brief book reviews

here are brief reviews of the four books i've most recently read. i have collected a lot of books recently and have slowly been reading some and very quickly reading others.

the bridegroom was a dog by Yōko Tawada (Kodansha): maybe 2 years ago or so tom laplaige recommended i read the emissary by Yōko Tawada because, i think, we had talked about japanese literature on twitter, and i remember tom expressing curiosity/disappointment in me not writing about it for this blog. i liked it a lot, particularly the strange consequences of the apocalyptic setting and the daily minutia and this, i felt, kind of bold anti-American sentiment, or at least setting. i thought it was an interesting book with a lot of cool imagery, and it ends, basically, with this child turning into a fish, kind of. anyway, i found this collection of three stories, kind of like three novellas, from the early-to-mid 90s, for cheap online. across the stories there's this consistently interesting meandering structure, where unexpected things come up and happen, characters are introduced, and how long they last or what they do is unpredictable. i got a lot of kafka vibes, especially in the second story, which is about a mail-order bride showing up in a strange country, never meeting her husband, and trying to learn about the country with its strange quirks from combative, guarded, and selfish people. the third story reminds me of Bernhard, with its more obsessive protagonist, european setting, and emphasis of a second character named Reinhart, but there is a weirdness and playfulness to it, with the protagonist being insane in unique and special ways (rambling about wanting to be 'swallowed' by a mountain) and, interestingly to me, a lot of funny images/scenes involving penises. reading the book, its trappings and style choices and some of this imagery, like the penises, reminds me of my own book in a lot of unexpected ways, which, in a comforting way, made me feel like my book isn't that unique or innovative at all. something in particular i liked is that these stories feature characters who seem unexpectedly angry, rude, and frustrating - even the protagonists are very flawed and selfish in a non-edgy way, which made the reading experience exciting and unpredictable. the imagery and plot for each story hinges on unexplainable, evocative things, but is often written with a lot of humor. for example, the first story begins with a litany of weird, seemingly abusive/traumatic things a daycare teacher does or teaches children, but the emphasis is on how gossip works, how people can bicker over potential explanations, and even trust that they don't know any better; the title story is about a strange 'folktale' the teacher tells her students about a lazy caretaker training a dog to lick a child's ass instead of wiping her herself, and then the child grows up and marries the dog on an island (or something - the story is unclear, in the story); the story then randomly pivots to the teacher dealing with a sex-crazed vampire moving in, and other unexpected things happen. i like the perplexing crassness of various scenes - lots of weird sex and toilet stuff - without seemingly written to be shocking, just bizarre and contemplative, like an image of the protagonist thinking/dreaming about 'rotating' her friend on the beach until he's mostly under the sand, aside from his penis sticking out. each story also prominently features unexplained phenomena, magic, transformations, etc. all set against the normal, selfish, preoccupied modern world, which creates a lot of the humor and intrigue. overall, i think i most liked the confidence she shows to let the stories meander, flow in strange directions, and not feel tidy or overly moralistic. something that stood out to me is that these are explicitly not "i-novel" in execution, and i'm curious more and more about less popular japanese literature especially from the 90s (my previous reading has mostly been limited to banana yoshimoto, haruki murakami, ryu murakami, and some other random, more popular books like convenience store woman and older books like the key and no longer human); feeling more and more sure that someone on twitter would berate me for not knowing about how the CIA made japanese writing known for the i-novel in order to something something something communism.

leave society by tao lin (vintage): tao had the publisher send me an advance copy, which i was excited to get. this is another mostly straightforward autofiction book based on Tao's life, but includes - which i thought was most exciting - several sections which he refers to, in the book, as meta-autofiction, where he writes about writing/planning the book, with jumps between time to create a sense of auspiciousness or wholesomeness, or larger context for various scenes, and also serves as a means of explaining the naming of the sections of the book and stuff like that. the first two thirds focus on the protagonist, Li, traveling between NYC and Taipei, spending time with his parents and their poodle. i knew going into it that there would be a big emphasis on Li learning about health and nutrition and reading books on alternatives to accepted scientific thought, but what i didn't know, and which made the book more exciting to me, i think, is that this is framed around Li's chronic back pain. the pain serves as a key lens through which his past and present are connected, exploring childhood illness and hospitalizations, mental health issues, and family problems, and gives a richer context to the book's larger theme/obsession with 'healing.' i can imagine this book being challenging for some people for reasons similar to his previous autofiction books, in that the character of Li does/says a lot of frustrating, unempathetic, or pushy things, which can lead the reader to feel that the author, tao, is some kind of asshole, but i think the book's strength is in capturing a larger complexity to personal life that a lot of fiction fails to capture and is thus overly simplistic and (ironically) moralizing. i think we all generally think of ourselves as good and correct and like to ignore when we're short-tempered, mean, dismissive, bossy, etc in our personal lives, in small moments that we often move past or recognize and apologize for. this is a thing i also liked in frederick barthelme's books, where characters 'act out' under pressure but then quickly realize that was stupid - i think most fiction tends to require that every interaction build toward some monolithic 'good/bad' characterization, where only the 'bad' characters say mean things and only the 'good' characters show empathy. in this sense i think leave society's focus on daily minutia and research into wellness and experiments with foods/alternative medicines is encouraging and realistic and brings a natural sense of tragedy, to me, at least - by the end, Li still mostly suffers endlessly from physical and mental ailments and struggles to navigate interpersonal relationships. unlike the more grifteresque 'guru' people who promote natural health remedies, tao lets the reality of Li's life speak for itself and doesn't try to insist on having figured everything out from some sort of pedestal, but i can see a lot of people lazily, negatively reading/dismissing the story as some kind of lecture. in this sense this book is similar to his previous books in which the protagonist, suffering a great deal in the modern world, continues to explore new ways to make his life better (cognitive behavioral therapy/self-help tapes, pharmaceutical drugs and nihilistic socializing, alternative medicine/science, calm art creation/learning) in an order that seems relatable and that i've seen in maybe all other people as they age (image here of restless teenager moving to the city and then becoming, eventually, a suburban grandmother with an extensive flower garden). style-wise, tao alternates between simple action-oriented sentences and complex, adjective/adverb-riddled, hard-to-parse-on-first-try realizations/insights into the Mystery - idle speculations or fits of imagination about the world, universe, history, and humanity. these sentences use unexpected verbs and invented/inventive adverbs, but there are also these kinds of word choices in the rest of the text. some favorites include "quarterheartedly" and the when two characters come across the word 'winkle' and start to use it. so there's generally a playfulness and lack of self-consciousness that i like, and, i think, all the discussions of books he's read in the text itself serve some part of the 'plot', which i thought shows a lot of restraint and conscious effort in crafting the story. this is an excerpt of what i sent tao over email after reading maybe half of it (looking over this now i've enjoyed seeing how infectious tao's newly developed writing cadence/style is, in this book, like with his other books): "wanted to say really quickly that i got leave society and have been enjoying it a lot. i've had to get my car's brakes and tires fixed/replaced yesterday and today in a convoluted way, at a mechanic shop 1.2 miles away, needing to go back and forth so we could use the car to help my kid nap, etc., so yesterday i walked about 7 miles total while reading your book, which was a really pleasant and heartening experience... i've felt really impressed by the playful and unexpected word choices, like 'dodder' as a verb, and things like that which made me smile, alongside the general arc about family, memory, and introspection... the discussion of prehistory, history, alternatives to established scientific assumptions, and medicine are really thought-provoking. felt myself feeling curious, intrigued, and excited to think, speculate, and imagine between bouts of reading, especially about alternatives to 'modern society'. reminded me of learning more about childbirth (we're expecting another baby in december), how the western medical establishment arbitrarily and patriarchically dominated childbirth and reframed it as a 'medical procedure', resulting in the unneeded death of tens of thousands of mothers and babies, unneeded trauma, and negative cultural associations with childbirth and femininity (eg cultural assumption that childbirth is painful, violent, traumatic, requires drugs and metal tools, and involves blaming others). so i've also enjoyed reading your book and seeing connections form between my new knowledge and thoughts on childbirth and 'medical' things i hadn't thought much about, and i enjoyed reading your book about walking up mountains and in parks while walking up and down the hill we live on, near trees and flowers. i'm maybe halfway through. thank you for sending me a copy. excited to continue reading it. just got to the part where Dudu cuddles with Li and guards the bathroom door for him, felt emotional thinking about dogs."  the last third or fourth of the book transforms into a love story, focusing in the slow building of the protagonist's relationship with Kai, an editor for an unnamed press, and staying in hawaii for a week together. there was a lot of humor in this section especially, i felt, for example, the recurring bit about Kai rubbing a clay ointment on Li's butt. i never felt bored reading and wanted to continue reading when i wasn't able to, but i imagine a lot of people won't have the interest or patience to enjoy it because of its unique writing style, subject matter, and assumptions about authorial intent/division between author and protagonist. i did really enjoy thinking about a random, generic enjoyer of big press books buying it on a whim and having no conception of what to expect from the book, because it intentionally subverts the vast majority of literary fiction conventions and in this way is unlike any other book i've read. enjoyed realization maybe halfway through that i might show up as a character in his next book.

