A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

 

Ignatius Rising by Rene Pol Nevils & Deborah George Hardy

 

Sort of perfunctory "biography" - but to be fair, Toole died so young, completely unknown, his masterpiece CONFEDERACY languishing in a drawer after two years of interest from a major publisher. Then his book was published to great acclaim more than 10 years later, after the fervent attempts of his mother and the intercession of Walker Percy.

So by the time the world was ready for him, he'd already been dead for the entire 1970s. There are very scant primary sources from his early years.

Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

Good one, about a disgruntled career CIA intelligence officer outraged by the killing of JFK, who decides to track down the real killers behind the assasination, a conspiracy that almost everyone still believes in but can never agreeon.

There's a welcome lack of melodramatic murder and mayhem, and instead a tightening intellectual knot as the agent wrangles who knows what, and what they know, and narrrows down his pursuit until he's got the right people.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

 

V. late to the party here, as the novel came out in 1979 - my senior year of high school! - and if I missed it then, I'm certainly not going to get on board now.

It's somewhat amusing - the anti-poet stuff is hilarious to me (prisoners are strapped in "Poetry Appreciation Chairs" and forced to listen to the terrible poetry of the Vogon leader) - but nothing is really continued, it jumps for scene to scene, with no regard for science, or fiction, or character development really.

Earth's entry in the titular Guide was "harmless" - later amended to "mostly harmless," which Arthur, the main earthling character, is saddened to see after the earth is destroyed early in the book.

In my mind, it's like extremely minor Vonnegut - but even minor Vonnegut would be better than this.

In my mind, at that time, I was really into Tom Robbins for awhile, STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER (which I recently tried to re-read, and just could not), and had read Vonnegut's best in high school (and still re-read him joyously today). This is more Jonathan Livingston Segal-country to me - pop sci-fi w/ a philosophical bent, but a slightly caustic sense of humor that I do enjoy. Next: ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYLE MAINTENANCE, which I can't believe I've never read. Maybe I did, and just forgot it.

Postscript: in the end, I actually enjoyed the end of the book. The planet of used ballpoint pens (where DO ballpoint pens go? how many have I used in my life), the Ultimate Question, the greatest (and second-greatest) computer in the Universe, the white mice who are actually in control of Earth/Universe.

Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh

 

Good page-turner. Not great. sort of the premise of Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN exploded to a bunch of Manhattanites in the current time frame, grief support groups mined for victims of violent crime who will agree to murder someone who ANOTHER alleged victim wants revegne on.

Every Exit Brings You Home by Naeem Murr

 

Good, if grim. Egyptian-born, Gaza-raised, Chicago-residing airline steward undergoes much sacrifice as 1) head of his Chicago condo 2) long-suffering husband of ailing childless Palestinian wife 3) possible bisexual, certainly promiscuous.

Murr's prose and description and character sketches are knife-like - he summons such a vivid external landscape of Chicago neighborhood life, and at the same time a jolting inner landscrape of memory and desire - Gaza, Egypt, endless airline flights.

Recommended but bleak.

Festival for Spies by E. Howard Hunt

Rabbit hole of reading Richard Helms book THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRET. This novel (according to a footnote in TMWKTS) was given BY MY OWN FATHER to another CIA agent, Victor Marchetti, in Helms' office - Helms was a spy fiction fan and kept a stack of same on hand for distribution.

This is of course the same EH Hunt famous for his Watergate exploits - he was semi-retired by the CIA already in early 1960s and charged with writing sanitized spy novels where the good guys always won, a reaction to the more knotty guiltily-existential novels of someone like Le Carre.

I bought it thinking it would be a joke - and it is light unintentionally semi-humorous reading, melodramatic, purple prose, all breezily accomplished in around 130 pages - but the travelogue descriptive prose on southeast Asia is quite nice. I'd read another of his, guiltily. Complicitly!

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

 

Got halfway through, it's beautifully written, but the conspiracy - the twelve men's role in murder/robbery/coverup plot - is too drawn out and 12 is too many variations of complicity for me to follow.

