January-February 2022. I began the year with Celestial Mechanics, a novel by William Least Heat-Moon, whose nonfiction books River Horse, Blue Highways, and Here There Everywhere I thoroughly enjoyed. However, this was disappointing. The first 50 pages were interesting, engaging, but then it became tedious, pointless. Next came James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, a book not for everyone to be sure; filled with sordid homoerotica blended with outlandish, Puritanistic Christian fundamentalist sadism. Everyone in this book is nuts! I’m a big fan of Purdy, he is usually incredibly funny and a great storyteller; Narrow Rooms should have been left in the back room behind the boiler. Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway was so disorganized, irritating, such a disappointing follow-up to the beautiful Rules of Civility and the extraordinary A Man in Moscow, that I can’t believe it was written by the same man. David Sedaris’ A Carnival of Snackery is typical and greatly appreciated Sedaris. He cracks me up on every page. 
The Eyre Affair from Jasper Fforde is a brilliant trip through literature and a future science fiction world that once you get past the expected absurdity of the Future, you’ll be fine. Lots of tongue-in-cheek politics. I cannot wait to read Lost in a Good Book, his second of the Thursday Next novels. He’s also a very good photographer; I follow him on Instagram. The Danger Tree by Olivia Manning, of whom I am extremely fond, is part of the Levant Trilogy, which follows the Balkan Trilogy, during the WW2 years (this time in Egypt). I love Olivia Manning’s books. If you’re hooked on the precipice of the Anschluss through the aftermath of El Alamein, you’ll like these trilogies which take you away from the usual landscapes of France, Britain, and Italy and drop you into Rumania, Greece, and then the Beirut-Cairo-Alexandria huddle.
The Eyre Affair from Jasper Fforde is a brilliant trip through literature and a future science fiction world that once you get past the expected absurdity of the Future, you’ll be fine. Lots of tongue-in-cheek politics. I cannot wait to read Lost in a Good Book, his second of the Thursday Next novels. He’s also a very good photographer; I follow him on Instagram. The Danger Tree by Olivia Manning, of whom I am extremely fond, is part of the Levant Trilogy, which follows the Balkan Trilogy, during the WW2 years (this time in Egypt). I love Olivia Manning’s books. If you’re hooked on the precipice of the Anschluss through the aftermath of El Alamein, you’ll like these trilogies which take you away from the usual landscapes of France, Britain, and Italy and drop you into Rumania, Greece, and then the Beirut-Cairo-Alexandria huddle.
The Battle Lost and Won by Olivia Manning is another lovely book by herself--whom I mentioned above--filled with restless officials, officers, academics, and refugees, soulfully battling “...the climate,” says the character of Harriet, “[it] changed people; it preserved the dead, but it disrupted the living.” I have been an ardent fan of John Gardner since the late 1970s, and I was so happy to have found our misplaced copy of The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) and to have given it
another try (my first attempt, while still in my twenties, fizzled) at digesting this metaphysical, humorous, cultural, political, crime-infused mammoth of a novel. I couldn’t stop talking about this book. John Gardner was a living treasure, that’s all I have to say.
another try (my first attempt, while still in my twenties, fizzled) at digesting this metaphysical, humorous, cultural, political, crime-infused mammoth of a novel. I couldn’t stop talking about this book. John Gardner was a living treasure, that’s all I have to say.
The Sum of Things is the final book in the Levant Trilogy (Olivia Manning again); and I’m not going to tell you anything about this book because I loved it and it is a stand-up finale to the prior volumes in Manning’s “Fortunes of War” series (which spans the two trilogies).
April 2022. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a bit challenging and unconventional, and I like her work, so don’t get me wrong. You have to pay attention to what you’re reading. It is a “strange futuristic tale that dramatizes in unusual fashion a nameless woman’s obsession with a science-fiction writer whose imaginings blithely mirror and exploit his ‘power’ over her.”
Whew! I made it through the third volume of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 1943-1945, which I started a couple years ago. I would march alongside Orwell any day, any time. He is as skillful a writer as he is brilliant a mind. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun teaches us an immense historical lesson, Biafra’s lost war of independence from Nigeria. This novel is exciting, filled with unimaginable hardship, as well as the deceit of love in competition with the war crimes committed by the Nigerian government, with the complicit self-appreciating role played by the British. This is really a good book.
