The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

Bear by Julia Phillips

 

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

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.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

 

Long involved (if beautifully written) novel about boy born speechless growing up on a dog breeding farm in Wisconsin. How did I hear about it? I don't know. Oprah selection from 2008. It's good but don't know if I can stick with it.

10/30/24 - I cannot stick with it. Halfway through and gave up.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallce

 

Great funny essay on prose poems.

sex is never "bad," but it's also never casual. (from "Back in New Fire," his strange essay on sex in the aftermath of AIDS.)

He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty - a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. (from "Borges on the Couch."