Good New Zealand local description, eye-opening, had never really thought about its "colonial history".

But over all annoyed feeling at wasted effort.

I read about this novel in some discussion of meta-novels and DFW and Infinite Jest. There's a horoscope/celestial cast of characters list and pie chart at the beginning, supposedly indicating fate tracking movement of starts, etc. - but I couldn't follow it. 

And really won't be bothered.

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA by Thomas Powers

 

I may have believed I read this before, and certainly did read the footnote that references my father, who served as an aide to Richard Helms, and who gave to agent Victor Marchetti a copy of FESTIVAL OF SPIES, written by David St. John, a pseudonym for infamous Watergate participant Howard Hunt, as Helms had a box of those sort of CIA-friendly spy novels in his office and liked to hand them out.

But this time I really did read every word of it - and though it is dry and acronym-laden, and hard to follow, its reputation precedes it as THE best CIA book ever published when it appeared in 1979. (Have no idea whether that is still true, as a tide of revelations and books have appeared since then.)

This book came at the end of a massive tide of post-Watergate bloodletting and scapegoating of the national intelligence community that Helm's CIA (and the first 30 years of a national intelligence service) never quite got over. Intelligence (in Powers' words, the only way during the Cold War of "waging peace) has always been mandatory for any country. 

p. 43 "Analysts deduce what spies have failed to learn."

My Struggle Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knaugaard

 I read Book One many moons ago and (sort of) remember liking it, after reading about the Knausgaard phenom and being completely prepared to despise it.

So on to Book Two - if nothing else, it gives me something to go to when INFINTE JEST grinds my teeth down to powder (usually three pages).

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

 

Don't know how I've missed reading this book all my life - intriguing fairy tale/children's book about an ugly, misanthropic nobelman hiding away his beautiful daughter from the world, giving suitors impossible tasks to fulfill to win her, then killing them and feeding them to the geese when they fail. An intrepid prince (disguised as a minstrel) enters the scene and wins the girl, helped along by some mysterious Deum de Machina characters.

The wordplay is fascinating and funny and deep. Need to re-read it immediately - and find the edition pictured, with illustrations by M. Searle of DOWN WITH SKOL and Molesworth fame.

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovitz

 

Sailed right through this - a relief while still laboring away at INFINITE JEST - a short narrative of a disgruntled husband and father dropping his younger daughter off at college and just continuing on, away from his wife, his job, his troubled marriage. 

Interesting, and compelling as far as it goes - but seems to drop out quickly without resolution.

The narrator is easy for me to sympathize with, but I didn't really care about him. Is that cruel? Yes!

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

 

Good characters - but second half of plot gets a little ridiculous with enslaved prostitutes and ring of predator men.

The Slowworm's Song by Andrew Miller

The Irish Troubles, as navigated by an ex-British-Army recovering alcoholic dying of liver cancer/failure, as told in a long letter to his newly-reconciled daughter.

Very pretty prose. A small quiet narrative about big things, like love and forgiveness and addiction. 

 

Always funny. Each story is much the same, but Wodehouse's crafty vocabulary and diction makes each unique.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

 

Terrific novel from the always reliable McEwan. A literary mystery story spanning 150 years, going into a future where much of the world's has been submerged by climate change and human strife.

A sonnet sequence - a coronet of 15 linked poems - from 2015 (ish) goes missing. In the sequence, a renowned elderly poet allegedly rhapsodizes about his wife Vivien and their love and their shared joy in nature. But what's true in the poem may not be true wife. In the second half of the novel we read Viven's journal, in which several (many!) uglier truths are revealed.

Pure pleasure to read.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

 

Naively (unwisely?) re-reading this (for the third time total).

