Cyberwars by Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Hark by Sam Lipsyte

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

These stories I enjoy more than her novels - but still not much.  Enough of her already.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

A sprawling, beguiling, Borgesian exercise in literary history and narrative focus.  Two poets, leaders of the so-called "visceral poetry" movement in Mexicon, dart in and out of a 600 page novel that features many dozens of "interview" with other poets and people whose lives intersected with the two poets.

Challenging!

everything began to tangle in my head, as if the words I had to say were plants and all of a sudden they began to wither, fade, and die.

when I was in high school we had a teacher who claimed to know exactly what he would do if World War III broke out: go back to his hometown, because nothing ever happened there, probably a joke, I don't know, but in a way he was right, when the whole civilized world disappears Mexico will keep existing, when the planet vaporizes or disintegrates, Mexico will still be Mexico.

... I could peel my hands off that glass of that old mirror (noticing, all the same, how my fingerprints lingered like ten tiny face speaking in unison and so quickly that I couldn't make out their words).

Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

My sister Maureen gave me this book on Christmas in 1977 when she was a freshman at Fordham University and I was a junior in high school.  I don't know if she'd read it - when I reminded her of the gift two weeks ago, she had no idea what I was talking about - or if, at the time, she'd read it was Bellow's impassioned extension of his friend with the great doomed poet Delmore Schwartz, and figured, since at age 16 I was talking great guns about becoming a poet, that it was a gift that would sit right with me.

But I've just finished it for the first time, I will confess.  Although I'm a Saul Bellow fan - his Adventures of Augie March certainly makes my top ten American Novels list, and I've read several others and fervently admire them for their intellect.  

And what a staggering book! Infuriating, too.  

He [H] said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night's rest.

Well, we woo one other with everything we've got.

Look, professor, you don't mix things up. That's not what a wife is about. And if you have a funny foot you have to look for a funny shoe. And if you find the right fit you just let it alone.

acts of exalted violence by dedicated ideologists to shock the bourgeoisie and regenerate its dying nerve.

Blake was naked and saw man naked, and from the center of his own crystal.

At the center of the beholder there must be space for the whole, and this nothing-space is not an empty nothing but a nothing reserved for everything

'Though you are said to be alive you are dead. Wake up and put some strength into what is left, which must otherwise die.' That's from the Revelation of Saint John, more or less.

By means of music a man affirmed that the logically unanswerable was, in a different form, answerable. Sounds without determinate meaning become more and more pertinent, the greater the music.

[Humboldt] "I ask myself why you figured so prominently in my obsessions and fixations. You may be one of those people who arouse family emotions, you're a son-and-brother type. Mind, you want to arouse feeling but not necessarily to return it. The idea is that the current should flow your way."

[Humboldt] "Good old Henry James, of whom Mrs. Henry Adams said that he chewed more than he bit off..."


[Humboldt quoting William Blake] "Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."

The Butterfly Revolution by William Butler

Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

 Terrific novel.  Little long in the end, but when you write as beautifully as Doerr, you can't be blamed. Sad to finish it.

Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God by Tony Hoagland

My Bishop and Other Poems by Michael Collier

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

His Favorites by Kate Walbert

Cherry by Nico Walker

Blood Salt Water by Denise Mina

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Tremendously moving, tremendously informing. First one of Powers' novels that I've finish, and well worth it.

Not for the faint of heart. It is a BIG book, long and dense.  There are two sides to the novel: there's a third person authorial voice that layers on incredible reams of facts about trees and plants and science, and then there are a handful of human characters who start out wholly separated and end up merging in radical protest against logging and commercial forces destroying the American forest.

The one problem for me is that the tree-speaking tends to dwarf the human speaking.

The humans move at lightning pace, compared to trees which have been around for thousands of years, in some cases.

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

Kafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach

A piece of string and a razor blade may cast an identical shadow.

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason

The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, stories by Ben Fountain

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

A bit underwhelming.  Haven't kept up with Lethem, but this is a sort of pale Pynchon-lite story.  The female narrator's voice is unconvincing at best, and sappy at worst.  the-day-after-trump-is-elected setting is invoked occasionally, but never means much.

The Secret Place by Tana French

Another winner from powerhouse Tana French.  So much atmosphere, so little time! This time the setting is a posh girls school outside Dublin, and the murder on the grounds of a young man from a neighboring posh boys school.  About adolescence, about femininity, about friend, but of course also about murder.

Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath (foreword by Frieda Hughes)

 Expanded version of Plath's larger manuscript she was working on when she died.

Townie by Andre Dubus III

The Dead Hour by Denise Mina

Another winner by Mina.  Paddy Meehan, investigative reporter, comes of age.  The "wee hen" gives better than she gets, and gets the story, and gets something else, as we learn in the cliff-hanging last sentence.

It's a shame Mina gets marketed as crime fiction -- she's a wonderful, close observer of character and class, with a sharp eye and tongue, this time setting down in 1984 Glasgow, with an Irish-Catholic take on the decline of the Scottish city.

A History of Loneliness by John Boyne

Terrific predecessor to Boyne's 2017 stunner THE HEART'S INVISIBLE FURIES.  This one takes on the scandal and coverup of Catholic clergy sexual abuse, but through the eyes of an "innocent" priest and the narrative of his family's life. Boyne is remarkably sensitive in painting a family, inside and out. The plot of who-touched-whom and who's-to-blame is good and holds one's interest, but it's the characters in the end who are indelible.

Kafka: The Early Years by Reiner Stach

A dense, kaleidoscopic cultural history and biography of Franz Kafka, the final book in the three-volume series by Reiner Stach, but covering the early years, as legal hassling delayed Stach's work until a settlement was reached with Kafka (or Brod) estate on critical scholarly resources.

