Seven Books I Read This Summer

Friends know that prison rules seriously limit the number of books that I can possess at any given time. There's only so much room in these cells and the footlocker that stows my stuff, so a DOC-imposed limit isn't a terrible impediment. But occasionally I'm caught off guard, such as when leisure time's been at a premium, with a full compliment of books on hand when an order of several more unexpectedly arrives. To keep my property numbers in line, I then have to hurriedly send an equal number out. People I know usually ask first, "How's your book situation?" Strangers surprise me.

One such person is Veronica S., a person with whom I've never had any contact, who follows this blog and my case, and who has several times surprised me at random with orders of books from my Amazon wish list. The titles are obviously ones that I chose, but she seems to pick rather deftly, as if she knew what I was most in the mood to read at the moment. They delight and occupy me in the best way, but they also transport my mind from this place. When she — when anyone sends me a book, they're sending a fragment of freedom. It means so much.

Dexter Palmer's novel The Dream of Perpetual Motion was one of the latest books that Veronica sent. It's sort of a steampunk revision of The Tempest, (yes, there's an airship), and while it had moments of literary beauty, Palmer seemed incapable of resisting a bit of goofball humor here and there that, for me, blunted the mood of this otherwise fine alternate-reality fantasy.

Comparatively, Girl in Landscape engrossed me utterly. The third Jonathan Lethem novel I've read in a year, it's part parable, part coming-of-age story, part sci-fi, part Western — and it's every little bit as compelling as the last excellent Lethem novel I read, As She Climbed Across the Table. Both are highly recommended.

And then there was the hard-bitten tech-noir of William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk, who kind of returned to his roots in 2014 with the fast-paced The Peripheral. Gibson never did time travel before, and, technically, he doesn't do it here, either. The conceits at work here are quantum entanglement, the transmission of data streams to alternate timelines, and very, very rich hobbyists who get a kick out of playing god with those timelines by manipulating their financial markets and media. The fascinating concept, riveting plot, and trademark Gibsonian grit made a great, geeky alternative to summertime fun in the sun.

The Civil War provides a backdrop for no other fantasy books that I know of. Chris Adrian, however, used it to great effect in Gob's Grief: A Novel, — part alternate history, part magical realism — about an optimistic young doctor's quest to resurrect his long-dead twin brother. The book's so large, so historical, so richly textured, so beautiful. That this was Adrian's first novel is nothing short of stunning.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Omnibus Volume Two was a gift to me from the delightful Emily C., and equal in excellence to the previous volume. I adore Gaiman's graphic novels about Dream of the Endless and the people — well, not always people, but beings whose worlds brush against his realm of unconscious fantasy. Gods and demons, eyeless nightmares and ravens who used to be men, retired superheroines and creatures of folklore walk the pages of these tales. Rereading them for the first time in twenty-two years was such a treat. Thank you again, Emily.

I wanted to feel my way around before I signed up for the prison's Buddhist services in July. To that end, I borrowed Buddhism, a 1961 history and what's-what compilation of scholarly works edited by Richard A. Gard. As introductions go, I could definitely have done worse, but what struck me most was how much history 2,500 years includes. This book doesn't scratch the surface.

Several other books then came from Punker Bee, who follows @FreeByronCase on Instagram. For Read a Book Day, 6 September, I started and finished Jean-Christophe Valtat's English-language debut, 03 (translated by Mitzi Angel). A brief sprawl of a novel, it tracks a teenage boy's profound thoughts about the dark-eyed developmentally disabled girl across the street, while both wait for morning buses — his to high school, hers to a special-education academy. He calls what he feels for her love, and so he yearns for her notice, narrating, "[M]y own existence, hard enough for me to maintain with any robustness to myself, was, for those dark eyes — black as the inside of closed fists, reflecting less the outside world than the abandoned interior of a skull — a thing she never recognized but saw as a hazy blip on the landscape of those school mornings, an unremarkable little figure standing in front of the already shabby backdrop, a simple outgrowth, barely organic, of the bus shelter I leaned up against, my hands in my pockets, brain blowing on my eyes as though they were embers, trying to make my 'passion' seem that much more notable, more incandescent, but failing to send it over to the other side, across the cold magma frozen into tarmac by the organized disaster called society." It's that kind of book, and I loved it.

So, to my three book benefactors, thank you, thank you, thank you! You made my summer something supremely special. I'm looking forward to this coming season of change, when I dive into the rest of those novels that Punker Bee sent.

