavior explains long-distance running and graduate school, which are not altogether dangerous to others, but it’s the part of myself that needs to most surveillance and I hate feeling in league with the Shawn Westovers and the Dan Laffertys of the world.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate. Occam didn’t know how right he was.
]]> 3.97 2003 Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
author: Jon Krakauer
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/06
date added: 2022/07/06
shelves:
review:
On 24 July, 1984, a woman, Brenda Lafferty, and her infant daughter, Erica, had their throats slit. The murderers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, killed Brenda and Erica after receiving a revelation from God that they, along with several others, had to be “removed� in order for His divine plan to be realized.

I can’t remember reading a book that frustrated me more than this one. Krakauer, by way of reporting on the Lafferty murders, widens the scope of his investigation quite a bit and winds up telling two stories: The nineteenth-century founding and growth of the LDS church, and the contemporary culture of fundamentalist Mormonism that has begotten crimes ranging from polygamy to kidnapping to incest to rape to murder. The idea here � and I think that this is both smart and judicious � is to show how Dan Lafferty is the product of a religious faith with (like pretty much all religions) a history of violence, and thus that these murders were not so anomalous. What’s frustrating about this, to me at least, are the apparently unchangeable conditions of possibility � American cultural respect for religious beliefs, LDS culture, FLDS doctrine, constitutional protection of religious practice � that lead to such crimes when changing those conditions should be as easy as reading this book.

Perhaps the aspect of Mormonism (shared with many other major religions) that is A. most violent and B. most easily tolerated (since it’s so common) is the tacitly understood inferiority of women inherent to this arch-patriarchal worldview. To read the early history of Mormonism, it looks to me as though Joseph Smith wanted to have sex with women who were not his wife and introduced a self-serving revelation from God that polygamy was ordained in order to get what he wanted while upholding nineteenth-century moral standards. Of course, this revelation was so crazy (even by the standard that Smith had by then set) that he chose not to share it with the group right away, testing the water first to see how it would go over. It turns out that a lot of other Mormon leaders could get behind the revelation, and so it became codified as LDS doctrine until a future LDS president rescinded it about fifty years later in 1890. Rescinding one of Smith’s revelations didn’t go over well with the faithful, however, and so fundamentalist sects splintered off in order to continue the practice of polygamy, first not-so-secretly and then secretly. Brenda Lafferty married into a fundamentalist clan without knowing it, and instantly became a focal point of patriarchal disquiet because she had gone to college and could think for herself and wasn’t going to be totally subservient—she threatened the worldview of insecure men who were in effect made insecure through the same ideological process by which Brenda was understood to be inferior. As part of the religious practice of Mormonism is direct communication with God, and so at times the receipt of revelations, it’s little surprise that Dan Lafferty received a self-serving revelation decreeing that Brenda and Erica should be murdered. The method through which Dan verified that this revelation was authentic was to pray.

Among the many many interesting parts of this book, the most interesting part for me was the legal case against Dan Lafferty. The state sought to prove that Dan should be put to death because he was fully aware of what he was doing at the time of the murder and that he remained fit to stand trial—in other words, that he did not meet the legal definition of insanity. The defense sought to reduce the sentence down from execution to something lighter. Neither side was willing to argue that claiming to hear the voice of God, and to even receive direct instructions from God, constituted insanity, since such an experience is reported to be so common and a part of the religious practices of so many. This was so aggravating that I found myself actually raising my voice at a book (perhaps not the picture of perfect mental health). In a 2011 interview with Bob Schieffer, Michele Bachmann stated that she received a “sense� from God that she should run for president after having prayed. That was not then, nor would now be, an unusual statement.

While reading this, I couldn’t help but return in my mind to Tara Westover’s Educated, which also involves a fundamentalist Mormon family (though not a polygamous one). Through that book as through this one I feel forced to face up to uncomfortable truths about myself—my sense is that fundamentalism is the only way to practice religion and so that I am by nature a fundamentalist. If not for the milquetoast, namby-pamby, weak-tea Protestantism I was brought up in (and could easily get out of), who knows what havoc I would have wrought? Being given to extreme behavior explains long-distance running and graduate school, which are not altogether dangerous to others, but it’s the part of myself that needs to most surveillance and I hate feeling in league with the Shawn Westovers and the Dan Laffertys of the world.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate. Occam didn’t know how right he was.

]]> <![CDATA[Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life]]> 36236100

As R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick demonstrate in their sharp and convincing work, avowed atheists were derided since the founding of the nation. Even Thomas Paine fell into disfavor and his role as a patriot forgotten. Popular Republican Robert Ingersoll could not be elected in the nineteenth century due to his atheism, and the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton was shunned when she questioned biblical precepts about women’s roles.


Moore and Kramnick lay out this fascinating history and the legal cases that have questioned religious supremacy. It took until 1961 for the Supreme Court to ban religious tests for state officials, despite Article 6 of the Constitution. Still, every one of the fifty states continues to have God in its constitution. The authors discuss these cases and more current ones, such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which address whether personal religious beliefs supersede secular ones.


In Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic, the authors also explore the dramatic rise of an "atheist awakening" and the role of organizations intent on holding the country to the secular principles it was founded upon.]]> 256 R. Laurence Moore 0393254968 E. C. 4 3.66 2018 Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life
author: R. Laurence Moore
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/27
date added: 2022/06/27
shelves:
review:
America’s history � from its founding in the foment of the Enlightenment up to last week’s abortion ruling � is inextricably bound with religion. And, as we all know, the country’s relationship with religion is complicated—we’re ostensibly secular (the much-touted separation of church and state) but constantly betray that secularism with preference toward religion (which means Christianity here). That preference toward religion, and occasional lapses of church-and-state separation, aren’t really a big deal most of the time since America’s resting heartrate is already religious. But that religiosity becomes problematic when it comes to ensuring the constitutional rights of nonbelievers who wish to enforce the rules and effect that separation. It might seem as though this sort of thing works itself out in the courts, that there comes a point when complainants arguing that, say, the pledge of allegiance or the national motto ultimately violate constitutional proscriptions against endorsements of religion do, to the chagrin of the majority, get what they want because they’re right. Right though they are, this isn’t what happens. What Moore and Kramnick offer in their book is a long look at how atheism as a concept and atheists as a demographic have been by turns unacknowledged, ignored, ostracized, and punished, by way of illustrating how America has consistently floundered when put to enforcing its own rules about secularism. Each period they cover � colonial America, the long nineteenth century, the contemporary � abounds with confrontation and contradiction, and generally portrays an inability to give up religious practice in an ever-more-secular world. I’m especially interested in how M&K linked America’s hatred of socialism with its hatred of atheism (that an existing prejudice against atheism is what led to the demonization of left politics). Although they didn’t put it this way, M&K repeatedly show how the government’s nonsecular tendencies rest on a big fat petitio principii and so how secular petitioners continue to frustrate the judiciary by pointing out that logical fallacy. In 2022 there are eight state constitutions that require a belief in God in order to hold public office.
]]> The New Sincerity 30900804 54 Alena Smith 0822234254 E. C. 4 3.79 The New Sincerity
author: Alena Smith
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/24
date added: 2022/06/24
shelves:
review:
This is a sneaky-good play about the contemporary moment’s self-negating double-binds. First among these is, as the title suggests, the matter of sincerity. I’ve made this claim many times before, but it’s worth pointing out, again, that sincerity is exactly what Adorno says it is, a paradoxical signifier that unmakes itself as soon as it is voiced. In other words, the problem with sincerity is that, first, it can never be proved, and, second, in the real world it can never be wholly divorced from motive, and therefore it can’t really exist. Here, then, espousing one’s sincerity or making claims to the sincerity of some other entity is always already open to criticism on the grounds that such individuals and entities can never not possess some preĂ«xisting motive (including (here’s the kicker) the desire to be perceived/construed as sincere). Artistic and political movements that advocate for and/or rely on sincerity as a core tenet are not only always going to regarded as naĂŻve, but are also likely to be picked apart (both from those on the outside and the inside) for not being “pureâ€� enough. All the way back in 1993, when Jim Collins used the term, “the new sincerity,â€� his coinage likewise hinged on a sense that the New Sincerity cycle of movies of the late-eighties/early-nineties responded to an all-consuming media culture by seeking “to recover a lost â€purity.’â€� Of course, Collins, like Alena Smith, suspends “purityâ€� in q.-marks because that purity is a phantom, it’s a reflection, in large part, of a sense of loss consequent to the “media-saturated landscape of contemporary American culture.â€� What Collins means by “media-saturatedâ€� in the early-nineties doesn’t even come close to what Smith is looking at in 2015, by which time the social media juggernaut instantly mediated almost all experience. This is what I mean by self-negating double-binds. By introducing anything to social media, say, that thing becomes, in a sense, a product within a cultural marketplace, and so reflects the motivation of the introducer, and so scuttles the possibility of sincerity, making even the best artistic/political statement/argument subject to suspicion. How, then, to change the world? This whole, overlong preamble sets up Smith’s play. The New Sincerity is about a writer, Rose, who works for a political journal, Asymptote, where her immediate boss, Benjamin, seeks through the magazine to do something important. Benjamin is also engaged to Sadie, who is in Berlin completing a Fulbright and who is about to publish a book about the death of left politics, following the logic that the radical movements of the sixties failed and that the youth of today “don’t know how to careâ€� about large social movements. The unsaid implication here being that the authentic activism that grew around the counterculture movements of the previous generation cannot be replicated without being perceived as derivative, that authenticity (sincerity) cannot exist alongside mediation and, crucially, self-awareness. And then Rose brings Benjamin to the Movement â€� a thinly veiled stand-in for Occupy Wall Street â€� happening right outside Asymptote’s office doors, where a leaderless phalanx of activists seeks to remake the status quo. Now, Benjamin, who had been happily presiding over the end of history and who had been happily cloistered in his impenetrable nihilism, throws himself into the Movement, dedicating his journal to the publicization of this revolutionary political action. Parallel to the Movement main plot is the subplot of Rose and Benjamin’s growing infatuation. Benjamin is indifferent about love and is indifferent about his engagement and is pretty openly flirtatious, while Rose is, while not a prude, dedicated to her sense that love is attainable. This distinction between these characters lines up with sincerity once again, as sincerity, like love, only exists in the metaphysical—there’s no proof for these things, they’re only called into being when they’re believed in. Eventually, Benjamin is arrested on the last day of the Movement when the cops come and “evacuateâ€� the park, after which he writes about his time with the Movement and casts himself, falsely, as one of the founders. Too, Benjamin marries Sadie, and Sadie adds an epilogue to her book “predictingâ€� that the Movement would transpire. This conclusion is an obvious challenge to Rose’s, and by extension our, sincerity, as it comes to look as though the perfidious elements of the world â€� e.g., mediation, marketing, neoliberalism â€� will always undermine sincerity and make sincere movements look ridiculous in retrospect, if not also in the present. The bind here, though, is that artistic/political change can’t happen without publication; the Movement is nothing if it remains inside one person’s head. And so here I see Smith’s real brilliance as she’s asking us to accept that sincerity is imperfect, that in a world of unfathomable complexity and totalizing relativism, a heuristic is the best we can hope to attain, and, perhaps like love, we can call change into being by believing in it.
