Purity by Jonathan Franzen

I couldn't put this book down for five days and tore through it avidly.  Franzen writes so fluidly and with such intelligence that 550 pages went by like 50.  No kidding.  And that is rare indeed.  But is it in the end enough of an accomplishment?  To be five pounds of pure high-brow entertainment?

For the characters in Purity are monotonically neurotic and unloveable.

a la Dickens, the opening, central character, Pip (short somehow for "Purity") is an orphan without knowledge of her fortune.

Franzen searches for the zeitgeist of our times, and comes up with the Internet. The moral seems to be that in a world where all information is global and transparent and available to all, we know less about ourselves.

He can write with great emotion but has chosen a somewhat rarefied (and loathesome) group of characters to bring to life -- the mothers and fathers pictured, almost without fail, are satanically bad parents.

natural description extraordinary

for a novel that centers on "high tech," and Wiki-Leaks-like network infiltration and security hijacking, the novel is remarkably un-savvy about tech, relying on "googling" and "databases" and "face-recognition software" in the most general usage for most of its sleuthing.

relationship between Pip and her mother (Annabel), her eventual father (Tom), and the leader of the SunShine Project (Andreas Wolf)

Andreas Wolf's childhood in East Germany and his relationship with Annagret

themes:  power, feminism, secrecy vs. openness

A Tan and Sandy Silence by John D. MacDonald

What a terrific story.  My first JDM, after a lifetime spent mentally scoffing my father's adoration of Travis McGree.  Beautiful prose, no non-memorable scenes, real voices.  Capsule histories of Florida real estate in the 60s and 70s, the island of Grenada, construction minutiate -- and a great whodunit with marvelous torture, seduction and redemption episodes.  Highly recommended.

Killshot by Elmore Leonard

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

My first experience with Ferrante's wonderful, penetrating and prickly prose.

I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, by David Shields and Caleb Powell

Annoying book seemingly based on admiration of the film My Dinner With Andre (also annoying).  Looking forward to the (probably annoying) film by James Franco starring the two authors.  Trite literary criticism inflated by authors' weird swollen senses of self-importance.  Finished reading it in three hours so no harm, no foul, as Shields might say.

The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

What her pitiful look saw, at that early time, in her father, in her sister, in her brother, in the jail; how much, or how little of the wretched truth it pleased God to make visible to her; lies hidden with many mysteries. It is
enough that she was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a
priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

James Merrill: Life and Art, by Langdon Hammer

Crow Fair, stories by Thomas McGuane

My Struggle, Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

You know too little and it doesn't exist.  You know too much and it doesn't exist.  Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.  That is what writing is about.  Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.  There, that is writing's location and aim.  But how to get there?

We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.

What did I like about volume 1 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the IT book of the year or past year or so?

Well, I can tell you what I didn’t like.  I didn’t like the plot: almost nothing happens.

I didn’t like some of the characters, they were indistinguishable from other characters, and had impenetrable Swedish names.

The setting was hard for me to follow:  in the first half, it seem to rely heavily on the difference between Sweden and Norway, which my naïve American idiocy unconsciously had always assumed were just different names for the same (sort of) country.

So what did I like?

Dunno, but I read the whole damn thing and found it half compelling, half boring.

There is so much almost unmediated physical description: half the time I found it boring, half the time I thought it was overwhelming strong, making things, stuff, landscape and sky, into almost living characters themselves.

It seems to be a coming of age story, then the story of the aftermath of a difficult father’s death.

from James Woods New Yorker profile: "But there is also a simplicity, an openness, and an innocence in his relation to life, and thus in his relation to the reader. Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up."

The Martian by Andy Weir

Great book, listened to it on cd in the car, made 375 miles almost a joy, even brought it inside the house on Thursday to finish it from the office.  Come for plot, suffer through some scientific details, and stay for the great first person narrator's voice.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Terrific book about the search for a serial child killer in Stalinist Russia. How to catch a criminal the state will not even admit exists?

Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored by John Lydon

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell

Critics and Connoisseurs
Marianne Moore

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious
    fastidiousness.  Certain Ming
        products, imperial floor coverings of coach-
    wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something
            that I like better--a
                mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly bal-
                        lasted animal stand up,
                similar determination to make a pup
                    eat his meat from the plate.

