Twelve Books I Spent My Summer Reading

Never one to shy from an intimidating text, I'd had James Joyce's Ulysses on my wish list forever, until my friend Zach ordered a copy and loaned it to me. After slogging through those 800 pages of intermittent coherence, I handed it back to him with the pride of a wounded soldier returning from a decisive battle: I had faced the enemy and survived. PUSD ought to be declared a real thing, though, because I definitely needed a little talk therapy to work through my post-Ulysses stress.

Then there was a major fight and Crossroads was locked down for the better part of a week. By an astonishing stroke of luck, the prison library had just shelved a Virginia Woolf volume that included Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando — arguably her three best-known novels — and I'd checked it out a couple of days before my cell confinement began. A lot of guys deplore lockdowns, but I relished those days of silence, having every meal delivered to my door (although, cheese sandwiches do turn tedious pretty quickly), and being temporarily released from all obligation. It felt like a four-day hotel stay, except for the part where I had to bathe in the sink every night. At least the entertainment was top-notch: Woolf wrote gorgeously.

Some research for my eternal work-in-regress, the novel I seem incapable of writing, then led me through The Book of Hadith — sayings attributed to Muhammad in the Mishkat al-Masabih, selected by Charles le Gai Eaton. And because that was such a heady thing, I followed it with Marion Herbert's German translation of The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I almost never read anything in German, so it's reassuring that my second-language literacy is still intact. Thanks to John A., for surprising me with the gift of this modern fable.

John also ordered me Umberto Eco's sinister quasi-historical fiction The Prague Cemetery (as translated by Richard Dixon), because he and I are both so taken with Eco's genius. The Prague Cemetery turned out to be my least favorite of his novels, but even Eco at his worst is better than many writers at their best, so thank you, John, for that.

A couple of fantastical reads followed — Jennifer Egan's vaguely Gothic novel The Keep and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde and Other Stories. Neither struck me as exceptional, but Stevenson's Scottish-dialect ghost story, "Thrawn Janet," succeeded on numerous levels and is highly recommended late-night reading for fans of supernatural tales.

My first experience with William Faulkner ended very well. I shut the cover of As I Lay Dying with a contented sigh. What a masterpiece! Faulkner surprised me by flirting with magical realism in this novel of poor Southerners' hardship. I'd supposed that his was a more terse, factual style of writing. In reality, Faulkner seems to me quite dreamily impressionistic. Marvelous stuff!

Switching gears, I moved on to a memoir. Missouri's governor, Eric Greitens, is the author of four books, including The Heart and the Fist, which details his extensive humanitarian aid work, training as a Golden Gloves boxer, Oxford University attendance as a Rhodes scholar, agonizing conditioning to become a Navy SEAL, and cofounding the nonprofit The Mission Continues with a friend. I came away with an affinity for the man I wouldn't have thought possible after seeing last year's campaign ads on TV — proof that politics exists in a different sphere of reality than the one where people actually live.

Then Nicholson Baker's novel Traveling Sprinkler proved an offbeat delight. (I'd expect nothing less from an author who once used for a novel's entire plot a businessman's trip up an office-building escalator. That book, The Mezzanine, was also a joy to read.) Thomas McCormack's thick-tongued advice, in The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist, counterbalanced it. My mother gifted me the latter because, well, you just don't know where fresh knowledge is going to come from. At least she got it for cheap.

Gearing up for a slog through serious work in October, I didn't want to commit to any long-form fiction. The Best American Short Fiction 2014, despite being three years old, showed up on the library's New Books shelf and was just the thing. Jennifer Egan and Heidi Pitlor edited these phenomenal pieces from the usual assortment of magazines — Meridian to The New Yorker, and everything in between. The Best American series have yet to let me down, but the short-story collections are perennial sources of excellence.

There's also something to be said about having my morning coffee with RED MEAT, the collection of Max Cannon comic strips that makes up in flavor what it lacks in taste. Emily C. surprised me with this, and it was more fun than a mouthful of crickets. I did what I could to savor the strips, reading no more than two each day. I failed at restraining myself. RED MEAT is addictive. In the end, I binged, not even bothering with excuses. My nerves are a wreck from all that caffeine, but at least I had some good laughs.

