Book I Read, November 2nd 2025

Happy belated Halloween! I read a lot of horror this week and made some pan de los muertos which I should have taken a picture of but didn't, alas.

It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral and Love-across-a-Hundred-Lives by Werewere Liking – Post-modern African fiction, poems and fragments of stories interrupted by digressions on art and colonialism told by a complex variety of perspectives. Complex and multi-layered. My test for this kind of book is two-fold – 1, does it give enough on a first reading to warrant a second? And 2, if I was reading a page of this blind, without being aware it was critically acclaimed, would I think it was nonsense? And the answer here is yes, and no. Liking is very smart, her language is beautiful and her perspective uncommonly optimistic.

You Like it Darker by Stephen King – I do, though, Stephen, I like it darker than this collection of mostly upbeat, sweet-natured shorts. I think it's possible that King is just too decent of a human being to write horror any longer.

The Dark Country by Dennis Etchison – A surprising number of these short horror stories are about organ donation.

The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell – Fey horror.

The Crowd by Gustave le Bon – 19th century proto-psychoanalysis of the behavior of mass man throughout the ages. This is a period of intellectual history where you could get away with a lot of sweeping general statements, which makes for an engaging if somewhat simplistic read.

The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due – A lot of these horror shorts are a little too much 'the real monster is racism!' but some of the meaner ones are strong.

Depression: Causes and Treatments by Aaron Beck and Brad Alford – An attempt to codify depression as a medical condition by the father of cognitive-behavioral psychology. Beck's attempt to define despair as a condition related to underlying inaccurate intellectual schema is far more persuasive (if perhaps less interesting and fun to write about) than any of the existential psychoanalysis that I've been reading lately.

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc – A couple moves into a haunted house, go collectively crazy. The plot isn't unfamiliar but the execution is excellent, evocatively horrific and well-written, an insightful and not altogether unkind portrait of a relationship on the rocks.

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm – A thoughtful discussion of art as a continuous act, with frequent references to eastern mysticism and Meister Eckhart. A pleasant way to spend 150 pages, although the ubiquitous prejudice against homosexuality in the pre-modern era weakens some of the thinking, as the idea of a healthy romantic love outside of a male-female dynamic is denied out of turn, limiting the scope.

Book of Days by Gene Wolfe – Always love Wolfe's short stories. I've probably read Forlesen like 10 times over the years and it still stands out.

Books I Read October 27th, 2025

Just sort of quietly baking bread while the Republic burns.

The Black Insider by Dambudzo Marechera – A postmodern evening in an apocalyptic Zimbabwe destroyed by ethnic strife, as told by an authorial analog. Marechera was brilliant, and very much wants you to know it. There's a pretty constant stream of literary references in addition to the philosophical asides, linguistic deviations and switches in perspective usual to this genre. But, Marechera was brilliant, and there's a lot of very insightful stuff here. There's a sensitivity to Marechera which I think would come across even if you didn't know his tragic life story, a rawness to him, as of a burn wound. I've enjoyed my foray into his writing, for which, as it happens, I have Binyavanga Wainaina to thank, who recommends him in one of his short stories. Always enjoy following ladders of inspiration.

Bachelors: Novellas and Stories by Arthur Schnitzler – Shorts from one of turn of the century Vienna's many insightful psychoanalytical authors. There's one in here which is the stream-of-consciousness of an unlikable anti-Semitic officer who experiences a devastating social shock that's particularly excellent.

In Sickness and in Health by Ruth Rendell – A creepy noir ruined by its ending.

The Woman from Sarejevo by Ivo Andric – In a dying Dual Monarchy a Bosnian woman dedicates her life to greed to predictable effect. Interesting fact, according to Goodreads I am the first person to read this book.

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker – The underlying theme of all human existence is not sex, as per Freud, but death and the paradox of existing as a being of thought chained to a rotting corpse. All our problems come from being a god that shits. As a philosophy I pretty much share it, but still it is probably a mistake to suppose that the same sense of existential angst which is the concern of humankind generally is also the root cause of mental illness, rather than the failure of some other process generally possessed by the better functioning members of the species. An attempt at the end of the text to define schizophrenia and sexual perversion in line with the overall concern is spectacularly unpersuasive. Still, this was engaging as thought and philosophy, if not in any particularly clinically useful way.

Through the Doll's House Door by Jane Gardam – Toy Story but done with a precious smallness. A lovely digression, very different from the other stuff I read by Gardam, all of which if memory serves were well-drawn character studies of serious English people. Always impressive to see a skilled writer break successfully in an unfamiliar direction.

Books I Read October 19th, 2025

This week I sacrificed in service of my better nature, then had several cocktails to celebrate.

Scrapiron Blues by Dambudzo Marechera – Posthumous work of several genres by Zimbabwe's mid-century enfant terrible. Marechera's mental health issues saw him spend the waning years of his short life on the streets of Harare, and this is certainly evidence of diseased mind's take on a diseased world. At all searing, sometimes quite funny, not quite universally bleak (though close), all in all a fascinating way to spend a few hundred pages.

