Michael Kevane

For some reason in leading up to the start of teaching classes in Sept. I did a lot of skim-reading in the last two months rather than complete book. But worthwhile a usual to keep track.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. I’ve read this several times and seen the movie several times, but for sure more than 15 years ago… so was fun to just open up random pages, knowing the whole context and story, and enjoy Ishiguro’s writing. It is, though, a painful read, in the sense of an unreliable not-very-likeable narrator about a bad subject-for-our-times (collaboration with Nazis).

Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World. I had not read this and am slowly working my way through. So far very “complement” to Remains of the Day… unreliable, uncomfortable, icky subject (aligning with fascism).

R,F, Kuang, Babel. Got halfway through and then just jumped to the end. Heavy-handed, I found. Lots of exposition. The plot was too thin for me (gosh, I’ve read a lot of these wizard academy coming-of-age plots…). But I can see people who have not read a lot in the genre enjoying, or if you like reading the familiar genre and don’t want the genre to do much more than deliver, it’s probably fine.

Jose Saramogo, Levantado des suelo. Really the first 50 pages got depressing for me so I stopped but I will come back to this. Something maybe I will read Rayuela-style and then if enough chunks are good start over and read linearly.

Mark Gregory Pegg, Beatrice’s Last Smile. I read this a couple years ago. You can open to any of the short chapters and read super interesting anecdotes from primary sources about life in the 300-1300 AD period in Europe.

Richard Hingley, Hadrian’s Wall: A life. Like Pegg’s book, you can open anywhere to read vignettes of the ~2000-year history of the wall. Definitely makes me want to walk the length of the wall.

Richard Jenkins, A Fine Brush on Ivory. Appreciation and light literary criticism of Jane Austen. The enthusiasm is infectious. You start thinking, couldn’t I become an Austen-ite too? How delightful, the arcana, and the debates over interpreting Willoughby, etc.

Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann. Again, can just open randomly and be “listening” to Vinteuil ….

Hermann Melville, White-Jacket. I think I was reading this in pandemic and picked up again. So many interesting vignettes. The homeward-bounder beards struck me again some reason.

Henry James, Washington Square. I gave up about 2/3 way through. As usual with James, he just takes forever to advance the plot, and the long decriptions of character and motivations just make the reading tedious. Skimming to denouement, I found I had no desire to read carefully.

John Jennings (text) and David Brame (illustrator), After the Rain (after the short novel by Nnedi Okorafor. A graphic novel of a short novel. Sort of a horror story with an identity question (Nigerian or American!?) tacked on. The illustrations play up the horror/gore. Personally not my vibe at all.

Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe. Collection of short stories and novellas. He has a recognizable style. Folksy and uncanny. Shirley Jackson? Not much science-fiction in the collection. Many are enjoyable, but after a few days I didn’t find that the stuck with me.

Enrique Vila-Matas, Paris no se acaba nunca. Been skimming this randomly throughout the month, reading 5-10 pages in chunks. Doesn’t seem very linear.

Javier Marias. Todas las almas. Reading for sibling book group.

Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. Reading for literary book group. Very, very good- merits careful, slow, thughtful reading.

Alan Bennett, An Uncommon Reader. Reading for neighborhood group. Very short and enjoyable and a nice complement to the literary fiction.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations. Trying to slowly work through the last long chapter on meaning.

Mostly light reading these two months, with Vila-Matas in reserve occasionally.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Made Things. Throwaway fantasy short novel. The usual. Fine for kids. At this point he must be able to write stuff like this in 2-3 days?

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls.

Benjamin Black, The SIlver Swan. After reading a couple of John Bannister literary novels, decided to dip into his crime novels (written under pseudonym). While friends highly recommend, I was disappointed. The crimes did not seem that interesting, and Quirk, the forensic pathologist, kept being described in exactly the same way. And according to the narrator, Quirk’s self-description (inner voice passages) is the same as the narrator’s! What? For Irish “color” or world-building of the 1950s, barely a whisper. Could be set in the present and most readers would not know.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Reading for book club. After we selected, slew of stories came out; I guess it is 100th anniversary. My daughter said it best: “It is great for every high school student to read, because all the literary devices are there hitting you over the head, so it is good for 10th grade analysis!” I had not read since high school, and had forgotten all of the plot. The unrequited love story is so superficial, and Tom and Daisy Buchanan are so one-dimensional, one wonders how, say, someone who had read Proust or Zola or Balzac or Dickens thought it significant.

Ursula LeGuin. Wizard of Earthsea. I do like reading fantasy novels in Spanish or French, because the shift in vocabulary adds some distancing and immersion that is useful I think for “transportation” that fantasy novels rely on. I read this in French, and noticed that some words that I thought to myself “don’t know” were her own made up words… so it was more like being a chid and not knowing whether a word referred to something or was fantasy. I’m a sucker for a single-themed novel about coming of age and being reconciled to the world as a big, bad, grim place, with dashes of beauty and joy, and this novel delivers that.

Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice, and Royal Assassin. Very good fantasy escapism… close attention to detail and character. In the end, I grew weary though, and really started skipping. I found I could pick up 100 pages later with little loss. Will not be reading others. But would definitely recommend for a 14 year old avid reader.

Junji Ito, Frankenstein. Manga-style version of Frankenstein. Fun read.

