A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

 

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.

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.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

 

Thought this was going to be about a redhead, but as the cover shows, a fire hydrant is the only redhead (so far).

Also, predictable Tyler story, comfortable, well-worn, quiet insights. Least amount of plot ever.

Effortless to read. Lesser work.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

 

Okay time travel book, if a little bit overblown prose style. The 1840s-era Arctic exploring ships details are the most vivid.

The Ministry of Time is set in near future UK.  A time travel "door" has been discovered time travel, and the Ministry performs experiments on its effects on humans, by taking historical figures from the verge of death and bringing them to the present.

The narrator's voice and POV are a little melodramatic. She falls in love with her historic figure, Graham, Arctic sailor who is hot and also Victorian-repressed.

The two gay characters are most interesting - Maggie from the 1600s who speaks in a delightful Shakespearean patois, and Arthur, rescued from the trenches of WWI (I think).

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

 

Crazy sci-fi plot - a woman discovers that she can get a new husband and life by sending her current husband to the attic, where there is a brief glow of light and then a new husband descends - and the pictures in her flat change, the furniture and books and wall paint colors change, and the messages on her phone change, and her relationships change.

Wacky. But Gramazio makes some excellent points about desire and need, as the woman favors some husbands and discards others, loses many husbands by consciously sending them up - and others by mistake.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

 

Re-reading this in a concentrated effort, rather than how I read it in high school and college, where it might have taken ten days. (We watched most of the film version of WITCHES OF EASTWICK last week, and it got me in an Updike mood.) Updike's descriptive powers are murderously sharp - if often over-done - and I enjoyed the  tearing through the first 100 pages on a windy, dull Sunday afternoon.

Rabbit shoots hoops with kids, goes home and fights with his wife, goes to pick up his kid and his car, drives instead all night to South Carolina, drives back, stays the night in his high school baseball coach's room at the Y, goes on a double date w/ coach and goes home with hooker, starts living with hooker, begins a dialogue/golf friendship with his minister, Rev. Eccles.

Then back to wife when she gives birth to daughter, and back home with her, then gets shut down for sex, and leaves, and wife starts drinking again and drowns newborn in tub accidentally. Then Rabbit returns to her side, but after funeral, runs away again.

The prose is a little much, too ornate, too brilliant, hard to reconcile the omniscient narrator's brilliant genius synthesizing tone and world view with Rabbit's (and other characters') much more limited and pedestrian views.

Still, a stunning book, and, I imagine, in 1960, a shock to the system of literature.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. [140]

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. [208]

You couldn't bear to love anybody might return it. [245]

Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima

 

Slow, sprawling, unusual set piece from Mishima. More of a Henry James/Iris Murdoch exercise in character manipulation and inter-relationship than his usual dark, violent, compact narratives.

Crudo a novel by Olivia Lang

 

Free association and collage details, with a plot of "how life is anxiety-inducing." Reminds me somewhat of Renata Adler and SPEEDBOAT. not impressed thus far.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch

 

Probably the fourth time I've read this. Always enjoyable. Murdoch's protagonist (rather late in the game revealed to be a concentration camp survivor) is a puppet-master of his friends, and his malevolent gamesmanship destroys character's lives by setting up clashes of their own vanity with other characters' vanity.

The diabolical Julius sending Morgan's old love letters to him (Julius) to the noble husband Rupert - and Rupert's old love letters to his noble wife Hilder on to Morgan - just too satisfying. He creates their brief love affair out of their own self-regard and vanity.

Cartoon-level drinking - women swill whiskey like it was water, semi-unbelievably. Most of the plot comes from dialogue.

There are times when one's just got to go on loving somebody helplessly, with blank hope and blank faith. When love just is hope and faith in their most denuded form. Then love becomes almost impersonal and loses all its attractiveness and its ability to console. But it is just then that it may exert its greatest power. It is just then that it may be really be able to redeem. Love has its own cunning beyond our conscious wiles. [p. 18]

Good is dull. What novelist ever succeeded in making a good man interesting? . . .  

