The List: Reading January Through March 2013

As it often does, thanks to my usual subscriptions, the generous staff at a couple of literary journals, and friends with Amazon accounts, the new year brought me ample reading material. But as the year bringeth, the year taketh away.

Returning to what passes for a workforce has robbed me of my prime reading time over the past two months, so I’ve had to do some jury-rigging to my schedule in order to keep up. Not that I mind all that much, in retrospect; the shake-up has led me to write more short-form posts for this blog and a great deal more poetry, which, in turn, freed some of my writing hours for reading, instead. After a period of adjustment, I’m reading less than before I took up the mantle of pot-scrubber, but still managed to read the nine books I’ve reviewed here.

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Don DeLillo, White Noise
Some of the white noise that fills DeLillo’s incandescent comedy of horrors:

IRREGULAR PEANUTS
…
“If it breaks into pieces, it is called shale. When wet, it smells like clay.”
…
“Until Florida surgeons attached an artificial flipper.”
…
“Kleenex Softique, your truck’s blocking the entrance.”
…
“There are forms of vertigo that do not include spinning.”
…
“And other trends that could dramatically impact your portfolio.”
…
Ululation.
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A band played live Muzak.
…
“This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it’s like. They didn’t prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation. In less than three minutes we will touch down, so to speak. They will find our bodies in some smoking field, strewn about in the grisly attitudes of death. I love you, Lance.”
…
“Convulsions, coma, miscarriage.”
…
“It’s the rainbow hologram that gives this credit card a marketing intrigue.”
…
GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL
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“Meanwhile here is a quick and attractive lemon garnish suitable for any seafood.”
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“A California think-tank says the next world war may be fought over salt.”
…
“Did you remember: 1) to make out your check to Waveform Dynamics? 2) to write your account number on your check? 3) to sign your check? 4) to send payment in full, as we do not accept partial payments? 5) to enclose your original payment document, not a reproduced copy? 6) to enclose your document in such a way that the address appears in the window? 7) to detach the green portion of your document along the dotted line to retain for your records? 8) to supply your correct address and zip code? 9) to inform us at least three weeks before you plan to move? 10) to secure the envelope flap? 11) to place a stamp on the envelope, as the post office will not deliver without postage? 12) to mail the envelope at least three days before the date entered in the blue box?
…
“Now we will put the little feelers on the butterfly.”
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“In the four-hundred-thousand-dollar Nabisco Dinah Shore.”
…
“Now watch this. Joanie is trying to snap Ralph’s patella with a bushido stun kick. She makes contact, he crumples, she runs.”
…
A cold dry sizzle. A sound like some element breaking down, resolving itself into Freon vapors.
…
“They’re not booing — they’re saying, ‘Bruce, Bruce.’”
…
All sounds, all souls.

How did I make it this far in life before reading White Noise? How many benighted years! What a pity.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Chuck Palahniuk novels are like M. Night Shyamalan movies: read any one and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect when you pick up the next. But I like Palahniuk’s formula — the invented almost-credible-sounding facts and figures; the demented archetypal characters bent on self-destruction; the chains of revelations, one after another after another, until readers have discovered so much shocking information they can scarcely tell anymore which way is up. Fiction that disorients can be instructive, a fact that Palahniuk all but writes on his books’ covers.

“Our real discoveries come from chaos,” says Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, in Invisible Monsters, a madhouse of a novel by the same man who brought us the eminently filmable Fight Club and Choke, as well as a slew of other anarchic romps that have yet to be made into movies. And discoveries certainly abound in this one, most of them of course meant to shock. Imagine if Shyamalan’s interests turned to making queer soap-opera camp; this book is sick and twisty. It’s also fun in ways you’ll be ashamed to admit lapping up.

Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director’s Cut
On a park bench, fourteen years ago, my friend Anna handed me an issue of the Johnny comic book series and said, “You have to read this. It’s soooo funny.”

I did, and, in the most questionable way, it was. And that was that, until, a couple of years later, I started dating a girl who shoved a hardcover edition of the collected JTHM into my hands, saying, “If we’re going to get serious, you have to read this first.” I liked her, so I spent a week reading the whole series in that one volume, chuckling intermittently and wondering what was wrong with me that I found Johnny’s existential torment so amusing.