Two Books I Spent My Spring Reading

I wouldn't have thought it would be hard to best my meager reading list from last season — I just had to read more than three books this spring. It didn't happen. One big obstacle (nearly removed) was polishing and sending off the final pages of my novel-in-stories. How can a guy read when he's wrapping up a nine-year literary project? Then the ever-generous Veronica S. surprised me with another order of some delicious-looking sci-fi, and I had to read a couple of the books she so kindly sent.

One was As She Climbed Across the Table, which vindicated Jonathan Lethem completely after the disappointment that was Amnesia Moon. I'm almost ashamed that I ever found fault. This short novel has just about everything one wants in a Lethem book. It has a fanciful premise: a woman falls in love with a incorporeal area of null space. It has quirky wit (such as when the narrator muses, "Do you think there are bootleg tapes of Muzak outtakes? Maybe they get excited by the groove and really cut loose sometimes. And the producer says, okay, boys, that was swell but now let's try to get this wrapped up so we can all go home. I'll bet that happens all the time."). It has outlandish character names (Carmo Braxia, Georges De Tooth, Gavin Flapcloth). And it has emotional sincerity that never devolves into gross sentimentality. Yes, I was pleased.

Neal Stephenson wrote Zodiac, a so-called eco-thriller, just a few years before Snow Crash, his prescient novel about VR and the future of the Internet. Snow Crash and William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic were hugely influential on my growth as a geek, so reading pre-Snow Crash Stephenson risked tainting my opinion. Zodiac has action aplenty, accented by Stephenson's sarcastic wit. But it did pale in comparison to Snow Crash. To be fair, Zodiac, a 316-page novel, took me almost all May to read. I clearly couldn't give it my usual close attention. Even so, a couple of editorial gaffes — extra spaces, a misspelled name, and other such relatively minor typos — leapt off the page at me. This is what happens when you're polishing your own manuscript while trying to read for pleasure. I don't recommend it. It's why I read nothing else this spring. There was other demanding business in my life, which, combined with finishing my novel, demanded maximum focus.

Three Books I Spent My Winter Reading

"You only read three books in three months?" you ask in astonishment.

Yes, I did. Now close your mouth before some small flying insect thinks it's an invitation. It's spring, you know. Bugs are a thing now.

There were several good magazine articles that passed under my newly prosthetically enhanced eyes during that time. But I've really been too busy writing to fit in my usual volume of reading. Try asking me about my nearly complete novel-in-stories if you want a lengthier response. Oh, but you wanted to know what books I've read since I posted last season's reading list, or else you wouldn't have made it three paragraphs into this one.

First was Amnesia Moon, Jonathan Lethem's second novel. It marked my fourth experience with a book he'd written. (Yes, that's probably too many ordinals. I've been prioritizing more than usual lately.) This particular one is a post-apocalyptic phantasmagoria involving a man with no memory who, with a furry little girl in tow, escapes the desert hellscape he's been calling home, only to find the rest of the world very different from what he dreamed. Misfortune and confusion find the pair at every turn. Nightmares become reality... or something very much like it. By the end, too many hallucinatory detours into fantasy and sci-fi left me, as a reader, on shaky ground. Years ago, Lethem's Chronic City left me awestruck. Amnesia Moon just seemed unfinished. I hope that it's the least of his books, because I know he's capable of so much better.

Speculative fiction has always been woefully lacking in minority voices, but when Octavia E. Butler wrote Kindred some forty years ago, a black woman's time-travel narrative was sui generis. That alone merits acclaim. This much-lauded "grim fantasy" still makes for harrowing SF, as well as a gut-wrenching history lesson, which just adds to Butler's credit. I'm glad that I finally made time for it.

Next was The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel. Salman Rushdie's prose enchants, no matter the genre. Part of the secret to his magic lies in the blending of the crassest profanity with mannered English prose. The effect can be laugh-out-loud funny. As is often the case with Rushdie, fable and fact also interweave here. The wild, intricate, phantasmagorical tale-within-a-tale (plus other tales within that one, besides) treats historical figures, including Andrea Doria, Niccolo Machiavelli, Vlad Tepes, and Giuliano de' Medici, as players in the farce. Notwithstanding his so-so novel on last year's reading list, reading Rushdie has always been a joy for me.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some writing to do.

