It's rare when I go through a contemporary short story collection where I'm not flipping forward to find where the blissful end is—you can't wait to finish these stories, and you also don't really want to leave them. On the whole, the stories are, dare I say, remarkable fun. Which is weird because woven throughout are dire dystopian undertones, one of which is the disintegration of language and expression. I'm gonna read this one again. Four stars.
"Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular" by Rust Hills (1977)
So it's a book about writing by a guy who doesn't even claim to be a writer: he was a long-tenured fiction editor at Esquire. So that means there are no writing exercises, and there are no lofty flights about the magic and power of the written word. It's basically just one long essay explaining what exactly differentiates great literature and moving works of art from, say, "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian. A discussion I’ve, stunningly, rarely run into throughout my 20+ years of studying writing—perhaps because Hills isn't really a writer he feels less protective of allowing people to plainly see how literature does what it does (I mean, if I fully understood how to create literature the last thing I'd ever do is blab about it all to you.) Does he do it though? Does he explain what literature is? I think so. And it was way simpler than what I was attempting to do. Four stars.
"Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson (1919)
Oh dear, where to begin ... (1) I can't explain why, but knowing little about the book beforehand you're kind of expecting "The Wonder Years". Instead, almost off the bat, you kind of get something more akin to a David Lynch film; (2) How does this series of short character pieces somehow work as a unified whole? It's a little hard to tell: the book seems to deemphasize proper literary form in favor of the author's intuitive, almost arbitrary whims, like a chef who arrives at their final dish by taste and taste alone; (3) A recurring image is of a character inexplicably, breathlessly running away—what's interesting about the book is the image of America it paints as something that's free and enormous and wide open and full of possibility, but at the same time chokingly restrictive and smothering, in a deeply unfathomable way; (4) It's a short, 200+ page book. But I found the individual stories so uncomfortably intense, the book turned out to be a surprisingly slow read; (5) While the diverse character studies don't always 100 percent ring true all of the time, the revelation of people's private lives and personal logics as being somewhat bizarre, somewhat inexplicable, and more than a little believable in its nonsense is piercingly perceptive—early on, the book declares, we each decide to follow a truth, and we each age into truth-molded grotesques who perhaps learn too late that maybe we had it all wrong all along; (6) Personally, did the book in spots make me think about my own embarrassments, make me feel a tinge of horror in the pit of my stomach over my own past behavior? Yes; (7) Once again, I feel I should reiterate: if you're expecting "Our Town", THIS IS CERTAINLY NO "OUR TOWN"; (8) Upon finishing, out loud, I remarked to myself, "That was a wonderful book!" You know what's thrilling in a novel? When you're not sure how the author is going to stick the landing after a turbulent flight but somehow they manage, even as you deplane feeling weak-kneed and naggingly unsettled—My god, you think, even if we all survive it's likely none of us are ever going to be okay. Four stars.
"Washington Square" by Henry James (1880)
If the name Henry James conjures thoughts of baroque, infinitely tangential clauses, miniscule type, brick-sized binding, and a crochet of psychological threads, Washington Square is kind of like his 200-page "pop novel". You get the same deeply human characterization—be it an unusually plain and awkward debutante, an extremely intelligent, plainspoken, vindictive bastard, or an emotion-besotted, meddling sweetheart—but it feels more like fun and less like a highly detailed owner's manual for the human heart (not like these manuals are unenjoyable reads on their own, mind you, they're just much more effortful.) Washington Square is the psychologically deep Henry James we all know and love, except it's fun. I couldn't put it down. Four stars.
"What to Listen for in Music" by Aaron Copland (1939)
Is this truly a guide to classical music for the non-musical layperson? Well, no—there were far too many things in here that went way over my head. But as far as steering you towards noteworthy compositions through the guidance of an accomplished, passionate composer goes (so passionate, apparently, he frequently forgets most people don't understand what the fuck he's talking about; also, Copland is the one who wrote the "Beef, it's what's for dinner" theme) I don't think you can beat it. I think I really like Bach now. Four stars.
"Transit" by Rachel Cusk (2016)
The first time I read this book was in the middle of last week. And I found it maddening, confusing, impossible, and pedantic but I finished it. The second was over the past couple days when I found it delightful, engrossing, fascinating, and insightful. Both are right and neither are right and if you can get over how oddly profound and thoughtful every single character seems to be about their own lives, this might all start to make sense. But you'd still be wrong. Four stars.
