The Slowworm's Song by Andrew Miller

The Irish Troubles, as navigated by an ex-British-Army recovering alcoholic dying of liver cancer/failure, as told in a long letter to his newly-reconciled daughter.

Very pretty prose so far.

 

Always funny. Each story is much the same, but Wodehouse's crafty vocabulary and diction makes each unique.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

 

Terrific novel from the always reliable McEwan. A literary mystery story spanning 150 years, going into a future where much of the world's has been submerged by climate change and human strife.

A sonnet sequence - a coronet of 15 linked poems - from 2015 (ish) goes missing. In the sequence, a renowned elderly poet allegedly rhapsodizes about his wife Vivien and their love and their shared joy in nature. But what's true in the poem may not be true wife. In the second half of the novel we read Viven's journal, in which several (many!) uglier truths are revealed.

Pure pleasure to read.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

 

Naively (unwisely?) re-reading this (for the third time total).

It's still great - a droll, heartbreaking, technically prodigious masterpiece - but it's less fun this time around. It's just so difficult physically to read - often long long page(s) long paragraphs, intricately constructed sentence syntax interrupted by often-random brief footnotes, but occasionally chapter-length footnotes that advance the play and do key work narratively. Syntax already mentioned - Wallace worshipped syntax and deploys it hilariously and ironically and strategically, but you often feel like you're diagramming a sentence as you're reading it. His vocabulary (natch) is intense and technical and super-specific and (sometimes) created on the spot.

It's... alot.

The plot - revoling around tennis prodigy/genius/depressive/substance-abuser Hal Incandenza and his friends at a tennis academy/high school in Boston, a substance-abuse halfway house down the road and hill from there, separatists from Quebec planning terrorism, and a back-story involving a movie Hal's father made which kills anyone who watches it - is agonizingly drawn out. But the prose - Wallace's empathy for his characters, his humanity and wit - is always rewarding. If you have the wherewithal to read it all.  Certainly a middleclass intoxicated brainy young white man's book. Don't know how anyone else could care.

Vigil by George Saunders

 

Disappointed (so far) in this new novel - using the tropes of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO without any of the emotional zing (so far).

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe

 

Spell-binding. Was prompted to re-read this after reading an old journal entry of mine from freshman year of college, where, out of the blue, I read this for the first time - don't know why, wasn't studying it in a course at the time.

Anyway, it was just as good this time around - couldn't put it down, even though I'm in the midst of reading several other books. Part adventure story, part mystical journey, partly (rather boring) history of South Pole journeys.

The ending is particularly dramatic (not that all the starvation, murder, shipwrecks that precede it are UNdramatic), with its quasi-spiritual white clouds and whitening water and giant white human figure that rises up out of the mist.

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky

 

Ruth by Kate Riley

 

Strange, puzzling, powerful book, tracking a woman's interior and exterior life as part of a strict Anabaptist community in upper Michigan.

Ruth is a thinker - on the surface, a compliant (if bizarre) cult member, but underneath, in her thoughts, a poet and a puzzler and a rebel and resistor, rebellious the only place she can be, in her own mind.

The prose structure is almost all touched by the omnicscient narrator giving us Ruth's thoughts - but the narrator speaks in a much more abstract, formal, supremely-ironic tone of voice and vocabulary than does Ruth, when we actually hear her speak (which is not often).

Really liked the book - deceptively simple-looking, but the language and its levels of irony require a slow, deliberate, reading pace.

A child wa no longer a baby when he hit back. A child was no longer a baby when he knew how to use a comb. A child was no longer a baby when his mother had another child. By this last definition did Jamie and Rose Feder quit their statio, and by this last definition did Gretel Feder remain a baby her entire life. (166)

Makup allowed one to life without speaking. (216)

She had finally read Revelation, and for all the beasts, remembered best the description of a Heaven defined by the nouns it lacked: death, mourning, sorrow, tears. A modest facility in which mixed species could rest together without histrionics.

Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel

 

Great horror/thriller, existential  psychological statement on mental illness and modern British suburbs!

She reminds me of the great Iris Murdoch in her pathological obession with the cruelty of human relations - but she's much more plot-driven than Murdoch.

This one is just stunning, scary, bleakly hilarious.

The Best American Essays 2007 edited by David Foster Wallace.

 

Fascinating essay about the culture of sexualization  and the sexual revolution by Mark Greif called "Afternoon of the Sex Children."

Great analysis of the Iraq Wars.

Amazing opening essay about a man dying in an apartment fire.

Came for the Wallace imprimataur, and it's ringing true.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

 

Started out thinking I would hate this, now suddenly charmed.

Couldn’t quite finish. quite funny at times, but too travelogue for my tastes. stylish melancholic nostalgic locales for an aging gay man to pity himself in. 

Learning to Talk: Stories by Hilary Mantel

 

Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories by Elmore Leonard