The Searcher by Tana French

 

Deep River by Karl Marlantes

Had to bail at page 385. Underwhelming and duddish, particularly in comparison to Marlantes's ferocious Matterhorn. Logging detail was fantastic if largely beyond me, union/Wobbly stuff was sorta boring. But in the end it was all the Finnish names that crushed me.

Philip Guston

A painter's first duty is to be free, unless you're the kind of artist that gnaws on one bone all the time, and I don't seem to gnaw on one bone.  - Philip Guston

San Clemente

Couple in Bed

The Painter

The Studio

The Line

To Fellini (1958)

If This Be Not I (1945)

Processed Cheese by Stephen Wright

 

This starts out promisingly, but the second half seems to lose the luster somehwat. The first half is laugh-aloud, stuffed with the consumer-crazed, imaginary commercial labels and proper nouns of society of Wright's today-at-warp-speed vision, while the second devolves into a more traditional narrative of several doomed romantic relationships and family connections, where I stopped laughing, or at least laughed more ruefully.

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall by Frank Brady

 

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout