Last Friends by Jane Gardam

Last in the trilogy.  A joy to read.  Finally the story of Terry Veerling's childhood.  Fiscal-Smith's redemption as a sort of bonus.  Gardam's powerful method of exposition ---misdirection and understatement and ellipsis -- make it much more important to pay attention to WHO'S doing the telling and WHEN they're telling it than the act itself.

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Big fan of Saunders, but found this collection underwhelming.

Stoner by John Williams

She was, he knew-- and had known very early, he supposed -- one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and cared for that it might be fulfilled.  Alien to the world it had to live where it could not be at home; avid for tenderness and quiet, it had to feed upon indifference and callousness and noise.  It was a nature that, even in the strange and inimical place where it had to live, had not the savagery to fight off the brutal forces that opposed it and could withdraw to a quietness where it was forlorn and small and gently still.
Beautiful, tender quiet masterpiece about a poor farm boy who falls in love with literature and works his entire life in obscurity teaching at a Midwestern university.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

First read this 1995, and remember admiring it enormously -- but that's about the extent of my recollection.  After reading Joseph Anton, I decided to re-read MC (as a warmup to another attempt on The Satatnic Verses).

An overwhelming book.  This time around, it seemed clear to me that Rushie had The Tin Drum in mind as a model for the book -- a personal history of a precocious (and damaged child) whose birth, life and conflicts cunningly mirror his country's fortunes.

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushie

NW by Zadie Smith

Fobbit by David Abrams

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Recent poetry and poetry critical thinking: "Incident Light" by H.L. Hix (poems), "Lazy Bastardism" by Carmine Starnino (reviews), "On Poetry" by Glyn Maxwell (essays) and "Alien Vs. Predator" by Michael Robbins (poems)

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzro

Seaching for Caleb by Anne Tyler

Slow starter but builds terrifically.

Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century

Trying to set aside envy and self-pity is difficult.

The Beats: A Graphic History

Got this from the library-- as a goof! -- and really enjoyed it.  There's something perfect in tracing the memory and legacy of the beats as a series of black and white cartoon panels.  Can't judge the accuracy of the history in contains, but the spirit seems right.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Headache inducing.

First extended Kindle experience. Did not enjoy it.

Coincidence?

Like Philip Roth without pleasure.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

A Sport and a Pasttime by James Salter

The celebrated 1968 "short" novel (187 pgs in my edition, although it feels much longer than that, and in a good way) is dense and lingering and smacked full of the senses.  At once a love story and a travelogue of "old France," it features the lovers Dean (a Yale dropout) and Anne-Marie (a French waitress), and a probing, poetic third person narrator who at onces describes their affair in sensual,emotional detail and also seems to be fantasizing into existence, in the same moment.

Begs re-reading, like any good poem, since I had that rushed feeling reading it (like poetry) that only halfway through was I truly begin to understand it narratively, and so need to go back and revisit both the heightened language, the emotional tone, and the plot of it all.

Singular.  Nabokov crossed with John O'Hare.  France seems an infinitely enchanted and endless place.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

Was so excited to read this, nostalgic, read Updike's more general appreciation of Vonnegut in his Hugging The Shore and thought I'd really missed something.

Missed nothing.  A terrifically slight book, I thought. Read it in about two hours, felt almost nothing.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

A brilliant book about war.  I was slow to warm up to Kevin Power's prose, as it is knotty and cerebral, we follow the narrator's complicated thoughts of guilt, complicity,choice and mortality, as he struggles to find meaning in memory of his Iraq tour, the death of his friend Murph, the strength and ferocity of their leader, Sergeant Sterling.  But the last fifty pages or so really tightened for me and I was left astonished, saddened and uplifted at the same time.

The rest is history, they say.  Bullshit, I say.  It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven.  And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths.  I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission.

This sort of consciousness, a voice searching for moral reason and ethical sense and metaphysical reassurance, is dense on every single page of the novel.  And at the same time, constantly present in his prose, beautiful, vivid, haunting concrete physical description of two worlds -- Iraq, and rural southern Virginia -- that never ever meet and yet somehow, in Power's vision, are fused, confused, refused, and unresolved.