THIS IS A TUMBLR ABOUT BOOKS I HAVE READ

Short Book Reviews

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The Massacre at El Mozote is a book about the confusing nature of terror, the complex means by which people invite other people to their doom, and the conflicting reactions of the doomed and damaged. I first read the original version of this book when it filled an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1993. In the waiting room of my therapist’s office, appropriately. This is not a book that requires my endorsement. It is a book that is already necessary. A book that will remain necessary, always.

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Ariadne’s Thread is a book about W. G. Sebald. Or, more specifically, Ariadne’s Thread is supposed to be a book about W. G. Sebald. A book in memory of the great author, by a woman with whom he was friends in the 1980s, perhaps his most formative and least known period as a writer. In fact there is almost nothing about W. G. Sebald in this book. He appears with regularity, it is true, and his work is liberally quoted from and analyzed, which is fine as far as it goes, but provides strikingly little insight into his personality, and as such, what’s the point. True, she introduces him to Urne Buriall, and that’s enough to make to make their friendship important in itself. Not enough to make her book worthwhile, though. The point is I wanted to read a book about W. G. Sebald, the person. Ariadne’s Thread is not that book. Unfortunately neither is it really a book about W. G. Sebald as an author. It circles around the man while revealing nothing, a labyrinth whose center cannot be reached.

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The Wives of Henry VIII is a book about the wives of Henry VIII. It is therefore also a book about Henry VIII, though you will likely learn more about Henry VIII by reading this excellent book ostensibly about his wives than you will by reading a book about Henry VIII. In addition you will learn about Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More and Ferdinand and Isabella and all sorts of interesting historical figures, many of whom were murdered by Henry VIII. You will learn how Henry’s historically unusual insistence on marrying for love lead to the English Reformation, the Church of England, and the destruction of the abbeys. And you will learn about the powerlessness of women in the past, the more supposedly powerful, the weaker, paradoxically. Right, the past.

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Gutshot is a book about how to write off-kilter short stories in the prescribed off-kilter manner and though I read it not three days ago when I sat down to write this review I could not remember a single one. All that remained was a feeling: a bittersweet sadness, half-contrived, half-earned. Over the last few decades there has emerged from the frozen Iowa of MFA programs a cottage industry of young and young-ish American women writing off-kilter short stories - Judy Budnitz, Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Julia Slavin, just to name a few - whose mix of Raymond Carver and magic realism in the patented Murakami manner has resulted is a surfeit of virtually indistinguishable work characterized by a clean, occasionally vaguely experimental prose style, grotesquerie presented matter-of-factly, and a relatively flat affect suggesting an allegory or fable, all of which taken together unfortunately tend to trivialize the result. That is not to say it cannot be effective. Karen Russell’s “Haunting Olivia” or Judy Budnitz’s “Dog Days” are proof enough that this approach can be devastatingly effective. But it’s a method that too quickly becomes an easy lifeless crutch. These writers lack the glowing uncanny strangeness of geniuses like Lydia Davis or Diane Williams, whose luminous language, self-conscious obscurities, and dangerous ambiguities elevate their forms and material. The facile Gunshot suggest on the other hand that while Amelia Gray originally became known for her stories, the sustained narrative of her dark, troubled novel Threats may be where her true talent lies. 

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Anathem is a book about everything that is beyond us. We join a young priest in a monastery. We follow him and his brothers on their quotidian rituals. We learn about their history. Slowly, ever so slowly, the world outside the monastery comes into view. Then, over the course of a thousand pages Anathem expands to include the entire world, and more. It even manages a stunning narrative twist that, unlike most such things, is no gimmick, but intrinsic to our understanding of everything that has come before and everything that follows. A magnificent novel, shorn of all the questionable politics of its predecessor Cryptonomicon and its successor Reamde, Anathem magnificently rewards Stephenson’s agonizingly slow buildup and patient world building by tying together its manifold narrative threads in the most spectacular and exciting way possible. A masterpiece.

