A hornball French guy putters around Berlin, doing things other than writing a monograph on Titian. Yes, this novel is a dispatch from the weedy wilds of writer’s block. Among its peers in the genre — Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist comes to mind — Television stands out for the elegance of its prose and Mr. Toussaint’s fresh eye for quotidian detail. But I should confess that my experience of reading this kind of narrative is marked by conflict and agitation. Often I fail to keep reading. Often I end up back at my desk, trying to prove I’m not blocked myself. Read, May 2020. Image: Interior at Paddington by Lucian Freud

The Plot Against America is a novel of alternative history: Charles Lindbergh as WWII-era president, American Jews persecuted. I heard a bit of narrative throat-clearing in the first 50 pages, but after that the story can’t be stopped. I especially appreciated how Mr. Roth portrayed the vertiginous erosion of personal freedoms that comprises the final third of the story. “How could this have happened?” is a common question to ask of historical atrocities. The Plot Against America provides plausible answers. This is no small feat, given that characters we care about must share the page with a high volume of political detail. Mr. Roth sticks the landing. Read, May 2020. Image: Lindbergh speaking in Des Moines

Shoutout to Metahaven and the Strelka Institute for putting out this heady little number. Great title. The book addresses the titular question from the perspective of graphic designers who are interested in political theory and memes. Since I don’t have much background in design theory, part of the fun here is getting turned on to Metahaven’s sources, always thoughtfully discussed (love reading something where I come away with a reading list). It’s plain weird that there aren’t any illustrations in this book; to publish several paragraphs describing a cat meme in detail seems to me a deliberately provocative act. Read, May 2020. Image: doodle from my journal

This collection of poems arrived to me in a care package. The circumstances of sheltering in place greatly affected my reading. Some of the poems in Meditations in an Emergency are about watching movies, some about staying indoors. I found myself aligned with Mr. O’Hara in a push against confinement, but also an acceptance of the virtues of not doing all that much. It will be interesting to revisit this collection when I am free to move around. Read, April 2020. Image: Lillian Gish

This crime novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The MBP has led me to many fine novels; it has not led me to many fine crime novels. I come away from reading Snap impressed — both with the MBP people and with Ms. Bauer — for breaking a genre barrier. The prose favors idiom and simplicity over literary pretension. What separates this novel from other crime novels is emotional nuance rendered deliberately and with care. Ms. Bauer has seized onto the trauma of a murder and not let go until she’s drawn out all the truly compelling ways it has motivated and affected her characters. It is a story told with generous clarity. Read, April 2020. Image: a knife’s edge under a microscope

Bonkers. And I say that having a very high tolerance for the bizarre. The narrator of these prose-poems is often explicitly in a fever or traveling in invented lands. If there can be said to be a goal to the work (debatable), it is to fold journeys outside the human experience back in. It’s the kind of thing that makes a little more sense during a plague. Here’s me reading “The Executioner” while sheltering in place. I’d like to shout out New Directions for this bilingual edition that has allowed me to learn some French along the way. Read, April 2020. Image: stamp art by the author

Can’t get through one of these stories without a sigh. I’m never exactly sure whether I’m sighing over how good they are or how heartbreaking. Someone always ends up doomed or lonesome at the end. The endings are particularly noteworthy: if the story is laced loosely before, the last two paragraphs are a space of swift tightening, focus, snug pleasures. Read, April 2020. Image: floor of an apple orchard

A pairing of 1) uncertain childhood memories and 2) an allegory of a brutal island dedicated to sport. Nazi Germany is at the heart of this thing. The reader is left to make their own connections, a literary mode I appreciate. If the story is an archive, it is an archive of oddments. A resonant read for anyone interested in the workings of memory. A weird read for just about anyone. Read, April 2020. Image: author photo

Flights had the effect of reactivating my wanderlust, so it was an ironic read while sheltering in place. There’s more intention here than with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. More calculation. A narrator in less of a dash, and thus less open-hearted, more analytical. Philosophical insights take shape quickly; the process by which they slip in and out of narrative episodes is subtle and balanced. But I admit I prefer the narrative episodes to the more direct philosophy. And I admit I prefer Drive to Flights. Read, March 2020. Image: a map included in the text