The List: Reading April through June 2017

Midway through May, a yearning for greater depth and meaning seized me, and I felt my mind give entry to some darkness. It felt futile to look for anything more than intellectual cotton candy around here. "Prison," I once wrote, "is no haven for the intelligentsia." It's just as true today as it was ten years ago, when that essay, titled "Literacy," was published. You would expect me to have learned sly tricks for overcoming mental stagnation, but my means are limited, and my best efforts are sometimes not enough. 

Prison food is awful, as are prison libraries. By what others have told me, Crossroads' are better than most. Having picked clean the shelves here, for the most part, only a couple (okay, exactly five) books are in circulation that I'm interested in reading. This recent hunger for meaty subjects brought me to finally check out the weighty volume of Emerson, which went a long way toward filling me up. Books that my friend John, and the ever-gracious Tom Wayne of Prospero's, provided were a real boon, too. 

This bout of heavy reading isn't done. If anything, I feel insatiable. Maybe I just haven't run across the precise philosophical meditation that'll tip me over, or the right poetry collection to shift my perspective just so. Maybe this hunger will fade, like so many moods, and I'll settle into a simple novel for some summer reading. If you've been paying close enough attention, though, you'll probably know as well as I do that this is a silly idea. I basically need a steady supply of reading that makes me think, if I'm going to stay sane in this stultifying isolation. 

***** 

Umberto Eco (Richard Dixon, translator), The Name of the Rose
My praise, in an earlier review of Eco's nonfiction, was unequivocal. The man was a brilliant, thorough scholar, and losing him, as the literary world did last year, bleeds a measure of contemporary letters' life away. Reading this, his debut novel, for the first time in April, I was struck not just by the intricacy of its central whodunit puzzle, but also by the prominence of certain preoccupations — literary lists, specifically, and medieval legends — that still held Eco in thrall thirty-odd years later, when he published those outstanding works, The Infinity of Lists and The Book of Legendary Lands. His fixations, bordering perhaps on obsessions, make The Name of the Rose the most substantive mystery novel I've ever read. 

J.M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus

To describe this vaguely surreal novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Coetzee, telling about its plot seems unfair. On the other hand, he probably didn't intend for the book to be strictly allegorical — and possibly not even metaphorical. It dances along a line between story and idea, never quite entering fully into the category of either. There is no Jesus here, only an orphaned refugee stripped of his true name and called Daniel. A benevolent older man called Símon looks after him as they struggle to make a way for themselves in a foreign country. But biblical allusions abound, and the parallels are sometimes striking.

Coetzee (whose work I waited years to read) plays with the flow of narrative and with readers' expectations, maintaining a flux at once disorienting and engrossing. Never, ever does he dispense what could be described as a certainty, which, for a certain type of reader, might be infuriating, but I relish this ambiguity for its truthfulness. As Chekov once put it, "lt's about time that everyone who writes — especially genuine literary artists — admit that in this world you can't figure anything out." Coetzee understands this and brings his canniness to the page memorably.

Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
What would happen if you set off a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane?

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light?

How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge capable of carrying traffic from London to New York?

Former NASA engineers don't generally retire to become cartoonists, but if Randall Munroe is anything like his former colleagues in aeronautics and space flight, the future of quality webcomics is assured. I assume that checking out this guy's very popular website, xkcd.com, will give you a healthy (or not-so-healthy, if you really get into it) dose of his super-geeky humor. If it's your cup of tea, buy his books. They're as funny as they are fascinating — also, they're useless. Could you ask for a more ideal diversion?

Christy Wampole, The Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation

A tide of vacuity has washed over society. Chronic distraction, knee-jerk insincerity, consumerism, indiscretion, and anti-intellectualism plague even the American universities, former hotbeds of enlightened thought. Our culture is empty. Our minds are atrophying. Our bodies are decomposing mannequins over which to drape the latest fashions. Our homes are mix-and-match simulacra of individual taste. Our workplaces are fluorescent-lit tombs. Our institutions and mass media are perpetuators of false dichotomies. And all of this is our fault, because we haven't done our due diligence, questioning, assessing, and appraising the vapid bullshit masquerading as substance in our lives.

You are by birth a card-carrying member of civilization and are thus responsible for it. No one really wants you to know this; things would be easier if you'd just passively accept your assigned role as a low-standards consumer, a human Pac-Man stuffing your face with pixels. There are other ways to go about life, like being three notches smarter than you thought you were and investing everything you do with aesthetic sensitivity.

