This book kind of makes you wish the story of the Philippine-American War and its aftermath were written by a white person, or any other ethnicity really. At least that way, using an outsider's point of view, they would know what to edit and how best to curb one's excesses. One star.
"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William H. Gass (1968)
(1) You know those books that people gush about, especially in educated circles, but when you push them to explain exactly why they liked it so much you can never really squeeze out a clear, considerable answer? Partly because its reputation, particularly in educated circles, seems to have surpassed its actual quality? Something, among certain educated circles, you're supposed to like more than anyone actually does? Something you'll spend a proud year telling everyone about, all your educated friends, and years later struggle to remember? This is one of those books; (2) Maybe the reason revisiting postmodernist works feels so deeply unpleasant is that time has proven their “things are so fragmented truth no longer exists” theory absolutely, 100 percent correct. One star.
"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.
"Humour" by Terry Eagleton (2019)
This book is a little difficult to grasp in toto, even at a brisk 164 pages, so permit me to work backwards. The final two pages point out that the Christian gospels contain a great deal of the carnivalesque: "Jesus and his plebian comrades do no work, are accused of drunkenness and gluttony, roam footloose and propertyless on the margins of the conventional social order, and like the free spirits of carnival take no thought for tomorrow." Naturally, that followed an elaboration on carnivalesque comedy as defined by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, "a way of combining humour as critique with humour as utopia." Which followed a discussion of the Trevor Griffiths play "Comedians," wherein characters clash over the purpose and point—the philosophy, if you will—of stand-up comedy. All this, in a chapter titled "The Politics of Humour". So, yes, we've established that the book is rather discursive—the prior chapter begins by surveying the history of comic attitudes in society ("Cheerfulness and congeniality usurp a surly Puritanism") and ends with a lengthy definition of wit. Before that, the superiority, incongruity, and relief theories of humor get similarly torn apart and so we end at the beginning, with a winding definition of what laughter is. So it's not necessarily philosophical, it's not necessarily a historical survey, it's not necessarily anthropological or sociological, and it's not necessarily a critique of literature, yet it's all those things. Is it useful though? I guess, in its own disorienting, pointillist way. Though you could easily end the book feeling that it says so much it doesn't really say anything at all, if that makes any sense. Three stars.
"Having and Being Had" by Eula Biss (2020)
As far as meditative, book-length nonfiction prose poems about capitalism go, as far as I know this is the only one. Four stars.*
*Biss spends great deal of time ruminating over what is actually expressed through a single word.
"Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales" (1993)
I'm only on page 200 of 600 but I'm just gonna go ahead and call it: After you get past the novelty of finding out the original, violent versions of the Disney fairy tales we all know, you start to come across a bunch of German folk stories that seem to have been collected from the town insane lunatic—they have no point, they go nowhere, and they read like a series of wacky, random events all crammed together into one short story. If it wasn't depressing enough that a lot of stories feature innocent people getting chopped into little bits for no reason, and evil people humiliating the good, and oftentimes end with a moral that just basically says, "Welp, the world sure is unfair," soon the stories make you remember the time you were trapped at a party and the marijuana ran out before it got passed to you. I can't believe I have 400 more pages of this. (I suppose I should caveat that even as a child I couldn't stand fantasy—"What? People can't have wars in space. Why are you making me watch this?!") One star.
"Go All the Way - A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop" Edited by Paul Myers and S.W. Lauden (2019)
My best guess as to why power pop never exploded in popularity is that a lot of people don't necessarily love the music they listen to, they just sort of use it to prop up some image of themselves, usually a mirage. Four 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.
"Flyboy in the Buttermilk - Essays on Contemporary America" by Greg Tate (1992)
What's truly shocking as you go through the essays, some full of jazz-like riffs and others more baldly academic, is how little cultural criticism I've read over the years was written with a proudly Black voice (in one essay, he criticizes an Afro-centric art book for assiduously excluding white influences: "Black art historians shouldn't just talk about how the massive mandalas of a painter like the Africobra school's James Phillips draw on Coltrane's modal solos and African textile patterns, but how he proposes fresh uses for African-inspired geometry in painting when Cubism and Constructivism were thought to have exhausted them.") Though this may explain why I had never run into the work of Greg Tate before he died last year. It's hard to explain how this realization makes me feel. Kind of like I've been duped. Like I've been had. At one point he laments the lack of a cohesive Black artistic community because white corporate America is offering them enough money to work as a Creative Director and buy a suburban home. Probably an oversimplification. Then again, no mainstream outlet would ever, EVER, publish great, insightful, perspective-shifting stuff like this. Unfortunately, white people got the money. And they prefer their edges smooth. Three stars.