"Theory of Literature" by Paul H. Fry (2012)
It's a Yale Open Courses class so there are YouTube videos, but I found Fry's speaking style so grating I decided to buy the book. There are 26 chapters, and most chapters have you read two or three outside essays, which are fairly easy to find on today's internet, and fairly difficult to read because (as I should have guessed from the book’s title) it turns out the class is less about literature and more about philosophy (I would describe reading philosophy as equivalent to drinking out of a container labeled "HEADACHE JUICE".) You'll span hermeneutics, modes of formalism, semiotics and structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic approaches, Marxist and historicist approaches, theories of social identity, and neo-pragmatism (and that's just what's written on the back cover, and also, hardly scratching the surface) which turns out is a lot for the brain to soak in when not spread out over 13 weeks. But, considering the density and breadth of the material, Fry does a pretty good job of keeping the class focused on its core ideas, even as he's seemingly steering everyone off-course. Would I say I got what I was expecting? Well, no. Was I exposed to far more ideas than I was expecting, far more than I ever needed? God, yes. Did I retain most of them? No—seemed like any new information I learned would push whatever previous information I learned out of my brain. Lucky I was taking notes. Four stars.
"The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead (1940)
I can't remember the last time I became angry when something pulled me away from reading a book. I also can't remember the last time I got through 500 pages and just said, "Wow," out loud to myself upon closing it. If I were you, I would read this book. Four stars.*
*Perhaps the book didn't do well because the title is kind of bad, though once you get through enough pages the title starts to feel quite fitting.
"The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West (1939)
As far as books about Los Angeles go, this genuinely FEELS like LA. From the setting to the characters to the situations to the way the sky is often described like paint. Which is noteworthy because it makes an (ultimately) heavy-handed point about how the dream of Hollywood, California, is really quite bleak (I know there are a lot of "LA is actually bleak" stories, just know in this case I don't use the word "bleak" lightly—the 1975 film version is often described as a disguised horror movie.) For LA in the 30s, this too feels accurate: a stage mom boasts about how she's following a raw diet while sucking her adorable child actor son bone dry. Strangely, a lot of it reminded me of life in your twenties, full of unmoored people seeking big dreams but really only finding stunning boredom, a boredom that can somehow teeter into either soulful magnanimity or senseless violence depending on the day. It's really quite a good book. And that's because it's more than about Hollywood, it's really about boredom and how it makes us behave, set in a town built to be the ultimate antidote to American boredom (is the solution also the source of the problem?) It's also well written, it's compelling (in some parts, it's actually too much to handle), it's truthful, it's weird, parts of it had me howling with laughter, and parts of it were horrifying. It really ranks among the best books no one has ever read (Christina Stead is also on that list.) That combination Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust book? You should really pick it up. Sidenote: there's a character in the novel named Homer Simpson. And the reason The Simpsons only contains one reference to this in its 30-odd years is because, in the novel, Homer Simpson murders an 8-year-old child, coldly and cruelly, stomping on their now lifeless body again and again and again and again and again, and then again and again and again, right in front of a huge crowd of people. Four stars.
"The Complete Short Novels" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2004)
So Chekhov only wrote one full-length novel, which I've never heard anyone talk about. The rest were short stories and novellas. This contains all five of his 100-page-long-or-so novellas: The Steppe, The Duel, The Story of an Unknown Man, Three Years, and My Life: A Provincial's Story. And the most noteworthy thing about Chekhov's writing is that his depiction of human behavior is so well observed very little of it feels dated, even over a hundred years on, traversing language, country, and several political revolutions (comparatively, Tao Lin's 2000s output feels HELLA DATED.) Story (1) is a loosely plotted coming-of-age story; (2) is inspired by the concept of natural selection; (3) involves a revolutionary assassin; (4) is a fucked-up romance; and (5) is a hive of volatile twentysomethings. (1) and (5) are oddly plotted, and therefore, somewhat tedious. (2), (3), and (4) are riveting reads from beginning to end. All of them feature characters so objectively true to life, it kind of makes the people you see on TV (and even most of the characters you come across in books, and also many of the people you meet in New York City) look crassly, offensively, two-dimensional. None of them, however, can smack you in the face like some of his 6-page-long short stories can. Is that something to hold against him and his longer works? No, I guess not—judging by how rarely you see dramatically strong stories where no one quite knows what they're doing, where nobody's right and nobody's wrong, where winning may not mean progress and where losing may not mean defeat, even after decades of successive, ever-accumulating stories, Chekhov's writings remain stunningly singular works. Four stars.