I found this book on the bookshelf of a home where I was dog- and cat-sitting. I’d read other Delillo novels before. I hadn’t read this one because the Kennedy assassination had never much interested me — it seemed monolithic in its complexity, I struggled to find an entry point, and wondered whether it was worth my time to nerd out about the whole thing. This novel impressed me on a level of craft and ambition. I didn’t fall under a spell (as I have under other of Delillo’s novels). The characterization of Jack Ruby, which may have seemed extraneous and even caricatureish to some readers, resonated most with me. Ruby’s character is rendered in a more traditionally sympathetic way than the rest of the assembled conspirators. His trips to Dallas delis and his deadbeat roommate made him real to me. Read, March 2020. Image: Oswald

A gallerist who stayed at a former apartment of mine recommended Touissaint to me after reading some of my stuff; I have now returned to reading Touissaint because I found out he’s Belgian and I’m moving to Belgium. I liked this novel more than the other Toussaint novel I read. Camera has a breezy pace, some weird jokes, and raises interesting philosophical questions, namely this one: is it better to be anxious about everyday things or step back from the everyday and experience the anguish of being? The novel doesn’t have the scope to really mount an argument either way, but that’s okay; I’d rather mull the idea over myself (if you read this and have any insights about the question, let me know). The comedy here often comes from the narrator’s martian sense of plotting (unmotivated events, spontaneous appearance of new characters). I’ll quote the first sentence, because it gives a good sense of what you’re getting into if you read the rest:

“It was at about the same time in my life, a calm life in which ordinarily nothing happened, that two events coincided, events that, taken separately, were of hardly any interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way.”

Read, March 2020. Image: poster for a driving school

This novel is about the disappearance of things and all associated memories of these things. The disappearances happen on an island. The narrator is a novelist. Novels eventually disappear. It’s an allegory. And I think one reason I didn’t connect with The Memory Police is because allegories have some stiff competition in the history of literature. As a literary form, they’ve been around for a long while. For whatever reason, I think contemporary allegorical stories (I’m thinking of Saramago right now) require some red hot prose style to enliven them. It could have been the translation, but I didn’t find the prose style of this novel all that compelling. Read, February 2020. Image: book cover

What I have in my hands is Slave Old Man, a brief and radiant novel with an introduction, translator’s note, and glossary. The supplemental materials seem to want to tell me that it was a huge pain in the ass to translate the novel from the French and Creole of Chamoiseau’s original text. The translation won many awards. The novel deserves more awards than it won. It’s not a poem, but it reminds me of epic poetry. It’s not just lyrical: its lyricism successfully captures the feeling of oral storytelling — no small feat. Slave Old Man also reminds me of epic poetry because its plot is elemental. Runaway slave vs. killer mastiff: this story contains multitudes. Hero and monster. It seems rigorously simple. It isn’t. Read, February 2020. Image: author photo

I picked up this novel in a bookstore in Melbourne. They were charging a lot for it, so I didn’t buy it then, and while I can’t say whether the interim (almost a year) has seasoned me to appreciate it more, I feel thankful that I did not forget to buy this book eventually. I feel even more thankful that there’s a whole trove of work by Olga Tokarczuk out there waiting for my reading pleasure. Drive engrossed me thoroughly, and for that reason I felt the need to rush through it, though if I were to read it again, more slowly, I could spend a lot more time pondering. There’s much philosophical food to digest: it is a novel that raises difficult questions and offers the answers of a main character as perfectly constructed as she is flawed and strange. She does many things I could not see myself doing. She annoys me sometimes. And yet there is no moment when I find myself less than aligned with her. The narration, the narrative, is never less than inviting, even when the spaces (physical/cognitive) it inhabits are bleak. Tokarczuk has built a sense of moral imperative, under whose weight the novel crackles more than creaks. The novel never becomes polemical nor political, though it’s full of ideas that polemicists and politicians wish they could articulate so effectively; it presents a case that can’t help but draw a wide variety of opinions from its readership. I urge you to add yourself to this readership. Read, February 2020. Image: Soaring Urizen by William Blake

