Six Books I Spent My Fall Reading

There's a little story that goes along with the first book I read this season. My mother, wanting to contribute to literary well-being, ordered The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between, by Stacey D'Erasmo, from the section of my Amazon wish list that includes books on writing. Weeks later, I still hadn't received it. I joked with Mum that whoever inspected the package on its arrival probably saw that word, "intimacy," and assumed they were holding a sex manual. We had a good laugh.

Then Mum called the prison and learned from someone in the institution's mail room that The Art of Intimacy really had been flagged as potential violator of censorship guidelines. The book was "under review," proving yet again that assuming the absurd is often a very sane way of coping with reality.

D'Erasmo's little book was eventually cleared, and I read it with gusto. Her argument is that simple, standalone phrases, such as I love him, aren't automatically meaningful. Nor is merely adding names sufficient. "In order to feel the weight," D'Erasmo writes, "we sometimes have to use a mirror, a distorted image that will make the 'true' image appear. She claims that we grow closer through distance, through a gap of time or space or context across which we are somehow better able to apprehend a connection than if that which we seek were directly at hand."

Those words resonated with me. My world (or my concept of the world, which, it can be argued, amounts to the same thing) is largely defined by its distance – from those I love, from activities that most enjoy, from involvement with society at large. Yet I feel an intimacy with the world. I've often been asked how. I never had the words to explain. In her writing here, D'Erasmo exposes the necessity of separation in feeling close to something or someone. The space makes it possible.

An altogether different perspective on space (and time, and basically everything else) came from Buddhist philosopher David R. Loy's Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond. The author points out the similarities and differences between several Eastern ontological systems, including Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Sankhya-Yoga, Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, and Mahayana Buddhism (of which Zen is a part), before briefly discussing aspects of mystical Christianity – all in service of his argument that they share comparable concepts of nonduality. Along the way he cites a veritable who's-who of philosophy: Plato, Plotinus, Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Hegel, Kant, Derrida, Spinoza, Eckhart, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Suzuki, and others.

The premise of nonduality, essential in Buddhism, is basically that the subject is the object, and vice-versa. All is one. There is no inside and no outside. (Leonard Cohen wrote a nice poem about this, which was also about a lady friend's vagina.) In every pair of opposites, each contains the other: in emptiness, fullness; in darkness, light; in birth, death. It's that simple. And that complex.

Nonduality began life as Loy's doctoral dissertation. It's not-so-catchy original title was Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. Unsurprisingly, it reads a lot like the scholarly paper from which it evolved. It took me a while to read. Like oases in the desert, flickers of the poetic kept popping up amid the dry bits, particularly when he quoted Zen Master Dogen. But the words from the book that most deeply struck me were Loy's: "We look for compulsion in the world and therefore find it, because freedom explains nothing and gains us nothing."

Satisfying in their own way were the linked stories in Sherwood Anderson's classic collection Winesburg, Ohio. By accretion they take on greater significance, greater weight, as the reader slowly approaches an intimacy with the town and its inhabitants. In that way, Winesburg, Ohio is a lot like the Spoon River poems of Edgar Lee Masters. Both books are of a type; the fictional characters who populate them get under your skin. You share something with them that can't be communicated. That, or they speak to you in a visceral way, which says, I am not real, but I am most assuredly human.

It was thanks to the kindness of Kristie H., a fellow book lover whom I don't even know, that I was able to finally read Winesburg, Ohio. I'm grateful for the other book she ordered for me, too, Dance, Dance, Dance, by Haruki Murakami. It's the seventh Murakami title that I've now read, a sequel, of sorts, to A Wild Sheep Chase. Here too appears the nameless, mostly aimless protagonist. Here too appears the (correction: here too appears a) Dolphin Hotel. Here too appears the Sheep Man. It was a far more mystifying, more entertaining read, for me, than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was. I apologize to no one for saying so.

Dean Young's voice in Elegy on Toy Piano is similarly unapologetic. This collection of his often-surreal poems dates from the dawn of the millennium but bears a few elements that seem to anchor it to an even earlier period. Among these are references to VCRs, AIDS medication, and Fritos, a corn chip whose popularity, I'm sure, peaked in 1994.

Some poetry has a shelf life. At their best, though, Young's poems feel timeless and, if not universal, then at least specific to a point that I'm able to comprehend them. In this collection, I especially love "Alarm Clock," which takes what the reader thinks is a familiar subject and turns it on its side a few times before righting it again, a divertissement before setting the table.

"Alarm Clock"

     I felt like a raven going on revelation alone.
     Deep forest I was in deep forest chased.
     In my mouth-hole an alarm clock.
     I couldn't stand the ticking.
     The earliest I ever set one was 3 for an airplane,
     4 for a pill, 5 to write fast without thinking
     but generally I do without.
     Orpheus, in disgust, threw his alarm clock
     into the river where it went on ringing.
     Time is honey so the clock buzzes.
     Naked beside me! Naked beside me!
     Da Vinci's sketch of an alarm clock –
     still not fully understood.
     Voice command.
     Croak coax.
     The wind blows the curtains
     making it easier for ghosts to appear.
     Clank of the lightning factory, clank
     of the leopard's leash.
     There is no pleasure like leaving
     before dawn in last night's clothes.
     Light snow or thick dew in the grass –
     no one's passed this way before.
     The note you left needed only a few words,
     no explanation where lies could creep in.
     Your eyes, blinked clear, won't squint or glance off,
     it's the stars that turn their faces away.
     He or she is or is not the one you love
     and you cannot stay. The dark
     turns to mist and the mist cannot stay
     but for once there's no need for alarm.
     You're getting a good head start.
     Maybe the world isn't made of dust.
     Maybe you won't make another mistake.
     You're as young as you'll ever be.

Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive came (thanks to Kristie H. for this great read as well) heaping with accolades and awards. It was among the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2019 and a bunch of other best-ofs, and I get why. Luiselli writes here in a formally inventive style, framing her book with an atypical family road trip set against the silent epidemic of disappearances by Mexican children at the US border. In this way she makes the impersonal very personal. I enjoy reading books by BIPOC writers with strong voices, like Luiselli's, because they permit me, a white, cisgender, middle-aged male, to visit another body for a while and come closer, by however small a degree, to understanding other humans' lives.