A Way of Being by Carl Rogers – Rogers' late life writings reveal an exaggeratedly optimistic view of the human species and an unfortunate interest in the clairvoyance, life after death, and the general esoteric.

Far from Home by Walter Tevis – Did you know the guy who wrote The Hustler also wrote some really excellent, psychosexual sci-fi? He did! The paired stories about a middle-aged man's dead parents coming for lunch is a particularly weird standout.

Back to Delphi by Ioanna Karystiani – A mother takes her incarcerated son on a furlough to the center of the world. I can only assume this is something that actually is allowed within the Greek legal system? In any event, an exceedingly bleak if well-executed portrait of a malformed family and male psychosis (grimmer parts of this read like something from an early Joyce Carol Oates story). A difficult but rewarding read.

The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai – A parable for the rise of Islamofascism in North africa.

Love and Will by Rollo May – Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate studying philosophy I discovered there was no longer any real interest in ethical thought or general theories of the good life. It was seen as at best quaint and at worst mawkish, something like figure drawing in a modern art course. People preferred to fritter their energies away in service of post-modern linguistic trickery, or engage in paradoxical mind-fuckery i.e. philosophy of time (A professor who was hired the year I left wrote his thesis on whether you could go back in time to kill your grandfather, a question to which the only possible answer could be—come back when you've built a time machine). Anyway, it turned out a lot of that energy just sidestepped its way into analysis—Freud's writing is on the whole far more philosophical than clinical—and recent forays into existential psychotherapy has me putting my academic hat on for the first time in many years. May's work is full of interesting insight into the eponymous, particular in the first half where he skillfully expounds on the full meaning of eros, even if is does spend a lot of time exaggerating the importance of etymology, as if each word represented some cultural theory of recapitulation. At bottom, though, reading this reminds me of the other reason that I didn't continue further into philosophy (apart from my grades being garbage), which is that logic is an insufficient tool for compelling belief. I've never learned anything important by result of a succesful argument.

As a quick side note, is there any more pointless question than that of free will vs. determinism (and I mean this on both a psychological and materialistic level)? Our minds are composed such that it is impossible to imagine functioning except in the belief that you are in control of your decisions, irrespective of the validity of that belief. You could prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that what passes for my personality is nothing more than electrical impulses in my brain and it would not effect one's behavior in the slightest.

Books I Read October 12th, 2025

I made some pretty fabulous sandwich loaves this week.

Look at that – ain't she a beaut? I did some other things too, but that's probably what I'm most pleased with.

The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White – A loveless, dying matriarch is visited by her two horrible, horrible adult children, desperate for her to die so they can inherit her estate. Patrick White wrote two kinds of books—the first are this surreal or hyper-real depictions of Australian existence, and the seconds are bloodless drawing room novels, of which this is obviously the latter. Told mostly in inner monologue, it's the kind of book were nothing really happens but all the characters seem perpetually on the edge of a nervous breakdown, where all food exists as reminders of the entropic nature of existence (can no one in Sydney cook a lamb chop correctly? How many times must we be subjected to descriptions of fat congealing on a dinner plate?) and all sex is awkward and awful. Finishing it's 600 pages was an act of literary masochism for which I can only condemn myself.

Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder by Marsha M. Linehan – The bible on the subject. Also, about the length of the bible.

Young Blood by Sfiso Mzobe – A young man in a Durban township finds himself caught in an underworld of car theft, drug dealing and death. Energetic and full of lived experience.

Fly Already by Etgar Keret – Keret's usual brand of surreal, modern, urban, sympathetic stories. Sad and sweet and always very human. I really enjoy Keret.

Texas by the Tail by Jim Thompson – The best craps mechanic in the southwest tries to roll his way out of penury. One of Thompson's 'sweeter,' less surreal works, but it's still got some remarkably insightful/horrific bits of psychosexual insight. No one straddled crime and existential despair like Jim Thompson.

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death by Irvin Yalom – America's foremost existential psychoanalyst does his best to fill the yawning catacomb above which we all awkwardly straddle. Is there something wrong with me that I find Yalom a bit too much of an optimist for my tastes? Probably, but there we are.

Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent: Story of Various Mysteries by Pepetela – An obese Angolan detective raised on American crime novels investigates the murder of a teenage girl, becomes embroiled in the internecine government plots which plague modern Luanda. A satire of a profoundly corrupt society, ultimately more bitter than funny. Pepetela is a fascinating voice.

Enchiridion by Epictetus – Always useful to spend an hour or two with the stoics.

'You are a little soul carrying a dead body.'

'If you are ever very thirsty, take a draught of cold water, and spit it out, and tell no man.

'If a man has reported to you, that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defense to what has been told you: but reply, the man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only.'

