Books I Read This Winter (Part 2)

When I go traveling for long periods of time I like to take books I know I wouldn't get around to reading if I was in my normal environs, with the distractions of cell phones and internet and booze and pretty woman and so on. This is what I read while wandering through East Africa in January and February. Who cares about any of this? I dunno. I barely care and I'm me.

The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne– What's the point really in reviewing what is widely regarded as a seminal classic of Western letters? On the other hand, I read it, so, F-you. Montesqieu had the then revolutionary idea of basically writing down everything he ever thought, learned, or felt, a revolutionary concept in an age which put Classic and Christian tradition ahead of all other forms of thought. Little did he know that he was paving the way for the blogosphere, but then on the other hand he was also enormously clever, erudite, and experienced. I liked the chapter on dealing with death, and also thumbs.

The Decameron by Boccacio – Basically 14th century soft porn, often quite funny. It's always a hoot to see what previous generations thought was decadent, and what they could manage to get away with (incest, date rape, orgies, etc.) Also, he really hates the clergy, it's kind of hysterical. Every few chapters there's just a hundred word aside on how useless monks are.

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – Funny! Melodramatic! Bitterly mean! Frankly this era of English writing mostly doesn't do it for me (I just finished/hate Sense and Sensibility, more on that soon) but this is actually very sharp. Thackeray is the ancestor of Evelyn Waugh, and his contempt and affection for the bright young things of early 19th century London are well worth a read.

The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle – It's kind of interesting to read totally mediocre genre stuff of previous generations, just sort of as an artifact. But this book is basically pretty stupid. Doyle has done his homework and there are some interesting bits about monks, but it's mostly pure melodrama, and the characterization is shoddy as a tree house made by drunken children. It's basically just a bit pile of shit, but I didn't mind it while I was reading it.

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis – A series of episodes in the life of the eponymous Maqroll, a sailor, traveler, vagabond, melancholic loser, occasional lover. Did I, alone on the coast of Kenya, in an old Swahili town near the Sommali border, while very, very sick from the sort of disease one gets in East Africa, have vivid nightmares in which I could not distinguish between things I had read in this book and the actual events of my life, until finally in the middle of the night I wandered down to the beach and found a Rasta to help me, talking to him in a mad sort of pidgin language and holding this book up as if it was some sort of aegis against misfortune, until finally he took my hand and led me to the one village shop which was open after dark and got me some water and a bottle of sprite? No comment.

But yeah, anyway, read it.

Books I read this Winter (Part 1)

Right – so I was keeping track of these for a while, and then I got lazy, but then at some point I remembered I had a blog, and that I might as well throw some nonsense in there about it, and also that I kind of appreciate having a record of things I read. Below are what I remember of the last 4 months or so worth of books. Why would this be of any interest to you? No idea.

The Confidence Man by Herman Melville – Melville's final novel, the catastrophic failure of which (apocryphal evidence suggests it only sold 300 copies in his lifetime) encouraged Melville to give up writing all together, Confidence Man, His Masquerade is now widely regarded as the first post-modernist text. One does not struggle to understand why it did not fly off the shelves initially – reading it is a difficult and exhausting exercise even today. A century and a half ago, when it was released, audiences must have been confused, infuriated, and alienated. Forgoing anything which could honestly be called a narrative structure, the book is essentially a series of dialogues concerning the nature of confidence and the degree to which humanity as a whole is worthy of that trust, dialogues which take place between a series of characters who may or may not be the eponymous con man, who himself may or may not be the devil, or perhaps god, or some kind of strange amalgam of the too, or something else altogether. His fellow interlocutors are themselves shifting and unclear, some representing historical/literary figures like James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and others possibly also serving double duty as the devil, or perhaps god, or some strange amalgam of the two.

It is a strange book . The dialogues themselves are, in and of themselves, rather terrible, written in a curiously stilted fashion. One senses that this is deliberate, and that the very awkwardness of the language and the logic is meant to draw attention to subtler puzzles within the book. The constant repetition presumably serves the same purpose, it and the 'off-notes' meant to jar the reader out of their normal style of reading and to offer a more nuanced thought on the framework of the book itself, on the characters and on the nature of literature itself.