Eight Books I Spent My Spring Reading

Haruki Murakami has written very fine, very bizarre works of short- and long-form fiction, of which I've read over half. I feel confident in saying that I know his work well. So when my mother made a birthday gift of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (translated by Jay Rubin), from my Amazon wish list, I thought that I knew roughly what I was in for. More than 600 pages later, I realized how wrong I'd been. For my taste, the story of Toru Okada, an aimless thirty-something protagonist (like almost all of Murakami's narrators), and his search for, first, his cat, then his wife, meandered along, in stilted prose, for far too long before arriving at its propulsive ending. Part of me wants to blame the translation, the language of which feels stilted and out-of-date. The story never cohered for me. I found myself wondering if other readers agreed, so I had it googled. As it turns out, a majority of his fans call The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle their favorite Murakami book. I'm baffled as to why; it's easily my least.

For no reason but to be nice, a fellow book-lover named Kristy H. sent me several titles. I dove straight into Junot Díaz's story collection This Is How You Lose Her. I first read several of its stories in The New Yorker, about a decade ago. These tragic, profane monologues about love and loss confirm that Díaz is a writer with a unique voice, a prodigious talent deserving of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize he won for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which I also read – and relished).

Kristy also sent the classic Margaret Atwood novel The Handmaid's Tale. This was a reread, too. The narrative of a woman subjugated and half-brainwashed by an oppressive religious regime in what used to be the United States was worth revisiting. Last time, I'd been seventeen or so, and the book seemed like more of a warning against the perils of theocracy; this time, possibly because of post-#MeToo awareness, its central horror seemed more the mistreatment of women. Either way, Atwood was at the absolute top of her game when she wrote The Handmaid's Tale. I don't know if I'd want to watch the TV series, though. The novel's ending seems too perfect a thing to change for the sake of reaching a different audience.

On the opposite side of the spectrum sits Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's infamous tome, The Illuminatus! Trilogy. It had a lot going for it – the recommendations of not one but two friends, enthusiastic blurbs from reviewers, and a longstanding reputation as a cult classic. But a lot of the book, a fantastical tale of conspiracy and absurdity aswim with references and concerns that were probably foremost on the minds of its readers in the late '70s (the JFK assassination, Watergate, the Black Power movement). These bugbears have since lost dramatic punch. Or, maybe, I'm just not as easily amused as I used to be by absurdity and dirty jokes for their own sake. In either event, I wish The Illuminatus! Trilogy hadn't taken up space on my Amazon wish list for as long as it did.

The last book in "the Kristy Trove," Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes (translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin), contains a better brand of weirdness. Its first story, "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," is actually an excerpt from the novel I started this quarter reading. (The excerpt, standing alone, is much more enjoyable.) I usually enjoy Murakami's short fiction quite a bit, and this great collection was no exception. Thank you for these months of good reading, Kristy! I really appreciate them.

At various points along the way, I had my nose in dharma teachings. Because of popular misunderstandings about enlightenment (as the term is used in Buddhism) most people, especially in the West, are surprised and a little confused by the Zen tenet that we are – every single one of us – already enlightened, pure and complete, lacking nothing. Our enlightenment is just asleep, lulled into its inactive state by a world of phenomena and conditioning. In his Essentials of Transmitting the Mind-Dharma, the ninth-century Zen master Huangbo Xiyun reminds us again and again that there's nothing we have to do, nothing we need to attain, in order to cultivate our enlightenment. We already have what we need, right here, right now.

Commenting on this, the Korean Zen master Subul Sunim writes, "After having an 'experience' through your meditation practice, there is nothing you need to do but pass the time by going along with the flow of causes and conditions." The book I'm quoting from is A Bird in Flight Leaves No Trace, translated by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Seong-Uk Kim, a collection of commentaries (originally delivered as lectures) on the text by Huangbo mentioned above. I read just one account in A Bird in Flight each day, every time I locked down for the 11 o'clock count, then sat with it awhile, letting my mind orbit what it just took in.

Since I was usually in a receptive state after reading Sunim, noontimes often found me picking up Timothy Donnelly's latest collection, The Problem of the Many, and reading one or two of his poems in that particular mindset. This book came as a gift from Emily C., a delightful mid-spring surprise. (Thank you, Emily.) I love the voice that Donnelly writes with – by turns academic and plainspoken, mating in his poems the highbrow and the low-, to breathtaking effect. (I described his work as "breathtaking" before, when I wrote this May blog post in response to "Bled." It's true here, too) His newest collection seems less emotionally fraught, and less personal, than The Cloud Corporation, which I loved. But poems like "Diet Mountain Dew" and "Chemical Life" offer similar syntactic and linguistic delights without weighing as heavy on readers as many of those earlier poems did. Nevertheless, from here, too, points an accusing finger, drawing attention to our shirked responsibilities as stewards of history, of our race, of the environment, and referring back, again and again, to a hope that we flawed humans aren't a lost cause, and to a belief that all that exists is connected. The opening poem's final lines (following references to the Ridley Scott prequel Prometheus, a snake in Texas, and Baudrillard's America) phrase it well: "let particles of us entangle / knowingly with those of a gold encyclopedia / in the ruins of Vienna or an ear of teosinte across /an open border, a common source of being, before I / die – let us be, let being be, continuous, continuous."

The simply titled Look and See by Myokyo-ni is made up of twenty-five Buddhist teaching stories, with a commentary on each. The author, a Zen master from Austria, studied for more than a decade in Japan before becoming a nun and assuming the position of abbess at a British monastery. She practiced in the Rinzai tradition, which places particular emphasis on discipline. This, coupled with certain biographical facts, could be responsible for the old-fashioned writing style here. The stories are certainly ancient. Some, like "The Blind Men and the Elephant," are even familiar to Westerners. All have an invaluable lesson to impart.

Fifteen Books I Spent My Spring Reading

Last season's reading list ended with some speculative-fiction collections. The SF trend continued into this season, beginning with the tense, eerie China Miéville novella This Census-Taker. Miéville's novels, most of which I've read, have made him my favorite SF writer, edging out M. John Harrison by a mere hair's breadth (an irony, since Miéville's bald). This Census-Taker reminded me of why. It's as powerful as it is short, as vivid as it is obscure, as touching as it is unsettling — a perfect balance, especially since I don't want too much of any one thing while engaged in my own novelistic effort.

