Open Secrets by Alice Munro

 

Playworld by Adam Ross

 

Thick, long book - possibly too long - but I'm halfway through and digging it. Great schoolboy wrestling descriptions. NYC in 1980-1981.

Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry

 

"Re-" reading this after forty years. How did I even pretend to understand it at twenty years old? Lowry's prose is dense, elliptical, allusive, often semi-private. A late entry in the great modernist novels. But I'm having real trouble "finishing" it.

Friends of My Youth by Alice Munro

 

Despite her recent cancellation, Alice Munro is a genius. Going back and re-reading her now is stunning and numbing: her men are cruel and selfish, her women are passive and selfish, the northern landscape is bleak and cold, but other setting details are lavishly and lovingly rendered: interiors, trees, flowers, clothes, anything inanimate with color.

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

 

Ending up liking this quiet, calm novel about a Jewish Russian refusenik who served 13 years in a Soviet gulag after being betrayed by his Jewish friend and roommate. 

Refusenik visits Crimea and accidentally books a room in his betrayers house. 

Yid dreitzikh. A Jew gets by. 

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

 

Lazarus Man by Richard Price

 

Meh. Certainly no Clockers. Sort of muted narrative drama about a guy finding himself and his soul's real purpose after a building explosion/collapse that he sort of survives. Tormented cheating cop and a grandiose undertaker.

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

 

Wilt on High by Tom Sharpe

 

Returning to Sharpe after years off the job. This is a 1984 installment in his WILT series. It's good, but not as good as I remember his earlier books. Little smack of Joe Orton to it, though, which I like. A community college professor/administrator gets involved with a heroin ring.

Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story by Rick Bragg

 

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz

 

Good but not as good as THE PLOT. I sort of automatically read it.

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]