It's still great - a droll, heartbreaking, technically prodigious masterpiece - but it's less fun this time around. It's just so difficult physically to read - often long long page(s) long paragraphs, intricately constructed sentence syntax interrupted by often-random brief footnotes, but occasionally chapter-length footnotes that advance the play and do key work narratively. Syntax already mentioned - Wallace worshipped syntax and deploys it hilariously and ironically and strategically, but you often feel like you're diagramming a sentence as you're reading it. His vocabulary (natch) is intense and technical and super-specific and (sometimes) created on the spot.

It's... alot.

The plot - revoling around tennis prodigy/genius/depressive/substance-abuser Hal Incandenza and his friends at a tennis academy/high school in Boston, a substance-abuse halfway house down the road and hill from there, separatists from Quebec planning terrorism, and a back-story involving a movie Hal's father made which kills anyone who watches it - is agonizingly drawn out. But the prose - Wallace's empathy for his characters, his humanity and wit - is always rewarding. If you have the wherewithal to read it all.  Certainly a middleclass intoxicated brainy young white man's book. Don't know how anyone else could care.

Bookmarked the father-song tennis lesson in the 300 page area - sort of insufferable.

Got through the Eschaton wargame extended scene, which was also annoying but easier to follow.

4/7/2026 - Still annoying but still gamely plowing through it. Extended history of TV-advertising tedious. What is is about it that's so unusual? Such brilliant thought and comedy is interwined with the most banal activities and trumped-up dramatic situation.

Shared qualities (in Stefano Ercolino’s phrasing) of the Maximalist novel, aka the “systems novel” or the “Mega-Novel”: length, encyclopedism, exuberance, polyphony, paranoia, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. In other words, they’re long, dense, and ambitious, told from numerous points of view, interested in morality, awash in conspiratorial machinations, and framed in a narrative filled with over-the-top characters and unlikely scenarios.

May 3, 2026: finished re-reading after two months (and reading five other novels durring the process so I wouldn't hang myself).

Amazing, exhausting, depressing, uplifting, hilarious, bleak.  Two thirds of the way through (around page 600?), I slipped into a higher gear and read it much more easily, fluent with the characters and the settings, the diction, what passes for "plot". By the final pages, I was experiencing a touch of almost post-coital tristresse that it would soon be over. But was still relieved. And then had to go re-read the very first chapter, as that is the final "plot" moment - Hal is rendered speechless externally but alive internally.

I got much more out of it this time then I remember from previous readings/attempts - I followed it, I took my time, I read a ten-page online summary online that kept me (in retrospect) less at sea with the whole thing.

important terms: anti-confluential, annular, anhedonia

p. 157-169 - Inc Sr.'s (?) terribly long monolog to his son.

572 - annular fusion, annular chemotheraphy (a cancer that kills cancer)

685 - son raped by father

694-695 - hip, cynical, anhedonia, Weltschmerz, "the Great White Shark of pain," "It" - psychotic depression

765 - the Moms to Mario - disassociation, fear of one's own emotions

900 - Hamlet doubts everything/anything (is real) but the ghost

972 -  Orin's death by roaches - like my dream-poem about Michael

973 - "the truth will set you free but not until it's done with you" - one of the AA old-timers (the Crocodiles) to Gatel

1026 - footnote listing Inc Sr.'s film title - favorite one about plotlessness

1053 - footnote, Hal on loneliness

Vigil by George Saunders

 

Disappointed (so far) in this new novel - using the tropes of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO without any of the emotional zing (so far).

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe

 

Spell-binding. Was prompted to re-read this after reading an old journal entry of mine from freshman year of college, where, out of the blue, I read this for the first time - don't know why, wasn't studying it in a course at the time.

Anyway, it was just as good this time around - couldn't put it down, even though I'm in the midst of reading several other books. Part adventure story, part mystical journey, partly (rather boring) history of South Pole journeys.

The ending is particularly dramatic (not that all the starvation, murder, shipwrecks that precede it are UNdramatic), with its quasi-spiritual white clouds and whitening water and giant white human figure that rises up out of the mist.

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky

 

Ruth by Kate Riley

 

Strange, puzzling, powerful book, tracking a woman's interior and exterior life as part of a strict Anabaptist community in upper Michigan.