hehehe by gg roland (clash): bought this as part of clash's indiepalooza bundle, knowing i already liked blake's book, homeless's HOV book, and roland's twitter presence. on a related note, i enjoyed, from a linguistics point of view, how, even though clash is an indie press putting out a lot of poetry books, they specifically referred to this bundle as the 'indie' one in line with, i think, sam pink's, big bruiser dope boy's, and my books, which makes me think they (clash) and potentially many others are (un)consciously using "indie lit" to just mean "post alt lit" or something like that - interesting distinction between their other indie poetry books and these 'indie' poetry books, basically. anyway, this is a book of poems that specifies they were all written 2013-2015 on the back, which is an interesting thing to include in the synopsis and stood out to be as potentially 'explanatory', trying to make sure you know they were written during the tail end of alt lit even though they're published in 2021, because the majority of them are very alt lit in execution to me, in the sense that a surprising number focus on quiet, autofictional relationship and love/alienation thoughts with a lot of 'i want to / i will' phrasing for things, like [paraphrasing] "i will not murder you / i want to touch all of your skin with my mouth". these constitute the bulk of the book, which was unexpected to me, and date the book in this late-alt lit time period - feels like a sort of 'lost' book from this time period, like no glykon's numbskull, and in this sense it is in a way 'cozy' and familiar, but also interesting form a sort of 'archeological' point of view. a few of the poems stand out to me as more wacky/goofy or intentionally humorous with a more contemporary feeling, ranging from self-deprecating one-liners to more inventive and silly imagery (like jerking off onto a robber during a break in). i think these more exploratory/image-based and humorous poems are generally the strength of the book, for me, and i'd be curious to know if these are later additions. the result of having both is that the book seems pitched/framed as more goofy/comedic/dark but reads much more tender and earnest than i expected. i am curious, though, about some of these one-liner goof poems, in the sense that they technically predate a lot of, like, brian alan ellis and homeless-style one line goof poems i'm familiar with, but being published now feel more conventional than unconventional. so i'm curious now to trace back a common ancestor for these kind of poems - seems to be something tao lin, spencer madsen, etc didn't do, but i'm also unfamiliar with a lot of alt lit stuff, especially out of print things, or maybe this goes back farther (haven't read any brautigan, for example). i think overall this shows a lot of promise and i'd be curious to see what he would write right now, or what he'd publish if he had 10 days to write a book, something like that. i think the author bio and photo are great.

family annihilator by calvin westra (expat): i've enjoyed reading calvin's things on the internet and have enjoyed his seemingly earnest enthusiasm for things/people on twitter. this is a novella told in an inventive, i think, three-levels-deep split narrative: the first is about Oen, a writer who starts a cleaning company with his brother and spends time with his girlfriend, the second follows a character named Florian from Oen's story, which is called "Family Annihilator", and the third is made of scenes from the television show that Florian is trying to write, called Family Annihilator. i enjoyed this conceit of embedded, self-referential story telling and i felt like, relative to maybe all other indie lit books i've read in recent memory, the idea of bouncing between storylines chapter to chapter like this is refreshing and novel, especially with the added post-modern layer of the characters being characters in a story in a story. however, my favorite parts where the 'real' layer, about Oen, which emphasizes Oen's relationship with his girlfriend and brother, and is very tenderly written and emphasizes small details in a wistful, mournful kind of atmosphere, featuring really compelling subplots about starting a cleaning company and being with his girlfriend, Lee, while she prepares to give her first big speech at an AA meeting. the second layer about Florian was a little less compelling but still interesting, featuring the character trying to get feedback on his strange television scripts on an internet forum (assuming 4chan) (my favorite part of this layer) and also being in a relationship, but which is also framed by flashback-style chapters about being involved, unwillingly, in some kind of traumatic porn production thing in high school, which is introduced later in the book and informs/motivates the rest of the narrative. i liked that the secondary layer is where most of the bleak, manufactured melodrama lives (the kind you'd expect from a 'normal book') and where you notice more of a mccarthyesque run-on sentence style (which i didn't really care for, in that it seems affected and overly dramatic, but is also probably intentional, to create the 'artifice' of the story being a story, in the book, so i feel conflicted about it), while the main, 'real' layer is calm and full of positivity and optimism and hard work - this feels realistic and relatable, to me, and is what i found most compelling about the book; i enjoyed the simple passages about Oen and his brother cleaning a library and talking optimistically about expanding their business, overcoming the small external conflicts, and the relationship between Oen and Lee, with its focus on being caring, supportive, and vulnerable without artificially crafted conflict. this, i felt, really stood out as the most unique and exciting thing about the book. while reading it, i felt like it's something that, if longer, maybe, and on a bigger press, it could be critically acclaimed and sell many copies (i generally don't think many indie books have 'crossover potential' but this book has a good balance of stylistic hooks and content - not too extreme in its dark themes, not too alienatingly self-aware in its autofictional approach). i would have liked it to be longer, as i think there is a lot of potential development left in each of the stories. this is probably the best book i've read from expat press and i feel enthusiastic about calvin writing and publishing more books.