It’s hard for me to decide whether I prefer Paul Auster’s novels of scope (e.g. 4, 3, 2, 1) over his novels of economy (e.g. The Music of Chance). Leviathan belongs to the latter category. No place nor event is exhaustively described, many questions are allowed to hang, the reader is allowed to fill in many blanks — all this seems intentional. I take it as a sign that Auster respects his reader immensely. Leviathan concerns a promising author’s reinventions; he ends up a maker of bombs. Paul Auster seems satisfied at how he’s taken the character from A to B. I too am satisfied. The winds of chance blew through my hair along the way. I’m not saying anything new by saying Auster’s novels are about chance. But Auster seems to know more about chance than many other authors who have tried to write about it. Usually playing a game gives one a different kind of thrill than reading a book. Read, February 2020. Image: Statue of Liberty

My uncle has learned that I’m moving to Belgium. In Belgium there are many places where the battles of WWI were contested, and for this reason he sent me a reading list focused around the war. I picked up this book first from his list because it seemed similar to Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (probably my favorite memoir). It is similar in that both books are written by poets. The poetic soul shines through. Blunden’s account is often compelling, and there’s no denying his art as a stylist. However, while reading Overtones I became aware that there was a collection of Blunden’s wartime poetry tacked on to the end. This shaded my reading in a certain way. I began to suspect — and note times in the narrative, when Blunden speaks about writing during the war, even receiving notices of publication on the front — that the entire narrative might be an elaborate advertisement for Blunden’s own poetry. It affected my enjoyment. Because I also suspected that I wouldn’t like Blunden’s poems very much. My suspicions were correct. The poems didn’t connect with me, though I’m sure they do with other readers. Read, February 2020. Image: Flanders fields.

The Stand by Steven King — I may be someone who gets lost in King’s longer novels. After a (much) less than full survey of his work, I have concluded that I prefer his short stories. Crypotonomicon by Neal Stephenson — a gift from a friend. One of the three intertwined narratives here doesn’t contain any characters I want to spend time with. However, I can recommend this novel for people who want to relive the thrilling sense of possibility of the late 90s internet. Unfinished, December 2019 and January 2020. Image: Still Life with Books by Jan Lievens.

A collection of academic papers. I was inspired to look into sea lore after seeing The Lighthouse and actively wondering what books were on the filmmakers’ night tables; L bought me this in response to my wondering. There’s more in here about Moby Dick than mermaids. That’s okay. The essay on mermaids is a standout. I’m thinking of getting a tattoo of a mermaid cutting her hair. Read, January 2020. Image: Sirens by Norman Lindsay.

After a bit of a Seamus Heaney kick (see below) I had to return to the delights of this anthology he and Ted Hughes put together. Its strengths are many, but here’s one: you can open up any given page and find something to brighten your mindscape. I have dozed off while L reads me some of these. It is a very fine way to doze off. Read, December 2019. Image: “In the Pocket” scarf by Hermès.

My appreciation for Bohumil Hrabal boils down to this: he crams his stories so full of human incident they seem to breathe. His prose flows so fleetly that before you even know it you’ve gotten to know half a dozen townspeople well enough to say hello in the pub. Before reading this novel I’d read all the Hrabal I’d been able to get my hands on in English translation; I’d also seen the film Closely Watched Trains several times. The fact that I’d seen the film and knew the story might explain why I didn’t read this novel sooner. The fact that I’d read all the other Hrabal novels was also a factor in my decision to hold off: I have experienced before the sadness of coming to the end of what an author I admire has written. Read, December 2019. Image: still from the film by Jiří Menzel.

