"There Are No Children Here - The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America" by Alex Kotlowitz (1991)

I become embarrassed when I think back to my attempts at emotion as a young writer—don't get me wrong, an unusual number of my attempts were actually good and they worked (I'm professionally paid to write stuff that makes people cry, you know.) But you do certain things in your youth, like temper the police killing of a well-respected non-gang member with scenes of children literally chasing a rainbow down Chicago streets, things you wouldn't do when you're older and you perhaps realize that one can easily smother their own emotional seedlings simply by working the soil a little too hard. A review said this was the better of his two books on Chicago inner city life, but I disagree. In fact, I think Hoop Dreams, the movie which covers similar territory, is better than this book, a book that's fascinating though naggingly facile (as opposed to engagingly real.) You know, like a middling This American Life story. I'd go read "An American Summer." Three stars.

"The End of Me" by Alfred Hayes (1968)

Of the three books in this unofficial "aging Jewish male writer stumbles into an unusual romance" trilogy, this one had the most plot complications, and therefore was the most engrossing, but also the most predictable. It's your typical "Sad old man suffers enormous failure, flees to his hometown, tries to recapture youth, or any sort of feeling for that matter, by stealing his nephew's girlfriend, fails miserably" plot. (Is that common? I don't know, it felt common to me.) I'm up and down about a lot of the elements in this book—I liked the depiction of 1960s New York City; I was a bit bored with the sad old writer routine; his prose poetic style didn't step over itself except for a couple glaringly obnoxious places; I liked how he wrote twentysomethings, though I liked the girlfriend who was far too adept with wearing teasing masques of confidence more and thought the temperamental poet boyfriend a caricature. Yet it hung together. If the other two books were probably great books held back by some unraveling thread, this was a somewhat bland one that had undeniably solid stitching. Did you know Alfred Hayes wrote "Joe Hill"? I didn't know where to put that so I thought I would put that here. Three stars.

"Three Sisters - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1900, 2004)

If you were to sum all of this up as "a heavily existential soap opera" it feels tautly apt, if a tad bit flippant. There's a 1966 televised version. And I was a little shocked when I thought: This isn't just the best interpretation of a Chekhov play I've seen, this might actually be some of the best theater I've ever seen. Turns out it was by the Actors Studio, who have a direct line to Stanislavski, who originated Chekhov's plays in Russia. For such an extremely busy, centerless play, a somewhat lengthy play that I would describe as having a "constantly swirling" structure, you're almost grateful that such talented theater people bothered to grapple with the material. Because there were so many things I didn't catch by reading the play alone, and I could easily imagine all this being utterly unbearable in lesser hands. I guess the question I have is, does this odd, swirling structure serve the theme? The theme seemingly being: No amount of education, intelligence, faith, or virtue can prepare you for the unpredictable vicissitudes of life, exponential, ever-evolving, incomprehensible vicissitudes that are idly set in motion simply when one human being collides into another. If you wanted to illustrate such existential confusion, then perhaps it does. But was reaching that point worth all the effort? I'm not sure. I almost want the point to be even more out-there, even more ambitious, even more soul-shaking. As it stands, I ended the play thinking: Well, yes, I find life confusing, and yes, my beliefs probably are delusions, and no, I suppose I don't really know anything about anything. Good on you, Chekhov: you nailed me. Now, why exactly did you feel the need to point this out? Because I kind of already knew that—that's what my delusions are for! But perhaps I'm again being flippant: it's really a remarkably written play, short of extraordinary, even. Where the rub is, is you feel like there's something holding it back from really blowing your brain wide open, and here I offer my best guess as to what that brain-blowing dampener might actually be. Three stars.

"The Cherry Orchard - A Comedy in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1904, 2004)

Ah, the last of Chekhov's plays. Presumably, this is the one where he figured it out, the final attempt at his then-unusual, and now EXTREMELY unusual, swirling, "centrifugal" form, where the story elements chaotically spin away from the center, interweaving, colliding, stuttering, rather than neatly converging straightaways towards clarity. A lot has been made about how the theme concerns people being comically inactive, too mired in the past, to confront their own looming demise, but that seems to me to be too facile to be the point—if someone you loved were dying I doubt you would kill them prematurely and move on just because it was decisive and made perfect financial and logical sense; in fact you're much more likely to behave foolhardily just for the sake of holding onto something, anything. To me, it's more noteworthy that the characters can't seem to understand each other, due to selfishness or impatience or lack of life experience or insecurity or status or what have you, while at the same time desperately demanding that their own peculiar selves be understood. In fact, whenever the characters are flat-out offered clarity and resolution, they refuse it, as if they found more comfort in not knowing. If we know for certain everything is coming to an end, maybe we'd rather be lost, and foolish, and deluded, telling people who try to shake us out of our ruts to SHUTUP, because at least being lost in our own way is something we already understand. That seems like a bit of a soul-shaking point. In a sort of similar way, I liked his more ambitious, messier attempts better than this fairly well polished one, even if they weren't totally successful (it's the same reason I like "Billy Madison" more than "Happy Gilmore.") The feeling of "God, Chekhov, what the hell are you doing?" is far more thrilling than "Okay, Chekhov, I see what you're up to: perhaps the reason people don't seem to advance and evolve as sentient beings is simply because we don't want to. Also, Chekhov, remind me never to invite you to any parties. You're kind of a bummer." Three stars.