brief book reviews

 i just ate a big burrito so this might get sloppy

the divorce by césar aira (new directions): bought this on a whim, new, at a local bookstore, feeling rushed to find a book in a story that mainly only sells big five books and bestsellers while some visiting family picked out some kids books. i liked that this seemed small, was by an argentinian author, and was blue. i hadn't started reading it until i saw sebastian castillo had bought it, so we decided to read it together and talk about it. i read it over the course of a few days. it's a funny kind of book, where there's a larger 'joke' about how it's not really about his divorce - he keeps sidetracking into these long, rambling, often surreal (magically real) stories, which are actually the meat of the book. it basically consists of four of these stories, loosely based on a character named enrique. the first of the four stories was least interesting to me - seemed to go on too long and repeat itself a lot. sebastian speculates that part of it being less interesting is its emphasis on an action sequence - people running through a burning building, which neither of us seemed interested in, but i like that sebastian commended him for writing an action sequence that seemed inventive or literary or something. but the rest of the stories i thought were very endearing, interesting, and sometimes funny. style-wise it's very maximalist and playful - lots of interesting words, descriptions, wandering philosophical pondering. i liked the metahumor of, by the time he starts the last story, he doesn't bother really setting it up or tying it to anything, just like, "i saw him walking, and, well, in this part of the city...". unsure if it's a kind of book i'd enjoy reading a lot of, so i appreciated its short length. as part of book club i embarassingly rambled about combinatorial logic to sebastain in a DM until he said he had to go run an errand - this was because of the way aira tends to let a story's natural logic 'balloon' out into an interesting philosophical idea, with one specific instance being combinatorial logic. sorry, sebastian.

second marriage by frederick barthelme (penguin): found myself being 'comforted' by barthelme's prose when i started this one. a very classic barthelme novel that follows the checklist: shlubby divorced guy with a step daughter, extramarital affairs and uncomfortable conversations about them, horny/weird neighbors, driving around in the rain, watching tv, eating at seafood restaurants, weird interactions with strangers on or near a highway. the first half i think i was really great and featured like 4-5 very comedic scenes where he let stupid shit naturally play out for pages at a time, e.g. a guy spilling a bunch of ketchup in a burger king. second half kind of drags on and seems moodier, less engaging. felt interested in how he often writes interactions/dialogue that make no sense to me, usually about people trying to flirt or be act horny around each other. one of the earlier chapters was familiar and i'm pretty sure it was a stand-alone story in moon deluxe. i was thinking idly about how i like how he writes teenage/preteen kids in the 80s/90s in a way that feels like the polar opposite of how these kinds of characters were presented in movies in the same time period, and i like how he writes about father/stepfather relationships with kids in a positive, calm way. felt frustrated/confused by everyone having similar, boring first names (including a dog named Henry) - i kept having to stop and try to remember who Cindy was, who Winnie was, who Cameron was, etc., especially at the end, during a long party sequence where basically all the supporting characters show up. i like how there are a lot of moments where things get really intense or fucked up or otherwise 'extreme' seeming, in a way that feels natural in spite of being unnatural, e.g. a person shooting out a car tire, a guy breaking a diving board and falling into a pool, his neighbor trying to seduce him in a hotel room while eating fried chicken/covered in chicken grease and then later attempting suicide, etc.

i thought i read a third book...maybe not...might just post these two

email vs blog

i want to write something for my blog that isn't just a book review, but i also have many emails to respond to, from friends. i enjoy writing and receiving long emails, but i also, for whatever reason, get paralyzed by the task of responding to a long email. i have been thinking a little bit about what i choose to say in emails vs what i choose to say in a blog post. i think direct communication with someone where you have context, historical precedent, and some amount of mutual vulnerability is freeing in a way that a blog can't be.in an email to a writer, i mentioned writing lots of emails to other writers, and then later included random excerpts from those emails, which was funny to me, sending things i wrote to other people to someone else.

for this blog post i've decided to just list some non-sequitur-seeming lines from emails i've written to other authors. in compiling this, it sort of reads like a bunch of tweets, which seems interesting

excerpts of emails i've sent to other writers

i like the idea of peeing as a defense mechanism, and how effective it's been. it's like it's his niche combat move to compensate for being slow and fat, like a pokemon or something.

i've read some random good things by various people. 

there's a great little scene where the characters are watching some video footage of a riot and a guy beats this other guy's ass, knocks him out cold, then pulls down the dude's pants and psray paints his cock and balls, and the characters watching are like "what the fuck," talking about it, and the one guy is like "yeah no spraying the guy's cock was retarded."

feel like i felt that way and said something to that effect to you a long time ago but now i feel differently. 

the most depressed i ever felt, maybe, was when i was applying for jobs to get out of grad school, but part of that was also knowingly applying for jobs i knew i was unqualified for, in academia, which i'd only get if i could also finish my dissertation, which i knew i couldn't do. 

bruiser is dope (heh)

i go back and forth. i try to send some stuff out throughout the year to stay 'engaged' and like i'm 'contributing' or something. always bummed me out when my favorite authors stopped sending shit to indie mags so i wanna keep doing that to spite them

you gotta trust toddlers

i have some vague conviction that how gen z uses social media will change things in the next few years - there's that push to decentralize/publicize social media but gen z is doing it via public and private networks/accounts. and people are being sick of being sold to, of everything being monetized, of everything they say being potential fodder for retribution in 1-10 years

feeling embarassed about you 'already knowing' birds have 2000+ feathers

i've only seen one person directly/indirectly shittalk me/the book

i've been waking up every day at 5:45 to do chicken chores for months now and do i breathe in the bright morning air, look at trees, smile and think of god in the details? no, i just blearily carry out my duties and then try to go back to bed as soon as possible. it's stupid, and i feel stupid for thinking it'd be different.

every time i think of the author, eugene marten, i think of the comedian, eugene merman, who did this stupid and weird internet show in like 2008

i remember listening to george saunders on otherppl and him saying something like "what you want to write might not be what people like - you should find what people like and write that" and it left a bad taste in my mouth. i don't think i care about what people like in a broad sense, and am more interested in what interests me or feels innovative or interesting based on my experience or perception of writing.