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Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is a book about books. It’s the sort of book where weird things happen to weird people, the sort of people who spend all their time in a weird bookstore. Fun, lightweight, effectively plotted, totally diverting, and totally forgettable: the novel as soufflé. A literary airport novel, for those times you just want something good. But not too good. 

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Going Clear is a book about the lengths to which people will go to find meaning. By now the sheer insane creepy weirdness of Scientology is general knowledge; much more interesting than the strange and terrible rituals at the heart of this cult however are the people drawn to it. Why do people fall into this madness, and why do they stay? Who was this L. Ron Hubbard, and from whence did Xenu’s legions arise? These are the answers Wright seeks in his intellectually ineradicable study, and his answers are ultimately as enlightening and convincing as they are sadly commonplace. Among the more devastating interrogations of the ways men construct belief, Going Clear reminds us of the strangeness inherent in mankind’s long search for something outside himself. And it’s as impossible to put down as the Bible.

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House of Holes is a book about how boring sex can be. It is no accident that many of the erotic masterpieces of the past - 120 Days of Sodom, The Story of the Eye - proceed from decadence and depravity in pursuit of philosophical ends. House of Holes, by comparison, is frankly wholesome. (Holesome?) It’s fundamentally a comedy - and not a very funny comedy - in which instead of a plot and characters we find a series of unconnected hippy dippy episodes involving sex. From the outset Baker seems intent on providing a kind of pointless sexual surrealism, introducing early on for instance the bearded, decapitated heads of two deceased Russian composers performing oral sex on the protagonist. If this sounds contrived, that’s because it is. Moreover, in addition to its astonishing paucity of characters, story, motivation, style, or any intellectual purpose, I was neither aroused nor uncomfortable at any time while reading House of Holes, and for an ostensibly erotic novel I can imagine no more utter, abject failure.

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The Genocides is a book about life. It is a book about life, but not, alas, human life. It is one of the most bleak visions of the future ever offered science fiction, and all the more stunning for it. Alien plants are sown across the Earth, and machines are coming to remove the pests that infest them: us. As The Genocides moves forward so too it moves backwards, from farming to hunting and gathering all the way back to Adam and Eve. A lush and terrifying apocalypse comparable to the great natural cataclysms of J. G. Ballard. Truly the premature loss of Thomas M. Disch was a loss for us all.

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From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail is a book about an unfortunately overlooked time in American history. Reconstruction and the Gilded Age are perhaps more relevant to today than any other period in our shared past, yet when we think of Gilded Age politics—when we do at all—we struggle to remember musty terms like tariff or differentiate Chester Arthur from Benjamin Harrison. (Which one had the mutton chops? Wasn’t someone assassinated?) Calhoun’s slender book brings this tumultuous and significant period to life. With straightforward elegance he traces the evolution of American politics from race relations and the Civil War (the bloody shirt) towards economic issues such as inequality, trade, and the gold standard (the full dinner pail). Whether your interest is history or contemporary politics, Reconstruction and the Gilded Age must be understood to gain perspective on where we are today, and From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail provides an excellent overview of this messy, remarkable time.  

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Light Boxes is a book about how to be Richard Brautigan, only less so. I can hardly imagine a more derivative work. In Watermelon Sugar is one of the great sui generis novels: we don’t need another one. That being said, there are many incidental pleasures here, and Jones is obviously a creative mind with real potential. The story is well told. Phrases are well turned. The characters, though flat as pancakes, pass the time divertingly enough. Unfortunately, perhaps because it is deliberately obscure the ambiguous ending lacks the bittersweetness Jones clearly intended and one comes away distinctly underwhelmed. Light Boxes is what Wes Anderson’s detractors think his movies are: stylish but suffocatingly twee, weightless and without real feeling. Unsurprisingly Light Boxes was optioned by Spike Jonze. Unsurprisingly the option was dropped.