Did I like this book? No, I didn't. I can appreciate how ahead of its time it was, and some of the oblique construction, but it was interminable and dull, and those mysteries and secrets which I could decipher did not ultimately make up for the rest of the time I had to force myself through it. Did I understand this book? Again, no, not really, or only to a pretty limited extent. To offer a serious critique of this book I would need to spend probably an odd couple of weeks giving it a line by line reading, complete with critical texts, and that's something I have no real interest in doing, as much because I'm pretty busy as because I just didn't find the book valuable/enjoyable enough on its own merits

One of my personal pet peeves, one of the things that annoys me most, is when one sees a review on goodreads to the effect of, 'I didn't get this book, the language was too complex, two stars,' that sort of thing. It takes a certain sort of an idiot to suppose it impossible that anyone could be smarter than them. I am not that sort of an idiot – there are some books that I read, understand completely, and loathe. There are others, of which The Confidence Man, His Masquerade is one, that I simply didn't put the effort and attention into to develop a serious understanding of (as an aside, this is one of the reasons I don't give any sort of numeric rating in these reviews). I don't honestly know if this is a good book or a bad book (putting aside the admittedly subjective nature of this question to begin with). I know that I didn't enjoy it, but that's not at all the same thing.

Persian Fire by Tom Holland – How many works of popular history do we need to dedicate to the Persian War? One more, apparently. Persian Fire is a first-class overview of one of the definitive conflicts in human history, nuanced, unbiased, giving useful background to the major players and the historical circumstances in which they lived. Of course, given that Herodotus is basically the sole source of all the information we have on this subject, you might as well just go read Herodotus and ignore the less plausible parts. But if you don't feel like that slog, this will serve.

High Wind in Jamaica by Ricchard Hughes – Hahahah! I loved this one. A vivid rebuke to the Victorian notion of childhood innocence, as well as a broader condemnation on the species entire. Also, funny, nasty, beautifully written, and surprising. A group of children are captures by a band of second-rate pirates off of the Jamaican shore circa 1880, and chaos and violence ensues, though not of the sort which one would expect. I can't imagine anyone wouldn't get a kick out of this, I certainly did.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood – So this is the first Atwood book I ever read, and I gotta say, it did not blow the back of my head open. The writing is strong,the nested narrative is interesting, but taken as a whole it's a bit interminable. Really it seems like the better part of the first portion of the book, the long narration regarding the protagonist's childhood in a decaying mansion in rural Canada, could have been comfortably chopped. And the final reveal was one of those things that seemed kind of obvious to me from the beginning, almost to the point where one is confused as to whether the author was even trying to hide it. Probably a lot of this is having been regaled for so long with tales of Atwood's genius I found myself expecting something a little bit more exceptional.

Mystic Masseur by VS Naipaul – the story of a country Indian of second-rate intellect who, through genial good-humor and a serious of fortunate coincidences becomes renowned as a mystic healer and later as a political representative in post-colonial India, Naipaul's first novel is hysterically funny and vividly cruel. Naipaul is the essential misanthrope, a cultural chameleon who seems to find very little to like anywhere he visits, from Indonesia to India to Alabama. But he clearly reserves a special contempt for Trinadad, his country of birth, and the Indian population thereof, amongst whom he was raised. In this and the more famous House for Mr. Biswas he portrays them as being utterly ignorant and without principles of any kind. Naipaul's ear for dialogue and his sense for the essential hollowness of people's conceits are on full display here, although the relentless negativity does become, well, a bit relentless.

Angel by Elisabeth Taylor – the story of a genre writer in the early 19th century who manages to harness her tremendous self-delusion into a force which makes her one of the most popular novelists in the country, Angel's critique of the publishing industry, writers and humans in general is devastatingly funny. Admittedly being a part of this industry probably heightened the appeal, but any way you slice it this book is a minor masterpiece, and I have no damn idea why the author is not more famous. New York Review of Book Classics doing killer work, as ever.

Ubiq by Phillip K. Dick – So look, I didn't like this at all. Sorry. I know I'm supposed to, but I just didn't. This is the sort of mystery novel where no amount of close attention can explain what is going on at any point in the narrative, where you basically just have to wait until one of the character's comes out and explains outright what's going on, and then the final explanation is basically just, 'oh, hey, God did it.' Dick is imaginative but his ideas are all kind of half-baked, they don't really cohere into anything and he has the horrible and exhausting habit of having the last page of every book go, basically, 'Everything I told you so far in the narrative is a lie!' Which is like, great, thanks, can I have my three hours back? No? Shit.'