"The Bear" by William Faulkner (1942)

Is this novella worth talking about, considering it's really a part of the larger novel "Go Down, Moses"? Maybe. I'll start by saying it feels like a somewhat straightforward and pleasant five-chapter adolescent adventure story, except for Chapter 4 where, seemingly, Faulkner COMPLETELY LOSES HIS MIND. Fortunately, at this point the main character is kind of losing his mind as well, trying to justify walking away from a major inheritance, which he does by compressing all of his family's history, and southern racial history, and all of American history, and all of Earth's history, and all of mankind's existence, and all of God's intentions, into one singular thought (I suppose if this were simply a story about killing a legendary bear we wouldn't still be talking about it.) Needless to say, this chapter gave me a headache—apparently, a radical compression of time and experience involves a 60-page chapter made up of only 15 sentences (or so) and the identities of scores of characters, across generations, somehow being merged and confused (if you imagine that the wilderness, the bear's home, can be considered an everlasting cycle of chaos, birth, death, and destruction, all happening simultaneously, without reward or reason, the past never being past, then you can sort of see Faulkner's unique stylistic choices here.) Is it possible for one man to exit this endless morass of recycled sin, committed by every single person on earth, committed by every single family on earth, committed by every single race on earth? Well, you can say an awful lot of contradicting things about this story—loaded, intertwining symbols are pretty much ripe for the picking in this one—but it's noteworthy to me that our overthinking, idealistic main character in the end, despite plotting the only escape he could think of, achieves absolutely nothing but near paralysis (the symbol he becomes instead is also of note.) If anything, the problem with this story is that the characters feel so symbolic, it's difficult to relate to them as people, though I also suspect that was Faulkner's intent: "Don't focus on the people, focus on the enormous ideas! Gahd!" But! Is it a good read? Yeah. It is. It's a really good read, in fact. Especially if you like getting mad. Three stars.

"Rabelais and His World" by Mikhail Bakhtin, Translated by Hélène Iswolsky (1965, 1968)

I ran into this book in The New Yorker. The author of the article brought up this Russian philosopher's examination of Rabelais's Renaissance-era comedy while discussing how Volodymyr Zelenskyy's former life as a comedian factors in the fight against Russia. What's interesting is, the book actually seems to frown on comedy as satirical resistance. In fact, you could easily characterize the book as a 500-page defense of poop jokes—he argues comedy that has an individual target is almost worthless, but comedy that joins the hoi polloi together in gleeful abandon pulls power down from cosmic, divine, virtuous enormity and gives it to the common, unsophisticated person, the kind of person who eats too much, drinks too freely, and defecates without compunction. It's basically saying the simple act of calling everyone you dislike "retarded jagoffs" removes fear. So, basically, that Ivy League-educated, well paid, richly connected writer for The New Yorker namedropping an obscure Russian philosophy book in order to produce timely content for their snooty magazine, whether or not the message of the book is actually a sensical fit for the situation (it far better explains the vulgarity embraced by the right against progressive shame) seems to me like a retarded jagoff. Three stars.

"Of Elephants and Toothaches - Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ‘Decalogue’" Edited by Eva Badowska and Francesca Parmeggiani (2016)

It's an academic book that's only worth reading if you enjoyed watching all 10 hours of "Dekalog". That said, because of the film's subject matter—10 films based on The Ten Commandments, centering on realistic stories about everyday people during communist Poland—the book is allowed to dive into psychology, theology, cinematic craft and analysis, philosophy, morality, the nature of love, drama, politics, human behavior, parenthood, the legal system, and even comedy, all in less than 230 pages or so. Of course, with so many different perspectives you won't necessarily agree with everything, but one of these 12 scholars is bound to talk about something intriguing that viewers hadn't before noticed. In fact, it's a little astounding that the film can bear this much scrutiny and still maintain its integrity. I think, in all the years I've spoken to people about this movie, I've convinced roughly 0.0 percent of them to sit down and watch it. Which, I suppose, is just as well. Three stars.