At least I was not alone in having a twisted sense of humor — the JTHM comics first published in the ‘90s are still in print today; though, Slave Labor Graphics could just be churning out reprints to pile in landfills, in some diabolical scheme to destroy the environment in one of the most tasteless ways possible. Rereading Johnny now, well into adulthood, was a deliberate effort to remember my friend Anna (it worked, and she’d smile that little sideways smile to know this is how I did it) and of the wonderful long-ago I spent with that so-serious girl I fell in love with (she may find this funny, if she ever reads these words). Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny’s creator, surely never intended ‘Nny to rouse sweet, mushy, hug-hug feelings in readers, so learning that it did might freak him out. Possibly, his head could explode, then he’d do a headless spite jig at me and I would be sad again.

Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
There is a recipe for this kind of participative journalism that I’m apparently incapable of resisting. Mild-mannered reporter Foer writes here of his immersion in the peculiar subculture of mental athletes, where he learned and practiced their memory-enhancement techniques — techniques pioneered by the ancient Greeks and still employed today — to ready himself for entry into the US Memory Championships. Moonwalking is heavy on anecdotes, not on the boring how-to approach implied by the book’s misleading subtitle, so it’s better than it sounds. Foer’s history lessons and digressive fact-finding along the way make for an entertaining jaunt reminiscent of Stefan Fatsis’s journey through the wilds of tournament SCRABBLE competition, Word Freak, which I read a decade ago and also recommend.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
In his elegant 2009 book, The Black Swan, Taleb expounded on how unexpected events shape our lives, teaching valuable lessons about the ludic fallacy, the dangers of implied narratives, and false pattern recognition. Writing The Black Swan, he came to realize how well his thought process lent itself to constructing aphorisms — pithy, self-contained bits of ostensible wisdom — and so pieced together The Bed of Procrustes, a notebook’s worth of thoughts, an empiricist’s bathroom reader. Morning constitutionals could only be enhanced by musing over propositions like these: “Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears”; “Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness”; and “They read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Chateau Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup.” Very clever. The rest of the pages can be torn out to improve your bathroom time in other ways.

Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories
PKD was nothing if not a prolific writer, authoring, in addition to his many novels, what I suspect are hundreds of short stories in the sci-fi genre, and, as with his longer works, many of these stories resonate at frequencies that penetrate the reader’s mind like radiation, quietly mutating the gray matter to delayed but significant effect. The upshot is that the story on which you later reflect stands out not for its hard technical data (Dick was no technologist; he expertly obfuscated the science in his science fiction) but for its paranoia, delirium, or isolation — the themes he dealt with best. Standout stories in this generous collection of early PKD include the haunting time-travel tale “Captive Market,” the title story that was adapted into Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie, and the Kafkaesque “What the Dead Men Say.”

Just as in all near-future SF, it’s easy enough to point out the ways in which the author’s speculation about a future thirty, fifty, or even ninety years away failed. Dick didn’t predict the Internet, DNA forensics, the uninhabitability of Venus, Soviet Russia’s demise…. However, we still watch Twilight Zone episodes whenever Syfy reruns them, and suspend our disbelief for classic SF cinema, such as This Island Earth. There’s a timeless je ne sais quoi in black-and-white futurism, on the screen or on the page, which has nothing to do with anything as pedantic as accuracy.

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
For how many English lit courses is this 1898 novella required reading, I wonder. I’ve encountered its title, and James’s name generally, for years and years, without having a clue to what the book is about (and even less interest in finding out). Had I known it to be a ghost story — and my reading leaves little doubt about the paranormal nature of the malevolence with which the tale concerns itself, never mind the rhetoricians who think it’s a case of hysteria, delusion, or whatever else — I’d have gotten around to it earlier.

As it happened, I was several chapters into A Rhetoric of the Unreal (see below) before I realized that three whole chapters of that book are devoted to analysis of The Turn of the Screw. In a sense, then, this became required reading for my self-administered, ongoing course in English literature. Posthaste, a friend went online and ordered a cheap paperback edition for me.

In the simplest synopsis I can give, it’s the story of a governess charged with caring for a wealthy bachelor’s orphaned niece and nephew. She takes the job in “a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized,” only to be seized by dread at the appearance of two sinister apparitions — former employees of the bachelor, it seems. The governess maintains, externally, the utmost poise and decorum, spending the remainder of the novella quite privately losing her shit. Keeping her composure becomes all the more challenging once the angelic children are implicated in a conspiracy of knowing what’s really happening. It’s all very dramatic and suspenseful, if a tad fusty.

