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A probably incomplete list of books I read in 2015
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon* Dockwood, Jon McNaught A German Picturesque, Jason Schwartz* Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon* Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles Flee, Evan Dara Birchfield Close, Jon...
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The obligatory 2015 year-end list
Favorite Reading Experiences I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow in full in 2015. Then I immediately read it again (which is sort of like really reading it), occasionally dipping...
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RIP David Bowie
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie because I was born in 1979 and he was always there, ahead of me. Always on. I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember...
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A riff on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels
“Are we not Men?” — The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells (1896) “A country, a people…Those are strange and very difficult ideas.” — Four Ways to Forgivenss, Ursula K. Le Guin (1995) —Each of the...
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Does anything good happen in The Hateful Eight?
I don’t like films where nothing good happens, my wife told me years ago. I can’t remember the film that occasioned this remark, and I don’t find myself beholden to her rubric, but I still find myself...
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A conversation on Ursula K. Le Guin’s first novel, Rocannon’s World
After I posted a review on this site of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, the novelist Adam Novy recommended that I check out her under-read first novel, Rocannon’s World. So I did. Our...
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The Coen Brothers’ film Hail, Caesar! adds up to less than the sum of its parts
Hail, Caesar! film poster by Chuck SperryIn her cameo in the Coen brothers’ newest film, Hail, Caesar!, Frances McDormand gets her scarf stuck in her editing machine. It nearly chokes her (or, I...
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William Gaddis’s J R (A short riff on a long book)
1. I reread William Gaddis’s 1975 novel J R this February and, as is usually the case with a reread, I was pleasantly unsurprised by all its unremembered surprises—the jokes and japes, riffs and...
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Extinction, Gilgamesh, Miyazaki’s Wolfchild, etc. (A Riff)
Reading the introduction to Ashley Dawson’s Extinction: A Radical History this afternoon (forthcoming from OR Books), I felt a surreal yet nevertheless familiar twinge of apocalypse anxiety creeping...
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Audiobook Riff 1 (a non-definitive list (mine) and a Maqroll anecdote (not...
I got a lovely email, with the subject line “Audiobooks,” a few weeks ago from a guy named Ben. Basically, he asked me to do a post on some of my favorite audiobooks, which I suppose I could’ve done...
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“First—listen. Listen to Joyce, to Woolf, to Faulkner, to Melville”| On...
Moby-Dick, Rockwell KentI am a huge fan of audiobooks. I’ve pretty much always got one going—for commutes, jogs, workaday chores, etc. The usual. I love to listen to audiobooks of books I’ve already...
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In American Candide, Mahendra Singh reboots Voltaire’s classic satire
About halfway through Mahendra Singh’s American Candide, our omniscientish (yet beguiled) narrator slows down for a moment to offer an internal critique (and useful summary) of the novel thus far: If...
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Despite our Ballardian present, the High-Rise film adaptation is a nostalgia...
Our present is utterly Ballardian. Our present is so utterly Ballardian that our present is actually our (unevenly distributed) future. Like, what is the 2016 U.S. presidential election but a short...
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A conversation with Mahendra Singh on American Candide, the drooling...
Mahendra Singh is an author, illustrator and editor in Montreal. His other published books include a graphic novel version of The Hunting of the Snark, illustrations for D.A. Powell’s Cocktails,...
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A review of João Gilberto Noll’s surreal novella Quiet Creature on the Corner
Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s 1991 novella Quiet Creature on the Corner is new in English translation (by Adam Morris) from Two Lines Press. The book is probably best read without any kind of...
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What book have you started the most times without ever finishing?
What book have you started the most times without ever finishing? I asked this question on Twitter a few days ago (and then asked it a few more times, probably annoying some of the nice people who...
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Dissolving boundaries | Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
Organism (detail), Fred Tomaselli A few weeks ago I finished The Story of the Lost Child, the last of Elena Ferrante’s so-called Neapolitan Novels, and now perhaps have enough distance to comment on...
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Books I’ll (probably) never finish (yet return to again and again)
A week or so ago, I wrote about the books (specifically novels) that I can’t seem to finish despite beginning them five, six, seven plus times. In that post, I noted that there “are certain books I’ll...
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The BFG, Roald Dahl’s love letter to his lost daughter
Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s classic The BFG begins with a dedication to the author’s daughter: “For Olivia: 20th April 1955 — 17th November 1962.” If I had noticed the dedication when I first read...
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Bored of Hell
I am bored of Hell, Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel of voyeurism. Maybe I should blame the 1966 English translation (from the French) by Robert Baldick, which often feels stuffily stuffy for a book about...
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