Here are the books that I read from January 1, 2023 to January 1, 2024.

The Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer is what got me started on the Yalta Boulevard series: "It's August 1948, three years after the Russians liberated this small nation from German Occupation, but the Red Army still patrols the capital's rubble-strewn streets, and the ideals of the Revolution are but memories." And then it began.

 Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.  This author is so outside my comfort zone, and I am so absorbed by his fictional environment and the strange life of urban Japan, that I can safely say Murakami is my cult.  Simple as that.  This book takes you by the hand and insists that the subconscious is a world of its own, different for each of us, full of private symbols and sensations that nobody else can understand or access.  You're always treated to a fine 1:00 a.m. meal and some lonely sex mixed with regret or insecurity in a Murakami book.

The Confession by Olen Steinhauer, number two in the Yalta Boulevard series. It's Eastern Europe in 1956, and Ferenc Kolyeszar (a writer as well as a state militia homicide detective) is estranged from his wife, frustrated by writer's block, and growing increasingly uncomfortable in the politicization of the police force.  Lots of deception and horrible individuals in this book.  That's why I recommend it.

36 Yalta Boulevard is number three in Olen Steinhauer's Yalta Boulevard series.  It's been published as The Vienna Assignment as well.  We are now in the shadows of the political climate of the 1960s.  It is a "tour-de-force political thriller that teaches that loyalty to the cause might be the biggest crime of all."  You bet I liked it.

House of Glass, vol. 4 of the Buru Quartet, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer.  This volume is narrated by our hero's nemesis, the sleazy self-loathing colonial official who is trying to destroy the emergent Indonesian independence movement.  People are very conflicted in this book, and it deals with as much inner turmoil and it does with the national turmoil under the heavy heels of Dutch colonialism.

Angel Pavement by J.B.Priestley is a good old-fashioned novel published in 1930 about the lives of employees at the firm Twigg & Dersingham, and #8 Angel Pavement, London.  Their lives are changed after the arrival of a mysterious Mr. Golspie, an entrepreneur with import-export contacts with the Baltic.  It depicts the high levels of economic insecurity of late1920s London before the Great Depression.

This is a wonderful and at times hilarious biography of one of the most productive writers of our time, well, of the previous century, half of which is my time so I can say that.  Wodehouse by Robert McCrum does a superb job of taking us all across Wodehouse country, from England to France to Long Island and Beverly Hills taking with us his frighteningly financial forays and his incredible creations: Psmith, Jeeves, and the Empress of Blandings, and his followers:: John Updike, Dorothy Parker, Salman Rushdie, John Le Carre, Seamus Heaney, and associates: Guy Bolton, Jerome Kern.

Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif tells the story of how the West took possession of the Middle East's oil reserves and brought whole desert countrysides into conflict with the modern, cash-obsessed world of greed.  This was my first foray into what is called petro-fiction, a genre that deals with the role of oil in society and its impact on developing cultures.  I have two more of his books waiting to be read. And I can't wait.

The Istanbul Variations by Olen Steinhauer (also published as Liberation Movements) is the fourth book in the Yalta Boulevard series.  I tell you, once you start with Steinhauer, it's difficult to stop.  His characters are so well presented and the postwar ambiance so well-kept and creepy makes you wonder not how Eastern Europe survived the war, but how did they survive the peace.

Shibumi by Trevanian (aka Rodney William Whitaker) is the story, set in the 1970s, that details the struggle between the "Mother Company" (a conspiracy of energy companies that secretly controls much of the Western world) and a highly skilled assassin, Nicholai Tel.  This is a riveting book, twists and turns.  Not my usual bill of fare, but a very good read.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is a nostalgic novel of loss.  It is told in first-person narrative: Toru looks back on his days as a college student living in Tokyo, and of his relationships with two very different women: the troubled Naoko and the outgoing, lively Midori.  Set in late 1960s, during a period when Japanese students were protesting against the established order.  

The Chronicler of the Winds by Henning Mankell.  From the creator of Wallander and many other fine works of literature, we have here a beautifully crafted novel about a mystical orphan boy named Nelio.  He's on the rooftop of a small theater company on a hot African night.  And he's dying slowly of bullet wounds.  Nelio tells the story of his life as a sole witness to the cruel raids on his village by bandits, the abandoned children living on the streets.  Says The Observer, "...Mankell writes eloquently of the realities of poverty and violence without becoming sugary or didactic."