Although the dusty syntax of a century-old book takes some getting used to, once I grasped James’s style, immersing myself in his cinematic plot was as easy as tumbling from a ramshackle manse’s widow’s walk. (I’m merely illustrating a point; there is actually no such fall in this story. Sorry to disappoint you.) The Turn is very episodic, and I kept envisioning its scenes like those of a movie, probably a BBC affair, on par with Downton Abbey, as far as production values go, and wondering if a film version was ever made. If not, why not? I’d watch.

Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic
Education options for the incarcerated are few. My discovery of this fact occurred around nine years ago, when I was in the doldrums, awaiting the circuit court’s decision on my direct appeal — an awful period in which I sought only distraction, in the form of crossword puzzles, games of SCRABBLE, and all the literary classics I could get my hands on. When I thought to make more edifying use of my time, I considered reapplying myself to formal education by way of a correspondence course. Doing so would have many benefits, I thought, not least of which were better job options (if certain crucial improvements to my circumstances were also made, that is) and my casting off of the label “high-school dropout” that’s clung to me like a scarlet letter ever since I opted to forgo three more years — of teachers who couldn’t engage me, classmates who couldn’t tolerate me, and schedules that couldn’t accommodate me — in favor of a GED and the honest, well-intentioned goal of enrolling at a two-year college sometime before I turned seventeen. So, locked in a prison cell, seven years after clearing the books and the M.C. Escher postcard out of my locker, I wrote away for information on schools.

When the stacks of brochures, pamphlets, and course catalogs arrived, though, my enthusiasm diminished in inverse proportion to the volume of data provided. These days, nearly all of the correspondence involved in taking a correspondence course is web-based, with a few that require students to at least have e-mail. But yours truly lacks any computer access. My options were therefore narrow: (a) business management or (b) nothing. If you remember those midday and late-night TV ads from the ‘80s — the ones in which Sally Struthers flogged courses in gun repair, locksmithing, TV/VCR repair, shoegazing, saw sharpening… “or you can major in business management or accounting” — you’ll understand why I went with option b. Call me elitist, but I could never subject myself to a class I’d seen hyped during a commercial break from Night Court. Deciding against a correspondence course ultimately proved practical, because my direct appeal was quickly denied, reducing me to a braindead mourner, too wrapped up in suffering to devote brainpower to anything more academic than my navel.

Eventually I came back around. I also changed my mind about formal education. For me, given what I want to do with my life, whether or not it’s ever fully restored to me by the State, earning a degree would largely be a waste of money and time. (Establishments of higher learning, take note: I will still happily accept any honorary diplomas you see fit to offer me.) My middle name might as well be Autodidact, considering how rigorously I pursue the self-instruction that works so well to cram information into my miswired brain. And it’s books like this one, A Rhetoric of the Unreal, that allow me to get knowledge and understanding at the speed I prefer, by the terms I dictate.

Friends agree that my taste in reading material sometimes skews to the masochistic. The friend who ordered me this book from my Amazon wish list did so because, in his words, no one else would. He was probably right: people tend to get me the books they themselves would like to read, and I don’t imagine there’s much demand for in-depth rhetorical analyses of sci-fi, fantasy, or other written works that make use of fantastical elements, among you who read this blog. But I was challenged (pleasantly so) by Christine Brooke-Rose’s semiotic studies of works ranging from James’s The Turn of the Screw (as I mentioned above) to LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, stories from Poe’s “The Black Cat” to Lem’s “The Twentieth Voyage,” and style exercises from Reed’s Yellow Black Radio Broke-Down to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, in dense, imposingly titled sections (e.g., “The Fantastic as Theoretical Genre: The Three Requirements,” “Ambiguity as Distancing,” or “Metafiction and Surfiction: A Simpler Formal Approach”). I can understand how this kind of thing might put a purely pleasure-seeking reader off his or her breakfast. Me, though? I ate it up.

Davy Rothbart, My Heart Is an Idiot
When you know the author, it’s basically impossible to critique a book objectively. When an author has written about you in that book, it’s more difficult still. Davy Rothbart is my friend, and in his collection of autobiographical essays is a piece about how he and I got to know each other after he learned about my wrongful conviction for first-degree murder. How could I review My Heart Is an Idiot fairly?

I can’t. Instead, I’ll just use this space to effuse about my friend’s newest book.

Davy is a phenomenal entertainer whose adventurous spirit leads him through one bizarre circumstance after another, and these situations make for very amusing story-fodder. I laughed — actually laughed out loud — twice before reaching page ten. Davy’s such an adroit storyteller because he embeds his idiotic heart in every one of these essays — sometimes in ways that make you think you should be embarrassed for him, sometimes in ways that make you want to curl up in a corner and hide under a blanket, but always in ways that make you feel something.