Richard Powers is one of my favorite writers, and he blew my mind with The Overstory (2018); and Bewilderment is no slouch let me tell you. During a Trump-like administration, a widower who is an astrobiologist, and his son who is diagnosed with any number of shades of Asperger’s, OCD, ADHD, seeking a treatment with an experimental, neurological therapy amid the environmental and political crises that mark our country. Claire Messud’s novel The Burning Girl is so excellently written, just like her latest and just like her earliest, both of which I’ve read and enjoyed tremendously. “...The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality—crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence.” (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat is a memoir by the talented, versatile Scottish actor Brian Cox. It made me laugh constantly, and his gossip (for which he does beg pardon many times) is hilarious and naturally insightful. If you like him in “Succession” and have liked him in the film “Manhunter” (with William Peterson) among other great movies, you’ll find this book very entertaining. 
Eva’s Eye (the first of the Inspector Sejer Mystery series) by Karin Fossum, a Norwegian writer with the acuity and talent of an expert police procedural novelist kept me captivated. Please forgive me if you don’t “see it,” but I don’t usually veer to the mystery novel genre, having only read a few by Henning Mankell, Stieg Larson, Sjowall & Wahloo, and friends.
Eva’s Eye (the first of the Inspector Sejer Mystery series) by Karin Fossum, a Norwegian writer with the acuity and talent of an expert police procedural novelist kept me captivated. Please forgive me if you don’t “see it,” but I don’t usually veer to the mystery novel genre, having only read a few by Henning Mankell, Stieg Larson, Sjowall & Wahloo, and friends.
I’m a regular at Colm Toibin’s literary hideaway, and The Magician, a novel-biography of the great Thomas Mann, I think was quite good. I know some bishops of higher thought and cultural mountaintops who step on the low-culture turtles think the book was lightweight; well, they’re wrong.
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans is like drinking gin in mile-high Colorado while walking around on crutches and taking Vicodin: I’d rather not. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy’s first novel since The God of Small Things [1997]) is a tender, yet confusing, strange tale with ghosts interloping between gender identity, religious and political tension, and God knows what else. I thought it was worth the read, but not nearly, not nearly as clear and beautiful a narrative as The God of Small Things.
June 2022. Doris Lessing’s The Real Thing: Stories & Sketches, I’m giving a passing grade only because she is more powerful than a steaming locomotive and I don’t want to upset the delicate balance of my universe. Rock Springs by Richard Ford: now this is some book of short stories; Ford can write the shirt off your back
and you’d thank him for it, ask him to be your friend; they are really, really beautiful stories with a backdrop of the Northwestern US, and a time before the national disintegration. Kirkus Reviews say he’s a cross between Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway. No, I don’t think so. I think he’s just Richard Ford and we should stop all this meandering down Comparison Street.
and you’d thank him for it, ask him to be your friend; they are really, really beautiful stories with a backdrop of the Northwestern US, and a time before the national disintegration. Kirkus Reviews say he’s a cross between Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway. No, I don’t think so. I think he’s just Richard Ford and we should stop all this meandering down Comparison Street.
Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry. Baseball’s Greatest Gift by Harvey Araton is charming, hilarious, deeply moving. Most everyone in my intimate circle (just about six or seven people or so) have read it. Child of All Nations (volume 2 of the Buru Quartet) by one of my Indonesian heroes, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, is adventurous and heartrending as you drown in the arch cruelty of Asian colonial history (Dutch in this case). I liked Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (from the Jackson Brodie series), has three interconnected mysteries. I recommend it.
July 2022. Silence by Shusaku Endo “... tells the story of a Jesuit missionary sent to 16th century Japan, who endures persecution in the time of Kakure Kirishitan ("Hidden Christians") that followed the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion. It has been called "Endo's supreme achievement” and "one of the 20th century's finest novels.” Written partly in the form of a letter by its central character, the theme of a silent God who accompanies a believer in adversity was greatly influenced by the Catholic End?'s experience of religious discrimination in Japan. It was made into a film in 1971, 1996, and 2016; the last one by Martin Scorsese.
I’m a big fan of William Boyd. In 2021, I read Brazzaville Beach while recovering from a broken ankle/leg at the home of my sister Robyn in Colorado. Waiting for Sunrise is about a handsome young English actor who has a sexual problem: He cannot ejaculate. Which is why our protagonist is in Vienna in the summer of 1913: He’s a patient of an English psychoanalyst with a crackpot theory, Parallelism. He needs his problem cleared up before he marries his fiancée, a lovely leading lady of the stage. Soon enough, our hero discovers that underneath Vienna’s decorum runs a “river of sex.” It’s not necessarily as lurid as Kirkus reports, but it is one hell of a story.