I remember a swan under the willows of Oxford,
    with flamingo-colored, maple-
        leaflike feet.  It reconnoitered like a battle-
    ship.  Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were
            ingredients in its
                disinclination to move.  Finally its hardihood was
                        not proof against its
                proclivity to more fully appreciate such bits
                    of food as the stream

bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it
    to eat.  I have seen this swan and
        I have seen you; I have seen ambition without
    understanding it in a variety of forms.  Happening to stand
            by an ant-hill, I have
                seen a fastidious ant carrying a stick north, south,
                        east, west, till it turned on
                itself, struck out from the flower bed into the lawn,
                    and returned to the point

From which it had started.  Then abandoning the stick as
    useless and overtaxing its
        jaws with a particle of whitewash--pill-like but
    heavy--it again went throught the same course of procedure.
                        What is
            there in being able
                to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of
                        self-defense;
                in proving that one has had the experience
                    of carrying a stick?

1924

Stalin's Curse by Robert Gellately

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

A quiet, slow-gathering story of a recently-widowed woman, Nora Webster, and how she gradually surfaces back into life after her husband's death.

Mason's Retreat by Christopher Tilghman

Excellent novel, set on Maryland's Eastern Shore, during the run-up to WWII.  Brought to mind "Howard's End" by E.M. Forster.

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

great sprawling book about a woman, her husband who is stricken with Alzheimers, and their son.  tremendously moving.  just what you think you know everything, you realize you know nothing, and that is a book about living.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History

Addictive for the lengthy commute. So far I've listened to:

Countdown to Armageddon (5 parts, WWI)

Radical Thoughts (on the evolution of the idea of a "Red Menace" in America)

Thor's Angels (4-hourson European tribes after the fall of the Roman empire in 472 and in the ensuing 1000 years, what used to be known as "The Dark Ages")

Logical Insanity (a history of aerial bombing between 1895 and Hiroshima)

Wrath of the Khans I & II (long series on Genghis Khan)

Brothers Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On you? by George Clinton

Great, couldn't put it down, drives me back to the gaps in my pfunk musical library.

A Moveable Famine by John Skoyles

Ironweed by William Kennedy

Legs by Williams Kennedy

If I don't Breathe How Do I Sleep, poems by Joe Wenderoth

The Fun Parts: Stories by Sam Lipsyte

The Life of John Berryman by John Haffenden

 Advantages to working at Johns Hopkins so far: access to an extraordinary library, ability to find all of Bill Knott's scattered books of poetry.  Amazing poet, a model for me of self-creation.

Revolver: Poems by Robyn Schiff

 Too many words, not enough punctuation.

The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics by Matt Bai

While reading it, kept forgetting what it was about as the unknown-to-me proper names continue to pile up.

One More thing: Stories and Other Stories by BJ Novak

Wanted to hate it.  Liked it. Like heavy Steve Martin, or lite Donald Barthelme.

March 2026 - Re-reading it. Still like it, and after now becoming an Office super-fan.

It's a little long - not in pages but in number of stories included, some of which are only a paragraph or two, or a couple lines. The shorter ones just seem like polished jokes in prose form. Some of the longer stories are quite interesting, although the final one, about the poet who becomes a translator and finally just rewrites THE GREAT GATSBY, seems to have been a better concept than story.

Still, I've recommended it to several peopl.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel

Something to do while waiting for the next Wolf Hall installment.  Something to do, but not much.

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game by William Kennedy

Re-reading after 30 plus years.  Even better.  "Screwing your own wife is like striking out the pitcher."

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

Creepy.  Good Detroit scene.

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

Ian McEwan for those in a hurry.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Disappointing, but what was he going to do next?  I was doubtful but willing to try to believe he could pull off another  interconnected-novellas-including-the-future, but the sixth section, "An Horologist's Labyrinth," lost me.  The fantasy/sci fi stuff just made my mind go numb.  Gorgeous writing all over the place, great characters, great settings, the huge presence of lived-life feel that Mitchell so soundly delivered in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns, but in the end, a solid, sad, Nope from me.

The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

And as he glowered at Pat he wished that writers could be dispensed with altogether.  If only ideas could be plucked from the inexpensive air!

At a quarter to one, he began to feel hungry -- up to this point every move, or rather every moment, was in the writer's tradition. Even to the faint irritation that no one had annoyed him, no one had bothered him, no one had interfered with the long empty dream which constituted his average day.

