Off Course by Michelle Huneven

 

I liked it but didn't love it. The protagonist - a 29 year old economics scholar finishing her dissertation at her parent's mountain cabin in northern California - grated on me after awhile. She's in love with an older blue-collar married man, a cabinet-maker, and the relationship seems contrived. The close writing about the natural Sierra landscape is quite beautiful throughout, though.

Poems by V.R. Lang

Excellent and interesting New Yorker piece on forgotten American poet Violet Ranney "Bunny" Lang (forgotten by the academy, I guess, as I never knew her work to begin with.) 

(A débutante, a burlesque dancer, and a poet, the shape-shifting Lang—who died at thirty-two—wrote some of the most aching, entrancing poetry of the twentieth century... - The New Yorker)

Born in 1926, died in early 1950s, socialite, in the Frank O'Hara orbit of New York poets - she reminds me of Medbh McGuckian somewhat, the obscurantist Irish poet. 

The Suicide

by V.R. Lang

Shocked that she missed the footbridge! She cried out,
But no later than the water she fell in and drowned in;
God help me, they tell us she shouted, but she had no sovereign --
No one at all to order her out of the water.

Now the animals have charted the land for their reasonable holiday;
All have appointed this time to be there to see them.
Photographers capture each other -- the carnival quickens!
The spectres, the hawkers, the talkers, the damned are all there.

At the Meeting of Two Families
by V.R. Lang

Who were the assasins that came to get you?
Six of them coated in black and silently smoking --
Slithering quiet like empty clothes

Alert to the dark, from hangers.
Who were they that came to watch you?
Chewing cigaretts they looked at you, they looked at me.

What in a hay moon hovers and waits like a bag
With a man in it? Why did you make
Your face like a Japanese mask of terror to style?

Limply arranged they waited, just waited.
As always I gave back your terror, I felt it --
I grimaced, aped it, then flashed it to you.

And we stared at each other and back to our inerlocutors,
The bareback riders from kingdom to kingdom --
You knew them, I knew. You remembered.

Why is your dark like a bag with a man in it?
In the moment of panice, hardly anything happens,
But nothing is true. I remembered, I knew.

I cried out, and the light broke. Your family
Pronounced me charming. My love, my love,
We will scratch all over the dusty earth crawling

The way out of dread we've no name for, could not tell.
We will come to dread all we own, as well --
Till you make and weep, till you break the spell.

25 Years
by V.R. Lang

We got through this year and nobody;
We got through this year and perhaps.
On the day of the white crow somebody
Will kiss us and keep us, but this was not this year;
This year is over and nobody; this year is next year now.

    Here is the hole in the wall. Here we peek.
    Here is Chanticleer. We shall do everything but speak.
    We shall bless, address, abuse -- we shall not speak.
    Had we to love or were we at fault? 
    We were confused, affection or assault
    Proved only beasts will eat themselves or anything:
    Let us join hands and dance around the naked king.

This year the creeping itch was apparent in the left hand,
This year perhaps it will sneak to the right, we will see.
The eye shivered at the slack it saw it did not understand;
The white crow never came to kiss us under the pear tree.
Twenty-five are pinching parents, poppy-addled, fed-on-us--
We wept our dusty latter thoughts, we stretched and scrabbled loose.
O! the day of the white crow will come, when it will come it can;
Then shall we shake our sticks, o years, in wicked triumph then.

from "Poems to Preserve the Years at Home"
by V.R. Lang

Tuesday when you opened your eyes your
Room was a cold disaster. Arranged
Around you, its own disorderly life

Took stock of you like a crazy pendulum
Swung over your head like a demonstration
In a science museum, your hands were numb,

All the pieces of you clunb to the bedclothes
Like a broken promise, sorrow sticking to the cracks
Till you sat up and the floor went dizzy.

You did not go near the mirrow, you fed the cat
But it went on weeping, and you had to sit down.
Still all that day you were followed by your

Tall still angels, walking like trees.
You had no choice but to lead them, and twice
You listened, and once, you smiled.

Some days the days for providence we wak
Up taller than the telephone, our eyes more harsh and black,
And even its screaming cannot shock us.

Some days we wake up the Act
Which casts a shadow on the infinite plane
of suggestion, we become our Agents,

Pay our rent and sort the laundry,
Make appointments, go to market,
Lay in stores with strange, beleaguered haste.

Some days our guardian days we
Go gladly into one dimension;
These days our days are not our dominion

But our deliverance, practical and moral.
On these days only motion casts a shadow.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

 

Years since I read this. Struck anew by Flaubert's chiseled detailed style. 