August 2022. Late Call, by Angus Wilson, is about “Sylvia Calvert [who] is all at sea in her son's house in Melling, a residential area of Carshall, the West Midlands new town to which she and, seemingly incidentally, her damaged husband Arthur have come to live. Upstairs, their bedroom is ...yellow, a particularly strident, mustardy tone chosen by ...their late daughter-in-law. ...This setting proves particularly unforgiving when their own homely items, scuffed wooden furniture and upholstered easy chairs in powder-blue rep and chintz, arrive. 
Wilson's unsettling novel Late Call (1964) is, to my knowledge, the only work of fiction to be set in a postwar new town.” (Gillian Darley, The Guardian). You might think it’s kind of dated, but so am I. Angus Wilson was a very important writer in the UK, and should not be overlooked nor forgotten.
Wilson's unsettling novel Late Call (1964) is, to my knowledge, the only work of fiction to be set in a postwar new town.” (Gillian Darley, The Guardian). You might think it’s kind of dated, but so am I. Angus Wilson was a very important writer in the UK, and should not be overlooked nor forgotten.
Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 is monumental, about our titanic American Nobel-prize winning writer who died April 5, 2005. We deal with the very early years, and it’s fascinating. I just finished (1/30/23) reading volume 2, which has been a mind-blower to say the least. Zachary Leader’s prose has sometimes confusing antecedents for his pronouns, but you get around it; the life he presents, although complex, is nevertheless inspiring to me. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler is such an interesting fish-out-of-water (I don’t like that phrase but it’s apt) memoir by an American in the Peace Corps in a town in Central China, a couple decades ago. Brilliant in its discovery of what we in the U.S. would need quite some time getting used to.
Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories by Saul Bellow. “Six very various short stories, involving lifestyles and searches of one kind or another. Only in the title story are there some of the abrasive, dissonant vibrations of Herzog, as an elderly and quite parched professor on a Guggenheim remembers and ruminates, trying "to avoid the common fate of intellectuals," spooked by aspects of his own death in life.” (Kirkus). Not my favorites by the Master, but ruminating and dissonant vibrations are right up my alley. I liked very much Shusaku Endo’s When I Whistle, one of Endo's most unusual and powerful novels set largely in a modern hospital, with themes and scenes that are eerie to say the least. A jaded businessman has a chance encounter with the doctor son of his best friend at school, and memories are stirred of a former love interest of that friend, a miss Aiko. The son of his friend proves to be contemptuous of the outmoded values of his father's world and ruthless in pursuit of success at his hospital.” (Google Reads). I can’t tell you more without giving away significant plot points.
September 2022. The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell: A lifeboat floats ashore at the coast of Skåne, Sweden. Inside are two dead men who've been murdered. Policeman Kurt Wallander is assigned to the case. The men are identified with the help of the police in Latvia. One of the Latvian officers, Detective Liepa, travels to Sweden to assist the investigation, but when he returns to his home country he is mysteriously murdered. A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford--Yes, another book of short stories by himself. A multitude of consequences on the sin of adultery. A very good book, no matter what Kirkus insists about it. In Kennedy’s Brain, by Henning Mankell, we have “...alone in his Stockholm apartment, a mother finds her son overdosed on sleeping pills. An obvious suicide, say the police. 56-year-old archeologist Louise Cantor, home on a break from a dig in Greece, knows better. Her son was 25, vital, optimistic, fully engaged in life.”
“A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between [a] father and his damaged son, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age is the work of an unparalleled writer at his sparkling best.” Very, very interesting novel. I’m running on the same train as Oe and Endo. Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris will remind one of his earlier book Calypso, which I thought was extremely poignant, delivering crazy humor and loving last rites for his mother and sister. This book deals largely with the recent death of his 96-year-old father, who is an irreverent character beyond belief, but you can’t stop reading about him. The Webster Chronicle by Daniel Akst (whose St. Burl’s Obituary [1996] I totally loved) is hot and cold for me, mostly because it started out as a hopeful work of art, but then it turned to a journalistic issues-oriented narrative dealing with nightmares that are so out of control in our country, especially those of education and child abuse (the reading time is Reagan era), mob rule, assumed guilt (see the McMartin Preschool case in Calif.), that it makes for an uncomfortable reminder of the huge volume of stupidness in our country, the sheer unstoppable idiocy of the populace before social media, Neo-Cons, and Trumpers grabbed hold of our necks. Reading this book made me feel as if I’m living under an recurring avalanche, with brief periods of breathing space, only to find it’s going to get worse after the latest deluge clears.