The List: Reading January through March 2016

Medieval readers were among the first to recognize the transformative power of text. They saw how reading facilitated raw knowledge by way of the facts laid down by authors, of course, but they were also perceptive enough to notice how reading inspired original thoughts, independent from the ideas explicit in the text. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria likened reading to a dream: “I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent to me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”

In that placid realm we readers know so well, there’s an exhilarated activity. Readers only appear inert. Inside, our minds are churning.

A study published a few years ago in Psychological Science confirms this. Researchers found that we readers “mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about action and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences.” As this empathetic activity takes place, the regions of the brain at work are the same as would be engaged if the reader were doing or watching the goings-on in real life. Reading, you might say, is being.

Unless this is your first encounter with my blog, you know how important the written word is to me, both as intellectual sustenance and emotional lifeline. I post these quarterly reading lists because I want people to see where my mind has been recently. My “List” posts are mental itineraries, and friends say they enjoy observing my travels from afar (although, not as much as I appreciate their accounts of life beyond Crossroads Correctional Center’s walls and fences). Sometimes they follow along, if the sights are compelling enough, but usually my journeys are solo affairs. What’s important is that these people care and take an interest, despite how peculiar my tastes and habits tend to be, in reading and in life — same thing.

For the life support they’ve sent this year, I owe thanks to Adam M. and my dearest Mum. And now, on to my voyagings.

* * * * *

Annie Liontas and Jeff Parker (editors), A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors
For anyone who feels a deep connection to the craft, this anthology will hold meaning. A Manner of Being presents a trove of anecdotes, witticisms, wisdom, and writers’ testimonies about those inspirational souls who nudged, cajoled, or bullied them to higher literary planes.

As a contributor (my tribute to L., a family friend, begins on page 108), I’m recusing myself from a proper review of the book, except to say how honored I am to be published alongside such estimable names as George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Tony Hoagland, Tobias Wolff, and Tibor Fischer. Thank you, Jeff and Annie, for including me in your labor of love.

Charles Simic, Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems
Too often I arrive at a poet’s oeuvre, or am smitten by the glimpse afforded by a newly published or reprinted selection, right around the time that poet dies. It’s enough to make a man cry out, “Poets, please, stop dying!” In the case of these Selected Early Poems, the book was already on my shelf, awaiting my attention, for a good month before Simic’s death last year. A superstitious sort might make something sinister of that. I was just disappointed that the world had reached its maximum allotment of distinctive works like

Gallows Etiquette

Our sainted great-great
Grandmothers
Used to sit and knit
Under the gallows.

No one remembers what it was
They were knitting
And what happened when the ball of yarn
Rolled out of their laps
And had to be retrieved.

One pictures the hooded executioner
And his pasty-faced victim
Interrupting their grim business
To come quickly to their aid.

Confirmed pessimists
And other party poopers
Categorically reject
Such far-fetched notions
Of gallows etiquette.

It’s a poem that actually made me laugh — to say nothing of the other 150 or so poems, dated between 1967 and 1989, in this collection. Simic was never stodgy or grimly “poetical.” His way with words was astonishing.

In the four instances here when a poem failed to resonate with me, I think Simic’s surreal juxtapositions got too dense or random-seeming, but it speaks to his tremendous talent that the bizarre imagery that was his hallmark almost always accentuated the poems’ emotional heft. At their most unreal they grab you and hold you, and you never want them to let go.

Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor (editors), 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories
Anthologies purporting to be the best of the best can’t help but disappoint on some level. Either the editorial selections aren’t diverse enough to let a reader breathe fresh air, or they’re so self-consciously pluralistic as to verge on schizophrenic. I enjoy every title I read in the Best American series, which has presented a broad spectrum of voices without apparently resorting to affirmative action. This selection from the past 100 years of the series intelligently sticks with the demographics of authors most emblematic of their era. Moore and Pitlor include plenty of white males — Carver, Updike, Fitzgerald, Cheever — but segue into the contemporary multi-culti literati without it feeling forced. That every story her is a true gem helps. If any imbalance exists here, it’s in the abundance of stories first published in The New Yorker. I didn’t really mind rereading the superlative fictions that ran in the magazine over the course of my twelve-year subscription. 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories is the most delightful form of reiteration I can imagine.

Jonathan Lethem, Men and Cartoons: Stories
Some might call this collection of nine wildly entertaining tales uneven. But it is a testament to Lethem’s virtuosity that the contents of Men and Cartoons leap around in time, space, and form the way they do. Here the fantastic abuts the absurd, which itself neighbors poignant realism, which precedes straight science fiction, with the author’s witty, inquisitive voice the only thread necessary for tying the collection together.