In these pages, I have previously mentioned how much I love Alice Munro; how much I love her stories; and how they have been soul-tending for me.  The late Nobel laureate gave us plenty of short stories to enjoy and to empower, to enlighten and to entertain.  Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You is one of those collections.  If I were you, I'd start with the Collected Stories of Alice Munro and work around that with any missing ones.

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami.  No matter how many books you may have read by people who want to tell you how to write, how they write, etc., I really think this is one of those books that you read in spite of those others.  Murakami shares with us his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society, his own origins as a writer, and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.  I think this is a wonderful book, especially for those who don't write but would like to have an inkling of what the writer, a good writer, is concerned about, what's going on in that head.

Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa is a heartrending novel about Uganda in the 1970s and 80s, and follows the narrator Mugezi as he tries to break free from his parents and capitalize on his charm and intelligence.  There is the chaos of transition, the despair of the younger generation over the failure of transition from colonial to postcolonial life.  There is life under Idi Amin and then under Milton Obote.  Corruption followed corruption.  This is a really good book, important, and recommended by Nancy Pearl, I believe. 

The Actual and The Bellarosa Connection by Saul Bellow.  Two minor works in the late period of Bellow's canon.  Both are not memorable.  

 That Distant Land by Wendell Berry is another one of those beautiful books populated with unforgettable characters from the rural landscape of Berry's homeland, Kentucky.  It's an enjoyable and lovely follow-up to other Berry books that I have read, e.g., Nathan Coulter, The Memory of Old Jack, A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow, to name but a few.

All That Is Left Is All That Matters by Mark Slouka.  A collection of short stories dealing with the lives of ordinary people battling the forces of love and loss, from Czechoslovakia to California, to the Pacific Northwest; they're about what "life is like when our back is to the wall."

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson is a posthumously published collection of short stories that Johnson finished weeks before his death.  Critics called the stories "...ravishing, painful, as desolate as Dostoevsky."  He is noted for Jesus' Son and Tree of Smoke.

A continuation of my journey into Shusaku Endo's works, Deep River is a moving novel of a group of Japanese tourists, each with their individual life traumas, who visit India, which is dealing with the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination. This was at times heartbreaking.

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005. This is the second volume of Zachary Leader's two-volume bio of Saul Bellow.  It was, for me, monumental. Having always been a big fan of Bellow, I could not put this book down, in spite of the Nobel prize winner's personal foibles and difficult relationships with five wives.  I still am enamored of him.

Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami. A novel about the narrator's quest to find his mysteriously vanished girlfriend Kiki.  He plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence, metaphysical dread and collides with call girls, plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic, and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man.  Yes, it is somewhat bizarre but comical. 

The Fall by Simon Mawer. Great friends from childhood, the two main characters became top climbers, but have since become estranged. One of them is nevertheless amazed and grief-stricken when he hears of the other’s death after a fall on a relatively easy Welsh rockface. The past, though, hides the secret clues behind the tragedy. Layer by layer Simon Mawer peels back what happened, going not only into the friends' childhoods but that of their parents - who were also intimate.

The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst is about 1983 London, and Will, a privileged, gay, sexually irresistible 25-year-old, saves the life of an elderly aristocrat who has a heart-attack in a public lavatory. This chance meeting ultimately requires Will to re-evaluate his sense of the past and his family's history.  There's a lot going on in this novel, I'm telling you.

Maps by Nuruddin Farah takes place in 1977, after the Ogaden Rebellion (1963-1965), and uses the innovative technique of 2nd-person narration for exploring questions of cultural identity in a post-independence world.  (The Somali populated Ogaden region is part of Ethiopia.)

Dirt Music by Tim Winton is an absorbing book.  It was filled with surprises and unfortunate decisions by characters on how to live their lives.  I'm looking forward to reading more of Winton's work.

Just like William Boyd's other books that I've read, The Blue Afternoon  is as captivating and charming a story as you could get, about an architect who is shadowed by a mysterious stranger who claims to be her father.  It is some ride into the past.  Boyd's books take you into strange places, each of which I can't get enough of.

The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey.  In this novel Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire—and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Carey creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.

Some of the most sordid, horrific, funny, agonizing tales join the queue in Kolyma Tales by Varlan Shalamov.  All of these people are attached to the Soviet Gulag apparatus.  All of them suffer.  It makes no sense but it's all they have, this Kafkaesque brutality.  And I couldn't stop reading it.

