Anatole France

by David Tylden-Wright

Delightful—this is a “propah” biography, as the Brits would have it. Biographies of writers are a strange subgenre of an already-weird genre, especially when you haven’t read any of the work of the writer whose life story you’re reading, but Tylden-Wright does very well here. For one, he’s a bang-on writer, with some truly capable prose that stays fresh throughout. Alliteration and allusion and verbal command on a level usually reserved for fiction are all on frequent display. For another, his good-faith effort to really get to understand France (that the writer shares the name of his country of birth, rearing, and adulthood is mildly joked away in the first few pages) as an idiosyncratic human rather than just a famous man of letters comes across clearly, and he’s just as willing to admit what he doesn’t know as what he does. And Tylden-Wright proves remarkably adept at explaining the historical context of his chosen vessel—19th Century Paris comes alive, in all its sweeping romance and bloodshed and glory and beauty—without belaboring any points, and while keeping the whole thing trim and tight. His only fault, which isn’t really his, is the emphasis on the later portions of France’s life; understandably it’s difficult to find sources from a famous person’s days before they were famous. Spry and witty, multifaceted and revelatory, Anatole France the book is just as rich a creation as its subject. Rating: 8.2/10.

Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

A disappointment. Plenty of fame and hype, but Rabbit, Run is a snoozefest. A promising start—26 year-old disaffected kitchen appliance salesman leaves his wife and child one night and takes off down the eastern seaboard—is ruined immediately by his return to Pennsylvania, and its only downhill from there. The next few hundred pages are so stultifying and cloying, populated by the least compelling (and frankly, stupid) cast of characters I’ve seen in a great american classic, that I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Never has the electricity of the late 1950s in America felt so tired, or rendered so sleepily. This book apparently heralded a generation’s lost youth, but really, reading today, all the elements designed to provoke are inane and laughable, and all the everyday matter is what really shocks. By the end of the book you hate every character, including Rabbit, and he’s a poor choice for protagonist anyway. Plus, Updike’s ludicrous purple prose causes eye-rolling on every page, and in general he tries way too hard to impress with pretty sentences rather than focusing his attention on the book’s glaring flaws: no plot, stupid people, ridiculous dialogue, and yawn-worthy set pieces. Characters come and go at random, as does reason. This book has nowhere to go and takes all damn day to get there. Move over, Johnny, and let me drive. Rating: 2.4/10.

The Odyssey

by Homer

Oh, The Odyssey—what a mess. It swerves, it dips, it backpedals, it spins, it gets dizzy, and eventually it falls over a cliff. I know it was written and delivered from memory. I know it invented the hero’s journey. I know Western literature owes it a great debt. I know and don’t care, because The Odyssey, like The Iliad, sucks to read. The melodrama is ludicrous and often inexplicable, the characters are insufferable, and the narrative structure is so tangled that it completely falls apart. (The cop-out ending, too, is just bizarre.) Furthermore, I’d argue that it’s not just one of the earliest examples of human storytelling, it’s one of the first pieces of propaganda. Everything in The Odyssey reinforces the ancient establishment. Kids, the mighty gods are totally real, so brush your teeth and sacrifice your favorite goat to them or they’ll drown you in the ocean or light you afire or something. Peasants, the kings are kings because they’re better than you, and if you get slaughtered wantonly so the king can sleep with your daughter, be grateful that you were allowed to die for him. Wives, your husband is encouraged to do anything he wants to you, and he will, so get ready. I hated The Odyssey, and as always: just because something is old does not mean it is good. Regardless of who wrote it, and why, I think we can let it rest. No rating; I can’t handle it.

String Theory

by David Foster Wallace

If this one seems tailor-made for me—a collection of essays on tennis from the guy who wrote Infinite Jest—you’d be right. All five essays are brilliant, and build upon the strength of the others. We explore Wallace’s own junior career in the Midwest, the commercialism of the US Open, the strange lives of the lower-ranked players who are world-class but playing to afford dinner, top athletes’ inability to express their artistry in words as exemplified by the mass-selling sports memoir genre, and Roger Federer’s brilliance. The only big problems with this book is I wanted it to be ten times as long, and much of the material, while not “outdated” from the essays’ initial publication in the 90s and 00s, makes one wish Wallace were still around to write about today’s players. In general he does a neat job of explaining tennis’ confusions to the casual fan—scoring, strategy, tournament format, etc.—while digging deep enough to let enthusiasts find some new insight into a familiar game. Whether you like tennis or not, I think you’d get something from this book, and Wallace’s typically eerie prescience (particularly with his riffing on the sponsorship culture that swamps sports) makes him look like a tennis prophet. Wallace’s legacy is unique in recent American letters because he found so much success as both a writer of fiction and a cultural commentator, and after reading this I’m only more determined to eventually devour everything he ever published. Rating: 8.1/10.

Trainspotting

by Irvine Welsh

Hell yeah—this is the best book I’ve read since last summer’s GR study. Trainspotting is so good, in fact, that it’s probably going to become part of my personality now, much to the chagrin of my family and friends. What makes it great? First is the extreme authenticity to the vernacular of Scottish twenty-somethings in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, a profanity-laced dialect full of nearly opaque urban slang that’s faithfully transliterated on the page, even in narrative passages so long as they’re first-person. Second is the subject matter--heroin addiction, petty crime, substance abuse of all kinds, unemployed railings against Thatcher, family drama, friend-group warfare, failed relationships, and drugs, drugs, drugs—Trainspotting is like an encyclopedia of bad behavior, told with both hilarious wit and deep profundity. This is the core of the book’s strength; it makes no commentary on the good- or badness of its characters, it simply presents its large and unforgettable cast as real people, flawed and broken, but also redemptive and sometimes even likable. That is—human. And through all of this farce and pathos there is the unmistakable mastery of prose that Welsh displays, with seriously excellent dialogue and some brilliant philosophical riffing on what It all means. That the book finds no answers—refuses to find them, really—to its own questions reveals precisely how penetrating they are, and it’s up to you to decide where to go from here. Rating: 9.5/10.

Many Lives, Many Masters

by Brian Weiss

This book could serve as a manual for how to write a book ostensibly about something else while making yourself look good, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Weiss, who like most psychiatrists is clearly desperate for fame and adulation, must have thanked his lucky stars when a new patient walked into his office one day who under hypnosis revealed dozens of past lives and could act as a communication vehicle for mysterious entities holding the secrets of the universe. Strangely enough, in all of his patient’s past lives Weiss just happened to be a trusted teacher or holy man who provided some crucial brilliant insight, but this coincidence isn’t enough to derail the book from being at least somewhat compelling. Reincarnation, mystical enlighted spirits, past-life therapy—it all could easily be dismissed as baloney, but there’s just enough plausibility to keep you reading. Plus, it’s a very brisk 200 pages, digestible over a weekend, and Weiss really isn’t all that bad a writer. Read it, or don’t. Why not? Rating: 5.0/10.

Madame Bovary

by Gustave Flaubert

I don’t agree with the literati who claim this a “perfect” novel, nor will I ever understand the 19th Century’s grotesque prudishness, but Madame Bovary certainly has its strengths, and I was far more impressed than I usually am with these 1800s “classics.” For one, Flaubert’s symbolic order is deep, rich, and striking, and the objects in this book—cigars, swords, flowers, clothing, potions, onions, and countless others—do far more than provide scenery. Each symbol reveals a great deal of character and power dynamics, and I appreciate the obvious care Flaubert took to build the collection. Furthermore, I’ve read a great deal of Victorian English fiction, so getting a distinctly French flavor of the period was refreshing. This book does have flaws, though. For starters, the title character ranks among the least likable women in fiction. Vain, stupid, silly, weak, adulterous, envious, slothful, proud—you name a deadly sin, she’s got it. That’s not necessarily bad, but it does cause a major problem: because she’s so awful, her neighbor, the pharmacist Homais, pretty early on emerges as the most compelling character and the real engine of the book. I think Flaubert realized this, as more and more of the book becomes about him and thus the story feels confused. The other big issue, which isn’t Flaubert’s fault, is that the supposed supreme beauty of his language either just doesn’t come across in English or the Penguin Classic translation I read is lacking. Regardless, the workaday prose didn’t stun me the way countless critics over the centuries have claimed it should. Any book with this immense a reputation is bound to disappoint, but in general Flaubert did quite well here and I can certainly understand this one’s staying power. I’ll never know what to make, however, of millions of women, upon its publication, claiming to be its inspiration. Rating: 7.9/10.

Common Sense on Mutual Funds

by John C. Bogle

One has to wonder if “John C. Bogle, Chairman and CEO of the Vanguard Group” really sat down and wrote 450 pages of hard-hitting statistical nonfiction, but that’s sort of a moot point. Even if he did have an army of researchers and assistants and ghostwriters to compile the necessary tables, figures, and stats for him, what’s really important in this book is the general investing principles he espouses. As usual, these can be boiled down to a sentence: invest in low-cost, broadly diversified index funds, then wait, and you’ll retire comfortably. Generally, then, reading the book is unnecessary unless you’re a real Boglehead, but if you do, you’ll find it has a surprisingly literary bent that keeps it fresh. Bogle invokes Shakespeare, Homer, and a great many other historical writers and thinkers to provide analogies and cross-references to his arguments. The big problem, which Bogle can’t help, is the book came out in 1998 and thus can’t cover several rather important economic events since then: the dotcom bubble, 2008, the pandemic, and countless others that an updated edition would help greatly with. Oh well. Rating: 6.0/10.

At Swim-Two-Birds

by Flann O’Brien

If you’re ever looking for a book that doesn’t make a damn ounce of sense, this one’s for you. At Swim-Two-Birds isn’t bad, it just repeatedly goes out of its way to avoid clarifying or explaining any of the seemingly arbitrary and baffling choices it makes. The setup: a college student in 1930s Dublin is writing a book about a guy writing a book whose characters are trying to kill him. Interesting, sure, but my thought was: why stop there? Why not have a guy writing a book about a guy writing a book about a guy writing a book…? That is, if you want to be nuts, why put any limits on it? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Can true weirdness have so defined a space to play in? I don’t think so, and the book feels awkward as a result. My point is that there really seems to be no goal here other than paying mild homage to James Joyce and retelling in supremely bizarre fashion several old Irish fairytales. Though it’s occasionally quite funny, it so completely submerges its better sections in long detours of inexplicable nonsense that it’s a relief when you finish. Rating: 1.8/10.

The Life of Samuel Johnson

by James Boswell

Regarding the sixties in America, Andrew Gordon summarized literature’s problems in capturing that elusive time: “If somebody told you the history of the decade as a story, you wouldn't believe it. You'd wonder: Is this for real? Is this some kind of joke? Is it supposed to be farce or tragedy? You wouldn't know how to feel, to laugh or to cry.” Well, Boswell and Johnson lived an ocean away and two hundred years before the Summer of Love, but Gordon’s sentiment also applies to this bizarre, unclassifiable and somewhat bewildering book. Billed as the greatest biography in history, though it isn’t one, The Life of Samuel Johnson is basically a propaganda showpiece for a specific 18th century British guy who everyone apparently thought (and still thinks) a genius despite his never holding a real job, spending years on end doing essentially nothing at all, and acting a condescending git to everyone all the time. Allegedly Johnson’s gift for conversation and few published writings make him the most distinguished man of letters in English history, but I’m not buying it. (I suppose he’s hardly the only poor choice the Brits have made for national heroes.) Boswell himself emerges as the more interesting character, though he glosses over the parts of 1700s life that really interest me—both his and Johnson’s sexual adventures and endless partying—in favor of verbatim transcriptions of Johnson’s supposedly singular (but usually tiresome) speech. One gets the sense that an ostensibly nonfiction book is written by an unreliable narrator. Something about the whole thing feels off, and despite its immense reputation and geologic staying power, you probably just have to be British to get it. Rating: 3.5/10.

Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

A solid round of applause to Palahniuk, who, like Rick Moody and Bret Easton Ellis and others, followed my dictums on first novels to an absolute T. Taut, tight, tense, and revelatory, Fight Club the novel is just as worthy of examination and appreciation as its more famous film adaptation. Perfect minimalist prose for the chosen subject matter, real narrative compulsion, deliberately caricatured and therefore compelling characters, stylized dialogue, and of course brutal, aching violence in many forms—this book gets some work done in just 220 pages. This is what fiction is for—capturing the unvoicable emotions and sentiments of what turned out to be a very large segment of the population in words and concrete plot movements. This is the real thing, baby, and by the end of this book you feel like you’re the one that’s been pummeled in a bar basement, such is the cathartic release of all the bitterness you hold at the world. Fight Club was the rarest beast: the indie small-time novel that made it huge, and I’m happy to report that in this case it was for good reason. Palahniuk became a sort of unwilling bard for the ‘90s, and 25 years later it holds up. Great work, Chuck. Rating: 8.0/10.

Europe Central

by William T. Vollman

Yet another very long book assumed to be good without anyone ever actually having read it, everything about Europe Central pissed me off. It is not a novel. It is 750 pages of ostensibly historical fiction, except 99% of it is true—real people doing and saying the real things they said and did, in mini-biographies that only rarely overlap. This, in the worst way, is a travesty of novel-writing, as the novelist’s greatest gift is imagination, the ability to reveal things that are truer than truth. Unfortunately, nothing is said here that hasn’t already been said before with more eloquence and authenticity. Since they’re all real historical figures (chosen seemingly at random), there’s utterly zero narrative momentum or plot, which makes 750 pages tough sledding indeed. Why care about any of these people? No idea. They’re all annoying anyway—I hate adult characters whose overriding traits are teenage angst, and we get plenty of them here.

On a thematic level, it’s no better. Here are the grand revelations of Europe Central, the type of penetrating insights that can win you a National Book Award: 1) Hitler was stupid and evil, 2) Stalin was stupid and evil, 3) World War II sucked, and 4) Russia is cold. These groundbreaking ideas are presented as though no one has ever considered them before, and the book relies on them to do all the heavy lifting (exploitation of historical tragedies for emotional impact is very weak novel-writing). Furthermore, the book’s supposed dichotomy of Germany vs. Russia is actually deeply lopsided in Russia’s favor, by screentime and level of detail, which means the whole structure collapses. At all times the book feels like what it is: a California white guy trying to understand and present things that he doesn’t understand. Thus the book reads incredibly hollow, terribly false. And the sophomoric prose flights, the bizarre dialogue, the unwelcome insertions of Vollman’s first-person commentary, the weak attempts to conflate battling Germany and Russia of the 1940s with various national epics and poems—none of it worked. A big, bloated, boring behemoth made even worse by a ludicrous 60-page annotated bibliography that follows the main text.

Overall, as usual in these cases, the author thinks he’s the smartest man alive, but is actually the most deluded. Rating: 2.0/10.

Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization

by Meredith Small

Swift and fairly engaging, this one is almost straightforward nonfiction. Small, an anthropologist and apparently a classic case of the white American woman who loves traveling, wrote this book mostly, it seems, because she really likes drinking coffee in Venice while sneering at tourists as though she isn’t one of them. We learn a host of inventions that the Venetians have dreamed up over the years—casinos, double-entry bookkeeping, the publishing industry, lagoon living, maritime economies of scale, and many others. Wisely subdivided by topic rather than chronologically, 220 pages feels about right. The “almost,” though, is that this book contains more typos and easily-spotted factual errors than any published work I’ve ever read. The errors—of grammar, punctuation, spelling, numbers, etc.—are so frequent and so obvious that it detracts from the reading experience, and it’s particularly galling that in her acknowledgements Small thanks no less than three people that she describes as excellent or brilliant editors. How does that happen? Pegasus Books is a pretty well-known company, too, which makes it all the more baffling. I’m guessing much of it was edited by AI or other software, which is depressing, since literally hundreds of typos in the book would be easily caught by human eyes. Whatever. I still learned a few things. Rating: 6.8/10.

All the Pretty Horses

by Cormac McCarthy

I’ll say it: this one sucked. The more McCarthy I read, the more I agree with Harold Bloom—Mac wrote one grade A astonisher, Blood Meridian, but everything before and after is drastically worse. And this one, a major bestseller and award winner, is like the worst of all his stuff I’ve read before put together. Whiny, shallow, absurdly philosophical, or completely opaque characters; utterly ludicrous prose that he clearly thinks is amazing and awe-inspiring but really only made my eyes roll; a beaten-to-death obsession with mountains, hills, the sun, the moon, and horses; violence with no purpose; and a very long list of extremely melodramatic plot twists, most involving teenage romance. What are we even doing here? How did he write this and think it was good enough? In Blood Meridian, everything had a point, and even in its biblical scope and inhuman violence there was purpose, both as story and as ideal. In this one we get one weirdo teenage cowboy prancing around Mexico after another, with the silliest notions of honor and courage in their heads. And really, it’s impossible to imagine being a worse writer of women than McCarthy is. The two most prominent female characters: a teenage girl whose only discernible trait is being hot, and an old spinster whose only discernible purpose is to dispense bloated monologues about revolutions, marriage, and virginity, but mostly virginity. Come on, Mac. At least you’ll always have Blood Meridian. Rating: 2.1/10.

1876

by Gore Vidal

This book lacks mystery, deliberately so, and I have no idea why you’d write a novel in that manner. Vidal’s historical fiction is really historical—most characters are real people, and as he notes in his afterword, they say and do pretty much what they said and did in real life. That didn’t detract me much from enjoying Burr, his precursor to 1876, as I didn’t know many of the facts behind the fiction. But for 1876, if you know in advance, as everyone does, that the 1876 presidential election was stolen from Tilden in favor of Hayes, much of this book falls completely apart from a readerly compulsion standpoint, as the plot relies on delaying the revelation of its outcome. What also made Burr successful—engaging fictional characters mingling with the real ones—is sorely lacking here, as a variety of melodramatic plot twists and baffling invented characters are nowhere near as compelling as the historical figures they interact with. The book thus fails at both history lesson and as narrative. Read the Wikipedia page on the 1876 election, and read Burr, but ignore this one. A final gripe: a book with major themes of American corruption and decadence and fraudulence at all levels of society—a book supposedly concerned with the finer and seedier sides of raucous 19th-century life—all that, and yet not a single impolite, impure, profane, or sexually explicit word. We dance along the edges of great and exciting times, but alas, Vidal is too puritan to take us where it really gets interesting. Rating: 4.0/10.

Garden State

by Rick Moody

I have to give Moody a lot of credit here, because he doesn’t make pretty much all the glaring errors I’ve railed about other authors committing in their debut novels. Garden State is short, tight, clean, knows its goals and MO from page one, and does a terrific job of capturing the early ‘90s zeitgeist of drugs, metal, and general depression and unfulfillment. That said, the characters in the book, as maturely created as they are, are pretty insufferable: a dozen supremely lazy and woe-is-me twenty-somethings in small-city New Jersey. Each is totally incapable of communicating (or having?) deep feelings about anything other than self-pity and lack of motivation. In other words, this book succeeds too well at portraying people that suck, and is far more “slice of life” than “story,” as no one really changes at all during the two months in the book’s purview, and such plot as it has lacks memorable features. But overall Moody impresses by staying in his lane, smartly picking and choosing his prose flights, and knowing his material well enough to make it convincing. Nice work, Rick. I’ll read your other books at some point. Rating: 7.0/10.

Better Than Sex

by Hunter S. Thompson

Now here we go. I’ve read almost every word Thompson ever published, and there’s something of a consensus that he produced his best work in the early 1970s and everything after that declined to some degree. This one is written about and during the 1992 campaign, so allegedly two decades after his peak, and it’s an excellent example of why I don’t agree that Thompson fell off a literary cliff after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. Why? Because in this one he’s still got it. There are passages in Better Than Sex that are as good as anything of his from the Nixon years. The end of the American century, as Thompson repeatedly refers to it, offers him a perfect platform to riff on the 1900s as a whole and how the Reagan/Bush/Clinton paradigm was a fitting culmination of the fever and madness of the entire period. He’s still funny, he’s still sharp, he’s still biting, he’s still acerbic, and he’s still crazy—all the things that made him great in the first place, diluted not in the slightest by that hardest of ravages, time. Good for him, really, and good for all of us. We miss his voice more than ever, but the sting of that absence is lessened slightly by several uproarious episodes in this book. Plus, it concludes with perhaps the greatest obituary of all time—Thompson’s of Richard Milhous Nixon, who died just before the book went to press. Rating: 7.7/10.

The Lincoln Highway

by Amor Towles

This book is truly poor, but Towles is not the only one to blame. Several symptoms of its badness are quite obvious: horrific sentences, sophomoric characterizations, weak dialogue, etc. But the root causes of its ugly construction point to flaws that run much deeper. This book was published in 2021, which means it was explicitly designed for the average reading public in 2021: that is, an easily offended, stupid, and whiny public who are completely unable to critically think or confront moral dilemmas. So the book is written in a way that leaves no stone unturned. Never once does the reader have to think for himself, or ponder anything, or wait more than a few pages to have all his questions answered, or feel uncomfortable about any “problematic” situation. This chicken and egg of bad readers and bad writers is truly depressing, and this book insulted my intelligence in a way no other ever has. It leaves out so many potentially interesting or engaging things, in fact, that it’s the literary equivalent of scrolling social media (unsurprisingly, this one was big on BookTok). Reading this book is a passive experience, something I didn’t know was possible. It happens to you, like all modern culture. It is so ironed of life, so lacking in the exuberance of great literature, that I felt compelled to write a longer essay on the sorry state of modern fiction with this book as Exhibit A, which you can read here. Rating: 1.5/10.

Money

by Martin Amis

I can’t say I disliked this book, because I didn’t. But goodness me does it have some flaws. Money is the Rabelasian/Falstaffian/Marquis de Sadeian “story” of early-1980s British-American commercial and film director John Self. Self is addicted to the twentieth century, he tells and shows us: endless and constant booze, terrible treatment of women, an awful diet, compulsive porn consumption, and a complete slavery to and obsession with money. Spending, making, doesn’t matter—money flows through Self and the book like water. This all means that Self, while remarkably entertaining and agile a narrator, would be the least likable character in fiction. Would be, that is, if it weren’t for the presence of about eight other supremely despicable characters in the book of all ages and genders. I’m just really not sure what the book is trying to say except that everyone is terrible and everyone wishes they had more money. The book is occasionally very funny, and Amis can be a whale of a prose stylist and does a fair job of capturing a certain zeitgeist, but the avalanche of vice simply crushed the tender moments beneath a ton of addictive sludge and poor behavior. The very late plot twists didn’t work for me at all, either, because the characters lack any coherent motivation. I also think it’s lazy of a writer for a main character to be drunk all the time, and the book’s meta elements—a writer named Martin Amis is a major character—took me out of it. It’s quite the ride, Money, and you’ll certainly see a few interesting sights along the way. But by the end I was pretty carsick. Rating: 6.0/10.