Friedrich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufman, translator and editor), Basic Writings of Nietzsche
There’s too much to say about Nietzschean philosophy than could be encapsulated in a blog post (not one you’d want to read, anyway), let alone in my review of this collected volume. I won’t even try.

What I will remark on is how differently I read Nietzsche now than the first time. The vague transgressiveness I felt at sixteen, paging through his Beyond Good and Evil, eclipsed any significant understanding of the book’s message. I wanted to understand, but the philosopher himself commented on the futility of scholarly understanding without life experience. And what did I know about life then? Mired in depression and single-mindedness, the central formula within Nietzsche’s philosophy — revaluation of one’s ideas — was beyond my ken. I hadn’t yet endured enough. In the intervening years I suffered some truly wretched states and, by surviving them, learned and grew, just as Nietzsche describes in Ecce Homo: “[I]t was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement.”

The guy’s hard not to quote. It’s his aphoristic style, how he strung together clever phrases, one after another, to approach his ultimate point, that worked so well for and against him. Nietzsche worked by accreting refinements, coming at his subjects gradually, with finesse, like building a house by gluing single wood chips atop one another. Many readers ignored the structure and, instead, glommed on to single chips — lines or passages that seemed, divorced from their context, to support certain ideologies. Although he was unequivocal in his opposition to nationalism, anti-Semitism, and even the “Germanness” later readers attributed to him, Nietzsche’s still egregiously misappropriated and misread today.

Of course he set himself apart:

The spiritual haughtiness and nausea of every man who has suffered profoundly — it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer — his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been “at home” in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “you know nothing” — this spiritual and silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether against everything that is not equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.

Sardonic, complex, and, above all, honest, Nietzsche was practically destined for a bad reputation he didn’t deserve.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks: A Novel
Its back cover declares The Bone Clocks to be the story of Holly Sikes, “once contacted by voices she knew only as ‘the radio people,’” who has now “caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics.’’ This makes it sound like a Dean Koontz book. Terrible. I trusted David Mitchell to deliver more (and better) than Random House’s marketing department promised, and I’m happy to say that he did exactly that, most spectacularly. Not fantasy nor thriller, not sci-fi nor literary novel, The Bone Clocks is somehow also all of these — a multivoiced, labyrinthine saga, touching and intimate, violent and raw, snarky and dispassionate — that plays with genre as much as with mood, and is all the more engrossing for this multifariousness.

Frank Lima, Angel
The bowled-over feeling I got from reading Lima’s poems in November’s Poetry — astounding examples of that meaningful surrealism I mentioned above — didn’t revisit after I ordered this 1972 collection. There was no magic here for me, despite the heavenly title. Maybe I should’ve waited for the posthumous Incidents of Travel in Poetry, just published in January. As of this writing (hint, hint), that one’s still on my wish list.

Alan Weisman, The World without Us
How disappointed I was to realize that this wasn’t exactly what I wanted, researchwise, nearly made me lose interest before I began reading. But I took the plunge, and not only did I pick up several useful tidbits for my perpetually in-progress zombie novel, Weisman’s exhaustively researched thought experiment — What would happen to Earth if humans suddenly vanished from its face? — astonished and freaked me out. No wonder it won so many nonfiction-book-of-the-year kudos. The World without Us is a reality check that ought to be required reading for everyone alive.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe {Walter Arndt, translator; Cyrus Hamlin, editor), Faust: A Tragedy: Interpretive Notes, Context, Modern Criticism
You know the old story: a learned man exhausts all the common areas of study — philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology — and so turns to magic in his boundless hunger for experience, only to wind up in a diabolic deal for his eternal soul. Goethe knew it, too. The folktale captured his imagination as a young writer, and he published fragments of his own dramatic interpretation to some acclaim, beginning in 1787. As decades passed, he composed a patchwork of scenes for the drama’s second part {today we’d call it a reboot of the franchise), which took Faust and Mephistopholes far, far from their original setting, making them almost ancillary characters in an allegorical sprawl, alongside classical myths and burlesques of Goethe’s contemporaries.