Basti by Intizar Husain – Written by, apparently, modern Urdu's most beloved novelist, Basti is a dream of Pakistan, from it's bloody birth in partition to the war which gave birth to Bangladesh. Dreamlike, evocative, tragic, all around excellent. Do check it out.

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney – Right. I read this months ago and now I'm kind of struggling to remember anything specific about it. The hero is very tough but also kind of literary, or philosophical. He is a good investigator but feuds a lot with the other cops on the force. Glasgow seems like a pretty shitty place to live. I must have liked it more than I'm remembering because I went out and picked up the next two in the series pretty quickly. The writing was better than the cliched description I just gave made it sound.

The Papers of Tom Veitch by William McIlvanney – Yes. Uhhhhhh... I think like a year has passed and he's divorced his wife at this point? Honestly for the life of me I can't remember anything about this. Glasgow doesn't improve much in the interim. Laidlaw is more Laidlawish. I dunno.

Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney – Yeah, I think this was kind of a disappointment Laidlaw just kind of bitches endlessly about people and the system and blah blah blah. Why did I read all three of these in like a week last year? There must have been something I liked about them. Oh, well.

Actually, this just catches us up to Christmas. Shit. I'll get back to this at some point.

Books I Read 11/17/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This week I read:

The Rings of Saturn – Thanks to Stark Holborn for suggesting this/making for a melancholy Friday. A walking tour of the coast of England gives Sebold's nameless narrator the opportunity for flights of fancy centering, in a grand if oblique way, on entropy, on the collapse of all human endeavor beneath the implacable weight of time. Also on imperialism, war, evil, lots of shit. There's not really a plot per se but it makes for lovely, haunting, unhappy reading.

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon – wow, two negative reviews in two weeks, what a misanthropic prick I am becoming, I mean more so than usual. Then again, Pynchon hardly needs my praise.

Which is just as well, cause he ain't gonna get it. Bleeding Edge really crystallized to me a lot of the things I haven't liked about the other Pynchon books I've read. There's no denying he's got talent as a writer – the breadth of his erudition is impressive, and he's pretty funny. Some of his other tics –the oversize casts, his penchant for abruptly switching scenes – I find less impressive. But that's not my essential problem with Pynchon. My problem with Pynchon is, quite simply, I don't think he has fuck all of value to say.

Pynchon's abiding concern is with these infinitely vast conspiracies and the individuals who, consciously or unconsciously, struggle against them. The first time I read this, in Vineland I think or maybe Inherent Vice, I thought, that's pretty funny, haha, he's got a real talent for this wheel within wheel thing. The second time I read it I thought, OK, I got where you're going, not a fan of the CIA, Republicans are bad, we're all clear here, let's move along. The third time (I'm not counting V or Gravity's Rainbow which are a bit less on the nose) was Bleeding Edge, and I really fucking hated it. Unlike the top two Bleeding Edge deals directly with contemporary political events (the book is set around 9/11) and in doing so it revealed the fundamentally hollow nature of his worldview. Of course, Pynchon never goes so far as to outright posit that 9/11 was a conspiracy hatched by some faction of the US government, but then, Pychon never explains the underlying nature of any of his conspiracies, preferring to leave the reader with a vague soupy murk of suspicion that leaves the moral decency of his characters in sharper relief. He hints at a conspiracy behind the destruction of the twin towers, however, which is a) kind of insulting if you take it all seriously, but b) even if you don't, still highlights the unseriousness of Pynchon as an author.

Because here's the thing – Pynchon's conceit is bullshit. I wish there was some evil fat white man in a room somewhere dictating human events! It would mean there's a hand on the tiller, and someone has the power and incentive to keep the world humming along in its imperfect, flawed, cruel fashion. But there isn't, and no one does. Our leaders (yes, even the leaders of your disliked political party!) are not secret geniuses, nor are they being ordered around by shadowy men who are themselves secretly geniuses. It's just a bunch of arrogant, flawed, foolish men, making ill-considered decisions that don't benefit anyone because they misjudged the circumstances on the ground at the time. The US didn't go into Iraq in some secret double blind to bump up Haliburton stock, we did it because Bush had an image of himself as being the second coming of Churchill and he was too arrogant to spend some time reading up on the political history of the region he was about to invade. And we all went along with it because we were scared and angry and wanted to hit someone, especially if it actually wasn't so much us hitting someone as it was members of our all volunteer army – we got the best of both worlds, the feeling of self-righteous strength without all of that having to stumble around in the desert and get sand in our eyes.