He wrote “The Strongest Man in the World” about how his research into my case led him to know me and a few of the people who most fervently believe in my innocence. Certain individuals who make a profession of reviewing books for major media outlets have called this, the book’s longest piece, its best. I personally preferred “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Pee on the Wall,” which didn’t leave me despondent beneath the aforementioned blanket. You know what they say about opinions, though. Buy a copy of Davy Rothbart’s book right now and develop your own unique scent.

The List: Reading April Through June 2012

Priming the pump. That’s probably the best metaphor for my speculative-fiction-reading jag, these last couple of months. After I completed work on my memoir manuscript last year, I was nagged persistently by the thought of what book-length writing project to tangle myself up in next. I was certain I wanted to try my hand at a novel — perhaps a sci-fi novel. Science fiction, as I like to tell people, was my first love. The Tripods, Asimov’s Robbie the Robot books, The War of the Worlds, and classic movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still — my early childhood memories of these are perfectly preserved even while those of most family gatherings, many special outings, and several birthday parties are but hazy half-recollections. I’m not adequately credentialed to assess what this says about me, except that my geek pedigree is solid.

But months dragged on without inspiration striking for my next writerly undertaking. It could be that I had focused for so long on essays and literary fiction that I was hobbled, unable to envision scenarios ungrounded in the here and now. A friend suggested this, then offered a solution. “Read more high-quality genre fiction,” she advised. “Maybe something will come to you.”

So I shifted my reading habits for awhile, picking up nothing but books of fantastika that were critically lauded, in the hope that doing so might jar a wild idea or two loose from my stuffy, logical brain. I started reading Locus, a monthly magazine of speculative-fiction criticism and related book-industry news. I also re-watched, on a whim, Aliens on Syfy, just to see if it would put me in the mood. (Forget Ellen Ripley, that xenomorph queen is the real babe of that film.) Whether or not all this was the cause, I had a breakthrough in mid-June: I’ve officially begun writing a sci-fi novel. Check back with me in a few months and you’ll be bound to read all about this endeavor’s progress. For now, though, you can see below what books I transitioned to in order to break free of the gravity of my sci-fi writer’s block.


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Søren Kierkegaard (Alastair Hannay, translator), The Seducer’s Diary

One of the fathers of existentialism in the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard’s first major work was Either/Or, an exploration of ethics versus aesthetics from which The Seducer’s Diary is excerpted. It so happens that a copy of Either/Or found its way to me when I was in jail awaiting trial. It was wheeled in on the meager book cart that made the rounds every other week, and, because it was one of the few titles that didn’t bear a cheesily embossed, foil-stamped cover, I snatched it up thinking to distance myself from my daily bouts with that peculiar admixture of ennui and anxiety. I was facing double life sentences; existential philosophy was, as it turns out, something of a back-burner topic at the time. I scarcely read past the book’s first fifteen pages, and so never read the portion comprising The Seducer’s Diary.

It’s exactly what it sounds like, though. The book’s fictional narrator, Johannes, poetically describes his first sighting of the lovely young Cordelia, then his calculation to win her heart utterly, then, finally, at the point she is irrevocably his, his rejection of her. Johannes is the very model of an aesthete, his only interest in women being the beauty of the dance that is their seduction. In Johannes’s defense, he’s no libertine. Not in any strict sense, anyway. If anything, he has a very thoroughly developed sense of propriety, saying at one point that to make outwardly amorous advances, even after he secures an engagement to Cordelia, “would be really outrageous,” as it would “insult her profound femininity.” To him, romance is an art, nothing more, and this fictional diary reads with all the subversiveness and outrageous humor you’d expect to result from such a perspective. Assuming, that is, you’re in a calm enough mindset to assimilate it.


Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Consider for a moment a man named Steve. Steve is described by his neighbor as “very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” So, is it more likely that Steve is a farmer or a librarian? If you are like most people, your answer will be based on the resemblance of Steve’s noted personality to the profile of a stereotypical librarian. The trouble is, the question is one of likelihood, not profiling. Steve’s neighbor’s description is irrelevant to determining his occupation. Therefore, if you are like most people, your answer was probably wrong. In the United States, librarians are outnumbered by farmers by a ratio of more than twenty to one, yet most people tend not to think in terms of statistics, even when they believe they’re doing so — even when the alternative is more direct.

