Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren by Colin Asher

Terrific book on Nelson Algren, his childhood, his meteroric rise in prominence as a novelist, his puzzling retreat as a journalist.

On bullfighting: “It’s always a shutout for the bull.”

We are all members of one another. Algren, The Man With The Golden Gun

From his 1957 essay “Ain’t Nobody on My Side?”:

Surely never before has any people lived so tidily in the midst of such psychological disorder. Never has any people deodorized, sanitized, germproofed, cellophaned and hygienized itself so thoroughly, and still remained stuck with the sense of something dead under the house. Never have so many two-baths-a-day people gone to so many analysts to find out how to quit washing their hands. Never have so many analysts made appointments with other analysts. How can we be so satisfied that God is on our side, and at the same time be so apprehensive lest he be not?

No other people, I suspect, has set itself a moral code so rigid, while applying it so flexibly. Surely nowhere before has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities. Never has any people been so completely at the mercy of its own appliances.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Big Bang by David Bowman

Sort of amazing monumental book.  What he's done is take a cast of historical characters from 1950 to 1963 (but with generous casts in time before and after, to establish some history and to layer more irony by reporting on the future), all of which characterizing is eventually pointing at November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas.

These charcters include JFK and Jackie Kennedy, Aristole Onasis and Jackie's sister, Richard Nixon, the Vietnamese political and military leadership, Howard Hunt, the erstwhile CIA misadventur who eventually bumbled into Watergate, authors like William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller and his wife Marilyn Monroe, noted baby doctor and author Benjamin Spock and his wife, TV personality Ed Sullivan.  And literally dozens more.

He builds richly detailed personal lives for all these historical characters.  Some of it sounds like it's actually historically true, but this seems to become less and less important the more richly detailed the interior lives become.

The Altruists by Andrew Ridker

Exhalation, and Stories of Your Life, by Ted Chiang

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Intriguing true-crime ish novel, abounding with details about the Kamatchka peninsula in the Russian Far East.

two girls go missing in the first chapter, and we don't see or hear from them until the final chapter.  in between, over the course of the year, we do submerge deeply into lives of a dozen or so residents whose lives have been touched by the girls' disappearance in small and larger ways. the isolation, the hopelessness, the hope, the national and ethnic frustrations of these people are bracingly delivered by Julia Phillips piercing, empathetic prose.

Recommended.

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

another good one. it's not enough for the novel to cover a menage a trois between two humans and a robot, a buried crime involving rape, murder and a non-rape.  It also contains an intellectual and ethical history of the development of robotics and computers, an alternate history of the 20th century that includes the survival of Alan Turing, JFK and the defeat of Reagan in 1980, as well as an alternate conclusion to Britain's Falkland Islands gambit.

hard to put down. some of the plot machinations seems a bit facile and quickly-established, and I could do without McEwan's constant interlude marker ("and then we made love") but hard to argue with a novel that does so much in so little space.

The New Me by Halle Butler

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

I liked it but found it a bit slow going.  In a world where everything seems eccentric -- in a novel were everything seems eccentric -- the eccentric begins to become a bit... normal.

A woman found sleeping in a Massachusetts graveyard establishes a candlestick bowling alley that is later determined to be inhabited by ghosts, both real and literary.

Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot... Your walking was a devotion. (44)

LuEtta had recently decided she would be a wonder instead of a beauty.  She had seen beauties go mad in middle age, as their beauty turned less live and more monumental, beauty still but mostly to mark the space where greater beauty once had been. But wondrous was wondrous, even when you outgrew it.

Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos

Fear by Bob Woodward

Ill Will by Dan Chaon

Compelling.  Multiple points of view, multiple time frames, putting together a tormented family history of murder and treachery.  Falters a bit at the end, but some very interesting swings of sympathy with characters you thought you knew well.  And some interesting clinical explanations on the psychology of memory and personality.

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

Proof of Collusion by Seth Abramson

Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis

In justice to my father, one should note that he resorted to elaborate invention only after first experimenting with simple falsehood.

Virgilia was a beautiful sin, and it is so easy to confess a beautiful sin!

Dante: A Life by R.W.B. Lewis

House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke

Couldn't quite get this novel.  Feels like a science fiction/dystopian exercise addressing the famines and failed social engineering experiments in China in the middle of the 20th century.   A small village begins experiencing a wave of sleepwalking and mental disease.

One chilling note:  the production, storage, and uses of "corpse oil," which is rendered by a family that runs the local crematorium, pressed from dead bodies before they are burned.

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

First novel, written while he was a graduate student.  Re-reading it, I find it charming and breezy, compared to Infinite Jest and The Pale King. Still a handful of a novel, though. Many of the same elements -- the disturbed, brilliant, manic nuclear family, the meta-presence of philosophical theory as part of the plot, the post-modern experiments with narrative and dialogue.

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.