Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

 

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.

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.]