A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

James Merrill: Life and Art, by Langdon Hammer

Crow Fair, stories by Thomas McGuane

My Struggle, Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

You know too little and it doesn't exist.  You know too much and it doesn't exist.  Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.  That is what writing is about.  Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.  There, that is writing's location and aim.  But how to get there?

We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.

What did I like about volume 1 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the IT book of the year or past year or so?

Well, I can tell you what I didn’t like.  I didn’t like the plot: almost nothing happens.

I didn’t like some of the characters, they were indistinguishable from other characters, and had impenetrable Swedish names.

The setting was hard for me to follow:  in the first half, it seem to rely heavily on the difference between Sweden and Norway, which my naïve American idiocy unconsciously had always assumed were just different names for the same (sort of) country.

So what did I like?

Dunno, but I read the whole damn thing and found it half compelling, half boring.

There is so much almost unmediated physical description: half the time I found it boring, half the time I thought it was overwhelming strong, making things, stuff, landscape and sky, into almost living characters themselves.

It seems to be a coming of age story, then the story of the aftermath of a difficult father’s death.

from James Woods New Yorker profile: "But there is also a simplicity, an openness, and an innocence in his relation to life, and thus in his relation to the reader. Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up."

The Martian by Andy Weir

Great book, listened to it on cd in the car, made 375 miles almost a joy, even brought it inside the house on Thursday to finish it from the office.  Come for plot, suffer through some scientific details, and stay for the great first person narrator's voice.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Terrific book about the search for a serial child killer in Stalinist Russia. How to catch a criminal the state will not even admit exists?

Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored by John Lydon

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell

Critics and Connoisseurs
Marianne Moore

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious
    fastidiousness.  Certain Ming
        products, imperial floor coverings of coach-
    wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something
            that I like better--a
                mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly bal-
                        lasted animal stand up,
                similar determination to make a pup
                    eat his meat from the plate.

I remember a swan under the willows of Oxford,
    with flamingo-colored, maple-
        leaflike feet.  It reconnoitered like a battle-
    ship.  Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were
            ingredients in its
                disinclination to move.  Finally its hardihood was
                        not proof against its
                proclivity to more fully appreciate such bits
                    of food as the stream

bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it
    to eat.  I have seen this swan and
        I have seen you; I have seen ambition without
    understanding it in a variety of forms.  Happening to stand
            by an ant-hill, I have
                seen a fastidious ant carrying a stick north, south,
                        east, west, till it turned on
                itself, struck out from the flower bed into the lawn,
                    and returned to the point

From which it had started.  Then abandoning the stick as
    useless and overtaxing its
        jaws with a particle of whitewash--pill-like but
    heavy--it again went throught the same course of procedure.
                        What is
            there in being able
                to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of
                        self-defense;
                in proving that one has had the experience
                    of carrying a stick?

1924

Stalin's Curse by Robert Gellately

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

A quiet, slow-gathering story of a recently-widowed woman, Nora Webster, and how she gradually surfaces back into life after her husband's death.

Mason's Retreat by Christopher Tilghman

Excellent novel, set on Maryland's Eastern Shore, during the run-up to WWII.  Brought to mind "Howard's End" by E.M. Forster.

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

great sprawling book about a woman, her husband who is stricken with Alzheimers, and their son.  tremendously moving.  just what you think you know everything, you realize you know nothing, and that is a book about living.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History

Addictive for the lengthy commute. So far I've listened to:

Countdown to Armageddon (5 parts, WWI)

Radical Thoughts (on the evolution of the idea of a "Red Menace" in America)

Thor's Angels (4-hourson European tribes after the fall of the Roman empire in 472 and in the ensuing 1000 years, what used to be known as "The Dark Ages")

Logical Insanity (a history of aerial bombing between 1895 and Hiroshima)

Wrath of the Khans I & II (long series on Genghis Khan)

Brothers Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On you? by George Clinton

Great, couldn't put it down, drives me back to the gaps in my pfunk musical library.

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