Books I Read October 5th, 2025

Autumn has arrived in LA. I wear my slippers in the morning but a tank top in the afternoon. Might need to make some apple butter—anyone got a food mill they recommend? As a rule, I dislike single use tools but having made it for several years by mashing the apples through a strainer I can tell you how much of a hassle that is.

Why Are We So Blest by Ayi Kweh Armah – A brilliant African student loses himself amid American academia, returns to Africa with a soulless harpy girlfriend intent on destroying him. Ruthless to the point of nihilism, particularly as regards interracial romance. Makes V.S. Naipaul look like a puppet in 'It's a Small World After All.' Bits of brilliance, but I'd regard it as a misstep from an enormously talented writer.

The Heroic Client: A Revolutionary Way to Improve Effectiveness Through Client-Directed, Outcome-Informed Therapy by Barry L. Duncan, Scott D. Miller, Jacqueline A. Sparks – If you get passed the horrible title, what you find is a scathing indictment of the modern mental health system, from its false identification with conventional medicine to its over-prescription of pharmaceuticals. Fascinating and insightful.

Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist - Collected Stories by E. and H. Heron – A supernatural Sherlock Holmes investigates the surreal and impossible, written by a mother and son duo who themselves seem to have come from a pulp novel.

How to Write About Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina – When I read last week's One Day I Will Write About This I was unaware that the author was 1) very famous and 2) dead. I was disappointed to discover both of these facts, the first because I like to feel that I'm outside of the mainstream and the second because Wainaina was a really talented, insightful writer, as this collection attests. While his writings about Westerners views of Africa are themselves sharp and funny (particularly in writing about the African-diaspora's perceptions) his writing about Africa itself are better, rich and thoughtful. His writing leaves you with the impression of a man who was never happy with a superficial reading of a situation, an outsider who brought his critical gaze to whatever he saw. We lost a great talent in his premature death.

Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan – An ex-con's good deed gets punished, embroiling him in a vicious Dublin gang war. Nasty and cleverly plotted.

The Hustler by Walter Tevis – This book still rules.

Books I Read, September 28th, 2025

At this very instant, the Almighty writes your future into his book of life. There is still time, through prayer and desperate apology, to earn forgiveness for your manifold sins of the past year.

Or, you know, not.

Hope by Erich Fromm – Humanistic optimism from a largely forgotten psychoanalytical socialist.

Transparent City by Ondjaki – A frantic, surreal depiction of Angola's capital city in its decadence, squalor, and beauty. There's definitely a tendency among African authors to use magical realism to accentuate the chaotic nature of their metropolis – see Mwanza Mujila Fiston and Alain Mabanckou for Francophile versions – which, having spent some time in the continent's urban areas, I can appreciate. But really the unnatural and impossible aspects of this are much less important than the sympathy and sensitivity with which Ondjaki depicts his home city. Strong stuff.

The Face of Tresspass by Ruthn Rendell – A dissolute writer decays in a country hovel, reminisces about a dangerous lost love in this psychological noir with shades of James M. Cain. Apparently Rendell was a ubiquitous crime novelist in England in her day, which surprised me a little in that her books are slick and small and (seemingly) a little too clever to reach mass market appeal. Good on her for bucking that trend, even if she seems largely forgotten on our side of the pond.

The Shadow of What We Were by Luis Sepulveda – A squad of aging ex-revolutionaries come together for one last job in a Santiago which seeks to forget its dark past—but a comedy! Brisk and funny and enjoyable, you get the sense that the author is enjoying himself.

Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride – A nameless woman experiences a series of meaningless love affairs in lonely hotels, reflects on the history which brings her to those points. Shades of Djuna Barnes. Largely (although not completely) plotless, your enthusiasm for this will depend on your feeling for McBride's artful, compulsively confusing writing style. I enjoyed it, but then I tend to enjoy these sorts of literary high-wire acts, especially if they top out below 200 pages.

Books I Read September 21st, 2025

Mornings are the blues.

One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina – Scattered reminiscences of a lost soul growing up in a turbulent East Africa. Sharply written and insightful, Wainaina is a real talent, putting his skills towards understanding the complexity of his personal and national existence. An African writer, and not a Westerner's idea of an African writer.

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler – The first major psychologist who doesn't seem to dislike people, which is nice. On the other hand he still has the Freudian tic of seeing all human development as being the product of certain singular childhood developments, in this case the inferiority/superiority complex, to which Adler assigns an absolute and exaggerated position.

Selected Writings on Client Centered Therapy by Carl Rogers – The father of client centered therapy describes his model of psychoanalysis. By denying the therapist a position as expert and making the patient/client's thoughts the focus of the therapeutic relationship, Rogers revolutionized the field and defined much of modern counseling. Also, he seems like a real sweetheart.

