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.