Re-reading this after seeing it superbly performed by Scena Theatre at the old Source Theatre building at 14 and T Streets NW.

A Clockwork Orange by Anythony Burgess

 

Dusting off my disorganized bookshelves and allowing myself the luxury of reading by alphabetical whim, I stumled on this and am enjoying re-reading it. The vocabulary lexicon is daunting - and one learns to ignore it and just read and comprehend the strange words by context. All leading to an imminent re-watching of the superlative movie.

Spartina by John Casey

 

RIP John Casey. A great novel, reminds me of Thomas McGuane without as much drugging and screwing. Although there's certainly some screwing. Casey's attention to detail - the salt marsh estuaries of Rhode Island, the tidal currents and color of the Atlantic - is meticulous, and the novel is a love letter to a sailor's preoccupation with the sea, how it rises above all human concern.

The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor

 

Great novel about jazz and life and, well, a bear who blows an intense jazz saxophone and screws women and goes to jail and ponders all of life with a delicious, dark, rueful energy.

Zabor's astonishing accomplishment - spread out over nearly 800 pages - is to make a history of jazz so human and complex and saving that it can only be fully lived by a bear. If at times his prose seems endless, it's also endlessly inventive, like great jazz - and may not be for everyone. But I loved it. And his listening guide appendix has been delighting me for a month now. Jackie McLean among one of several discoveries.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

 

Thought this was going to be about a redhead, but as the cover shows, a fire hydrant is the only redhead (so far).

Also, predictable Tyler story, comfortable, well-worn, quiet insights. Least amount of plot ever.

Effortless to read. Lesser work.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

 

Okay time travel book, if a little bit overblown prose style. The 1840s-era Arctic exploring ships details are the most vivid.

The Ministry of Time is set in near future UK.  A time travel "door" has been discovered time travel, and the Ministry performs experiments on its effects on humans, by taking historical figures from the verge of death and bringing them to the present.

The narrator's voice and POV are a little melodramatic. She falls in love with her historic figure, Graham, Arctic sailor who is hot and also Victorian-repressed.

The two gay characters are most interesting - Maggie from the 1600s who speaks in a delightful Shakespearean patois, and Arthur, rescued from the trenches of WWI (I think).

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

 

Crazy sci-fi plot - a woman discovers that she can get a new husband and life by sending her current husband to the attic, where there is a brief glow of light and then a new husband descends - and the pictures in her flat change, the furniture and books and wall paint colors change, and the messages on her phone change, and her relationships change.

Wacky. But Gramazio makes some excellent points about desire and need, as the woman favors some husbands and discards others, loses many husbands by consciously sending them up - and others by mistake.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

 

Re-reading this in a concentrated effort, rather than how I read it in high school and college, where it might have taken ten days. (We watched most of the film version of WITCHES OF EASTWICK last week, and it got me in an Updike mood.) Updike's descriptive powers are murderously sharp - if often over-done - and I enjoyed the  tearing through the first 100 pages on a windy, dull Sunday afternoon.

Rabbit shoots hoops with kids, goes home and fights with his wife, goes to pick up his kid and his car, drives instead all night to South Carolina, drives back, stays the night in his high school baseball coach's room at the Y, goes on a double date w/ coach and goes home with hooker, starts living with hooker, begins a dialogue/golf friendship with his minister, Rev. Eccles.

Then back to wife when she gives birth to daughter, and back home with her, then gets shut down for sex, and leaves, and wife starts drinking again and drowns newborn in tub accidentally. Then Rabbit returns to her side, but after funeral, runs away again.

The prose is a little much, too ornate, too brilliant, hard to reconcile the omniscient narrator's brilliant genius synthesizing tone and world view with Rabbit's (and other characters') much more limited and pedestrian views.

Still, a stunning book, and, I imagine, in 1960, a shock to the system of literature.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. [140]

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. [208]

You couldn't bear to love anybody might return it. [245]

Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima

 

Slow, sprawling, unusual set piece from Mishima. More of a Henry James/Iris Murdoch exercise in character manipulation and inter-relationship than his usual dark, violent, compact narratives.

Crudo a novel by Olivia Lang

 

Free association and collage details, with a plot of "how life is anxiety-inducing." Reminds me somewhat of Renata Adler and SPEEDBOAT. not impressed thus far.