The Hollow Land by Jane Gardam

 

Charming "children's book" that is much more sophisticated than that term implies. A London "town" family has a summer/vacation house in the Lake District, under the Cumbrian fells. They begin a long-lasting relationship with a "country" family. Beautiful landscape after beautiful landscape: abandoned silver mines, fields of icicles, menancing sheep and sympathetic gypsies. Another stunner from Gardam, who never wrote a bad or lesser book.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

 

Novel where one story (the birth and life of the narrator) takes places in the chapters and her relatives' back-story appears in the lengthy footnotes (which are often as long, or longer than the chapters.)

Ancestral Vices by Tom Sharpe

 

The usual hi-jinks, but at a slower (longer) pace. Malevolent evil old English lord hires a strident ally of the working class, a college professor, to write a tell-all history of the lord's equally evil relatives and ancestors. So far there's been a "suckling pig" entree at dinner that was created out of a normal size pig that was cut into three pieces, two of which were sewn back together to create the shorter meal. Funny but effortful.

I did like it in the end but the pace was slow. The accidental death of a dwarf in front of a tractor, and his slow-witted buxom wife, complicate the professor's story when he boards with them. The usual clueless police appear.

Sharpe really does remind me of Joe Orton. I find Sharpe addictive and but not always that keen.

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

 

Sorta remember reading this when it came out. Unimpressed so far. Too many half-funny jokes dampen the effect of some good sentences.

Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson

 

Loving this so far. My first Atkinson experience. Funny and twist-y.

Really like the threaded characters who appear in several stories, Franklin and Connie, whose doomed relationship starts with Franklin winning a bundle off via talking horse at a racetrack, and ends with her framing him for murder.

"Spellbound" - the fairy tale that arrives roaringly back in the present day

Last successful was the Toy-Story lite tale, "Existential Marginalization."

 

I am braving my paternal grandmother's favorite author out of utter boredom, having indeed now possibly come to the very last door of literature.

That said, enjoying it so far - 15 year old French schoolgirl full of feeling and audacity. Much unlike my Nana.

Authority: Essays by Andrea Long Chu

 

Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days. Cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.

Essays and reviews by the noted trans scholar Andrea Chu. I enjoyed her biting tone in the reviews, but am suspicious generally of critics, whom I tend to judge mostly by what they tend to criticize. And PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Bret Easton Ellis, and Zadie Smith hold little interest of me. 

The cultural entity she praises most highly is the streaming junk, THE LAST OF US.

She is funny, and brilliant - but reserves her emotional energy for her essays on her own trans journey.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

 

Incredibly odd novel, story within a story within a story, essentially about a man and a woman and their two children living in a house with an infinitely expanding hallway on the second floor. Sort of gothic horror story, I guess. Massive appendices, illustrations, kooky diagonal pages and pages where you must rotate the book to read text. All to what end I don't know. So far (100 pages in, 500+ to go) unimpressed with the actual prose style (somehat purple and mundane) but impressed with the scope. And the parody of academia and scholarly citation is funny if overwhelming.

So far, a bloated slog. Stephen King is a fan, which should be a warning sign.

Excuciating, in the end. The haunted horror house narrative is the most interesting, but the stacks of meta-layers are lame.

Was surprised I hadn't heard about it before, as it came out in 2000.

Wilt in Nowhere by Tom Sharpe

 

Pretty good one. Eva and the quadruplets visit America, and Wilt goes on a English walking tour with no planning whatsoever. Naturally chaos ensues in both Britain and America.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

 

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.