I needed to understand the beginnings of one of my favorite writers, W. Somerset Maugham, and so I picked this from corner of the room and realized what a bleak society London could be indeed.  Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham.  I'm so glad he moved on to bigger and better scopes of view.

Virgin Soil by Ivan Turgenev.  The big man's sixth and last novel.  Depicts young people in late 19th-century Russia who rebel agains the standard cultural mores of their time.  There are the simple workers and peasants, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, the niece, a Populist manager of a factory.  

Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercer is one of the best books of the year for me. It "...plumbs the depths of our shared humanity to offer up a breathtaking insight into life, love, and literature itself. It "...is an astonishing novel, a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves." I highly recommend it.

The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.  "Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humor."

The Island Within by Richard Nelson. In his work among Alaskan native peoples, anthropologist Nelson came to admire their relationship with the environment and sought to emulate it. Thus his exploration of an island off the Pacific Northwest coast is a search for a way of belonging to its natural community, to be not only observer, but participant in its life cycle.  I loved this profoundly beautiful and inspiring book.  Jim Harrison is quoted as saying "On the borders of consciousness as in Matthiessen and Lopez...a holy book...a text to help us understand ourselves within the natural world."

Mohr: A Novel by Frederick Reuss. When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimes--and only sometimes--he can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can find in their faces, and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform before the camera, the light trace of their story. It is a love story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era.

Silverview by John Le Carre, who is high on my list of bodhisattvas, was Le Carre's last work; finished by his son.  You can pass on this one, but not his others.

Learning to Talk: Stories by Hilary Mantel.  Mantel has fast become one of my favorite modern writers, having first been introduced to her by her Thomas Cromwell novels. Her writing continues to inform my own.  She is indeed a literary blessing.

A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown was published posthumously, and although his family may have felt it was ready for publication, I don't think it was.  I have read a lot of Larry Brown's works, and I'm a tremendous fan.  But an unfinished novel, it was a disappointment.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, who is one of my heroes, is a very strange linguistic book.  I liked it, but I know many critics and other readers found it lacking authenticity.  I think they're wrong; a boy in Southern Appalachia, with a single, wounded mom, is written pretty well: This is not Holden Caulfield, people, this is Demon--a poor kid in the middle of the opioid nightmare that is West Virginia and environs.

Yes, that's right, another William Boyd book, Restless taps right into my obsession with the Soviet Union, the horrors of Stalinism, World War 2, and those dark, gray clouds that were everywhere.  I liked this book a lot.

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by MG Vassanji is a must read. Vikram had to flee Kenya to Canada because of bribery accusations and other hints of corruption. But that is not the main story. This is post-colonial Africa, where people just don't get along, and remnants of Mau Mau freedom fighters are still lurking in the shadows.  Kirkus puts it "...bleak but affecting portrait of loss by a master writer."  I'll buy that.  I did.

Another Bernie Gunther detective novel, The One From the Other by the late Philip Kerr, is as fascinating and right up my World War 2 alley as Kerr's Gunther series always is.  We've got the constant tracking of ex-Nazis and their collaborators and even a stint in a Soviet POW camp, "...the human propensity to be inhumane."  I'm looking forward, of course, to the next Gunther novel, which is just two feet away from my lamp.

Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo continues the story of his "beat-up cast of variously broke, overweight, senile, adulterous, dissolute, and philosophical citizens..." in a broken down resort town.  I have laughed so often while reading Russo's North Bath, NY series of novels sometimes it hurts.  I love his books.

The Devil's Mode: Stories by Anthony Burgess is a collection of short stories, "varied in their settings and themes and display Burgess's characteristic wide range, while touching on...the private life of Shakespeare, ...and the lives of British expatriates in the Far East."

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by one of my other bodisattvas Pico Iyer is another book in the spiritual and travel writing canon of this brilliant man.  He discusses the concept of paradise that is imagined or believed in different cultures and religions.  Starting in Iran, he takes you to Sri Lanka, Jerusalem, and various shrines in Japan.  His previous books that touched me as strongly are The Global Soul and The Art of Stillness.

Dickens by Peter Ackroyd is a huge book, as Dickens was a "huge" man. Ackroyd's books are such a pleasure to read, not only for the philosophical speculations, or the blooming historical vignettes, but for the sheer brilliance of the subject matter.  This is an eye-opening appraisal not only of Dickens's work, but of what Ackroyd has been able to glean from the many sources of biography that have been written about Charles Dickens.  I'm not so sure I feel the same way about genius anymore.