The next book I read was David Mitchell's 2015 novel, Slade House, which occupies a prominent place in the world Mitchell's built with his other novels, Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, and so on. Their interconnectedness rewards ardent fans, but I wonder if Slade House isn't too reliant on that mythology. Newcomers might not appreciate this quasi-haunted-house story's grand climax, dependent as it is on the appearance of a very, very old friend to those in the know. Being in the know, I enjoyed every page.

Then NW: A Novel, by Zadie Smith, revealed the sort-of sordid world of British government-housing residents. That same week, Sigmund Freud's essay collection The Uncanny (as translated by David McClintock) offered up the Austrian psychoanalyst's examination of the mind's approach to strangeness. The latter was a delightful surprise gift from Emily C., whose curiosity about human psychology rivals my own and leads us to some truly great conversations. I absorbed the Freud book in two sittings, during the second-to-last institutional lockdown I endured before my unceremonious transfer from Crossroads Correctional Center. With my cellmate so present it was hard to shift my mind into novelist mode. I sublimated the urge to write and did some research instead — something old Siggy probably would've had a thing or two to say about.

Before that lockdown was lifted, I'd borrowed a Christopher Hitchens book from Crossroads' library. The late bon vivant wrote Mortality, a short collection of atheistic deathbed essays, over the agonizing months he languished from esophageal cancer. I tore through it in a night and, the following morning, picked up the most recent fantasy by Hitchens's friend and fellow member of the unbelieving literati Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which didn't stir me as much as Rushdie's previous novels have — but they can't all be masterpieces.

To wit: the good Lady V. indulged my deathless inner fanboy with the gift of Ready Player One, Ernest Cline's massively successful '80s-obsessed sci-fi adventure. My curiosity had been eating at me for years. Finally getting my hands on a copy, though, was a mixed bag. I can't remember another book that I liked so much even while wincing at its many flaws. Judicious editing would've caught the factual/continuity errors and, maybe, massaged the obnoxious exposition smoothly into the streamlined story line. Will Steven Spielberg's film version be as fun? I'll give it a watch, even though I'm leery.

Alternating between lowbrow and highbrow for a few days thereafter, I bounced between Stephen King's Desperation and Markus Gabriel's anti-"neurocentric" I Am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century (translated from the German by Christopher Turner) as my mood demanded. I'd never read any of King's horror, so my friend Jenna recommended that I jump right into Desperation to see what I've been missing. The Gabriel book was from my wonderful mother, who knows so well my tastes and ordered it from my Amazon wish list. No shocker here: the philosophy book's oppositional stance to the increasingly popular idea that the fatty goo of the human brain constitutes the mind made a deeper impression than the gore-fest. At least now I know what readers get from King's fiction that draws them back again and again, even though one round was quite enough for me.

Following the riot at Crossroads was another lockdown. About sixty hours later I was en route to a different prison altogether — time used for handwriting some long-overdue letters and cards to friends, and for reading. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from a Dead House (as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, but commonly titled The House of the Dead) might not seem like ideal literature for someone under lock and key. It's Dostoyevsky's novelization of the eight years' hard labor he served, a political prisoner, in a Soviet gulag in Omsk, after sharing a letter criticizing Stalin. I was halfway through the book on the day of my transfer and finished Part Two on the opposite side of Missouri, the week after. Whether or not it's ironic that the novel ends with its narrator's escape I leave to minds more inclined to long associative leaps.

Having gotten a high enough dose of literary masochism to last me awhile, I picked up several pleasure-reads at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center as soon as I could: Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun (translated by Philip Gabriel), A Wild Sheep Chase (translated by Alfred Birnbaum), and the disappointing After Dark (translated by Jay Rubin); the late, great George Carlin's hilarious hodgepodge, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?; and Colson Whitehead's stunning speculative pseudohistory The Underground Railroad: A Novel. ERDCC's library is roughly three quarters the size of the one I left behind at CRCC, but there are enough books of interest on its shelves to pack these quarterly reading lists for a while yet.

One book that I began to read but, much to my own disappointment, abandoned after 149 pages deserves mention: Swann's Way. I had the best intentions. In truth, though, this first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part Remembrance of Things Past, in which he writes in minutest detail and at great length about his childhood, recalled abruptly and all at once after taking a bite of a little tea-cake, was just too much for me to handle. It felt like a grind the instant its novelty wore off. Conceptually, I think it has value; as a readable work, though, I find it lacking. A pity. I really wanted to enjoy this one.

Eight Books I Spent My Fall Reading

Birthday season, perennial bringer of many excellent literary gifts from loved ones and strangers alike, did not leave me without reading material worth crowing about. Sure, I finally got around to the Sherman Alexie collection Blasphemy (shipped to me six months prior, by Tom at Prospero's Books in Kansas City) and Anthony Doerr's magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See. But more meaningful were the books sent by the people who care what literature enriches my days.

To wit: ever so thoughtful and generous, Emily C. ordered a trifecta of marvels into my hands. First was Joe Wenderoth's insanely clever (or, perhaps, merely insane) Letters to Wendy's, which includes such gems as

SEPTEMBER 18, 1996
I don't think Wendy's coffee has such a good taste. This is not to say I don't like it. I like it very much. Its poor taste keeps my intentions clear; I drink coffee for the enthusiasm-prod, not the taste. The taste, when it is too pleasant, can distract one from what matters most — the deep writhing jolt. Of course some taste is necessary so the jolt seems, at bottom, inadvertent.

and the poignant

APRIL 4, 1997
One is accused of sensationalism when one focuses on pain. Rightly so when one is using pain to re-create a pre-existing sensation. But in truth pain has never been before, exactly, and its shadow has always concealed its coming fullness. To know this is to haul out the most fundamental question a speaking animal can attempt. The question is not: what is creating pain? The question is: what is pain creating?

Then were the stimulating quasi-realities depicted in the short-story collections Tenth of December, by George Saunders, and Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel and Theodore Goossen). Both delivered just the type of eccentric, plausibility-agnostic tales I often need in my life.

Following those, I descended into playwright Jeff Jackson's dark, fraught novel Mira Corpora, a gift from the good Lady V., who'd never, ironically, read such a harrowing, nihilistic misadventure of wayward youth herself. Then I moved to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter — a gift from my mother, who read Mann in the original German long ago enough as to hardly remember his luxurious descriptive power or frank homoeroticism. Discussion followed.