Ruth is a thinker - on the surface, a compliant (if bizarre) cult member, but underneath, in her thoughts, a poet and a puzzler and a rebel and resistor, rebellious the only place she can be, in her own mind.

The prose structure is almost all touched by the omnicscient narrator giving us Ruth's thoughts - but the narrator speaks in a much more abstract, formal, supremely-ironic tone of voice and vocabulary than does Ruth, when we actually hear her speak (which is not often).

Really liked the book - deceptively simple-looking, but the language and its levels of irony require a slow, deliberate, reading pace.

A child wa no longer a baby when he hit back. A child was no longer a baby when he knew how to use a comb. A child was no longer a baby when his mother had another child. By this last definition did Jamie and Rose Feder quit their statio, and by this last definition did Gretel Feder remain a baby her entire life. (166)

Makup allowed one to life without speaking. (216)

She had finally read Revelation, and for all the beasts, remembered best the description of a Heaven defined by the nouns it lacked: death, mourning, sorrow, tears. A modest facility in which mixed species could rest together without histrionics.

Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel

 

Great horror/thriller, existential  psychological statement on mental illness and modern British suburbs!

She reminds me of the great Iris Murdoch in her pathological obession with the cruelty of human relations - but she's much more plot-driven than Murdoch.

This one is just stunning, scary, bleakly hilarious.

The Best American Essays 2007 edited by David Foster Wallace.

 

Fascinating essay about the culture of sexualization  and the sexual revolution by Mark Greif called "Afternoon of the Sex Children."

Great analysis of the Iraq Wars.

Amazing opening essay about a man dying in an apartment fire.

Came for the Wallace imprimataur, and it's ringing true.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

 

Started out thinking I would hate this, now suddenly charmed.

Couldn’t quite finish. quite funny at times, but too travelogue for my tastes. stylish melancholic nostalgic locales for an aging gay man to pity himself in. 

Learning to Talk: Stories by Hilary Mantel

 

Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories by Elmore Leonard

 

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samantha Schweblin

 

Saw this review in the WPost (probably). Strange, eerie, pathologically deep examinations of characters and plotlines that sometimes feels like they're straight outa Stephen King fiction. 

Wasn't digging it, but just read and liked her long story ("The Woman from Atlántida") about two young sisters "rescuing" an alcoholic reclusive poet living in the beach resort town they're visiting.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

Good but the usual Greenblatt treatment - take a subject about whom almost nothing is factually known, and build out the social/intellectual/historical era around the black hole of the character's existence, and posit how he must have participated.

Marlowe is regarded as being Shakespeare's progenitor with his plays TAMBURLAINE, DR. FAUSTUS, and THE JEW OF MALTA. He was the first playwright to succesfully use blank verse in his works, and though Shakespeare surpassed Marlowe by a stunning margin, it's possible to see how Marlowe had to come first.

Watched SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE again last night, in which Kit Marlowe features.

Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford

 

I remember as a child reading a young person's biography of Beethoven - or at least reading the first chapters, where a six year old Ludwig races home through the village streets humming the melody of a composition he's going to give to his mother at her nameday celebration.

This biography is good if stuffed with cultural history of Bonn and Vienna, the other German states and Europe at the end of the 18th century. Lots going on. Meanwhile, Beehoven, preternatually gifted, sullen, isolated, productive, does exactly what he needs to do.

From a junior Mozart/Hayden imitator, he creates incredible music that builds on their example, and then towers over it.

The Angel of Rome and Other Stories by Jess Walter

 

Good if minor stuff. Seems like he's imitating Richard Russo sometimes though, but without Russo's snarky undertones.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

 

I'm late to this party, but find the novel clarifyingly beautiful...

... if long and somewhat tediously overwritten. I watched the 2007 BBC series with Ruth Wilson instead. Quite good!

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

 

Finally got around to this. Found it tedious and overstuffed with internal psychologizing.