brief book reviews

feeling weird because for the last couple weeks i was unable to read as much as i usually do. part of this was because i suffered from a prolonged, acutely painful gout flair up that lasted ~10 days, preventing me from walking my dogs in the mornings, which is usually when i am able to read almost uninterrupted for ~20 minutes each day. and then shortly after that subsided, my toddler stopped sleeping well, and now most nights i have to sit with my toddler to induce sleep and wake up and repeat one or two times in the middle of the night, making my own bedtime chaotic and ruining my energy level throughout the day, meaning reading books at night in bed is harder than usual.

anyway, here are brief reviews of the last 3 books i've read:

Blood-Soaked Buddha / Hard Earth Pascal by Noah Cicero (Trident Press): i've been slowly reading through noah cicero's catalog of books. i think i read nature documentary first (which i liked a lot), then the human war (which i didn't find super gripping at the time but appreciated that for its time was rightfully impactful), then go to work (which i liked the first half of more than the second half, but i admired noah's confidence/ambition in writing the second half the way it is written), then give it to the grand canyon (which i liked a lot, and interviewed noah about on vol. 1 brooklyn), then best behavior (which i really liked, and pestered my friends about for maybe a week while reading it). i'm thankful that he has such an extensive and varied bibliography and that i can continue to find and enjoy his writing for the foreseeable future. i like how small the book is and often kept it in my back pocket. i thought it was funny that it lists an editor in the credits (nate perkins) but is kind of edited poorly, eg it consistently uses "everyday" when it should be "every day", etc., but it was also edited better than best behavior, which i think maybe wasn't edited at all. the book is non-fiction, basically an open, concise, and lucid philosophical text about noah's views on spirituality/life outlook and his personal experience with reading/understanding buddhism. he spends a lot of time more or less critiquing aspects of american religion/spiritualism/conservatism which is familiar to me as someone who also more or less grew up in Ohio. i felt like his invented examples of people/outlooks and experiences, while reductive and cartoonish, were still effective in communicating his points and made me think in terms of how i view people and where i could use more compassion/understanding in my daily life. i like that he accepts that he doesn't know everything, that he has no authority over anyone. i liked his simple, often playful, sincere tone, for example one paragraph ends with the line "Comets are cool!" and another ends with "I was super annoying!" I also liked his honesty and personal details, and once you get past the first few chapters full of nietzche and sartre and buddhism quotes, he grounds his argumentation in his personal life and experiences and those of his friends and family. i personally find a lot of value in autobiography/memoir/autoficiton and i think noah is very good at writing this way. i also accept that, now, having read many of his books, he often writes about the same things and events, but i think it's interesting to think of his body of work as interrelated, non-discrete, offering various looks at the same topics but from different perspectives in style, eg nonfiction vs fiction and in time/place/experience. i can't compare this book to other books on the topic of buddhism; it's my first and only text on buddhism that i've read, but i found it insightful and helpful. i've been recently struggling with my emotions, anger, feeling tired/drained, feeling present and engaging with family because of things like my toddler's inability to sleep through the night, the global pandemic, etc., so it was good for me to read about this and think on it, get some help/tips on being mindful, etc. I think if i instead read a book about buddhism that just presented a bunch of those 'hard to understand' quotes with nebulous morals or points, like...about a guy hitting someone with a stick...or about someone eating a corpse in a cave...without the grounding of noah's emphasis on explaining things well, i would feel frustrated and turned off. i feel ok admitting that as a white man from ohio, i benefited from having a white man from ohio explain some aspects of buddhism to me as an introduction to the topic. i will probably try to read some more of the source texts that he references, in the future. my brother in law is a buddhist, but we haven't talked much about it. he is a person of many great passions (hiking, thrifting, board gaming), who has many collections (music boxes, minerals, instruments) and works as an arborist, which i think is cool. i know mike andrelczyk knows a lot about buddhism and talks about zen a lot. he's a lot more zen than i am, probably one of the more chill people in indie lit.

