My book club read The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis, and discussed today. All agreed: a ham-fisted, boring allegory for thinking about the meaning of life and how to be a person who will be closer to God. God turns out to be a distant mountain range, a never-ending exploration of love for the wholeness of All Creation blah blah. I can be generous about it: Lewis was trying to work through ideas in WWII when presumably intelligent people were having a hard time seeing God In All Things. He perhaps sincerely thought he could write a short allegory that would give people hope, and deepen their faith. It did not speak to me or most others in the book club. Does not stand the test of time. Camus was writing The Stranger around the same time, and I think it is definitely better as a novel, and engages more honestly with the fundamental question of meaninglessness, in the context of the times.

Published back in 1994 and 1998, the novels seem very prescient about our new cusp-of-AI age. In the novels, scanning and uploading of conscious human sentience is achievable. It feels like that could be 50 years away, at this point in 2023 (considering that 50 years ago, 1973, there basically were no computers at all for practical purposes). Egan then deals with a lot of the issues of how these computer programs would interact and evolve, in an environment without embodied boundaries. Our slow human trait of mind-training (basically the idea that consciousness is self-consciously alterable) is vastly sped up when a computer program simply edits itself, perhaps after running many trial and error simulations in a sandbox. Computing power is a central issue, but the assumption is that when computing moves to the quantum scale, this somehow goes away, in the same way it is mysteriously accomplished in our brains. Lots of food for thought about philosophical questions of meaningfulness. As novels, however, they are pretty clunky!

I loved the narrator voice here. It’s a picaresque farce of a novel, drawing a lot on Shakespeare’s comedies. Very enjoyable read, although in the end maybe more like a delicious trifle. Possibly there is a deeper literary subtext going on, but you’d really have to be in the weeds. The Hollywood scenes are especially enjoyable– the Forest of Arden. Lots of melancholy, too. Life can be sweet, but its ending … ah!

I really wanted to like this, but in the end it seemed more trifling that substantive. A foreword tries hard to make the case for the novelette as a showcase for writing craft mastery, in the device of the narrator telling the story through the voice of a different character. But in this case, or two related stories told by two different narrators, the stories are of different events, so there is no complexity added in the point of view. And the central characters (the chess opponents) are exaggerated “very serious literary characters” (you know, the kind who never go to the bathroom). There is no arc to the story, really. or at least the small arc of each chess master moving their understanding of their chess self a little bit did not resonate with me. Characters: Czentovic, the peasant grandmaster, and Dr. B., a discreet lawyer of the Austrian aristocracy imprisoned by the Nazi’s.

Our book club read this odd young person book. As one member said in our discussion, “It’s an allegory, but an allegory for what?!” Definitely worth sharing with a 12 year old avid reader, and discussing with them, is my guess.

Tremendous! I loved reading this. Such amazing writing as Saramogo elides the story of the present-day publishing house with the story of the reconquest of Portugal from the Moors, with the same narrator commenting on what he is doing.

Another in what is apparently an enormous fan-fiction of Greek and Roman myths. That I think I was sort of unaware of. And maybe that is because most of them are bad? This one is a throwaway- Atwood seemingly makes little effort to keep the Penelope narrator’s tone consistent… Almost as if each section had been written at different times, and she had not bothered to re-read the earlier sections in order to be consistent.

I thought they would be better. More clever, more interesting details. Instead they seemed perfunctory. I think I’ll take Patricia Highsmith or Muriel Spark.

I don’t need to write much, since Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, is probably the best novel I’ve read in a decade (since I read Alan Garner, Beppe Fenoglio, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, I guess?). Definitely I want to start reading it again: it is dense, complex, and full of subtle writing.

Wow, reading this was a pleasure, after having read Jean Rhys. You can see almost a direct line from Kafka to Rhys to Kavan to more contemporary novels like Annihilation. The subject matter is banal; everything relevant in the novel is in the writing style and narrator voice. Hazy, elliptical, jumpy, somewhat surreal, sometimes seemingly non-linear, conventional explanations of plot deliberately left out. As you read you’re just in awe of a writer who can pull something like this off, and it feels so incredibly hermetic and thoughtful, rather than contrived. And the subtext of gendered violence penetrating every paragraph.

A friend was reading this “creature feature” and so I borrowed The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree from the library. Competent tale in the setting of Galveston in the “mighty flood” of 1900. It is definitely genre fiction, almost like a preliminary sketch for a television miniseries… Very visual.