i get uncomfortable meeting people or talking to strangers

brief book reviews

after somehow reading a lot of books very quickly a few weeks ago, i have since been slowly reading and rereading things, juggling books, finishing very few. these are the books i've recently finished reading:

my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh (penguin): i picked this up used based on being vaguely aware of her/this book from hearing people in indie lit talk about and praise it in spite of it being popular and on a big press; the cover also seemed good and distinct and the conceit seemed like it carried a lot of potential. i listened to her episode of selected prose and felt offput by her business-like approach to writing books and making money from it, then got this book to see what it was like and if this sense i had of her approach to writing was reflected in the book. overall i felt disappointed, but it was a quick read.  i was interested in thinking about it from the perspective of my limited understanding of what women think about other women, how their relationships work, etc., which is a large part of the book, and i've enjoyed asking my wife questions about relationships between women after asking her to read some of it, and speculating with her why it's popular. in terms of the writing, it struck me as very typical of bestsellers, with a lot of confusingly redundant passages, telegraphed and manufactured drama, emphasis on set dressing/time period, and a limited scope of 'jokes' that recur frequently. i also felt aware of what seemed like very artificial, or self-aware, methods of introducing 'literary' content to make the protagonist more complex, like the framing of various childhood traumas/sad things with a cheeky "i am trying to think of things that make me sad; nope, not making me sad" context, but which still accomplishes the same (needless?) thing. the jokes were limited to riffing on and/or shittalking a couple simple supporting characters or easily-critiqued cultural things (hipsters, people who live in new york, creepy professors) and a recurring "ugh aren't i a total bitch lol" narrative. toward the end i found myself skimming passages where nothing really happens, prolonged lists of items in apartments, and vague reflections on the character's personal development. i got the sense that what people like about the book are the open cynicism toward things like, e.g., shallow people and pretentious stuff like contemporary art/music or aspiring to like those people/things, the breadcrumbing melodrama of the looming 9/11 attack, and the 'action' in the last third where she makes a plan with other people involved, sort of like a heist movie or something. i noticed she places a lot of emphasis on reminding us that this is taking place in 2000/early 2001 in awkward and obvious ways all to serve the ending, which i thought was dumb and reminded me of extremely loud and incredibly close, with its emphasis on being obsessed with footage of jumping out of one of the twin towers on 9/11. a small thing that bothered me early on was the confusing timeline of her graduating college (in ~1996) and living in this particular rich person neighborhood ~2000, wherein she makes fun of people who use bluetooth headsets while walking toy poodles, but the first mass-produced bluetooth headset wasn't launched to consumers until ~2002. this is a minor thing, but it really emphasized to me this artificiality of the narrative and setting, a laziness in execution, some kind of attempt at making the things/people she shittalks more relatable for a modern audience (the book was released in 2018). i can't imagine wanting to write a book that centers 9/11 so much in ~2016-2018 but i'm happy she made a lot of money doing it. i did like the emphasis on wanting to be asleep as a central plot element - this felt relatable, especially when i suffer from more extreme periods of depression and anxiety. i also the scenes from her childhood spent sleeping in with her mom, and the recurring bit about her liking whoopi goldberg, which made me smile/laugh almost consistently. i also enjoyed thinking of different, alternative endings or twists that would have been more interesting to me. i have the sense that this book could be a popular movie - it felt written like a movie, with the simple dialogue and characters - but would face complaints of antisemitic and anti-asian sentiments from a wider audience.

bonding by maggie siebert (expat press): purchased this based on reading an excerpt, or a story that wound up in the book. i generally feel mixed about expat books but i enjoy seeing what they put out. the excerpt i read was apparently one of the more 'normal' stories, with the majority actually being gory horror stuff. i am not super familiar with horror writing, but it seems like the most fitting description for this book, in the sense that most of the stories consist of a relatively intriguing, literary fiction set up that then pivots to some kind of spooky/violent ending. other stories, though, fully start and end in the horror-space, with some more humor, like the one about people living in a mansion and being attacked by spooky things, and the one about the alumni association, although the humor in that one is more or less just the premise of it. some stories are also more sci-fi horror, like a relationship drama played out via advanced virtual reality, and some are more understated/mysterious, like the one about a guy running over himself or something via time loop (this is the excerpt i had read and thought was pretty good). most stories emphasize or center body horror, gore/violence stuff as a key plot element. in general i was usually pretty interested in the first half of a given story (the normal part) and pretty uninterested in the horror half. the former is usually compellingly written and interesting in terms of character and setting, to me, with good prose, while the latter i feel usually revolve around some kind of horror movie trope like psychosexual gore, murder, religious imagery, and spooky blob monster things, and the writing seems a bit more clunky with passive constructions and descriptions. i noticed that 3+ stories reference: the word 'guts' or 'gut', eyeballs being popped/ripped out/open, internal organs being ripped apart, and 'facial bones' being 'shattered'. since i don't really consume much horror media, i don't have much background in knowing whether these are, like, unique spins on horror tropes or just kind of normal for the genre, or normal for the seemingly popular indie lit horror stuff; as an outsider to this genre, the images seem familiar, like the 'kid making spooky drawings' thing - feeling like this is in a lot of movies, etc. i would probably really enjoy a collection of vaguely strange/subversive stories by siebert that don't all pivot to or focus on a horror sequence - i thought her setups were really engaging, the dialogue was natural, and the characters/setting were mostly interesting and believable in a unique and impressive way. i liked seeing certain things acting as a throughline, like sort of setting multiple stories in the same 'universe', connected by a child abduction (i may be wrong about thinking all three child abductions referenced in the book are the same child - i didn't go back to verify names/details). i liked that most of the protagonists were 'down-and-out' people with shitty jobs looking for purpose/happiness in unique or small ways. the humor-forwarded pieces seem sort of out of place relative to the more broody/serious stories, so i felt unsure 'how to read' some of the stories/scenes in the context of the collection. basically i just don't have much familiarity with the genre - this might be 'great' or something, relative to things these books strive for. i liked that the acknowledgements section was earnest, long, detailed, and generous, and didn't just list first names. this is also the second expat book i've read where "retch" is misspelled as "wretch", which is funny to me - seems like retching seems common in expat books, something something about the books involving lots of wretched people retching. looked at the blurbs for this book - feeling like BR Yaeger's blurb does a good job communicating what the book is actually like, and most of the other blurbs seem like people just saying stuff. feeling like i'd disagree with the john samuel brown blurb, in that i don't get the vibe that bonding is specifically about some absence of sexual desire. trying to think...maybe the first and last stories center a disinterest in sex in their specific arcs, but i wouldn't say it's a theme in the book. feeling interested in writing more about blurbs when i write reviews.