Failure to do this, Wampole writes, means "a pointless life." It isn't a new idea that she puts forth, but the passion she musters to express it should be enough to wake even the lazy-minded and compel an emphatic yes. So rarely do I come away from an essay collection believing that its author and I see eye to eye, and yet Wampole's philosophy seems to exactly parallel my own. The Other Serious is a book about how to live, and why, that I wish could foist into the hands of every literate American and exhort them, "Read this!"

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone and Lincoln in the Bardo
I'd hoped that the essays in The Braindead Megaphone would be deeper than they turned out. Saunders's reportage work was superior, ripe with nascent meaning (particularly "Buddha Boy," which he wrote for GQ, about the fifteen-year-old Nepalese kid much of the world believed meditated his way out of eating or drinking for nine months). Unfortunately, this wasn't the bulk of the book. Blame my disappointment on its misleading title, plus the introduction, which asks, "Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general?" My pump was primed for lacerating social criticism. What I got was mostly a succession of short humor pieces suited to The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" department. I felt duped.

Lincoln in the Bardo, on the other hand, was stimulating. The novel's clever premise hinges on the death of Willie Lincoln, the young son of America's sixteenth president, and his burial in Lot 292 of Oak Hill Cemetery, where his soul is trapped. (The bardo, in Tibetan Buddhism, is a state of existence between life and death. Conduct, age, and the manner of one's death determine how long it lasts.) As little Willie is interred, the voices of others entombed and buried at Oak Hill narrate his arrival. None acknowledges their deaths, believing instead that they're simply convalescing in "sick-boxes" and will soon be well enough to return to their lives. Part historical fiction, part fantasy, Lincoln in the Bardo intrigued and delighted me so much, I read its entire second half in an afternoon.

John Cheever, Falconer
Whether true or fictional, accounts of prison life are generally avoided. Why read about the same circumstances in which I'm languishing? Ah, but there's the rub: no one's experiences are ever exactly the same, and sometimes there's an unconsidered truth in another's observations of what otherwise appears identical. So I conceded to read Falconer, a selection by my bookstore guy, because you just don't know about most things until you give them a go. And there it was, right at the end of the first hopeless chapter:

Like everything else, [the cellblock] was shabby, disorderly, and malodorous, but his cell had a window and he went to this and saw some sky, two high water towers, the wall, more cellblocks and a corner of the yard that he had entered on his knees. His arrival in the block was hardly noticed. While he was making his bed, someone asked, "You rich?" "No," said Farragut. "You clean?" "No," said Farragut. "You suck?" "No," said Farragut. "You innocent?" Farragut didn't reply.

While Cheever's protagonist is a retired man of means, a heroin addict in a loveless marriage, and probably guilty of killing his brother in a drunken fight, there's much in Farragut's way of thinking that I identify with. That is, Farragut's arrival at Falconer Prison was as shocking to him as it would be to anyone far-removed from the criminal element, and his existential crisis thereafter feels authentic. You don't have to serve years of a life sentence to imagine what goes on in the head of someone who has, but Cheever did so with such empathetic élan that I'd swear the man did a stretch behind bars. Farragut's dealings with the "fucks, freaks, fools, fruits, first-timers, fat-asses […] phantoms, funnies, fanatics, feebies, fences and farts" of cellblock F ring true. And even though pre-1970s prison life was vastly different than prison life today, incarceration's effect on the human psyche will never change.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (David Mikics, editor), The Annotated Emerson
So heavy as to be uncomfortable to hold, so festooned with explanatory footnotes as to be disorienting, and so inclusive as to verge, at points, on irrelevancy, this fat volume of America's (arguably) best-known essayist was nevertheless a profoundly fulfilling read. Coming to Emerson much sooner, I might have pooh-poohed his fervent advocacy for toil, for communing with nature, for putting down the book and learning from the world. Having had the experiences I've had, though, I'm now more than ready to say that a strain of Emersonian self-reliance would do today's America good.

Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Two qualities I appreciate in a person quite a bit are prominent in Chuck Klosterman: a propensity for deep thought about unexpected subjects, and a wry sense of humor. This is the fourth of his books that I've devoured, and it rivals his previous excellent work, I Wear the Black Hat, for poignant insights on an area of thought not much considered. But What If We're Wrong? draws to the reader's attention how society and its individual constituents always assume that they know the truth about x, that their predecessors' ideas about x were all wrong, and that nothing could ever come along to change what is "known" about x today. As examples of this phenomenon, he cites the cultural significance of rock music, the history of astrophysics, and the surprisingly authentic-seeming nine-season run of the TV series Roseanne. I would love to sit down for a beer with this unique thinker.

