The Mulching of America by Harry Crews
Currently reading…
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
- Sylvia Plath
“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”
- Mario Vargas Llosa
Again, like last year, I managed to get through some fantastic books over the past 12 months. Actually, as I look at the list right now - damn - some great books I’ve been able to read. There were a couple of strange asides from what I would call my normal reading tastes, but also plenty of more standard fare as well. I have made substantially fewer comments about the books this year and have left a bunch off of this list. Anyway, here it is…
My picks of the lot:
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The best character I read all year. Ignatius J. Reilly - a lazy, over-educated, grandstanding, southern behemoth with a valve problem.
Rabbit Redux by John Updike
This book is a masterpiece. The second installment of the ‘Rabbit Omnibus’ shows us another, seemingly once per decade, collapse of the life of Rabbit Angstrom. If you want to read about suburbia, here you go. Updike is a master. It is impossible to distinguish between the first and second books. Will surely finish the series this year. I have no choice.
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
This book got me at a time where I was ripe for the picking. Heartbreaking doesn’t begin to describe this story of a life suddenly falling apart.
Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
I feel like he’s talking straight to me. Am currently devouring everything he has written.
Some Other Favourites:
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by Mark Vonnegut
Would like to get my hands on this one. His follow up to his 1975 memoir, Eden Express.
Q. How was it growing up with Kurt Vonnegut as your father?
A. It was both inspiring and terrifying to have him around, to have him talking to himself, banging on the typewriter and sometimes swearing. He was a big guy, 200 pounds and 6 feet 3 inches, who could sometimes be very nice and sometimes be furious because he couldn’t write.
There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, “It’s okay to be an introvert, but I don’t want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.”
Full interview at nj.com - HERE
While Mortals Sleep by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Release Date: Jan 25, 2011
I am ashamed of myself for not knowing about this sooner. Hope it is as enjoyable as Look at the Birdie.
Thank you wifey. I think she looks at this tumblr now and then. Also, this book dwarfs every other book on my shelf. Will have to prepare well before taking it on.
“I’m very flattered by the linkage in so far as it exists. I’ve been admiring John long before I became a writer so the linkage redowns to my benefit considerably. I wish I could write like John Cheever, but I don’t feel I do, and I see him do things effortlessly that I couldn’t do with a great deal of effort. So the similarities to me aren’t as meaningful as the differences.”
John Updike on The Dick Cavett Show, October 14, 1981 - Full show with Updike & Cheever HERE from NYT.
Fantastic stuff.
“The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don’t care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn’t matter to anyone who isn’t him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.”
-Chuck Klosterman
“Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”
-John Updike