Evil on the contrary, is exciting and fascinating and alive. It is also very much more mysterious than good. Good can be seen through. Evil is opaque. [205]

The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme

 

Really dull, really annoying, occasional flashes of wry humor are completely buried in a mass of self-conscious, self important nonsense.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

 

"Dimensions" is first, famous story - about a woman visiting her husband in prison, after he murdered their three children. Graceful, reconciliatory story that takes place sort of miraculous, against all odds.

my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me).  p.89, “Wenlock Edge”

"Fiction" "Wenlock Edge" 

"Deep-Holes" 

"Free Radicals" an elderly woman deals with a home intruder in a distracted way.

"Face" - a boy with a birthmark across his face.

"Some Women" 

"Child's Play" two girls at their summer camp take revenge on a disabled girl that one remembers from her childhood.

"Wood"

The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima

 

good, sort of Romeo and Juliet story, poor young fisherman woos the daughter of richest man in fishing village. very pretty, evocative, island and seascape setting, a lighthouse. Mishima's spare concentrated energy is satisfying.

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

 

Another winner, stranger, earlier novel by author of PLAYWORLD. Man is questioned by two detectives in the suspicious death of him wife. It is revealed that both detectives also has suspicious dead wives in their past.

Or is just in a book the man is writing that all of this is happening?

It's a puzzle book, and like PLAYWORLD, it ran too long for me. While in PLAYWORLD it was more descriptive and expanded long moments with many different characters, here the number of characters is limited. But I got lost in the puzzle.

Still, Ross is a gifted, powerful writer whom I will read again.

Below is the Escher illustration that serves well as the flyleaf to the book.

Open Secrets by Alice Munro

 

"Carried Away"

"A Real Life"

"The Albanian Virgin" - amazing, circuitous story of a woman lost in the forest of Albania.

"Open Secrets"

"The Jack Randa Hotel" - an abandoned women follows her husband to Australia.

"A Wilderness Station"

"Spaceships Have Landed" - girl lies about a sexual assault - or does she?

"Vandals" - vicious revenge.

Playworld by Adam Ross

 

Thick, long book - possibly too long - but I'm halfway through and digging it. Great schoolboy wrestling descriptions. NYC in 1980-1981.

Finished - exhausting, but Ross's lapidary prose style is not to be believed. I feel that several of the plot lines lost energy in his creation of such a sprawling bildungsroman that covers maybe two years tops, when the narrator is 14 until about 16.

Plots include narrator's seduction by a 36 year old woman (a family friend), his wrestling coach's sexual abuse, his parents' marriage seemingly about to dissolve, his TV star financial status as an actor on a popular series, his pining for an out-of-reach teenaged girl. And that's just some of them.

Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry

 

"Re-" reading this after forty years. How did I even pretend to understand it at twenty years old? Lowry's prose is dense, elliptical, allusive, often semi-private. A late entry in the great modernist novels. But I'm having real trouble "finishing" it.

Friends of My Youth by Alice Munro

 

Despite her recent cancellation, Alice Munro is a genius. Going back and re-reading her now is stunning and numbing: her men are cruel and selfish, her women are passive and selfish, the northern landscape is bleak and cold, but other setting details are lavishly and lovingly rendered: interiors, trees, flowers, clothes, anything inanimate with color.

"Friend of My Youth"

"Five Points"

"Meneseteung"

"Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass"

"Oranges and Apples"

"Pictures of the Ice"

"Goodness and Mercy"

"Oh, What Avails"

"Differently"

"Wigtime"

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

 

Ending up liking this quiet, calm novel about a Jewish Russian refusenik who served 13 years in a Soviet gulag after being betrayed by his Jewish friend and roommate. 

Refusenik visits Crimea and accidentally books a room in his betrayers house. 

Yid dreitzikh. A Jew gets by.