]]> <![CDATA[God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything]]> 2239102 of the double helix.]]> 336 Christopher Hitchens 0446697966 E. C. 3 4.10 2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
author: Christopher Hitchens
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2022/06/21
date added: 2022/06/21
shelves:
review:
I don’t really have occasion to use this saying very much, but this reminded me of the idiom: “Everybody got a gris-gris.� If you’re not already familiar with it, this saying relates how we all harbor (at least) one irrational belief, that none of us is wholly free of superstition or magical thinking in at least one regard. This might look like a belief in ghosts, or astrology, or actually knocking on wood to prevent a hypothetical event from happening, but whatever it is, so the saying dictates, we all got one. As someone who strives to be educated and so rather self-aggrandizingly considers himself to be rational, I have tried really hard to eliminate the gris-gris from my thinking and behavior and language in order to accommodate new learning by eliminating the threat that new information might otherwise represent. One of the big ones, of course, was religion. I’m embarrassed now to think back at just how into church I was, but suffice it to say that there was a time when I thought (as did my parents, I later came to find out) that I would go to seminary. At sixteen, though, while sitting in a pew one Sunday morning, the seed of doubt was sown. Without ever having heard of William of Ockham, I considered to myself how much more sense this all made if it was just made up, and so accidentally became an agnostic. By eighteen, in McCune Hall 336 (not at seminary), while reading a world history textbook chapter on the spread of Islam though northern Africa, I accidentally became an atheist. And, like converts of all religious varieties, I leaned into my atheism with all the stridency and vitriol of a fundamentalist, which, of course, I’m also embarrassed to look back on now. While my fundamentalism has tempered somewhat with age, I remain, as I like to say, a devout atheist. It’s no surprise, then, that Hitchens� subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything, was like nip to the cat, as I’ve had similar feelings for some time now. But then I’ve also put off picking this up—after all, it isn’t as though I need to be convinced of anything in this particular book. This may be the irresolvable problem with something like God Is Not Great; it’s not likely to be read by the person who “needs� it, and so winds up preaching, as it were, to the choir. There may be other problems too, though. I find Hitchens to be a compelling orator, and yet this writing doesn’t thrill me (and here I’m primed to get really worked up). He didn’t explain enough about the details of his objections with the religions and denominations he addresses here, and too quickly changes topics, to move anyone off of their line. Also, because he’s the kind of well-bred English toff who uses “discover� to mean “take the lid off of something� I found myself repeatedly getting lost in his syntax. (Oh, and he has this weird habit of referring to clerics as “mammals,� presumably to remind us that they’re just animals like the rest of us.) But perhaps the biggest issue I take is that the great vast majority of these pages is dedicated to cataloguing all of the horrible shit done in the name of religion, leaving open the question of God (as Al Sharpton annoyingly pointed out) and leaving open the possibility that the outwardly harmless, casually religious petty bourgeois types could read this whole book and think that it had nothing bad to say about them. Maybe I’m just too jaded to imagine that the book is really changing the temperature of the room. I mean, isn’t this sort of thing polarizing even for those who haven’t read it? Everyone already has their team, right? So this was fine and all but I’m reluctant to recommend it. It fails to edify; it fails to get to the it. Go watch the Sam Harris–Jordan Peterson Pangburn debates. That stuff edifies for days.
]]> Look at Me 43471995
With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.]]> 528 Jennifer Egan E. C. 3 3.61 2001 Look at Me
author: Jennifer Egan
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2022/06/15
date added: 2022/06/17
shelves:
review:
A frustrating part of contemporary life involves the discrepancy between our inner lives and our outer appearances. Social media has amplified this aspect of the human experience to such a degree that we might not even consider this a problem anymore � and surely it’s far from insightful � but the idea that beauty, in whatever form, is to be treated with suspicion now sits in the back of our collective mind. Beauty, the thinking goes, is a con, it’s a product, it’s a façade, and it belies deep despair. Thus, for literary authors of the nineties, beauty became a metaphor for postmodernism, something superficially attractive that was all the while hiding an ever-more-depleting sadness. This idea’s maturation coincides, of course, with the most recent period shift away from postmodernism, when Wallace, in Infinite Jest, and Saunders, in “Isabelle,� use the concept of beauty as something to be wary of and, more importantly, of ugliness as something to trust, an analeptic for a decadent world. This, I sense, is Egan’s starting point in Look at Me, a novel about a model, Charlotte Swenson, whose face gets smashed up in a car accident. The plot is way way more convoluted � involving a pseudo-terrorist, Z, (Egan, who once waitressed in Windows on the World, anticipates the 9/11 attacks here), a former high school jock’s adulthood as a disgraced academic, and a teenage girl who starts a sexual relationship with an adult man � but Charlotte’s narrative line is the one we care most about here (it’s the one delivered to us in the first person) because it’s the most compelling and is the one doing the most work as cultural commentary. What eventually happens is that she gets invited to join a new site called OrdinaryPeople (oh yeah, Egan also anticipates social media) where people with interesting jobs/experiences will blog (before blog was a verb or a noun in out vernacular) about their lives and the rest of us will buy subscriptions to read about it. Of course, becoming a character on OrdinaryPeople means that she begins to curate her real life such that it, too, becomes fake, an effect we’re all now familiar with thanks to Bookface. The novel’s crescendo occurs on almost the final page, when Charlotte’s accident is recreated and filmed for OrdinaryPeople, during which experience Charlotte kind of loses it. At the end, then, Charlotte trades in her beauty and sadness for ordinariness and happiness, which I can’t help but read in line with the other literary fiction of the time that sought to throw off the pomo mask. This book is weighed down with narrative lines that go nowhere and conflicts that fail to arrive and unnecessary opacity, meaning it's not one of Egan’s best, but still and all it’s another tile in the New Sincerity mosaic, and so worth a look.
]]> Osama 61108064 Osama.