• John Banville, The Sea. Highly literary fiction, with an unpleasant narrator, who spins a melodrama about aging and memory that definitely I will re-read someday. Had a great discussion about it with book club partner readers. Filled with details and nuance.
• Percival Everett, James. A book that needed to be written. Easily read over a few nights. But once read, there would be no pleasure or profit from re-reading.
• John Banville, The Untouchable. Highly literary fiction, with an unpleasant narrator, who spins a melodrama about aging and memory that definitely I will re-read someday. Had a great discussion about it with book club partner readers. Filled with details and nuance. (Yup, repeated on purpose!)
• John Banville, Body of Evidence. I had to stop. Too unpleasant a narrator. Reminded me of Wasp Factory.
• Josephine Tey, Daughter of Time. Who did kill the brothers in the Tower? Richard? Or…. Fun detective novel as historical fiction, but the style definitely dated.
• Shirley Jackson, Flower Garden (short story). Yikes: a meditation on racism that cuts straight through the bullshit.
• Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces. I have a decent appetite for “physics explained to economists,” and this was pretty good!
• Beth Brower, The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion. Excellent if you are 12 years old.
• Adam Gopnick, All That Happiness Is: Some Words on What Matters. “Some words that my publisher thought we could make a tidy sum off, is more like it.” Learn a craft for the emotional satisfaction of improving at something. There, saved you time and money.
• Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay. A poorly written rehash of some of his main ideas (complexity and emergent properties). Perfectly fine as an entry text into his work. The writing is dialed in here.
• Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver. You can imagine Stephenson in a small home library, with old books about the 1600s everywhere, and manuscript pages scattered about, and every morning he randomly picks a few and then figures out how to insert into his narrative fictionalized version of the times. After a few hundred pages, most readers I am sure start thinking, “Why not just read Wikipedia? Or better yet, let me go browse in the old books section of my local bookstore.”
  

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake. Reminded me of Elizabeth Hand. A moody, philosophical novel, but on the whole meadering writing and for me not very inspiring. Eventually, I gave up about p. 270 with 100 pages left. At some point I realized nothing was happening nor was anything going to happen, so why continue. Plodding. The idea here seems to be to make the reader go through 350 pages without any compelling character, plot, or writing, and with a string of fairly banal philosophical observations mixed in throughout.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Silence du Choeur. An earlier novel of his- very competent polyphonic voices about African migrants in Sicily. I’m not a lit studies person, but can I presume riffs/references to The Aeneid, which would make it more fun to discuss? (Google search reveals nothing…)

Film

• Emilia Perez – great first half then it (and I) wandered off
• Beanpole – beautiful Russian film about two women in Leningrad right after WWII. Harrowing and quiet.
• Caravaggio (by Derek Jarman) – self-indulgent and ridiculous. Probably “daring” in its time but a yawn now. Contrast (aesthetic, intensity, attention to detail) with Beanpole couldn’t be bigger.
• Saturday Night Live. A re-creation of “first night.” You are definitely better off seeing Birdman.

Scott Alexander Howard, The Other Valley. Nicely done, sort of YA, regretful, and grim (like a woodcut!) time-travel story.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden. Disappointing multi-earth multiverse story, a la Terry Pratchett. Some interesting evolution possibilities, but the plot was just dumb and got dumber.

James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes (first book of The Expanse). Watched the show some years ago. They stuck very closely to the text of the novel. So a very enjoyable distraction.

I only use this blog to keep track of my book reading.

Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago. Excellent fictionalized novel with the Palio in Siena!

Georges Simenon, Le passager du “Polarlys”. I was unimpressed. Enjoyed the French. I guess at the time the world-weary captain in the frozen north and the semi-debauchery of the criminal may have been thrilling.

Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami. Enjoyed the French, and the sociology of the times, and the profile and evolution of an unlikable and dubious yet sympathetic (to be reader) hero.

Roberto Bolaño, Estrella Distante. 2nd time reading. Excellent.

My second time to read Nocturno de Chile, by Roberto Bolaño. I really missed a lot in the first feverish read about two years ago! Highly recommend multiple reads.

Book club discussed Shopgirl, by Steve Martin. It’s a slight novella, later turned into a movie (book reads as a script, we thought, with stage directions and present-tense narrator). We mostly intensely disliked, and were disappointed. It came across as cringy and unaware. Characters were flat.

I started to intensely dislike his prose style halfway through the novel, in the long scene with Connie (“Slowly her head came up, and he saw her face clear, and his voice quickened and gathered strength.”), and then just could not enjoy one more reference to Karla. Every 20 pages a reference to “Anne” who in the end appeared to be Helena Bonham-Carter playing a 50 year old Princess Margaret in The Crown? What then did that make Smiley?

I read Azúcar, by Nii Ayikwei Parkes, a few months ago, but forgot to add to reviews. Enjoyable and light. Not as rich for me as Tail of the Blue Bird. I kept waiting for the novel to go deeper, but instead it stayed relentlessly on the surface. More like a young adult novel, in that regard, and I can see it having a lot of appeal to teen readers. Nice review by Houman Barekat from The Guardian is here.

I read James Ellroy, My Dark Places, while overlapping with 2666. The misogyny, the femicides… can get overwhelming. I give Ellroy a lot of credit for putting down in writing a person’s dark places. We humans do not like to go there, especially when it comes to sexuality and adolescence. Yet, how are we to learn and share if we never talk or read about it. It would be scary to “teach” this… so glad to be an economist. On the downside, the writing is the standard hardboiled LA prose, that often skirts cliché. And can be repetitive. Piling murder on murder, the way Bolaño does in 2666, is literary when the writer is paying careful attention to language and nuance. Here it is just one more piled on.