Barry Lyndon

by William Makepeace Thackeray

This may well be a top-five satire ever written. I’m usually lukewarm at best about 19th century fiction (this one’s from 1844), but Barry Lyndon has three things going for it that absolutely floored me. The first is that Barry Lyndon himself, our anti-hero narrator, is probably the most resourceful and agential character ever put on paper. There is no obstacle he cannot overcome via his own powers and efforts. Second is the brilliance of Thackeray’s observational powers, and his ability to perfectly capture the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of 18th-century Europe. Together, 1 and 2 mean the book functions, remarkably, as both a satire of the 1700s and an utterly fascinating character study in its own right. He wrote the satire so well, that is, that unless you know in advance that it’s a satire, you would think it merely an impeccably told bildungsroman. And third, this book is just flat-out entertaining in a way so many classics are not. Barry spends the novel mingling in the most dashing and thrilling exploits the 1700s had to offer: war, intrigue, duels, gambling, high society, blood feuds, royalty, and the push and pull of wealth in a time when social mobility was nearly impossible. There is an exuberance in this book, and its main character, that went missing in fiction until about 1960. This is all to say that Barry Lyndon is now probably my favorite book written before 1900, and Thackeray a writer for whom I now hold immense respect. The Kubrick film version from 1975 is also one of my favorites, and equally worthy of your time. Rating: 9.0/10.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond

The only major problem this book has is it can be distilled to 25 words: modern humans are unequal in terms of wealth and power because of the natural forces present in the environments of ancient peoples as they evolved. That’s it, the book’s thesis. Diamond gives you 400 pages of argument, reasonably well-written and clearly well-researched, but it never gets any more earth-shattering than that. I don’t mean to belittle the achievement, though, as it is a compelling idea. The availability of domesticable plants and animals, climate patterns, geographical conditions precluding or encouraging the spread of goods and ideas, and most importantly the potential forms of food production—these things, in the prehistoric world, shaped the development of societies to such a degree that some of them “progressed” much quicker. That led to guns and steel being invented in some places and not others, with immunity from deadly diseases a co-product, and boom: by the time Columbus was hitting the Indies, Europe was so far ahead that conquering the New World was inevitable. Diamond does all this to refute the racial narratives that for so long justified colonization and exploitation of native peoples, and to synthesize a few centuries’ worth of archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and historical biology. If that sounds like a lot of -ologys, it is, and I found myself somewhat unimpressed at how general and broad the book’s approach is. That’s no knock against Diamond, as I suppose I just prefer more personal histories in the way of names and dates and people, not peoples. Oh well. Interesting, and important, but just read the summary online. Rating: 6.5/10.

Gravity’s Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity’s Rainbow is the greatest novel of all time, and my favorite, and every other superlative you can come up with. It is massive, hilarious, horrifying, enlightening, entertaining, brilliant, breathtaking, bloated, dense, shocking, obscene, gleeful, baffling, ambitious, and more. The dizzying plots revolve around a host of loners, stoners, freaks, obsessives, fanatics, and weirdos in 1944-45 Europe, but the book functions as a meditation on the terrors and triumphs of the 20th Century as a whole. At its center is the V2 rocket, developed by the Nazis during WWII to rain unpredictable and unpreventable death on the Allies, which serves both as the greatest literary symbol since Melville’s white whale and a stupendously engaging plot device. Pynchon's mind is almost laughably fertile, and his goal is both simple and yet surpassingly complicated: to have the reader encounter, somewhere along the way, absolutely everything. This means the book is an extraordinary synthesis of basically every type of entertainment and human activity, its scope encompasses every possible style, and it surveys all of humanity in its keen gaze. Its theses are as compelling as they are stunning. Its prose is as featherlike at times as it is sledgehammer at others. It balances on a knife edge of comedy and tragedy from beginning to end, and in its exploration of humanity's tipping point beyond the cliff of no return—via the perfection of deliverable death—it captures the human condition since WWII. It is all of us. It is an ancient power struggle for our survival. It is a total look behind the curtain of modern civilization at the largest and smallest scales. It is utterly worthy of your attention and your pondering. It is utterly urgent, authentic, true, and the most readable novel ever composed. You can read my full review here, which explores Gravity’s Rainbow’s myriad brilliancies in great detail. Rating: 9.9/10.

This Boy’s Life

by Tobias Wolff

This book was one of those that struck me, after reading all the glowing reviews about it, to have somehow pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. It is a memoir of Wolff’s life from roughly age 10 to 20, though it moves in such poorly-paced fits and starts that I never actually found it to be about much of anything. The big problem is that our “hero,” the author as a boy, might be the most unlikable character I have ever come across. He is vain, stupid, a compulsive liar, a compulsive thief, a betrayer of friends, a scam artist, an abuser of substances, and the kind of kid who repeatedly lies through his teeth to his own mother—yet somehow we are supposed to root for him! I was honestly astonished when I found reviews praising his resourcefulness and spirit. He sucks, man. And yet this is a true story, and Wolff, writing from his adult perspective, somehow seems to find no fault with his objectively awful behavior even long after he reached an age where he should have known better. For the first hundred pages, I was unable to understand why he was going out of his way to portray all the terrible things he did, until it hit me like it hits Steve Carrell in The Big Short: he’s not confessing, he’s bragging. The adult Wolff is proud of his idiot adolescent self. Everyone, in his eyes, is stupid except for him, and whenever he screws up it’s always someone else’s fault. Usually his stepfather's, who gets so much screen time for Wolff to spew vitriol that you wonder if the whole point of the book is to get revenge on the poor guy. If this was fiction, I’d say whatever. But since it’s a memoir, and true, I came away from this book pissed that we celebrate terrible people. I also finally understand why we lost in Vietnam: it was Wolff and others like him who were fighting it. Rating: 3.0/10.

The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

The Recognitions is one of the worst and longest books to ever appear in print, and it is a useful disasterclass in exactly how not to write a successful novel. It makes every possible new-writer mistake: weak characterization, nonexistent plotting, endlessly redundant/pointless scenes, meaningless long conversations, bloated and sophomoric prose, and severe lapses in clarity. The book is ostensibly about a 50s-era painter who produces art forgeries amid a strange New York underworld (or at least it should have been), but from page one it is actually about the author’s self-belief in his own genius. This leads to exceptionally muddled themes of religion and real vs. fake, truly poor writing at the sentence and syntactic level, and long diatribes on completely irrelevant topics. By the end of this thousand-page behemoth, one wonders if there is any point to reading literature at all, such is the unpleasantness of slogging through the book. At no point does it redeem itself. At no point does it resolve. At no point does Gaddis prove he is in command of his material or the English language. At no point does Gaddis appear to doubt that every idea he has ever had is a good one. It is an exercise in arbitrary words, scenes, people, and settings thrown together at tremendous length for no reason whatsoever. The deepest problem I found was that were Gaddis to have sliced The Recognitions down to its workable parts, say around 200 pages, it could have been an excellent first novel. Instead it stands as a striking example of how in 1955 anything a white man wrote could get published, and how far postmodernism still had to develop before it could be something worth reading. You can find my full review here, which explicates these criticisms to significant length. Rating: 0.5/10.

Musicophilia

by Oliver Sacks

After a string of reading disappointing novels, this was a breath of fresh air. In encyclopedic detail, Sachs covers the relationship of music to basically every known neurological anomaly, with a central emergent theme that music does in fact have a relationship to basically every known neurological anomaly. Parkinson's, dementia, Alzheimer's, synesthesia, hearing/vision loss, paralysis—you name it, and somewhere in his long career Sachs encountered a patient that had been helped or otherwise deeply affected by music. Besides the inherent "interestingness" of what he's talking about, that's what really makes the book tick: everything is told through real-life case studies, which ensures the book, which very easily could have strayed into a technical, jargon-heavy yawn-fest, remains a fascinating study of the human mind and music's connection it. Sachs is also a good writer, with strong, clear sentences, a compassionate tone, genuine curiosity for his subject, and a touch of the 20th century British parlor humor he was so naturally part of. This is about as good as popular nonfiction can get, both educational and entertaining, and I, with zero background or natural interest in the subject, was captivated all the way through. Rating: 9.0/10.

The Day of the Locust

by Nathanael West

I'd wanted to read this one for a long time, if for no other reason than the great title and some underground rumblings that this is the Hollywood novel. Alas—another disappointment. I don't like to judge books for their length, positive or negative, for brevity or long-windedness, as any word count can be justified by the story it tells. But this one, barely 200 pages, saw me reaching the back cover and thinking, that's it? It just never really gets going. It feels like the exposition to a much longer work. It's not even that West left a bunch of loose ends, he just never really created any ends worth tying. We get about 5 "main" characters, each left unexplored to any convincing degree. We breeze through events that may or may not hold any significance, but this book doesn't have time for any reflection—it's gotta get to the next stilted conversation about the edges of interesting ideas quickly! And the last section, a complete departure from all that came before and evidently supposed to serve as some eloquent expose of 1930s Hollywood, just feels weird and muted. There's just not much to sink your teeth into. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is there's a character named Homer Simpson, which Matt Groening stole when he needed a name for his protagonist fifty years later. Cool? Maybe? Anyway, this was the day of the unfulfilled book. Rating: 3.5/10.

The Big Money

by John dos Passos

The Big Money concludes dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, and it's rather unfortunate that he saved the worst for last. There's no euphemistic way to say it: this was a pretty big disappointment. The characters were one-dimensional, the plotlines were far less compelling, there was a whole lot of preachy political stuff, everyone got drunk on every page (a really lazy writing device), and the brilliance of the preceding novel, Nineteen Nineteen, was nowhere to be found. Since I've already reviewed the first two books below, and I was so frustrated at this one for its failures of storytelling and characterization, I'll restrict this review to the prose itself, as it's emblematic of the trilogy as a whole. dos Passos writes in what I'd call a "loose" style, flinging adjectives around with wild abandon, lengthening and shortening paragraphs without compunction, splitting sentences in half across lines, smashing compound nouns into unspaced singular words on every page (seemingly at random), and beginning sentences without clear direction of where they're going to end. This book, even more than the others, feels thrown down on the page rather than carefully written. It is not necessarily ineffective, but there are certainly more than a few moments that should've been tightened, made clearer, striven for some sort of purpose. The Big Money feels aimless, in pretty much every way, and whatever dos Passos achieved with the first two-thirds of his trilogy is nearly undone by the time this one ends. Sorry, Johnny. I just don't know why you didn't keep up the momentum you'd created. Rating: 3.0/10.

The Facts

by Philip Roth

Roth's consistency in producing dozens of top-class works is unmatched (Pynchon's only written eight books) and he and Pynchon have jointly held the position of my favorite writer for several years now. Within the pantheon of Roth novels, for me my favorites are usually the ones most autobiographical—why I like Operation Shylock so much—and I'd been waiting to read The Facts, his memoir-novel, until I could properly savor it. After the travails of Fariña and Hoban, I felt I finally deserved to enjoy this one. And of course I did. Mostly using real names and dates and places, Roth picks five major periods of his life and dissects them as only he can. The first few, focused on his childhood in New Jersey and his time as "Joe College" while an undergrad, are the sort of writing I could read forever. When he transitions to his adult life, and his disastrous first marriage, which takes up most of the rest of the book, I was still interested but mostly in repulsion at the delusions of the woman he married and fascination at how deeply it affected him. The Rothian magic comes in bookend form: it all opens with a letter to his most famous fictional character, Nathan Zuckerman, asking him to read his autobiography, and it all closes with a long reply from Zuckerman explaining to Roth how he's failed as a memoirist. The usual jokes and insights into American life are there, and learning more about the man behind the novels I enjoy from his own perspective was a great reading experience. And of course it's all told in his usual perfectionist sentences, with phrasing and syntax impeccable from start to finish. A unique look into a master's mind. Rating: 7.9/10.

Riddley Walker

by Russell Hoban

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a great review of Joseph Heller's Something Happened that said, in effect, "regardless of what you think of the book, it is evident that every single word on every single page is exactly as Heller wanted it." That same sentiment is true of Riddley Walker, a totally original, unlike-anything-else post-apocalyptic novel by a guy who was best known for writing children's books. The novel is narrated by our titular character who, we gradually come to understand, is an interpreter of the traveling puppet shows put on by the government for the peasants of far-future England, something akin to a priest in a religion that draws upon elements of pretty much all the current ones and a bunch of other folklores and mythologies as well. We also learn that in this dirty, gray, devoid-of-electricity world (so—England) pretty much everyone has been dirt poor since The Big One, which took me too long to realize was a giant nuclear holocaust some millennia before. There's a bunch of stuff happening, mostly involving a bloody power struggle regarding some ancient puppets, but what is truly unique about this book is the language—Riddley and his people speak a heavily distorted, clipped, evolved form of English, and he also writes purely based on sound, so his thick accent of this dialect is what's on the page. This makes reading this book difficult, and its 200 pages feel much longer. Does the story merit the language, and vice versa? You know what—yes, they do. Just don't make me read it again. Rating: 7.3/10.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

by Richard Fariña

This book is a rollercoaster of quality: the first 50 pages are quite good, the next 100 are muddled, the next 20 are excellent, the next 30 are disappointing, and the last 10 are extraordinary. Despite its uneven form, on the whole it's a pretty decent first effort for Fariña, who was a classmate and friend of Pynchon's at Cornell. Alas, unlike his famous acquaintance, Fariña only left us with this novel—he was killed in a motorcycle crash two days after its publication at the ripe age of 29. A terrible tragedy both private and public, as this book reminds me so much of Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana: uncontrolled, raw, badly in need of editing, scattered, and populated by purple prose, yet unmistakably the work of a budding writer of prodigious talents. Regardless, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (one of the best titles ever, also) would still be merely a yawn-worthy campus novel were it not for its unforgettable protagonist Gnossos Pappadopoulis, whose singular methods of self-expression form the core of the book. Most of the other characters need fleshing, and the central "conflict" between the students and the administration about letting girls stay out late feels so dated it's almost quaint, but Gnossos just about keeps the reader interested. The novel flounders in excess without going anywhere sometimes, especially in that middle section, but the close, with its brutality and shockingly satisfying feel, finally burst's the book's storm clouds that have threatened since page one, and redeem much of what came before. Nice work, Rick. I wish you'd had the chance to keep improving. Rating: 6.8/10.