"Franny and Zooey" by J.D. Salinger (1961)
The strangest, most engrossing meditation on Christ you'll ever read, buddy. Four stars.
"Fire on the Prairie - Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race" by Gary Rivlin (1992)
An imperfect book, only because occasionally it gets muddled telling an extremely complicated story with many ancillary characters. But for the most part it's clearly written, and not at all hagiographic towards its subject. It's a book forged from old-school, objective journalism. On a personal level, the book upset me at many, many points: it helps me understand why I so desperately hate a city that I can't help but love (Why do people from Chicago tend to have great bullshit detectors? Because, if so many people are trying to fuck you over from seemingly all sides, you learn to develop a good sense of the kinds of people you should trust. Also, no one who has ever grown up in Chicago knows what "controlling your emotions" means, for better or for worse.) Four stars.
"Flying Home and Other Stories" by Ralph Ellison (1996)
I guess most of these stories are from before "Invisible Man" and were published posthumously which might explain why most of them read like small character sketches rather than complete stories. Honestly, while reading these I couldn't help but think back to my writer's workshop classes, where even the most talented students would routinely turn in works that felt clunky and incomplete. If "two stars" would indicate flawed but not worthless, and "one star" would indicate pretty much worthless then I guess I really have no choice here. Reading this book was unpleasant. One star.
"Flowering Judas and Other Stories" by Katherine Anne Porter (1935)
It seems like every time I'm about to proclaim Katherine Anne Porter the best writer of her era, I stumble upon one of her enormous, stinking turds. Not like the stories here, among her earliest, should be stamped in gold or something, but the way she draws her characters is nothing short of exquisite—a frustrated artist, a dying woman, an Irish (County Sligo) immigrant living in Connecticut, a Mexican bride-turned-murderer, a 15-year-old Mexican girl who's never been kissed, a Mexican revolutionary's female confidant, a husband and wife who get into an enormous fight after he randomly decides to buy rope—the people and their relationships are all so finely detailed, densely woven, and true-to-life they carry you through some rather thin narratives. I'd imagine a writer, like any craftsman, who masters the basics would become eager to take bigger and bigger swings. And here her big swing is a huge whiff, a convoluted, overcrowded story about Russian filmmakers from California working in Mexico that pretty much bored me to tears (for the record, her later enormous swings in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" knock it out clear of the park.) I guess I can't in good faith say you should all run out and read this book, unless you happen to want to study the characterization techniques of someone who probably did it better than anyone. So, yes, that’s right, most of the stories here feel like little more than character sketches but, I gotta say, they're pretty god damn great sketches. Three stars.
"Fifty-Two Stories" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2021)
I think of all the fiction I've absorbed over my life—books, TV, movies—and I find it stunning that I can read Chekhov and think that I've never seen humanity depicted so accurately before. The all-confused whole of humanity is so acutely depicted, in classes grand and wanting, I actually find it difficult to explain to you just what he did (in one story, Chekhov repeatedly mocks a novelist for writing stories about people that could never happen in reality.) What does that say about us now? That a guy in 19th-century Russia could look at another person and see a wealth of contradictory motivations, whims, desires, behaviors, and inner thoughts and we just look at people and attach to them the comfort of familiar archetypes and little much else? It's really quite remarkable what he did, simply and economically. And it's also quite remarkable if you consider where we all eventually ended up. I really hope you get to read "The Name Day Party" some day. Five stars.
"Fiction and the Figures of Life" by William H. Gass (1971)
I suppose if you have no interest in how literature is created, there's no reason for you to read this book, a collection of essays and book reviews straddling literature and philosophy. But there's something so thrilling about his writing style, to me, it's a bit of a shame if people don't experience it at least once. The best, most succinct way I can describe it is: it doesn't ever feel cheap, or chintzy or mass produced or even triple-gilded, overadorned, and when you run into writing that doesn't feel cheap your awareness of the sheer amount of cheap writing that surrounds our lives actually begins to feel overwhelming, in a somewhat suffocating way. And! If you happen to already have an interest in how literature is created, what you'll find are a number of stunning insights, too many to list, often philosophically spiked, that avoids aphorism, grandiloquence, inspirational cant, or even equivocation—you really get the impression of a person who's very thoroughly thought through something in an attempt to get as close as possible to the heart of the heart of his subject (he's basically what David Foster Wallace would be if David Foster Wallace were actually as intelligent as he taught himself to sound.) And if that seems somewhat trite—praising someone for actually thinking deeply about something before writing it down—again, you come out of the book feeling like that kind of approach, for whatever reason, isn't actually valued by anyone with a pen. After all, putting on a cheap show, as we've all seen by now, is a fairly easy thing for anyone and their mother to do. Five stars.
"Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O’Connor (1965)
Flannery O'Connor said she was intimidated by William Faulkner, a Southern contemporary, but I honestly think if she hadn't been dying of lupus in the process of writing, this book could have been one of the all-time greats. She's better than Chekhov. She's better than Hemingway's god damn baby shoes schtick. Her short stories are better than any of the stories Faulkner tried to write, and I've read most of them. However, if you've read her earlier, much more famous stuff then you might just label her a God-tooting moralist—“Wow, a good man really is hard to find!” But here, you come out of these stories feeling mostly confused: (1) Why would the guy who got a huge tattoo of Jesus Christ on his back end up crying against a tree? (2) Why would someone who's merely trying to behave as virtuously as she possibly could, only going by what she's been taught through sheer circumstance, still get ruthlessly punished by God? (3) Why would an author who uses the n-word liberally end another story by depicting a woman who hallucinates a bunch of n-words entering heaven before she did? It's a cycle of nine stories that illustrates the title, that each of us, race-gender-class-location-citycountrywhathaveyou, will have to meet and confront each other if we both intend to climb any further than we already have, and that (except for one story) doesn't necessarily portray faith as something that elevates: Jesus-loving woman believes she's saved by following Sunday school theology to a tee for all her life, but hates LITERALLY every other human being alive = Jesus-mocking tattooed man somehow finding the lure of God literally inescapable = seemingly kind woman finds stray bull teasing her herd, tries to raise children: fails, tries to run farm: fails, tries to steamroll over other people: fails, tries to be a strong woman: fails, yet when she gets gored by that stray bull you're kind of glad it happened to her. Flannery O'Connor makes it look easy. But what she tried to achieve with her stories was really hard, and must have taken an inordinate amount of thought. And a lot of mystery. And they almost get to "classic level," they really almost get there. What is it that I think that stops them? There are a few times throughout the book where your view doesn't feel expansive, but instead feels restrictive and plain—in other words “bad simple.” As if she was too tired to think about it all. Considering how successfully the rest of the book hides enormous complexities within simple-seeming frames, this feels like a sin. Four stars.
"El Filibusterismo" by José Rizal, Translated by Harold Augenbraum (1891, 2011)
You know when someone accomplished in non-literary fields, someone very intelligent, says they're going to write a novel? And the descriptions are fine, and the dialogue is fine, and the characters are fine, and the ideas are fine, and the cliffhangers are fine, and maybe there's a liberal heaping of esoterica, in this case many many Latin phrases, and maybe it follows that escalating plot curve thing to a tee, and maybe Chekov's gun ends up going off, and at first glance it all appears to be fairly competently put together? And even the writing itself as a whole seems perfectly fine, everything except for the sense of joy experienced by the reader, which falls jaw-droppingly flat? This book does that. The joy part, it turns out, is screamingly difficult to engineer. One star.
"Dancing in the Streets - A History of Collective Joy" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2006)
I suppose all books like this bend the truth, it's only a matter of degree ("The Dawn of Everything" apparently bends the truth quite a bit in service of its ultimate point.) So, was public celebration really discouraged by the rise of Protestant discipline-fed capitalism? Was ritualistic dancing really seen as a threat to public order? Do we really live according to the dictates of a culture that sees benefits in our separation, that celebrates individualism and identity both as a triumph of selfhood and as a method of organization (if you identify as "gay" then I know what to sell you,) that peddles products to alleviate the dismay that the culture itself causes? Is what we're experiencing now the result of centuries of human repression at the service of power, control, and money? Beats me—most of the relevant information I know comes only from personal experience and this very book. Once again, Ehrenreich starts by examining something simple, in this case "joy", and spins it out into all sorts of enormous threads—Why do we, as humans, relentlessly seek out so much pointless joy? And why do people seem to find this so threatening? I can't tell you if she's onto something for certain. But it's something to think about, for sure. Four stars.