Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

 

Wilt on High by Tom Sharpe

 

Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story by Rick Bragg

 

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz

 

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

 

Very readable novel about some very ugly characters.

In the end though it was quite long and compounded by the large type edition from the library, i really enjoyed it. 

It seemed like a revelation to them, but really the revelation was only that someone took the time to sit and listen to them and appear to absorb their human condition instead of ignoring it. [120]

The last thing Carl saw on this Earth before he closed his eyes were the anguished faces of the people who had loved him most in the world - the people who fretted over him and live symbiotically with him and existed with him inside the unique syzygy that is a family.  the whole universe lines itself up to make a family, and the family takes it from there. [650]

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

Mystifying novel. There is power in Kang's prose - the story follows a young woman who gives up eating meat and ends up losing her mind - but the three part structure diffuses that power somehwat.

In the first part, she gives up meat and is denounced and abused by her husband and family.

In the second part, her brother in law features her in a video series after painting her body (and his own) with flower parts and having sex with her.

In the third part, her sister (whose husband seduced her in part two) visits her in a mental hospital where she is deteriorating.

Bear by Julia Phillips

 

More than halfway through and still puzzling over my lack of feeling for the story she tells.

Couldn't make it, didn't care.

Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosches

 

Hardly lives up to the hype. Tosches' Old Testament doggerel prose style and wandering biographical outline are underwhelming. 

JLL was an astounding performer and musician - and at the same a deeply disturbed addict with many mental health issues, exacerbated by his profound musical genius that had him barely finishing the eighth grade and cutting his first sides for Sun Records at age 15.

It did drive me back into Lewis's music, which I was obsessed with for awhile in my 20s, and which is an incredibly deep pool. Not that rock and roll as such - the original Sun sides were never really improved upon in multiple re-recordings and reissues -- but JLL released an ungodly amount of first-rate country music after his heyday and fall from grace in the 1960s. He was a great singer and showman. 

Will now see out "Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story" by Rick Bragg which seems a much more complete, scholarly and un-rabid version of the life.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Stories by Will Self

 

My Idea of Fun by Will Self

Brilliantly written but a bore to read, like much of Self's work. Still he appeals to me as a thinker and a philosopher, much like JG Ballard (whom Self admires). THE BOOK OF DAVE and GREAT APES were unqualified masterpieces. The rest of it I've struggled with.