Enough with the politics. My point being, this recurring theme of Pynchon is a lazy, inaccurate vision of humanity and human existence, doing nothing to further our understanding of the political order or of the reality in which we live. Sometimes it takes five books to realize you don't like a writer – it took me that long for Pynchon, but I'm tapping out here.

Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon – Yeah, fun. I mean it was OK. Maigret is tough and mean and fun to follow along with, but the story itself is kind of nothing and there are a lot of evil Jews running around doing their evil, Jewy business, and at points the whole thing got a bit too Bulldog Drummond for me. God I hate those books. Anyway. Still not entirely clear on why these are held in such immense esteem. Do they get stronger?

Books I Read 11/12/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This week I read:

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk – Fun! Just fun all around, Indiana Jones types wandering through Central Asia and snatching up the treasures of long lost civilizations. A quick and enjoyable read.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti – As a rule, I really don't like to write negative reviews. There are two reasons for this; the first is as a matter of aesthetic principal. As a youth I can remember thinking that the understanding/appreciation of an art form – what might broadly be described as 'having taste' – consisted largely of sharpening one's sense of contempt for the vast body of work in that particular form, and of being able to convey that distaste in a vicious and entertaining manner (we might call this the Pitchfork model). But in fact, this is the absolute opposite of what a true critical sensibility really entails – what would we say of a good critic who exclusively enjoys Italian food, or who loathes sushi? A competent critic is able to move beyond their inclinations to appreciate a wide variety of genres, to say, yo, Ghostface Killah is a hell of a rapper, and, also, Gillian Welch has a great voice.

The second reason is essentially personal. A sort of invisible line is crossed when you write your first book, and start to see your name on things, and realize, 'shit, these authors I've spoken of are not abstractions but concrete, living human beings, and not just targets of abuse.' It would be one thing if I were a professional reviewer, and responsible, at least in theory, to the people reading my reviews. But I'm not, and have no such obligation. I've had days made worse by a negative review of a stranger – not much worse, not dramatically worse, but still, slightly worse, and I would just as soon not pass that injury onward.

Also, as a professional, there are, shall we say, political concerns – either the target of your opprobrium is more popular than you, in which case your dislike is sure to be seen as a simple case of sour grapes, or the target is less popular, in which case you are acting as a bully, an abhorrent activity regardless of the circumstances. In short, I prefer only to speak ill of another author's work if they are a) dead or b) so popular as to make my dislike irrelevant, and preferably both.

So I can only hope that the release of Ligotti's works in this Penguin omnbius edition signals he has reached a level of success that the following not particularly kind review will have no effect on him or his career. (it helps also that he will almost certainly never read this).

Enough preamble. This is not at all a terrible book. If you were to compare it to every other work of horror released this year I feel confident it would be in the top quarter. But that's really about the best that can be said about it, in my own opinion. It is not groundbreaking, it is not brilliant, it is not even particularly excellent. Ligotti seems to operate entirely or almost entirely within the framework which Lovecraft devised, albeit with an improved level of prose (admittedly, damnation with faint praise). Virtually every tale in this collection might be summed up as 'too-eager seeker of esoteric knowledge falls afoul of alien forces which live just below the surface of the universe'. There are no surprises here – any remotely observant reader can deduce the ending of most of these stories from the opening sentences. At a certain point I started to find the thing kind of terribly repetitive, the endless descriptions of visions that can't be described/colors that can't be named/feelings that can't be expressed/nameless lands where shadows lurk/etc.

It is a constant source of curiosity to me whom the literary establishment chooses to laud as exemplary. There is something arbitrary, even absurd about it, like a vegetarian reviewing a steak house. How else can one explain the veneration of an utter mediocrity like Murakami, a second-rater in terms of prose, narrative and depth of thought? Or that Gene Wolfe has not entered the canon as firmly as Borges? Unfortunately, after reading this compilation I came to feel firmly that Ligotti is undeserving of the laurels currently being planted on him. One man's opinion, but there it is.

