This is exactly the sort of novel you would expect from an editor good enough to have edited Nabokov, Updike, Townsend Warner, Sallinger, and every other titan of mid-century fiction writing at the New Yorker. There's more in this 130-page novella than most books two or three times its length. The structure is unique, the writing crystalline. Easily the best book I've read this year, and one I appreciate more and more the longer I think about it.

This is the first Mantel I've ever read, and her writing is as good as everyone says it is. Which is great, because this book at times seemed like an interesting central conceit stretched too thin. The idea that spirits roam the earth unchanged from how they were in life, their personalities frozen in amber, no matter how vicious or shallow or predatory, tormenting the living, is a terrifying one (and a good analog for trauma)...👇

A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to @RaeLovesToRead , who taught me a clever holiday savings tip I'd never heard of before - when sending Christmas cards internationally, wait three years and send all the cards in one envelope! 😆 Thank you for the nice surprise, Rae! ❤️

Even more amazing than the decision to cycle from Ireland to India as a solo female traveler in 1963 is the even-tempered, almost dismissive tone with which Murphy describes the series of harrowing situations she encountered along the way. She has a natural, deadpan comic sensibility that's quite endearing, even if unbelievable at times given the gravity of some of the things that happened to her. She's the best kind of traveler- open-minded...

Herzog's diary of his three-week walk from Munich to Paris to visit his dying friend, the film critic Lotte Eisner. This could have been a low pick. I've always loved Herzog's eye for the dismal and his bleak, deadpan observations, but I admit I found my mind wandering at times. It reads exactly like what it is - a personal journal, not originally intended for publication - and can feel rambling and unfocused.

And that's a wrap! I saved Vonnegut's last for last, which turned out to be the right call, I think. If this had been the first thing of his I'd read, I'm not sure I would have known what to make of it. As a swan song, though, it's perfect - a novel not quite coming together, the well of ideas running dry, repurposed into a meta-narrative reflecting on a life approaching its end and all of those who were a part of it.

A true religious pilgrimage, even if confined to the few square miles around Tinker Creek, near Dillard's home in Virginia. The journey here is internal. This is the best nature writing I've ever had the pleasure to read, not an ounce of sentimentality or nostalgia, no rote cliches about nature's grandeur. It is grand though, and ugly and mystifying and disgusting and beautiful. Life's mysteries distilled into one tiny plot of land.

This is why I subscribe to NYRB. An author I had never heard of before has now become a must-buy. This book packs an incredible amount into just 120-odd pages. The language is lean and spiky, not an ounce of fat to be found, yet it never sounds pedestrian. It's propulsive writing, one sentence flowing breathlessly into the next. I tore through it in a day and a half.

A kaleidoscopic narrative larded with symbols and references to just about every religion, philosophy, and mystical practice known to man. It felt sort of like a William Burroughs remastering of fables and fairy tales from around the world. I love Carrington, and I appreciate formal inventiveness when it's well-done, but I'm still on the fence whether this added up to anything or was so much performative vagueness (albeit beautifully rendered).

This was a difficult book. Halfway through the first chapter I considered bailing, but I had known going in what to expect and so pushed on. I'm glad that I did. Though I'll probably need to reread it several times before I can claim to have caught everything going on here, it's clear by the end of this first read that something truly great is happening here. Like all great art, it demands a lot from its audience, but the hard work is worth it.

This was a pleasant, sometimes funny but rather slow book that I was all set to give a "so-so" until the final 50 pages or so, when things became unhinged. The blurb compares Perez Galdos to a Spanish Dickens, which makes sense given the focus on class. It felt more modern than Dickens, though whether that's the writing itself or the translation I can't say. Let's just say that...

Superfluous cat content at the request of @RaeLovesToRead

Linus and Sophie don't know what to think about this one, and neither do I. My understanding of Surrealism was pretty shallow, so it was interesting getting acquainted with the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. I'm partial to the idea of creating chance encounters, of finding meaning in coincidence and of heightened engagement with the world around you. Still, it...