The Intelligent Investor

by Benjamin Graham

I make no pretensions to being a Wall Street guru, but this book makes more sense than probably anything ever written about investing. Warren Buffet's Bible, Graham lays out exactly how to avoid so many of the get-rich-quick scams of the stock market and instead build true wealth over decades by mastering the only controllable variable in the investing equation: yourself. His theses: you, and everyone else, can’t predict the future, so stop trying to "beat the market." Instead, invest in diversified index funds, avoid "hot" issues (like, say, NFTs or the dotcom bubble of the 2000s), and be ultra-patient. Apparently this is harder than it sounds, which is why millions of people lose vast sums of money on Wall Street year after year. From a literary perspective, Graham is a solid, understated, competent writer—I was compulsively hooked to reading a book on stuff like "price versus value" and "margin of safety" and "ten-year returns," which I didn't know was possible. The edition I had also had excellent updated footnotes and commentary from the 2000s by a journalist named Jason Zweig, himself a fantastic writer who was much more willing to say in plain English what Graham, out of tact, wasn't: a lot of stupid people will get rich fast because they got lucky, then lose it all very quickly. Don't be stupid. Anyway, as far as I can tell, if you want to retire comfortably, read this book. Rating: 8.6/10.

Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change

by Mike Lydon & Anthony Garcia

Yet another in this year's train of urbanist and anti-car books, this is a trim, straightforward, very practical book that reads like several highly interesting magazine articles strung together in a row. Lydon and Garcia, urban planners and collaborators themselves, proceed logically, first by defining their title concept and tracing its history before arriving at the bulk of the book: case studies of five major and several supplementary examples of tactical urbanism in action. The book closes with something of a how-to manual to implement tactical urbanism into the reader's city. One of the things I most enjoyed was their consistent and continued emphasis on cheaper/smaller/quicker = better. Avoid red tape. Cut costs wherever possible. Do it in a weekend. Hide from the cops if you have to. The whole point is to make micro change of your urban environment—by creating short-term installations of projects that could become permanent—just to get the ball rolling in official and larger channels. They make it clear that anyone can do tactical urbanist projects, and you don't have to be rich or the mayor to make real change. A smart, neat book that summarizes important ideas and solidifies them through examples. Rating: 7.8/10.

Good as Gold

by Joseph Heller

Heller, made famous by Catch-22 and then held to that impossibly high standard for the rest of his career, evidently only became more bitter as the years went on. This one, published at the end of the 70s, is somewhat of an aggregation of the best of his first two novels: Catch-22's institutional skewering and Something Happened's character-driven mania. The heart of Good as Gold is jaded, late-forties college professor Bruce Gold, who's offered a vague role with the federal government (with an unnamed President—one can only assume Heller's intense vitriol at the workings of D.C. stem from the dark Nixon days), then proceeds to flub his way through 500 pages of political doubletalk and confusion, without (spoiler) ever actually getting or beginning the job. The joke, of course, is that everyone in government is incompetent, lazy, stupid, or some combination of the three; the President, whom we never meet, is said to spend all his time either sleeping or writing a book about his own Presidency. The human element comes from Gold's attempts to navigate his large, domineering family and horrible, aging father—some of the most painfully cringe-inducing conversations I've ever read take place when Gold and his siblings all meet. Heller has a perfect ear for the idiosyncrasies of American life, from the family unit to the White House, and this novel, perhaps even more than Catch-22, functions as a metronome of the time period for which it was written. The dissonances and lies of our society, as Heller, probably pushing back his glasses and sighing, would tell you, run from top to bottom and back again. Rating: 8.0/10.

Nineteen Nineteen

by John dos Passos

Though I was lukewarm about The 42nd Parallel, the first book in the USA trilogy, the second, Nineteen Nineteen, is straight-shooter brilliant. The characters are better, the writing is sharper, the jokes are funnier, and the pathos is deeper than its predecessor. The structure and set-up were the same: longer vignettes featuring one of five major characters (often overlapping to create a central "narrative") interspersed with news reels from the time and purportedly autobiographical stream-of-consciousness sections from dos Passos. For whatever reason, all those sections worked better separately and collectively than they did in the first novel, and I was about halfway through this one when I realized something like "hot damn! this is really, really good!" It surely helped me that the time period of the book—during and in the immediate aftermath of World War I—are utterly fascinating to me, and dos Passos makes war-torn Europe come alive like nothing I've read. Cafes, hotels, bars, back alleys, brothels, and endless, unstoppable motion and movement—this book is an utter hurricane of forces and events and people and life itself, rendered with beauty and power. The only strange thing was that a book in the “USA trilogy” took place like 85% of the time in Europe (though all major characters were Americans), particularly France, but again, characters travel the world and back again every few paragraphs or so. This book succeeds on a very deep level in capturing the feeling of a terrible and terribly exciting age. A celebration of human ingenuity, a lamentation on the war that destroyed a generation's innocence, a capturing of the spirit of youth, a meditation on success and failure, an exploration of love and death—Nineteen Nineteen, the year and the book, had it all. Rating: 8.8/10.

The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

If you're looking for something uplifting, coherent, clean, well-argued, fun, humorous, romantic, powerful, smart, neat, impressive, enjoyable, interesting, or any other positive trait, you won't find it with this pile of meaningless garbage. The Soft Machine is composed of 200 pages of unrelated, indefinite passages of mostly gibberish strewn liberally with drugs, gratuitous sex, violence, more sex, and all other vices known to man. Pretty nasty work overall from Based Burroughs, who apparently wrote most of this and the two novels that follow in the Nova Trilogy (and Naked Lunch, which I've reviewed previously) during a four-year heroin binge in the mid-50s. Then he literally "cut up" (with scissors) seemingly random sections from this 1000-page screed of an addict's ravings, pasted them together to book-length, and ended up with this mishmash of laughably bad baloney. Perhaps even worse than the book itself is the fact that he seemed to think it was some sort of brilliant Bible for the Space Age, laying bare society's flaws and cataloguing them for future generations. Nah, man—you were just high. Don't read this. You won't get anything from it except an overwhelming feeling of disgust. There is no redeeming feature to the depravity of this book. Rating: 1.5/10.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuilt American Prosperity

by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

Strong Towns may well be the best book about contemporary America yet written. If you want to know why our human habitat is the way it is, and how to fix it, then here's 250 pages that do exactly that. If those sound like rather large topics to cover so concisely, they are, but Marohn's everyday language (he's an engineer and urbanist, not a writer, which is a good thing) makes extraordinarily complicated and complex systems both understandable and simple. This book explains all the brainworms I've had since I was a kid: the ugliness of the suburbs, the chaos of urban sprawl, the impossibility of indefinite growth, the pain of pillaging our finite land, the proliferation of strip malls and gas stations and fast food restaurants and big box stores, the blighted inner cities, the unsustainability of American consumerism and building, and the incredible obsession we have with our cars. This is how, and why, our society has been built, Marohn says. If you're at all like me, you think it all totally sucks, which is why it's damn good this book exists. Marohn lays out how we can build real wealth in our cities and neighborhoods from the smallest level upwards via incremental growth, and offers a very compelling and promising vision for how we can reverse these seemingly entrenched development patterns, highlighting the widespread benefits we would achieve along the way. To save our cities from financial ruin, to stem the stagnation of neighborhoods, to create beautiful places where people want to work and play and live, to create a more prosperous, connected society--these are what I hope to see happen in my lifetime, and every living American should read this book to see how it's possible. Rating: 9.7/10.

The Iliad

by Homer

How does one judge a cornerstone of Western literature? What can be said about The Iliad that hasn't already been? I struggled with these questions while reading and I'm still unsure of their answers—I told myself that to speak disparagingly of Homer is blasphemy, and then I told myself that it's a book like anything else and therefore equally open for anyone to pass judgement on. So: The Iliad is an overly long, surprisingly violent, extremely old poem that contains nearly every trope that has permeated Western art for three thousand years—war, lust, sex, death, and a great number of long-winded speeches by a very large cast of major characters. I give Homer credit, though, because in his time these weren't tropes yet; he was creating tropes that writers would exhaust into oblivion over the next few millennia. That said, all those epic heroes fighting the Trojan War of The Iliad seem suspiciously one-dimensional. Everyone is always in one of two moods—overwhelming bloodlust or crippling grief—and they also have one of two character traits—a great warrior, or a complete coward. Furthermore, amidst the near-constant graphic battlefield brutality, the Greek gods you know from Percy Jackson mingle themselves up with the fates of the mortals, which gets rather annoying when every character's death is foretold hundreds of pages in advance. And boy, is there a lot of death. As a foundational work in the world arts, The Iliad is terrific; as a book, it suffers from melodrama, glamorization of hideous deeds, simplification of life to the work of petty gods, convoluted metaphors, repetition of tiresome phrases, poor pacing, and flat characterization. The Iliad is like what my mom once said about Las Vegas: "Is that really the best we can do for ourselves?" Is it really the best the ancients could do, fighting and killing and dying at astonishing rates for no real reason at all? Is that the best we can do, with our world wars and mechanized death? I don't know. I'm glad The Iliad exists, but I'm depressed for having read it. No rating for this; its legacy is unshakeable.

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

I picked this one up because the Modern Library ranked it #1 on its list of the best nonfiction books of the 20th Century. I should've known better than to trust the Modern Library editors, who put Sons and Lovers in the top ten but excluded Gravity's Rainbow altogether from their 100 best novels of the 1900s. The best nonfiction book of the century? Boy, did this disappoint—it's really not about anything, save for a half-theme that Henry Adams' life sort of failed to adequately prepare him for the societal changes that occurred in the late 1800s. If that sounds somewhat nebulous, it is, and the book reads like an excuse for Adams to riff on anything that comes to mind—his childhood, London, trains, rich people, and a truly awful "theory of history" that takes up the last 50 pages. The funniest thing about it all is that Henry Adams was perhaps the most privileged person in America—the grandson of a president and the great-grandson of another—and never had to work a real day in his life, never experienced suffering of any kind, walked into a Harvard teaching post without applying, and rubbed elbows with senators for decades despite holding no governmental position. Particularly rankling is when he recalls the Civil War as a lovely and glorious thing—except he was an ocean away, assisting his father, who was the ambassador to England. This book, and its #1 ranking on that eye-rolling list, reflects the gross and ever-trendy glamorization of the past, and more specifically a phenomenon I call the Fetishization of the 19th Century. It's 500 pages to say, "darn kids these days!" Progress waits for no one, old man, and your inability to adapt was certainly not the fault of your "education," which was the best possible. His memoir is dull, his history is uncompelling, his scholarship is mediocre, and his conclusions are self-serving, incomplete, and poorly worded. Sorry, Hank, but your life was dreamland. Rating: 3.0/10.

Going Native

by Stephen Wright

This is a strange one. The set-up is simple: a guy in Chicago, fed up with his life in suburbia, steals his neighbor's car and takes off across the country. But here's the problem: that guy, though he's the only consistent character throughout the book, is not the protagonist; in fact, he only shows up for a few pages in each 25+ page chapter. This book is much more easily read as a collection of short stories, each interesting and engaging by itself—a serial killer in the Midwest, a sex cult in Denver, an overly long jungle excursion in Asia, etc—but creating a diminishing effect overall. By now the number of unconventional novels I've read is probably about balanced with the number of conventional ones, but there is something missing in this book, and it wasn't the lack of a main character; there's just no character movement at all, no arcs, no story to follow—sort of ironic in a road novel. There's a whole lot of flashy stuff going on, though: overstuffed sentences that are occasionally gorgeous but equally often just purple prose, highly engineered dialogue, a ton of sex, a ton of violence, and a ton of shock and awe. This book made the very conscious decision to put style over substance—it feels like a glittering mansion on fragile stilts. There's nothing to grasp hold of save the media-screen effect Wright creates from start to finish. Who are these people? Why do they do what they do? You'll never get any idea. But you will get plenty of what they do. It is sometimes very funny and sometimes very profound, but just too restless and incoherent to really enjoy. Rating: 6.0/10.

A People’s History of the United States

by Howard Zinn

It's easy to oversimplify and draw a direct line from this book to the revisionist histories so popular today, but I think Zinn deserves both more and less credit than that. On one hand, he does a superb job of detailing pretty much every single instance of injustice—and rebellion against that injustice—in American history, from 1492 to 2003, and in his monumental scope and blindingly overwhelming cascade of information you really do learn a thing or several. For example, did you know a bunch of native Americans took over Alcatraz in the late 60s for like a year? Me neither. On the other hand, Zinn doesn't engage too much with the why of events, and everything seems to happen as a reaction to something else (perhaps this is truly how it was) rather than proactively, which, I think, reduces people to numbers and collectives just as much as the traditional histories he speaks so disparagingly of do. And there is certainly a valid criticism that he draws society too cheaply into black and white, rich and poor, good and bad. But then again, he makes it explicit that he doesn't want to write the history of the rich, as that's been done too many times already. This is a staggering book that landed like a bombshell in high schools in the 80s, and it lays bare most of the difficult truths about our history: exploitation, slavery, subjugation in all its forms. Perhaps it’s a result of better teaching now, or I'm just jaded like most of my generation, but very little in here surprised me even if I didn't know it already—society is and always has been driven by the profit motive, and for Zinn to paint this as somehow unexpected to me struck the wrong note. The book's best parts by far were his dives into labor movements, strikes and strikebreakers, the resistances against injustice rather than the injustice itself—the descriptive rather than the preachy. It's also interesting how the book functions as a sort of time capsule; what was extremist left in 1980 is basically moderately liberal now. Useful but somewhat exhausting overall, it's more worth your time to read about different periods you're interested in rather than this book, which wants to explain the whole of American history. Rating: 6.8/10.

The 42nd Parallel

by John dos Passos

This is the first of a trilogy of novels dos Passos wrote to illuminate, apparently, the entire scope and breadth of America in the first several decades of the twentieth century; The 42nd Parallel covers (roughly) 1900-1918. It is very much not a conventional novel, as there is no single plot but rather five occasionally interwoven character studies, which are themselves interspersed by sections called "Newsreels," where dos Passos relates headlines and popular songs/poems of the time; sections called "The Camera Eye," which are stream-of-consciousness passages told from a whole variety of unnamed characters; and mini-biographies of famous people like Andrew Carnegie and Eugene Debs. Basically, dos Passos' goal is to present (in just 330 pages, no less) the entire bewildering array of turn of the century America from top to bottom, an artistic experience equivalent to a very long and very dense montage. Characters' lives and fortunes change so quickly and so often that it seems the point is change, the rapid expansion of the self while the society around it explodes too; this careening and abrupt plotting can feel amateurish in the hands of a lesser writer, but you get the sense dos Passos is fully in command here. His heroes are unionists, socialists, typists, self-made men, speculators, hostesses, hobos, alcoholics, mechanics, mothers, fathers, divorcees, laborers, decorators, immigrants, soldiers, etc.—that is, the average person in early 1900s America. This is a book about a time, told through its people and their American dreams, the crushing of those dreams, the uselessness of those dreams, the system designed to prevent the realization of those dreams, occasionally the attainment of those dreams, and then the collapse of those dreams. There are clearly some socialist under (and over) tones here, but the characters are so compelling in their ordinariness you cease to think of them as political and simply as people striving the same way you would, were you in their shoes. Bold and interesting, but somehow empty and restless, with little for the reader to anchor to. Which, I suppose, was how America was back then. Rating: 7.0/10.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

Moby-Dick is a very famous, very long, very strange, and sometimes very good book. It is not, I would argue, a novel in the conventional sense: much of the book—perhaps two-thirds or even three-fourths of it—is devoted to what are essentially nonfiction essays about whales, whaling, the ocean, and ships (but mostly whales). Were the book stripped of everything but its plot, it would be not more than 100 pages, but as it stands it comes in at a hefty 600+. Philip Roth once said something like "Moby-Dick is 500 pages of blubber, 100 pages of madman, and 20 pages about how good whalers are with a harpoon." So—the 500 nonfiction pages were pretty turgid and unenjoyable. But those other 120 pages—well, buckle up. The prose is a stunning achievement, mixing elements of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the ludicrously high (to us) intellectual register of 19th century writers, with near-constant allusions to the Bible, Greek mythology, Great Men of history, and everything else. The words are an ocean unto themselves, and it is easy and fun to let yourself float (drown?) in them. The story they tell—of the ill-fated Pequod, hunting the famous white whale (which is a symbol for everything and nothing: evil, the incurable self, racism, etc.), led by Captain Ahab—is simplistic in structure yet irresistible in execution. Ahab is one of the greatest characters in literature, and his soliloquies reach a depth of profundity and pathos unheard of since Hamlet, and more or less unmatched since. That those moments are so infrequent, surrounded as they are by all that blubber, is the flaw for which I cannot forgive the book. How do you create the most compelling man vs. nature/society/self conflict ever and then waste it with endless pages about whale jawbones? Very easily, evidently. Regardless: read this because it's worthy of your attention, not because you'll enjoy it. Rating: 8.0/10.

Patrimony

by Philip Roth

Patrimony is a novel/memoir with real names and dates, narrated by the real Philip Roth, about his real father Herman Roth, and it is excellent. The book begins with the elder Roth's diagnosis of an enormous brain tumor in his middle eighties, and the book follows the father and son as they confront the last few years of the father's life; a writer struggling with the real blood-and-guts world of hospital beds and loss of hearing and an indomitable father who at one point, Philip realizes, is the true Bard of Newark. It is a tough, moving memoir, as Roth neither spares (criticizing papa Roth's stubbornness, etc.) nor shies from praising (speaking in wonder at the courage his father possesses) his father and the long American immigrant life he lived. Both the elder Roth's descent and the younger Roth's grappling with a lifetime of being a son are powerful, and placing life's weightiest questions directly into the hands of our strongest writer produces a compelling work indeed. When Herman Roth goes on tangents about the Newark of the 20s, 30s, 40s, or his son philosophizes about death's hold upon us all—well, just pump that shit straight into my veins. Quite short but remarkable nonetheless, written in Roth's impossibly elegant and consistent sentences, Patrimony is a welcome break from the world's uproar to ponder what it means to live and die in America, and what it means to write about those things. Rating: 7.9/10.

Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

No review can do proper justice to this immense, exceedingly complex, deeply infuriating, brilliant, hilarious, and heartfelt book, but I'll try anyway. Infinite Jest is heavy work: it took me three solid weeks of effort to get through its 1100 pages (100 of which are endnotes. Yes, really). There are three main plots: 1) a group of teenagers at a tennis academy, 2) the lives of the residents of an alcohol and drug addiction halfway house, and 3) the wider world of the future (the 2000s, as the book was published in the mid-90s). Dozens and dozens of major characters, long technical passages on everything from narcotic chemical compounds to avant-garde film theory, and a shuddering, quaking, new-lexicon sledgehammer prose make the book a glorious, roaring, unwieldy yet engaging mess. I really, really liked several of its aspects. First is the central themes of Americans' relationship to media, our addictions to our screens and our shortened attention spans (Wallace perfectly predicted binge-watching, the TikTok generation, the ruinous effects of social media on our collective brains, and so much more. This book, I think, above all else, is a warning, one evidently nobody took heed of). The two more-or-less main characters (plus most of the side ones) are wonderful, deeply human, and compellingly presented, and despite everything that's flying around willy-nilly the book is still driven by the people in its pages. And I really enjoyed some of the book's more esoteric and bizarre scenes, specifically a game played by the kids at the tennis academy that replicates nuclear war with tennis balls. There were, however, things that bugged me. The plot doesn't resolve, at least not within the book's pages; you have to parcel out what occurs on your own (which, using google, I've sort of been able to). The last 400 pages, in fact, see very little motion of anything, and that can be frustrating. I also think that way more time should have been spent with some characters (particularly the two main ones) and way less with others—in fact, I will go ahead and make my biggest and most ruthless claim about Infinite Jest: it should have been two books. Telling two stories at once diminishes them both, and a book about the halfway house would have been tremendous, as would a book about the tennis academy. Whatever. I can't change it, but I do think I'm right. At any rate, this is the sort of book that sticks with you for a long time, and can be discussed for hours and hours on end without ever exhausting themes, topics, characters, or events. As an encyclopedic novel, it is worth reading if for no other reasons than shaking your head at its frustrations, laughing uproariously at its jokes, pondering its searching questions, and parsing its enormously complicated bulk long after you've turned the last page. If nothing else, it is interesting, so take that as you will. Since I've finished it I've told everyone I know that "if you ever, in your entire life, have a month to spare, read Infinite Jest." Rating: 9.6/10.

In Cold Blood

by Truman Capote

I hated In Cold Blood for a lot of reasons. From a certain angle, the book is the beginning of everything that's wrong with American culture: what Tom Wolfe called "pornoviolence," the eager glee with which the media sphere is dominated by the gruesome and the horrible and the sexual. Why did we watch OJs car chase? Why does Kim Kardashian have eighty million followers? For the same reasons this book was so successful when it came out in the late 60s: we crave terrible and erotic things happening to other people. The book tells of the real-life 1959 Holcomb, Kansas, murder of an innocent family by two weird loners. Capote called it a "nonfiction novel," which bugs me, because that's an oxymoron, and there are parts in his ostensibly true story that are objectively false. He follows twin storylines: the killers, before and after their crime; and the murdered family and the subsequent investigation. Throughout, I kept asking myself, is this really what we want to glorify? Capote has almost a fetish for the killers, instead of coming right and saying what it is they were: two pathetic losers who have Wikipedia pages for committing the most cowardly act imaginable. The book also makes its big "mystery" what actually happened that night in 1959—delaying it for some 240 of the book's total 330 pages—and when it finally comes, it is terribly anticlimactic, and takes only 15 pages. I disliked the book, and I loathe the cultural matrix that makes its success and enduring legacy possible. Rating: 3.5/10.

Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

This earned Eugenides a Pulitzer, to which I can only say that 2002, when the book was published, was a different time. Our narrator is Cal Stephanides, born a girl, then, as a teen, revealed to be neither man nor woman due to a genetic mutation handed down from his/her Greek ancestors. This book is the epitome of what I would call "loose" writing; a big, plush armchair of a book that tells you to get comfortable and stay awhile. This means much that could have been edited out was left in, unneeded details were kept, extraneous sentences remain, and the plot is in absolutely no hurry to go anywhere. Loose is not synonymous with "bad," though in this case it works against Eugenides because of the dearth of great sentences; often the loosest novels hold the reader's attention through the power and beauty of their language. The bigger problem with this book is its wish to tell two major stories: one, Cal's Greek heritage as manifested by his/her grandparents' immigration to America and their subsequently established family in Detroit, including Cal's parents; and two, Cal's hermaphroditism. That the second story does not begin until halfway through the book is, I think, self-evident of the misguided nature of attempting both goals. A first-person novel where the narrator isn't born until page 250—maybe not, sport. And that I preferred the family saga to the question of Cal's upbringing and self-discovery—well, I don't know what it is, but to still be introducing major characters throughout the second half of a book just rankles me. A promising but slowly disappointing read, though the character of Milton, Cal's dad, is an unarguably great achievement. Maybe he should've narrated it; it would have tied all the generations together, or at least saved this book from its own falling-apartness. Rating: 5.5/10.