Heck, Texas by Tex Gresham (Atlatl Press): i bought this book on a recommendation from cavin, who was very enthusiastic about it, i think because cavin had/has been excited about reading/writing books that experiment with form, especially screenplay-type structure, like that jin woo book on 11:11, and a book that cavin himself has been writing/editing that's written sort of like a hybrid screenplay thing. tex and i (and cavin, haha) had some short pieces in a bad lung press digital zine last month and i liked tex's piece the most out of the whole zine, i think, so based on that and cavin's rec i bought Heck, Texas. i'm writing all this to sort of illuminate aspects of my book-buying system, so i can better understand myself re: what influences me to buy a book and maybe leverage that to help sell more of my own or others' books. aside from a Mike Kleine book, this is the only other book on Atlatl i've read, and the press feels, in my head, kind of like a smaller and less gimmicky Inside the Castle because of this (every time i think of Atlatl, i think of joe bielecki saying it out loud on his podcast, and the sound of it sounds funny to me). anyway, this is a book written mostly in fragments across 3 sections, basically each page is a separate fragment, with different font, format, etc., with some illustrations and handwriting, stuff like that. it's generally based on vignettes centered on a nowhere shithole town in texas, with a lot of non-sequitur-seeming vignettes about really bleak things, mostly (brutal) death and violence, hard drugs, flagrant homophobia and racism, inflicting trauma on kids, all to (satirically) condemn a lot of aspects of american (small town) culture, i think. as brutal as some of the scenes/vignettes are, i think they're effective in reminding me in different ways, that the 'real' world differs from being online, in that while absurd/satirical, and while a lot of the scenes (esp. around classrooms) feel like experiments in 'dead baby joke'-style black comedy, a lot of it also feels very realistic, probably is happening right now all over the country, etc., and is effective in condemning things via the explicit brutality. the 'narrative' during the first two sections, as much as there is, is 'unreliable,' with different perspectives/imaginings of the same (bleak, violent) events. stylistically, it isn't really a book i would pick up on my own if i didn't have some personal relationship with the author or someone like cavin to recommend it. i think part of what made it hard for me to really enjoy is that the constant shifting of focus, topic, characters, events, etc. without any grounding or framing makes it hard for me to feel invested in any particular passage. each new page requires caring about the page as a generally independent piece of prose/poetry/art/whatever, and the lack of narrative movement made me feel more apathetic as i read. another thing that sticks out to me, which makes it hard to feel invested in starting each new page, personally, is that tex frequently uses the same set up + punchline combo of an 'intense' paragraph set up followed by a one-line punchline that diffuses everything, e.g. a dense paragraph of a man 'madly' pontificating about existentialism to, it turns out, an apathetic stripper, or when a Black man monologues a heartfelt confession about race relations to a white man who's just talking to him, we find out, to mug him. this happens frequently in the first section, and after the first couple times i felt myself feeling like "ok i get it" after the first 2-3 sentences and then skipping to the last line for the 'joke' which i knew was coming, so i could move on. in this way i think the stylistic decisions sort of interfere with each other -- the narrative ticks and recurring structure undermines a lot of the actual writing, which i think in a different context would maybe be more impressive/powerful. not sure if this makes sense. overall the texts range from sort of schlocky serious/spooky to flippant black comedy -- while some of the attempts at being mysterious or whatever don't feel super effective (like the 'creepy' slanted handwriting throughout), there are a lot of different kinds of jokes, and many of them i felt were pretty funny, and some i didn't get i think because i don't know much about cinema (there's some recurring joke(?) about a johnny depp movie which may or may not exist). the third section (written as a screenplay) is my favorite part of the book, as it has a narrative arc, is based on a single (interesting) character, and is more consistently funny and enjoyable to read, imo, and i guess in retrospect requires the first two sections, to some extent, to create the setting. i wish the third section were longer, i think, in that it ends kind of arbitrarily (something something comment on purposelessness/arbitrarity of life). overall it makes sense to me that tex would reach out to werner herzog for a blurb (which he got, which is rad imo) -- it feels like a book someone into experimental film would read/write. i like tex and i like some of his writing i've seen online, i just don't think i'm the target demo for this particular book, which is fine, because this kind of writing is sort of designed to challenge/put people off; i'm not a particularly cool person and i don't really watch or care about movies. this kind of book also feels 'vaguely popular' right now in twitter-centric indie lit, with atlatl, inside the castle, and now apocalypse party and other online venues investing in horror-adjacent, fragmented, 'visual' narratives, or something like that, i think. my favorite parts in the first two sections were the craigslist/facebook posts about sex and missing persons and stuff like that and the long paragraph about popping a zit.