The Politics of the Family and Other Essays by R.D. Laing – Oof. I'd forgotten how unreadable existential philosophy/thought can be. Mundane, even banal truths obscured by unreadable academic language. Did you know that we often internalize the teachings of our elders without realizing it? If not, you'll struggle to learn from these ludicrously opaque writings.

Yaka by Pepetela – A multi-generational narrative of the whites (mostly ex-convicts) living in a small city in southern Angola, impoverished vagabonds exploiting the native population in a miserable quest to survive. Pepetela is the pseudonym of a Portuguese-Angolan who fought with the MPLA, and this feels like a very personal mea culpa. Excellent in any event, a sympathetic but not at all forgiving depiction of the strange struggles of colonial existence. It's really astonishing how much excellent fiction came out of the relatively small population of Lusitanian Africa.

The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly by Luis Sepulveda – One thing about ordering a dozen-odd books from the library based on the authors and without really reading the (sometimes limited) descriptions is you occasionally end up reading a charming YA novelette.

Real World by Natsuo Kirino – A cadre of angst-ridden high school girls find themselves aiding their matricidal neighbor. Coming from a country that actually is in a state of collapse, it's kind of odd the degree to which Japanese writers seem so focused on the existential malaise afflicting their culture. Not that I'm in a position to say they're wrong, but some part of me is always like 'I'll see your materialist isolation and raise you the complexities of a multi-ethnic society and the ludicrous ubiquity of gun ownership.'

Creatures of a Day by Irvin D. Yalom – Brief retellings of the author's experiences with different clients, speaking to the essential concerns of existential therapy, i.e., that we're all going to die and how much this sucks. Thoughtful and compassionate.

Books I Read September 11th, 2025

Did you really have a vacation if you didn't sit on a beach and read 21 books? Or bake apple pie and various breads for your family? Or swim in the Atlantic? Or walk along a dusty road, remembering your past selves and what is to come?

The Name of a Bullfighter by Luis Sepulveda – An Chilean ex-revolutionary expat becomes embroiled in post-Cold War shenanigans. Skillful literary noir.

Fragments by Ayi Kwei Armah – A sensitive writer returns to his native Ghana after years in a Western university and struggles to deal with the brutal capitalism of post-Colonial Africa. Armah is at once a remarkably talented writer as well as a perceptive social critic, and this is excellent if perhaps not quite as strong as The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which was a bit more esoteric.

Time of Silence by Martin Santos – A provincial doctor is drawn into the Madrid demimonde. Very funny page to page.

Mass Psychology and Other Writings by Sigmund Freud – Is there a more frustrating writer than Sigmund Freud? A shrewd writer capable of the most extraordinary insights into the human condition who nonetheless wrote a great deal of errant nonsense. This is a mix of both, with the chapters on mass psychology fascinating and much of the digressions into religious thought absolutely incoherent (Moses was not an Egyptian, nor did Judaism spring from the long forgotten worship of the sun God Aten, as both historical scholarship and common sense would show.)

The Storm Lord by Tanith Lee – I'm always fascinated by how we train ourselves to read whatever we read. Once upon a time it would have been no trouble at all to work my way through this epic tale of a prophecied god-child saving his people from destruction, but these days I struggle to with high fantasy irrespective of its merits.

Where Late the Sweet Bds Sang by Kate Wilhelm – The environmental collapse of human society and the cloning project of a small group of survivors is the starting point for this fabulous, insightful sci-fi novel. Lyrical and strange, one of the best post-apocalyptic stories I've ever read. I liked it so much I went ahead and read two more Kate Wilhelm's in rapid succession.

Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki – The childhood reminiscences of a boy growing up in post-Colonial Angola, finding beauty and excitement in a society which threatens to collapse at any moment. Funny and poignant.

Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto – A surrealist vision of the Mozambican civil war, as experienced by a youth and his elder guardian. I can't say it did a tremendous amount for me, though I can appreciate the skill.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress – A group of genetically modified individuals, created to live without the need for sleep and functionally free of disease or aging, struggle to survive in a society which comes to loathe them. There's nothing fabulously original about the premise but Kress has a gift for characterization and plotting which make this an excellent example of intellectual sci-fi.

Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo – A career driven African woman leaves her traditional marriage to become the second wife of a man with whom she is passionately in love. A thoughtful dissection of (then) contemporary African norms, as well as an engaging romance.

Panama by Thomas McGuane – A faded rock star undergoes a drug-fueled misadventure through the Florida Keys. Hyper-masculine gonzo literary fiction is another genre that I struggle with these days, although at least it's shorter than most high fantasy.

Hardcase by Dan Simmons – A two-fisted ex-con shoots a shit ton of people. Pulpy action is another genre for which I don't have much tste.

The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino – A mythical retelling of Japanese mythology high-lighting the eternal struggle between men and woman and the savage and bloody nature of love. Strange and haunting, I quite enjoyed it.

Dark Echoes of the Past by Ramon Diaz Eterovic – A leftist PI investigates a murder with roots in the mass murder of the Pinochet government. Competent but familiar.

A Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell – The slaughter of an upper class English fantasy by their illiterate maid as minutely detailed by a first class writer of noir. Excellent and disturbing, one of those books that maintains its narrative force despite the plot being laid out on the first page. Very strong, I'll definitely look for more by the author.

Huysman's Pets by Kate Wilhelm – A journalist discovers strange secrets when investigating the experiments of a dead scientific genius. Not as good as 'Birds,' but not so terrible neither.

Ombria in Shadow by Patricia A. McKillip – A crew of misfits attempts to save a princeling from his monstrous great-aunt. Fun and evocative if a bit fay.

Song of Kali by Dan Simmons – A journalist travels to Calcutta to investigate the re-emergence of a poet thought dead, has a worse time than VS Naipaul. Ominous, well-written, debatably racist.

Idoru by William Gibson – An investigative savant and a teenage girl travel to a rebuilt Tokyo to discover the fate of a reclusive rock star. A cyberpunk Lost in Translation. As usual with Gibson the plot feels arbitrary but the experience is enjoyable.

Death of an Artist by Kate Wilhelm – The death of a turbulent painter is investigated by her daughter, mother, and an ex-detective. Engaging if pat.

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammet – A consigliere of dubious morality tries to navigate a gang war in an unnamed city. If you've seen Miller's Crossing you've got most of the plot down. The plots mechanics are a little fidgety, but Hammet's prose remains a joy.

Books I Read August 26th 2025

If you voted for Donald Trump, may wild weasels nest in your bowels.

Pirates of the Universe by Terry Bison – A blue-collar space worker wanders through dystopia.

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon – Short biographies of some of Africa's most destabilizing tyrants, and the aid invariably offered by western governments and multi-nationals to them.

When We Were Fireflies by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim – An artist finds himself investigating his past lives, trying to escape the cycle of love and murder to which he seems condemned.

Books I Read August 17th, 2025

Pushing on.

A Practical Guide to Levitation by Jose Eduardo Agualusa – Absurdist Angolan shorts, reminiscent of Etgar Keret. I dug it.

Snakepit by Moses Isegawa – An amoral bureaucrat wades into the squalid waters of Idi Amin's Uganda. A riveting and disturbing look at the chaos and corruption of a decomposing nation.

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins – A meticulously researched overview of the horrific mistreatment of the Kikuyu people during the Mau Mau rebellion at the very tail end of British rule. If you were somehow unaware of mankind's grim capacity for cruelty against his fellow, this will certainly educate you.

The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul – Sort of an anti-travelogue, Naipaul's studious consideration of his journey from rural Trinidad to rural England, and the preconceptions with which we inevitably view our ever-changing reality. The narrative is vague and driftless, slowly accumulating in weight and meaning until it coheres into something profound and even revelatory.

Nadja by Andre Breton – Andre Breton name drops his way through Paris with an incoherent ingenue. A teaspoon of surrealism is plenty.

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 by Piero Gleijeses – A studiously researched, compellingly reasoned overview of Cuban intervention in post-Colonial Africa. I was vaguely aware of the role Cuba played in the Angolan Civil War (War of Indpendence?) but Gleijeses does a marvelous job of exploring the Cold War shenanigans of the Great Powers and tiny Cuba's peculiar (and sometimes effective) willingness to counter them. As is generally the case when reading about imperial policy (be it American, Russian, English, Roman, what have you) one is struck by the constant misreading of the situation by the people in power—which is to say, fuck Henry Kissinger.

Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana – A suite of short stories describing the childhood and youth of a girl growing up in Entebbe. Baingana has a rare gift for language and a sensitivity to the complexities of human interaction across cultures. Good stuff.

Books I Read July 27th, 2025

Sorry for the week's delay—the Bible took longer to finish than I'd anticipated.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah – A civil servant in post-Colonial Ghana suffers the temptation of corruption, the indescribable agony of existing in a fundamentally entropic reality. Sympathetic, scathing, beautifully written, really excellent.

The Hebrew Bible translated by Robert Alter – Finally got around to finishing off the handful of prophets and minor books which have kept me from logging this off my list. What's their to say about the Hebrew Bible? It's pretty good. It's a pretty good book. It is incongruous. It contains multitudes. It is extraordinary to watch the development of Yahweh the sky god, with his mighty sword and petty ethnic concerns, develop into the universal God of all creation, guarantor of a system of morality which, loosely expanded, continues to govern us today. Qoheleth and Job remain my favorites, although the per-deutoronmist bits of Kings are pretty wild, and Jonah is a beautiful and engaging portrait of a loving God rarely seen in other books. Endlessly fascinating and rewarding.

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by Ondjaki – A pair of children in rural Angola scheme to stop a Soviet plot to destroy their village. Fun.

Every Man is a Race by Mia Couto – Surrealist shorts from a white Mozambican. Brilliantly odd dreams of Africa, youth, and war. Very good.