Terrific stories: concise, vicious, delicious and sad.  Runyon-esque comedies.  Bleak undercurrents.  Hilarious.

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Terrific, sprawling, intense novel about a state social worker in Montana whose web of concern and care and personal struggles widens unexpectedly.  Couldn't put it down.

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing

As we make our hell we certainly should like it.  (Hemingway)

It's everything I've forgotten – all the complicated dark mixture of my youth and infancy that made me a fiction writer instead of a fireman or a soldier… Why I chose this God-awful metier of sedentary days and sleepless nights and endless dissatisfaction.  Why I would choose it again. (Fitzgerald)

I showed him [the blue devil] that I could endure him and I made him respect my endurance… Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect. [Hannah in T. Williams Night of the Iguana]

Here's the dilemma, let's face it.  I can't recover any nervous stability until I'm able to work again freely, and I can't work again freely until I recover a nervous stability.  (Tennessee Williams)

You know, paralysis in a character can be just as significant and just as dramatic as progress, and is also less shop-worn.  How about Chekhov? (TW)

Such pithiness and soul in all the quoted material from the authors Laing profiles, and she's interesting in charting the intersections of their lives and their shared alcoholic pathologies.  But alas, her own travelogue grows wearying and shapeless, there’s no direction or essential narrator’s voice beneath all her lengthy, “well-written” description.  By the time she get to plumbing the depths of her own childhood awfulness, the drunk aunt or whatever, it’s even more insignificant in relief, against the problems, travails, delusions and triumphs -- the words! -- of the writers she’s talking about.

Of Kennedys & Kings by Harris Wofford

Great history of the civil rights movement and the Kennedy White House, and the post-JFK civil rights struggle.

In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds

First novel I've read in a month, by the author of the scintillating "The Quickening Maze."

Gulp by Mary Roach

Supremely interesting science writer on lots of disgusting subjects.  "Anal violin" was a new concept to me.

A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren

Love her politics, but her prose is less lovely.  Super dull.  Agree with everything she says, but very little color or like-like deal.  She acknowledges her husband for being a "great kisser," which is kind of hot.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

Stunning debut novel about Chechneya.  Sort of The English Patient meets 100 years of Solitude.

Political Fictions by Joan Didion

[I was] distrustful of political highs . . . convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood.

in which both parties are committed to calibrating the precise level of incremental tinkering required to get elected

Many speeches are scheduled long before they are to be delivered. Thus the commitment to speak precedes the knowledge of any issue to speak about, often causing staff to find or create an issue for the speech.... The routinization of crisis, endemic to the rhetorical presidency, is accompanied by attempted repetitions of charisma. In Reagan's case this style was further reinforced by an ideology and a rhetoric opposed to the Washington establishment, to bureaucrats and bureaucracies.... He serves as a better illustration than any other president of the possibility and danger that presidents might come themselves to think in the terms initially designed to persuade those not capable of fully understanding the policy itself. Having reconfigured the political landscape, the rhetorical presidency comes to reconstitute the president's political understanding.

“The last thing the Democratic Party has wanted to do is declare that there is a possibility for class struggle. The Republicans, however, are perfectly happy to declare class struggle all the time. They are always waging a one-sided class war against the constituency the Democrats nominally represent. In this sense, the Republicans are the only real political party in the United States. They stand for ideology and interest, not compromise.”

note monster hand

Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks

Bob Dylan Sleeping, new poems by Sean Enright

Buy it

On Not Dying At 28
      

                       [Or perhaps I will die at thirty?  Ezra Pound]

I’d written nothing. Two days later, I wed.
In eighteen months my own father was dead.

All I thought about back then was writing.
Or having written, I guess. It was exciting

To me, everything I hadn’t done at all.
When would I start?  My future looked full.

Often I sat there, imagining the movie: 
John Cusack would star, or I’d  play myself. Groovy.

We watched the news on honeymoon in Maine:
A man who stopped a tank was never seen again.

In the cabin my naked wife sat on the top bunk-bed.
She spread her legs, and steered my head.

Looking back, it seems only right
To have survived, if just for a night like that.

Now I’ve written some poems, at last.
They’ll exist until I’m dead, at least.

Yawn.  Look at me, tending my legend, 
In flagrante delicto. Elsewhere, headlines happened.