Ok, so I promised some people that I'd throw up a little recap of what I've read this month. I was about as surprised as you might be to find that I've read around 25 things this month. I don't remember working very much, but presumably I found time to squeeze all of that into my life as well.
I'm pretty happy with the balance between fiction, poetry, and true-facts elucidation I managed to strike this month. Sure, there might be too many comic books (or "graphical" "novels" if you're full of deserved shame), but I can look back at this month of reading and say it probably hasn't made me a worse person.
1. Gilead- Marilynne Robinson. For a few years I had written this off as something that, despite almost universal acclaim, I would never read and never want to read. It sounded, essentially, like Christian apologetics in a folksy Garrison Keiller-type small-town setting, which to me is more or less like proffering up a bag full of vomit with a Pulitzer sticker attached to it.
I can now look back and say I was being a totally self-righteous and small-minded jerk. Gilead is a great book. Robinson delves into the religious psychology with an unexpected tenderness and nuance, showing her protagonist John Ames as, far from the fanatic I expected, a man living in a small world dignifying himself with the encompassing consolation of an idea. The third-act tension between Ames and prodigal-son-cum-unbeliever Jack Boughton also avoids slipping into the kind of dialectic where the author inevitably is forced into showing some kind of agenda. No-- their eventual "confrontation" is a masterpiece of generosity and authorial largesse.
2. The Revival- James Sturm. A short piece-- let's call it a graphic novella-- about the late 18th century revival movement in America. Sturm is heavy on the atmosphere, with lots of tightly framed shots of bare tree limbs and impoverished, desperate faces, rendered in thick, scratchy black and white. He doesn't give his characters much room to breathe or flex, but he isn't interested in a character piece. The story moves like a Nerval piece, a teetering pile of unsettling omens leading to a psychological collapse.
It was interesting to read this right on the back of Gilead, which provided a much more accommodating view of the American religious life. Telling, maybe, that Robinson's book takes place in the endless vistas of the Mid-West while Sturm's is almost entirely cloistered in forest, his action packed into claustrophobia.
3. Dictation- Cynthia Ozick. I'd been meaning to read some Ozick for awhile, and found this quartet of novellas in the Phoenixville library. The title story, about the dictationists of Joseph Conrad and Henry James, seems to have gotten the most nods from the critical community, but I found it relatively slight and showy. I was much more interested in the other three, which also show off Ozick's urbane but cozy elegance but are less afraid to dip into ambiguity.
"Actors" is a kind of Jewish ghost-story dealing with Yiddish theatre, method acting, and the guilt of Sephardic integration. Whether it functions as tragedy or farce may depend entirely on the reader's mood upon reaching the last three or four pages, which I have no problem with.
"At Fumicaro" is less adept and occasionally starts to look like an over-written rehash of "Death in Venice," but the sweltering prose fits the tropical and sexual luridness. Basically, Catholic journalist comes to Italy, sees the sights, seduces adolescent maid, fucks up hugely. The story is slight and the writing often over-the-top but as a psychological study akin to Nabokov on PCP, its fun and it has its moments.
"What Happened to the Baby" was the stand-out story of the collection, a bleak fable about what language does to us. It wasn't until this, tucked away at the end of the book, that I really came to appreciate Ozick's grasp of pacing and the allotment of crucial information.
4. The Golem's Mighty Swing- James Sturm. Sturm again with a look at Jewishness and baseball at the turn of the last century. I'm always fascinated by late 19th/early 20th century baseball, so I appreciated the care he takes in getting the details of traveling league life, and the room he gives the game to expand and enact itself. The Jewish material was a little less masterful-- it never really seemed to come into its own. If anything, he seemed to have more to say about black players of the time than Jewish ones.
5. failure- Philip Schultz. Schultz has some really gorgeous and bitter poetry here. I guess "long poem about 9/11" is just about the most tedious thing to here about these days, but Schultz pulls it off with a 50+ page rhapsody on dog-walking, New York, race, and, well, failure.