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The Hawkline Monster is a book about the Western. It is a Western too, sort of. It is also a mystery, and a monster movie, and several other things besides. What it is not is boring. The Hawkline Monster is never boring. It is funny, and it is smart, and if you can guess where it’s going someone already told you. Brautigan is among the most playful of writers, and this is one of his most playful novels. Wondrous strange and great. 

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The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is a book about how to write an engaging one-volume history of a subject that really requires a lot more than one volume. Too often books about ancient Egypt are as dusty and obscure as the museum vitrines that contain their remnants. Yet it never feels dry. It is the Nile, not the desert. Wilkinson’s tome presents a rich flow of facts and analysis in a clear, compelling narrative, complete with useful, easy-to-read charts allowing the reader to keep track of the various dynasties. Politics, art, culture, war, everyday life: the sheer amount of information contained within these covers is astounding. If you have any interest in this fascinating chapter in human history The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is the book to read. 

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Vanished Kingdoms is a book about vanished kingdoms. So many civilizations have lived and died and disappeared without a trace and are all the more fascinating in their desuetude. Vanished Kingdoms is a salutary reminder that just as the greatest nations of yesteryear were eventually consigned to oblivion, so too will today’s empires crumble into dust. Burgundy overshadowed France proper for centuries. Savoy stretched across the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union may have gobbled up an embarrassment of Asia but like Tamerlane’s pyramids of skulls soon enough it too joined Burgundy and Savoy in time’s dark backward. Vanished Kingdoms unforgets these accidents of history. In pellucid prose stung with telling details Norman Davies brings to life these curious relics, a useful reminder that had one battle or one treaty turned out differently it might be France or Spain schoolchildren sweat to remember for their AP European History test. 

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The End of Beauty is a book about a great poet not quite at the top of her game. Some Graham is good. Some Graham is crackers. The End of Beauty was sort of crummy.

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The Plot Against America is a book about failing to stick the landing. Roth constructs a plausible vision of an isolationist America led by a President Charles Lindbergh who allies himself with Hitler and brings Nazi-style anti-Semitism to American shores. He introduces a set of old-fashioned relatable, round characters the reader cares about, constructing circumstances that try these characters, that change them, that link their individual fates to the larger questions of the society shifting around them. Then, just as the climax of the book is reached, the narrative momentum at its apex—Roth punts. He shifts from a first person narrative to a series of historical bulletins explaining the momentous events that (SPOILER ALERT) remove Lindbergh from power and restore the historical status quo. And just like that, everything is fine. It’s over. It’s as if after Roth spent all this time building this intricate world he got bored writing the actual novel. And that’s a shame.

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The Perfect American is a book about Walt Disney. Or, more precisely, The Perfect American is a book about the idea of Walt Disney. Biographies transform men into myths; novels transform myths into men. The Perfect American is a biography masquerading as a novel. There are good things here, good things unfortunately lost in a morass of structural instability and confusion. The most important element in a work of art—any work of art, from painting to music to architecture—is neither style nor content. The most important element in a work of art is form. Jungk’s decision to structure his book not around Disney himself but around one of his former employees is therefore tremendously, even insurmountably problematic. Because this book focuses on Disney, the majority of the story requires Jungk to find some way for the narrator to describe scenes at which he cannot be present, and the contortions this novel makes to tell what should be a straightforward story become increasingly ridiculous. What’s worse, none of it is necessary. The narrator’s story is uninteresting and unimportant. Parallels, comparisons, and contrasts between the employee's life and Disney’s could have been dealt with much more effectively in a short, simple Flitcraft-style anecdote. Had The Perfect American told the story of the last year of Walt Disney’s life in close free indirect style there would be something excellent here. The chapter in which Disney’s racism and vision of an America that no longer exists—that never really existed—is challenged by an angry animatronic Abraham Lincoln is extraordinary, funny and poignant. That is what the whole book should have been. Unfortunately, it is not.