Book Burning

[bookburning]

Wise Blood

What a ride. This lil' book ran me all the way from, "this is just a confusing description of scary people doing things that make no sense" (a pet peeve) to "O'Connor sees into my own mind" within a few hundred pages. It's about The Way and The Truth and The Life but also contains freakishly accurate descriptions of windshield wipers ("they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church"). It's incredibly dark and also one of the funniest things I've ever read. For example:

Hers was a brown portrait of a moose standing in a small lake. The look of superiority on this animal’s face was so insufferable to Enoch that, if he hadn’t been afraid of him, he would have done something about it long ago. As it was, he couldn’t do anything in his room but what the smug face was watching, not shocked because nothing better could be expected and not amused because nothing was funny. If he had looked all over for one, he couldn’t have found a roommate that irritated him more. He kept up a constant stream of inner comment, uncomplimentary to the moose, though when he said anything aloud, he was more guarded. The moose was in a heavy brown frame with leaf designs on it and this added to his weight and his self-satisfied look. Enoch knew the time had come when something had to be done; he didn’t know what was going to happen in his room, but when it happened, he didn’t want to have the feeling that the moose was running it. The answer came to him fully prepared: he realized with a sudden intuition that taking the frame off him would be equal to taking the clothes off him (although he didn’t have on any) and he was right because when he had done it, the animal looked so reduced that Enoch could only snicker and look at him out the corner of his eye.

lololololol

Anyway: I feel privileged to have read this and glad I pushed past my initial lack of interest. The only thing I remain truly confused by is not, actually, any of the stuff about God or human suffering or existential truth, it is: wtf is a "high rat-colored car"? Why does this book refer to them only and exactly as such? Can any conveniently passing O'Connor scholar explain?

[bookburning]

Of Human Bondage

He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to his active imagination and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was able to look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement. “By Jove, if I weren’t flippant, I should hang myself,” he thought cheerfully.

I know it isn't cool. I'm know I'm supposed to be reading other people. But at the end of the day, I will never find anything so useful or enjoyable or relatable as a nice, long, generally linear story about an English man 150-200 years ago or so going about his life, quietly Surmounting Difficulty, making observations, and proposing how to be. There may be proportionally more of these books than ought to exist, but the fact that the supply is not literally inexhaustible is of actual concern to me in my attempt to exist in the burning world. Every character in this story is someone I know. There is something grounding and instructive that feels written to me personally every 10 or 15 pages. For me, English* lit is functionally equivalent to the Bible:

There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace.

—I mean, come on—

—and for all the pleasure and wisdom I may get from anything else, even the best of the rest is a sort of apocrypha. I'm sorry, but I just can't help it. (*Yes, Maugham was born in France—but on the grounds of the British embassy, so. 😎)

[bookburning]

The Guest

If you can appreciate an unlikeable protagonist, value fiction as a way to move through the world as a different person ... then this is a hell of a book.

I have, I think—for a soft modern specimen—at least an average amount of physical courage: for speed, for heights, for darkness; big animals, deep water. But my own degree of social anxiety is such that I steel myself to inquire after an unused chair in a bar, feel heat off the cashier on my way to a gas station bathroom unless I buy a pack of gum on the way out. I am miles closer to an unchecked adrenaline response when ordering a sandwich than when riding a motorcycle. Knowing that this is irrational makes absolutely no difference; shut up. Point being: While I understand reviewers complaining that nothing happens in The Guest, to someone like me this book is a bona fide thriller. Imagine being this person! God! I don't think there are enough drugs in the world, and the book is furthermore a good reminder not to try and find out.

[bookburning]

Fleishman Is In Trouble

Toby hadn’t dreamed of great and transcendent things for his marriage. He had parents. He wasn’t an idiot.

People seem to dislike this book because it's Brodesser-Akner doing rich-people problems again, but I personally prefer that to spending any more time thinking about actual-people problems than I already do. It gets pretty smug and MFA-y at the end, but I found the story engrossing otherwise and didn't really mind that, either.