“In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante...�

“Joe’s quest to find the man takes him across the world, from the backwaters of Asia to the European Capitals of Paris and London, and as the mystery deepens around him there is one question he is trying hard not to ask: who is he, really, and how much of the books is fiction? Chased by unknown assailants, Joe’s identity slowly fragments as he discovers the shadowy world of the refugees, ghostly entities haunting the world in which he lives. Where do they come from? And what do they want? Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he’ll find in New York and, finally, on top a quiet hill above Kabul—nor for the choice he will at last have to make...]]> 385 Lavie Tidhar E. C. 2 2.00 2011 Osama
author: Lavie Tidhar
name: E. C.
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2022/05/25
date added: 2022/05/25
shelves:
review:
I don’t think I understand this novel. The what-if?-ness of fantasy, the theory goes, is a tactic employed by the author to channel and exorcise cultural anxiety related to questions of ontology—in other words, to determine something otherwise inscrutable about the nature of this world by constructing an alternative one with a more immediate, tangible structure. The Man in the High Castle (the book that everyone seems desperate to compare this book to) might be an example of this; in order to work out how fascistic our cultural really is, Dick writes a book about how close to Nazi-flavored fascism we came. The uncovering-conspiracy-ness of noir, the theory goes, is a tactic employed by the author to channel and exorcise cultural anxiety related to questions of epistemology—in other words, to fathom out what seems like some unattainable knowledge in a world beset by secrets and mysteries. The Maltese Falcon (a book, by the way, that this book might have a bit more in common with than it initially appears) might be an example of this; in order to resolve our fear that an anonymous criminal underworld operates the true reins of power, an extra-legal P.I. uncovers a criminal conspiracy while also affirming that the supposed riches that organize their lives are empty of real value. Osama, it seems to me, is a noir fantasy that means to ask both ontological questions about the nature of the culture � is the world we occupy just an intelligence agency–run Matrix? is it possible to know whether what we perceive as real is always already mediated? � and epistemological ones � what is the spirit of terrorism? what unseen forces influence our lives? � simultaneously. What we get here is the story of Joe, a detective working out of Vientiane, Laos, in the mold of Sam Spade et al., who is hired by a mysterious woman to locate Mike Longschott, the author of the Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante series of pulp novels. Joe, it turns out, is familiar with Longschott’s work, having already read several of these pulps, which all follow (we’re given to understand) the fictional vigilante-hero, Osama Bin Laden, on his international escapades. We get chapters from these books throughout the principal narrative of Tidhar’s novel, which all describe actual terrorist attacks that will be familiar to anyone over the age of, say, twenty-five. This set-up is the reason you pick up Osama—you want to explore the world in which recent-history’s greatest monster is both a fiction and a hero, and where Islamist terrorism is nonexistent, in order to reflect on THIS world’s nature and THIS world’s mysteries. The direction that Tidhar points us in, though, is the apparent conspiracy that Joe is (very) slowly uncovering, involving the possibility that there is no Longschott, or that there both is no Longschott and that his novels are merely a means to transport opium around the world (as in, the drugs are clandestinely hidden in what are made to look like books). Tidhar thumps pretty hard on this latter reading, as the one detail we’re offered throughout this convoluted novel is the scent of opium that Joe notices in the various dark rooms and seedy hotels he finds himself in while on his search. Uh, jeez, yeah and so then he’s also occasionally beaten up and threatened by the CPD (Committee on the Present Danger), a kind of international order-keeping agency of uncertain mandate. Anyway, in the end, Joe does wind up finding Longschott in the Kingdom of Afghanistan (I guess there was no socialist revolution in this world’s Afghanistan), except that maybe Joe is Longschott and maybe the whole novel is actually an opium dream. This conclusion is just so not in line with the promise of the premise that I’m convinced that I just don’t get it. I like that idea of art/literature as an illicit drug, and the idea that THIS world is shaped by shadowy forces both inside and outside the law, and the idea that we all participate in the spirit of terrorism, and even the idea that our life’s effort is to finally “find� ourselves, but the ontological disjunction that this book ends with scuttles all of those readings. Someone tell me what I’m missing.
]]> <![CDATA[The Burned Children of America]]> 29707 320 Zadie Smith 0241142059 E. C. 4 3.84 2003 The Burned Children of America
author: Zadie Smith
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/07
date added: 2022/05/15
shelves:
review:
Adam Kelly pointed me in this direction after citing Smith’s intro. in his chapter on the New Sincerity in Postmodern | Postwar � and After, and if that wasn’t already enough it’s got a great title. As Smith has it, this anthology is the product of some Herculean schmoozing on the part of the editors, Marco Cassini and Martina Testa, who helmed an underground Italian press, minimum fax. Even taking into account that these aren’t all new stories, the line-up here is pretty incredible, making for a cool snapshot of American literary fiction circa 2003, which, not surprisingly, takes on themes of corporate-sponsored homogenized culture and the challenges that come from being vulnerable enough to have a relationship. While Wallace, Foer, Saunders, and Eugenides form their own constellation in the tapestry of twenty-first century American belle-lettres (or, they do for me at least) owing to their treatment of these themes in other, longer texts, my favorite stories here are A. M. Homes� “A Real Doll� and Aimee Bender’s “The Leading Man.� Altogether, this is a neat book with a neat publication history and a neat title that is probably unnecessary but I’m glad to have.
]]> <![CDATA[Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America]]> 43250827 A Hulu limited series inspired by the New York Times bestselling book by Beth Macy.

Journalist Beth Macy's definitive account of America's opioid epidemic "masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference" (New York Times) -- from the boardroom to the courtroom and into the living rooms of Americans.
Ěý In this extraordinary work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of a national drama that has unfolded over two decades. From the labs and marketing departments of big pharma to local doctor's offices; wealthy suburbs to distressed small communities in Central Appalachia; from distant cities to once-idyllic farm towns; the spread of opioid addiction follows a tortuous trajectory that illustrates how this crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.

Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother's question-why her only son died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy investigates the powerful forces that led America's doctors and patients to embrace a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same communities featured in her bestselling book Factory Man, the unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death.

Through unsparing, compelling, and unforgettably humane portraits of families and first responders determined to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows that one thing uniting Americans across geographic, partisan, and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But even in the midst of twin crises in drug abuse and healthcare, Macy finds reason to hope and ample signs of the spirit and tenacity that are helping the countless ordinary people ensnared by addiction build a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities.

