27. "Illness as Metaphor"- Susan Sontag. Read in a nice mid-70's hardcover with a dust-jacket upon which a hunch-backed and pudgy Hercules waves his arms around at a garden snake with two heads. I felt like her arguments vis a vis tuberculosis were much, much stronger than the cancer material.
28. "The Boy Detective Fails"- Joe Menos. Finally read after many, many recommendations. Maybe a little cutesy, stylistically, but you know, he had the good taste to keep a lot of the overly tweet formal experiments peripheral and really, when you think about it, entirely optional. Underneath all the hit or miss trickiness, there's a pretty solid and surprisingly tight story here.
29. "The Sun Also Rises"- Ernest Hemingway. Reread to settle a point that had been nagging at me for awhile, ever since I heard that at least two people I know consider this as a kind of... rival piece, I guess you'd say, to Gatsby. Not convinced after the reread but definitely glad I took the time to revisit such a perfect book.
30. "Exercises in Style"- Raymond Queneau. Babby's first Queneau. Yeah, I know.
31. "The Werewolf of Paris"- Guy Endore. Another for senior seminar, and an interesting choice because on many levels its an extremely blatant dime pulp, full of what must have passed for gratuitous sex and violence in 1932. Still, it grew on me not only as a fascinating historical artifact but also as a considerably better novel than I gave it credit for. Don't go in expecting Stendhal with fur and fangs or anything, but as an ur-text of a major contemporary monster trope its at least way better than anything Bram Stoker ever pooped out.
32. "Gravity's Rainbow"- Thomas Pynchon. I'd owned this book for at least six years, and every so often would pick it up, read about 60 pages, and set it back down in confusion and fear. You know what? The trick is to just roll with it. Pynchon knows what he's doing. Get into his scary stranger van and just let him do the driving.
33. "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion"- Steven C. Weisenburger. Probably the best of this kind of thing I've read, probably a worthwhile read even if you haven't and never plan to read GR, honestly. Lots of fascinating little things to be found.
34. "The Posthuman Dada Guide" -Andrei Codrescu. Bafflingly organized, and a little too infatuated with its own cleverness, but Codrescu writes here with an irresistible rhetorical heteroglossia. What's his point here? Who knows, he makes like 15 contradictory ones every three pages, but he makes them with such lunatic glee that you have to just drink it all in and think it all over and sort it out for yourself.
35. "Invisible Cities"- Italo Calvino. In late March my father was rushed to the emergency room, with pessimistic expectations. It was a really terrible couple of days, and when I got in the car to get to the hospital I just grabbed the nearest thing at hand for the whole waiting room experience. Thankfully, I wound up with a book I didn't appreciate enough the first time through. Of course, it would be stupid to suggest that you need to read this in a crisis to get more than a cool aesthetic appreciation, but maybe it helps.
36. "Orlando"- Virginia Woolf. The fact that this novel is so stylistically dissimilar to the classic Woolf routine just adds another layer to the wonderful and startlingly lucid strangeness of the whole thing. Another for senior seminar.
37. "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture"- Juliet B. Schor. I'm not sure why this was in my car, but it was the only thing to read in a freezing airport waiting for my girlfriend's delayed flight to land. Interesting and hackle-raising investigation of marketing practices.
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