The Norton Critical Edition I was fortunate enough to get my claws into granted insight that otherwise would’ve eluded my grasp. Goethe himself told a friend, “all attempts to bring it nearer to the understanding are in vain.” He was speaking about Part Two, because Part One, for its somewhat patchy nature, at least carries emotional weight and coheres as a drama. Part Two rambles and rollicks so many different ways, and reeks of a poetic decadence almost too stifling to tolerate; it could never be staged.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Depth of thought. Attentiveness versus automation. The mechanisms by which we arrive at meaning in our lives. The value of literature in contemporary society. I’ve been preoccupied with these themes for years, but until hearing about this Pulitzer Prize finalist during a lecture on C-SPAN 2 (BookTV is my jam, yo) I knew of no grand unified theory for them all. As it turns out, they’re not only closely connected issues, I’m also by no means the first or only person to lose sleep thinking about them.

Carr’s subtitle for The Shallows sounds, somehow, simultaneously alarmist and anodyne. His book is neither. Rather, it’s a well-reasoned, provocative look at the culture and science of wired life. Slate dubbed it “Silent Spring for the literary mind,” and I can’t do much better in summarizing its disturbing importance. What Silent Spring warned, ecologically, parallels the mental pollution Carr shows is a byproduct of the Internet age. I wish I could place a copy in the hands of everyone I meet. The book, however, makes clear that few would read it, and substantially fewer still would hearken its message by taking conscious steps back from the intellectual precipice world culture is blindly scampering toward.

The List: Reading July Through September 2015

Sarolta Bán

Among the reasons I like putting together these posts about my reading every three months is the revelation of unexpected patterns, digressions, and occasionally jarring contrasts that come to light when all the books I’ve been through are considered, one by one and as a motley whole. The timing of their subjects, too, is sometimes surprising.

In the wake of such major news items as the outing of the NAACP Spokane chapter’s president as white, the church massacre by racist creep Dylann Roof, and the much-belated lowering of the Confederate flag (we hope for good), my intention wasn’t to pick up two successive novels that meditate on American blackness — it just happened as a result of liking those authors’ previous work. And somehow it makes sense that I would progress from there to mysteries and science fiction (a stack of old Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, and Asimov’s issues finished out the month), genres that often challenge the reader with ideas only occasionally more outré than the concept of racism.

So: these “List” posts illustrate reading as Rorschach test. Reading as weathervane, too. Reading, also, as tarot, runes, bones.

My hearty thanks to Kristin S., Tom at Prospero’s, and Bridget S. this quarter, for sending me so many exceptional books. I can hardly wait to devour them all.

* * * * *

Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude: A Novel
There’s too much here to neatly encapsulate. All of Lethem’s prodigious talents are brought to bear, and the story he’s set down swells with commensurate energy and scope. To call this a corning-of-age novel denies the complexity of its sociological perspectives. To say it’s about 1970s Brooklyn is to shrug off its sense of timeless intimacy. To zoom from its wide panorama to its addressing of racial identity or relations devalues its treasures. Although, to do any of the above would be technically accurate and therefore excusable. How do you write about a life? Obituary writers have their way, directed more by word count constraints than fidelity. Biographers have another, bound to a preconceived narrative arc. Lethem, with The Fortress of Solitude, gives us something altogether more vibrant, more meaningful, by way of Dylan Edbus and his friendship with Mingus Rude.

Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist: A Novel
On the strength of Zone One, Whitehead’s insightful zombie novel of a few years ago, I insisted on reading this, his debut novel, set in what could be an alternate-history Manhattan of the 1960s. I wasn’t disappointed. Whitehead’s prose is alive and his plotting deft. The story of Lila Mae Watson, this nameless metropolis’s first black female elevator inspector, getting swept up in political conspiracy — a game piece fought over by multiple feuding factions — has all the briskness of a beach read. But its uncanny way with irony and subtlety belie the book’s status as literary fiction.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Edmund Wilson, editor), The Crack-Up
Before this, my familiarity with Fitzgerald was nil. The Great Gatsby, probably his most lauded work, might’ve been on the syllabus at my high school, but I left too soon to find out. Wide-ranging though my subsequent reading has been, it never included so much as his Benjamin Button. I’ve written here before about my tendency to approach from strange angles, not least (as is the hallmark of the autodidact) in matters of literature. Coming at Fitzgerald via his personal essays, letters, and unpublished notes, as they’re collected in The Crack-Up, often rough and rugged, is like ransacking the man’s bathroom — inspecting his medicine collection, checking his bathtub’s cleanliness, and itemizing the contents of his wastebasket. In other words, it may be the best way to get to know him.