It’s hard to recast myself to the person I was when I first read this in high school. My teacher was probably trying to show me something about the elements of a compelling story — character, tension, climax — and just how long those elements have been in the human conversation. I get it now. I love it now. I am present in the windy spareness of this platonic ideal of a story. The only insight I can offer today is that now I feel connected with the monsters in a way I didn’t before. They are characters, too, and constructed with maybe more care than our hero. Read, December 2019. Image: chainmail.

Taut and precisely written seafaring tale, borrowed from a friend who also spends time in a boat. Racist characterizations of Chinese workers distracting. Read, November 2019. Image: Snow Storm at Sea by Joseph M.W. Turner.

Nobel Prize winner buried in the dollar bin of a New Hampshire used bookstore. 99 cents well spent. Not just because it’s a solid read (though it takes longer to gear up than Saramago’s more well-known works) but because of the wake-up call: no matter how good you are, you’ll end up in the dollar bin somewhere. Read, October 2019. Image: author photo.

A reread. And I remembered why I liked Kleist the first time I read him: the pacing. He throttles through a tale without fluffing the pillows first — the pillows being niceties like character introduction, setting, swaying trees. There’s something seasonally appealing about the spareness of Kleist’s aesthetic. It is autumn. The stories I read should be stripped/wind-scoured/leafless… Read, October 2019. Image: still from the film The Marquise of O by Eric Rohmer.

…And yet I also read these songs of the soil. Mostly I read them on the fishing vessel where I work (in rough seas the spacing of poetry on the page is easier to read than prose). If anyone could inspire a person to dig a hole, it’s Seamus Heaney. When I’m at sea he brings the earth back under my feet. Read, October 2019. Image: bog man, Ireland.

A return to one of my favorite periods in literature: Central Europe in the 1920s. This novel made me miss Berlin and miss the writing of Stefan Zweig. I never escaped the notion that the interlocking characters of the hotel are literary creations (in some cases literary confections); nonetheless, their journeys are compelling, their movements balanced and considered. And there exist a handful of moments in this novel where motivations are at once unexpected and true — these were exceptional moments. Read, October 2019. Image: The Pillars of Society by Georg Grosz

I am exactly the kind of fool who pushes poetry to the margins of my reading calendar. I picked this volume up because I had the opportunity to see several of Brueghel’s paintings while in Brussels earlier this month. My interest was rewarded — in stark beauty, the giddy pleasures of small words backed by armies of consideration and truth. I read these poems at sea, where I work now, on a fishing vessel. New to the act of reading while pitching and rolling, I reckoned a book where words are well-spaced on the page would be easier to read. I keep this volume now in my bunk belowdecks. I feel lucky at the conspiracy of factors (Brussels, fishing) that delivered me unto this rich collection at this very moment. Unexpected turns in my life remind me, in themselves, of the movements inherent to poetry, as I’m sure poets understand better than I. Read, September 2019. Image: The Harvesters by Breughel

Many pleasures and thrills in horror depend on the reader’s alignment with an outsider to whatever horrific happenings take place in the story; Dracula isn’t told from Dracula’s perspective, much less does it depict the normalcy, to Dracula, of his life. Shirley Jackson’s tale subverts the outsider-alignment paradigm by ushering the reader — swiftly, deftly, and with her mastery of narrative voice — directly into the shadowy world of the castle, where she holds us and asks us to consider the world on the shadows’ terms. The characters of the castle are sympathetic, nuanced, and possessing souls as only the finest literary characters do. Masterful. Read, September 2019. Image: author photo

There are some good jokes in here, but they overcrowd the narrative and chip away at its emotional concerns. Seems like a reference point for the work of Paul Beatty, who strikes, at least for this reader, a finer balance between humor at the sentence level and emotional resonance at the narrative level. Read, September 2019. Image: author photo

