A Moveable Famine by John Skoyles

Ironweed by William Kennedy

Legs by Williams Kennedy

If I don't Breathe How Do I Sleep, poems by Joe Wenderoth

The Fun Parts: Stories by Sam Lipsyte

The Life of John Berryman by John Haffenden

 Advantages to working at Johns Hopkins so far: access to an extraordinary library, ability to find all of Bill Knott's scattered books of poetry.  Amazing poet, a model for me of self-creation.

Revolver: Poems by Robyn Schiff

 Too many words, not enough punctuation.

The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics by Matt Bai

While reading it, kept forgetting what it was about as the unknown-to-me proper names continue to pile up.

One More thing: Stories and Other Stories by BJ Novak

Wanted to hate it.  Liked it. Like heavy Steve Martin, or lite Donald Barthelme.

March 2026 - Re-reading it. Still like it, and after now becoming an Office super-fan.

It's a little long - not in pages but in number of stories included, some of which are only a paragraph or two, or a couple lines. The shorter ones just seem like polished jokes in prose form. Some of the longer stories are quite interesting, although the final one, about the poet who becomes a translator and finally just rewrites THE GREAT GATSBY, seems to have been a better concept than story.

Still, I've recommended it to several peopl.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel

Something to do while waiting for the next Wolf Hall installment.  Something to do, but not much.

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game by William Kennedy

Re-reading after 30 plus years.  Even better.  "Screwing your own wife is like striking out the pitcher."

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

Creepy.  Good Detroit scene.

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

Ian McEwan for those in a hurry.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Disappointing, but what was he going to do next?  I was doubtful but willing to try to believe he could pull off another  interconnected-novellas-including-the-future, but the sixth section, "An Horologist's Labyrinth," lost me.  The fantasy/sci fi stuff just made my mind go numb.  Gorgeous writing all over the place, great characters, great settings, the huge presence of lived-life feel that Mitchell so soundly delivered in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns, but in the end, a solid, sad, Nope from me.

The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

And as he glowered at Pat he wished that writers could be dispensed with altogether.  If only ideas could be plucked from the inexpensive air!

At a quarter to one, he began to feel hungry -- up to this point every move, or rather every moment, was in the writer's tradition. Even to the faint irritation that no one had annoyed him, no one had bothered him, no one had interfered with the long empty dream which constituted his average day.

Terrific stories: concise, vicious, delicious and sad.  Runyon-esque comedies.  Bleak undercurrents.  Hilarious.

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Terrific, sprawling, intense novel about a state social worker in Montana whose web of concern and care and personal struggles widens unexpectedly.  Couldn't put it down.

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing

As we make our hell we certainly should like it.  (Hemingway)

It's everything I've forgotten – all the complicated dark mixture of my youth and infancy that made me a fiction writer instead of a fireman or a soldier… Why I chose this God-awful metier of sedentary days and sleepless nights and endless dissatisfaction.  Why I would choose it again. (Fitzgerald)

I showed him [the blue devil] that I could endure him and I made him respect my endurance… Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect. [Hannah in T. Williams Night of the Iguana]

Here's the dilemma, let's face it.  I can't recover any nervous stability until I'm able to work again freely, and I can't work again freely until I recover a nervous stability.  (Tennessee Williams)

You know, paralysis in a character can be just as significant and just as dramatic as progress, and is also less shop-worn.  How about Chekhov? (TW)

Such pithiness and soul in all the quoted material from the authors Laing profiles, and she's interesting in charting the intersections of their lives and their shared alcoholic pathologies.  But alas, her own travelogue grows wearying and shapeless, there’s no direction or essential narrator’s voice beneath all her lengthy, “well-written” description.  By the time she get to plumbing the depths of her own childhood awfulness, the drunk aunt or whatever, it’s even more insignificant in relief, against the problems, travails, delusions and triumphs -- the words! -- of the writers she’s talking about.

Of Kennedys & Kings by Harris Wofford

Great history of the civil rights movement and the Kennedy White House, and the post-JFK civil rights struggle.