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary – a breezy, readable history of the Muslim world – indeed, perhaps too breezy. This is probably too extensive a topic to overview in so brief a fashion, and though Ansary does an admirable and even handed job of providing a broad overview of 1200 odd years of human history, at times, particularly as we get closer to modernity, I felt the subject was getting short shift. Also, I found the prose occasionally more talky than was appropriate, and I caught enough minor errors to worry about what I was missing (for instance – Ansary blames the Sepoy rebellion on the British greasing their rifle cartridges with the pork and beef fat, though in fact these cartridges were never distributed, and it was the Brits ham-handed response to the Sepoy's fear of this indignity which provided the spark for a long simmering powder keg. A small point, but not an irrelevant one.) In short, it's a good starting point for someone who has spent little time on the subject, but a more experienced reader would probably do better to look elsewhere.

Now I am Reading: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebold

Books I read 11/4/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This week I read:

The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon – a slick little crime novel in the Raymond Chandler mold. Inspector Maigret of the Parisian police is a decent man in an ugly world, where the weak are oppressed by the strong, where sin follows us forever, where...right, you get the picture. But actually I love this kind of thing so I didn't at all mind this one. Cleverly plotted also, which many of them are not. I'll pick up the next when I get round to it.

Were there swords: No.

Endangered Species by Gene Wolfe – hey, did you know I was a Gene Wolfe fan? Well, you're about to hear it again. This is not at all the best retrospective collection of Gene Wolfe's stories (not shockingly, that honor goes to self-selected The Best of Gene Wolfe), and if you are new to Wolfe's short fiction you are better off starting there. All the same this is very,very strong, with barely a misstep in five hundred pages. The plaintive stories are sad and wondrous, the scary stories are brutal and nasty, all the stories are strange, clever, and utterly unique.

Were there swords: Here and there, I think.

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad – the tale of a revolution in a turn of the century bannana republic, and the eponymous (anti)hero is caught within it is fascinating on a number of different levels. Conrad is a keen observer of human nature at its most brutal and grand, and his genius lies in combining the modern psychological novel with the bones of an adventure story. Having spent much of his life as a sailor and general adventurer, Conrad's books have an authenticity that comparable works lack, and though he in fact never spent any time in South America, the cast of characters which populate this book seem realistic in their arrogance, foibles and heroism. Moreover the structure of the novel itself is peculiar, at times frustrating and times rather wondrous. Is is slippery and illusive, constantly expanding to describe the background and motivations of different characters, and it makes a deliberate effort not to provide the sort of narrative pay-offs which your typical book of this sort would offer. The first fifty pages are a bit of an up hill slog, but it pays off if you stick with it.

Were there swords: I dunno, I guess. I think this is the last week I'm going to do the 'were there swords' thing. This isn't funny anymore.

Now I am reading: Dunno, gotta head to the Strand tomorrow.

Books I Read 10/27/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This week I read:

The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky – This Dostoevsky character, I tell you, why hasn't anyone ever heard of him? Wait. What? Oh, everyone has. Appropriately enough, then. Generally considered one of his lesser works both in size and merit, the Double is nonetheless an excellent if bitter little read, dealing with many of the issues which Dostoevsky would develop to greater degree in his future works. Madness, persecution, identity, all these cheery sorts of things. Golyadkin senior is a functionary in the classic Dostoevsky mode, which is to say, petty, miserable, grasping, desperate for social recognition, weak-willed, venal, too cowardly to be very much of anything. (It would not be for more than a century that the west would begin to use this archetype in fiction). His position is usurped by the arrival of Golyadkin junior, physically identical but possessed of the selfishness and easy social manners which Golyadkin senior wishes he possessed. Or, alternatively, Golyadkin is simply going insane. Like all Dostoevsky, it's very funny in a terrible way, and also like all Dostoevsky, it's a bit of a slog. Needless to say it is also quite brilliant.

Were there swords: Not a one.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind – Ha! This one was a ton of fun. The story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born without a scent or a moral consciousness whatsoever, but blessed with a superhuman sense of smell, and the atrocities he wreaks in 18th century France. Gorgeously written, an adult fairy tale of the most fiendish sort. A great Halloween read, sent a nasty little chill up my spine. Highly recommended.