Books I Read July 13th, 2025

I grow slightly stronger every day.

Blue White Red by Alain Mabanckou – An African everyman is seduced, betrayed by the dream of life in Paris.

The Shadow of Things to Come by Kossi Efoui – A youth labors to survive in an imaginary African country turned Orwellian nightmare. Efoui reduces his surrealist landscape to component parts, denuded of cultural specificity and effective as a parable for the creeping totalitarianism of the modern state.

Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne – The collapse of late Roman society in Europe began not with the barbarian invasions, who largely maintained the status quo, but with the expansion of Islam in the Mediterranean, which shut off an essential conduit of trade and thought between Constantinople and Europe and led to the distinctive 'Germanic' culture of the middle ages. Is this true? Maybe? Certainly seems plausible! I found myself entertained by the style and argument.

The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch – A two-fisted Semitic gangster tries to hold back the tide of fascism in pre-war Warsaw. There is a certain sort of Jewish man who loves to remember the crimes of Meyer Lansky and old Arnie Rothstein, identifying with an ideal of strength they find themselves conspicuously lacking (they will also brag about the raid on Entebbe). As a virile Semitic specimen myself, I am, thank G-d, spared of this predilection. I am not sure if Twardoch is a member of the tribe-that he still lives in Poland suggest not—but this is very much in that vein, a childish fantasy of violence justified by ethnic pride. The back compares it to Inglorious Basterds, another story which dared to ask the burning question 'wouldn't it be fun to shoot Hitler?' Yes, yes it would. Thanks for your contribution.

The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivanna by Maryse Conde – I read this book.

The Antipeople by Sony Labou Tansi – A schoolmaster loses himself in unfulfilled lust, the corrupt African state, and the comprehensive meaninglessness of the human endeavor. Post-Colonial African existentialism.

Books I Read June 29th, 2025

Many things are sad, but some sad things are beautiful.

The Hounds of Hell by Jean Larteguy – A very lightly fictionalized account of the Katangese rebellion, written by France's Frederick Forsythe. I think I've probably hit my current quota for Congolese history but that's on me, this was a well-written and thoughtfully observed.

The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap's Masked Iconoclast by S.H. Fernando Jr. – Probably the best biography we'll get of hip hop's most enigmatic MC, whose obsession with privacy means that fairly basic aspects of his life remain unknown. Ayone reading this is going to be a DOOM fan, and the image that does come out—of a fascinating, brilliant, mercurial and often amoral figure—are worth the price of admission.

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories by Luis Sepulveda – A hunter obsessed with romances pursues a man-eating ocelot into the Amazon in service of a civilizing influence to which he is simultaneously drawn and repelled. Lovely if small.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofen – A vacationing hausfrau awakens one morning to discover her mountain refuge has been cut off by a force field which seems to have also killed every human on the planet. Her struggle to survive with a small menagerie of pets becomes not only an engaging survival story but a profound statement on modernity, motherhood, and our relationship with the natural world. Really excellent, certainly among the best post-apocalyptic novels I've read.

Congo Inc by In Koli Jean Bofane – The ruinous effects of globalization as suffered by a cast of Kinshashan neer-do-wells. Unfocused.

The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe – Two brothers return to their rural hometown, unearth dark secrets expressing the corruption of Japanese society and the existential discomfort of identity and existence. Masterful and disturbing. This feels an ur-text to a lot of other Japanese fiction I've read, full of disturbing imagery, subterranean obsessions and an uncanny if peculiar plot. Murakami in particular seems to have taken a lot of his career from this book. But don't hold that against it! If you're in the market for a difficult, peculiar, moody work from a Nobel laureate you could do a lot worse.

Night on the Galactic Railroad and Other Stories from Ihatov by Kenij Miyazawa – A lovely little parable by Japan's most beloved children's writer. Sad and bright.

Books I Read June 22nd, 2025

Ashamed to be an American. Not that proud to be a Jew. I also didn't read as much as I might have. Alas, alack.

A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse – I don't have the energy for the joke where I write this in Fosse's single sentence style, which is maybe not that funny anymore anyway. The final volume of Fosse's epic depiction of an aging artist's final days in a small house on the Norwegian coast is, like the first two, ruminative and luminous. The prose replicates the intangible bleed of observation and memory which make up human thought, while the repetition and simple language turns the act of reading into a meditative, even prayerlike act. The best advertisement for Christianity since Marilynne Robinson, if I were Catholic I'd be ready to add it to the canon.

Seasons of Migrations to the North by Tayeb Salih – This remains a profound and beautiful novel, managing in less than two hundred pages to touch intimately on colonialism, tradition, lust and death. Line to line the language is beautiful, and the structure is complex and distinct but also captivating as a story. Reading it again after ten years I found myself coming to the end and still half-remembering it's final passages...

I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time, and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. I I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget.

