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.