[bookburning]

Wild Houses

The Ferdias had the unreliability, but also the dangerous decisiveness, of creatures who did not understand their nature and did not care to understand it. You could never tell what lines they would elect to cross, what courses of action they would follow through to the bitter end, because they did not know either.

(^ Genuinely useful anthropology—zoology?—of the Lout. This is the sort of insight that could save your life if you spend a lot of time in bars, e.g.)

Great little book: bleak but compassionate treatment of neglected subjects, vividly Of A Place. The Irish voices are very clear, and not just in slang—hearing the words off the page instead of from someone's mouth made me conscious of differences in phrasing and cadence I'd never really noticed before.

[bookburning]

Leverage

This book has many of the same elements as The Audacity, and I think I picked it up hoping Gowani might arrange them more effectively than Chapman did. No, alas, Leverage is even clunkier and sillier, and I'm pretty sure I would still think this even if I did understand high finance.

Having said that, both Gowani and Chapman deserve credit for at least attempting to get at what must be Silicon Valley's most under-acknowledged racial dynamic: white public faces on Southeast Asian lackey brains. Compared to conversations about underrepresentation in tech, people are weirdly silent about this structure—in life, not just in fiction—which to me suggests that Literature probably needs to happen first. I wish Rushdie had done it before getting so old, but he's a New Yorker. 😢

[bookburning]

Seduction Theory

In general, the suffering of women struck him as deeply erotic. Simone’s total unwillingness to be battered by life was, in his view, a missed opportunity. If he were a woman, he would luxuriate in his imperilment a little. Ethan didn’t know he thought any of this.

I love an academic scandal, in the news or in fiction. The real working world (sorry, but) does not generate the amount of lunacy and petty bullshit as is incubated and insulated in the ivory tower, and it's much cheaper to read about it than it is to go to grad school. Hence, I picked this up—

and, related—

—because I'm not educated enough to have recognized the reference to Freud, I assumed from the title that Seduction Theory would be total trash. I do not mean this as a pejorative. But the book is observant, has some interesting structural things going on, and felt as original as one can reasonably expect of yet another novel by an MFA writing what they know (that is, MFAs).

But while I found all this a pleasant surprise, it seems many readers did not. Their irritation at the bait-and-switch is funny ("This is not a sexy book about a student and teacher having an affair") and reminds me of reactions to The Friend: the salesman in me really wants to see the publisher's revenue modeling for effective pitch vs. satisfied (satiated?) reviewers.

I would also be very curious to know if the author poached from her own experience or from the 2024 Stanford dean debacle, I suppose the timing doesn't entirely line up, and there's no shortage of other reference points, but a civilian can't help but wonder.

[bookburning]

The Audacity

Has its moments as a Bay Area Bullshit hate-read (I live here; I'm allowed), but in general this is a good idea not particularly well executed—much like many startups, in fact. And when the idea itself is more or less literally an actual news story, I'm not sure you can get too much creative credit for that, either.

[bookburning]

The God of the Woods

I didn't note a single line from this book but had a good time with it. It's extra fun if you've ever worked at a summer camp yourself and can project some of the scenes into your own distant dining halls, cabins etc.—although ever since the trailer for Blair Witch I've believed that creepy things mostly happen in East Coast forests.

[Mild spoiler ahead]

I recommended God of the Woods to a friend, who later told me she disliked it because the answer to the Whodunit is one the reader can't plausibly work out for themselves. This didn't bother me at all, which led me to the belated realization that people approach books like this differently: some people read mysteries with the expectation of actually solving them. This seems obvious, now, but if anything I think I may tend to do the opposite—deliberately avoid putting the pieces together, to protect the pleasure of the reveal.