People are prone to the sort of simplifying and substitution in mental behavior that appears in the Steve question (the technical term for which is heuristics) because intuitive thinking is less resource-intensive than statistical thinking; and this is as straightforwardly as the subject of Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s eye-opening book can be stated. Not that it’s a terribly complicated work. Kahneman does an outstanding job of making the fascinating concepts of loss aversion, duration neglect, and availability bias exceptionally easy for laypeople to grasp, avoiding the pedantic tone that would drag down a less well-written effort. He even introduces some humor, here and there, which is no mean feat for a text equally suited to be shelved in the psychology and economics sections of the bookstore.

A bonus source of interest to me was the striking frequency with which my own cognitive processes failed to jibe with those of the study subjects cited in this book. (Research questions are posed frequently throughout, allowing readers the chance to be surprised by their own responses.) Granted, I hardly needed a book to tell me I’m a more rational, analytical thinker than the average human. A single, early reference to a study of people’s impressions of causality fleetingly mentioned that people with autistic spectrum disorders were often exceptions to the rules defined in Thinking. It could have distracted somewhat from the author’s points if he’d contrasted neurotypical and autistic cognition further, but I’d still have been interested in reading such a divergence.


Phillip Lopate (editor), The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present
I think that when many people encounter the word essay, uncomfortable memories of high school English class come flooding back. That, or what comes to mind is some dry, didactic treatise they once read, which addressed a subject as tedious as the varieties of plumage observed in the European swallow during the writer’s two-week birdwatching tour of the United Kingdom. Either way, the essay has a bad rap. I blame the type of literary Ambien just mentioned — a case of a few boring apples spoiling the whole bunch. But some of the most entertaining and enlightening writing I’ve encountered has been essayistic in nature. There are a lot of great things to be said for the Best American Essays series of books, a new volume of which is published each year. In those I’ve found many pleasant surprises from pieces that begin with an apparently unpromising subject (a New England lobster festival, say) and, by virtue of a unique perspective and an amusing, conversational tone, are rendered remarkable. This is the essay’s power.

In the instance of this collection, The Art of the Personal Essay, the focus is on that subcategory of the essay form that implies, or speaks directly to, a certain universal human condition by dealing in autobiographical detail and avoiding formal, fusty language (unless it’s for laughs). This is a hefty book, packed as it is with selections from as far back as the first century. Two selections are by Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century patron saint of the form. His “On Books” and “On Some Verses of Virgil” failed to impress me. Better examples could almost certainly have been found. Plenty of other pieces here were a pleasure to read: Seneca’s relatable “On Noise”; Maria Edgeworth’s facetious sexism in “An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification”; George Orwell’s study of English boarding-school life, “Such, Such Were the Joys…”; Sara Suleri’s meditation on bull testicles, “Meatless Days”; James Baldwin’s powerful race-relations treatise, “Notes of a Native Son”; Annie Dillard’s sensory paean, “Seeing”; and Richard Rodriguez’s affecting, unsentimental view of San Francisco during the early AIDS epidemic.

While I may have read anthologies that were more fun or that I believed more effectively curated, The Art of the Personal Essay succeeds at least in being a broad-ranging introduction to the form — a good dock from which a novice may kick off his or her shoes and dip a toe into the essay’s open ocean of possibilities.


David Rakoff, Half Empty
“Warning!!!” reads the bright yellow seal on the cover. “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found Within These Pages.” And this is true; the contents of this collection of loosely interlinked personal essays (some previously published in well-known magazines) live up to its cover’s alert. Rakoff — journalist, author, frequent This American Life contributor, and sometimes actor, — is at his sardonic best here. Half Empty reads like I imagine David Sedaris might, if the edge of Sedaris’s bleak wit were honed on the whetstone of being a Jewish pork-lover and three-time cancer survivor. Although I got this book under the misapprehension it would be a tongue-in-cheek manifesto for pessimists, this quick read was nevertheless a dark delight. I lost track of how many times my bursts of laughter earned quizzical looks from my cellmate, who doubtless silently questioned why Mister Intellectual was reading a book with a cartoon bunny on its cover.


David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Imagining what becomes of us after we shuffle off this mortal coil has preoccupied humanity since before recorded time. Disagreements between factions with incompatible theories blemish our history as well as our present-day, frequently causing believers from every camp to personally find out, a bit earlier than may have been hoped, whether or not their guesses were right. As fiercely as some hold to their belief in an afterlife, and given the preponderance of largely homogenous ideas those believers hold, this short collection of alternatives brainstormed by Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman is a refreshing reminder of just how unimaginative those beliefs are.