Re-reading in honor of the late great Northwestern Professor Paul C. Edwards, who died on October 15 at the age of 75, of alcoholism and grief. He staged this in the mid-1980s with Alchemy Theatre Company of Manhattan, which I was a member of in its first formative lackluster year. I left group just in time for them to successfully mount BOVARY.

Salve, magister!

After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

 Slow going and a little aimless, but the story is building in its way. Three generations of women - grandmother, mother, daughter - are slowly revealed in all their damaging passion. I guess.

A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi

 

Strange concept - a central character/narrator who is a different version of the same person every day of the week. And each version of the narrator has trust issues with the other versions.

Oyeyemi's prose style is unsettling and brilliant - surprising, obscure, eccentric, funny all at the same time.

I'm only up to Wednesday (Kinga-C is narrator) but liking it more and more, after being put off by the Monday narrator's verse for awhile. All will be revealed, I hope.

11/5/2025 - Up to Friday (Kinga-E) now and still confused but trying to complete the journey. Oyeyemi's style is cutting and intelligent, but I don't always follow. Oh well.

Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven

 

Like this very much, complex family love with discovered connections, half siblings, step siblings. Hunever moves back for through time to constantly unsettle us as to what we really know - vs what we thought we knew - about each character.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

 

Good - great even - but I will admit that all of her Jackson Brodie crime novels blend in my mind, and I usually have no idea which one I'm reading, I'm just worshipping her motion.

This one is set in Scotland/Glasgow during the Fringe festival, and involves the spouse of a corrupt real estate developer, a Russian sex worker, a timid crime novelist, and of course, Jackson Brodie who is as muddled and ineffective and heroic as ever.

The Finishing School by Muriel Spark

 

Lovely, compact, dense as usual. A precocious 17 year old historical novelist squares off with his frustrated, envious private school headmaster.

 

Good, odd unsettling - but do I really have enough time left in my life to read the whole thing (again, apparently, this is third time apparently - I mentioned Prince Myshkin in my high school valediction, which is some serious pretension and presumption - think I said he was Christlike. true enough. but aren't we all, in the end?)

Still at it a month later and approaching the 200 page mark (not even halfway through). The plot is almost entirely psychological - it's an unusual novel even for Dostoevsky, his last and his favorite, apparently, but critics are split.

The naive, child-like, but clear-headed Prince Myshkin arrives back in Russia after many years abroad in Switzerland recovering in a spa from TB or epilepsy or something. He moves among an ungainly collection of St. Petersburg upper middle class folk, all jockeying for position and money and love.

11/5/2025 - Still working on this but hard work. 

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

 

Another masterpiece miniature. She's already in my pantheon of short novel geniuses for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with the likes of Penelope Fitzgerald.

Big Machine by Victor LaValle

 

Early strange one. Spends an awful lot of time getting started, which I remember in his other later novels was part of the thrill and the horror and the revelation of it all. But wondering if this one will pay off.

Didn't even finish it. Got close enough that I could have, easily, but it was boring and frustrating. Good writing but no paydirt, or at least it didn't pay off for me.

Time of the Child by Niall Williams

 

This one I'm finding hard. His prose style is very beautiful indeed, but now feels overwritten in places to me. If every single sentence is so dense it feels like it's from a poem, my cosciousness has a very hard time moving in a linear narrative fashion and getting involved with characters, plot, and setting.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

 

Particularly good Jackson Brodie episode. Criss-crossing murder, kidnapping, and trainwreck plots serve up lots of tension and release. Some of the good guys win, but not all - and Jackson, as usual, fumbles around with his set ways and ends up not doing too much damage. Despite a near-death experience, coma, a fleecing from his new much-younger wife.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

 

Amazing novel, less about Hollywood than about existential despair, more Dostoevski than the Pat Hobby stories.

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

 

Re-read this after, say, 45 years. It was de rigeur as a tortured undegratuate - and is even more bleak to read now. The alcoholic advice columnist tormented by his boss, whose wife he's dallying with, and further confused by his own thoughts. It's known as a "black comedy" but I counted exactly zero fun.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

 

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

 

A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

Return to Barry after some months. a young Irishman signs up for WWI and ships off to Belgium. An exruciating four years is served, his loyalty to Ireland and to the British crown, his father and his girl friend and his faith, are all tested. Unshockingly, the war takes everything from him. Descriptions of mustard gas attacks are particularly terrifying.

The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories by Karen E. Bender

 

Only read the title story and "The Extra Child." Fascinating sci-fi dystopian concepts baldly done.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

 

Tore through 100+ pages late last night without a pause. Brilliant as usual - and a whodunit!

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

 

Another WWII novel from the master. I liked it but didn't love it. It still went down easy though. Another obscure young woman protaganist caught up by forces that are beyond her, starting up with MI5 in 1940 and then with the BBC in 1950.