[bookburning]

Trust

She could feel herself think differently and knew that, in the end, it did not matter whether this feeling was based on reality or fantasies. What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors—and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next, wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becomes the flesh for its own teeth. (My annotation here says, "YIKES YIKES YIKES") I thought that given ... everything, I might not be in the mood for "rich people are crazy and also lying"—or, after IOAWNAT, for any necessarily lesser take on book-within-a-book. But Trust felt original and was very entertaining, and, unusual for a novel of that description, also read as if either Diaz or his editor paid at least some attention to the prose. A nice surprise all the way around, even if the last few chapters did leave me even more hung up on my own mortality than I already was.

(I am still rushing through a backlog of reviews and this one is coming out sounding much cattier than I mean for it to—I liked this book, for the record.)

[bookburning]

Kill Your Darlings

This can't possibly be anywhere near the first/only book structured like this (mostly in reverse), but off the top of my head I can't think of another? I expected it to feel gimmicky, but Swanson keeps the details straight and executes well. That's not nothing, to sustain suspense in a story that begins with its own outcome. Plus: academia, murder, scandal—fun!

[bookburning]

The Last Session

Junk food, over-the-top beach-read nonsense—but (a) junk food is delicious; and (b) the gap between over-the-top beach-read nonsense and any given weekend at, e.g, Esalen, is ... not that big.

[bookburning]

Pale Fire

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. …. I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

I think about this particular, atomic fraction of a moment: the exact point at which the uncut delight of discovery—in this case, of working out all of Nabokov's little riddles and tricks—contacts, collapses into, is corrupted by the knowledge that you will have that feeling only once per puzzle and that there are only so many games to be be played. I know this is true of every book, of life, of course, but it felt truer to me of (finally) reading Pale Fire than of any given Tuesday.

Back on Earth, everything I love about Nabokov is packed into Pale Fire: all the master-conjurer's illusions, allusions, sleights of hand; the excruciating characters; the fist-pump-perfect captures of extremely specific but instantly recognizable lighting conditions (...); the potential tattoos:

Dead is the mandible, alive the song

The lost glove is happy

I think she always nursed a small mad hope

—et cetera. I am genuinely surprised I can't find examples on Reddit of surviving Sad Girls with that last one across their wrists in tiny cursive. What a miss!

In short: I was in raptures over the poem; slogged through the rest of the book feeling impatient and dense; was amply rewarded for persistence; continue to consider Nabokov a god.

[bookburning]

The Book of George

“You need to get over yourself, George. You have this Eeyore affect going on, you act all pathetic and self-loathing, but your’e actually extremely egotistical. You think you’re too good to be anything short of exceptional, and maybe you could’ve been exceptional, if you’d had the humility and discipline to commit to whatever it was you decided to do, and just go for it, which is scary, because what if you were okay, or merely competent. That would be worse, in your eyes, that not even making it at all. Just being average.”

I'm going to guess I picked this up because I mentally scanned it as a Tony's Chocolonely bar, perhaps in more ways than one. The sales pitch—(1) we all know/have dated a George; and (2) we all recognize the George within ourselves—is essentially accurate. But I have almost no memory of having read the book, so it may have been accurate and not much else.

[bookburning]

Dietland

At this time it may not be a good idea to put anything I actually thought/felt about this book on the internet. But may the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice, amirite? 🙏🏽

[bookburning]

The Librarianist

Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough—that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know how to describe it. There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone. After I had already finished this this book, I recommended it to a friend who looked it up and read me back the publisher's description of it as a "document of the introvert's condition." This was a bit of a jolt because I had previously thought the book was about the human condition. No matter how many times I remind myself, I never to seem to remember that some portion of the population—perhaps most of it?— is not like this. What do such people think about all day? They seem so much less likely to write it down in easy novels that it's possible I may never know. 🥲

[bookburning]

Orlando

“To fall from a mast-head,” she thought, “because you see a woman’s ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be a slave of the frailest chit in petticoats, and yet to go about like you were the Lords of creation. Heavens!” she thought, “what fools they make of us—what fools we are!” And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her.

Of the ... many things about this book I found confusing, chief among them was how the hell Woolf managed to get this published in 1928. An effect of my own vantage point, I suppose: almost by definition, a regressive era will never seem in the moment half so regressive as it actually is.