"The Tyranny of Virtue - Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies" by Robert Boyers (2019)
Elderly liberal academic and steward of long-running literary magazine attempts to deconstruct, one-by-one, censorship inflicted by liberals upon themselves—examining in turn notions of privilege, safety, diversity, appropriation, identity, ableism—in cold, dense, academic prose. I could express more of my own thoughts on what Boyers actually says about it all but I’m afraid I might get cancelled. Four stars.
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961)
Having grown up in a city, I got the impression that most people didn't really like them—I never saw city life as I knew it depicted on TV, and in fact, throughout my adult life I rarely run into another person who was also raised inside the city proper. I loved them, though, to the point that in my 20 years in New York I've never lived in a high-rise, because I don't like separating myself from street life; it's why I've spent the last 10 of them living in a place like Crown Heights. So reading Jane Jacobs I couldn't be more thrilled to run into someone who was just as enthusiastic about cities as I am. And not just the fancy, fun parts: Jacobs is in love with the complexity, with the mess, the collisions and the contradictions. In essence, she's spending the entire book trying to shine lights on a mystery no one seems to understand, both then and now: how can a confused, massive throng of people actually succeed together? So I'm all about this book; I can see why it's considered revolutionary. I'm even thrilled that she spends a lot of time questioning what I consider an overwhelming human epidemic among people my age and younger, the lust for control where control is a fantasy. Sure, there are some spots where it seems like she's backing up an assumption with nothing more than a confident-sounding voice, but it's a five-star book. At a certain point though, lightheaded, you lift your bleary eyes from the dense, small type and say, to nobody in particular, "Geez, she just sort of kept going on and on for a bit now there, didn't she?" Four stars.
"The Craft of Fiction" by Percy Lubbock (1921)
I'm not sure if this is considered "New Criticism"; if anything, it feels like a precursor to that movement, which apparently took off in the 1940s. Both this book and that movement import to the ordinary reader that in order to fully appreciate literature a reader needs to go beyond the pleasures of story and implant within themselves some understanding of the workings of craft. I buy that in the sense that ... well, remember how in the 90s people thought Harry Potter would usher in this renaissance of reading? And all that ended up happening is now there are a whole bunch of grown adults pushing 40 reading books that were explicitly intended to be comprehended by children? Well, so, to backtrack, I buy that in the sense that understanding the mechanism of story might help people expand beyond the things they already like, in the same way that someone who understands the game of baseball can watch and appreciate games played by teams other than their favorite. So should this book, which is focused entirely on the role point of view plays in accomplished novels, be read by the casual reader? Well, no. But if you aspired to be a writer, there's great stuff in here! What's interesting is, as writing instruction became more formalized in the 20th century, it seems like the "rules" actually grew more and more rigid, even as the field became more and more democratized. I think that's what happens if you want to open up the field to more people: it's hard to organize (hard to sell) a big tent if you tell everybody: Hey, fundamentally, there are actually no rules whatsoever! The New Criticism crowd seemed to understand that, even while pointing out exactly how the gears turned. It's interesting to read thoughts about writing from this era, to me, because I keep running into fundamentally sound arguments that seem to have been entirely forgotten/ignored/rejected, for whatever reasons, none of which seem good. Four stars.
"The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick" by Elizabeth Hardwick, Selected by Darryl Pinckney (2017)
She's a very very good writer, but it's striking how her writing style didn't change all that much from the first essay published in 1953 to the final one published in 2003. For contrast, Flannery O'Connor's writing style matured exponentially in just the 18 years between "The Geranium" and "Judgement Day". Kind of gives me pause, considering. Anyway, you probably shouldn't read this book if you don't particularly like reading (Hardwick on Joan Didion: "The inclination to pedantry in instances of piddling, measly inconsequence are sometimes the only protection one has against the witchery of this uncompromising imagination, the settings so various and the sometimes sleepwalking players who blindly walk through windows and fall into traps of great consequence such as the Vietnam War or the world of the Contras.") But if you do, it's a BONANZA. Four stars.