The (Belated) List: Reading January Through March 2014

Unidentified Photographer, Student, c. 1960

Friends and strangers sent me so many books to read this quarter that I barely kept from running into the wall that is the prison’s personal-property limit. I consistently had a stock of books in my cell, waiting patiently for my attention. It was a great two and a half months of reading. Then I went to the Hole for thirty days, a circumstance that cut me off all but entirely and kept me from posting this list in the usual timely fashion. But now I’m back on track and need to thank the people who generously supplied most of the titles below: John A., Sarah L., Chris Steadman and the Freethought Books Project, my dearest Mum, and Tom Wayne at Prospero’s, hands down the best bookstore in Kansas City, Missouri.

* * * * *

Umberto Eco, (Alastair McEwen, translator), The Infinity of Lists
I get so few opportunities for intellectual stimulation and aesthetic pleasure. This anthology, companion to a 2009 exhibit of the same title at the Louvre, provided both. It’s a gorgeous collection of artwork and literary excerpts from throughout the history of Western civilization, curated by Eco in a thoughtful essay on the myriad forms of that deceptively humble tool, the list.

Every glossy page of this startlingly hefty book is a feast for the eyes and brain, accounting for all kinds of lists, from visual lists (Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans) to lists of things of innumerable quantity (the gods in Hesiod’s Theogeny, the Greek armies in Homer’s Iliad, the moon’s fantastic sights in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso), to sacred lists (the Catholic litanies, the begets in the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, the Song of Solomon) and profane ones (Paradise Lost’s demonic hierarchy, slaughterhouse atrocities in Berlin Alexanderplatz, sixteenth-century bum-wiping options in Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel), to fantastical lists (Aristotle’s De Mirabilibus), to practical lists (the Ten Commandments), to lists of treasures (the holy-relic inventory of the Saint Vitus Cathedral in Prague), to lists of curiosities (the Wunderkammern — cabinets of wonders), to chaotic hodgepodges that don’t even resemble lists at a glance but resolve into them when considered in a greater context. What a marvel!

Albert Camus (Justin O’Brien, translator), The Fall
A novel replete with irony and mordant wit, in which, strictly speaking, nothing happens. Yet The Fall moves swiftly through the monologue that forms it, to a calculated conclusion that doesn’t leave an impression so much as apply a red-hot brand to the reader’s mind — the sentence for its verdict on modern man. Even more so than The Stranger, the infamous novel Camus published eleven years earlier, The Fall is a stunning piece of literature.

Bill Henderson (editor), 2013 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses
The Pushcart Prize is the high water mark for small, independent literary magazines and presses. Nominations come in from many hundreds of editors each year and the competition is stiff. I admit to entertaining a little fantasy of winning one myself someday. Meanwhile, I was happy to have this 500-page collection of last year’s winners — essayists, writers of short stories, and poets alike, including such personal favorites as Karen Russell and Joyce Carol Oates. The creativity and intelligence on display in this anthology is impressive. I’m going to have to start reading these every year.

Howell D. Chickering Jr. (translator), Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition
Probably originating from the eighth century CE, Beowulf is the oldest of all the great English poems. Even those who haven’t read it have encountered some form of the legend of Beowulf, the Scandinavian warrior prince. The tale of his heroic battles with fell creatures is one with enduring appeal. Demons, dragons, and death make for good story elements in any century — if you want proof, check the numbers for that CGI-animated Hollywood version of Beowulf that was released several years ago. I knew the basics from a prose retelling I read in elementary school, but it’s one thing to get the CliffsNotes version of a masterpiece, another altogether to dive into the sprawling bombast of this poem in something close to its intended form. (I say close because the poem was meant to be recited aloud by a bard. Me, I’m fresh out of bards at the moment, so this translation had to do.)

What adds so much value to this particular edition of Beowulf is Professor Chickering’s extensive annotation, before and after the poem itself, which gives historic, syntactic, and semiotic information that aids the contemporary reader’s understanding. One tidbit I picked from these was the connection and influence Beowulf had on J.R.R. Tolkien’s renowned tales of Middle Earth. Greatness begetting greatness.

