All the Wrong Moves by Sasha Chapin

Unusual book about Chapin's obsession with playing competitive chess, even when he knew he was no good. He studied with fabled teaching grandmaster Benjamin Finegold:
music as "auditory cheesecake"

Isaac, when game is falling apart: "it's mostly fine."

another instance of my manic mind urging me to adopt an unlikely persona that would be discarded as soon as my self-loathing dicated that it should be

the problem with trying to solve your own psychological problems is that you're inside the delusion you're trying to diagnose

Paul Morphy: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

In a way, it happens to everyone, with age - the volume of experience gets turned down.

hot chess grandmaster Sopika:

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Marvelous, surprising book. An international English-language newspaper headquartered in Italian is peopled and dissected, both from its origins in the 1950s and from its current failing situation.

Funny, moving.

The Stand by Stephen King

Taking the plunge after years of disparaging everything about Stephen King. So far I'm LOVING IT. Is there no end to my self-education, and fundamental stupidity?

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Long. Intense. Stunning so far. An immersive experience into the connected lives of four college friends over three decades.

 Too long a slog. Compelling but grotesque.

My sister gave it to me with a note that it was "pain porn." That's exactly right. Makes me feel dirty but can’t stop reading.

The problem seems to be that Judes afflictions are the main character. Even Jude is minor compared to them. His course of affliction is also most of the plot. Only Wilhelm's death is an action that changes people. And not much and too late for a “twist.”

Yanagihara can certainly write. But the preciousness of how precocious all the central characters are- the Manhattan gilded class - smacks of Tom Wolfe and worse.  The four friends start as scrounging clueless college freshmen - and in no time are at the pinnacle of their careers: litigation lawyer, movie star, painter. Jude is memorialized in enough paintings by his painting buddy to fill a Museum of Jude.

It's an ahistorical narrative that touches up nothing that's happened in the past 30 years -- even its NYC locale seems stodgy.

 I’m ANGRY at the book!

Machines in the Head: the Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

Kafkaesque re-un-discovered speculative fiction sort of writer.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Was fired up by the reviews of this debut novel by Megha Majumdar, but less impressed reading it myself. Certainly she writes very well, and the rotating pov between the wrongly-accused young woman, the heji woman she tutors, and her and her old grammar school phys ed teacher PT Sir is deftly handled. But I didn't feel any drama.

Cosmiccomics by Italo Calvino

How can I not love short stories where a narrator named "Qfwfq" affectionately and seriously recalls events in the history of the universe, like when the moon was within jumping (or at least laddder) distance of the earth, or the first sign ever created as a galaxy revolved around the universe and anxiously waited 200 million years to return to his sign and see if anyone had noticed it?

Confessions of an Irish Rebel by Brendan Behan

Dusty, cheap, falling apart paperback of Behan's 1965 swan song. Stinks of my father's bookcase.

I suppose at heart I am a daylight atheist, for I would not like to die without a priest.

I would not go within an ass's roar of her.

narrator gets in trouble for reading the following to his sick sister, from an olden book, not realizing that the s's looked lik f's ... remarkable for steeling eggs and fucking them ...

Lord Waterford is dead and the devil make his bed,
With an oven for his head, say the Shan Van Vocht.

[snuggling in an armchair with a girl] ... no two people ever slept in each other's arms ... I was as cramped as the crucified