The List: Reading October through December 2016

Jacek Yerka, Bible Dam

In the years since I started posting these reading lists, I doubt there's been one as illustrative of my crazily wide range, as a reader, than this. The Halloween season meant watching more TV, my November birthday meant more visits and phone calls with friends, and the holidays meant, well, more eating. Also, my early-morning reading time disappeared when Brett, my occasional workout partner, moved into the wing with me, eager to talk and stroll around before breakfast. By evening, more often than not, I'm too worn down to keep my eyes open while moving them across pages. Still, what books I did read are so wildly diverse as to make you shake your head in disbelief, wondering how the same guy enjoying books of poetry and literary criticism can also read comic-strip collections about a lobotomized cat who loves Star Wars. 

For several of these titles, I owe thank-yous to my ceaselessly thoughtful mother (who knows my literary tastes, insane though they may be, better than anyone) and the lady with the out-of-this-world hair (who sometimes spoils my appetite with cotton candy).

* * * * *

James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War

Purveyor of current television's most consistently awful programming, Syfy astounded critics and me, premiering a high-value series last year, The Expanse, a well-written and capably acted space opera about a mining ship's crew and a hardboiled detective who get swept up in interplanetary political intrigue threatening every colony in the solar system. The series is based on these James S.A. Corey novels, a rare adaptation that's actually better than the source, and it's no Z Nation.

I'm picky about my science fiction, generally preferring the literary strains. Although big, loud, and prone to explode, Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War aren't dumb. I was able to overlook Corey's repetitive use of a few go-to phrasings — characters muttering "something obscene" and smiling in a way that "doesn't reach [their] eyes" — more easily than the atrocious first chapters of Caliban's War, but all was forgiven in light of these books' edge-of-your-seat twists and turns, and their skillful pacing.

Berkeley Breathed, The Bill the Cat Story and Bloom County Episode XI: A New Hope

Such is my Bloom County fandom that Bill the Cat would've had my vote in the 1984 presidential election, if only he hadn't died in that horrible cocaine-fueled car accident that claimed the life of an innocent prostitute. (It also would've helped to have been old enough to reach the voting-booth lever.) But Opus, Steve, Binkley, Oliver, Milo, Cutter John, and the rest of the gang kept me reading the strip. I was overjoyed when a new Bill was cloned, using the severed tongue found in the wreckage at the bottom of the cliff, and Berkeley Breathed's 2016 resurrection of this hilarious comic was an even more welcome return from the dead.

Leo Tolstoy (Lynn Solotaroff, translator), The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Anna Karenina's mannered tedium didn't affect me (precisely why can be read in this reading list post, from last year), but like the fever of a sudden illness, Tolstoy's little novel seizes the reader with life's profoundest, most harrowing drama — the one we've all got to face, eventually and in one form or another: the end.

This passage appears in chapter nine, describing the titular judge's deathbed thoughts:

And in his imagination he called to mind the best moments of his pleasant life. Yet, strangely enough, all the best moments of his pleasant life seemed entirely different than they had in the past — all except the earliest memories of childhood. Way back in his childhood there had been something really pleasant, something he could live with were it ever to recur. But the person who had experienced that happiness no longer existed. It was as though he were recalling the memories of another man.

The familiarity I have with this sentiment validates my own thoughts. At best, life in prison is a gimpy, fucked-up kind of living, and the gulf between who I now feel myself to be and the fragile, gullible young man first brought into this place is an unfathomable abyss of years. Some late nights, when I wake for no reason, it yawns like the grave. By bringing across the universal in the specific, Count Tolstoy succeeded here. What a book!

Ed Tato, True Stories of la Cosa Nostra: Poems

I don't know whether the family profiled in these poems is a fabrication, like the Spoon River decedents written about by Masters, or a real object of genealogical study. I don't know if it matters. As with The Spoon River Anthology, Tato's True Stories are more conceptually engaging than as poetry qua poetry. Was this Tato's intention? I don't know his work beyond this collection, and (although I'm on such intimate terms with his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, that I get to call it Larry) I don't know the man.

James Wood, How Fiction Works
I love this:

We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality. We must proceed on the assumption that almost all prose popularly acclaimed as beautiful ("she writes like an angel") is nothing of the sort, that almost every novelist will at some point be baselessly acclaimed for writing "beautifully" as almost all flowers are at some point acclaimed for smelling nice.

Wood's survey of literature's wide swath, from the Bible to John Updike, examining the mechanisms by which fiction does what it does, is a must-read for all serious readers who want to better understand fiction and its truths. 

Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

The Gothic novel to top all Gothic novels — that's what Maturin, an Irish clergyman, set out to write in 1818. Not three years later, the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer met with outright vitriol from reviewers, one of whom accused Maturin of blasphemy, brutality, and "dark, cold-blooded, pedantic obscenity." In other words, this is good stuff.