pee on water by rachel b. glaser (publishing genius): saw this recommended places, i think by giacomo specifically, and got it when i bought a bunch of pubgen books during a sale. short stories with a strong emphasis on things being 'hard to grasp' temporally or in terms of viewpoint, shifts in memory, some dream-like sequences and vague action. lots of poetic language and turns of phrases mixed up with for deadpan/'vulgar' things, e.g the title of the book referencing pee (there's a person on twitter who edits a mag who likes to tweet about men writing about pee too much, which this reminded me of - seems good for more women and nonbinary people to write about pee). focus on interpersonal/relationship dramas, femininity, family, being in love with hard-to-love people/situations. in many ways the emphasis on 'hazy' narratives with this focus on language and themes reminds me a lot of joy williams, but these are also generally more playful and some involve science fiction stuff, like the one about astronauts. a specific thing that reminds me of joy williams is the use of exclamation points in a sort of sad or naively-coded way when talking about people from the perspective of someone else, something like (making this up) "Charles was always looking for dogs, on their walks. Charles and his love of dogs! What fun!" i felt like in general i enjoyed reading each story in terms of wording/phrasing but few stories really stuck with me in terms of the content or dramatic arcs. some seemed repetitive, like the one about the teenagers having a baby seemed to say the same thing over and over again. for this reason it took me a very long time to read it - i never felt really compelled to pick it up. i skimmed the last two stories, which seemed long and redundantly written, kind of melodramatic - the titular story does that broad sweeping "Things swam in the ocean. They crawled on the sand. Wind blew clouds around" thing for like 6 pages straight. the book feels to me, in my head, like it's a certain kind of candy, and often i'm not in the mood for that kind of candy. thinking about skittles hard candies for some reason. do you remember those? this book reminds me of skittles hard candies. DM'd giacomo about skimming/skipping the last two stories and he confesses to probably not having finished it.

a partial list of music other writers have recommended to me

Troy James Weaver
troy DMd me through the back patio account at some point when i wasn't on twitter to ask for my phone number so he could ask me for music recommendations, and to just talk. we've only texted a few times - i'm really bad at texting (have ignored all texts from my family group chat for ~2 months). i recommended fiction by pope to him and he recommended deserve by weed to me. i like that we recommended each other single-word albums by single-word bands. the weed album is very good. i like the emphasis on good melodies and guitar noise. this album, like fiction by pope, feels like a very good post-shoegaze, riff-based album. troy and i also share am affinity for shoegaze and sparklehorse.

Benjamin DeVos

i interviewed ben in 2018 about his books and asked whether lord of the game was named after the death grips song, and he said that it was, and also that the bar is low was named after a song by pissed jeans. i listened to and enjoyed why love now by pissed jeans, but in particular a few songs, including "the bar is low", the video for which i would often send coworkers on my 'team' while shittalking other 'teams'.

Mike Andrelczyk

has recommended both extensive beat poet reading lists and phish playlists to me but i have, embarrassingly, never done anything with this information. i love you, mike.

 

Bud Smith

at some point in 2017 or early 2018 Bud Smith and I DMd on twitter briefly because, i think, he had tweeted about some music production documentaries/interviews, and i wanted to learn more. we mostly talked about music during this exchange. i told him i was holding my sleeping toddler and listening to turn on the bright lights by interpol. bud recommended like 4 artists or albums but i only really bothered checking out one, Light Information by Chad VanGaalen. i ended up listening to this album frequently, mostly during my morning/evening commute, while driving, and sometimes at home while cooking or doing other things. i really like it as an album. i think i described it, to bud, as something like if BAND had gotten into talking heads instead of OTHER BAND. i have since forgotten which bands i had thought of at the time. will come back to this. I don't think bud likes me. I can't remember the bands.

Cavin Bryce Gonzalez

cavin has almost exclusively recommended music by mac miller to me. I've listened to a playlist he sent me of mac miller songs. i enjoyed how depressing they all seemed but i had a hard time paying attention to the lyrics, as is typically the case for me.

Graham Irvin

graham and i have been emailing for a while, and 2000s indie rock has been a central discussion point for us, i think starting with talking about wolf parade. graham has recommended a lot of music to me because of this. i have been most excited about rozwell kid, who have a song about putting identifying information/clothing into a Wendy's trash can. rozwell kid feels to me like if weezer was still good and paid the guy from the mountain goats for lyrics. i keep intending to listen to more rozwell kid but my headphones don't work with my phone right now, for some reason, so i have been unable to 'listen closely' like I'd prefer. update: spent 30min driving around dark county roads at night with windows down while listening to precious art by rozwell kid. it smelled like rain and i got emotional while thinking about graham. gunned it through a thickly wooded road with my brights on, laughed at how it seemed like I was driving through a fantasy world tunnel of trees. update 2: i think too shabby is the best rozwell kid album, and i recently purchased it on vinyl.

Crow Jonah Norlander

crow and i both like some of the same bands, like early modest mouse, and for this reason crow will occasionally ask me if i am familiar with some B-tier indie band from the 90s. i am familiar with many such bands but somehow never any of the specific bands that crow messages me about. for example, he told me he's been getting into you're living all over me by dinosaur jr., which is an album i owned on vinyl but for some reason never actually listened to. i listened to it via streaming the day he recommended it and enjoyed it but felt distracted. i remember liking how apathetically the guy sings. i told crow a minor story about how j mascis is relatively active in the massachusetts shoegaze community.

 

Sebastian Castillo

late addition to the list bc i was trying to remember recommendations after i published originally. sebastian and i have emailed a few times and we talked about music a little bit. he recommended this bad Lilys, whose first album happened to be on Slumberland records (1992) while I recommended Henry's Dress, whose only albums happened to be on Slumberland records (1993-94). i like that we independently recommended each other music from the same label and time period. when i listened to the Lilys album, i realized i had already heard it, or parts of it, from back when i was really into shoegaze, and it was nice to listen to again. we talked breifly about how in many ways it's better than MBV's isn't anything while doing similar things, sonically.

