The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

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.

The Rolling Stones: The Biography by Bob Spitz

 

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.

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.