Olivia Liang, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Having heard me summarize this utterly engrossing 2016 history/memoir/meditation on loneliness, which wends through the lives of artists from Andy Warhol to Henry Darger in its exploration of loneliness, my neighbor Jim rolled his eyes. "Oh, great," he said. "Hanging out with suicidally depressed artsy-fartsy people is what put you in this mess to begin with!"

Touché, Jimbo. Although reductive (and missing the point) my curmudgeon pal's quip had the effect of validating my enthusiasm for the book. Yes, I do have more friends and associates now than at most other points in my socially awkward life, but I still exist in a persistent state of what psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan defined as "the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy." We all do. To what degree, and in what way it's dealt — these are areas Liang crawls into and peers around. 

There are names here of varying recognizability: Billie Holiday, Edward Hopper, Josh Harris, David Wojnarowicz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Klaus Nomi, Greta Garbo…. The Lonely City wends its way through the lives of these lonely souls, a path that reveals the ways in which we — human beings — live without that "discharge" the psychiatrist wrote about, the forms of our connections when we do have it, and the role played by society in perpetuating the exclusion of what Liang terms "unwieldy and strange" people. Her eye is keen, her mind is lucid, and the product of her studies is easily the best work of nonfiction I read all year.

The List: Reading April through June 2016

Andre Martins de Barros, La philosophie

Heavy reading predominated this quarter’s reading, for reasons that I couldn’t begin to tell you. And by heavy I mean literally weighty. Have you ever tried holding a two-and-a-half-inch-thick hard cover over your face while lying in bed, barely fending off sleep? There’s nothing quite like the worry of getting smashed in the face to keep one’s attentions piqued, as I discovered.

A byproduct of focusing on big, epic tomes for three months is that this may be one of the shortest “List” posts I’ve done. Is that ironic? Probably not. But limiting the number of books I read meant turning down offers by friends to send me others. Now that I’m past this little phase, though, feel free to indulge me with some summer reading fare if you feel like doing so. Not to seem desperate (merely pretentious), I should point out that the next book in my queue is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of several hundred pages, after which I can always turn to the prison’s long-ignored library.

* * * * *

A.J. Arberry (translator), The Koran Interpreted
What had I expected? Islam’s holy text was both less and more than my Western understanding led me to believe before actually reading it. If the Bible is the greatest story ever told, the Koran is the greatest praise song ever sung. Neither a narrative nor (to my eyes) a metaphoric puzzle, the Koran, as rendered in English for this well-regarded translation, moves through cycles of verses in praise of God that repeat again and again, perfectly suited for chanted prayers. Although, as one of the unbelievers to whom the book promises “a great chastisement” in due course, as well as not experiencing it in the original, “true” Arabic, I’m sure that there’s a great deal of missed beauty here.

Bruce Cohen, Imminent Disturbances, Impossible Numbers, & Panoramic X-Rays
”I love reading books no one else finds interesting,” begins Cohen’s “Beach Day,” the sixth in this new collection of thirty-nine poems. He and I share the sentiment. My appreciation for obscure, ponderous, or otherwise unpopular books is a repeated subject on this blog and in my real-time conversations, and knowing that I’m in the company of readers of Cohen’s caliber makes me happy.

His poetry, in its long lines and hyperobservant perspectives, reveals a surplus of patience. He writes the way you’d probably expect a middle-aged white American man to write... but in the best possible way. On their surface, his poems deal in matters of a superficially prosaic nature — married life, phone calls from friends, growing older and out of touch, fatherhood, et cetera. But being a poet of some skill, Cohen employs these leaping-off points to associate, juxtapose, and pontificate widely, often quite deftly. Like origami in reverse, he unfolds the universal tucked within humdrum specifics.

When his poems don’t work as well it’s because certain lines stray not far enough from the well-worn path: “One way or another, everyone is an understudy”; “It’s the ambiguity of life that drives us insane”; and “Does your mind trick you into pleasure, is the perceived actuality any less // Than the actuality?” Blah. The rest of the time, however, they do succeed, becoming not mere poems but spotlights whose beams writhe and twist, defying physics to illuminate the elusive, otherwise unseeable.

Leo Tolstoy (Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky, translators), Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts
In an interview published this year in Poets & Writers Magazine, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, Pamela Paul, said, “I very much want to reread both Anna Karenina and War and Peace, because I think those are two novels that really evolve along with the reader. Anna Karenina read at age twenty is very different from Anna Karenina read at age forty.” By Ms. Paul’s thinking, I missed out on a delightful exercise in perspectival contrasting, not reading this much-praised romance at a younger age. My twenty-year-old self begs to differ.