"An impressive feat of journalism, monumental in scope and urgent in its implications." -- Jennifer Latson, The Boston Globe]]> 400 Beth Macy 0316551309 E. C. 3 4.17 2018 Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America
author: Beth Macy
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/13
date added: 2022/05/13
shelves:
review:
Having broken the rules and watched the Hulu series (twice) before reading this, I had a certain idea about what would this read like already in mind. The series (if you haven’t already seen it) follows a few discrete plotlines: the miner who incurs a back injury on the job and is prescribed OxyContin; the Purdue rep.s who are tasked with aggressively pitching OxyContin to doctors; the small-town doctor who reluctantly prescribes OxyContin, only to then become hooked on it himself; the low-level attorneys and agents trying to make a case against Purdue Pharma; and the Sackler family � Richard Sackler, in particular � that brings to market and then grossly profits from its “blockbuster drug.� My expectation, then, was that Macy’s book would follow along this trajectory, circumscribing the opioid epidemic by addressing its many intersecting facets. Had I looked at GR first, I would have learned that this isn’t exactly what Macy offers here. And since my expectations weren’t initially met, I was pretty disappointed with what I got, but now that I’ve finished I wonder whether my not getting what I thought I would isn’t in itself reflective of the problems inherent to our culture that led to the epidemic in the first place. Let me explain. Very little of this, it turns out, is about the Sacklers or Purdue Pharma or even OxyContin. As it unsurprisingly turns out, the Sackler family’s members weren’t enthusiastic about sitting down to be interviewed for this book, and are insulated by their money and privilege and money and legal team and money, and so don’t really have to answer to anyone who doesn’t possess subpoena power. What you get in the miniseries is, basically, the dramatic representation of a bunch of writers� best guesses about what went down behind very expensive closed doors, and what you get in the book are the interviews Macy conducts about OxyContin and similar opioids with users and treatment specialists and doctors, meaning that the corporation-as-Mammon-worshiping-soul-eater angle is largely absent from the page. I found this to be a pretty big missing piece, since, to my mind, the epidemic is a product of rapacious greed (read: standard business practices under capitalism) as much as it is about the human animal’s tendency to become addicted to oxycodone. So, here I see a parallel between Macy’s Dopesick and Moore’s Radium Girls in how both books set the reader up to see the built-in iniquity of an economic system that makes low coal mining and radium dial painting and rural poverty and urban poverty and the outsized power of corporations even possible in the first place, but then don’t follow through and actually name the actual enemy. I’m about to write some nice things about this book, but, still and all, I think that Macy misses a trick here; even without getting to sit down with a Sackler or a Purdue spokesperson, she could still have outlined the fact that the system that makes Purdue possible is the system that makes 100,000 opioid-related deaths in a single year possible. Macy, to be fair, comes closer than Moore does to making this point, as she ends the book by trying to make the political encumbrances to the resolution of the opioid epidemic more clear (e.g., red-state resistance to expanding the Medicaid provision of the ACA, puritanical resistance to MAT recovery and safe-injection sites and needle-exchange centers, neoliberal resistance to rerouting law-and-order money to addiction recovery assistance) which often involve an unshakable dedication to the premise that market solutions can solve social problems (and the implicit knowledge that a good number of legislators are on the take from Big Pharma). Okay, but Macy isn’t indifferent to the systemic nature of the opioid epidemic; her approach is to talk to as many people involved as possible (forget about keeping up with all the names in here, by the way) in order to get their take on the problem being faced. The result of these interviews is something like a mosaic of the epidemic: economic depression leads to white-market joblessness, encouraging black-market employment; physically demanding, dangerous work leads to injury, encouraging powerful opioid pain-relief medication subscriptions; powerful opioid medications lead to both iatrogenic and divergence addictions, encouraging black-market employment and economic depression; opioid addictions lead to crime (theft, principally), encouraging a tough-on-crime reaction; overly expensive opioid addictions lead to much less expensive opiate addictions, encouraging black-market employment and a tough-on-crime reaction; opioid and opiate addictions lead to a surge in reliance on underfunded, understaffed, undereducated, underprepared social services infrastructure, encouraging what meager funding there is to funnel into traditional (as in, religiously oriented, twenty-eight day, drug abstinence only) recovery centers; the ineffectiveness of the too-few traditional recovery centers in the economically depressed places where opioid/opiate addiction is ubiquitous leads to yet more black-market employment and yet more theft and yet more tough-on-crime reactions, encouraging the dog the continue to chase its own tail until it dies. Death, though, isn’t really a metaphor. Between 1999-2019, about 500,000 Americans died due to opioid- or opiate-related overdoses. Between April 2020 and April 2021, over 100,000 Americans died due to opioid- or opiate-related overdoses. The solution that Macy lands on, and thumps hard (as does the miniseries), is a MAT recovery approach that uses methadone/suboxone/vivitrol in concert with counseling to combat addiction since ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the research concludes that AA-style, come-in-and-dry-out, abstinence only, “Just Say No,� “This Is Your Brain on Drugs,� pray-the-addiction-away approach CANNOT help someone with an opioid/opiate addiction. I really needed to hear this part of the story. Having seen my own sister get forced into and then flame out of maybe ten rehabs (including one in Philadelphia she never made it to because she ODed on pills (but didn’t die) the night before we were scheduled to leave) that all followed the abstinence model, and having grown up in a world where drug addiction and the inability to recover from drug addiction is regarded as a moral failing of the addict, and having believed that one’s willpower was enough to beat any addiction, learning that none of my assumptions were true was really valuable. This, then, is what makes Macy’s approach successful—her focus on the lives of the addicted and the families of the addicted and the communities of the addicted allows the reader (me) to see how impossibly hard it is to break out of the addiction cycle, rather than the questions I usually care about and concern myself with (like, what conditions of possibility must exist for addiction to occur in the first place). What I got from Dopesick is the messiness of the epidemic and the messiness of the lives of the addicts. The miniseries irons all of that stuff out, making it better and this realer.
]]> The Candy House 58437521 From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own—featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing� memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters� who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,� those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.� Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.]]> 352 Jennifer Egan 1476716765 E. C. 5 3.61 2022 The Candy House
author: Jennifer Egan
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/05
date added: 2022/05/05
shelves:
review:
There was some controversy ginned up, you’ll recall, after Goon Squad came out about whether it was a bona fide novel or really just a collection of short stories dressed up like one. Goon Squad would go on to win the Pulitzer and the Book Critics Circle Award because it was awesome, but which also further roiled this tempest-in-a-teapot about the signifiers of various literary forms. Not that it matters, but I’m on the it’s-a-novel side of this now-dead (embarrassingly) academic debate, but that’s not to say there isn’t merit to the other side’s position. Goon Squad carries a flavor of the short story collection about it, in large part, because if its decenteredness, by which I mean its lack of a central main character or organizing plot line. With the book in your hands, what this means is that you have to register its themes as they’re offered impressionistically (like how a short story collection works) rather than gauge their gradual development over the span of a text designed to direct your attention to the conclusion and a conclusive reading. So, anyway, there’s something about this approach that thwarts an easy reading of the novel, and is therefore, for that same reason, deserving of attention, because, just like you were told in middle school, literary form carries content. Goon Squad argues (convincingly) that we share intricate connections that may eventually become known to us or, just as likely in the world of the novel, remain invisible, that, in other words, we (the chapters, the characters) are all connected even if those connections aren’t immediately apparent, and, moreover, the novel’s coherence is only discernable by selectively framing a reading. We experience our lives as a singular coherent narrative, but this is a fiction as it’s really the result of many many influences, and so our lives, then, are, like the novel portrays, the decentered result of many influences both known and invisible. This is all preamble to talking about The Candy House, which, being the sister novel to Goon Squad, is structured in the same way, making a summary of its plot impossible while the book itself remains inarguably brilliant. In these chapters we see a huge roster of characters � some of whom we met (at different ages) in Goon Squad � who each advance a plot line unique and important mostly to them (although, of course, what we wind up learning in one chapter inevitably informs the narratives of later chapters (and of the previous novel)) that often involve divorce, parents, and the challenges of balancing work lives with home lives (and, more and more, digital lives). Here, once again, we see the intricate plotting and connections suggested by Goon Squad’s form, along with the (very) subtle optimism forwarded by that earlier novel. As I’ve sometimes said to various captive audiences, I think of Goon Squad as a 9/11 novel—a text that hints at that event and how it consequently changed the culture, in particular how it shifted our attention toward sincerity. Here, once again, I see optimism, but of a post-pandemic, socially-mediated variety, where the emphasis now (as is brought up in different ways throughout the book) is on authenticity and whether it’s possible to maintain authentic spaces in a world so inundated with not only advertising but also highly curated “realities.� To this end, there’s a lot of attention paid here to the future of social media and how those new technologies will be met by the general public on the way to changing the shape of that public and whether these changes are good or bad. On the strength of Goon Squad, I’ll read anything that Egan writes, which is now also true of The Candy House.
]]> The Nineties 58082714 The Nineties: a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history.

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.

Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a '90s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.