October 2022. What a relief to reenter the world of spies and the true story Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, the great Ben MacIntyre’s book about Ursula Kuczynski who rose through the ranks and handled people like Klaus Fuchs and living in places as diverse as Shanghai, Poland, Switzerland, and England. Ursula shows up in several of my already read memoirs and histories of Soviet-era spying. She was a marvel of a woman.
George Johnson’s Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order is a remarkable book, sending me from one microcosmic molecular frenzy to another. For instance, a common thread in the book: “...neuroscientists have been trying to show that consciousness is simply an emergent property arising from brain cells, whose behavior can be explained with chemistry, the grammar of molecules and atoms. So, while some scientists are trying to reduce matter to consciousness, others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter.” That’s probably one of the simplest sentences you’ll find. It’s a wild book.
I have enjoyed Julia Glass’ previous work, and A Widower’s Tale is consistent with Glass’ complex plots and memorable characters. This book proceeds in some curve-ball strikes, and I found it “...an irresistible pastoral tragicomedy.” The third volume of the Buru Quartet, Footsteps, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, he’s one of my guys remember, could have been a great book like the first two in the Quartet, but instead it was rampant with dogma, didactics, and the drawn-out social torture of caste systems and pre-WW2 Dutch colonial cruelty.
The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is a beautiful, huge, wonderful book. I came late to reading Price, and can’t wait to branch out into his other works.
November 2022. Mickelsson’s Ghost by John Gardner is a great book. I’ve already mentioned that Gardner is a treasure, and this book, for me, re-solidifies his prominence. I loved this book. I haven’t given up on Orhan Pamuk, but his Nights of Plague sure comes close to that desperate act. I have not really got with any of his novels after he won the Nobel Prize. I’m sorry to say that. It’s like he’s a totally different person from who wrote My Name Is Red and Snow and The Black Book.
Remembering and A World Lost by Wendell Berry are books I’ve already quoted from in a previous post, and I can’t stress enough about how enamored I am of Berry and his beautiful writing. His land is peopled by some of the most memorable in my reading history. The Last Judgement by Iain Pears is a good murder mystery with tongue-in-cheek narration and fast-paced adventure within the art world, that is, stolen art.
December 2022. William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is a masterful novel that tells, in a series of intimate journal assemblages, the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, art dealer, spy—as he makes his precarious way through the 20th century. This book is clever and laughter-producing.
Loot and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer is something of a blur to me, even while I read it. There is an insistent experimental writing methodology that I couldn’t get with; I don’t know if I’d recommend it even to the off-beat quirky reader. Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield is an excellent American novel about
the deep roots of classism in New England (particularly Massachusetts) and the depressing fate of women in a white man’s world, just after World War I. WASPs rotting on the vine is one way to look at it. But again, Bromfield is an outrageously gifted writer. Australian writer Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story was a very good read; it often had me laughing out loud (figuratively, because I was reading it late at night). The Guardian says “...[it] will get right up your nose.” It is humane, passionate, and filled with “high mischief.” It was published in 1926 and won the Pulitzer in 1927.
the deep roots of classism in New England (particularly Massachusetts) and the depressing fate of women in a white man’s world, just after World War I. WASPs rotting on the vine is one way to look at it. But again, Bromfield is an outrageously gifted writer. Australian writer Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story was a very good read; it often had me laughing out loud (figuratively, because I was reading it late at night). The Guardian says “...[it] will get right up your nose.” It is humane, passionate, and filled with “high mischief.” It was published in 1926 and won the Pulitzer in 1927.
Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone is a pretty good police story, and as I understand it the first in the Justin and Cuddy series.
It can be gritty, Sam Spade-ish, and dated, but nevertheless, it’s a very good read of a “whodunnit.” When the World Was Steady by Clair Messud takes place mostly in Bali and England, and is a book filled with a woman whose marriage has ended, a “crew of international misfits and smugglers”, and a sister and mother trying to find meaning on the other side of the world. It reinforced my banner raising of Ms. Messud. Also, she and her husband James Wood were close friends of Saul Bellow and they show up very well and golden-like in Leader’s Bellow biography, part two. Well, Haruki Murakami’s Wind/Pinball, two novellas, his first official works of literature, were not in my comfort zone. I might have liked them if I were 19. I really liked A Wild Sheep Chase, a humorous and well-done mystery; but these two novellas I suppose were something he had to get out before he could blossom. And blossom, I believe, he did.
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