6. Fear and Trembling- Soren Kierkegaard. Special K has a great rhetorical touch and its fascinating to look at the very religious roots of existentialism, but Christ if some of his points seemed to just slog under too many conceits. I have no idea what he was talking about with that whole "merman" story.
7. Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography- Chris Bachelder. Bachelder is a novelist who may have slipped under your radar. He has two novels you might stumble upon in a used bookstore (I think they're out of print), "U.S.!" and "Bear v. Shark" which are both quite funny, and occasionally will have an essay in The Believer. Its a shame, because he's one of the sharpest satirists working today. This one is available as an ebook via McSweeney's, and takes the form of an obsequiously second-person manual to the eponymous virtual tour photography. The social commentary is a little flatter in this novel, perhaps because he sticks to what have become fairly safe targets, but his characters are, god forbid, a little richer and fuller. Its free so whatever, go look at it.
8. Codex Seraphnianus- Luigi Serafini
9. Transparent Things- Vladimir Nabokov.
10. Eating Animals- Jonathan Safron-Foer. Ok, so I came into this pretty committed to not eating animals, and pretty committed to not liking Jonathan Safron-Foer. So, a guy I don't like telling me things I already know. Believe it or not, I enjoyed this. JSF recognizes that he's a storyteller, not a philosopher or sociologist, so he gets right into the gristle (pun?), dredging up the more visceral appeals to emotion and good taste that more "thinky" thinkers like Singer sometimes shy away from. He occasionally gives a shot at dietary bi-partisanship by giving voice to some of the more ethical people in the farming or slaughter industries, but against the wall of evidence here and elsewhere it feels a bit pointless. Better than I expected by far.
11. Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror- John Ashbery. Ashbery. Ashbery Ashbery. What to say. I sat down to discuss this collection with what I would consider a pretty fucking sharp group of people and mostly we were all equally baffled. The poems are beautiful but they seem to violently resist explication or even simple commentary. So, what's left to say? I liked them. They were good. Ok.
12. Evening Man- Frederick Seidel. My introduction to the sordid poetic universe of Frederick Seidel, where everyone is either an old white billionaire, or a beautiful 20-something desperate to fuck an old white billionaire, or a motorcycle being ridden across the planet by an old white billionaire. For all of that, I liked it alot. He makes himself out to be such a loathsome old piece of shit that I'm certain he's engaging in some sort of meta-persona, and his relationship with language reminds me of nothing so much as his often cited patron saint, Fred Astaire. Elegant, urbane, rotten to the core.
13. Antipoetry: How to Look Better & Feel Good- Nicanor Parra
14. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time- Marie Howe
15. The World Doesn't End- Charles Simic
16. The New Kings of Non-Fiction- Ira Glass (editor)
17. Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture- Daniel Radosh
18. Blood Dazzler- Patricia Smith
19. this emotion was a little e-book- Tao Lin
20. The Savage Detectives- Roberto Bolano
21. Ooga-Booga- Frederick Seidel
22. Distant Star- Roberto Bolano
23. The Last Interview- Roberto Bolano
24. And So- Joel Brouwer
25. Fagin the Jew- Will Eisner
26. The Dreamer- Will Eisner
27. Life on Another Planet- Will Eisner
28. City People- Will Eisner
29. The Magus of the North- Isaiah Berlin. A riveting novel about the elf-master's sacred girdle. No, not really, but that is a pretty atrocious title. This is actually a short study on a German counter-Enlightenment thinker named Johann Georg Hamman. Berlin makes a pretty sound case for the guy as one of the forefathers of the Romantic movement as well as the potent blend of anti-intellectualism and populism that eventually fermented into fascism. He keeps it snappy despite being tasked with summing up an extremely obscurantist and fragmentary writer's whole conception of language, knowledge, and creative genius in about 120 pages, without falling into pop-philosophy gloss. Recommended if you have an interest in de Maistre or Vico or those guys, or just a general curiosity about what else was going on amidst the fine commotion of Hume and Kant and all those fancy fellas.
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