i think i'm forgetting many other people, hence the partiality of this list

brief book reviews

i remembered some more books i read a few months ago, and then recently for whatever reason tore through like 3 books in the past week:

the hole by hiroko yomada (new directions) - i bought her first book, the factory, on a whim in richmond virginia based on the cover (a photograph of a smoking trash bin in a pastel pink room) and ended up really enjoying it, reading it mostly straight through during a plane trip. the hole is different but still explores, i think, this sort of existential ennui about societal expectations and 'work'. while the factory was generally ambiguous, awkward, and evocative, the hole is a little more straoightforward and transparent, i think, in its 'moral', especially at the end, with a small sort of reveal. i felt intrigued by the ending but then thought about it later and i think i 'got' it. i have only read a few japanese authors so it probably sounds dumb for me to refer to this as an 'i-novel' but it's the vibe i get, similar to banana yoshimoto and haruki murakami, where the first-person protagonist conveys internal thoughts in a sort of rambling, casual, "this is who i am" fashion, conveying opinions and little anxieties throughout various scenes. early on i had a sort of 'worry' that it would be a kind of psychological horror book but it ended up not being like this. there are a few particular scenes, basically all the scenes with the brother-in-law, that i enjoyed immensely, and found a very unexpected and fun absurd humor in how she lets certain scenes 'escalate.' in particular, there's a prolonged scene with a lot of children running around playing, and it slowly amps up what the scene is like by including little details, slowly going from kids swimming to collecting bugs to throwing fireworks at each other to a bunch of kids cheering on a kid who's taking a shit in the middle of a field. little things like this, and how they were written, excited me and made me laugh. the overall vibe is strong and consistent, mysterious, confusing, frustrating, and interesting, and i like how certain characters that seem important are actually just set dressing and don't do anything or change, while the actually interesting characters are very interesting and complex in unexpected ways. it starts kind of slow, i feel - i didn't feel super enamored until maybe halfway through. then everything up until then felt worth it. i enjoyed thinking about the book after i read it.

potted meat by steven dunn (taurpalin sky): this had been recommended to me before but i never got around to reading it, i think because the description makes it sound exceptionally bleak and like misery porn, but the reality is that it isn't so bleak, and that it's a fantastic book, i think, and unique in its (continually unexpected) emphasis on tender moments and positive experiences. i think for every two vignettes about being beaten as a child or something similar, there's a vignette about a positive experience with a friend or family member. this is what stood out to me most and made it more endearing and interesting to me. structurally, it's a first-person autofiction 'novel' consisting of very short, 1-2 page vignettes in chronological order, from childhood to graduating high school. based on listening to a part of dunn's otherppl interview, it seems like more elements were invented or fictionalized than i would have expected. i'm generally curious about how people approach writing this kind of novel for these reasons. i think toward the end the vignettes got a little unfocused, or it seemed like some were kind of like b-sides that were added back in toward the end to try and 'tie up loose ends' but i didn't think they were super necessary and it weighed down the pacing a little bit. i liked some of the stylistic typos and spelling, noticed a lot of missing apostrophes, for example, which i think were 'effective'. while trying to convey my excitement for this book to giacomo by sending him pictures of some of the stories, he responded saying he didn't quite get it, maybe because of it being very american, and i felt compelled to describe the perspective as something like a Black scott mcclanahan book, but i don't think that's a very accurate or useful description, because the only real similarity is the setting - rural, poverty-stricken west virginia in the 90s. i'm curious about dunn's next novel, which seems like a sort of fragmented, 'experimental' hybrid novel about the military - feeling like it won't be as good as this one.

i don't know i said by matthew savoca (publishing genius): bought this and some other pubgen books during some kind of sale a long time ago - this one bc i remember seeing it listed in some old article or list about the best alt lit books, and felt curious. ended up feeling very disappointed - very often, after reading a chapter, felt compelled to put it down and do something else. feeling like people who include this in some kind of alt lit canon are doing a disservice to alt lit. coming off more aggressive than i mean to - it's a fine but mostly boring book. it's about two unemployed people (one is 'officially' depressed) doing nothing, going on a boring road trip, trying to think of what to do, and almost breaking up a few times. it's written very plainly with a lot of emphasis on little details, scenery, and what they did/ate/drank, in a hemingwayesque way, and then later the protagonist is reading a hemingway story collection, and then later thinks about how much he loves hemingway's stories. i think this makes what the author is 'trying to do' obvious and makes the book disappointing. hemingway's minimalism is interesting, to me at least, in the context of the actual events and relationship drama (the bull fights, the traveling, the exotic food/experiences, the love triangle), but this book has none of that, or at least it's not centered, so there's no, like, 'vicariously traveling' aspect of this book, just bored 20 somethings eating nondescript vegetarian food and complaining. unlike other 'good' alt lit books, there's no kmart realism or real details about the world/time period, and the narrator keeps vaguely pontificating about vaguely political ideas. it all feels very overly serious in spite of its baseline uninteresting scope and style. also, neither of the characters are particularly likeable, and i found myself secretly getting really hopeful/excited whenever it seemed like they would be breaking up so that the main character could finally seemingly feel happy and/or something interesting would happen. there were a few lines that i remember thinking were funny of clever, but they're pretty rare. also felt disappointed by the ending.

briefer reviews of books i read a few months ago:

pets: an anthology edited by jordan castro (tyrant): most of the pieces are pretty short and many were very similar - i feel like 2-3+ were about a woman with a dying cat. i think i liked yuka's the most, then tao's, then prescious's, then blake's, then sam pink's, and the rest are kind of vague to me now. i remember feeling a little surprised or let down at how short most of them are. felt like the selection of authors/styles was kind of random or unpredictable. seems like a fine book, good for what anthologies are supposed to be. jordan's intro was good, too

chilly scenes of winter by ann beattie: was surprised by this in a lot of ways. enjoyed seeing how similar it is in scope and tone to a lot of alt lit books, makes sense that it is often cited/influential. i enjoyed a lot of the little scenes and the internal monologue/anxiety of the protagonist and the associated dialogue of feeling fucked and unsure what to do, ever. felt 'impressed' by the 'boldness' of beattie to write a whole novel from the perspective of a guy, and to very accurately, i think, explore differences in thought/communication between men and women, based on how we are socialized, maybe, from my experience.

$50,000 by andrew weatherhead (publishing genius): bought bc of the hype and having read some of his poems online before. felt like it was pretty good. i enjoyed not using a bookmark and sort of randomly rereading/skipping/then reading again various lines over a few days. felt like some of the lines were a little overwrought/'philosophical', like things you'd read in a reddit comment or something. laughing about how it's triple-spaced, and how its triple-spacing was a key talking/publicity point during the promotional cycle, etc., is what encouraged giacomo and i to write two million shirts - i think our (deleted) first line was a riff about triple spacing.

horror vacui by shy watson (house of vlad): hadn't read anything by shy before aside from some random stuff online. giacomo highly recommended her first book but i haven't read it. in this she consistently does the same couple of 'tricks', like juxtaposing certain types of ideas very brusquely - like a small trivial thing to a very big existential thing - but i don't think i really like the effect it has, so i generally felt underwhelmed by the book, because that's sort of a cornerstone of most of the poems. also lots of discussion of astrology shit and things she tweets about normally so it felt like it wasn't a particularly exciting/unique experience to read. hard to really articulate this right. i guess it's just 'not for me', which is fine. i feel like the book has value regardless but i felt disappointed.