Its subtitle tells you exactly what this book holds in store: forty vignettes about different versions of the Great Beyond. Each averages a couple of pages and posits its own theoretical hereafter. Despite their profound differences — some are warm and fluffy, others cold and bleak — every one of Eagleman’s ideations is a testament to humanity. Each should also prompt a reader to think, perhaps uncomfortably, about life.

The first sentence of the titular chapter, “Sum,” reads, “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.”

“Metamorphosis” begins, “There are three deaths.”

The melancholy “Spirals” starts with the humorous conceit, “In the afterlife, you discover that your Creator is a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures.”

In “Scales,” Eagleman flirts with transcendence, writing, “For a while we worried about a separation from God, but our fears were eased when the prophets revealed a new understanding: we are God’s organs, His eyes and fingers, the means by which He explores His world.”

Then he goes in exactly the opposite direction, in “Microbe,” a few chapters later: “There is no afterlife for us.”

Big ideas presented by the simplest prose. Sum is witty, quietly provocative, and highly recommended.


M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
It was interesting to transition from Sum’s tidy syntax to this collection’s nineteenth century linguistic sprawl, while staying (in a sense) on the topic of afterlives. More than just in style, I hardly think these two books could be less similar.

A distinguished medievalist and internationally renowned scholar of biblical, antiquarian, and historical subjects, M.R. James took to writing spook stories on a lark, in the late 1800s, as after-dinner entertainment for his literary colleagues. So effective were his understated-yet-descriptive tales of terror that James was prompted to publish them, and a succession of four ghost-story volumes ensued, plus the stories’ various appearances in journals of the day, before his 1936 death. Collected Ghost Stories brings together his entire output of horror, save for the three stories he wrote after its 1931 publication. And quite the collection it is.

Readers know we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, but I couldn’t help myself in this case. The paperback copy from Wordsworth Editions’ 2007 “Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural” series, which I received, is ugly — not just ugly, but cheesy: a skull and a spatter of dripping blood are embossed here, where the badly photoshopped British country inn and ominous evening sky alone would have better fit James’s writing. There is scarcely a hint of blood in these tales, and of skulls only slightly more. James wasn’t interested in gross Lovecraftian exposition. He described only what was necessary to set a scene, then subtly, almost casually, unloosed precisely enough detail at the dramatic climax as to let readers’ imaginations deliver the chills.

From “The Diary of Mr Poynter”:

James Denton, not yet inclined for bed, sat him down in an arm-chair and read for a time. Then he dozed, and then he woke, and bethought himself that his brown spaniel, which ordinarily slept in his room, had not come upstairs with him. Then he thought he was mistaken: for happening to move his hand which hung down over the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair, and stretching it out in that direction he stroked and patted a rounded something. But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted his touch, made him look over the arm. What he had been touching rose to meet him.

And this is as explicit as James ever gets.

Subtle, conversational, and, above all, very, very British, Collected Ghost Stories represents what I believe is some of the best horror writing of all time. Hardly any wonder why James is still regarded as one of the genre’s greatest.


Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
This debut novel kept popping up on readers’ lists of 2011’s best books, yet I confess to having acknowledged it with an initial dollop of skepticism. The title, The Night Circus, I thought belonged on a particularly awful Dean Koontz thriller. Circuses and carnivals have been the backdrop for innumerable crap-fests on page and screen alike. The off-kilter setting naturally appeals to writers who want to set a fantastical story where the otherworldly is credibly commonplace. Except it takes more than some popcorn and striped tents to create an effective atmosphere of this kind. The numinous isn’t easily invoked. Until I found a review of Miss Morgenstern’s literary talent, I was satisfied ignoring this book’s existence. I’ve never taken well to what some readers call “guilty pleasures.”

This novel begins in 1873, in New York, when a wager is made by two very old rivals. We’ll call them magicians. A complex strategy game is to be played; however, we’re not privy to its mysterious rules. Only the pair of bettors know what is to come — the instruction of their players, Celia and Marco — and the field in which the challenge will unfold, Le Cirque des Rêves. (I suspect this, French for “The Circus of Dreams,” may have been Morgenstern’s superior first choice of titles before Doubleday questioned its mass appeal. A pity, if true.) From there, abrupt shifts and gradual progressions of time treat the reader to a story replete with charms, illusions, and star-crossed love, but it’s the circus itself that’s the real star of this book.