"Nonconformity - Writing on Writing" by Nelson Algren (1996)

A humanist railing against how "being American" is a dehumanizing force, a treatise teetering on the edge of unhinged rage. Good thing I didn't really get into Algren when I was younger. Because if I did I would probably now be dead—I didn't really need an avowed nonconformist to fan my flames; if so, I would have exploded. Three stars.

"My Face for the World to See" by Alfred Hayes (1958)

It made me vividly remember relationships I found volatile, female gaslight-y, and far too melodramatic, which are the relationships I usually spend a great deal of energy trying to erase from memory. And while it paints a far more realistic, far more nuanced picture of two mismatched Holllywood dreamers than, say, the movie "La La Land", you're also left with the nagging sense that it didn't go far enough. That's speaking with a psychological eye. As far as the sensual eye goes, I don't know how the book does it, because it never gets explicitly sexual, maybe it's an exquisitely arranged accumulation of images, maybe it's the confused fragments of thought, a writerly way to capture the struggle to recognize and connect with another person's signals, but I thought the touch of flesh came across rather tactile-ly, especially given that most of it was achieved through indirect techniques. Bravo to that; I would have just used an outpouring of moist, evocative, three-syllable words. So overall, it just smacks of nothing all that novel. Still kinda good though. Three stars.

"Middlemarch" by George Eliot (1872)

This is the novel version of a "talker," all 800 pages of it. There are probably fewer than 10 locations seen in this isolated British manufacturing town, and all are barely described. That leaves an enormous amount of text dedicated to the inner thoughts and emotions of our cast of a dozen or so disparate character types. And Eliot is generally quite sharp with the human insights, stuff like: "Politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation," or "Prejudices, like odious bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle—solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness," or "Does any one suppose that private prayer is candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?"—and that's just 0.001 percent of what you get in this book. Now, you might guess that an 800-page book that consists of little more than the densely webbed thoughts and emotions of only a dozen or so people might begin to feel overwhelming, and you wouldn't be too off-base. I will grant the experience is much more pleasant than reading an 800-page psychology textbook, but her writing style is also not exactly tailored towards ease-of-use (I suppose getting readers to follow the deeply entangled, deeply rendered psyches of your highly intellectual soap opera requires difficult-to-digest, high-fiber prose.) Is it all worth it, though? Well, you're likely to give a healthy boost to your emotional intelligence and you might earn some quality meditation time over the true nature of providence and you might excite some weird lit kicks, falling into the spell of a (now rare) fully omniscient narrator—and it's an exceptionally well written book, don't get me wrong! But to tell you the truth, there were certain times when I wished someone would just take this brick of a book and end my life with it so I would be relieved of the responsibility to finish it (God dammit, Eliot, just fucking tell me what Bulstrode did, you *told* me literally everything else! WHY ARE YOU DRAGGING THIS OUT AT PAGE 700?!!! I'M TOO EXHAUSTED TO PLAY SOME DUMB GAME WITH YOU!) However, I'm told providence doesn't quite work that way. Three stars.

"Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics" by Anton Chekhov, Selected and Edited by Louis S. Friedland (1924)

I picked this up because I assumed it would be filled with insights into his writing process, a distillation of his much larger collection of letters into select, juicy nuggets of creative wisdom. It's not. The vast majority of it, actually, reads like gossip. In fact, you get the sense that Chekhov wrote these letters believing that there was no way in hell his survivors would ever approve the commercial publication of his private correspondence,* which can be characterized by their emotional erraticism, the sense that he found the state of modern culture entirely stupid, and his hatred of seemingly every other human being on earth (I laughed out loud at the harshness he doled out on this female writer for saying, "The aim of life is life itself," calling it bafflingly insincere, and then ending his tirade by basically saying, "Ah, she's a good lady"; there's also a very memorable exchange where he tells the head of a young writer's association that, no, he won't join their young writer's association because young writer's associations are stupid.) There's a much more recent collection of his "writings for writers" which edits things to give you only a spiritually uplifting picture of an esteemed, moral thinker, which is pretty much wholly anti-Chekhov, and which seems to me a book to cherish only if you happen to be dumb. As for this one, there are perhaps loads of grand statements (he really hated grand statements) to be made connecting his realistic fiction with the stunning emotional range of what is said here (in turns: wise, scared, demanding, childlike, mean, kind, horny, ascetic, probably drunk.) Though, for the purposes of writing instruction, maybe this should simply be considered an endorsement for the energizing, even inspiring, power of creative hatred. Three stars.

*I’ve read Flannery O'Connor's letters and in comparison, in hindsight, they now feel very, very, very carefully controlled.