Lana C.'s surprise to me was an Amazon package containing three books from my wish list.  Greedily, I propelled myself myself through Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins, before year's end. Robbins was one of my father's favorites — and now I finally know why. Fun, philosophical stuff.

2018 finds me with several more promising books on hand, and a few on the list to borrow. I can hardly wait.

The List: Reading April Through June 2015

Master Leiden, Still Life of Books

If books were money, my little personal library during the past three months would have made me feel like a multimillionaire. So many to choose from! Unfortunately, this embarrassment of riches was untouchable, thanks to one maddeningly time-consuming undertaking, doctoring a friend’s book manuscript, which took away any prospect of leisure reading. To complete it, I even put aside my own writing projects. It made for some extraordinarily trying weeks. Dropping that fat envelope in the mailbox (it wouldn’t fit through the slot; I needed a guard to unlock the box’s lid for me) was a literal and figurative weight lifted, a liberation from bondage.

And so, at last I can get on with reading all the books that piled up, finally sit down with them and fully appreciate my riches, eyes, fingers, nose, mind, and heart.

For the books I received between April Fool’s Day and now, I want to thank Ben T., Sarahberry (twice), the Freethought Books Project, my dear friend Mike, Kyra at Midwest Pages to Prisoners, Lady Val, and my incomparably wonderful mother, Evelyn. Your spontaneous gifts made me feel like a suddenly wealthy man.

* * * * *

Fred Chappell, Familiars: Poems
“It’s all about cats!” Lefty said when he lent me his copy of Chappell’s latest collection. I think he was a little let down. After the noteworthy Midquest, which I read and reviewed here last year, Lefty expected more grandness than ailurophilia out of his favorite poet. Familiars isn’t without worth, though. The poems’ frequently simple structures and rhyme schemes make them accessible, while Chappell’s wit gives readers craving depth a little nook in which to sink. A forward tells us that most of the pieces here originally appeared in a limited-edition book cleverly titled Companion Volume, the paper for which was made out of cat hair.

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
I like novels like this, about things that didn’t happen but also, in a way, did — that happened maybe in ways different in the details of names, words spoken, thoughts had. Sri Lanka has seen such bloodshed and horror, and Ondaatje comes at his native land unflinchingly. His characters shadowed and unknowable (though not unrelatable for that), his country appalling and beautiful, Ondaatje’s written a book that’s very much like life itself.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road
My first encounter with Kerouac, the man credited with naming and embodying the Beat Generation. The book contains its own synopsis in these three lines of dialog from its penultimate act:

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”
“Where we going, man?”
“I don’t know but we gotta go.”

I wanted to tell Jack that it was okay, that he could calm the hell down and take a breath or two, but of course he can’t, having now been dead for forty-five years.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Although I was a young weirdo of eighteen when William Seward Burroughs died, I wasn’t versed in the Beats or familiar enough with 1950s counterculture to recognize the significance of this event without someone explaining it to me. My car only had a factory AM/FM stereo in it, on which I listened to a lot of KKFI, Kansas City’s independent radio station, though, and late into the night, for the entire week of Burroughs’s death, they broadcast readings of the poet’s work. I have distinct recollections of hurrying to the employee parking lot when my late shift at Kinko’s ended, so I wouldn’t miss one minute more of Bill’s terse, nasal recitations than absolutely necessary. What was it I was listening to? I couldn’t have told you — not satisfactorily — but the language was insane, obscene, and still, forty years after its writing, at least for a young would-be poet sitting in his piece-of-shit car behind a copy shop at 1 AM, entirely new.

Is Naked Lunch a work of literary art or a disgusting stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge? “I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity,’” Burroughs himself admits on the page. “I am not an entertainer.” But aren’t these impositions the very stuff of being a writer, an artist? The Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in 1966, declared the book to have at least one iota of redeeming social value, in its decision not to ban it as obscene. So that’s one thing, but the fact that the question can still be legitimately asked….

Magdalena Zyzak, The Ballad of Barabas Pierkiel: A Novel
Publishers Weekly declared that Zyzak’s debut novel would “infuriate as many readers as it delights.” For this reader, it did both. Funny, yes. Clever, yes. But even the funniest book needs to ease up on the humor and offer something solid, something real that makes you feel that what you’re reading isn’t purely a lark, bereft of purpose or point. After a while I wanted Zyzak to give it a rest with her yokel poking (I get it — the villagers in her Eastern European town are dumb!) and give us a sympathetic character worth rooting for. By the novel’s end, after hundreds of pages’ wishing, she reveals what I feared all along: none of what has gone before matters in the least.

Bill Cheng, Southern Cross the Dog
Episodic and supremely atmospheric, Cheng’s first go at a novel chronicles a young black man’s coming of age not only the twentieth-century American South but also under terrible bedevilment. The novel’s voices ring clearly. Cheng has a real knack for dialog that brings to life the fetid swamplands and small-town nights in which his characters swelter. He conjures a bluesy brand of magical realism. And he never tips his hand as to whether the vexations his protagonist, poor Robert Chatham, endures throughout are the work of an otherworldly curse or just really bad luck. It’s an ambiguity that only adds to the book’s appeal.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Just the encouragement I needed. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard offers essays on writerly existence, which zing around hilariously, sit stoically pondering, and marvel at its strange little wonders. Readers who are writers will come away from these pages refreshed and emboldened. Those who aren’t may gain a new perspective on this obsessive, misguided, solitary, masochistic avocation.

Taner Edis, Science and Nonbelief
Aside from having a name suspiciously resembling an anagrammatical nom de plume, Taner Edis is also notable for his work in the field of theoretical physics. His subject here is the meeting and diverging of two realms of thought — science and religion. I was surprised by the noncommittal stance he takes. He makes only a few implications about his opinion, which seems to coincide with biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” (the idea that science and religion address entirely separate interests and competencies, and therefore cannot encroach on one another’s territory). Rather than preach, Edis teaches the controversy, so to speak, offering what I consider even-handed considerations of competing ideas. Starting with a succinct history of science, philosophy, and doubt, Edis wends his way through human thought patterns, evolution controversy, consciousness, fringe science, religious meaning, and morality, and lets you reach your own conclusions.

