The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

 

V. late to the party here, as the novel came out in 1979 - my senior year of high school! - and if I missed it then, I'm certainly not going to get on board now.

It's somewhat amusing - the anti-poet stuff is hilarious to me (prisoners are strapped in "Poetry Appreciation Chairs" and forced to listen to the terrible poetry of the Vogon leader) - but nothing is really continued, it jumps for scene to scene, with no regard for science, or fiction, or character development really.

Earth's entry in the titular Guide was "harmless" - later amended to "mostly harmless," which Arthur, the main earthling character, is saddened to see after the earth is destroyed early in the book.

In my mind, it's like extremely minor Vonnegut - but even minor Vonnegut would be better than this.

In my mind, at that time, I was really into Tom Robbins for awhile, STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER (which I recently tried to re-read, and just could not), and had read Vonnegut's best in high school (and still re-read him joyously today). This is more Jonathan Livingston Segal-country to me - pop sci-fi w/ a philosophical bent, but a slightly caustic sense of humor that I do enjoy. Next: ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYLE MAINTENANCE, which I can't believe I've never read. Maybe I did, and just forgot it.

Postscript: in the end, I actually enjoyed the end of the book. The planet of used ballpoint pens (where DO ballpoint pens go? how many have I used in my life), the Ultimate Question, the greatest (and second-greatest) computer in the Universe, the white mice who are actually in control of Earth/Universe.

Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh

 

Good page-turner. Not great. sort of the premise of Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN exploded to a bunch of Manhattanites in the current time frame, grief support groups mined for victims of violent crime who will agree to murder someone who ANOTHER alleged victim wants revegne on.

Every Exit Brings You Home by Naeem Murr

 

Good, if grim. Egyptian-born, Gaza-raised, Chicago-residing airline steward undergoes much sacrifice as 1) head of his Chicago condo 2) long-suffering husband of ailing childless Palestinian wife 3) possible bisexual, certainly promiscuous.

Murr's prose and description and character sketches are knife-like - he summons such a vivid external landscape of Chicago neighborhood life, and at the same time a jolting inner landscrape of memory and desire - Gaza, Egypt, endless airline flights.

Recommended but bleak.

Festival for Spies by E. Howard Hunt

Rabbit hole of reading Richard Helms book THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRET. This novel (according to a footnote in TMWKTS) was given BY MY OWN FATHER to another CIA agent, Victor Marchetti, in Helms' office - Helms was a spy fiction fan and kept a stack of same on hand for distribution.

This is of course the same EH Hunt famous for his Watergate exploits - he was semi-retired by the CIA already in early 1960s and charged with writing sanitized spy novels where the good guys always won, a reaction to the more knotty guiltily-existential novels of someone like Le Carre.

I bought it thinking it would be a joke - and it is light unintentionally semi-humorous reading, melodramatic, purple prose, all breezily accomplished in around 130 pages - but the travelogue descriptive prose on southeast Asia is quite nice. I'd read another of his, guiltily. Complicitly!

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

 

Got halfway through, it's beautifully written, but the conspiracy - the twelve men's role in murder/robbery/coverup plot - is too drawn out and 12 is too many variations of complicity for me to follow.

Good New Zealand local description, eye-opening, had never really thought about its "colonial history".

But over all annoyed feeling at wasted effort.

I read about this novel in some discussion of meta-novels and DFW and Infinite Jest. There's a horoscope/celestial cast of characters list and pie chart at the beginning, supposedly indicating fate tracking movement of starts, etc. - but I couldn't follow it. 

And really won't be bothered.

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA by Thomas Powers

 

My Struggle Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knaugaard

 I read Book One many moons ago and (sort of) remember liking it, after reading about the Knausgaard phenom and being completely prepared to despise it.

So on to Book Two - if nothing else, it gives me something to go to when INFINTE JEST grinds my teeth down to powder (usually three pages).

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

 

Don't know how I've missed reading this book all my life - intriguing fairy tale/children's book about an ugly, misanthropic nobelman hiding away his beautiful daughter from the world, giving suitors impossible tasks to fulfill to win her, then killing them and feeding them to the geese when they fail. An intrepid prince (disguised as a minstrel) enters the scene and wins the girl, helped along by some mysterious Deum de Machina characters.

The wordplay is fascinating and funny and deep. Need to re-read it immediately - and find the edition pictured, with illustrations by M. Searle of DOWN WITH SKOL and Molesworth fame.

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovitz

 

Sailed right through this - a relief while still laboring away at INFINITE JEST - a short narrative of a disgruntled husband and father dropping his younger daughter off at college and just continuing on, away from his wife, his job, his troubled marriage. 

Interesting, and compelling as far as it goes - but seems to drop out quickly without resolution.

The narrator is easy for me to sympathize with, but I didn't really care about him. Is that cruel? Yes!

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

 

Good characters - but second half of plot gets a little ridiculous with enslaved prostitutes and ring of predator men.