"Kieślowski on Kieślowski" Edited by Danusia Stok (1993)

Basically an oral autobiography, which ends while he's in the middle of making Three Colors. If you come here looking for insights into films that are notably *not* passive entertainments, then you might actually find them—it's a little refreshing when someone is talking and you can sort of tell that they're not trying to sell anything, or burnish their reputation, or relive past glories, or even merely turning themselves "on" for the crowd: they're just talking, trying to be as sincere and as in the moment as possible. How can you tell? Well, at one point he starts musing out loud about how, if none of us individually believes that we have an ounce of evil within us, how is it possible that evil can exist in the world? And later he goes on a long, somewhat sloppy, cigarette-fueled rant about how terrible Polish people are. Three stars.

“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte (1847)

Dickensian, in effort, that is to say alternately wasteful and worthwhile. A paltry tale of feminism, I think not. To decry "feminism" of this work deems most simplistic and, hence, most degrading. Difficult, dear reader, to impart modern tribes to so distant a world, duly acknowledged. The portrait of a woman is drawn strong, indubitably, but perceived strength oftwhile yields insufferable ignorance, hurtful to those perhaps underserving. Characters as symbol, by definition, hardly bests character as character, indecipherable and mystery full, I fain. Maybe that, reader, is the impart: the truly honest don't make any rational goddamn sense. Three stars.

"In Love" by Alfred Hayes (1953)

There's this danger if you write a long prose piece using the rhythmic, structured beats of poetry, that the rhythm eventually becomes so incessant, like the steady drip of a faucet somewhere in the background, that the story actually takes a back seat. So while I kind of get it, that short, clipped, kinda calloused, clauses strung together can capture both the neurotic energy of New York City and the elevated inflammations of love, eventually all I heard was that damn dripping faucet—it was hard to absorb the story of a (somewhat standard, and therefore interesting) love affair because technique drifted into the spotlight. As if the disciplined grammar of poetry makes the story the writer's to dictate, not the reader’s to hold and inhabit. Still kinda good though. Three stars.

"Humboldt's Gift" by Saul Bellow (1975)

It's quite the rollercoaster ride, this book. Any attempts to reduce it to something pithy and sharp feels off in some respect. Is it a metaphysical farce? Is it a screwball satire on art and artists? Is it a highly intellectual adventure? You spend the entire book with one man, perhaps the world's most insufferable overthinker, as he gets overwhelmed by an extremely elaborate, continents-spanning plot. You eventually get the impression of a man, presently consumed with Rudolf Steiner's thoughts on spirituality, who so desperately wants to distance himself from a messy humanity (mainly characterized by a scheming, grimy, lawless, 1970s Chicago) whose constant propulsions and collisions become more and more impossible to evade (viewed through a modern lens, it can actually be considered a book-length argument for how the term "introvert" is nothing more than a sympathetic rebranding of "being a crassly antisocial, isolated jerk.") Can you sustain a one-thing-after-another, coincidence-laden, farce-like pace over 500 pages of text, though? Maybe? Almost? You never quite get lost, even as yet another name is thrown onto the pile, and yet another secret is unraveled, and yet another philosophical treatise is expounded. But, at the same time, there were too many moments where I slid my bookmark in at night and said, "No more. No more book. Please, please, no more book," and not at all in a teasing, curious way. I feel like this one's been forgotten, which it shouldn't, it's quite the unique novel—I can't think of too many modern urban novels that remind you of a relentless Indiana Jones film. But you kind of end the rollercoaster ride sensing the whole thing was soundly built, craftily designed, even inspired (I mean, instead of a giant boulder, the guy's trying to outrun humanity itself) but still lacking some sort of ... hard to place ... perhaps even harder to conjure ... spark. Maybe it simply needed more laughs. Three stars.

"Heart of Junk" by Luke Geddes (2020)

Well, it's good in the way seeing some random improv troupe pull off a surprisingly successful Harold is: even though it's kind of sloppy it's extremely satisfying, maybe uplifting even. You might even recommend the troupe to others, if it ever comes up in conversation. Maybe one day, it wouldn't surprise you if you ended up seeing that troupe on TV. For now though, chances are you're not going to remember any of it come tomorrow. Three stars.

"Good Behaviour" by Molly Keane (1981)

I suspect the book is better than I'm giving it credit for—it's hard for a Filipino kid who grew up in a Chicago bungalow to easily relate to the horsey goings on at an Anglo-Irish estate in shambling decline at the turn of the 20th century. But I'll say it's a very densely packed book that gives you a hell of a lot to think about. Let me attempt to explain: the bulk of the book is spent inside the head of a Michael Scott-like character, an unusually tall, unusually self-conscious, unusually put-upon misfit named Aroon St. Charles who's prone to avoiding harsh realities and desperate to feel loved. Now, marry this with the revelation in the very first chapter that she eventually ends up ruthlessly murdering her own mother. All the tension is found in between those two spaces. And it's a neat little trick that kind of lingers with you even after you've left behind the final word. Possibly four following a re-read, but for now. Three stars.