No Way Home by T.C. Boyle

 

Etna by Paul Yoon

 

OK, dog-during-wartime POV, little pulseless. The prose is pretty but not much happens.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

 

Liked this, small quiet book that builds and packs and outsized emotional wallop at the end. 

Elderly widow settles in a "retirement hotel" and deals with loneliness, memory, and hope.

Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson

 

I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend by Martin Short

 

Listened to a couple hours of this memoir/biography - I love Martin Short's work and roles, think he's peerless - but the mocking-self-putdown, while also self-congratulatory, style, and the celebrity namedropping wore pretty thin by halfway through.

 

Got two books of Walker Evans photo out of the library and am slowly relishing and turning over the plates - it's a lot to take in. His evolution from handheld to fixed camera was dramatic - his eye was capacious - and his persistence and attention to detail enormous.

It was description of his subway series in Amor Towles first novel that drove me to look him up: candids he took unbeknowst to the subjects. Their starkness and humanity and beauty touched me.

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

 

A little generic coming-of-age story by the author of ELECTION. Things move along fast - he uses very short (usually 2-3 page) chapters - so the plot as it were thickens nicely, but there's nothing surprising in the characters. And the overlay of a middle-aged successful in-crisi author's POV feels weird.

The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley

 

Frustrating NYRB classic, slow moving. Trying to stick with it but mired down halfway through it. Sort of a SEPARATE PEACE or ATONEMENT vibe, but grander scope of language, sometimes losing sight of the 12 year old boy protagonist.

What Not by Rose Macaulay

 

Listened to this driving home from Chicago. Absorbing but not that great. Wanted other books by her but couldn't find anything else recorded. Sci fi dystopian 1920 Britain, the Dept of Brains, people are classed by mental acuity and breeding laws passed to try to limit stupidity. Love story within all this.

Fascinating but thin.

The Mission House by Carys Davies

 

Listened to this driving out to Chicago, slow start but great in the end. Totally absorbing activity to do while driving.

A Confederacy of Dunces: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by John Kennedy Tootle and Albert Monteys

 

Had to get, as they're never gonna make the movie version, at least not in my lifetime.

Unimpressive drawings and obviously-reduced text.

Meh from me.

Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis with Larry Sloman

 

Lent to me by a good, respected - if not respectable  -friend. I'm not a big RHCP fan except for their sophomore effort FREAKEY STYLEY (produced by the infinite George Clinton), and Kiedis is self-admittedly and unabashedly a junkie (from an early age - maybe 14 was first heroin use?), so not that reliable a narrator. But I'm finding the sleazy Hollywood/LA/endlesstoursing narrative pretty riveting - what a life, what travels, what meetings and what a grand sleazy musical perfomative mess he's made over the years.

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

 

Spurred on by finally seeing the movie of the musical ANNIE of all things. Don't know much of the FDR story. This is interesting so far, if a little by-the-numbers on how polio drove him to do it all.

Eleanor would write that Franklin's illness had been "a blessing in disguise, for it gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons -- infinite patience and never-ending persistence."

from an FDR speech: "We have lost in recent years the economic liberty ot the individual -- this has been swallowed up in specialization of industry, agriculture and distribution and has meant that the cog can only move if the whole machine is in perfect gear."

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

 

Liking this, easy to read, sparkly - but not at all the stunning experience I found his A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW to be.

Walking to Martha's Vineyard, Poems by Franz Wright

 

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

 

Promising premise, flat delivery. Good talking cats and dolphins, but second half of plot falls a bit flat for me. Sci fi, fantasy mock-superhero/villain genre new to me, nice change of pace, for awhile.

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

 

Extended essay about why author kept an 800,000 journal for 20+ years and decided not to publish it. Mostly about motherhood, in the end.

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.

But what a tremendous series (really one long novel of 3000+ pages). Watched the one-season TV version, which was nice but not nearly enough.

Highly recommended. A toned-down Brideshead with three times the number of family members. Driving me to her other novels.

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.

Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol. 4 of Cazalet Chronicles)

 

Beginning Volume 5 today with great trepidation about it being over. I don't think I've ever read another novel (for I consider it one novel] as long as THE CAZALET CHRONICLES that maintained such steady, intense, interesting focus and detail on such a number of characters for so long a period (ten years, 1937-1947 so far).

p. 95 -  [Stella about her Uncle Louis after Auschwitz] "The point is that when... anyone becomes more than a certain amount unhappy they get cut off. They don't feel any comfort or concern or affection that comes from other people - all of that simply disappears inside some bottomless pit and when people realize that, they stop trying to be affectionate of comforting."

p. 343 - ... how the Duchy had once said to him that part of bearing the responsibility for one's actions entailed not unburdening them to other people and making them unhappy also. 

p. 369 - ... about whether anything they ever did would in the least change the worl and its dreary, warlike, power-mongering ways, about whether the arts were a politically civilizing influence, about whether people had always been the same and the only changes were technological.

p. 503 - "Stop being so sorry for yourself, making everyone else pay for your mistakes, expecting everyone to make allowances for you without even doing them the honour of telling them why. You've got to stop wallowing."

p. 591 - [what Father Lancing had said that a monk had told him] "You can put yourself in the centre of the universe, or you can put God. You cannot put another person there."

Summer of '42 by Herman Raucher

 

Tore through this via Kindle at the beach, a hit novelization of a hit movie, the novel of which my father had on his shelves and I read several times during my teen years. A coming-of-age, sentimental, quasi-sexual summer spent chasing an older woman. Still enjoyable after all these years.

Vagabond, a memoir by Tim Curry

 

Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol 3 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

 

Vol. III of the series. Love loved, couldn't put it down at the beach. The war continues, the girls (in particular) get older and wiser and hurt. 

p. 23 - "Isn't it funny how men have large ones and they hardly ever cry, and ours are only good for one dainty nose blow, and we cry far more often than they do?"

p. 81 - I don't think people every get over something as terrible as that [mother's death]; it just slowly stops being the only or main thing in their mind, but when they remember it, they feel the same.

p. 82 - [St. Nazaire destroyer incident - Brits rammed destroyer against lock gates, then mined the ship, then invited many German officers on board for drink when they were to be taken prisoner, and then they blew up their own ship.]

Erasure by Percival Everett

 

Another striking novel b Percival Everett, published in 2001, the earliest of his that I've read. Semi-autobiographical, emotive, meta (it contains another satirical novel and a short story). They made a move of it, American Fiction, 20 years after it was published, which I'm looking forward to watching.

Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol 2 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

 

Volume II of the series. Great great great I'm hooked. The war starts and the kids get older. Rupert is lost in France. Zoe loses one baby and has another.

p. 13 - It's as though our feelings were simply the size of our bodies - smaller.

112-113 - She had decided that although she did now believe in God, she certainly didn't love him, she didn't even like him very much.

147 - Tragedy is never just bad luck. Tragedy is not taking everything into account, usually one own's nature. I'm not going in for tragedy - not me.

161 - but then Zoe had childish views = she was rather like an old sort of worn out child, Clary realized, and quickly put that down.

 

I don't often mention or think about theatre or TV or movies here - I watch too much of them to mention! and half at least are unspeakable - but finally caught up with the TRANSPARENT series this past month. It bedeviled and fascinated and puzzled me and energized me enough that I'm going to write a little about it.

Ostensibly about gender identity (the main protagonist, a father of three who decides in his late 60s to embrace his lifetime-closed identity as a woman), it morphs early and often - and ends - much an essay about indentity at large - particularly religious identity, and here mostly Judaism. 

The stunning (to me, at least - controversially received) Musicale Finale, a 90 minute one-off after four complete seasons, was almost all about Judaism, I think. I found the music to be delightful (if totally pop), the lyrics thoughtful and funny, and the production great. (The whole series was amazing to view, beautiful and colorful and deep). The series had to end abruptly, and without Jeffrey Tambor in the Finale, as he was fired from the production after the fourth season, following  accusations of sexual misconduct (harassment charges from trans members of the cast and production staff, ironically - he denied charges but admitted being difficult to work with).

The characters were what drove me crazy - each one completely self-centered, most very selfish (if comic). No one did a thing but worry about themselves really, throughout. But in the Musicale, the three kids don't do much - a host of non-central characters lead the parade. This was part of Slate's well-put review:

The Pfefferman children—Sarah (Amy Landecker), Josh (Jay Duplass), and Ally (Gaby Hoffmann), now nonbinary and going by the name Ari—have always been phenomenal talkers. Volatile need monsters who can only be safely interacted with through a protective screen, they unload their unruly feelings and abundant sexual energy on basically everyone with feverish, realistic linguistic verve. Highly emotional and narcissistic, with the same relationship to boundaries that kids learning to play soccer have to orange pylons—knock ’em over!—their verbal too-muchness, the never-any-small-talk mania with which they carry out their existence is so much of their charm. But the musical reduces them to non-native speakers.

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol 1 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

First volume of five, the Cazalet Chronicles. Enjoying it very much so far. Excellent control of shifiting points of view of all members of the Cazalet clan - and the hired help. Little daunted by the fact that there are four more, but only halfway through.

Finished this, 8/4/2026 - really like it, looking forward to the second volume. WWII appeasement has just been sought by Chamberlain at end of volume 1, Cazalet family mostly relieved. Vol 2 starts with appeasement not working. Howard's touch is really very deft - no character left behind.

pp.26-27: ... and at weekends she [Miss Millicent, 73-year old governess] looked at pictures. Looked! She stared, stayed, revisited a picture until it was absorbed into those secret parts of her bulky being that made memory, which digested into spiritual nourishment. Truth - the beauty of it, the way that it could sometimes transcend the ordinary appearance of things - moved and excited her; inside, she was a paradise of appreciation.

p. 42 - He [Edward] didn't read at all, as a matter of fact, but luckily she didn't ask him, and so it became one more little grain in the molehill of her ignorance about him. The longer they knew each, the more things there were like that.

p. 156 - He thought, but did not say these things; his deepest adoration of her could not be shared; somewhere he knew that her image and herself were not the same, and he could only cling to the image through secrecy.

p. 258-9 - As he put his arms around her and drew her into bed, he discovered, with a sad but grateful amazement, that loving her did not depend - as he had been afraid it did - upon his admiration. Later, lying awake while she slept, I married her, he thought, and she has always given me all of herself. It was I who invented some other part of her that she would not give. But I was wrong: there was nothing to withhold. The discovery was painful and astonishing: then it occurred to him that if he loved her enough, she might change. He was not yet able or willing to accept that this was unlikely, or even impossible; he clung to the more welcome idea that though a person might be transformed by love they could not be transformed without it.

p. 311 -  All I want is for him to love me, she thought. I don't care about anything else. She was not aware that the secret lies are the ones that endure.

p.323 - She [Evie] was perfectly determined in this, as in her emotional life, never to learn from experience. She is a monster, thought Sid, but she thought it protectively. Since Evie's birth, when Sid was four, she had been conditioned to feeling that Evie was up against circumstances rather than her own nature - she had always been subject to ailments, and an early and bad attack of measles, acute appendicitis and peritonitis had enfeebled her frame and strengthened her powers of manipulation to the point where she could be certain of special consideration for whatever she did or didn't do and resulting circumstances kept her steadfast in her discontent.

The Rolling Stones: The Biography by Bob Spitz

 

Loving this, finding it deliciousness, even if the prose is consistently wooden - the facts as such of the Stones' existence and triumph are overwhelmingly enough.

The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley

 

Having suffered through the lousy Peter Sellers movie treatment, I bought the book, which I remember reading in grade school with delight. Three chapters in, it's already much better than the film.

PostScript: the novel is charming and a real achievement. 

Let's go (so we can get back) : a memoir of recording and discording with Wilco, etc. by Jeff Tweedy

 

Okay for awhile, but didn't finish it. He's a fluent, conversational writer, but no really piercing insights.

The Keeper by Tana French

 

How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy

 

good but slight book - reads like a series of creative writing exercises, ballasted with philosophical rejoinders on the importance of creativity to the soul. Liked, didn't love.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

 

Another slow-building marvel from Andrew Miller. Two couple live across a field from each other in an English village - one man is a doctor, one man is new farmer, both of their wives are pregnant and become friends, and the relationships intermesh and are poisoned as slowly as snow falls and as viciously as snow keeps falling.

Rat by Fernanda Eberstadt

 

Liked it okay - didn't love it - haven't kept up with Eberstadt since her groundbreaking ISAAC AND HIS DEVILS.

There is an emphasis on exotic locale - the south of France, in the Pyrénées Orientales - and exoctic character nationality - French, gypsy ish types - and the lifstyle is either in that bohemiand strain - or in a more conventional privileged London class.

But the character don't exactly leap off the page - and everyone is high-minded and culturally snobbish and artistically conversant. I'm such a bitch!

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry by Adam Plunkett

 

Heavy explication of the poetry, with sparse surrounding details on Frost's biographical life (as much as is known). So far I'm very much enjoying the close readings of the early poems - Frost is a towering figure in American poetry and needs constant attention.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

 

Delicious as usual. The episodic nature of the plot - how things develop separately, then come together in the end - is comic and old-fashioned, but deeply satisfying to me, at least, in my immature way.

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.