Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President by Jonathan Darman

 

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

 

Walking to Martha's Vineyard, Poems by Franz Wright

 

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

 

The Beforelife, Poems by Franz Wright

 

Exceptional, dark, depressing, funny poems. 

How does one go

about dying?

Who on earth

is going to teach me—

The world is filled with people

who have never died

Deceptively easy to read, they are bruising when you slow down and read them aloud, and allow some breathing room to the spaces between lines and stanzas.

Alcohol

You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.   

Can’t we.

The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.   

Do you hear me.

You aren’t all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the   

dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and   

grinning with terror flowing over your legs through   

your fingers and hair . . .

I was always waiting, always here.   

Know anyone else who can say that.

My advice to you is think of her for what she is:   

one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than   

harm, is not abject.”

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and   

never care again,

think of it.

I don’t have to be anywhere.

Memoir

Just hope he forgot the address

and don’t answer the phone

for a week:

put out all the lights

in the house—

behave like you aren’t there

if some night when

it’s blizzarding, you see

Franz Wright arrive

on your street with his suitcase

of codeine pills,

lugging that heavy

black manuscript

of blank texts.

—from The Poem Said

The poem said never love anything

Not even you?

I asked

and it answered

especially me

Based On a Prayer of Rabi'a Al-Adawiyya

God, if I speak my love to you in fear of hell, incinerate me in it;

if I speak my love to you in hope of heaven, close it in my face.

But if I speak to you simply because you exist, cease

withholding from me your

neverending beauty.

Description of Her Eyes

Two teaspoonfuls,

and my mind goes

everyone can kiss my ass now --

then it's changed,

I change my mind.

Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso

 

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

 

Another (third and final?) volume in Whitehead's Harlem Trilogy.

All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard (vol. 5 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

 

I'm pre-depressed it's almost over. Jumping ahead to 1956 (from 1946), there are new children's names to learn, and the Duchy dies! 

Sob.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

 

Niven's 2007 (?) debut novel. Okay as far as it goes, but definite AMERICAN PSYCHO vibe - over-the-top sexual, emotional, and linguistic violence. A Martin Amis-lite experience.

All about a music scene (UK 1990s) that I couldn't know (or care) less about. Reading it on iPad ("reading" it) but it's not the amazing experience listening to OH BROTHER has been.

O Brother, a memoir by John Niven (audiobook)

 

Listening to Niven read this hilarious, heartbreaking, stubborn memoir of growing up with and mourning his troubled younger brother.