The Gardens of Democracy by Eric Liu and Nick Hanuer

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Not really a political campaign book, because Obama wrote it when he was 33 and hadn’t even run for anything yet. Really stunning and beautiful (if a little long), and sounds 100% like he wrote every word of it.  I mean, you can HEAR him saying the book.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Greatest Vietnam War novel I've ever read.

For me, Hawke’s death was adequate, not want I wanted exactly, but absurd and tragic enough.  It successfully finished the racial narrative of the book, which I kept wondering how he was going to tie up.  I was more disappointed with Mellas not going back out there.  Apparently, the original draft of the book (he says it took him 40 years to write) was much longer, 1600 pages at one point.  I’d read that long version.  And I hate long versions.

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

The Man Who Walked Away by Maud Casey

This Dark Road of Mercy by Wiley Cash

I liked it.  Sort of a page-turner.  Simple, good baseball stuff, little noire-ish.  Not as stunning in intent and delivery as his first, A Land More Kind Than Home, but certainly a solid in the category of "The Difficult Second Album."

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart

I already understand how easily a feeling can become a thought and the other way around. 

On most days I have my head so far up my family's ass I can taste yesterday's borscht

Little Failure: as if The Tin Drum and The Adventures of Augie March has a little funny baby, with photographs, in a good way.

"When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished." Czeslaw Milosz

The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch

I lived in your gaze like a false God. But it is the punishment of a false God to become unreal. I have become unreal. You have made me unreal by thinking about me so much. You made me into an object of contemplation. Just like this landscape.I have made it unreal endlessly looking at it instead of entering it.

Want Not by Jonathan Miles

Hilarious, thoughtful, humane.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues, new album by Against Me!

Difficult to know how to proceed here, from the start, as I usually lead with a photo (and often never get any further than that).

A tremendously moving set of 10 new songs by Laura Jane Grace, nee Tom Gabel, lead singer, writer, rhythm guitarist and force primeval behind the band Against Me!

I cannot think of an album that has affected me more in the past five years, ten years, fifteen years.  It's pop, sure, or I'm pop, so check in a month from now to see whether the aesthetic impression I'm swamped by remains.

From the first moments of the first song, which I thought was the Pretenders (something I've never thought before about any band except the Pretenders), through the slow songs and the fast ones, it's the most jarring, disturbing, amazing 29 minutes of music I think I've ever heard as a complete piece, a messed-up, triumphant, suicidal narrative that makes no sense, apparently about a transexual prostitute who commits suicide (although it takes me years to figure out all the words, so again, see above, check back).

The double-shot of irony widely reported is that Grace made it known in 2012 that she herself was a trans-gender woman.

I don't know how to handle the vocabulary and am wary of the politics and intellectualism surrounding the issue of trans- culture, so am skipping a photo and just trying to report drily that I love Laura Jane Grace, I loved her in 2007 when I first heard her album New Wave, and am back on board and now listening to TDB for the third time, blinking back tears, fighting goose-bumps at the drama, detail, desire and despair her voice alone conveys.

Billy Bragg, Green Day, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Chrissy Hynde, the Pogues, all ghosts she brought in during the party in a car her new album threw for me in my grey hour and a half of workplace commuting.

A picture of Laura post-, or of Tom pre-, (or of the album cover which is deeply disturbing and graphic) would do nothing but change my focus, which is on the music.  Find the album and dig in.

The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch

A set piece.  The landscape is thoroughly constricted to a British public school, set in a beautiful wooded area just beyond the reach of suburban sprawl.

The narrative shape of the novel takes from naturalism -- all fortunes tend downward.

Various symbols -- water (river, rain), the sky (the sun, the moon), tall things (the school tower) -- are introduced, but their symbolic meaning is traduced by the great detail and attention Murdoch pays them:  they can no longer be simply translated, e.g., river=sex, river=life, river=adventure, river=freedom, because all of the meanings seem true.

Murdoch's great trope -- the "muddle" -- is used here in her third novel.  It's a stand-in for the human mental and emotional condition.

End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by James Swanson

Fluffy, romantic language.  Still a clear and concise chronology (if superficial) of immediate time frame of assassination.

What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Great extended literary and autobiographical reflection upon death.

Some funny stuff too: There would be no bad men in the world if there weren't bad women. (JB's grandmother)

Steps by Jerzy Kozinski

Creepy, vague.  Don't understand why David Foster Wallace liked it so much.  Subject of a funny experiment in literary industry though.

Transatlantic by Colum McCann

Mo said she was quirky by James Kelman

Only 200 pages mustered.  Too bad, a big fan of Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late.

Now it seems to be by my fault that I'm not finishing reading books, after always priding myself on being a finisher, good or bad.  Impatience?  Extended bad mood?  Encroaching old age?  Sudden clarification of sharp personal idiosyncratic literary taste?  Advancing alcoholism?

The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner

Was liking this a great deal during the wartime and motorcyle sections, but quickly lost interest once the Manhattan art-scene-talk started happening.

Too bad.  It's that sexy, nyc book-du-jour movement that I'd loved to seem to be a part of, but ain't.

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem

Didn't finish it.  Not my fault, author's fault: I finish reading books all the time.

New label?