Christopher Steadman, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious
What was I doing watching The O’Reilly Factor? The host’s an antagonistic blowhard, less interested in meaningful exchanges with guests than with promulgating the Fox News narrative as stridently as possible, and I think the reason viewers tune in to his show is the same as draws people to boxing and martial arts events: to watch some poor sod get beaten down. But when I saw the caption ATHEISTS ATTACK! in that angry red of which Fox News is so fond, I had to stick around to root for O’Reilly’s guest, Christopher Steadman, the Assistant Secular Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, and hope against a verbal beating.

Faitheist is Steadman’s memoir about his journey from Christian Evangelist to atheist, and about the interfaith work he subsequently undertook, bringing people together, no matter their religious beliefs or disbeliefs, in the spirit of greater good. It wasn’t quite what I expected when I wrote my letter to him, congratulating the young man for holding his own against Angry Bill. Not only is this fairly intimate glimpse into Steadman’s struggles with religion, it’s arguably more candid on the subject of his homosexuality. A confounding pair of issues for a youth to grapple with, and so an interesting read that adds a fresh, much-needed Millennial voice to the religious-conversion memoir genre (into which my initiation, nearly twenty years ago, was Dan Barker’s very good Losing Faith in Faith).

I do wish his final chapter had included more ideas for forging quality interfaith relations; although, most of the book’s readers, unlike me, will have access to the Internet and be able to visit Faitheist’s website for lists of those, if they’re interested.

George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context
”Look at the girl smile!” writes Trow in this ruthlessly truthful essay on the Media Age. “The more she smiles, the more certain it is that she represents something trivial, something shocking, or something failed.”

Falsity, pseudo-intimacy, indiscretion, agglomeration, schadenfreude, impermanence — all qualities that Trow attributes to contemporary culture, and even though the latter half of this books was first published in 1980, when TV was still the dominant fixture of empty lives, it continues to resonate, maybe more powerfully than ever.

Writing about the “I like Ike” slogan used in the 1952 presidential campaign, Trow isolates the empty language that a nation embraced: “From ‘like,’ all you could see was other Americans engaged in the processes of intimacy. This was a comfort.” But he might as well be referring to Facebook, where like has been rendered meaningless by users’ implicit agreement that it means anything at all.

Roland Barthes (Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, translators), Writing Degree Zero
My friend and occasional student in the insane, indecent pursuit of writing, Zach (whose blog can be read here), slumped in the doorway of my cell, hands shoved deeply in the pocket of his worn navy blue hoodie. I sat, my back to the desk. We were talking books. When he asked what I was reading just then, I pivoted to pull from inside a narrow cubbyhole the slim volume that is Writing Degree Zero. I held it up for him to read the cover.

“What is it?” he asked.

I held up a finger and turned to a page I’d read shortly before he showed up to converse. “Just listen: ‘It may be said that the whole movement of mathematical flow derives from an explicit reading of its relations. The language of classicism is animated by an analogous, although of course less rigid, movement: its “words,” neutralized, made absent by rigorous recourse to a tradition which dessicates their freshness, avoid the phonetic or semantic accident which would concentrate the flavor of language at one point and halt its intellectual momentum in the interest of an unequally distributed enjoyment. The classical flow is a succession of elements whose density is even; it is exposed to the same emotional pressure, and relieves those elements of any tendency towards an individual meaning appearing at all invented.’ I mean, why do I read this stuff? Semiotics is such tedious bullshit, and yet I keep subjecting myself to books like this.”

“That gave me a headache,” Zach said, pushing his glasses up to massage the left side of his head.

I laughed. “So I see.”

“It just came out of nowhere,” he said, still rubbing his temple. “Damn.”

“You’re serious?”

“Hell yes, I’m serious. This shit hurts!” He took the glasses off altogether and started knuckling the aggrieved spot. After a moment, when he quipped that he was having an aneurysm, I knew that he was fine. I also knew how I would review my experience reading Writing Degree Zero.

“Well,” I said, “there’s my review for the blog: This book made my friend’s head hurt. I’ll just recreate this little scene — you at my door, me sitting here, reading aloud from an almost fifty-year-old book on modern French literature.”

“Do that,” said Zach, recovered from his neurological event. “It won’t be helpful for your readers, but —”

I finished his sentence. “But neither will this book.”