It's hard to think of a better symbol for modern America than a private college with a fixed annual enrollment where the subnormal children of billionaires earn largely honorary degrees before going on to inherit and/or marry into their fortunes, situated across a valley from a prison where the inmate population increases exponentially year over year.

I'm not all that knowledgeable about Turkish literature, so it was nice to get an introduction to a writer I hadn't heard of before and who is so revered in Turkey. It was also fascinating learning about the difficulties in translating Turkish to English (I love modern translator notes), and in translating Atay's complex sentences specifically. Weird, dark existentialism of the best sort. I especially loved 'A Letter - Unsent'.

I bought Clockers on a whim when I was 15, not long after it was published, and fell in love with it immediately - the sprawling cast of characters, the street-level view of NY/NJ, the realistic dialogue - all of it was great. When I saw that Richard Price had a new book out, I was excited to dive back into that world. Why then did this one not hold my interest? All the ingredients are there, yet it sounds to me almost like self-parody at times.

Returning to Vonnegut is like putting on a favorite pair of old slippers - familiar, comfortable, almost as if it were tailor-made specifically for me. How it is that I didn't burn through all of his novels long ago is a mystery, but I'm glad I paced myself and can still enjoy the pleasure of reading one of his books for the first time at my rapidly advancing age.

Every bit as great as I'd always heard it was. I try never to judge older speculative fiction by how closely its predictions mirror real life; so long as the writing is good and the world that's depicted feels real and makes sense internally, that's all that matters. That said, it's impossible not to marvel at how accurately Butler foresaw our current situation (or tremble at what's still to come, if things continue this way).

Even though they were written more than a century ago, this pair of novellas felt surprisingly fresh. It helps that the themes are evergreen - in the titular 'The White Bear', it's "the individual vs. the institution" and "the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law"; while in 'The Rearguard', the relative importance of "spiritual vs. material nourishment". The latter felt especially relevant to today, where so many are searching for both.

It's telling that one of the oldest books in the world contains so many of the themes that continue being repeated in fiction right through today. Stories, after all, were overheard by man from the gods and quickly spread like a virus, marking the beginning of the age we still live in. Stories invade us, weave themselves into the fabric of our beings, until its hard to know where "we" end and the stories begin. Sophie says, "Whoa!"

Sometimes the best way to understand a complex, extended event (a war, a historical era, etc.) is to narrow the focus to a particular event or person or place. This book began its life as a New Yorker article in 1967, a contemporaneous account of the author's (then a 24-year-old traveling through East Asia) observations of the Army's destruction of Ben Suc and the relocation of its inhabitants. Felt alive in a way that few academic histories do.

A young boy in 18th-century Italy gets mad at his parents and scampers up a tree, a decision that will shape the rest of his life. A fairy tale about rebellion, originality, and fidelity to oneself, starring a Zelig-like figure who finds himself brushing up against many of the central figures and events of the Napoleonic Era. Linus approves!

A different sort of "summer read", one I enjoyed immensely. Tove Jansson is one of those authors I've known about forever but had never read (not even the Moomins, which aren't as well known in the US as Europe). I knew that she was fascinated by America's unique (to put it nicely) attitude toward aging and the elderly, and she really captured the pathos of being abandoned in "paradise" with insight and gentle humor.

I feel like I must be missing something. A sort of noir parody, or noir as a vehicle to play with language, there is a good deal of experimentation and deadpan humor to like here, yet taken as a whole this reads like an outline or rough sketch. Tons of fleeting characters, plot lines that come to abrupt and unsatisfying ends...it's almost like someone randomly removed 50 pages of a fully realized novel.

A look at cultural evolution through the lens of relationships - some decades-long, while others are little more than...well, a chance meeting. Stretching roughly a century from the Civil War up through the Civil Rights era, each chapter focuses on a relationship between two (occasionally three) artistic or intellectual titans of the day and shows how inspiration gets passed like a torch from one generation to the next. A mix of meticulous...👇

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

Thanks for the tag @RaeLovesToRead !

1. I think the further in time you move from a particular decade or generation, the easier it is to reduce it to a set of characteristics, events, or images that come to be emblematic of the whole. In that sense, you can absolutely have a book that defines the popular view of a generation.