Were there swords: I mean, not really. Not in the sense of people having sword fights or whatever.

The Infernals by John Connolly – I quite like John Connolly's stuff, even if he once said bad things about my beloved Jim Thompson on a panel on noir we were both on. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU JOHN? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Anyway, this is a fun little book, and a good seasonal read. I didn't exactly deliberately pick Halloween appropriate reads deliberately, but it seems to have worked out that way and I'm happy it did. I'll pick up the next in the series the next time I get the chance.

Were there swords: The demons hit each other with some, but it was mostly in the background. Still, I'm going to say yes.

The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes – Tons of fun! A history of the19th century's fanatical religious movements, pseudoscientific dogmas, cranks, humbugs, and general lunatics, written in the early 20th century. (Sidenote: there anything more fun than reading a history book written in an earlier era? It's like getting two books for the price of one, because you get the added delight of trying to figure out how the prejudices of the writer's age reflect his opinion on the period in discussion, as well as the opportunity to question your own. Anyhow.) Seldes does a fabulous job of tying together everything from the revival movement of the Great Awakening to mid-century obsession with phrenology, showing how each eroded what was the bedrock foundation of Calvinist theology which the country was initially imbued with. Really enjoyed. As always, the Goddamn New York Review of Book is doing Goddamn great work. Goddamn. Also -- what a great fucking title.

Were there swords: No swords.

Right Now I Am Reading: A Gene Wolfe short story anthology, and ain't I lucky?

Books I read 10/20/15

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I Read:

Peace by Gene Wolfe – A new favorite. Shit, do I love Gene Wolfe. Full review here.

Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes – I really don't know why this guy isn't more famous. First, you've got the pedigree – so far as I can tell the only black crime writer during the golden age of noir, friend of James Baldin, etc. – which alone would get him a peek. And on that whole end of things, he holds up nicely, offering an unflinching, indeed brutal, view on racial politics in New York during the tumultuous years of the 1960's. Himes's is a world in which everyone is pretty terrible, white or black (though the blacks have a better excuse), in which greed and barbarity are the operating motivations behind virtually everyone's actions irrespective of race. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones are Harlem's top cops, working to keep black Harlem from exploding in the face of the white power structures, and the white power structures from brutalizing its inhabitants as much as possible. There is a lot of pistol whipping in this novel, to put it another way.

But apart from the whole racial aspect of it, Himes just has a really interesting narrative style. Coffin and Gravedigger disappear for long portions of their books, and indeed Himes excels best when he is following around the criminals they are attempting to catch, in this case a two-big conman using the 'back to Africa' moment to try and dupe Harlemites out of their hard-earned money. The plot itself is more coherent than your average Chandler and less coherent than your average Ross McDonald, but it's fast and brutal and fun and even perhaps a bit more than that. Recommended.

Were there swords: No, but there's gunfights and fisticuffs of all sorts. Also, lots of sex.

Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch – So Iris Murdoch is a very well-regarded novelist, and I was excited to try her out, and she's got a pretty big oeuvre, and this isn't one of the more famous ones, and maybe I would have been better off starting somewhere else. Because this is kind of a crap book, I don't know what else to say. It's sappy and melodramatic but also really boring. There's a ton of description of how the characters are feeling, just page after page of exposition. The prose is not horrid, but it's not particularly noteworthy. Honestly I struggled to finish it. I'll give her another shot down the road, maybe this just wasn't for me.

Were there swords: This is very much not a sword-fighting book. Sorry.

Right now I am reading: Perfume, by Patrick Suskind

Books I read 10/13/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I read:

Dhalgren by Samul. R. Delany – Dhalgren has elicited extremely strong reactions both for and against it; Gibson wrote the forward to my addition, and clearly holds it in immense esteem. Phillip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison famously loathed it. It is deliberately sort of impossible to describe, but a thumbnail sketch of a story is part of the convention of a book review and I'll abide by it. Very basically, it is the story of an unnamed protagonist (referred to as Kid or Kidd or the Kid, though this is not his name) who comes to visit a city called Bellona which has suffered some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe, the exact nature of which is left unclear though in addition to largely emptying the city of people and destroying most vestiges of civic life it has also upended basic laws of time and causality. It doesn't exactly have a plot beyond that. Kid wonders around a while, he meets people, he has lots of graphic sex. He spends some time moving the last remaining bourgeoisie family in the city into a new apartment building. He becomes the head of a gang of miscreants. He writes poetry. He has long discussions with another poet and an astronaut. That's about the sum of it.