In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, "The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.]]> 370 Chuck Klosterman 0735217955 E. C. 4 3.86 2022 The Nineties
author: Chuck Klosterman
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/30
date added: 2022/05/01
shelves:
review:
I’m given to reading works of literature through a periodizing lens. I read, in other words, for how texts, to either a greater or lesser extent, conform to what the current thinking is about the literary period they come from. This, of course, entails regularly refining what these so-called lit. periods are about, requiring a robust (if insular) debate about the defining characteristics of, say, postmodernism, and then how those characteristics can be read for in fiction. Limiting? Yes. Stupid? Maybe. But, it’s my way. As it happens, it’s also why I loved this book so much. Klosterman, without using this language (he seems suspicious of academia, although this reads to me like his most academic book to date), periodizes the nineties by first offering what he thinks defines the spirit of the decade (the Gen X sensibility) and then explaining how this spirit came about (relative social and economic stability, television, a response to Boomerdom) and then delimiting this spirit’s timeline (1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall) to 2001 (9/11 attacks)), which is exactly how lit. periods get defined. Anyway, the meat of the book is Klosterman at his apophenian best, taking several seemingly unrelated events and revealing how they share a common trait that reflects a meaningful aspect of cultural thought. In the process he not only confers deep significance to pop culture’s most insipid manifestations (the macarena, Titanic, inflatable furniture) but he also relates one of the most challenging aspects of periodization in relatively simple terms: In order to understand what makes something from the past important (a dance craze, a movie craze, a décor craze) we have to try to understand it in the cultural terms of that past. Judging yesterday’s pop culture from today’s terms leaves everything looking quaint, retrograde, or stupid (what else can be said about pogs, or gak, or beanie babies as viewed from 2022?). I think Klosterman misses a trick by not getting into Daria, and I selfishly wanted him to unpack Hanson (I’m looking at you, Jacque), and, obviously, his mini-chapter on the New Sincerity is too unconsidered to warrant rebuttal, but, still and all, The Nineties was both edifying and a lot of fun. Klosterman is a writer I’d like to have a beer with.
]]> <![CDATA[The Cat in the Hat for President: A Political Fable]]> 36191714
While this mindbending classic vividly evokes the late 1960s—with psychedelic flights of fancy and tropes of the sexual revolution, civil rights, and Vietnam all heaving out of its pages—it also feels chillingly prescient a half century later. Its hilarity shot through with anger and fear, The Cat in the Hat for President anticipates and diagnoses the unheard-of spectacle of the current political circus, and, well, a cat in a (MAGA) hat.]]> 80 Robert Coover E. C. 3 3.33 1980 The Cat in the Hat for President: A Political Fable
author: Robert Coover
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1980
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/23
date added: 2022/04/23
shelves:
review:
Somehow in the same year that he published The Universal Baseball Association, Coover also managed to come out with this weird little novella, A Political Fable (later rebranded as The Cat in the Hat for President). I’d say that Coover definitely has Nixon in mind here � and so probably also has A Public Burning in mind too (there’s a lot of the Cat’s zaniness in Uncle Sam and The Phantom) � but in a more general, how-does-a-Nixon-even-become-possible? kind of way, where the emphasis is less on the politician and more on the electorate (I was put in mind of the Zaphod Beeblebrox–Humma Kavula dynamic from Hitchhiker’s Guide). Anyway, we get the story of the Cat in the Hat’s rise to political superstardom in the 1968 presidential election from the perspective of Mr. Brown, the stoic political strategist and sitting Attorney General who doesn’t like the Cat or what the Cat’s popularity suggests but does reluctantly go to work for. The Cat’s incredible rise, eerily mirroring another recent politician’s rise (see: on-the-nose reissue cover), is what matters here because it’s only possible (against all probability and decency) in the first place because we, the people, are just so susceptible to showmanship and spectacle and anarchy. Just like Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, that anarchic fun turns not-fun in a big hurry—it becomes disorienting and scary until the kids (us) are desperate for their parents to come home. From a political vantage, the warning is pretty clear: don’t conflate salesmanship with capability, since, at the end of the day, politics is (and should remain) boring. Yet, since this is Coover after all, I can’t help but also read literary periodization into this, and so also arrive at a comment on postmodernism. The literary moment in which Coover is writing this piece is, like the Cat’s arrival, suddenly anarchic, as all of the tacit “rules� of literary fiction were being ignored and teased through the moment’s self-reflexive, ironic, playful novels (including ones written by Coover), and so I find myself reading this as a warning against the ensorcelling thrall of postmodernism’s antics, a reminder that someone, eventually, has to be the parent who sets things right. Setting things right means returning a sense of order to the mayhem by anchoring texts with a version of the principles that postmodernism evacuated from the culture (a belief in language’s ability to contact the real world, for one; literature’s ability to move cultural thought, for another). Whatever. A Political Fable is neither a hidden gem nor political science—read this if you want filler for your dissertation reading lists or because you plan to bring it up at parties knowing that no one else will have heard of it and you savor the sense of superiority that comes from reading stuff that others don’t even know about.
]]> Tenth of December 18310275
One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.
Ěý
In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,� a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,� a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.
Ěý
Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.
Ěý
Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”]]> 272 George Saunders E. C. 5 4.13 2013 Tenth of December
author: George Saunders
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/18
date added: 2022/04/18
shelves:
review:
Why did I wait so long to read this? As everyone else already knows, Tenth of December, like all of Saunders� stuff I’ve read so far, is killer. As with his other short fiction, we get formal range and really fun experiments with voice/narration, which on its own is worth the price of admission, but then he’s also doing what we really come to killer lit. fic. for: a diagnosis of the cultural moment. Here, Saunders, to my reading, lands again and again on moral binds, backing his characters into a figurative corner in order to play out the moment of choice between right and wrong, which always comes with consequences. These consequences, at least in this book, regularly relate to class struggle—characters and their respective families are hurting for money and need to keep a job, or are trying to manage a sense of class inferiority which encourages more spending/consuming, or face limited options for want of more capital. This is perhaps best demonstrated in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,� where the emphasis on moral choice and class point to a larger comment about the nature of capitalism as it stands in large part as the structuring institution of American culture and also regularly pushes us into moral binds with unsavory consequences. Saunders doesn’t strike me as a stridently political writer, and his characters aren’t cast in the Eat-the-Rich mold, which would make this reading easier to convey, but even so Tenth of December appears to me to be a political text, commanding the reader to be, if nothing else, cognizant of the nature of an economic system that can’t but force us into real-world moral quandaries at every turn. This stuff is just so good.
]]> Fresh Complaint: Stories 37805243 The first collection of short fiction from Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American. The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­—and intriguing­­—territory.

Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster� to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail� (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth duringthe real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art flounder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in Fresh Complaint, a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist.

Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.]]> 304 Jeffrey Eugenides 1250192722 E. C. 3 3.55 2017 Fresh Complaint: Stories
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/31
date added: 2022/04/01
shelves:
review:
This is a good book of short stories helmed by a totally capable author whose natural form is not the short story. My sense is that this is a Don’t-Forget-About-Me book—as in, Eugenides didn’t have a novel published in a while and so needed to put something out to satisfy his publisher and keep the reading public from forgetting that this guy’s still around. Cynical, perhaps, but of the ten stories in this collection, eight of them have been previously published (the earliest in 1988), and so only two of them (the first, “Complainers,� and last, “Fresh Complaint�) are new to this publication. And because of the broad span of cultural evolution these stories cover, it’s hard to nail down a single prevailing theme that organizes these pieces (indeed, two of these, “Air Mail� and “The Oracular Vulva� (which is not, it turns out, about the Oracle of Delphi), are clearly first swings at the novels they would become (The Marriage Plot and Middlesex, respectively)), making the takeaway more ambiguous than I like. In an attempt to say something conclusive, I’ll hazard that among the big themes being worked out here (and this speaks to what we get in his novels) is the complex binds fashioned through sexual posturing and relationships, which for Eugenides means the frustration consequent to denial or the repercussions consequent to consummation (“Capricious Gardens,� “Baster,� “The Oracular Vulva� (though, to a lesser degree than you think), and “Fresh Complaint� all share this in common). I’d say, although I liked everything I read in here, that this is probably more for Eugenides completists than for someone just looking for a good read. The Marriage Plot is where it’s at.
]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band � and meeting the man who would become her husband � her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 E. C. 2 4.25 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2022/03/23
date added: 2022/03/24
shelves:
review:
This one never really took off for me. There’s a certain amount of vulnerability that a memoirist needs to lay on the line to make the effort worthwhile for the reader—I’m thinking about stuff like Westover being beaten by her brother and Karr getting drunk with her parents; emotionally charged events that the writer establishes thematically and builds up to in the plot. Zauner, it seems to me, kept avoiding those moments or shying away from them or mentioning them before quickly moving on. The book, if you don’t already know, is about Zauner’s relationship with her mother, which starts out just fine and then gets rocky after Zauner reaches puberty before leveling off and becoming fine again (this, I hope you’ll agree, isn’t groundbreaking). The slight deviation from this Bildungs-slash-Kunstler roman convention is that just as things return to stasis in Zauner’s relationship with her mother, her mother is diagnosed with cancer and dies soon thereafter. And it’s only after her mother dies that Zauner’s music career takes off (which is sad except that the album that catalyzes the career is itself about Zauner’s mother dying (is that a catch-22 or something else?)). So, on the face of it, Crying in H Mart has all the makings of a killer memoir. But it didn’t kill me. Exempli gratia: The epicenter of this book should have been the fight that Zauner and her mom have just before Zauner leaves for college during which her mother claims to have had an abortion because she, Zauner, was such a difficult child. This is how chapter five ends, and it’s moving and packed with pathos and exactly the sort of thing that makes memoir such a satisfying literary form. But Zauner lets it go, and all the hay that might have been made from that remark is left in the field. What I’m trying to describe, then, is a sense of not-quite-fully-realized story-telling potential that seemed to live beneath these pages. Aha, but, you’re thinking, what if this is really about Zauner grappling with her Korean-American identity, or about her slow development as an artist? To me, these competing themes served to dilute, rather than accentuate, the mother-daughter theme, and, again, I wanted more about identity and artistry in order to feel what Zauner feels about them. A cursory glance at GR tells me I’m going to get lambasted for this. Help me understand.
]]> <![CDATA[Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems]]> 596166 Report from the Besieged City is another tour de force by eminent Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert. His familiar alter ego, Mr. Cogito, is the subject of a third of the poems in this collection, and these easily stand up as well as the Cogito poems we are familiar with from the earlier eponymous collection. The rest, often on classical subjects (Damastes, the Anabasis, Babylon, Beethoven), are an excellent contrast and complement.
Herbert is on the top of his form in these poems which were largely written after Poland was again put under martial law. His concerns are always broad, though they are more politically oriented here. Herbert's precise moral vision is well conveyed in his verses, and it is certainly a voice worth paying attention to.
The collection is highly recommended]]> 100 Zbigniew Herbert 0880010940 E. C. 3 4.49 1983 Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems
author: Zbigniew Herbert
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.49
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/05
date added: 2022/03/05
shelves:
review:
In a joint effort, DeLillo and Wallace point me in Herbert’s direction (DeLillo in his epigraph to Cosmopolis and Wallace in his review of the then-recent English translation of Herbert’s Mr. Cogito). Following Wallace’s lead, I’m inclined to read this book of poetry as a very early marriage of pomo formal traits and popomo affect—the invocation of “uncertain clarity� in “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination� sounds to my ears like sincerity’s negotiated truth, and the “huge snout of nothingness� from “The Monster of Mr. Cogito� sounds like postmodernism itself being described. And then, following DeLillo, Herbert’s regular oblique references in his work to those in power (and their monopoly on knowledge, and their unhappiness) sounds like the nebulous forces of neoliberalism’s globalization being addressed, though perhaps not exactly defined. Obviously, someone with more experience reading poetry (which is everyone) will be able to get more out of this than I have.
]]> Our Gang 59487865 Our Gang is Philip Roth’s brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.
In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.

Author Biography: In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient."

]]> 201 Philip Roth E. C. 3 3.15 1971 Our Gang
author: Philip Roth
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.15
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/02
date added: 2022/03/02
shelves:
review:
There’s nothing quite as caustic as a novelist with a political agenda, and Our Gang follows in a long tradition of political sendups (e.g., Gulliver’s Travels, Catch-22, Primary Colors) with axes to grind and knives to bury. Here, Roth spins an old-school satire, taking down the bête noire du jour, Richard Nixon (or, as he lives in the text, Trick E. Dixon). The chapters mirror Socratic dialogues � each character’s lines are set off by that character’s name � and like a dialogue too, the purpose of these convo.s is to highlight Nixon’s gross hypocrisy at a time in American history rife with Culture War dissent, channeled through Vietnam War protest. So, Dixon talks to a citizen about the rights of the unborn and makes sure to explain how the My Lai massacre wasn’t a tragedy because none of the women who were murdered were pregnant, and Dixon holds a cabinet meeting under the White House to determine how best to deal with a protest from the Boy Scouts, and Dixon delivers a televised speech about why he needs to invade Denmark and nuke Copenhagen (this is a response to the Boy Scouts thing (it makes sense of the world of the text)), and Dixon gets assassinated (maybe) during a clandestine sweat gland–removal surgery (this is supposed to echo the abortion stuff from the beginning), and finally Dixon delivers a campaign speech from hell, where he’s running for office of the Devil. The fact that this was all written before the publication of the Pentagon Papers or Agnew's conviction or the Watergate scandal is both fascinating and frustrating (what Roth might have done with the rest of Nixon’s story, we can only speculate), but also illustrates just how unpopular this guy already was ahead of his most famous scandal. Like similar satires of this variety, I come away feeling a little fatigued by all of the ironic doubletalk, what Wallace describes in “E Unibus Pluram� as “feeling not only empty but somehow oppressed.� If this document tells us anything, I think that that thing is how incredulous the American public had already become by this point—how the metanarratives propping up the virtue of fighting communism to maintain freedom and the sanctity of the office of the president and the wisdom of democracy have all so eroded that Roth can make fun of all of it. So, this is historically interesting, minor Roth.
]]> Libra 13650080
When 'history' presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.