Bill Henderson (editor), 2014 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses
The 2013 Pushcart Prize collection made a real impression on me, such that I said in my review from that quarter, last year, that I was going to have to make the series an annual tradition. The selections from 2014 are, at worst, pretty damn good. At their best, they’re amazing. I was most affected by Pam Houston’s essay on truth in nonfiction (“Corn Maze”), Sarah Lindsay’s marvelous “Origin,” Bob Hicok’s “Getting By,” and the Bill Cotter essay from The Believer, “The Gentleman’s Library, a Nowaday Redux.” I was also surprised to see my friend Davy Rothbart’s “Human Snowball,” from his entertaining collection of personal essays, My Heart Is an Idiot, as the volume’s very first offering. I hadn’t even known he’d been nominated.

Miranda July, The First Bad Man
July’s debut novel reads a bit like a contemporary, feminized Confederacy of Dunces, which is good, since it was talked up to me so much that I was afraid it might not live up to the hype. I delighted in Toole’s posthumous novel even as I rolled my eyes at its protagonist, and The First Bad Man had a similar effect.

The meek, lonely Cheryl Glickman (great name, right?) finds herself saddled with a repellent, disrespectful houseguest without actually consenting to take her in, which results in one of the strangest fictional relationships I can recall. Cheryl is kind of an everywoman, hearteningly human, a character you can’t help but cheer on. By the time it’s all said and done, July’s given us a novel that ends exactly how it should, with a satisfying inevitability.

Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance

Any work that takes as one of its building blocks a seventeenth-century metaphysical philosophy like Monadism, the theory that perceptions exist independently of the act of perceiving, thereby creating reality in the most literal possible meaning of that phrase, probably oughtn’t have been given this much of my time. But Tiffany’s subject was too intriguing to pass up: lyrical obscurity in poetry, and its connection with the underworld of criminals, queers, and pariahs, whose dialects and ways of seeing the world color their conversations in ways that need not be literally understood to be aesthetically pleasing.

Literary criticism is always such a dense, unwieldy, even ugly genre. I confess to not understanding all of the nuanced points Tiffany sought to make, but Infidel Poetics was hardly a slog. If nothing else, his references saw to that, such as this translated stanza from François Villon, addressing a tavern scene peopled by a nefarious “canting crew” (known today as criminals):

Seekers after money, make-believe cripples,
Thieves too and cutpurses,
Beggars perpetually on foot
who on the road have demanded in jargon
hand-outs of food, where you’ve been
out in the fields to hunt for coins
and who, to support your girls,
have reached for bread — and handcuffs —
For all that, they make themselves feared,
the cops, crooked, tough, and cruel.

Not even academic prolixity could sap the vibrant life from verses like this.

Haruki Murakami, The Secret Library
A lovely little book with a fantastic contemporary collagelike design by Chip Kidd, the Murakami content is almost eclipsed by its packaging. But the literary surrealist’s short story, about a young man who’s taken captive by a sadistic quasi-librarian, reads like a wondrous fable of old. Read it after dinner, finish it before bed, read it again before breakfast, and savor the book’s look and feel for days afterward.

The List: Reading July Through September 2014

Quint Buchholz, Eines Morgens im November

There are several people I have to thank for sending me books this quarter: Ben T., Jersey, the good Lady Val, and my dearest Mum. I’ve been feeling especially in need of some escape lately, and as the Buchholz image above suggests, the books I mention here were a pleasant freedom from the day-to-day.

* * * * *

Julie Roorda and Elana Wolff (editors), Poet to Poet: Poems Written to Poets and the Stories That Inspired Them
The concept is a good one: get poets to submit their poems about, to, and inspired by the works of others, then provide readers with backstories that explain how and why each piece came into being. What hobbles this anthology is that its contributors are all Canadian. I’ve got no beef with the US’s neighbors to the north, mind you, but I also didn’t recognize more than a couple of names from the table of contents. Notoriety aside (because I know I’m not as well-read as I should be), Poet to Poet constitutes a mixed bag. There’s some rigorous, beautiful, erudite, and even funny work here. There’s also some superlatively mediocre stuff. A prime example of the latter is only made worse by what its backstory reveals: its creator was trying to pay tribute, simultaneously, to John Ashberry, Leonard Cohen, an unnamed poet friend, and basketball legend Michael “Air” Jordan.

Marcus Aurelius (J. Johnson, translator), Meditations
Can there be any wonder about the appeal of stoic philosophy to a man imprisoned? Its emphasis on self-reliance, on happiness from the inner life alone, on freeing oneself from the bonds that are passions, angers, and jealousies makes it an ideal system of thought for someone whose external freedoms have been stolen from him. I’ve trod such a road for a good part of my life — by my own nature, not in concerted practice of Stoicism — so when this work of Stoic-influenced thought came my way, I dived right in. Even though I found much of Meditations onerous and repetitive, passages such as this one from Book Seven, chapter XXXI, yielded some benefit:

As one who had lived, and were now to die by right, whatsoever is yet remaining, bestow that wholly as a gracious overplus upon a virtuous life. Love and affect that only, whatsoever it be that happeneth, and is by the fates appointed unto thee. For what can be more reasonable? And as anything doth happen unto thee by way of cross of calamity, call to mind presently and set before thine eyes, the examples of some other men, to whom the self-same thing did once happen likewise. Well, what did they? They grieved; they wondered; they complained. And where are they now? All dead and gone. Wilt thou also be like one of them? Or rather leaving to men of the world (whose life both in regard of themselves, and them that they converse with, is nothing but mere mutability) or men of as fickle minds, as fickle bodies; ever changing and soon changed themselves: let it be thine only care and study, how to make a right use of all such accidents. For there is good use to be made of them, and they will prove fit matter for thee to work upon, if it shall be both thy care and thy desire, that whatsoever thou doest, thou thyself mayst like and approve thyself for it. And both these, see, that thou remember well, according as the diversity of the matter of the action that thou are about shall require. Look within; within is the fountain of all good. Such a fountain, where springing waters can never fail, so thou dig still deeper and deeper.

That’s just what I do: I dig, then dig some more.

Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Zeizel, and Thomas Peisel, A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming: Mastering the Art of Oneironautics
It shouldn’t take much imagination to understand why lucid dreaming — being conscious and in control of one’s mental nighttime adventures — would particularly appeal to someone in prison. I don’t get out much, so there’s the obvious benefit of seeing some sights, but I also really like the notion of making use of the hours I lose to sleep. Dreams as productivity tools. With lucid dreaming, because it involves full awareness during one’s REM cycles, the dreamer is free to engage in creative and introspective thoughts.

As if that wasn’t enough incentive, the authors offer this tantalizing bit of neuroscience trivia:

Brain waves are simply the measure of the brain’s electrical activity. When we’re going about our normal, day-today lives, our brain waves are in beta, measured at 12 to 30 Hz. Theta waves (4 to 6 Hz) take over our brains while we’re slipping into twilight, and they continue pulsing as we dream. Recently scientists have been looking at a rare kind of brain wave, gamma, which is measured at 25 to 100 Hz. In a 2004 study, scientist Richard Davidson studied the brains of nearly a dozen monks, generously referred to him by the Dalai Lama. Davidson hooked these monks up to an EEG and, when he asked them to meditate on “compassion,” they produced brain waves in the 25 to 30 Hz range — gamma waves! Fast-forward to 2009, Frankfurt University. Six participants were monitored as they slept. The six had recently been trained in a four-month course on how to lucid dream. As they became conscious in their dreams, the machines lit up: The novice lucid dreamers reached gamma, their brains peaking at 40 Hz cycles per minute, higher than the Dalai Lama’s best meditators!

I used to be a prolific lucid dreamer as a little boy. It shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve that again. As this book, full of practical advice, recommends, I’ve been keeping a dream journal for a couple of months and have been practicing techniques for “incubation” and for triggering lucidity. My dream recall improved substantially after just one week of practice. So far, so good. It’s a process, though. I’ve yet to experience lucidity since I finished the Field Guide. Fortunately, I have time between head counts, seven hours a night, to practice.

Christopher Priest, The Islanders
Although a novel, The Islanders takes the form of a gazetteer of someplace called the Dream Archipelago — a scattering of islands indeterminate (possibly indeterminable) in number, located between the world’s warring northern and southern continents — the entries in which lock together like pieces of the puzzle that is the book’s plot. Actually, I should say plots, plural: a murder mystery, a dark fantasy, several love stories. Many entries read as you’d expect, presenting ordinary facts about the islands they report on, facts about topography, climate, industry, history, and currency. These entries are more than they seem to be. The entries consisting of anecdotes, journalism pieces, or personal narratives are also possessed of deeper import than a reader initially suspects. I love this complexity and the way the book winds around and through itself more and more, the further through The Islanders I read. Equal parts earnest and playful, sweeping and intimate, Priest’s tapestry is rich and lovely and makes me badly wish to read his previous novels set in this world.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
I delight in Russell’s haunting stories but took years to get around to this, her near-flawless debut novel, the sometimes humorous, sometimes harrowing, sometimes horrific tale of the Bigtree family — fake Indians who run an alligator theme park on one of Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands. Once I finally did, I was blown away. What a masterpiece of magical realism!

Albert Cossery (William Goyen, translator), Laziness in the Fertile Valley
Lots of people call me a go-getter now, so it might come as a surprise to find that I used to be a practitioner of profound laziness. Slacking is one thing; the type and degree of indolence that I’m referring to is an art requiring dedication. To live one’s life in such a way as to cast out any semblance of work or strenuous exertion — fucking off, in other words — takes a lot of effort.

Consider sleep. Fully embraced as a pastime, not just as a necessary biological process, sleep is exhausting. If you don’t believe me, try spending a languorous twelve to fifteen hours sleeping. How do you feel when you finally wake? Tired! Too much sleep will make you groggy, wanting nothing so much as to lie around in bed even longer, eyes closed, stretching now and again in spectacular catlike arcs over the sheets and yawning operatically. Some will cringe at the thought of squandering precious time this way; some will nod appreciatively and go, Yeah, that pretty much sums up my weekend. This novel is the satirical tale of a whole family of the latter sort, set in pre-nationalist Egypt.

Egyptian-born Albert Cossery wasn’t someone I’d heard of before. Apparently he wasn’t big in the west. The notorious Henry Miller was a staunch supporter of his work, though, championing it at every opportunity, and during Cossery’s epic sixty-year stay at a Paris hotel the man was regarded as part of a literary elite that included Giacometti, Genet, Tzara, Sartre, Queneau, and Camus. Quite the pedigree. He hung out a lot in cafés. He was also an acolyte of sleep. He and his first wife may even have divorced over irreconcilable sleep differences: he often complained that she awoke too early, and in a short, semiautobiographical story he wrote, about a man and his lover, that the man “had wanted to teach her to sleep, to respect slumber, that brother to death which he himself loved so, but alas! she understood nothing of it.”

In Laziness in the Fertile Valley, Galal has been sleeping for seven years. His brother, Serag, romanticizes work without fully understanding the concept of it, work being anathema to their wealthy family. Their uncle Mustapha and their father, old Hafez, are quite content to idle through their remaining days, never venturing outside their home or thinking about events in the distant city. Melodrama finds them regardless, in such amusing fashion that I read the book (which practically demands a stage adaptation) in two days. I could’ve been doing more important things during that time, of course, but Laziness is a tough thing to put aside.

Fred Chappell, Midquest: A Poem
The poet of Dante’s Inferno finds himself in a dark wood, in the middle of his life, and embarks on a journey through not only hell but through himself. Echoing that epic, Chappell, an acolyte of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Rilke, composed this intricate four-part narrative cycle that concerns itself with one day — the thirty-fifth birthday, to be precise — in the life of its narrator, Old Fred, an Appalachian poet whose hardscrabble existence in the mountains was traded for spartan country life, thanks to parents with the sense to emigrate to a rural home. “Book proud” and “second generation respectable” by his grandmother’s standards, Old Fred is erudite but born of earth — just like Dante’s narrator, a proxy for the everyman. Chappell did well to choose him for the telling of this lyrical story. In doing so, he wrote a life (surely not altogether a fictional one) that is believable and even relatable. He found the universal, which is no mean feat.