fun camp by gabe durham (publishing genius): looking up now three books on pubgen to confirm how to spell the author's name, i've noticed that the book descriptions on pubgen's website don't actually mention the author at all, and i had to look at the cover image to discern the author - seems like a bad design/usability issue, bad for author SEO, etc. bought this randomly during the sale. enjoyed the idea of it and several of the pieces but overall it felt overly long and repetitive. mostly dave eggers/mvcsweeneys-style character-voice/absurd humor driven vignettes about summer camp. seems like durham uses the same joke structure over and over - would have been a good chapbook, maybe, or the book could have been expanded in different ways than repeating the same kind of set up and structure throughout. some scenes include a reflexive, self-conscious self-reference to 'comment on' or diffuse 'problematic' ideas in a way that is intended to make the author look good in spite of the book still seeming 'problematic' for other reasons in another 10 years, or something. an interesting book that got kind of boring, basically. but i enjoyed thinking about summer camps because of it. felt surprised by how much press this book seemed to garner back in 2013.

brief book reviews

realized i had abandoned my blog halfway through writing a couple book reviews. these first two are from, like, november, i think. the last bunch are from what i can remember reading. since then and more recently. i think i'm forgetting several books, haha

Taking Care by Joy Williams (Vintage): this is a collection of stories. most revolve around, basically, "alcoholic parents", in retrospect. i think in some of the stories she does a wonderful job of capturing this strange ephemerality of things due to pointlessness, drinking, and isolation, where the writing and scenes are vague and evocative and really capture this reality she's describing. in other stories this strangeness is due to the protagonists - children or the elderly, so there's an ongoing vibe of how these internal or external factors influence how we experience the world. but some of the stories surprised me, in a negative way, with how she felt the need to sort of really clarify or set up her intention behind the story, and a couple were a little too transparently bleak. i also dislike that the second-to-last story is an excerpt from her novel Breaking and Entering, which i had recently read, and so skipped (it's possible it's a different version or outtake, but i didn't feel compelled to read it). but overall most of the stories are impressionistic and let you sort of contemplate or experience the culmination of little things in daily life to create a mood, which i found engaging. but what sticks out to me most about her writing in these stories is her evocative and powerful choice in adjectives/adverbs, especially in plain, staccato sentences, sort of like punctuation. i enjoyed thinking about what it would mean (making this example up to illustrate) to feel like my "life" was "rude" or something. these lines were interesting in terms of writing - the writer - and also the characters (and their self-awareness) and story, consistently across every story. i think this is interesting writing, to me, as 'literary fiction' in all the generic ways - quiet, domestic, (rich?) white people dramas - but in that each little detail feels impactful and important, in contrast with some other writing in this vein i've read, but i don't know enough about 'the canon' to really comment on this much. i look forward to reading more joy williams stories but i hope they aren't all based on these same themes of childhood/parenthood. but i liked the stories or scenes that emphasized things like ecological change due to human endeavors, plants, animals, etc.

Body High by Jon Lindsey (House of Vlad - ARC pdf) - brian sent me this over e-mail, which coincided with a stretch of nights where i had to stay up holding a toddler who doesn't sleep well, so i read this one on my phone in increments of maybe 45 minutes in the middle of the night over the course of a week. i feel like my appreciation for the book hinges on my (mis)understanding of various plot points and (changes in) characters and may be due to this bleary state of mind. overall, i was surprised, i think, at how 'straightforward' this book is, as a novel with a linear plot and resolution, considering the more alternative-leaning press and author, and also its emphasis on relatively 'heavy' and 'serious' themes, like incest/rape/pedophilia. it is a more or less 'action packed' story in the second half, with concise beginning and endpoints, reveals and 'twists', some degree of character development related to the established themes, and a good deal of exposition and scene-setting. so that's my biggest takeaway - aside from a few House of Vladian quirks (like a paragraph that's just a list of like 50 wresting moves, for example) it's, like, a normal book. most chapters start in media res, which is a fancy term i learned which means that each chapter starts after the start of some interesting action/decision/event to 'hook' the reader and then backfill the details a couple paragraphs in - for whatever reason this surprised and sort of bothered me, especially in the last half/third, since in this stretch the 'plan' that is concocted for [reasons] keeps (arbitrarily) changing in drastic ways, making each new chapter artificially confusing. in this way the in media res effect kind of wore me out, mentally (i'm trying to write this without including any specifics as regards the plot so i won't spoil it for anyone). the biggest thing i think that bothers me is how the narrator is written to be highly intelligent, thoughtful, motivated, virtuous, and grounded, or something, but the plot is more or less fueled by him being stupid or amoralistic in a few ways. there were several moments where it feels like someone would reasonably ask "what is happening" or "why is this happening" at some point, and the narrator is written to be someone who would ask these questions, but then never does. while i think part of this is narratively 'explained away' by some underspecified and kind of unmotivated 'drug binge', which would negatively affect everyone's ability to make decisions, it didn't feel realistic for the character. but i think with any kind of action-forward plot like this, you run into the potential for things to feel like they would be awkward to make 'realistic', so there's a trade-off on some idea of narrative propulsion and realism - i'm thinking here about how 'easy' it is for the narrator to find/access/confirm some information on a computer in the last few pages, with the relevant stuff, like, just saved to the desktop, on a powered-on, unlocked computer? i'm not trying to be too negative about this, like i said, because i think it's just something that happens with these kinds of books, which i usually don't read - you need to suspend disbelief in order to let the action unfold. i did also overall feel confused by the sort of jarring juxtaposition of 'slapstick' humor - some of which i thought was funny/interesting, like the jack nicholson corpse - and these serious, action-packed themes and the moralistic heroism; there are other moments where i think a scene is intended to be funnier than it reads because of this pallor of seriousness, like the scene in the sperm bank. this all comes off as negative, like i said, but i think is just me trying to understand what it is about these kinds of books that make me less interested in them in a general sense, and maybe i'm not the intended audience. in positive things, to me, i think he does a good job incorporating contemporary things like social media in a realistic and natural way, and the aunt character is very interesting and complex throughout. i also actually really enjoyed the wrestling subplot(s) and felt like it would have been even more interesting, to me, if it played a more active role in the story. i haven't read anything else by jon lindsey but am curious to look at his short stories (josh hebburn has hyped up to me a story jon sent to hobart). revisiting this in may, now, i feel continually 'gaslit' by how popular this book seems to be with everyone in the community, such that i kept revisiting it to see if i was just really out of it while reading it, but i feel the same way about it. some vague thoughts about what this means in terms of how people think about style and content - people like a certain kind of novel, and i don't like that kind of novel, i think, is just what it is.