Books I Read June 15th, 2025

I was the only white guy the year I worked in the bakery. Everyone else was a first generation immigrant from Mexico or Central America. I knew nothing about professional baking. My Spanish was extremely limited. I was not expected to stay long. But I stuck with it, stacking bins and sorting palettes of flour, trying to make up in effort what I lacked in skill. One day, some six months into my tenure, when I was scrubbing ash out of the deck ovens, the second in command of the bread department came over and interrupted my efforts.

“You work like a Mexican,” he said.

I felt honored, and remain so. The men and woman with whom I worked (both as a baker and later as a line cook) upheld the highest standards of the immigrant ideal. Industrious, sober, capable and family oriented. There is absolutely no question that without their labor, the city would fall apart. Moreover, without their existence the city would not be what it is, a glorious, contradictory amalgamation which I have been privileged to call my home for some eight years.

At the moment, LA feels like an occupied country. Foreigners have descended to arbitrarily remove members of the community, and to parade, weapons drawn, across our public spaces. The minor acts of nightly mayhem which we have suffered are due entirely to this provocation, and are an anticipated result of the weakening of the rule of law. As so often, I'm reminded of Rebecca West's judgment of the human species in her endlessly valuable Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

Curse Donald Trump and anyone who ever supported him. May the weight of your choices fall to you and you alone.

Land and Blood by Maloud Ferouan – Inter-familial tension smolders than explodes in a Kabylite village shortly before the war of independence. The well-observed customs of a dying world, if a bit formal feeling.

I am Alive by Kettly Mars – The Haitian earthquake of 2010 sends a schizophrenic back to his bourgeoisie creole family for the first time in thirty years, upends and inspiring the household. Unfolding in polyphonic confessional, Mars paints an honest but hopeful portrait of mental illness and its secondhand effects, one painfully recognizable apart from any distinction in language, race or culture. Mars is a writer of rare talent, I've been impressed with this and the also excellent Savage Seasons.

Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim – A May-December romance between an aging Islamic widow and a street tough leads to devastating consequences for all in this strange, bleak, original tale. I found the unfamiliar context and sympathetically drawn characters engaging. An impressive debut.

Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou – An orphaned youth tries to find his way in 70's Brazzaville in this brisk and stylish Dickensian satire. Mabanckou's work roils with energy and cleverness.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Ya Hua – Half satire of village life in post-Revolutionary China, half epic chronicle of a man's journey into fatherhood. Ya Hua made his name as an enfante terrible of Mandarin letter but this is funny and sentimental (though not cloying). I bought it for my Dad for father's day.

I was an Elephant Salesman by Pap Khouma – A loosely fictionalized account of the author's experiences as a seller of trinkets in Italy during the mid and late 1980s, before the explosion of immigration from Africa. Engaging and touching, its depiction of the hazards of life as an undocumented immigrant felt sadly apropos given the situation.

Books Read June 8th, 2025

There is no civil unrest in LA right now, and the national guard as useless as tits on a mule. Not infrequently I get messages from friends or family like ‘is everything OK?’ and then I go online and discover a store in Torrance has been burned down or someone punched someone in Santa Monica and it’s like ‘ugh there are tens of millions of us things are fine.’ Since it’s inception there has always been some quailty of Los Angeles which seems to preface it’s own destruction, and yet we muddle on despite.

Kaveena by Boubacar Boris Diap – A disgraced police chief investigates the ruined post-colonial past of his fictitious West African country. Uneven but worthwhile.

The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis – An impossible season in a small American town. Like all of Davis's work this is difficult, interesting, and largely plotless. I would describe it as an attempt to imbue the minute interactions of humans and the natural world with uncanny luminosity such as to blur the line between reality and fantasy, and in that it was largely effective. I would warn perspective readers that I am a sucker for Davis's prose, which is strange and original, and if you aren't as captivated with it on a line by line basis you might kind of be like what the fuck have I been doing the last three hundred pages.

Mission Accomplished by Mongo Beti – A callow student is deputized to visit his rural cousins and retrieve his uncle's faithless wife in this jovial satire of local customs and the town/country divide. I gather Beti is better known for his more serious, anti-colonial work, but this was sharp and funny and mean and I'm sorry it seems like no one reads it anymore.

The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset – I picked this one up because Bolano name checked it somewhere and I find it's good to make myself read a little bit of philosophy now and again, just to stretch my brain. And you can't really argue with...

As they [mass man] do not see, beyond the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and constructionn which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine their role is limited to demanding these benefits preemprotily, as if they were naturala rights. In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of to-day towards the civilization by which they are supported.

Though it does goes optimistically off the rails in the back third with its prediction of fascism's early demise.

Books I Read June 1st, 2025

This week I stepped on salt flats.

The Shameful State by Sony Labou Tansi – A surrealist post-modern satire of the African tyrant, I gather effectively the ur-text for this form of regional fiction. Not an easy read, as you'd imagine from the description, but excellent all the same. The language is complex but comprehensible, if viscerally and deliberately unpleasant at points. Another Alain Mabanckou recommendation which was very much worth the time.