It is, needless to say, not a typical genre novel, but it's also not quite as strange as it is made out to be. It's far more comprehensible than a lot of other post-modernist texts (I'm looking at you, Gravity's Rainbow). There is one main character and most of the text is, in and of itself, fairly coherent. That is to say that while it doesn't have a narrative in the normal sense, and it's sort of unclear why things are happening and even when they are supposed to take place within the larger narrative it's also fairly easy to understand what's happening at any given point.

There are two kinds of post-modernist texts; the first, far the rarer, is one which is difficult to understand because the author is so much smarter than you are, and has worked so hard to obscure his meanings. Ulysses is the ultimate example of this – if you chose to spend months with critical texts, and work through each sentence, you could understand what exactly he is trying to get at, figure out all the obscure allusions and metaphor. The other type is a book which is difficult because the author himself does not really understand what is going on, or at least he has written a book which no amount of time or effort could entirely decipher. Dhalgren is the latter – there is no key which will allow you to determine the hidden meaning of the text. Indeed I am not convinced there really is one – it is hallucinogenic, it is dreamlike.

But this isn't exactly a bad thing – the point, so far as I could gather, of Dhalgren is more to elicit certain feelings from the reader than it is to be completely understood. I read it as, in essence, a vast commentary on the anarchic 60's living of which Dhalgren was a part, a sort of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but with more fighting. Also, unlike Tom Wolfe, Samuel Delany does not more or less openly loathe his protagonists. The descriptions of the gang that the Kid runs towards the end of the book in particular had a real feel to them. Delany supposedly had a rather checkered history and the 'nest' amongst which Kid lives seems to have the strong echo of reality.

Dhalgren is about a lot of other things too, however, and those subplots don't all come together as well. One major theme is the way in which writing happens, and the mind and life of a writer, and frankly I did not find this to be one of the stronger portions of the book. Likewise, the shocking sex scenes very quickly stop being shocking and become outright banal, as shocking sex scenes often to do, until you get to the point where you're skimming a protracted gang-bang scene out of sheer boredom.

I'm honestly not sure I could recommend it to anyone, given that it's so long, and not super easy to read, and if you were willing to put the time and effort into something there are bluntly put a lot of better books you could be reading. All that said, gun to my head I'm on Gibson's side. The book has a real pulse to it, some energy, and if you can overlook the fact that it's not doing a lot of the things a book is supposed to do, it's actually surprisingly enjoyable.

Were there swords? There were bladed weapons, does that count?

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain – This is an easy one – run out and read it. I have no idea why it took me this long to read a James M. Cain book, but I assure you it won't take nearly so much time to get to the next one. The story of an insurance agent and a soon-to-be-widow and their murderous plot is as sharp and brutal and mean and blunt as it was when it was written. Tons of fun, strongly worth a read. Get to it.

Were there swords? Nope, no swords.

Right Now I Am Reading: Peace, by Gene Wolfe.

Books I read 10/6/2015

Today is a special edition of Books I Read This Week, because it takes up three weeks instead of 1, and also I drank a lot before writing it. More than usual, I mean. Not that it matters, no one reads this, it's just something I use to keep track of the things I read and because I'm a glutton for recording things. Why are you reading this? Don't you have something better to do, like bang on a trash can or howl at the moon? Anyhow...

The Last 3 Weeks I Read:

Tun-Huang by Yashushi Inoue – yeah....uhhhh, so this was three weeks ago and I can only faintly remember it. That's not a great sign I guess. It's about a period of Chinese history which I knew nothing about before reading it, so that's a plus. I admit that apart from that it basically was not of any interest to me. Seems to be highly regarded, so there's a fair chance that I missed what was special about it, but either way.

Were there swords: Yes, actually, but it was still pretty dull.

The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin – a cute historical fairy tale, but again it didn't really do a lot for me. I understand that a lot of Pushkins appeal is that he had a critical role in the elevation of Russian as a literary language, though reading it in translation that doesn't really do anything. