"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.

"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.

"Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Is this considered a classic just because it's written oddly and structuralist matrices get quite the workout out of it? Because it did exactly what Ulysses did or exactly what Middlemarch did but in a much less compelling, much more tedious way? I could see how aspects of it (the bisexual attraction, the female viewpoints, the metaphysical connections, the prismatic modernism) sort of stood your hair up back in the day. But now that those things aren't so rare, they don't feel strong enough to carry the book—I suppose you could make the argument that I'm not empathetic enough to get it, but I would counter that empathy isn't something that you can demand from people point blank; empathy is such a difficult emotion for people to attain that, once you're enveloped within a fictional work, it's the responsibility of the author to find a way to help you ascend there. But here, as it stands, you drift in and out of the minds of a large cast of characters and it was done in such a way that, no matter whose mind I went into, I barely cared. I mean, what the fuck. This is a classic? I don't get it. One star.

"Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville (1851)

Honestly, I went in expecting to be bored out of my mind. But it's great, it works! I think if you read it in a straightforward way it might bore you tremendously, but if you read searching for some sort of meaning it's terribly engaging. And what is that meaning? My guess, having only done one pass: it feels similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, honestly. That no amount of knowledge can equip people to take on The Great Unknown. Anyone who thinks otherwise is MAD. Four stars.

"Miss Lonelyhearts" by Nathanael West (1933)

Does a 50-page novella count as a book? If it does, my god, this one is bleak. Russian literature is (hilariously) stereotyped as bleak but within the first three pages of this one we're already exposed to depression, helplessness, Christ, sickness, abortion, suicide, mental disability, and rape—I don't recall Chekhov ever overloading his first act gun in quite the same way. The novella is also a weird, jittery comedy (how West achieves this is nothing short of a miracle.) This is the premise: A New York newspaper advice columnist receives daily pleas for help from desperately lost people with very serious problems; the combination of being exposed to the worst of humanity along with the fact that "Miss Lonelyhearts" (a stepping-stone gig taken by an ambitious, and very flawed, 26-year-old reporter) is viewed as a sort of unerring savior by the entire city completely batters his ill-equipped, genuinely empathetic/genuinely violent psyche. Hilarity ensues. (There's actually a lot of similarity to a pitch-black Joe Orton farce; maybe West was an inspiration.) Four 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.

"Lucky Per" by Henrik Pontoppidan, Translated by Naomi Lebowitz (1904, 2019)

I would describe it as the Danish version of Ellison's "Invisible Man", which is itself a remarkable book and which I have often referred to as my favorite. While both are preoccupied with identity and belonging (in its deft handling of confusion, this one might be the best, most accurate depiction of twentysomething life I've come across) and both are epic in scale, the scope here is absurd. It's so ridiculously epic I'm awestruck that, in the end, he sticks a perfect three-point landing. Five stars.

"Light in August" by William Faulkner (1932)

As you get older, running into art that you find powerful but impossible to articulate becomes a rarer and rarer commodity. I can't explain why I loved this book—there's a lot of talk about borders, and running away, and chasing after, allusions to Christ and religion, and much ado about collective society. There's an overwhelming amount of humanity, the complicated maddening kind, stuffed into 500 pages of text. The narrative is modernist and angular, scrambled but not indecipherable. The language is typical Faulkner, the kind of fecund sentence structure that rewards those who have learned how to read slowly (which nowadays I would argue is a virtue absorbed by virtually no one.) It isn't a logic puzzle. It isn't a book that rewards the mind over the heart. It isn't even what you expect or have been told it's going to be because, again, it's impossible to articulate what the story is, at least in a couple of sentences. I know I just finished it, but I love it. You don't really love Faulkner books. But I love this one. Four stars.

"Laughable Loves" by Milan Kundera, Translated by Suzanne Rappaport (1969, 1974)

A short story collection looking at romance, mostly from the point of view of the heterosexual male of 1960s communist Czechoslovakia (remember that?), from the sexually inexperienced and overeager, searching-in-the-dark twentysomething to the extremely experienced and somewhat calloused, mocking, reflective, overly-lit older intellectual, from the oft-defeated bashful type to the over-rationalizing forward type. They're all comedic, a couple even downright farcical (the one communism-themed story is actually by far the funniest one) which seems about the right sort of energy, jittery, for this sort of mission, which apparently involves exposing the messy, confused sentient being (who, really, never even asked to be born) behind the throbbing, perplexing, often caricatured testosterone fiend we never really ever even asked to be. Which is to say, it's a surprisingly enjoyable read from beginning to end. Similar to how watching the movie "Swingers" is a surprisingly enjoyable experience, even as it reminds you of all the romances in your life that you completely and totally fucked up and perhaps then even of several ineradicable sins you'd like to believe have long been out-run. I wish I could explain to you exactly what elevates this sort of comedy into actual literature, but I don't think I can, not immediately, not right now, though the writing is exquisitely strong, exciting even, in the meticulously plotted, musical way worthwhile comedy often is. The best I can do right now is say, rather than be entirely a force of idle distraction, or a force that lures you straight into pious, family-adoring treacle, the laughter seduces you instead into standing before and looking squarely at a harshly lit and coldly polished mirror for an uncomfortably long time. And I suppose if you happen to have been born a woman, perhaps you'll enjoy stumbling upon a number of solidly plausible explanations for your male partner's chillingly bizarre life decisions. Four 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.

"Kudos" by Rachel Cusk (2018)

Book three of The Outline Trilogy. Was this whole thing a meditation on femininity the entire time? Featuring a main character whom you barely ever see? If so, wow. Four stars.

"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.