Kafka's surreal "otherworldly" style is seen hatching in turn of the century Prague, where, as a Jew, he struggled with linguistic, nationalistic and religious ghetto-ization as a native Czech.

I didn't know he was so fond of swimming, too.

Kafka's favorite painting on his first visit to Paris, a portrait of Voltaire still in his sleeping cap with his trousers only half-on.

Statue of Kafka in Prague

Kafka and his favorites sister, Ottla

Hurlyburly by David Rabe

 as astonishing as ever to re-read. bleak and hilarious.  word-storms.

Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman by Paul Mariani

The Final Voicemails and Letters from Max by Max Ritvo

The LETTERS volume was something else, although I could have done with a little less Ruhl. 

I 'm struggling with the VOICEMAILS poems, though struck with lines all over the place.  Also take it personally that he was adopted so avidly by Louise Gluck and Sarah Ruhl, as a tragic Keatsian figure who was dying throughout his short writing career.

The Witch Elm by Tana French

Nice start and pretty gripping finish -- but a boggy huge middle sinks the newest from one of my favorite crime writers.

A novel that buries its crime and detection strengths in an over-embroidered family saga.  Plus, a strange echo of Forster's HOWARD'S END.

The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas

Hypnotically simple, subtle story of a 37-year old man with mental issues who lives with his spinster older sister on the edge of a lake in Norway.  She knits sweaters to earn their keep and he does nothing, at first.  The novel's point of view is entirely his, Mattis', and though he is intellectually challenged, the moral acuity of his emotional intelligence is breath-taking.  He ends up becoming a "ferryman" as much in his own imagination as in the real world -- his one ferrying job brings a lumberjack to the isolated cabin Mattis lives in with his sister Hege, and Hege and the lumberjack become lovers, creating an insoluble difficulty in Mattis' deceptively simple existence.

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

started weakly but I grew to like it.  much more somber book from him.  a lot of talk about expensive watches.

from Dwight Garner's NYT review:  [GS] is is light, stinging, insolent and melancholy, to borrow the words the critic Kenneth Tynan kept on his writing desk to remind himself how to sound.

Day by Day by Robert Lowell

The Red Road by Denise Mina

There There by Tommy Orange

The Wig by Charles Wright

The Life of John Berryman by John Haffenden

 They sell the reader short by trimming texture to a thesis. Haffenden on limitations of literary biography

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. 

Berryman on Delmore Schwartz's praise of JB's poems: One word is worth it all.  The sick waiting, and letting the poems go out despised, the insufferable reviewers, the silence from whatever readers; the arrogance and the sick doubt; the terrible hours of probing as at a wound, looking, looking, for what may not be there; the conscience and the dry throat, the dry eyes; the piercing hope. 

Schwartz to Mark Van Doren on JB: for what he needs in the most obvious way is some kind of situation to cope with besides his own feelings.

I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visibile tendency in both American and English poetry -- in so far as the English have any poetry nowadays. The aim was the same in both poems: the reproduction or invention of the motions of a human personality, free and determined... Critics are divided as to the degree of my success in both cases. Long may they rave!

from the novel  Recovery:
On the rare occasions when he had ever applied for anything - Guggenheim and so forth - he sweated. It was beneath his dignity.  His position was: let the Universe collect & do his bidding without being asked.

Some of the best kind of writing is really transparent....The artist just says what he thinks, or says how he feels....The art comes just in placing, pure syntax.

The World As It Is by Ben Rhodes

Quick history of the Obama years by his principal speechwriter and an important foreign policy advisor.

Hit and Misses by Simon Rich

First four stories are great, the next fourteen fall of sharply.

Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by Paul Mariani.

experience cannot tell you/experience is what you do not want to experience

Great book, and a palate cleanser/corrective after reading the recent River of Fire book focussing on Lowell's mania.

First seizure/manic episode in 1944 after writing "Colloquy on Black Rock."

Randall Jarrell on the intentional difficulty of modern poetry: with poet and public "staring at each other with righteous indignation, til the poet said, 'Since you won't read me, I'll make sure you can't.'"

Cold Harbor, "birth of the dogtag," in poem Inauguration Day: January 1953.

on writing prose: He wants to change every second word, but while he toys with revisions, "the subject sinks like a dead whale and lies in the mud of the mind's bottom."

most people were "warped old dogs set on lying in the sun and changing as little as rocks."

about the Beats: "the best poems are not necessarily poems that read aloud."

WC Williams was "right about our U.S. speech and emotional rhythms being unlike the British."

RL speech on the Gettysburg Address:  America's "struggles with four almost insoluble spiritual problems" which the Gettysburg address had somehow adumbrated: "how to join equality with excellence, how to join liberty with justice, how avoid destroying or being destroyed by nuclear power, and how to complete the emancipation of the slaves."

Mary McCarthy on Lowell's illness: "Poor Cal, one day in seven he's as God intended him to be."

One had "a thousand opportunities to misrevise."

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Re-read it for the second or third time, even better this time around, if a trifle long.  I read a snarky remark by Martin Amis about it, and this drove me back:

I looked at Catch-22 not long ago and I was greatly embarrassed — I thought it was very labored. I asked Heller when I interviewed him if he had used a thesaurus. He said, “Oh yes, I used a thesaurus a very great deal.” And I use a thesaurus a lot too, but not looking for a fancy word for “big.” I use it so I can vary the rhythm of what I’m writing — I want a synonym that’s three syllables, or one syllable. It’s a terrific aid to euphony, and everybody has their own idea of euphony. But the idea of plucking an obscure word out of a thesaurus is frivolous, I think.

Heller began the novel when he was 30, and published it when he was 38.  There are show-offy words here and there -- and whole chunks of it seen overwritten -- but it's an extraordinary novel, and even more so for being a first novel.