There’s too much symbolism at work in Midquest, too many references and sly allusions to other works, too many delightful turns of phrase for me to tell you about in a mere blog post. Trying to do so would be like attempting a how-to on making your own pocket watch using items found around your home. And Chappell’s structure, too, is a finely wrought thing, with portions of the poem answering others in a systematic manner, employing a multitude of poetic forms in pursuit of the narrative’s aims. This is damned impressive stuff for a thirty-five-year-old to have written (even though I suspect the book’s copyright suggests he was a bit older than that). I’d be a liar if I said it didn’t fill me, being thirty-five years old myself, with some trepidation about my own poetic abilities.

Pablo Neruda (Ilan Stavans, editor), I Explain a Few Things

The Poet’s Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or dry prison cell,
to him I come, and without speaking or looking
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a long rumble of thunder adds itself
to the weight of the planet and the foam,
the groaning rivers of the ocean rise,
the star vibrates quickly in its corona
and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my consciousness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn,
I may be present with an errant wave,
I may move in and out of windows,
and hearing me, eyes may lift themselves,
asking “How can I reach the sea?”
And I will pass to them, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing itself,
the gray cry of sea birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will call in answer to the shrouded heart.

(Alastair Reid, translator)

And we thank you, Pablo.

Paulo Coelho (Alan R. Clarke, translator), The Alchemist
I’m wary of any book purporting to have answers to life’s great quandaries. Too often they bludgeon readers over the head with heavy morals when all that’s called for is a decent story. More than that, though, you might say that I like my wisdom the way I like my beaches: rocky and hard to get to. Epiphanies are better when they come the old-fashioned way, organically, through inquiry and experience.

So, The Alchemist. More than twenty million copies sold worldwide. Translation into fifty-six languages. Celebrity endorsements by no less than Julia Roberts, Laurence Fishburne, and Pharrell Williams. Just what is all the fuss about? It’s a simple tale, simply told — a fable, really — about learning to interpret omens, follow your heart, and ultimately find what Coelho calls “your Personal Legend.” Language like that, most of which front-loads the book, at the outset of the protagonist’s journey, gives the undeniable sense you’re reading a self-help book. Inner Fulfillment for Dummies could be The Alchemist’s nonfiction companion title (I imagine the two sold together in an attractive slipcase). Not that the Dummies series isn’t a valuable one with lots of solid information on offer — it’s just unfortunately titled and, for a soul plumbed to such depths and breadths as mine (refer to my comments on Meditations, above), remedial material. At least the message conveyed by The Alchemist is, minus the metaphysical trappings, one I wholeheartedly endorse.

Haruki Murakami (Philip Gabriel, translator), Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
This newest Murakami book is one of his quietest, and perhaps his least fantastical, but it offers the author's enraptured fans (like me) everything they love about his novels. I agree with the Atlantic reviewer who said that Murakami’s plots tend to be formulaic and that some of his sentences are awful yet his books never cease to mesmerize. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is tragic and lovely, and I recommend it highly.

The List: Reading January Through March 2012

If you’re acquainted with my conventional year-end postings of all the books I read in the previous twelve months, this sudden appearance of “The List” in April should surprise you. I first posted a long alphabetical inventory of every book I could recall reading since my imprisonment — the period spanning from June of 2001 to that early 2008 date — after learning from a magazine piece about the practice of sharing reading lists. It seemed like a nifty idea. And a challenge: could I remember every title I’d read during those prior five and a half years? More recently, though, I’ve come to question the value of just tacking up a list of forty-some titles bereft of substantial comment or any critical insight.

Sure, there’s something fun about adding another line to my list as I close the cover of each book. Doing so adds to the feeling of satisfied completion. But then what? Who benefits? Certainly my friends like to know imprisonment hasn’t forced upon me crap books, but I prefer to think that there is more than a mere curiosity factor involved.

So we come to this list: ten books in three months. Except it isn’t only the length of this list that’s different. From here out, every book I read gets a review. This is bound to be more interesting and worthwhile for everyone. Followers of The Pariah’s Syntax who are avid readers (and few of you aren’t) may come away with recommendations to add to your own wish list, while I’ll get an acceptable excuse to monologue at great length about something I love (or hate, as the case may be).

* * * * *

Bill Brown, Dream Whip Issues 1-10
In this fat little DIY travelogue compilation from zine publisher Microcosm, the author — sketchbook aficionado, wandering poet, and lonely adventurer — muses on his sojourns across the widest expanses and teensiest pockets of North America. An index at the back lists such subjects as “coffee, black” (page 48), “dead people, machine for picking up voices of” (page 147), and “life, as sweet, scummy bog” (page 210). Those for whom staying in one location very long is a spirit-crushing prospect will empathize when Brown, writing in third-person, muses, “His joints ached, and he wasn’t sure if they ached from too much wandering, or if they ached to be going again….”

Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti, The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City
It isn’t a how-to, doesn’t concern itself overtly with capital-P Philosophy, and tends not to dwell on “issues,” yet I found this compendium of superficially disparate essays/monologues/riffs oddly important. Throughout its seventy-two chapters — many of which are comprised of a single page — on topics as varied as partygoing, game theory, quitting smoking by wearing a suit, experimental music, and the virtues of miscommunication, Chairs delivers a sort of quiet profundity that’s well worth experiencing.

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
As a fan of PKD’s deft handling of the uncanny, I can scarcely believe how long it took for me to get around to this affecting, Hugo Award-winning alternate-history novel. Distinct from his blatantly sci-fi works, yet just as compelling (if not more so), this tale unfolds in 1962, in a North America under joint Japanese and German rule following a loss to the Axis in World War Two. With adroit balance, Dick mixes political intrigue with the deeply human, ultimately transcending these genre-defining elements by posing that eternal and quintessentially Dickian question: What is reality? It is a book, foremost, of ideas — the kind that Dick always wrote well.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
This was my first foray into the work of Germany’s treasured national poet. I found it a little trying. An epistolic romance (the story is primarily told in the form of letters to a friend) of the terminally lovestruck eponymous young man, it was a short tale that seemed to me too much a reminder of departed friends. I ought to have gotten my introduction to Goethe through Faust, instead.

Larry Smith (editor), The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure
My moment, “The Verdict,” appears on page 205 of this great anthology from Harper Perennial, which I blogged about back in February. Check it out.

Haruki Murakami (Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, translators), 1Q84
I ♥ Murakami. His straightforwardly surreal stories bring a contemporary tweak to the mold set by Kafka, and I’m a sucker for them.