A bar in Neukölln, Berlin, 2 AM: I’m reading this book, killing time before a later engagement, when a group of neighborhood cardplayers invite me to set aside my reading and join their game. They are lifelong friends, at ease with one another, and curious about me; one picks up G., reads the jacket copy, and scoffs. “Imagined sex in the imagined Europe of old — what a cliché.” I had fallen for the cliché. And I maintain that, from a marketing perspective, the jacket copy of G. is outstanding. But my new friend had a point. Europeans of the past had no privileged insight to sex. And for a novel that purports to be about sex, G. Is not a sexy story. Writerly digressions (on the nature of representation, metaphor, the writing life, etc.) do no favors for the mood. I preferred the stretches of the narrative where Mr. Berger submits to the traditional pleasures of character and scene. Read, September 2019. Image: early flyers

The work of Ingeborg Bachmann represents a thoughtless omission in my reading of 20th Century Austrian literature. Thomas Bernhard championed her; Elfriede Jelinek clearly emulated her; and oh baby have I valued the amount of time I’ve spent on those two authors. So now I am glad to have reached Bachmann, though ‘glad’ does disservice to the work itself, for Malina is a bracing narrative. Cold water and a shore where footholds laugh at you. The novel of the unraveling mind sometimes (often, in my experience) offers its reader hope in the end; Malina situates unraveling itself as a continuum, a norm, an inhabited and uninhabitable place. Read, September 2019. Image: Lied in der Dämmerung by Franz Sedlacek.

Research for a writing project. Deals with the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system, which occurred on my birthday in 1995. Read, September 2019. Image: Shoko Asahara, leader of Aum Shinrikyo, in a sham levitation.

Rare is the page of this thick novel that does not creak with the weighty possible. Since I last read Mr. Auster’s writing, his sentences seem to have lengthened. They have become playgrounds where facts and incidents share space with emotion. They ring with midcentury modernity, chiseled but earnest, strange and beautiful as New York in the 20th Century. Read, August 2019. Image: 1968 Riots at Columbia University.

A reread. The novel takes the form of a brief encyclopedia of literary fascist cranks. My purpose in reading it again was to reexamine the scope of the entries and how they built to a whole. I fear I spent more time laughing out loud than examining. About ten years ago this book made me fall in love with Bolaño’s writing — his perspective, foremost. I’m no less enamored now. Read, August 2019. Image: author photo

The man was a surgeon with a simile. Much of his prose outclassed Mann, Zweig, and Kafka. He gets called a pure stylist. It’s true. The two novellas in this collection read as formal experimentation. Interesting, but lacking the traditional pleasures of plot and character (unlike his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless, where he applies his prose chops to a gripping narrative). Read, August 2019. Image: author photo

File under odd and superb. This “novel in verse” uses one of Herakles’s minor labors as the inspiration for a contemporary and precisely told tale of unrequited love. The connection between the myth and the story is tenuous. But because there is a large gap to bridge between myth and story, the narrative presents a pure expression of Anne Carson’s imagination — and what a bridge that is. We see how she filters myth; at times it seems we see this process in real time. She could have taught Homer a thing or two. Read, July 2019. Image: Krakatoa

Sebald’s first novel. I’m impressed with how his style (European wandering, personal engagement with history, photographs, the slide from fact to fiction) emerged fully formed. The rendering of Casanova’s escape from prison in Venice resonated particularly for me. Casanova spends years gazing up at the solid rafters of his cell — until an earthquake many miles away shows these rafters can be shaken. Read, July 2019. Image: Casanova’s cell

Moby Dick for trees. But Moby Dick never made me jump out of my seat with the urge to hug a whale. The Overstory sent me straight to the forest: I lucked out in finishing it in San Francisco, where my sister and brother-in-law were kind enough to indulge my need to see/smell/hug a redwood. I’m loath to imagine the reader who finishes The Overstory with the same view of the world. Read, July 2019. Image: redwood loggers

The political is rendered personal in the slow vise of a prison. The vise belongs to Stalin. The man ground to powder: he too belongs to Stalin. We know the prisoner intimately, as man, as dust. We know, too, with bracing specificity, just how the vise is operated. A flawless 20th Century novel. Read, July 2019. Image: author photo