Two Against One by Frederick Barthelme (Grove Press): this is the first frederick barthelme book i've read. i picked it up based on that tao lin tweet about the authors who wrote the most books he'd read, and barthelme was like number 3 or 4. i've also seen, maybe because i'm paying attention to the name more, some discussion in my twittersphere of his short stories, which i'm curious to read. i think this book is unique in many ways and i can see how it influenced tao lin and earned the term 'k-mart realism', as there is an emphasis on consumer culture being wholly integrated into the daily life of every character, and barthelme spends a lot of space in the prose on things like buying/using consumer products, eating snacks (and a lot of frozen/microwaved foods), thinking/talking about furniture and decorations and home appliances, considering minute details of car interiors and how people drive, and the contents/appearances of strip malls/other roadside stuff. all these things feel unique to read, to me, as opposed to in other books where most of these things are glossed over if they're not central to the plot. here though i think they are kind of central to the plot, in the way that 'nothing really happens' and all the characters live explicitly purposeless lives such that buying and using consumer products is kind of like all they have to depend on in breaking up the monotony of their otherwise pointless lives. some of these scenes, and some of the wording of things (at some point the protagonist feels like 'his life is fucked', which was good/funny/encouraging phrasing to read) are very very appealing to me, while a lot of the plot points (like some digression's about the protagonist's mother) and bits of monologue/dialogue seem extra pointless. when some chapters began, i'd feel excited, while when others began, i'd feel like putting down the book to take a break. toward the end of the book i felt like it could have been edited down significantly, and i kept thinking about how sebastian castillo tweeted that barthelme reportedly often skimmed books and assumed other people did too, or something like that, and it made me wonder if his books were written 'to be skimmed' or something like that, hence this book's slow/undirectional nature. i appreciated the way that 'how i felt' about the central idea of the plot -- the protagonist's semi-estranged wife trying to convince him to agree to an ill-defined, non-sexual, three-way marriage -- kept changing based on the introduction of 'new evidence,' in that i would go back and forth in my head on whether what was happening was 'unfair' or not re: infidelity and companionship. i liked that everything, for everyone, at all times in the narrative, seemed ambiguous/vague, even though this sometimes made for a sort of frustrating reading experience. i also think barthelme is exceedingly talented at identifying and writing about small details, including facial/body movements, and i wouldn't be surprised if this were influential for sam pink, for example, who, to me, is exceptionally talented at describing face/body movements (and many other details about people/the world). something that did stick out to me though is that a lot of the dialogue is confusing, i think because of how tone isn't really conveyed sometimes, and characters use idioms or phrasing that's unfamiliar to me, so, like, someone will give a little monologue about their feelings, and someone else will respond with like (i'm making this up) "That's a lotta fresh coffee on the stove," and then some other person will be described as looking hurt and be like "Ok now don't get mean," and I will have to try to figure out from (limited) context clues what the fuck "that's a lotta fresh coffee on the stove" is supposed to convey, to what degree it'd be read as mean, etc. After maybe the first third, i was unsure how it could possibly end, but i think the ending was good in a weirdly cathartic, funny, and sort of rushed way. i sort of had the sense that he didn't have a particularly good idea of how to end it, and went with one of the funnier ideas that popped into his head, which appeals to me from a writing perspective.

 

thank you for reading my book reviews. i'm currently reading a joy williams collection, mallory smart's poetry collection, and since i laid my burden down by brontez purnell. i picked up, briefly, the knausgaard book about munch, but didn't feel compelled to continue reading it, although i had been independently thinking about how i like how he describes people and artwork as 'open' or 'closed', and in the ~3 pages i read, he used these terms to describe artwork, haha