According to the New York Times Book Review’s Terrence Rafferty, literary fiction “allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way.” The Night Circus’ gossamer plot is frequently blown aside by its heady atmosphere of magic. Morgenstern is a deft spellcaster, placing before her reader sights and smells so evocative that attractions within the black-and-white tents of Le Cirque des Rêves feel tangible. Ginger and cream and caramel confections tantalize. Velvety curtains part at a touch. Clouds of mist fill a tent of living creatures made from paper. A bonfire in the circus courtyard burns white as new-fallen snow. It’s all a sumptuous banquet for the senses that should meld itself with any reader’s dreams.


China Miéville, Kraken: An Anatomy
When the preserved specimen of Architeuthis dux — a twenty-eight-and-a-half-foot giant squid — suddenly vanishes into what seems to be thin air from the Darwin Center at London’s Natural History Museum, it looks like the end of the world to curator Billy Harrow. Because it is. In the aftermath of the squid’s disappearance, formalin-filled tank and all, Billy finds himself enmeshed in a looming apocalypse and hunted by an increasingly abnormal assortment of law enforcement, underground cultists, freakish gangsters, paranormal assassins, and casual practitioners of arcane magic. They all think he knows something special about the squid, something dreadfully important. At a loss for what the End of Days might have to do with him or his pickled cephalopod, Billy has a hard enough time staying hidden from the forces chasing him down. The places in which he holes up show him a side of London he never could have dreamed existed.

Kraken, by my new favorite fantasist (sorry, Neil Gaiman; your Sandman graphic novels are wondrous, but these days I crave a touch less whimsy), is an adventure in more than just the sense of plot. If Miéville’s tortuous story of warring fringe religions, tenuous alliances, and red herrings — er, squids? — isn’t enough to hold a reader’s attention, his always-dynamic prose is a particular delight. Dialog crackles these weird and sometimes horrifying characters to life, imbuing each with a vivid, distinct personality. Too, the author is generally a brilliant stylist. Every other page offers some clever turn of phrase, punning neologism, or postmodern kick. Kraken’s storyline takes some dark turns, but by the time its breathless conclusion is reached, the fact is undeniable that it was, throughout, some wild kind of fun.


Colson Whitehead, Zone One
In an essay that he wrote for The New Yorker’s special science-fiction issue (“A Psychotronic Childhood,” June 4 & 11, 2012), Whitehead wrote

I never lost sleep over humanoids from the deep, or murderous, severed hands, but I didn’t lose my fear of people. Some people have anxiety dreams about being late for a class they forgot they’d enrolled in, or about giving a speech stark naked. I had zombie anxiety dreams. They started after I saw Dawn of the Dead, in 1979, and kept coming back. For decades. Depending on what was going on in my life at the time, I was pursued by fast zombies or slow zombies. I was alone or with a group. I got away or didn’t. For me, killer robots and giant grasshoppers had nothing on people. I had those dreams until I wrote Zone One and finally found somewhere else to put them.

He distills this off-brand misanthropy into a potent elixir of cynical end-of-the-world action for this compulsively readable novel.

Most of the beloved zombie-story devices are in play here. The uniqueness of Zone One is that the three-day period of its principal plot is set in a period of reconstruction, when the aftereffects of the worst days of chaos and bloodshed are declared PASD — Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder — and the bureaucratic oversight of New York’s provisional government is more concerned with the well-being of its few surviving corporate sponsors than of its hoi polloi. Parts of this book were reminiscent of Max Brooks’s excellent “oral history,” World War Z, but even for Brooks’s canny imaginings, his world trying to recover from the ravaging of the walking dead never felt as true as the one brought to life by Whitehead, in this grisly, perfectly paced tale of existential tumult. Only an accomplished author of literary fiction could have known how to make a story of the undead move with such meaning and life.


Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
What is it about Bradbury’s writings I can’t warm to? An esteemed member of sci-fi’s golden generation, he has millions of fans the world over. His decades in the field have yielded hundreds of stories and dozens of books. He’s been honored by the National Book Foundation, received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and was declared a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French (oh, the French). And yet, and yet. Some je ne sais quoi keeps me from enjoying his tales as much as seems commensurate with his purported greatness. For me, Bradbury’s simply blah.

Is it the era? The stories in The Illustrated Man certainly are superannuated, having first seen print in magazines between 1947 and 1951. They’re accordingly full of the trappings of atomic-age imagination: characters smoke cigarettes onboard rockets being guided to Mars by jumpsuited white men; vacuum modules propel residents to their homes’ upper floors, to be bathed and dressed by machine; beings from the inhabited worlds of our solar system — Venusians, Martians — are primarily bipedal and speak English. It all smacks of EPCOT Center’s “World of Tomorrow!” Except I enjoy even the most hopelessly dated  Twilight Zone reruns that Syfy airs periodically, so age shouldn’t be a substantial factor.