Spies, counter-spies, and maybe counter-counter-spies. I got lost but enjoyably!

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb by Philip K. Dick

 

Reading the Modern Library edition of five of his early novels.

This one is slow going - a thalidomide quad electronic repairman and the architect of a nuclear holocaust, among other characters. Fascinating as always.

Picks up speed halfway through, as we are suddenly jetted into the future - the late 1980s - from the 1972 starting point when a couple is launched into orbit, and a global thermonuclear war suddenly and literally explodes.

In the 80s, we pick up with survivors, who live their cultural life via nightly transmissions from the orbiting vessel, where the man (who was quickly widowed after the launch, reads aloud from his digital library. Animals have mutated and grow in intelligence, there is a barter economy, and local law and order (and violence).

Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

 

Surprised to have never read this. A racial parable as whodunit. Amazing.

History of the Rain by Niall Williams

 

More prose gorgeousness. Reminds me of THE TIN DRUM in its playful, pointed family-history-as-myth-and-larger-history style.

Two-thirds of the way through, it's still a fantastic book - but Williams prose style is laborious with narrative - the language is so rich, the back-story and motifs are so intricate and historical - so it's a bit of an ordeal too.

Definitely echoes (and references) A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, too.

Finally finished and was sad to do so, even with it taking me two long weeks (at least) to finish it. Williams' sure hand and funny, sad mind are a marvel. The story of a family told via the invalid daughter who uses the father's extensive literary library to move along the tale.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina

 

Fantastic lost classic of the 1960s. Farina takes on the end of the Beats era and the coming of the hippies. 

To say it's ahead of its time is to understate the matter completely. Farina's prose is ur-Pynchonian. The inappropriateness of the sexual posturing is beside the point. Complete versimilitude of the unhinged, drug-addled young ambitious tormented mind.

Still plodding through this. By the middle some of the gorgeous language surprise of the beginning has begun to wane - the plot itself is a little limp and undergrad hi-jinks ish.

This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

 

Crazy beautiful prose. Has to be read slowly, almost word by word. 

Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick

 

More PKD. He writes sci-fi, but is really interesting in how he addresses human relationships and psychological health under that genre.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

 

Great - but prefer its companion book below.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

 

A beautiful book - "companion" to LIFE AFTER LIFE, apparently, if not exactly a sequl. Must read LIFE then.

WWII bomber pilot Teddy moves back and forth in time as he dies in a nursing home.

Atkinson's kindness toward her characters is shockingly effective - there is a deep richness of the cast because of this empathy.

3 By Irving by John Irving

 

Re-reading SETTING FREE THE BEARS after a million years: I may have read it in high school? None of it rings a bell. Pretty absorbing if overstuffed with physical landscape/sky/weather descriptions. But many of the picaresque Irving qualities are already in place. He published it when he was 26, after a couple years of writing. So good on him! The other two early novels included here are shorter, I'll try to read them again too.

The Stories of Jane Gardam

 

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

 

Another winner. Postwar 1920s London, a night-club empress and her six children navigate a world of crime and wealth, a sub-plot of several young women making their way to the big city, and a detective investigating the night club corruption scene and disappearing women.

Wouldn't have thought it was my cup of tea, but Atkinson is just a delicious storyteller, un putdownable.

DEath at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

 

First of Atkinson's mysteries I've read, first 100 pages well written as always but I'm mystified at the three strands interconnection so far.

"A Jackson Brodie Book" - for the recurring detective at the center of the case.

The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines

 

Meh. No huge insights afte last year's deep dive. Obsession with Brian Epstein which does not move me. The music is the very last thing considered here.

I remember it as being an "important book at the time" as Peter Brown was an insider and first to share widely about the Beatles. But it comes off as tacky now - with all of his "revealed for the first time here" and "said to me, Peter Brown, the author" posturing.

And again, the lack of insight about the music is appalling. Though the Beatles inventing the rock music industry (among everything else they invented) and the business/industry side takes up an oversized space here.

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

 

Marvellously imagined retelling of the story of Agammemnon and Clytemenstra, from the viewpoint of Cassandra's slave.

Thoroughly modern voice and attitude, with no "classicalisms" used to make it seem like Ancient Greece.

A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam

 

A 12 year-old girl knows she is different and somewhat exceptional and wants to be a writer. Amazing as usual.

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 (in mid-20th-century) 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.)

Another winner from Atkinson. I'm totally impressed by her - and had read nothing before the short stories last month.

The backstory in footnotes seems tedious at first, and confusing, but soon takes over in momentum, as the narrator's mother's generation and grandmother's generation are pulverized by the World Wars.

Unhappiness could be relied upon in a way that happiness never could. [86]

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

Less 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.

Update: only got 30 pages into "Claudine at School" and quit.

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.