King Leopold’s Ghost

by Adam Hochschild

The nonfiction train continues. The story goes that Hochschild stumbled across the atrocities in the Congo by accident, and then opened the West's eyes to a pre-Holocaust holocaust. Whether that's true, this book is compulsively readable and interesting, with blinding revelations on almost every page. I think what makes it successful is his refusal to bend to easy stereotypes on one side or the other: the natives are neither peace-loving themselves nor noble savages; the Europeans are neither wholly racist nor exemplary Christians (to say the least). I particularly enjoyed the portrayal, in all their complexity, of the major players that make this book, and made millions of dollars flow from the African interior for decades at the turn of the 20th century, propel itself. King Leopold II is both great villain and great propagandist. Henry Morton Stanley is both rugged adventurer and self-conscious man without country. E.D. Morel is both relentless anti-exploitation crusader and self-righteous Briton. However, these (white) men tower above the Africans at the heart of this book, not through selective reportage but Hochschild's admission that almost no African voices from the period survive to us. That's the hole at the center of the book, and the events themselves: Hochschild claims 10 million died, through disease, torture, murder, and other nefarious European acts (online you can find arguments for the number being anywhere from 1 to 15 million), and those 10 million have no say. That is the inherent flaw in the book, and though Hochschild is a great storyteller and an impeccable uncoverer of the available facts, this book about a holocaust becomes more sensationalist than somber, more Eurocentric than Afro-conscious. An enlightening, engaging, and yet somehow empty read. Important, though. Rating: 6.5/10.

The First World War

by John Keegan

Can I be angry with a book for doing exactly what it purports to do? Continuing my attempt to read more nonfiction, I researched books about World War I that gave a complete picture of the who, what, where, and when of the war. Keegan's appeared to have near-universal praise accorded to it for doing just that, so I went with it. 700 pages later, it's easy to see why: from the war's inception to its armistice, Keegan painstakingly and expertly lays out exactly who was where, doing what. Above all else, this is a brilliant work of military history: Keegan's forte is troop movements, geographic advantages, battle strategy, high seas techniques, weaponry, etc.; that is, war, the cold-blooded depiction of slaughter reduced to rounds of ammunition and hills and square miles. If you want to know what happened in WWI, this is the book. Keegan is also clearly just a warfare nerd; he frequently interposes tidbits from other wars both present and future to WWI (usually WWII, which he has something of a fetish for). You'll learn every name, date, and obscure French town obliterated by artillery you could ever hope to. With that said: this type of book, I realized, is not for me. It is not Keegan's prerogative, and therefore not present in the book, to delve into the minds of the man in the trenches. The focus is on generals and kaisers and grand strategy, and not, despite a few notable exceptions, the everyday brutality of life on the front lines. The why of the war, I grasped, was what most interested me, and that is what this book most lacks. It was the exceptions that I found most compelling. War is a horrific game of men killing men on a superlative scale, and it is their stories that I find myself most drawn to (think All Quiet on the Western Front). So I learned a lot but didn't enjoy doing it. Rating: 6.8/10.

Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

This is the kind of book that looks me square in the eyes and reminds me why I love reading so much at all. Brilliant, gripping, masterful—throw out any superlative you want, and it applies here. Gorky Park is a detective/mystery/thriller, but it is far greater than its genre gives it any right to be; it transcends into something in the realm of high art. The plot is stunning, complex without being labyrinthine, but it’s really the dozen or so major characters, each of whom has a specific and unique set of goals and obstacles, who drive this narrative. Our hero, Moscow chief investigator Arkady Renko, both leads and follows the reader on a thrilling ride through the Cold War, and the people he encounters are so real, so non-tropes, that they come blisteringly alive. Smith is also a tremendous writer at the sentence level—again, punching above the book’s weight class, so to speak—and some lines just about stopped my heart. From start to finish it just kicks incredible ass. It was so singular for me that I wrote way more about it, which you can read here. Rating: 9.6/10.

The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

I’ve made it a goal recently to read more nonfiction, and this was an excellent first in what will hopefully be a long string. I wanted a book that offered a complete history of the French Revolution, with all the names, dates, and places you can ask for, and that’s exactly what this is. Doyle has complete command of his material, presents the tremendous complexity of events clearly but without simplification, is a writer of strong, clean prose, and avoids the twin pitfalls of over- and underexaggeration. What he describes, Doyle knows, is interesting enough to carry its own weight, and he’s more than willing to have the people he writes about speak for themselves. He presents all sides with fairness and without judgment, and conveys it all with impeccable detail with both chronological and contextual considerations. There is also competence with both macro and micro forces—Doyle speaks of enormous troop movements with as much ease as he describes Robespierre’s psychological motivations. Clean, self-propelled, impeccably sourced, and compelling throughout, this book is both popular and academic history at their bests. Add in a few subtle doses of both true profundity and dry British wit, and you’ve got something really good here. I learned a ton and enjoyed every page. Rating: 8.5/10.

Love in the Time of Cholera

by Gabriel Marcia Marquez

Well…it’s in the title, isn’t it? This is one of the least compelling novels I’ve read in a very long time. It’s strange, and disappointing, and a pity that Marquez would turn his Nobel Prize-winning powers of observation to what is, without exaggeration, the most overused trope in the history of art: heterosexual relationships. The plot of this book, and I’m not kidding, is “Boy Likes Girl. Girl Doesn’t Like Boy. Girl Goes With Other Guy. Eventually She Ends Up With First Guy.” So….The Notebook. And many other millions of terrible rom coms. It is so boring. If it were a satire it would be of the highest order, but it takes itself seriously to the very extreme. Marquez evidently believes, as do his insufferable, deluded, cringey characters, that there is no more interesting nor important subject than having a crush (?). Come on, people! There are stakes that are higher than this! 350 pages on “unrequited love” that puts one to sleep. It is colossally simplistic, and horrendously boring. It’s a soap opera. It’s grown adults acting like blushing middle schoolers. It’s bad reality tv. You’d think by 1985 we’d be past this kind of adolescent baloney, but no. I’m sorry, Gabe. I know Pynchon wrote you a blurb. I know you’re respected and revered around the world. But your characters, and this book, break no ground in the pantheon of literature, or life. Rating: 1.8/10.

Winesburg, Ohio

by Sherwood Anderson

I should apologize to Anderson up front for having read his 1920 collection of stories about Rust-Belt small-town life pretty soon after reading Garrison Keillor’s 1985 collection of stories about Midwestern small-town life, because Keillor’s was so good it set a standard that any other collection purporting the same material would have a difficult time achieving it. Winesburg, Ohio is good, but not great, and what makes Lake Wobegon Days charming—its lack of a central character—is what makes Winesburg frustrating. There seems to be something missing from the book, and the more I read the more I think it was the complete lack of humor. Keillor understands perfectly that small-town life is extremely funny, but Anderson seems to believe the petty dramas of emotionally stunted, alcoholic, backwoods, uneducated, proud, small-town morons constitute some kind of noble suffering. Not really; these people are just weird loners who can’t say anything of real value to anyone else. There’s art here in the clear, clean, smooth sentences, but the content is off-kilter and unsatisfying. Rating: 5.0/10.

Tenth of December

by George Saunders

Absolute banger, and really I expected nothing less. This is the first full collection of short stories by Saunders that I’ve read, and each one is so good that it redefines the excellence of the ones prior. They have nothing in common save the marvelously tuned inventiveness of Saunders’ voice, his settings, and his modes of storytelling, which make characters come alive (even in worlds or situations that don’t exist in our own) to the point where you feel like they’ll step out of the page and say something weird/funny/heartbreaking, because that’s what Saunders characters do. Each story is funny. Each story is profound. Each story lets you see into something about human nature previously uncodified but now made concrete. And each one is a delight, a surprise, and a laugh at every turn. Saunders tackles heavy subjects: abduction, terminal cancer, futuristic prisons, alienation, class warfare, global wealth inequality—but he approaches them from angles so novel that you only realize the significance when the whole story has unspooled. Saunders gets blurbs from Pynchon. Do you know how hard that is? A modern master. Rating: 9.0/10.

The Natural

by Bernard Malamud

Disappointing, and the more so for being highly acclaimed. This book follows Roy Hobbs, baseball wonderkid, and then it doesn’t, because this book doesn’t know what it wants to do nor how to do it. Every character in the book has one of two problems: completely one-dimensional, or completely opaque. That is, everyone is a trope character, from the tightwad team owner to the mysterious dark woman (there’s actually like four mysterious dark women who are all so mysterious as to be entirely boring), the been-through-the-trenches coach, and then Roy Hobbs himself, who makes nothing but poor decisions for no reason whatsoever. This was Malamud’s first novel, but I still don’t think I can cut him any slack, because there are some serious flaws here: bad pacing, unfocused characterization, no plotting, too much mystery, jokes that don’t land at all, and zero compelling baseball action. It’s like the book expects the reader to make it great by putting together its strange and disparate pieces, but all I got was a headache. Even at the end, Roy’s tragic downfall is neither surprising nor interesting—I was even rooting against him, so thoroughly unlikable is he. Sorry, Bernie. I’ll read your other stuff sometime. Rating: 2.0/10.

The Anatomy Lesson

by Philip Roth

The final novel in the loosely affiliated Zuckerman Bound trilogy, this one was my favorite of the three even though it was undoubtedly the most incoherent. It’s basically five interrelated acts that easily could have been five short stories, and characters that appear in one act usually don’t appear in the others, save Zuckerman himself. This is the second consecutive Zuckerman novel to wrestle with the questions Roth faced after Portnoy’s Complaint came out, and in this one Roth decides the only way to make sense of it all was to go full-bore into the abyss. Zuckerman’s got everything going wrong: undiagnosable pain everywhere in his upper body, his hair is falling out, he’s unable to write, both his parents are now dead, his brother estranged himself, and he’s incurred the wrath of all American Jews for the way he satirized their sexual exploits. So after grappling with all this in New York for the first half, Zuckerman gets the idea to attend medical school back in Chicago even though he has no scientific background. What follows is a degeneration into obsession and near-insanity, culminating with Zuckerman’s drug addiction and other chaos. Hilarious as usual and for the first time in the trilogy Roth lets the curtain fall and really goes for it, which is a sight to behold. Extremely enjoyable for me but not for everyone. Rating: 8.5/10.

Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

It’s not really a novel, doesn’t have a plot, uses a first-person narrator who barely features yet is also omniscient, and has structural flaws that would get crucified in Fiction 101—and I loved it. Keillor, a born-and-bred small-town Minnesotan, has a perfect ear for the quirks and idiocies of small-town life, which he explores by laying out in precise detail the ins and outs of the lives of the people in Lake Wobegon. If you’re from the Midwest, relatable doesn’t begin to cover how accurate the book is, and Keillor’s brilliant dry humor had me laughing out loud frequently. He presents the characters without judgment, which only reinforces how infuriating and stupid they are, and it’s all here: generational drama, religious disputes, immigrant legacies, too many tomatoes, snow, stubbornness, ignorance, indignation, and a million slice-of-life stories that connect just enough to not be separate but not enough to be considered a unified whole. The thing they all have in common is the town of Lake Wobegon, where everyone sucks and everyone is someone you know. Rating: 8.0/10.

One Night in Turin

by Pete Davies

This is probably my second-favorite nonfiction book ever now. Davies, a British journalist with a Hunter S. Thompson-plus-English-dry-wit style, followed the English national soccer team for nine months before and during the 1990 World Cup in Italy. But this book is not just behind-the-scenes anecdotes about millionaire footballers (which are numerous and wonderful), but an exploration of late-80s British society more generally, made manifest through the “hooligan” culture of football fans. The complexities the relationships between fans, the media, power, money, and ultimately the players makes this a riveting account of an era that portends much for our own. Davies is a brilliant writer, and his understated but sharp cracks at the way money was taking over soccer (i.e., he repeatedly calls Italy during the World Cup “Planet Football”) and how the fans, the source of all the money, were being squeezed to the rear of the pack, are a sad reminder that soccer’s problems today are not new. This book seemed almost tailor-made for me, but I think even if you don’t like soccer you can get something out of it. Rating: 9.8/10.