Sugar: a prostitute, a master in the evaluation of men. Henry Rackham: a man she loathes, and loves, and loathes again. Her reevaluation is fully earned within the world of this novel (a mucky but generously appointed place). In Sugar’s accumulation of agency, through the novel’s late turns, the narrative overcomes its middle doldrums. Read, June 2019. Image: Van Gogh

There’s a trove of Polaroid pictures at the end of this book. For no better reason than to withhold a treat for myself, I chose not to flip back there to examine the Polaroids whenever they cropped up in the narrative. I feel no wiser to have taken this approach. Approaches to this novel are many; the narrative is laden with external media sources, and one could make the case that a thorough reader should consume/digest these sources concurrently with the characters. Or after them. Or before them… There is an illicit pleasure in scrutinizing the bookshelf of someone you don’t know very well while they’re in the other room. Read, June 2019. Image: Geronimo

I haven’t cut my hair in a while. L’s suggestion that it makes me look like a character from Dumas was among my reasons for reading this book. The count’s fall from grace I found more engrossing than the revenge he wreaks. Maybe a question of pacing. Read, May 2019. Image: author photo.

Me in the bookstore: Have I read this before? It’s just the kind of book I would have read on my “New South” kick of ’06-07. Let’s look at a page or two… Turns out I hadn’t read it. And I’m grateful I didn’t leave it on the shelf. I should have read it earlier. I would gladly read it again. It is a story crowding with life. Read, April 2019. Image: author photo.

Research/detail/scope/obsession. This is what I have come to expect from Vollmann, and no less impressive for being expected… But the chapters that thrilled me most were the cabalistic ones: Hitler as a Wagner fanboy-mystic; Stalin as the master of unsolvable riddles; a vast fungal network underlying stone edifices, reminding me that big -isms (Fascism, Communism) often rest on the flimsiest human fictions. Read, April 2019. Image: Käthe Kollwitz, “Die Überlebenden”

Just a few months ago I resolved to stop writing any story that does not contain amongst its character a compelling villain. So, I’m on the lookout in my reading for villains, and this story has a great one: a pretender to the Russian Tsardom — a cossack warlord whose followers have grown wild beyond his control. The pretender not once but several times puts our hero, a young officer, on the gallows, only to remove him. In this story, hero and villain understand — and in a way respect — each other. There is immaculate balance to this tale. Read, March 2019. Image: author painting

The first novella in this set of two is so good it makes the second feel wanting (and I’ll ignore it here). As for the first… anyone who’s ever wondered about the the possibilities of body horror in literature (as I have) will be thoroughly stimulated. There’s a frame story that builds/sustains tension masterfully. There are unanswered questions; there is space for the reader’s thought to bloom. This is the first piece of fiction from Will Self I have read, but not the last. Read, March 2019. Image: from Cronenberg’s “EXistenZ”

I find it hard to go more than a year without picking up some offering from Simenon’s abundance of excellent novels. This one rates highly against the others I’ve read. The main character is named Kees Popinga. That alone is a mark of distinction. Read, March 2019. Image: detail from book cover

After seeing the film while in Prague, I had to check out the novel upon which it’s based. The protagonist is a Czech cremator being courted by the Nazis for his services. He’s unhinged, pathetic, and sometimes hilarious. In the film, he’s somewhat easier to laugh at, but the novel retains a sense of humor I found uncomfortably appealing. Picture me in airports reading this book and laughing out loud. Read, February 2019. Image: from the film adaptation

Truth. Fiction. Truth/fiction. What is fiction? What is truth? Every page prompts a consideration of these big questions. But… if i’m honest I got the most pleasure out of Herodotus’s colorful explications of the customs of ‘barbarian’ lands. They’re rich, editorial, and never fail to inject a human aspect to a narrative (about war) that can sometimes lose sight of the people involved. In my translation (Aubrey de Selincourt’s), Herodotus will often end one of his long digressions with something like “So much for the Libyans” or “More could be said about this tribe, but now I must move on.” These transitions —abrupt but honest — always made me smile. Read, February 2019. Image: bust of the author