1Q84 (the title refers to the year in which the story is set: a subtly different version of 1984) tells the tales, in alternating chapters, of a young Tokyo man and woman whose lives become increasingly intertwined through a convoluted series of seemingly random happenings. This being a Murakami book, the happenings aren’t random at all, of course, and over its 925 pages it becomes clear that almost nothing in the plot is accidental. Along the way are a dead goat, a town of cats, and a reclusive religious group that worships the mysterious — oh, but I’ve already said too much.

An instant bestseller in the author’s native Japan, it’s a pity the translation 1Q84 received for its English-language readers was “off” at times. A couple of stylistic inconsistencies that should have been caught by the editor bothered me, too, but readers less fanatically observant of such things won’t even notice them. I ♥ this book somewhat less than Murakami’s others, but it remains an enjoyable, enigmatic epic.

Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation
The poems of Timothy Donnelly are, to my mind, thoroughly modern. Yet on the occasions he turns his thoughts to antiquity, writing about ancient Egyptian or Central American culture, as he does a couple of times in The Cloud Corporation, this modernity makes his subjects crackle with life. Other pieces in the book are not (to use a dirty word) confessional, but, when they veer into the realm of the personal, they vividly reveal. It’s all quite a feat.

I am endlessly gratified by the writer’s playful pragmatism. This trait is most on display in the poems that might crudely be called mash-ups — works that juxtapose bits of disparate text, such as fragments from an Osama bin Laden tirade and sequential lyrics culled from the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies. Such efforts make several appearances in the book. Where Donnelly impresses me most, though, is in his inspired originals. My favorite is “Fun for the Shut-In,” which takes its title from an article in a children’s magazine and runs with it like a pair of scissors, beginning straight away with the grimly manic initial stanzas:

Demonstrate to yourself a resistance to feeling
unqualified despair by attempting something like
perfect despair embellished with hand gestures.

Redefine demonstration to include such movement as
an eye’s orbit around the room; the pull of red
through drinking straws or the teeth of a comb;

random winces, twitches, tics; the winding of clocks
and tearing of pages; the neck hair's response
to uninvited sound, light, and the scent of oranges

where none in fact exist.

Could lines like these be written by a man who has never known the consuming madness of hyperawareness? I doubt it. At their best, these are exquisite renderings of dissolution (in every sense of the word); at their worst, they’re still delightfully clever wordplay.

Philip K. Dick (Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, editors), The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Truly, I got more than expected with this excerpt from PKD’s 9,000-page search for meaning in psychosis. The author’s visionary experiences in early 1974 — in which he believed, among many other things, that God had exposed itself as a pink beam of light in his Orange County apartment, that he’d temporarily shared his mind with the biblical Apostle Thomas, and that the fictional worlds of many of his sci-fi books were literal depictions of reality — prompted much self-questioning. The Exegesis is the written account of that eight-year inquiry.

Probably never meant for anyone’s eyes but Dick’s, it’s fascinating as a glimpse into the inner thoughts of a man at odds with his own convictions and concept of the empirical. As a work of literature, however, it’s tedious and repetitive, with sporadic glints of brilliance occluded by all the surrounding crazy. one editor’s annotation sums it up: “We wanted readers to experience a bit of what it’s like to read the original manuscript, page after page after page. It wouldn’t be the Exegesis if there wasn’t too much of it.”

An exemplary passage by Dick, from page 761, reads

I’ll bet I never figure it out; it may take centuries of human thought and work after the Ditheon superman (or God) comes into existence. We may be faced with the true ruling (and truly most advanced) life form on this planet, which the mono-psyche human could not apprehend. It is also possible that now we meet our Creator and the entity that has guided and directed and determined and caused our evolution, like the great black slab in 2001.

Dick died in 1982 without the answers he so fervently sought, and I never figured them out, either. After nine hundred pages of delirium about the I Ching, the book of Acts, Richard Nixon, secret Christian cults, government thought-control implants, and reality’s resemblance to a ham sandwich, my own dreams were taking on decidedly erratic themes. I was relieved to move on to…

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
Just what the world needed: a light, funny novel about Armageddon. The plot of this farcical tale radiates outward from a mix-up at a hospital run by the Satanic sisters of the Chattering Order of Saint Beryl. On the night the Antichrist is to be switched with the just-born son of a wealthy and privileged American diplomat, there to be raised with all the resources he’ll ever need to secure his title as Destroyer of Kings, Sister Mary Loquacious accidentally replaces the wrong baby and forges the first link of a chain of confusion that has world-changing consequences.

As if to settle once and for all the old nature-versus-nurture debate, the Antichrist is raised without the corrupting influences of Hell while the perfectly normal boy with whom he was switched grows up being groomed by the most devilishly devoted nannies and tutors. When the latter fails to meet expectations (although, he’s evidently good at math), and the signs of the apocalypse begin nevertheless appearing, several parties with vested interest in the outcome — an angel and a demon, a practical occultist and a private in the Witchfinder Army, and four “Apocalyptic Horsepersons” — figure things out and converge willy-nilly on an idyllic, unsuspecting village.

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Like a nexus point of Victor Hugo’s squalid medieval Paris, the ingenious London of H.G. Wells, and Philip K. Dick’s psychedelic San Francisco, the city of New Crobuzon in Miéville’s books is a festering steampunk Babel. Its streets and dank alleys teem with bizarre residents the imagination balloons to accommodate — scarified, beflowered cactus-men; a race of scarab-headed women and their grublike male counterparts; gross little sentient waterborne blobs; an ostracized criminal class whose offenses are punished surgically, by way of catastrophic mechanical or animal grafts. The author’s bachelor’s in social anthropology informs him well, and he renders these denizens so evocatively that their impossible nature becomes believable, even common-seeming, as though the reader were surrounded by them daily.

The story here, in brief, centers around an unorthodox scientist the nature of whose work attracts a plea for help by a crippled creature from a distant land. In the ensuing research he does to mend the stranger, our man of science involuntarily unleashes something dark and arcane on New Crobuzon — something so terrible that the city’s much-feared militia cannot stop, and against which Hell itself will not intercede.

Miéville’s literary talents are prodigious. It’s no wonder why Perdido Street Station won the British Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He writes with the versatility demanded of one whose work brilliantly defies anything as pedestrian and small-minded as genre boundaries.