A wonderful book, Nickel Mountain by John Gardner, this pastoral novel set deep in the Catskills with a charming unpredictable story.  As George Stade writes in the NYTimes, "...good fiction can be written out of them...(the recovery of ancient forms)...as proved by Nickel Mountain, which is shapely and moving enough to make you believe in ancient forms and permanent truths.  ...the task [of Gardner's characters] was to rub the cliches off them until they shone with the dull gleam of permanent truth."

October Light by John Gardner is a masterwork. "The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother. Opposites in nearly every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute brother takes a shotgun to his sister’s color television set. After he locks the sister up in her room with the trashy “blockbuster” novel that has consumed her (and only apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses into the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people."  This book was so funny and so insane at times it bred in more even more admiration for Gardner than I ever had.

Naomi. This is a weird book by one of Japan's greatest writers, Junichiro Tanizaki. It's about a man who attempts to "groom" ala George Bernard Shaw a Western-looking Japanese girl.  It's comical at times, brutally sad at others, and displays the clashes between older and newer generations regarding how women should be depicted, how they should act, etc.  Definitely a mirror of 1924 Japan's transition into the modern.

More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow is "grounded more in the development of character than in the growth of action."  It touches upon reconciling one's ideals with actuality and the difficulties or relating to parents and to mortality.  As you may well know, I'm a big fan of Bellow.

Pulse: stories by Julian Barnes. I like much of what I've read by Barnes. And these short stories are darker than his others, yet they retain a modicum of quiet and remarkable elegance.  

As I have previously stated, I love Richard Russo books, and in Somebody's Fool, we return to North Bath, NY remembering Russo's memorable characters Sully and Raymer and ruth and all the others, especially Sully's sidekick, Rub.  Kirkus says "...[Somebody's Fool is] the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling."

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki andHis Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami tells the story of Japanese railroad engineer Tsukuru Tazaki.  When his close-knit group of friends abruptly cuts all relations with him, a young Tsukuba attempts to reconcile with his old friends, embarking on a quest for truth and a pilgrimage for happiness.  

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami is a psychological journey that is in six narratives that take place within the 6-month period between the earthquake and the terrorist attack, both in 1995.  I'm glad that I read this book.  

Sweet Caress by William Boyd is a fictional autobiography supposedly written by a woman, Amory Clay, and it includes extracts from her diary, written on a Hebridean Island in 1977, with flashbacks from her career as a photographer in London, Scotland, France, Germany, the U.S., Mexico, and Vietnam.  Boyd describes it as a "whole life novel" in that it tells the story of the book's main character "from cradle to grave."

To Heaven By Water by Justin Cartwright.  I like Justin Cartwright novels, they're as thought-provoking and well-written, as engrossing as Ward Just.  In this thoughtful novel, a circle of friends and loved ones are attempting to face down their personal troubles: a deceased wife, a callous lover, an affair with a young colleague. As they stumble through the events of their own lives, they turn to one another for advice and compassion, and, occasionally, to cause more trouble. All three romances are faced with serious decisions--how to go escape their shortcomings and demons, how to move ahead, how to survive the decisions they make.

The Destiny Thief by Richard Russo.  This is my second reading of this book, this collection of essays, "wise, personal pieces, and readers get to know the author as a comforting, funny, and welcoming guy.  These admirable qualities are most prevalent in "Imagining Jenny," an afterword to Jennifer Finney Moylan's popular 2003 memoir, She's Not There (about her sex-reassignment surgery).  These were fresh, thrilling and marvelous even the second time around.

The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz.  This is a wild book, I was enraptured the whole way through. In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (remember him?) said “If ever the Third Reich was pictured in microcosm, with its prejudices against people not rooted in the land, and its tiny spasms of nationalistic fervor that added up to an irrational howl in final sum, then Lenz has done it….”

Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys toYemen and the Red Sea by Eric Hansen is oftentimes unbelievable, astonishing, and frustrating to the max.  In 1978 Eric Hansen found himself shipwrecked on a desert island in the Red Sea. When goat smugglers offered him safe passage to Yemen, he buried seven years' worth of travel journals deep in the sand and took his place alongside the animals on a leaky boat bound for a country that he'd never planned to visit.

A Guest at the Feast by Colm Toibin, a collection of essays about Irish novelist John McGahern, a cancer diagnosis, a dark and empty Venice, Italy, and Buenos Aires among others on history, literature, politics, family, and the self.

A Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. This was an extraordinary book, I kid you not. At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton.

 One of the best books I have ever read!  And a highly influential (to me) resource on so many levels, intellectually, morally, psychically.  This is an incredible volume of incredible efforts.  Europe Central by William T. Vollmann is a novel, but it's like a WW2 newsreel interspersed with professorial lecturing and whispered readings from individual diaries and overheard asides from the people surrounding Hitler and those in the halls with Josef Stalin.  Shostakovich is a constantly recurring character, as is Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, among others, including Soviet artists and musicians, and German functionaries and wives of functionaries, even inmates and commandants of concentration camps.

The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami. Stylistically and thematically, the collection aligns with Murakami's previous work. The stories mesh normality with surrealism, and focus on painful issues involving loss, destruction, confusion and loneliness. The title for the book is derived from the final story in the collection.

My Books of 2022

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.

March 2022.  The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri is a whirlwind, or as the Kirkus Reviews puts it, “An amalgam of early Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, with just a whiff of Kozinski’s Being There. A highly likable, if oddly conceived and assembled, debut novel.”  Up Against the Night by Justin Cartwright.  The late Mr. Cartwright has become another one of my Go-to’s, that is, whom do I turn to for a lesson in how-to-write at 12:30 a.m. when I can’t go to sleep?  Like so much of the books I read, there is an escape element, and my Go-to’s keep me tucked into an eclipse of the world, dark and comfortable.  With Cartwright, we’re naturally in South Africa, in and out of the tumult and political/social warrens of which many Americans don’t pursue.  He “...casts a sardonic eye on a London expat who’s trying to uncover, if not openly parade, his Afrikaner heritage.”

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

May 2022.  Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children: Yet again, she is a master writer and thinker.  I liked this book very much.  Ah, The Moons of Jupiter by my old friend the Goddess, Alice Munro, as wonderful as any collection of hers can be.  Nina Revoyr has written a fantastic, page-turning book called The Age of Dreaming, “...loosely based on a scandal of Hollywood’s silent era. [Reading time is] 1964, and the protagonist, aged 73, is content to dwell in prosperous obscurity, monitoring his real-estate investments and hiking the Hollywood Hills. But troubling memories of his days as a controversial movie star resurface when a journalist interviews him about his flaming youth and leading ladies.” (Kirkus again) I think it would make a good short Netflix series.  I mean, what have you got to lose Netflix?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.”

 

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age by Kenzaburo Oe. 
“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.

 

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. 

 

 

 

 

Wendell Berry, in 2017

What is it like to read a Wendell Berry novel (or short story)?

     It's stopping every six paragraphs of so, or after a full page of dialogue, because you start to feel lonesome and guilty for something you haven't necessarily done and it's that not having done it that makes you lonely and culpable, implicated in the worst way before people, family usually, who are unfortunately dead.  This is what Mr. Berry knows about you.  About me. 

Photo by Guy Mendes

     Whenever I read his books, I get the sentimental self-conscious (and any other S-word you can think of) sensation that he's tilting his head and mentioning you in his words.  No other writer, besides Iris Murdoch or maybe William Goyen, or maybe John Powys, has ever made me feel so self-conscious, so simultaneously engaged and distracted from the page, because of the page.  I should probably add John Gardner, Dawn Powell, and maybe Saul Bellow to that encomium triad.  Maybe Alice Munro, Larry Brown; maybe C.P. Snow, John Le Carre, Camus, Gide.  See what happens? I'm already getting sentimental, self-conscious (about making sure who I'm including, so as not to offend), and sad again.

Mr. Berry, many years ago in his writing studio

                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                    Photo by James Baker Hall

"...and in the shade where we rested the water darkened, rippling a little as it passed the boat. The whole calm of the river moved down and past us and on, as if it slept and remembered its direction in its sleep."

          (Nathan Coulter from Three Short Novels, Washington, DC: Counterpoint Books, 2002, p. 76)

"He had become a special case, and he knew what he thought of that.  He raged, and he raged at his rage, and nothing that he had was what he wanted.  He remained devoted to his lost hand, to his body as it had been, to his life as he had wanted it to be; he could not give them up.  That he had lost them and they were gone did not persuade him.  The fact had no power with him.  The powerlessness of the fact made him lonely, and he held to his loneliness to protect his absurdity.  But it was as though his soul had withdrawn from his life, refusing any longer to live in it."