African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa by Michael A. Gomez – A comprehensively researched, relatively readable history of the great pre-colonial West African empires. Limitations in the historical record make the early portions a little touch and go but the later bits offered valuable (to me) insight into the basis framework of the epoch.

No Sweetness Here and Other Stories by Ama Ata Aidoo – Elegant short fiction exploring the disappointment of the post-colonial African dream. Varied and well-realized.

Waiting for the Waters to Rise by Maryse Conde – A kindly disaporean doctor tries to return a Haitain newborn to her family.

Books I Read May 25th, 2025

Reading sometimes helps.

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga – The third in Dangarembga's exploration of the failed promise of post-colonial Zimbabwe as experienced by an ever-suffering everywoman.

The Festival of the Greasy Pole by René Depestre – A middle-aged ex-Senator becomes the face of revolt against the Duvalier regime when he attempts a feat of strength during a national festival. An cri de couer to the embittered Haitian people from an exiled dissident.

The Knight and His Shadow by Boubacar Boris Diop – A man journeys to save his ex-lover, who has become lost in the threads of her own story, only to become entangled in the same. The loose plot quickly gives way to a stream of nested stories reflecting on love, loss, madness, and the Rwandan genocide. More of an experience than a conventional novel but I enjoyed it and will seek out something else by Diop.

The Snares by Rav Grewal-Kök – A Punjabi lawyer enters the intelligence service at the start of the Obama administration, loses his soul in a bid for power. High literature with a genre bent, a paranoid thriller made real as much by its attention to practical detail as by the life and depth it breathes into its characters. Shades of Patrick Manchette and Leonard Sciascia. Excellent, strong rec.

Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale – Tiny, cheery stories by a mid-century Italian poet. Slight but lovely.

Books I Read May 18th, 2025

For my birthday I made…

…strawberry tangzhong donuts and read the following books…

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi – A girl struggles to address the fractured divinities within her mind, medium-ship (?) as a metaphor for mental illness and the complexities of human identity. The idea of competing gods controlling the character and narrative offers an original and compelling take on a fairly conventional coming of age story, although I once again found myself thinking that the use of magic as a literary device allowed for an overly neat conclusion. A lot of my recent forays into African fiction have left me wondering how seriously I'm supposed to take the spiritual aspects of the writing, if they exist entirely as metaphor or are representative of some genuine belief.

Disappearance by Yuri Trofonov – Youthful recollections of the wartime purges which took the author's father and uncle, Soviet stalwarts erased by Stalin's madness. Published posthumously and left unfinished, which was too bad for everyone—this has the makings of something profound and epic, another Life and Fate or The Burning Years.

Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou – Stories from the downtrodden patrons of Kinshasa's foremost dive bar as told to the eponymous drunkard/intellectual. Rabeleisque tales of cuckoldry and failure, told in Mabanckou's house style, a run-on sentence interrupted by commas and occasional page breaks. I dig it, reminds me a bit of Bohumil Hrabel in its wit and absurdity.

Not So Much, Said the Cat by Michael Swanwick – Literate speculative fiction. Fun and engaging.

I is Another: Septology III-V by Jan Fosse – part two of Fosse's story of an aging artist named Asle and the small cast of characters with very similar names, yes, identity and personhood are part of what we are discussing, yes, what makes us different but more what makes us the same, the indissoluble similarities of time and suffering and death, yes, but also of love and God, yes, there is quite a lot of God in this which I enjoy despite, and after a few pages Fosse's rolling sentence and simple cadence becomes soothing, yes, a comforting way to spend a few quiet hours

Journal, 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War by Mouloud Feraoun – The intimate reflections of a righteous man caught in the horrifying brutality of urban warfare. Feraoun was one of Algeria's leading authors and intellectuals as well as a primary school administrator, and his attempt to understand and survive the collapse of French Algeria makes for poignant and tragic reading. Even-handed in its judgments, sincere in its conviction, this is a profound attempt to grapple with the end of the colonial project and the endless compromises required to survive in wartime. That the author would be murdered by the OAS shortly before the start of independence only offers a bitter poignancy to an already worthwhile work.

Books I Read May 11th, 2025

I count my blessings in quarter tones.

Cruel City by Mongo Beti – A restless villager tries to cope with the rapid urbanization of post-war Africa. A notable first novel, in the sense of demonstrating talent but not actually fitting working on its own. I did really enjoy the attached essay, however, in which Beti takes a shot at a then ascendant Camara Laye.

The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa – A father struggles against a dystopian future in which imagination has been eliminated.

Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade by Boubacar Barry – A clear if dry overview of the 400 odd-years between the arrival of the first Portuguese trader and the complete colonization of the region. A grim but fascinating subject, and I'm always excited to learn about a portion of human history of which I'm only very broadly aware.