"The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner (1983)
If you retitled the book "Irritating Man Explains It All", you wouldn't be far off. Four stars.
"Sons and Lovers" by D.H. Lawrence (1913)
You want to write a novel that explores, as a theme, the fundamental irrationality of the human spirit? Well, one way to do it is to wrap it all—behavioral contradictions, unfulfilled intentions, unexplained hatreds, incongruous humors, self-inflicted harms, underserved friendships, and general fluttering moodiness: action in conflict with the soul, basically—within a deceptively simple outline: a mother is extremely upset by her son experiencing a love apart from her own. You don't expect the novel to be as fast and as jumpy as it turns out to be, given the era. And, being sold a fable, you don't expect to be given a narrative that really makes no logical sense, and characters who don't behave the way storytelling deems they should; in fact, the omniscient narrator doesn't seem to even know what the big picture is, often hovering the camera closely over the shoulder of someone who doesn't seem at all to know where they are going. Can a writer tasked with placing the world into narrative order actually get away with telling a story about how the world doesn't really have any, where causes have no effects, effects have no causes, lessons don't seem to even exist, there are no villians, and there are most certainly no heroes? I don't know, but this one sure comes close. Four stars.
"Sanctuary" by William Faulkner (1931)
I bet you could make the case that "To Kill a Mockingbird" stole a great deal from this book, except making sure good was good, bad was bad, facts were facts, and giving all the characters a Full House-like sheen of adorableness. Also many fewer mobsters, whores, and pitch-black instances of sexual terror. Four stars.
"Pleasure: A History" Edited by Lisa Shapiro (2018)
Was reading a philosophy book about pleasure in and of itself actually pleasant? No, in fact at times it was downright maddening. Nonetheless, did I want to read it? Yes. Would I say reading it was worthwhile? Actually, very much so. In a way, it was exactly what I was looking for. But would I recommend that people pick up and read a philosophy book for themselves? Not if you don't like being driven crazy. Adjoining to the above contradictions, does it make sense that I would highly rate a book that filled me with deeply unpleasant feelings, that I wouldn't recommend to others, and in fact would advise to actively avoid, that spends a tremendous amount of time logically explaining how in the end it's impossible to understand certain things? (Why do we seek pleasant things? <24 pages later> It is because they are pleasant.) No, probably not. Four stars.
"On Writing" by Eudora Welty (2002)
I feel like we all forgot about her—sure, Flannery O'Connor wrote better short stories, and sure, Flannery O'Connor was so enticingly mean, and sure, it's a little odd that a fellow Southern writer wouldn't mention Flannery O'Connor once in her book about writing (Faulkner gets gushed upon), but Eudora Welty was still good. At the very least, Eudora Welty was more generous in her thoughts about it, even in this short, 100-page book (Flannery O'Connor's mysteries and manners kind of feels like a scolding.) What's different about this one? First, it starts from a base of: Not everybody can write. So it immediately dispenses with "Writing 101" issues. Hence, it also dispenses with the Writing 101 idea that writing should be a mirror reflection of life, and insists that good writing is really more an imitation of life, similar to how Van Gogh's sunflowers don't quite look like real sunflowers, and that's what makes it beautiful. The rest of her thoughts lie on this elevated level: how does the writer work with the reader to, together, create something beautiful? The effect is to expand your understanding of how beauty is achieved beyond, say, describing landscapes using exquisite words. And you could see her focus on beauty across each page: this is probably the best written treatise on writing I've ever read, wordsmith-wise. As I went through this I couldn't help but think that the prevailing writing advice I've received: "Just keep reading and writing," is flat-out horrible advice—yes, I've learned how to pack an enormous amount of big thoughts into one small paragraph and still make it digestible, but is what you just read beautiful? I would say no. Four stars.
"Natural Causes" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2018)
You would imagine a book that tries to marry biology with religion, psychology with philosophy, quantum physics with selfies, astronomy with medicine, oncology, sociology, holistic wellness, immunology, history, exercise, cellular anatomy, diet, and humanism to be a bit of a mess. And it is, very much so. But I will say after reading it, the everyday behavior of many people I know now and have known then seems flat-out moronic. Four stars.