Consider the Lobster
David Foster Wallace
After reading Infinite Jest two years ago, I didn’t become a DFW fanatic, settling instead for a measured respect for a writer who manages to be incredibly brilliant and hilarious at the same time.
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Invisible
Paul Auster
By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself…
Paul Auster is one of those writers where most likely you’ve read The New York Trilogy, if you’ve read anything, and nothing quite compares to that.
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Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald
A bit too elegiac of a novel for the early summer, Austerlitz is still worth any potential struggles in making it through the endless paragraphs — often as much as twenty-five pages long. The character, and really the voice of the book, Jacques Austerlitz meets the nameless narrator as they are both appreciating the architecture of the Antwerp train station, starting a decades-long friendship that seems to consistent of them usually running into each other unexpectedly and then Austerlitz talking this guy's ear off about his life for hours on end.
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Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann
I was drawn to this book based on its setting in 1970s New York City, specifically set around the day Philippe Petit made his World Trade Center tightrope walk; curiously the tightrope interludes in the book felt mostly unnecessary and distracting. The shorter sections that only have the tightrope connection to tie them with the rest of the book hence feel entirely disconnected.
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis
I picked up All the King's Horses as a break from this and found that a longer narrative really hit the spot. Afterward I decided to finish up the stories in the section I was reading here and come back to the rest of the collection later, only to discover somewhat disappointingly that there were just a handful until that next break. But I'm sticking to the plan.
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All the King's Horses
Michèle Bernstein
Most of the winter I've been buried in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which is excellent yet deceptively dense for short fiction. I needed something a little vapid as a break, and this book claims to have been inspired by Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse.
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Pretty Monsters
Kelly Link
It's almost exactly four years since I read most of Link's Stranger Things Happen, and I experienced similar hit-and-miss responses to these stories. Sometimes the concept of the story is more entertaining than the execution, and the writing is often too simplistic and almost juvenile, though I discovered after finishing the last story that this a YA book. I guess that's why all the stories are focused on younger people!
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The Design of Dissent
Milton Glaser & Mirko Ilić
—Read more…So great is our knowledge, in the early years of the twenty-first century, of all that has come before us, so vast is our experience of both human success and also staggering, holocaustic failure, and so sophisticated is our understanding of how little we understand, how vaguely we understand, that a toxic cynicism pervades our spirit, shutting down our capacity for faith, for hope, for imagining change — and consequently shutting down our passion, our imagination. —Tony Kushner (FOREWORD)
Bats or Swallows
Teri Vlassopoulos
I've known Teri for years via the zine world, and it's exciting to see her first book published. These stories are largely melancholy, lined with the poignancy of deaths and disappointments. They feel open-ended, most likely because the characters without fail need to reach a point of internal conclusion rather than exacting any kind of influence on the world around them.
See also: "Baby Teeth" on Joyland
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Girls to the Front
Sara Marcus
I became aware of riot grrrl late, mostly from a distance through zines and records. I can still conjure some sadness that Huggy Bear actually played a show in northern Connecticut, but on a Tuesday night when there was no way I could go. What I experienced influenced me greatly, but I never felt like I was a part of the movement in the political sense. There was a lot that I didn't know about the origins and history. I'm glad this book exists now, though it doesn't feel like the "definitive" record it claims to be.
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Sunset Park
Paul Auster
I was excited about this book since it is largely set in my neighborhood, plus I always enjoy reading Paul Auster. While the book is definitely entertaining, the writing feels a little rough around the edges, at times even clunky. His description of Sunset Park as a neighborhood during this time period — the 2008 economic collapse — is largely inaccurate, though the other NYC neighborhood descriptions are perfectly evocative.
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Between the Acts
Virginia Woolf
Jacob's Room is maybe my favorite Woolf novel, with its dark look at WWI and the futility of life; this novel shows England just before its entry into WWII, in a village hours outside of London, where a fragmented family is hosting a pageant on the grounds of their modest .
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I Wonder
Marian Bantjes
Apparently Marian Bantjes' approach to her first book was to make it "feel like a brick of gold." With a cover of gold and silver foils on a satin cloth with gold-gilded page edges and lots of gold ink on the interior, it's definitely a success, gold brick-wise. Her work is known for being both illustrative and typographic at once, involving intricate patterns and highly ornamental vector art. The graphics represent all of these aspects and fully entangled with the text throughout.
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee & Walker Evans
—Read more…Words could, I believe, be made to do or to tell anything within human conceit. That is more than can be said of the instruments of any other art. But it must be added of words that they are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums of record and communication, and that they come at many of the things which they alone can do by such a Rube Goldberg articulation of frauds, compromises, artful dodges and tenth removes as would fatten any other art into apoplexy if the art were not first shamed out of existence…
As Ever
Joanne Kyger
This collection has been hanging out on my bedside table for months, read in little pieces until finally this week I decided it would not be renewed again. I picked it up in the midst of the Desecheo Notebook (circa 1971), a semi-diary. In some ways her poetry can at times chronicle specific time periods and feel very similar to her published journals, Strange Big Moon, which I failed to get through earlier this year. But this collection spans so many decades that it doesn't get so bogged down in the every day.
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Anthropology of an American Girl
Hilary Thayer Hamann
Very Short List made this sound so good (a well-crafted classic!), and the NYPL hold list was hundreds of people deep, so when a copy finally came through nearly four months later, I was expecting a pretty awesome coming-of-age story based in the late 70s and early 80s in New York (the city and east Long Island). The story isn't so much non-linear as episodic with not all the episodes following the chronology, the jumps aren't distracting but lack purpose.
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