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
A lunchtime trip up an office building’s lobby escalator — sure, why wouldn’t that work as the entire plot of a riveting novel? And yes, The Mezzanine is a difficult book to set down. Specifically because Nicholson Baker centers this novel (a thinly veiled memoir, I’m sure) around such a mundane setpiece, he’s able to engage in page upon page of brilliant, complex associations, in which his musings on shoelaces, brands of shampoo, LPs, shirt buttoning, milk, footnotes, paper towel dispensers, the number of times each year people rethink specific thoughts, workplace etiquette, and drinking straws go far beyond the point you’d think they, as subjects of deep contemplation, could possibly withstand. Baker has a keen eye, and his unrelenting inquisitiveness brings forth insights about the modern world that generally sit right under people’s noses. I’m not surprised that his name isn’t more widely recognized; it takes guts to look at things this closely and report honestly about what you see, because truth never sells very well.

Umberto Eco (Alastair McEwen, translator), The Book of Legendary Lands
In 1899, an American named Cyrus Reed Teed put forth a theory that the sun, moon, and stars are not heavenly bodies as we believe, but are in fact visual effects caused by our living inside the Earth, on its concave crust, like standing on the interior of an enormous beach ball. Hollow Earth theories were relatively common in Teed’s day, but his evolved into a sect that claimed to have scientifically verified the concavity of Earth’s surface using an instrument they called a “rectilineator.” Teed’s followers called themselves Koreshan Unitarians, and they were serious about this stuff. When their founder died in 1908, they believed (presumably because he told them so) that Teed’s body was imbued with certain properties that would prevent it from rotting, so they left it laying out on display for a while, until it became obvious that at least one portion of their belief system was in error.

Florida was where the Koreshans “proved” the inside-outness of our planet, and, regardless of how wrong the sect was, Florida instituted the Koreshan State Park in 1967, nearly sixty years after Teed’s death, in the city of Estero. I’ve been there. Today it’s called the Koreshan State Historic Site — a nice stretch of lush greenery, one part of which is occupied by a little building overseen by a docent who’s only too happy to tell you all about the Koreshans and show you the cutaway model of our hollow world, its continents curling up at their edges as if someone spilled water on them and left them out to dry without weighting them down flat.

The social and psychological factors of why people believe weird things interest me to no end. The Book of Legendary Lands is a tour of places once widely believed to exist: Atlantis, the islands of Homer’s Odyssey, the realm of Prester John, the Antipodes, Ophir, Taprobane, Utopia, the Austral Lands, Shambhala, Saint Brendan’s Isle, Camelot, the Earthly Paradise, Ultima Thule, Montsalvat, Mu, Schlaraffenland, Christianopolis, Hyperborea, and others that I’d never heard of before, plus our hollow Earth — all of which lived in the wishful thoughts and dreams of countless of our forebears. Of a kind with Eco’s previous literary cornucopia, The Infinity of Lists (see my review above), The Book of Legendary Lands offers hundreds of glorious full-color plates of artwork, maps, film stills, and photographs distributed among its nearly 500 pages — more than enough to stroll through and get delightfully lost in.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Hats off to Pirsig, a schizophrenic who underwent electroshock treatment, for writing about his philosophical journey into madness in such a way as to capture the attention of tens of thousands of inquiring, questing readers. This book was recommended to me, with great enthusiasm, many times over many years. I didn’t even know until last year that it’s a novel. But as a novel I find it thin. And although it’s thought-provoking, the philosophy it seeks to forward is hit-and-miss. The most pressing question Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance leaves me asking is anything but profound: how an essay about one man’s East-meets-West philosophy, tacked on to the framework of a lackluster father-son bike trip, became a bestseller not merely raved about but profoundly loved.

W.S. Di Piero, Tombo
The fifth title in McSweeney's poetry series, this volume’s slimness belies its beautiful content. Di Piero’s poems sparkle with lexicographical gems, like rhinestones on a hard-luck nightclub singer’s slinky dress, and they sing the same songs of yearning.

Jean François Arouet de Voltaire (Richard Aldington, translator), Candide
Tragicomic melodrama wasn’t what I expected from a vaunted philosopher like Voltaire. His classic naïf-in-the-world adventure of vicissitudes piled atop ill fortune is a highly recommended weekend read. The coincidence of this being the last book I read before everything went sideways for me is noteworthy.

Larry McMurtry, Boone’s Lick
Neither an erroneous conclusion to this quarter’s reading nor a book I wanted to read, this blah western passed a few hours of time in the very bad place I had the displeasure of occupying for the latter half of March and first half of April. If you read my previous post you’ll understand the draw of this terribly un-Byronic book.