las vegas bootlegger by noah cicero: this was great. the best adjective i could think of while reading it was "free." noah seemingly let himself freely write exactly what he felt like writing at any given stage. the story is a weird mix of social commentary and politics (which is standard for cicero) and a ridiculous adventure novel. style-wise, he leans into a unique and artificial technique for dialogue - the characters speak in a very plain, artificial way so that their message/role for the character's arc is made very clear in a way that's funny, and it's formatted like a play, basically. i can't really explain it well. the plot itself is compelling and silly. there are no special twists, kind of - characters are open and honest about ridiculous things. it feels very unselfconscious, or, like, if this plot were written by someone else, they'd try to introduce some bullshit about, like, things not being what they appear, or things being a trick or plot, because they'd feel like what happens is too ridiculous or simple. so it's like a rejection of a rejection. it's overall very funny, by design. i kept taking pictures of paragraphs to send to my friends.

noah cicero's wild kingdom by noah cicero:  these are short, plain poems about his childhood in a very small/rural town in ohio, framed by this autoficitonal artifice of the narrator talking about his childhood. the long section of dialogue at the end was good. i like the structure of this - i like that noah feels liberated to experiment with structure i awkward and unconventional ways. the poems themselves are mostly pretty good. there's some awkward phrasing a few places and i kept hoping for the endings to be slightly different, but i think he's consistent in letting them be what they are - memory is strange and never neatly tied up like a poem is 'supposed to be,' and these poems reflect that. found myself feeling nostalgic for weird little things regarding food and nature and family.

something gross by big bruiser dope boy: read this really quickly because of its quick structure and exciting subject matter. bbdb hates the term 'alt lit' so i won't classify it as that but it reads a lot like books like best behavior in its autofictional style and subplot about real writers/publishers. i enjoyed looking stuff up on twitter to figure out who some of the characters correspond to in real life, but i don't think i know enough to identify one of them. it's one of those 'inside baseball' treats in an otherwise really great book. i similarly talked about it a lot while reading it and recommended it to several people. the last half leans into the self-shame over shame-of-others, with very 'vulnerable' moves to include things that characterize the narrator as complex and difficult. in this book he builds on some things he's done elsewhere - there are sort of ironic/cynical puns and jokes, excerpts of very long and intense text messages/emails, and stylistically builds on some of his other longer-form autoficitional narrative poems, both in voice and structure, that sentograph line line line thing. several images that he included, i think knowingly for this reason, have stuck with me and others, and we talk about them sometimes, when things in real life reminds us of them. i also liked the theme of older/aging men doing a lot of drugs and dangerous sex, this sort of bleak reality that everyone seems to acknowledge but can't/won't escape. it's written with a lot of empathy, i think, under this more cold and critical tone. it's a complicated and compelling book.

the nickel boys by colson whitehead: this is one of the very few 'normal' books i've read in recent memory - famous author on a big press writing standard mfa kinda stuff. the story is bleak and engaging and presents a good perspective on things i had internalized the formal story behind, i think. it was a compelling read with lots of 'action' and 'drama' but i think this means that the style, clarity, and cohesion took a backseat. i felt like there were a lot of awkwardly written passages, and it does that thing of like, time jumping to 'hook' the reader, leading up to a big 'twist' at the end. would be interested in reading more books like this in terms of content/perspective that aren't funneled through the big five palatable-for-the-masses writing choices. also felt interested in it being one of those fictionalized accounts of something that really happened, based on a lot of research and, apparently, the reading/study of nonfiction, firsthand accounts of this type of story. between this and some other things i've read/listened to, it seems like this is a good method of writing a best selling book, and seems weird to me.

escapes by joy williams: i liked that these stories didn't feel 'samey' about alcoholic parents. really enjoyed most of them, felt continually inspired by her interesting use of adjectives and adverbs. some of the stories seemed overly bleak, like, artificially dark (like someone was mashing together dark topics - 'what if we gave a dying old lady a baby? nothing could go well, right?'), but most were good and intriguing. felt confused by the fact that there are two stories that are, apparently, about the same characters/events but separated by time, but on first read through, i felt like it was two versions of the same story, because of how much parallelism is written into them; these were also the least exciting, to me, maybe.

libra by don delillo: read this for a bookclub with mike but he read it much faster than me. i've forgotten a lot of what i thought about it, but enjoyed the ambiguity of plots, plots on plots, the sense of being in control when not being in control. felt like a lot of the writing/structure was needlessly pretentious or dramatic in a way that people who read best sellers like. probably wold have enjoyed it more if it just followed oswald - his sections were most compelling to me.

white noise by don delillo: i was given this and libra as an xmas present. everyone says this book is super great so i was excited for it, but felt generally let down. i think reading too much frederick barthelme and some other kmart realism stuff ruined it for me. it's basically that kind of book but with some more pretentious dramatic writing. i did like how he lets certain unique scenes play out, in spite of them being 'dramatic' scenes. i enjoyed some of the dialogue between the professors - felt like realistic 'guys fucking around at lunch' talk - but overall most of the characters felt very artificial and wacky for the sake of being interesting. i liked the move of letting audio from the television or radio bleed into scenes, like a part of the dialogue. felt weird reading about the toxic airborne event and how people react to it from the perspective of living in a global pandemic. it overall felt a little long and the ending petered out in a way i didn't really enjoy- felt like i was just skimming the last two pages.

bob the gambler by frederick barthelme: got this bc mike wanted to bookclub it, but he read it in like 3 days and it took me a couple weeks. i like the mid-90s setting and especially the emphasis on the narrator being kind of a jerk/idiot. felt refreshing to read a novel about a guy who does stupid 'bad' shit like littering. also laughed at several scenes, like him wearing a massive shirt for no reason. the gambling scenes and subplot were very stressful and anxiety-inducing, which i was impressed by. it's a weird book and felt like he was having fun experimenting with what it means to include things in a book - like he was flexing, kind of, his writing skills, but pushing on some ideas in a risky way. he could have just written a more popular, probably, action novel about gambling, but he didn't - the second half is very meandering and calm in way that doesn't feel like a succinct 'happy ending'. enjoyed various scenes and subplots in the second half.

tracer by frederick barthelme (counterpoint): this one is short and full of strange imagery and characters. he lets weird little dumb moments play out and people tell stupid little stories. there's a lot of standing around and not being sure what to do which feels realistic. i liked a lot of little scenic details and how he lets little scenes play out, like the narrator and ex wife fucking around wih their cars on the highway. i looked it up on goodreads and saw joey grantham gave it a 5 star review and just wrote "perfect."

painted desert by frederick barthelme: went on a freddy b kick, obviously. it's pretty long compared to his other books and felt very...transparent in its moral arc. like there's an obvious couple of messages and it just sort of plays out naturally, no twists or anything. i liked all the scenic details. made me want to go on a roadtrip out west. enjoyed the reference to that kids in the hall sketch toward the end. enjoyed reading it in 2021 and feeling like nothing in the world has changed since 1994, only we're looking for this end-of-the-world-disaster content on social media instead of television.