"DeLillo has created a thriller of the most profound sort�Libra is electrifying, a book alive with suggestion." � Chicago Tribune]]> 461 Don DeLillo E. C. 4 4.40 1988 Libra
author: Don DeLillo
name: E. C.
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/18
date added: 2022/01/19
shelves:
review:
Any literary response to the (John F.) Kennedy assassination is a tough book to write. The suspense of the big ending is lost from the jump since we all already know what happens at the end. This, I suppose, is the crux of all historical fiction, making a story that we’ve heard before new and compelling. And this is. DeLillo shows us Lee Harvey Oswald (aka, Lee O. H.; aka, Alek Hidell), a man who finds himself in the throes of history’s vicissitudes as a result of his Mr. Magoo–like spycraft. And surrounding Lee are the myriad interested parties from all manner of intelligence service trying to bend him to their will in order to do their bidding. While I found the Lee chapters to be the most interesting reading, this other stuff is probably more important, as it’s here that DeLillo frames the assassination as a consequence of many intersecting motivations. Here, then, what might look to us like the deranged act of a lone actant is depicted as the influence of umpteen wills, making the true motivations of the act impossible to discern, lending the act the likelihood of clandestine interests, resulting in the act’s associations with conspiracy. And this association is one that DeLillo is keen to play all the way up to the level of theme. And this seems, to me, to be what the book is about. In trying to understand the reasons for world historical events like the (John F.) Kennedy assassination or the 9/11 terrorist attacks (which DeLillo has also written a novel about) forces us to entertain the rationale of the story’s villains, which always produces a web of related narratives, which means that every detail is a clue to the fated event, becomes superadded with the weight of conspiracy. Discerning significance among such details is impossible—each looks equally important in the production of a narrative that works backwards from ultimate effect to original cause. So DeLillo goes all the way back to Lee’s childhood here, filling in a string of causes that ends on November 22, 1963, the date that history conspired to murder a president. This speaks to the novel’s moral coup: rather than present a single, easy-to-castigate bad guy in the form of LHO, DeLillo shows how the real villain here is the confusion over what even constitutes goodness and badness in a world that is at once subject to relativism and in constant thrall to propaganda. And that kind of idea is one that only a novel can hope to deliver.
]]> Saigon, Illinois 418196 229 Paul Hoover 0394758498 E. C. 2 3.39 1988 Saigon, Illinois
author: Paul Hoover
name: E. C.
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1988
rating: 2
read at: 2022/01/06
date added: 2022/01/06
shelves:
review:
There’s a scene from Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, that I like to use by way of illustrating postmodern irony to my students. In this scene, the main character, David Bell, is in an art gallery assessing “an exhibit of prize-winning war photographs.� Of course, this being DeLillo, the emphasis is not on the war or its politics but on the “power of the image,� and so although we’re confronted with “an immense color blow-up, about ten feet wide and twenty feet high� of a “woman holding a dead child in her arms� the narrative attention is concentrated on the group of children circling her who “were smiling and waving, apparently at the camera.� The absurdity of the moment is made complete as Bell describes the “young man� who “was down on one knee in the middle of the lobby, photographing the photograph. I stood behind him for a moment and the effect was unforgettable. Time and space were annihilated and it seemed that the children were waving at him. Such is the prestige of the camera, its almost religious authority, its hypnotic power to command reverence from subject and bystander alike, and I stood absolutely motionless until the young man snapped the picture.� What I find so striking about this scene � as I do with similar ones from Pynchon and Coover � is the postmodern attitude’s incongruity with matters of self-evident import and gravity. Since the postmodern sophisticate is beholden to the maintenance of his own studied aloofness � making sure to couch all opinion or belief in irony lest one be forced to endure the socially costly accusation of naïveté � he can’t offer a sincere comment on, say, the Vietnam War, because doing so would reveal his credulity (which is always already overcredulity) with respect to an ultimately baseless metanarrative. In other words, postmodern lit. isn’t very good at talking about its feelings, leaving us with a canon that is at once replete with pyrotechnic writing and empty of emotional sustenance. Hoover, in his novel, Saigon, Illinois � a novel, by the way, that comes clothed in pomo’s vestments, as it was published as part of the Vintage Contemporaries series � seems to want to strike a balance between (then-)trendy superficiality and depth, for which he is to be commended. Jim Holder is a conscientious objector from Malta, Indiana, who has to find work for two years doing a service job in lieu of military conscription. From a list of unsavory choices, Holder picks a sort of middle-management hospital administrator position in Chicago, where it is his job to help run several of the hospital’s floors. It’s here that Holder finds himself, what do you know?, regularly confronting death, taking orders from cantankerous (and often antagonistic) doctors, nurses, and staff, suspected of drug trafficking, and ever-more-intimate with a small squad of admin.s like himself. Of course, this is all meant to parallel what his experience at war would likely have been, a narrative device underscored when Holder winds up in the hospital himself after being struck by a cop during an anti-war protest in downtown Chicago. After making a disparaging comment about one of the hospital’s hated nurses (with that very nurse standing right behind him), Holder finds himself out of a job and therefore in trouble with the draft board. To this Holder decides to drive his Chevy Nova to California’s Pacific coast (an ocean with a symbolic linguistic resonance) where he strips off his clothes and gets in the water, come what may. And while that may sound like a neat novel, and like a sophisticated comment on the War, and like a way around the pomo antifoundationalist trap, the book came across as lost and confused, like it wanted to have it both ways. I just could not get a bead on Hoover’s sensibilities. Scenes of Holder getting high with peaceniks in his apartment were contrasted with long descriptions of his duties at the hospital; scenes of Walter Cronkite reported the day’s war news were contrasted with retellings of Pynchonesque capers of the Union for a Free Union (FU) storming draft offices with ketchup. I never found myself convinced of Holder’s convictions, and so also found his narrative voice to be rather limp, giving the novel a weightlessness that seems unintentional. “Say what you want about the tenets of [postmodernism],� says Walter Sobchak, “at least its an ethos.�
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