Is it Bradbury’s prose style? Doubtful. He is sometimes wooden (a shortcoming he all but rubs in the reader’s face by way of exclamation points thrown onto the ends of otherwise drab declarative sentences), but he’s also capable of rendering some downright poetic passages. I’d say his technical skills are therefore fairly sound.

Is it that he’s a mediocre storyteller? Not hardly. Granted, with a couple hundred plots to his name, a few are bound to miss their mark (here it’s “The Man,” which hinges on a spaceship captain coming unhinged in a context that makes no sense, and “The Long Rain,” which, though an interesting concept vividly delivered, failed for me by letting life-or-death stakes assume the duty of making characters interesting). He’s usually adept with the twists and turns of narrative.

So we’re left with attitude. Not the attitude of Bradbury’s stories, for these veer from comic to melancholy, but the apparent attitude of the writer himself. With vision aplenty, he nevertheless renders his tales without a futurist’s thorough foresight. He’s cavalier and slapdash. We get rockets like they’re going out of style, but their crews’ sidearms are projectile guns rather than ray blasters. We get a man who lives by a busy highway and receives frequent stop-ins from travelers, yet he somehow doesn’t know there’s a world beyond the desert expanse he calls home. We get a sentient twenty-century-old city that possess the bodies of nine men who happen into its boundaries, and, although they share one consciousness, the unfortunate automatons spend the rest of the story explaining their plan to one another and calling each other by their dead human names. It’s clumsy. I want my sci-fi to be thorough, very thorough. Bradbury tosses out a couple of golly-gee technologies here and there, and expects the tech to be taken at face value. Technology begets change, though — often widespread and sometimes surprising. This childish lack of analytical consideration on the author’s part, with both his old-time high-tech and his more general conceits, is what keeps me from leaping aboard the Bradbury bandwagon.


Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year
Time travel. Precognition. Artificial intelligence. Telepathy. Alternate realities. The continued relevance of The New York Times in 2056. The sheer number of out-there concepts in this uneven novel is outrageous, even for Dick, the mad emperor of gonzo futurism. The plot centers on an organ-transplant surgeon named Doctor Eric Sweetscent (one of my favorite Dickian character names, along with Horselover Fat, from VALIS) and his efforts to end his hellish marriage to a drug-addicted psychopath. (For a while, I really empathized with him.) An ideally timed job transfer allows Sweetscent to get away from his psychologically abusive wife for awhile, but it also places him in a position to influence the interstellar war to which Earth has been bound for years as an impotent ally. This is all harrowing enough before his wife shows up at his door, addicted to a weaponized opiate that sends users on a real trip…through time.

Will he help her or won’t he? That’s the question the rest of the story devotes itself to asking, never mind that piddly matter of whether the classified information Doctor Sweetscent discovers along the way, in a subplot about Earth’s leader’s perpetual verge-of-death health status, will be of any use to save humanity. Will he or won’t he? — nearing the end, I wished the Doctor would swallow that toxic G-Totex blau and put us both out of our misery.


Charles Stross, Wireless
Before a search on the prison library’s computer (search term: “futurist nonfiction”) inexplicably turned up this short-story collection, I don’t know that I had ever seen the name Charles Stross; though, he’s evidently a somewhat highly awarded sci-fi writer. Wireless seemed an opportunity to expand my horizons, as well as a chance to get the lingering bad taste of Bradbury out of my brain.

I’m glad I checked it out. Stross’s style — generally brisk and unforgiving of ignorance — took a bit of getting used to, like stepping into an icy bath, but I took to these stories and novellas quickly enough, making a short read of this 352-page sampler, once his techniques became evident. Uncharacteristically for me, it was the more lighthearted stories in this collection I most enjoyed. “Rogue Farm,” about a freakishly consolidated community’s harassment of a rural couple and their hookah-smoking dog, showed off Stross’s knack for satire. Ditto, “MAXOs,” a parodic letter he published in the august pages of the science journal Nature (I’d love to learn how). His take on the old deal-with-the-Devil tale, “Snowball’s Chance,” was similarly amusing. If Stross is as consistently clever a novelist as these stories of revisionist history, deep time, and the multifarious potentialities in between lead me to suspect he is, I’m going to feel like an absolute troglodyte for taking this long to find out.

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.