I found it funny when one of the characters in an early story described a play as “very subtle … very oblique”—as it’s a pretty apt description of the stories in this collection. At first I felt annoyed that each one seemed to leave out a key detail I was wanting to know. But either I got used to it or the missing pieces were absent/less obvious. There’s a little Alice Munro in these stories, but they are a little less all-encompassing.

I loved “Lucidity” about a couple going, unannounced, to pack up the husband’s mother Gisela to take her to an assisted living home, on their anniversary. Shifting between the perspectives of the wife and Gisela, their impressions of each other are distant and complex. Mostly what is great is Gisela’s thoughts, how she is more aware and with-it than they realize. From her “So, it comes to this” when they arrive to later:

Lucidity, her son calls it when she looks most awake to him. But she thinks, No, it is not lucidity, it is boredom. On those lucid days it is as if each moment were flat enough to slide against the next and slip away, none more important than the other, none interesting to her anymore, or, at least, not as interesting as the more languid, dreaming moments of her non-lucid days. She feels like she is swimming then, when she is lost in her mind, and it is as pleasant as peaceful sleep.

I finally got around to hunting down the second and third issues of this three-part story, and re-read #9 since it had been a while. It’s interesting how these issues manage to be very much like the Optic Nerves of the past while feeling far more developed at the same time. The artwork has relaxed from the rigid precision of earlier issues and is all inked, none of the screentone shading that tended to darken up the pages.

The story itself continues following our depressed protagonist (probably the part of this storyline that most connects it to earlier ones) after his girlfriend’s departure to New York. Eventually he ends up following her there, and perhaps the best part is when they go to a bar that is called O’Daly’s but looks exactly like O’Connors.

Looking back on older Optic Nerves that were infused with Tomine’s experiences living in Berkeley/the Bay Area, it will be interesting to if and how he will use New York as a setting in future works.

If you’ve missed this series entirely, this fall the three parts will be compiled into a book entitled Shortcomings.

Several people told me how disappointed they were in Goodbye Tsugumi that I haven’t read anything of Banana Yoshimoto’s since Amrita, even though I liked that book a lot. The last time I read Kitchen, it really hadn’t stood up to the test of time—I must have been more forgiving of the often awkward translation as a teenager.

This is actually two stories paired together: the first a story of a girl hiking in the mountains (with some good creepy parts) and the second about a girl whose sister is in a coma. Neither is earth-shattering, and Hard Luck gets a little nonlinear in a bad way.

Toby mentioned this in the midst of recent Pottermania as one of the YA sci-fi books he would suggest to Potterfiends at the children’s bookstore he worked at in Boston years back. Set in 2194 Zimbabwe, three overprotected children of a general sneak out for an adventure and get kidnapped. Their parents bring in a trio of detectives, each with a distinct mutation from exposure to nuclear waste (check out the title and take a guess). There are so many characters and other things about this book that are awesome.

I remember seeing stuff on this book when it came out and taking the sleep test. I can’t remember what I got last time, but this time:

Find your own pose!

I had kind of forgotten about the book until McSweeney’s had a sale. Sometimes it’s more goofy than funny (if that distinction means anything to you), but it’s a cute, attractive little book. The drawings are quite nice.

Both Pablo and Leslie gave this highest ratings, so I took notice. A copy came through at the library just in time for a short trip down to the bay area, and it was pretty much the perfect reading for traveling, both in the subject matter and in the length of the essays. Every other one is called “The Blue of Distance,” and I love all the different ways Solnit explores this concept.

It occurred to me while reading that this exactly how I wish The Future of Nostalgia was written: not just fluffy ideas on being lost but contextual and personal. Many of the essays seem to progress through haphazardly connected stream-of-consciousness, seeming to get lost themselves in sidetracking, only to come to something lovely at the end.