Slocum and the Ketchem Gang

by Jake Logan

Another thriller, this time a Western. Jake Logan, if you hadn’t guessed, is not a real person, but the pen name of a consortium of writers who together have written over 400 Slocum novels (this one is #249). And reading only this one out of the 400 makes me wonder what exactly is going on in the others, since every Western trope possible is already stuffed into this one: cowboys, cattle rustlers, bank robberies, shootouts, saloons, whores, Indians, buffalo, racism, beautiful women, bounties, crooked bankers, lynchings, corrupt policemen, whiskey, and a ton of graphic sex. Short and taut, the audience for this kind of thing (it was published in 1999, unbelievably) is undoubtedly a boomer-male who pines for this “lost” America of muscular he-men with perfect jawlines and mysterious pasts bedding gorgeous women while fighting off the bad guys and saving the town, with handshakes and whiskey all around at the end. I put lost in quotes because the reality of the Old West is a bunch of very sweaty, smelly, desperate people fighting impossible and brutal conditions to survive long enough to reproduce. An interesting glimpse into mass-market genre fiction, which I really have never read, but honestly I feel like since I’ve read one I’ve read them all. I’m not going to rate this one because it wasn’t “written” to be analyzed or criticized, it was written to be read. And I read it.

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

by John Barth

This one is a trip. Very long, incredibly dense, almost impossibly complicated, and tremendously bizarre, this one is more “work of art” than “book.” It revolves around a 20th century American journalist mysteriously going back in time to the land of the Arabian Nights and Sinbad the Sailor, where he and Sinbad spend 700 pages swapping stories. Yes: this is a story about stories, and their tellers, and their listeners, a commentary on fiction and fact in general. There are also about four main plots and six sub-plots, with an ever-widening cast of characters, and each of them often tells the story of the same event differently, until the reader is so confused as to the truth that the point is the truth isn’t there to be discovered. This was ultimately somewhat disappointing to me because I’d invested so much into finding out the “answers” only to realize there weren’t any, and all the characters I hated didn’t get any comeuppance. Entertaining and at times funny, but extremely frustrating and sometimes even ridiculous. In particular the endlessly exhausted question of one character’s virginity was so tiresome (not to mention archaic) that I wanted to throttle the whole lot of them and say, “She’s had sex! Who the hell cares?” Anyway, if you’ve got the time, go for it, because there isn’t much online discourse about this one and I need to discuss it with someone. Rating: 8.0/10.

Zuckerman Unbound

by Philip Roth

This is a bit of a strange one, even from Roth’s prodigious imagination. It’s another Zuckerman novel, but what is most immediately off-putting is that it is in the third person—one of the few (only?) Zuckerman ones to not be told in his voice. And I don’t really think it’s necessary, this use of the third person; it’s such a close third that switching the “he”s for “I”s would be the only changes needed to make it first person. Anyway, it contains the usual Rothian elements: failed marriages, frustrated and passionate American Jews, lengthy riffs on “Oswald, Ruby, et al.,” and at its core a very complex character struggling with overnight success. But the first two sections of the book is dominated by major characters (including one based on the contestant in the famous 50s Quiz Show scandal) who simply fade without resolution in the latter half, and the plotlines of the third and final sections are wholly without introduction in the beginning. So hilarious, intelligent, wrenching, but a bit disjointed—both book and protagonist. Rating: 7.0/10.

The Saboteurs

by Clive Cussler and Jack du Brul

This one needs some background: when I was in middle school, Cussler was my favorite writer—he’s published 50+ books, all thrillers or adventure novels of some sort. This was what I was reading exclusively before I discovered literary fiction in early high school. So when I saw he had a new book out this summer, I thought what the hell—I’ll read it and see if this stuff is as good as I remember. Well, to my surprise, mass-market commercial thrillers still have plenty to teach about the craft of writing. Although Cussler is a James Patterson type and hasn’t actually written any of his own books since the 80s (in fact, Cussler died in February of 2020, 15 months before this book was published, which mean The Saboteurs is really by Jack du Brul), this book kicks ass. It’s a detective novel, book like 15 in a series I read religiously in middle school, that takes place during the building of the Panama Canal in 1914. The story is really interesting and I learned an enormous amount about the canal, but what really exceeded my expectations was the writer’s ability to convey information so effectively. This book would never be taken seriously in literary circles, but there is a special skill in crafting a character from top to bottom in just a few sentences, or pacing a scene correctly with the right sentence combinations, and du Brul does both those things with real competence throughout. So good work, guys. Rating: 7.5/10.

The Fishermen

by Chigozie Obioma

If you enjoy the power of words themselves, of their ability to be plucked from thin air into careful sentences that evoke beauty in and of themselves, then this one is for you. Obioma has a tremendous ability to sprinkle in several metaphors per page that are both wholly original and perfectly apt at capturing the sentiment he’s trying to express. And the power of the language enhances the already-engaging story it’s telling: the dissolution of four brothers’ lives in mid-90s Nigeria, during their childhood. How the bonds between them unravel, and with what shocking consequences, are set somewhat at odds with the grace of the language, as there are some truly terrible events in here that shatter the reader’s heart as much as his resolve. For an evocation of a time, place, culture, and lore, this book stands out, and that it is charged with an African mysticism makes it even more captivating. Rating: 9.0/10.

Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs

If you make it more than about 50 pages into this grotesque heroin fantasia, you’re braver than most Marines. Burroughs, evidently, wrote this deliberately to shock and provoke the staid picket-fence 50s American public—he wanted to “show them what’s on the end of the spoon”—and boy does he do it. It has every vice known to man contained within it, all laid out in a frenzied and gleeful prose that refuses to resolve itself into a “story.” I actually didn’t mind the lack of plot, but the book becomes somewhat tiresome as it just relentlessly depicts horrible people doing atrocious things, usually fueled by one or all of them under the influence of Junk (Burroughs’ blanket term for heroin, morphine, meth, and other hard narcotics). Inventive and brutal, a black satire of the purest order, a true expose of the worst of the human condition? Absolutely. Fun to read? No. I’ve read a lot of crazy stuff, and this was hard to get through. I can’t even imagine what Mom and Pop in the 50s thought. Rating: 6.0/10.

The Ghost Writer

by Philip Roth

Roth’s first novel to be narrated by his alter ego, Jersian Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer takes place over the single day and night of a young and ambitious Zuckerman staying at the home of his literary hero E. I. Lonoff. Those two are great, but there are some great flashbacks to Zuckerman’s family’s anger at his recently published story that features members of the family in a negative light. And then the absolute heart of the book, the chapter that made me say “There’s no way” out loud (spoilers ahead): Zuckerman, staying in Lonoff’s guest bedroom, imagines that the former student of Lonoff’s he met that night, twenty-six year-old lovely English major Amy Bellette, is none other than Anne Frank. Yes, that Anne Frank. He invents a forty-page backstory for how Anne Frank survived the war and arrived in America, stayed for ten years, until she just happened to be sitting in the living room that he walks into. Hilarious and deeply irreverent, as per usual with Roth. Great, great stuff. Rating: 8.2/10.

The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

One of the very few contemporary novelists worth reading, Lerner’s novels take you everywhere and nowhere, mesmerizing the reader with intelligence, humor, and endlessly inventive plot points that do nothing and everything. Heavily reliant upon his own life, Lerner’s autofiction reaches a crescendo in this book, which is about a great number of things—psychotherapy, high school debate, acid, bullied kids, anger, memory, Jews, infidelity, lake parties, etc. At its heart is the family of Adam Gordon, a white 90s kid from Topeka whose parents are psychologists (it won’t surprise you to learn where Lerner is from and what his parents do). Lerner, originally known as a poet, is in command of absolutely spellbinding prose, dense and supple at the same time, full of lofty ideas but very human characters to discuss and embody them. Everyone in the book is memorable, the structure is unsettling yet satisfying, and everything good and bad about the Midwest is distilled into less than three hundred pages. This book kicks ass, and I was enmeshed in it as deeply as a memoir. Rating: 9.0/10.

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

More social critique than novel, more caricatures than characters, and more depressing than Oliver Twist, Hard Times is Dickens’ three-hundred-page middle finger to Victorian society’s utter degradation of the working class. One gets vaguely confused by the book’s odd leaps in time and I was frustrated by the underdevelopment (and eventual non-resolution) of several interesting openings, but it’s still sharply funny in some places and does more than just tread water. Slim and quick, vitriolic and bitter, if you want the sordid facts of Victorian life and can never get enough of those comically pompous (or comically stupid, comically un-self-aware, comically rich, comically poor, comically everything) British people, go for it. Rating: 6.5/10.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Ernest Hemingway

Stunning. A 500-page exploration of the heart of life—war, love, death, loss, the forces that govern human relationships. Set amidst the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway’s famously taut prose evokes some of the most complex and subtle emotions we experience, expertly paced toward a thrilling conclusion. Though it only takes place over the course of four days, in those days the reader feels to have lived a lifetime, such is the profundity of experience Hemingway can portray. I particularly enjoyed his technique of translating the characters’ Spanish into a slightly strained but faithful English, rendering the whole book a sense of mysticism and constructed oratory. Something about this book reached deep down inside me and wouldn’t let go, forcing me to confront, as the characters do, both the best and worst of human nature and the societies we have constructed for ourselves. An acclaimed masterpiece more than living up to its billing. Rating: 9.5/10.

The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s second novel is a strange mixed bag of artificially heightened emotion, bored drunken rich Roaring Twenties parties, episodic war meditation, incoherence, and moral fable. The book’s protagonist, unemployed young rich New Yorker Anthony Patch, his wife, unemployed young rich beautiful New Yorker Gloria something or other, and their friends that run around the novel are easily read as portrayals of Fitzgerald’s circle, and the writer’s disgust with his characters is really disgust with himself. But his anger at his age, the decadence of the twenties, the hypocrisy of the rich, the moral degeneracy exhibited by the “successful,” is tempered with a sadness that the cycle cannot be broken out of—by neither his characters nor himself. That’s what this book feels like: stuck. Stuck in some glittering rut, turned over with its silver wheels spinning uselessly. Beautiful prose, reality-show-level shouting matches, glitz and glamor, WWI—and it’s all just empty, fake, a front for something that Fitzgerald clearly wants to exist but bitterly realizes doesn’t. Entertaining, but unenjoyable. Rating: 6.5/10.

Masters of Atlantis

by Charles Portis

A strange, bemusing half-satire that never really seems to take off, Portis’ tale of the fictional Gnommon society (which claims to protect the legacy and knowledge of the lost city of Atlantis) and its airheaded leader Lamar Jimmerson is something of a mess. There are too many main characters that are under-developed, too many side characters that are over-developed, too many jumps in time and space, an inexplicable and often pointless string of events that don’t really qualify as a plot, and a lot of promise going unfulfilled. Perhaps I just didn’t understand the joke, whatever it was, but the more I read the more I was convinced there wasn’t one—the book is better read as a series of mildly amusing episodes rather than a coherent narrative that reaches a profound destination. A fun but frustrating read. Rating: 5.5/10.

This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s first novel, published when he was only 21, shows the dazzling talent he possessed even at his tender age. Less of a straightforward plot-driven book than a character study—and by extension a study of an age—the novel chronicles the vapidity, hijinks, materialism, mood swings, cynicism, and discontent of the generation that came of age in the lost decade of the 1910s. Full of absolutely genius prose, with a poem or two mixed in, the book evokes an aura of a class of young men and women that dazzles the reader as much as it repulses him. Do I want to be like them or do I want to throw them all in a lake? is a question I asked myself more than once. Regardless of one’s answer, the book’s timeless portrayal of the disillusion of youth and the loss of innocence, trampled beneath love, war, machines, jazz, poetry—and the occasional drunken frat party—is enough to convince the reader that Fitzgerald was far from a one-hit wonder. Rating: 8.5/10.

Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, The American Matador Sidney Franklin

by Bart Paul (nonfiction)

A unique exploration of a world most of us Americans will never see nor understand, Double-Edged Sword is the rather remarkable true story of the “bullfighter from Brooklyn.” Part biography of Sidney Franklin—swashbuckling homosexual American bullfighter of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, who captivated audiences around the Latin world and suffered an incredibly graphic rectal goring—part introduction to the ancient art of bullfighting, and part gossip column about Ernest Hemingway’s many sexual adventures, the book zips along from continent to continent quicker than the bull charges at the strangely dressed matador. Insightful, occasionally bizarre, and short enough to keep one’s interest even as the material wanes, it’s a fine work of scholarship about a used-to-be-famous American who probably should be famous still. Rating: 6.5/10.

Staggerford

by Jon Hassler

The epitome of a hidden gem—I found this book in the “free books” bin outside A Novel Idea three months ago, finally read it, and was blown away. Set in the fictional Minnesota small town of Staggerford over a period of ten days in the mid-70s, the novel is a penetrating and brilliant look into middle America. Both resonant character study and exploration of small-town dynamics, Staggerford is deeply funny, endlessly entertaining, and ultimately heartrending—more Greek tragedy than simple pastoral. Our hero, high school English teacher Miles Pruitt, navigates the complex personalities of his town with grace and intelligence, fueled by Hassler’s evident compassion for the forgotten souls of the late 20th Century American heartland. I was stunned I had never heard of it and that the Wikipedia page isn’t longer. Rating: 9.0/10.

The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is masterful, though not for the faint of heart. It is the story of an unnamed father and son journeying through an unspecified wasteland in a post apocalyptic future. Their connection to and strength in one another is singularly moving, though the book is relentlessly depressing, full of ash, snow, burned cities, desperate cannibals, and some truly haunting imagery of people who have been pushed to the brink. But in his scarce, brutal prose McCarthy evokes a tender beauty at the way our best instincts, amidst nothing but ruin and death, may still survive and be passed on. Even the somewhat startling deus ex machina at the end feels mostly appropriate, as the entire novel reads like a Biblical fable. Rating: 8.6/10.

Giovanni’s Room

by James Baldwin

A brave and elegant tangled love story that takes place in the 1950s Parisian gay scene, Giovanni’s Room is a detached trip through stale hotel rooms, red-eye drinks, cigarette smoke, and the complicated stories men tell each other as they find and deny love. Narrated by a somewhat self-loathing American who has spent significant time abroad, Baldwin’s groundbreaking book is trim, taut, and charged with an authentic, impressively deep emotion rising from the sparseness of his prose. Whether the American and his beautiful Italian lover, Giovanni, find a happy ending, or whether they deserve one, is perhaps less important than how their relationship flares and dies. Rating: 7.0/10.

City of Glass

by Paul Auster

City of Glass is a strange, unsettling, highly intelligent novel that explores a variety of postmodern themes. Part hard-boiled detective story (that perhaps unsurprisingly goes unsolved), part philosophical discussion of the nature of language and identity (what is the Self?), and part just an increasingly strange romp through a dreamscape New York, Auster’s novel takes one unexpected and mysterious turn after another, all of them delightfully weird and thought-provoking. Perhaps the best way to describe the nature of the book is to reveal that the impetus for its plot comes in the first five pages when the main character receives a phone call from someone asking for Paul Auster. Metafiction at its finest. Rating: 7.3/10.

Bright Lights, Big City

by Jay McInerney

Short, sharp, and stunning, McInerney’s debut novel captured the spirit of a lost and disaffected generation. Set in mid-1980s New York, the novel follows the coked-up wanderings of an unnamed anti-hero through all-night parties, an office job he despises, the travails of his former wife’s modeling career, and the ultimate redemption he finds through the sympathy of others. Linguistically dazzling and remarkably evocative of a nightlife that is simultaneously alluring and repulsive, McInerney’s character is the poster boy for the yuppie crowd. Think American Psycho without the bloodshed and fear, but still with the biting humor and deep pathos that underwrote so much of the coke fiend culture. Rating: 8.4/10.

Lincoln in the Bardo

by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize in 2017, and with good reason. Saunders, who is best known as a short-story writer, puts his imaginative talents on full display here. Set over the course of a single night at the graveyard where Abraham Lincoln’s young son was recently interred, the novel features the voices of dozens of characters both living and dead, each imbued with a singular voice, a compelling backstory, and a painful longing to hold on to what they have lost. Funny, heartbreaking, nightmarish, but ultimately uplifting, Lincoln in the Bardo is a testament to the idea of conceptual fiction as a whole. Brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed, all other experimental novels stand in awe. Rating: 9.1/10.

The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian (nonfiction)

The Wax Pack is a wonderful road memoir of one man’s unique and moving journey across America. In the summer of 2015, Balukjian, a thirty-four year-old college professor and baseball fan, bought an old pack of baseball cards from 1986. He decided to try to meet with each of the players in the pack, which led him on a seven-week journey in a Honda across the country, where he discovers not just ballplayers and the game but a lifetime of his own memories. An entertaining elegy for how the past is always slipping from us, told by a likable and down-to-earth narrator. Rating: 7.5/10.

Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

A genuine masterwork. Doctorow narrates a gripping portrayal of the 1930s New York criminal underworld through the eyes of remarkable fifteen-year-old Billy, a shrewd and resourceful slum-dweller who rises from his station into the upper echelons of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Each sentence hits like a feathered sledgehammer, so precise and deft is the prose, while the story is by turns gruesome and gratifying, merciless and heartfelt. Gangsters have never felt more real, more terrifying, or more human, than the monsters Billy works among while still carving out a precise niche for his unique abilities. The city is brilliantly evoked and the social and class distinctions among men and women are rendered with penetrating insight. Rating: 9.0/10.

Julian

by Gore Vidal

Julian is historical storytelling at its finest. Vidal fictionalizes the life of the Roman emperor Julian Augustus, giving us a supremely entertaining narrative of a fascinating life, while also providing a rich tapestry of historical facts and details of daily life in the Roman Empire. Blood, lust, sword fights, sieges, cult rituals, betrayal, death, disease, horses, courts, eunuchs, intrigue, and a lot of very sardonic philosophers discussing the dubious merits of third-century Christianity, all rendered in elegant and witty prose—what else could a reader ask for? A delightful read. Rating: 7.5/10.

Child of God

by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy’s thin, taut, tense story is brutally revealing of a strange and violent culture, that of the Tennessee hills in the 1960s. The anti-hero of Child of God is Lester Ballard, a dispossessed, uneducated, disgusting small man who roams Appalachia committing atrocious crimes. The prose is sparse and beautiful, almost lyrical, but the novel’s frequent descents into the truly depraved feel self-serving and schlocky after a while. Not for the faint of heart. I leave it to you to discover whether Ballard earns his just reward. Rating: 6.0/10.

House of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewski

Ahhh, House of Leaves. What a trip. Ambitious, undeniably—but also overwrought, frustrating, and ultimately extremely tiresome to read. Multiple unreliable (and annoying) narrators, hundreds of pages of pseudo-scholarship, too many storylines, ridiculous ergodic efforts, and eventually a series of lazy cop-outs that avoid the questions that kept me reading at all. Oh, and don’t forget the 200+ pages of appendices that do absolutely nothing to illuminate what preceded them. There is a difference, I think, between an author being clever and an author being too self-satisfied. Read my full review here. Rating: 5.0/10.

Operation Shylock: A Confession

by Philip Roth

Operation Shylock is a masterpiece from one of our greatest writers. Another Roth 90s banger, the book is a haunting, hilarious, immensely intelligent and mature “story” narrated by “Philip Roth,” who discovers someone is using his name to spout radical and misguided ideas about the Jewish Diaspora. Traveling to Jerusalem to reclaim his identity, Roth gets mixed up in a grand comic adventure involving former Nazi guards, Palestinian revolutionaries, and the Israeli secret service. Every character is memorable and the prose is elegant beyond description. Rating: 9.7/10.

Seize the Day

by Saul Bellow

Seize the Day is a 115-page novella that does almost nothing to escape its trim length, its deeply unconvincing characters, or its inexplicable scene choices. Bellow continues to unimpress me, and he somehow won a Nobel. The dialogue is laughably poor, the main character has only one uninteresting emotion the entire time (panic), and New York City is so badly portrayed it somehow comes across as a boring place. Rating: 3.0/10.

Dispatches

by Michael Herr (nonfiction)

Dispatches is Herr’s formidably brutal collection of ruminations on his time as a war correspondent in Vietnam. Tragic, hilarious, profound, terrifying, and deeply revealing, Herr’s focus on the common American GI’s experience gives Dispatches a life and fever practically unknown in history textbooks. Some of the most incredible true sentences ever constructed left me feeling like I had just rolled wide-eyed out of the jungle. Rating: 9.5/10.

The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient is a unique dreamlike wander through the remnants of World War II and those it left in its wake. Four people—a nurse, a thief, a soldier, and a horrifically burned man, the patient—clash in and cohabit an Italian villa as the war ends. Ondaatje’s prose is almost otherworldly gorgeous, but the novel occasionally gets lost in its own web of fires and metaphors. Rating: 7.7/10.

Ordinary Men

by Christopher Browning (nonfiction)

Ordinary Men is a harrowing, haunting portrait of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a World War II German army unit tasked with carrying out exterminations of Jews during the Holocaust. The intimacy and immediacy of the book’s descriptions of the atrocities committed by a group of ordinary German working-class men raises questions that should trouble us all: if placed in their position, would we have done the same? Rating: 9.0/10.

Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

Antkind is a 700-page somewhat incomprehensible saga through one man’s delusional mind. Though very funny at times, the novel’s own sense of bloated importance and absurdity eventually make it seem overworked and deeply, deeply pointless. At around page 500, when I found myself reading about a narrator who was somehow in a futuristic dreamworld where a McDonald’s-like corporation is fighting robot clones for world power, my interest was fully lost. Rating: 5.0/10. Read my full review here.

The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

The Professor of Desire is typical Roth: a searching exploration of characters who are obsessed with literature, history, and sex. Wonderfully elegant prose and an unforgettable protagonist make the novel a deeply funny and moving inspection of what we all desire. There’s also the almost unbearably profound scene where the professor of desire himself meets a prostitute who claims to have serviced Franz Kafka. Rating: 9.0/10.

Omerta

by Mario Puzo

Omerta is standard crime fiction rendered more eloquently, containing the usual Puzo elements. The Mafia, the FBI, and a singular Sicilian-American family lie at the heart of this occasionally confusing but always entertaining novel about murder, loyalty, and pasta. Unlike The Godfather, unfortunately, Omerta takes place in the lost decade of the 90s. Rating: 7.2/10.

Oil

by Upton Sinclair

Oil, the novel upon which There Will Be Blood is based, is a long and sometimes engaging narrative through early 20th Century America. The first third of the book (the part actually about the oil game) is excellent, but all that follows gets lost amidst Sinclair’s relentless political message. Rating: 6.8/10.

Henderson the Rain King

by Saul Bellow

Henderson the Rain King is the occasionally hilarious, occasionally pointless story of how Gene Henderson, ordinary American pig farmer, becomes the “rain king” of a remote African tribe called the Wahiri. The book is written in first person, with excellent voice, but seems almost totally unconcerned with structural considerations or, really, meaning. Entertaining and elegant, sure, but not very memorable. Rating: 6.5/10.

I Married A Communist

by Philip Roth

One of five absolutely S-tier world-class novels Roth published in the 1990s, I Married A Communist is the affecting, infuriating, fascinating story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a fifties-era radio star blacklisted for being a communist. Told by Ira’s brother four decades later, Ira’s story captures the political and cultural fervor of the fifties with extreme precision and rapier satire. Brilliant, thunderous writing and the classic Rothian New England locales further ensure the novel’s success. Rating: 9.2/10.