Readings of 2022

 

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, Milton Rokeach

JR, William Gaddis

Nobody Grew But the Business, Joseph Tabbi

Pretty useful treatment of Gaddis here. 

The Madness of Crowds, Louise Penny

The Gamache books are a family thing and having become acclimated to how they work, I found this one unusually okay.

Have A Bleedin’ Guess: The Story of 'Hex Induction Hour', Paul Hanley

The Silentiary, Antonio di Benedetto

As good as Zama. 

Felix Holt, The Radical, George Eliot

Felix Holt, The Fuckin' Radical would have been a zingier title. 

Blood, Sweat and Chrome, Kyle Buchanan

Exemplary.

The Cold War Swap, Ross Thomas

The beginning of my Thomas journey. His first novel. The fellow who sold it to me said, "This is actually rather bland compared to where Thomas goes in later books." He wasn't kidding. 

Scoundrel, Sarah Weinman

The Method, Isaac Butler

Camera Man, Dana Stevens

Three first-rate non-fiction books by three first-rate writers and people. 

The Fourth Durango, Thomas

Cast a Yellow Shadow, Thomas

Maybe my favorite airplane book ever. 

Quick Curtain, Alan Melville

Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes

If Robert Graves had written Goodbye, Mr. Chips...well, not quite...

Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone, James Baldwin

Tell Me Everything, Erika Krause

Just stunning. Get it. Read it.

The Backup Men, Thomas

If You Can’t Be Good, Thomas

Mona, Pola Oloixarac

After gritting my teeth (and occasionally laughing in recognition) for the first fifty pages or so, this got me to some interesting places. 

Dancing Aztecs, Donald E. Westlake

My least favorite Westlake. Leans on its gags like an impatient motorist pressing their car horn. 

The Seersucker Whipsaw, Thomas

Dance of the Infidels, Francis Paudras

I know it's to be taken with a grain of salt but it is part of the literature as they say...

The Eighth Dwarf, Thomas

Yes, you got that title right. 

Do You Feel Like I Do?, Peter Frampton

It's good. Really. And it'll give you new ears to hear Humble Pie with. 

The Fools in Town are on Our Side, Thomas

Travesty, John Hawkes

Twilight at Mac’s Place, Thomas

A Word Child, Iris Murdoch

Tamarisk Row, Gerard Murnane

The Real Diary of a Wimpy Kid

The Time of the Angels, Iris Murdoch

Chinaman’s  Chance, Thomas

Yes, you got that title right. The first of three Thomas novels featuring good-guy con men Wu and Durant. I wish he'd written at least eighteen more. 

Intimations, Zadie Smith

Last Letter To A Reader, Gerard Murnane

The Eight of Swords, John Dickson Carr

Briarpatch, Thomas

The Nice and the Good, Iris Murdoch

There’s No Bones in Ice Cream, Sylvain Sylvain

The Golden Ass, Robert Graves

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Aldous Hoxley

L.A./proved too much for the man

The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight

The Instant Enemy, Ross MacDonald

Chance, Joseph Conrad

The Goodbye Look, MacDonald

Out on the Rim, Thomas

Voodoo, Inc., Thomas

Jonas Mekas: Shiver of Memory, Peter Delpeut

Leave the Capitol, Paul Hanley

Fascinating, even better than his Fall book. 

The Otherwise, Graham Duff and Mark E. Smith

Filmable!

McTeague, Frank Norris

Holds up. 

Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead

The real thing. 

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, Zachary D. Carter

The Zebra-Striped Hearse, MacDonald

The Chill, MacDonald

The Far Side of the Dollar, MacDonald

Three in a row and you start to think the guy is leaning on the family rot theme a little insistently, to be honest. 

Ah, Treachery!, Thomas

Platform, Michael Houellebecq

A trifle overdetermined.

The Trees, Percival Everett

Brilliantly harrowing, but also a book where you're always asking "Why is this so funny?"

Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life In Music, Greg Renoff and Ted Templeman

If a very friendly Golden Retriever could work a mixing board...

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman

Late to this classic, which is a little dated by necessity but still cogent.

Duck Soup, J. Hoberman

Perfect match of subject and author

The Good Apprentice, Iris Murdoch

For whatever reason my fave IR so far. There's a lot to go though. 

Five Decembers, James Kestrel

Believe the hype

Fathers and Children, Ivan Turgenev

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (started)

I've always had the hardest time with this book. Picked it up at fifteen, got 180 pages in, and picked it up again every ten years since and only got that far again. Finally read it all the way through maybe...six years back. And wanted to give it another shot, because it seems to bear re-reading and frankly because I did get bogged down in that incredibly dense last quarter. Anyway. I'm now on page 110 and feeling like I lack the commitment to go further until I get certain work done. I expect to finish the second reading before the end of 2023. 

The Singapore Wink, Thomas

The Master of Ballantrae, Robert Louis Stevenson

Dr. No, Percival Everett

Murder After Christmas, Rupert Latimer

A World of Curiosities, Louise Penny

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

Re the author: What a nut!