[Andy Catlett, dealing with the depression and anger after losing his hand in an agricultural (machine) accident, crushed inside a corn thresher.]

                        (Remembering, op cit., p. 147)

"What have I done with the time?  Remembering as if far back, he knows what he did with it.  He stood up there in the room like a graven image of himself, telling over the catalogue of his complaints.  There is a country inside of him where his complaints live and do their work, where they invite him to come, offering their enticements and tidbits, the self-justification of anger, the self-justifications of self-humiliation, the coddled griefs.  This is happening to my soul.  This is part of the life history of my soul."

                        (Remembering, op cit., p. 152)

"But he reminds himself of himself.  Something else is raging at him....  Yes, you sorry fool., be still.  For the flaw in all that dream is himself, the little hell of himself."

(A World Lost, op cit., p. 277)

[I love that phrase, "...the little hell of himself."]

The excerpts above are but a blink, a minuscule sampling of Mr. Berry's beautiful, engaging writings.  Of the 50+ books written by him, I have read the following: Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, Andy Catlett Early Travels, Remembering, A World Lost, and currently am reading That Distant Land (a book of short stories).  Of them all, so far, my favorite is The Memory of Old Jack, followed by Jayber Crow.

I so encourage you, Reader, to check him out.

Speaking well of Ford, Orwell, and Toer

Continuing with my embryo tradition of "the gleaning of great mentionables," that is, what I refer to in previous posts as my sharing great quotes and points of view, recollections, musings from the nonstop procession of literary gods and goddesses whom I have been reading, see Feb. 26, I have for you here Richard Ford, George Orwell, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

First, from the Indonesian version of Albert Camus, we have Mr. Toer's Child of All Nations.  Below, the narrator reflects on witnessing the sailing away of his young, beloved wife:

     The sun was moving slowly, crawling like a snail, inch by inch across the heavens.  Slowly, slowly--not caring whether the distance it had traversed would ever be traversed again.

     The clouds hung thinly across the sky, unwilling to release even a single spray of drizzle.  The atmosphere was gray, as though the world had lost its multitude of colors.

     The old people teach us through their legends that there isa mighty god called Batara Kala.  They say it is he who makes all things move further and further from their starting point, inexorably, towards some unknown final destination.  A human blind to the future, I could do no more than hope to know.  We never even really understand what we have already lived through.

     People say that before humankind stands only distance.  And its limit is the horizon.  ...There is no romance so strong that it could tame and hold them: the eternal distance and the horizon.

What killed me is the sentence "We never even really understand what we have already lived through."  I just love it.  I'm more than halfway through the novel, the second in his Buru Quartet.  It is not an easy, simple, humane life that Toer writes about, this turn-of-the-century (1901-ish) Dutch-conquered land of the future Indonesia.

From Richard Ford's book of short stories, Rock Springs.  This is a selection from the last story in the book, "Communist."  It's the narrator's response to a question his mother asks, that is, if she is still very feminine, she's 32, but she needs his truthful approval.

     And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings.  And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide.  And I said, "Yes, I do."  Because that was the truth.  And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.

     And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man.  I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, through my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.

What wrested my heart was the mention of the geese, that he "...could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings."  I've heard them, the mammoth glides of geese in their v-formations in Colorado, not just their honking but their wings.  And my sister Robyn has felt the air displaced, while walking or working in her garden, by the thousands that have flown overhead, east and west, constantly.  So it really resonated with me.  I highly recommend Rock Springs.

From George Orwell, in a piece he wrote toward the end of the war in Europe, from As I Please: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters:

     So long as one thinks in short periods it is wise not to be hopeful about the future.  Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying "I told you so" than the optimist.  By and large the prophets of doom have been righter than those who imagined that a real step forward would be achieved by universal education, female suffrage, the League of Nations, or what not.

     The real answer is to dissociate Socialism from Utopianism.  Socialists are accused of believing that society can be--and indeed, after the establishment of Socialism, will be--completely perfect; also that progress is inevitable.

     ....Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic.  Socialists don't claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better.  And any thinking socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of man's place in the universe will still remain.

I loved this little bit.  I have many socialist tendencies, and I know sometimes everyone goes too far somewhere, but like Orwell says, they "claim to be able to make it better" not perfect.  And that I adhere to.  I also loved the little bit about pessimism.

Well, thanks for listening, and leave the light on for me, will you?