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Yet another writing project led me to reread this. The first time was at least twenty years ago. A Study in Scarlet, for anyone who doesn’t know, marked the world’s first encounter with Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t make his acquaintance until I was eleven or twelve years old, almost 100 years later, when another fictional character introduced us. My favorite TV series at the time was Star Trek: The Next Generation, on which the android Starfleet officer, Data, spent occasional off-duty hours role-playing Holmes mysteries on the Enterprise D’s holodeck. Because I strongly identified with Data’s social misadventures, it stood to reason I’d appreciate Holmes’s exploits, too.

As it turned out, we had a lot in common. Holmes

• is an outsider;
• is often misunderstood by those around him;
• is passionate about his interests, to the point of being consumed, and ignores most everything outside their sphere, no matter how commonsensical or culturally relevant;
• is begrudgingly acknowledged by others for his talents, but gets little or no reward for his successes;
• lives a rich inner life;
• has keener-than-average senses; and
• plays the violin well, but only in private, for his own pleasure.

Because of how we met, it’s damn near impossible for me to think of the Sherlock Holmes adventures as anything but YA fiction. (Yes, even with the myriad obscure references and untranslated passages in French and Latin. And of course I’m only assuming there are no hidden allusions to Euripides and his Hippolytus in The Hunger Games. Correct me if I’m wrong.) It was kind of fun to revisit 221B Baker Street, though. They were some of the best research hours I’ve had in quite a while.

Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
How might time behave, and what might its nature be, in other worlds? While working in that Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein certainly gave this question lots of thought, and from that was birthed his theory of time. What Alan Lightman does here is imagine, in essence, Einstein’s dream journal — all of the ways time might work elsewhere, and what life would be like for the people in those other worlds. Lightman presents these flights of fancy with a lyricism and sensitivity not often seen from scientists (he’s not only a novelist but a theoretical physicist, and I found Einstein’s Dreams to be echoed by another physicist’s lovely work, Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives). This book is a minor treasure, as a result.

Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer
His breathtaking novel-in-stories, The Illumination, told me everything I needed to know about Kevin Brockmeier: that he possesses a near-supernatural sense of his characters’ inner lives, which are usually glossed over by lesser writers; that he understands how, more than by almost anything else, we are shaped by our flaws and pains; that he is able to tell a story without being limited by any particular genre, which resonates as deeply as a bell gong struck in the pit of your stomach. I knew these things. Reading The View from the Seventh Layer just strengthened my conviction.

Thirteen stories, about aesthetic rebellion, the value of unfulfilled desire, the meaning(s) of life, identity versus external perception, and the precious mundanities of existence make up this collection. It’s forty-three, if you count every possible iteration of “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story.” To paraphrase Donald Bartheme, I loved each of them, strange objects that they are, covered in fur, which broke my heart.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
If anyone in contemporary sci-fi could pull off a multigenerational epic spanning 5,000 years, it’d be Stephenson. He’s been toying with such grand visions for years — from the spans involved in his present-day/World War Two-era Cryptonomicon (itself loosely connected to his Baroque Cycle novels), to the temporally cloistered monks of Anathem. Spanning centuries seems to come naturally to his restless mind.

Even the most rigorous completist is bound to overlook a detail or two while wrangling five millennia of culture, language, and technology into fewer than 900 pages. I found a few minor points to quibble with (one of which, early in the story, I actually tweeted him about). For all I know, though, some of these were deliberate liberties Stephenson took, in the interests of plot or readability. In any event, Seveneves made for good summer reading.

Requiem for a Paper Bag Now Available

For anyone who has ever discovered value in a piece of trash, wondered about the author of a note they found fluttering down the street, or developed an inexplicable crush on the subject of a discarded photograph, the outstanding anthology Requiem for a Paper Bag is now available from fine booksellers everywhere.

Featuring the personal experiences of a diverse assortment of contributors (including Tom Robbins, Dave Eggers, Chuck Klosterman, Jonathan Lethem, Susan Orlean, Miranda July, Jim Carroll, Billy Bragg, Chuck D, Seth Rogen, and many others), these are stories to make you giggle, make you squirm, make you cry — stories, in other words, that are as distinct and as fascinating as their authors. It is not only because the collection includes my story "Trash Night" that I recommend it; Requiem for a Paper Bag really is a fine book you're bound to find worthwhile. Click here to pick up your copy today.