Comments

[Zack Handlen]

JR is one of those books that sticks with me even if I don't know how much I actually like it--Gaddis in general has that effect on me. The Recognitions has some of the most gorgeous, evocative prose I've ever encountered, but it's also so damn long that I lose track of it in places; JR just sort of overwhelms me, to the point where I'm not sure if what I'm getting from it is at all intended. (Like, I was extremely upset by a certain character's death, but am I taking it all too seriously?) I started the audiobook a year or so ago, and it's incredible (just one guy doing all the voices, and he nails it), but exhaustive nature of the text is hard to push through on audio; the unattributed dialogue, which you just sort of drown in on the page, starts to feel a bit one note when performed. But I'd like to revisit it someday, and the Recognitions as well. (Gravity's Rainbow is one of my all time favorites, in contrast, and I absolutely get lost in the back quarter. But the cumulative effect still stuns me.)

[Tom B.]

The audiobook of Gravity's Rainbow, read by George Guidall, is terrific.

[george]

I read all the Lew Archer novels this year. The underrated Sleeping Beauty (1973) was a favorite.

Also read a lot of early John D. McDonald books: The Brass Cupcake, Border Girl, The Damned, The Neon Jungle, The Executioners (aka Cape Fear), Slam the Big Door, The Drowner. All classic noir. Plan to read Travis McGee in '23.

I recommend Geoffrey O'Brien's book Hardboiled America as a guide to this territory.

[george]

I just read The Philosophy of Modern Song. Dylan has some smart comments about movies in the chapter on the Drifters' "Saturday Night at the Movies."

"People keep talking about making America great again. Maybe they should start with the movies."

[Aden Jordan]

This is quite an eclectic list. I read “The Octopus” by Frank Norris (don’t remember much about it other than the allegory) about five years ago and haven’t checked out “McTeague.”

[Rand Careaga]

I just completed the “Cambridge Centenary” edition of Ulysses, a novel I first struggled through half a century ago this summer. At twenty-one, I hadn’t anything like the cultural substrate I would have required for it to stick to my ribs. This massive Cambridge edition (seven pounds, with the surface area of a nightstand), reproduces the 1922 edition and comes with footnotes, marginalia and introductory essays to each chapter. Some of the essays are written in a style—or, perhaps I should say, they hew to a set of conventions—uncongenial to me. None of the critics I cut my teeth on in college would have written a passage like “Gerty’s identity as a disabled woman affords her critical distance from the all-consuming project of commodified, standardized femininity…Gerty’s stigma aligns her with Bloom, who is also stigmatized, carving out a critical space within Ulysses where critiques of compulsory normativity can, and must, be lodged in the face of ideologies of body perfectibility.” Fuck me. The exhaustive footnotes were helpful, if perhaps overabundant: if, say, a Dublin milliner is mentioned in the text, I don’t really need to know that it was a going concern at thus-and-such addresses between 1880 and 1912. All that said, I generally enjoyed the project.

I took in, variously reading or rereading, Pynchon’s entire œuvre following my retirement five years ago, and was gobsmacked returning to Gravity’s Rainbow after forty years. What an extraordinarily gifted prose stylist the man could be! Also recommended: Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and Bleeding Edge—the latter is now my recommended “gateway drug” for Pynchon newbies.

Laid up with covid last June I went through nine Iris Murdoch novels in a dozen days—none of them, oddly, from Glenn’s list.

[Glenn Kenny]

There's a LOT of Murdoch to read, to be sure.

I was considering the Cambridge "Ulysses" but it's a definite space issue...I've read all of Pynchon (I'm one of the relative few who's very fond of "Against the Day") except for "Mason and Dixon," which I'll get to...after conquering the re-read of "Rainbow."

[Rand Careaga]

Yeah, “Against the Day” was exhilarating. I expected to be put off by the faux-XVIII century narrative style of “Mason & Dixon” and was gratified at how easily it went down in the event.

Of the Murdochs from last June, I reread “A Severed Head” (the only book of hers I’d taken in previously, in the mid-eighties), going on to “Under the Net,” “The Sea, the Sea,” “The Sandcastle,” “The Bell,” “The Italian Girl,” “The Red and the Black,” “A Fairly Honourable Defeat” and “The Black Prince.” Of these, “The Italian Girl” struck me as an outright misfire, and had I read “The Black Prince” earlier in the sequence I might not have felt myself losing patience with the appearance of one more obsessed narrator chasing after young girls or their phantoms. However, I have another half dozen titles still unread on the shelf, and will probably get to these during the coming quarter or two.

[Joe]

Highly recommend the podcast Death is Just Around the Corner. Several episodes cover GR in great detail.

[jwarthen]

Stay with Ross Thomas long enough to read THE YELLOW DOG CONTRACT, maybe my favorite of his output.
My late brother-in-law enjoyed an aspect of Thomas' books I hadn't noticed-- his attentiveness to his men's clothing choices.

[Glenn Kenny]

The clothing descriptions, and how the couture aligns with an individual character, is a not-inconsiderable source of pleasure throughout the oeuvre.