Apparently this short experimental novel, Good Morning, Midnight, by Jean Rhys, published in 1938, temporarily ended Rhys’ writing career, the novel was so depressing. I’m here to validate that. Think Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell but instead written by a really clinically depressed person who sees no way forward in life. She abuses herself and is abused in turn. Crappy hotels, dirty restaurants, abusive men in bars. The ending section is a long interior monologue, confused and choppy, about what seems to have been sexual assault in the hotel room in Paris. Really sad and depressing.

My neighborhood book club just finished a easy-read detective story from 1960s Australia, The Lake Frome Monster, by Arthur Upfield…. All about the Outback and ranching and First Nations People/aboriginal people… the detective is interesting… not the best detective mystery but lots of interesting local stuff and apparently most Australians are familiar with it… The language is quite dated, but presumably close to how white Australians thought/spoke…

The only reason I checked out Galatea, by Madeline Miller, was because it looked really short. It’s like a 30 minute read, or less. A trifling story, where booksellers and publishers are happy to take your $12 for the hardcover (!) and you can gift it to a friend who is vaguely feminist, has a literary air but doesn’t really read much, and liked Greek myths as a child. Otherwise, really this is a waste of your time and dollars… Put it in a short story collection about reworking myths for modern readers.

Sometimes it only takes a few pages for you to realize there is a gap between the promise of the cover and the reality of the words on the page. In this case, the promise was a kind of time-travel (immortality for hundreds of years without aging, but at a cost)… so historical novel across the ages as the central character gets to live through them, becoming weary and wise. The reality is that it was a genre romance novel dressed up a bit for a certain kind of reader. Did she swoon? Did her Luciferian counterpart come to understand love? I certainly stopped caring and just skimmed a few pages every now and then, and it stayed the same. Buh-bye….

Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu, published back in 2020, is a long, shaggy dog story of Mars colonists gradual rapprochement with Earth, after a war of independence 100 years earlier. Jingfang imagines Mars as very much like a small country, rebelling against the commercial imperium of corporate control from Earth. Totally plausible. The Martians then establish a command economy, with some decentralization, in order to survive, and eventually to prosper. Inevitably, the command economy butts against desires for individual liberty and more freedom of choice. The novel traces through several characters, but focuses on an adolescent girl coming to understand the system. She’s waking up! As she struggles to understand the complexity of a social system, other actors are not waiting, and the system evolves even as her understanding grows. Jingfang nicely advocates for intellectual and engagement humility and sobriety. The enemies of the people end up being the hotheads, whether on the communitarian or the libertarian side. It’s long, but worth reading.

Was bored and wanted something light, so I re-read Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. I was amazed at how much I had forgotten. I last read it in May 2022. It is a very quick read: two nights. Enjoyable, but slight. Knowing that she doesn’t deal seriously with time travel paradoxes may have made it more enjoyable to read the second time around. The first time I had found myself annoyed that she was so glib about time travel.

Beautifully written, Admiring Silence, by Abdulrazak Gurnah follows the return of the protagonist, who has been living in England since the independence regime of Zanzibar lashed out against the Arab families of the island, and the island descended into poverty. He has a companion and child in England. Returning, he finds that Zanzibar holds few of the memories of childhood he hoped to rekindle, and he finds himself more lost than ever. The style is deliberately a bit foggy, as Gurnah tries to recreate the narrators own sense of displacement. While this is a genre I don’t normally enjoy (the emotional labor of the return home, and the creation of a new set of memories of those left behind) there is no doubting Gurnah’s very capable and enjoyable prose.

Historical non-fiction, immersing the reader in the world of lower Manhattan in the post-revolution period around 1790. New York just has about 25,000 residents. Sweet reconstructs the social world on a young woman Lanah Sawyer who is raped by a young landed gentleman Henry Bedlow. The rape trial was followed closely, and written up in summary form by a young lawyer, and commented on extensively by the press. Alexander Hamilton was one of the lawyers for the defendant. Many of Bedlow’s family (he was related to the Rutgers) left lots of records, too. And the “bawdy house” of Mother Carey, where Bedlow performed the act, was well-known. So in The Sewing Girl’s Tale, John Wood Sweet is able to give a compelling account. It makes me want to walk through lower Manhattan, with a new eye and appreciation for the early history of the place, which was so central to the early Republic.