2. The Great Gatsby defines the Jazz Age and the 1920s.

Probably the first profound thought I had as a little kid was wondering why anything exists at all. I then tried to imagine what "nothing" looks like, at which point my brain began to whir like an overheating laptop. This, then, seems like a book I was destined to write myself, but luckily Percival Everett got there first. Dense with clever wordplay, I found the rapid-fire riffing on the meaning of "nothing" impressive and genuinely funny at...

A reporter is assigned to investigate a string of recent suicides in the city to determine "why they did it", while the impending anniversary of his own father's suicide looms. Interspersed with religious and philosophical treatises on the morality of self-death, provided to the narrator by a research assistant as background for the story, the question soon shifts to "why not?" There's something impressive happening here. Di Benedetto's...?

NYRB comes through again 😸👍 I was not familiar with Monterroso before this and was pleasantly surprised by what I discovered. A hilarious compendium of works by and about the fictional writer Eduardo Torres, the bard of San Blas, Mexico. Poet, critic, essayist, and inveterate blowhard, Torres is a fully realized comic creation, a perfect send-up of provincial literary pomposity.

A deep dive (no pun intended, I swear) into swimming's history - both its modern incarnation as a recreational activity during the early 19th-century, and the Classical era from which those 19th-century Romantics drew their inspiration, when swimming was infused with heroic, and even divine, qualities. I love to swim, and I also love books where an obsessive examines the subject of their passion in detail, so this one was perfect for me.

Soft pick for me. Not buying into the blurbs describing this one as "suspenseful" or a "mystery". It is, however, one of the better renderings I've encountered of the inner-monologue of someone stuck in a repetitive, monotonous, unappreciated job (of which I have personal experience, albeit not for as many years as the narrator or without a reasonable expectation of escape). Not something I'm likely to return to, but well-written and nicely paced.

I'm a sucker for stories that delve into the internal politics of relatively insignificant groups (town councils, offices, or in this case, the residents of the Emma Lazarus retirement home and their upcoming production of Hamlet) and elevate them to epic proportions. A witty, comic novel that transforms into something heavier and darker by the end, a meditation on trauma and guilt that chimes beautifully with the play at the center of the story.

After plodding through Balzac's discourse on the terrain of the Loire Valley, I thought I would change things up and tackle a book in which...the landscape factors heavily. 🤣 Stylistically, the two couldn't be more different, though. This one is pure kinesthetics, spare and propulsive. Two prisoners of war make a break from their captors, and we spend time ping-ponging between their POVs as they strategize how to evade recapture.

One of my issues with 19th-century novels is how many of them began life as serialized publications. When you get paid by the word, you're going to use a lot of words, and while I don't begrudge anyone trying to make a living, even a writer of Balzac's level can't make me care about the topography of the Indre River valley for four whole pages. The first 50-75 pages of this were like literary Ambien, but there were enough compelling parts...

"To explain society through a theory of individual happiness expressly sought at the expense of others is a lethal doctrine, the harsh connotations of which drive man to believe everything he secretly gains, without the legal system, society, or individuals perceiving the damage done, is properly and duly acquired."

This book may be a slog, but there are some great (and painfully relevant) quotes scattered throughout.

This book must have caused a sensation when it was published in 1915. A slow pulling back of layers to show the rot at the heart of Victorian/Edwardian social mores, it follows the disintegration of two couples - one American, one English - who on the surface are the picture of upper-class propriety. "There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy...Here were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a ?

A fun, fizzy comedy of manners about a young, married woman in late-60s London and the two other men who are pursuing her. There's not much of a plot here, to be honest, but that's just fine. Sometimes a story is just a delivery vehicle for witty observations and dialogue, and this book has got both in spades. I shall forever more refer to gout as "one of the great horizontal diseases". ?

For years, I was nervous to try this one, as Deadwood is maybe my favorite TV series of all time. But having read Paris Trout and realizing what a great writer Pete Dexter is, I figured I was in safe hands (and after all, the book came first). David Milch may claim his series has nothing to do with the novel; I'm not sure I buy it, but there are major differences in the story structure and characters' personalities. Like with the show, 👇

One sign of a great writer is that they can violate all the so-called rules of good writing with impunity. This is the second Anita Brookner novel I've read now, and I'm hard-pressed to think of another writer who does so much telling (about her characters' personalities and thought processes) in relation to showing, but it's so nuanced and well-observed that I immediately feel like I know and sympathize with these lonely introverts.