"Jokes - Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters" by Ted Cohen (1999)

Well, it only gets interesting at the very end, when this University of Chicago philosophy professor defends offensive jokes; I'm not sure he does a good job of it though (basically saying that correcting the joke doesn't meaningfully solve any problems.) As for the rest of this short book, it frankly doesn't feel all that insightful, for instance, saying that jokes require some conditional knowledge/emotion from the receiver in order to work, or that Jewish jokes often play with absurd logic perhaps because Talmudic interpretation involves twisting logic games. There are a great deal of street jokes reprinted here, including a Polish joke I once heard Norm Macdonald tell, but I would argue that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, I was promised philosophy. Two 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.

"Ivanov - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1887, 2004)

The very first thing you see is someone pointing a gun at Ivanov's face. The very last thing you see (hear, actually) is Ivanov shooting himself. It's "Chekhov's Act I gun" in plain sight. But the rest of the play is kind of bad. Like it's overstuffed and rushed at the same time. Maybe it's okay if you see it in action, but I doubt it—his plays tend to assume obtuse forms, and this feels like an embryonic version of what he'd later refine. It's just funny that the epitome of his famous mantra, its literal manifestation, espoused as sacred gospel by generations of writing teachers, guarded as untouchable formula by generations of writing students, really kind of stinks. Two stars.

"It's Not Easy Bein' Me" by Rodney Dangerfield (2004)

If you didn't have a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation before you started this book, you will have one afterwards. It's jarringly odd to hear him talk about bouts of severe depression. Oddly, the most I laughed out loud was the chapter he talked about his best friend, the funniest guy he knew, a non-comedian named Joe Ancis. Two stars.

"Immortal Comedy - The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life" by Agnes Heller (2005)

It claims to be one of the few books to examine comedy from a philosophical perspective (even Aristotle, as far as we know, avoided it.) If you count literary criticism, that's certainly not true. What I'll say is it's one of the few books I've run into that tries to distinguish comedy as a high art form, analyzing plays, novels, jokes, paintings, and movies along the way; it seeks to identify comic works that achieve the sublime (as in sublimating innocuous laughter towards a higher, noteworthy aesthetic effect) which according to her definition would even exclude works like "The Simpsons" (memorable jokes, like fireworks, that always lead back to the status quo.) Whether or not that interests you, I suppose, is your business. But I will say her argument that our current comedy rarely does anything new, and in fact, steals liberally from past comedic innovations (see "Arrested Development's" similarities to commedia dell'arte, or even Charlie Kaufman's similarities to 20th-century existentialists like Kafka) is a rather damning one. That said, the main criticism I have of this extremely interesting, wonderfully accessible meditation on high comedy (tell an aspiring comedian that you consider comedy to be an art form and they'll consider you cuckoo, believe me) is, sure, that's all well and good, but is Samuel Beckett really all that much of a knee-slapper? Maybe not. In fact, Beckett sounds like he might be downright irritating. Yes, I may just be ridiculing something I'm too unsophisticated to understand, but it's not my fault I wasn't born into money, or into a culture that doesn't consider literature to be an impractical, time-wasting luxury.* Five stars.

*"All people are 'thrown' into a concrete social universe. The human genetic endowment is programmed for social life, but there is nothing in the genetic endowment which would encode a newborn for this or that particular, concrete social environment into which he or she is thrown. Philosophically speaking, there are two initial a priories in human life: a social a priori (the world into which each is thrown) and a genetic a priori (the inherited endowments of the thrown being herself). Since there is no initial connection between the two, and since only the experience of any single person can forge this connection, it is philosophically correct to speak of two a priories, given that they are prior to experience for all human newborns. To use a term coined by Hannah Arendt, this is the condition of human natality. In the process of socialization those two a priories must come together; they must dovetail in order for the individual person even to survive. But—and this is my hypothesis—the two a priories cannot be entirely dovetailed; there remains a tension between them. To use another kind of metaphor, an unbridgeable abyss remains between the two a priories. I call this existential tension and an existential abyss. According to the conception of laughing and crying presented here, both of these are reactions to the impossibility of a real jump over the abyss; laughing and crying are responses to the failure of any complete dovetailing between the social and the genetic a priori."

"If Only We Could Know! - An Interpretation of Chekhov" by Vladimir Kataev, Translated and Edited by Harvey Pitcher (2002)

One: Someone at the College of DuPage Library clearly has a hard-on for Anton Chekhov and, as far as I can tell, I'm the only person living in the district who appreciates it. Two: Yes, it's an academic book. So let me just say that the only reason I feel I should highlight it is because, as far as my experience goes, the interpretations of Chekhov's works are ALL OVER THE PLACE. And part of the reason for this, as far as I can gather, is that Chekhov's irony is bone-dry: for instance, in "The Student" a depressed character by the end reaches a grand, uplifting epiphany, struck by the eternity of human beauty, which leaves you the reader feeling pretty good unless you ask yourself, "How is a 22-year-old student supposed to confidently know all that?"; but you're barely force-fed the question, and if you miss the question it's easy to miss the point of the story. So the reason I'm highlighting this book is because I think (naivety pending) Kataev probably gets closer to what Chekhov was actually trying to do through his work than anyone else who has tried to explain him. Which is, basically, point out that not one person living on Planet Earth could ever possibly know what the hell they're talking about.* Chekhov, I imagine, died a lonely man. Four stars.

*Excerpt: "'Why should a little one have to suffer so much before dying?' the grieving Lipa asks the old man 'from Firsanov' (In the Ravine) / 'We can't know all the whys and wherefores,' he replies. 'A bird's meant to have two wings, not four, because two's enough to fly with; same thing with man, he's not meant to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. He knows as much as he needs to know for getting through life.' This is a very rare example in Chekhov of a character who accepts not knowing 'everything' calmly, as the inevitable lot of human beings."