I’d never have been able to stomach Tolstoy’s classic before learning a certain level of tolerance for what a young Byron would call “irrelevancies.” Anna Karenina overflows with conversations bearing no direct relationship to anything like plot, with diversions and delays, as its author immersed readers in the blithe concerns of Russia’s aristocracy. Only when the scandal of an extramarital affair shakes things up do we have reason to be interested. Before that, it’s all dinners and balls and hunting trips, and it’s all terribly, terribly dull. Young Byron was by no means a thrill-seeker when it came to reading — he actually enjoyed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged — but this novel’s preoccupation with status and societal pressures would’ve meant nothing to his autistically indifferent mind. (And I’m pretty sure he would have closed the book with annoyance as soon as Tolstoy presented that dog’s interior monolog. Even thirty-seven-year-old Byron had a problem with that incongruity.)

As it was, I waited, with increasing impatience, for the moment when Anna finally threw herself in front of that train, not because I wanted the story to end but because I wanted it to get started.

Sir Thomas Malory (Keith Baines, translator), Le Morte d’Arthur
Chivalry is dead, and thank goodness. Like a fifteenth-century Pulp Fiction, this flinty Middle English epic of Arthurian legend revels in casual bloodshed, sex, and an abstruse code of conduct that makes me wonder how English society ever survived.

Sir Palomides and Sir Gonereyes entered the field, jousted, and broke their spears. Then they both drew their swords; with his first stroke Sir Palomides knocked his opponent to the ground, and with his second stroke beheaded him. Then Sir Palomides went to supper.

Tra-la-la, another day in the life of a knight.

Late in the book Malory saw fit to introduce the famous quest for the Holy Grail by the Round Table knights, and the civil war that led to King Arthur’s demise. The several hundred pages prior to that are thronged with lists of Sir So-and-sos who battle each other for duty, for honor, or for fun, often losing their heads in the process. It was hard to keep track of who’d successfully pleaded for mercy after being unhorsed (and thereby been rechristened a knight of the Round Table), and who’d got his melon cleaved. Although technically still English, I don’t think I’d have been able to read “THIS BOOK OF ARTHUR AND HIS KNYGHTES FROM THE BEGYNNYNG TO THE ENDYNGE” in the original. It was tough-enough going in this modern rendition.

Andy Orchard (translator), The Elder Edda
Since my knowledge of that culture was largely founded on historically questionable sources (Thor: God of Thunder comic books and the occasional movie about Vikings), millennium-old heroic and mythological Norse poems sounded like a worthwhile read. I was fascinated to find that, for all their brutal intensity, the pre-Christian Icelanders were a funny, bawdy bunch whose national sport might as well have been playing the dozens. Between the many dismemberments and poisonings here, plenty of insult humor smoothes the rough patches.

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Like climbing a steep hill, the poems in this collection by the man some call America’s quintessential twentieth-century poet, get more rigorous (i.e., difficult) the further you go. I had no idea what I was in for. A lot of us know “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and the oft-anthologized “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” but nothing else Stevens wrote. That was me, anyway. So I wasn’t expecting the dense, often high-flown pieces packed into these 534 pages.

Stevens had an ear, and a penchant for obscure verbiage. I had to look up many of his choicest words: diaphanes, cantilena, tutoyers, cribled. But far more naturally came my appreciation for his — I guess you could call it his secular spiritualism. It’s on display in “Sunday Morning,” a poem from Harmonium, Stevens’s debut collection, originally published in 1923: “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires.”

Meanwhile, I did my level best to write off his casual racism as a cultural influence of his time, as unavoidable as it is unfortunate, and to avoid feeling cheated by his frequently too-tidy denouements (which, there again, were sort of fashionable then). I don’t care about his reputation, that the man was made a marble bust in his lifetime; he eventually tipped into pomposity, and in-fucking-comprehensible poems like “Puella Parvula” are useless to me (“Keep quiet in the heart, o wild bitch. O mind / Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella. / Write pax across the window pane. And then // Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins… / Flame, sound fury composed… Hear what he says, / The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.” Uh, what?). But I’m glad to have at long last read him and grasped what the Great Poet’s name was built on.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
My intro to Woolf, one of fiction’s greats. Now this is ironic, considering that A Room of One’s Own isn’t a work of fiction but an essay, addressed to writers and would-be writers of the female sex, advocating greater creative and financial freedoms for women. Woolf’s prose is distinctive and deft, to be sure, but, dammit, I want to get hold of Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and, in particular, Orlando (“minor Woolf,” as I understand, but with SF elements that I find compelling), so I can see her renowned talents for fiction on full display.