A guided tour through London's burgeoning teenage scene and the beginnings of mod culture set against the backdrop of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. I can't speak to the accuracy of his depiction, but I can say that he perfectly captures what it's like to be a teenager, waking up to the world around oneself and coming into one's own. It's a fast-paced book, crackling with energy. I buzzed right through it in two days.

#TLT @dabbe

55 out of 73. I didn't realize "pie crust" was a standalone item at some people's Thanksgiving dinners. ?

My three favorites have to be the classics:

? Turkey
? Stuffing
? Mashed potatoes

Of course, it's all down to how they're made and who's making them. My single favorite thing is probably my wife's roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon and maple glaze. ?

Like seemingly everyone else, I found out about this book through the (excellent) podcast, Backlisted. It was every bit as strange and compelling as they described it, like a walking tour of Kent directed by David Lynch, covering two centuries' worth of murder, depravity, and madness. In my experience there are few places with such sinister vibes as a decaying seaside town, and this book captures that feeling in spades.

The best book I've read all year. A second Book of Genesis cobbled together from scraps of Bible verse, western mythology, parables, art history, and pop culture left over after a nuclear holocaust sent human civilization back to the Stone Age some 2,400 years in the past. Profound, moving, funny, and utterly unique. I imagine I'll be re-reading this for years to come.

On the plus side, Stewart writes about plants and animals and the ever-shifting yet timeless nature of the landscape with a simple grace that's almost poetic at times. Unfortunately, such passages are immediately followed by characters and dialogue as wooden as anything you'd find in Highlights magazine. Would love to read some straightforward, nonfiction nature writing from him, but this one just didn't hold my attention.

Distracting myself from my increasing sense of doom by mixing in some reading with my election viewing. This is my first Percival Everett, and I love it just as much as I thought I would. If nothing else, maybe tonight has given me a new favorite author (a pretty thin silver lining, admittedly 😕).

A 170-page unbroken paragraph composed of a would-be piano virtuoso's obsessive, paranoid reflections on his former friends and fellow students - Wertheimer, now dead by suicide, and the great Glenn Gould, whose genius sent the others' lives into a tailspin (all three of whom are really different aspects of Bernhard himself). Venomous, funny, and formalistically daring, this was not an easy read by any means but well worth the effort.

#TLT @dabbe

Only 9 out of 100. There were a few authors I'd read, just not the listed book, and a few movie adaptations I've seen that could have boosted my score. Still, it included three of my favorite books of all time:

📘 Crime and Punishment
📕 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
📗 The Long Good-Bye

A deceptively sophisticated book about unrequited love, self-sacrifice, and the seemingly impossible task of trying to be true to oneself while doing right by others and becoming part of a community. The protagonist is a smut writer dealing with the impending death of a beloved aunt on the one hand and birth of an unwanted child on the other. Full of fantastic dialogue and insightful observations that feel wholly organic, never forced or tacked-on

#TLT @dabbe

62 out of 100, way more than all my previous ones. So many of my favorite movies are on this list, too many to choose just three. I also see they've stretched the definition of "thriller" to the breaking point. So in that spirit, here are my top 3 movies that are absolutely NOT thrillers:

? Titanic
? The Wizard of Oz
? E.T.

Tag @RaeLovesToRead @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @CBee @Ruthiella @IndoorDame

This book melted my brain. I can't claim I fully grasped everything Campo laid out in these essays, even after multiple readings. Attention is good, imagination bad. The Gospels, (true) poetry, and fairy tales are good, realist fiction and contemporary are bad. Virtue can only be found in an ascetic, hermetic lifestyle. I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse a worldview that dismisses the Renaissance as a "universal disaster", but I have...?

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

To accuse the French fabulists of frivolity because they adorned their fairies with a handful of ostrich feathers is to "have sight and not perception."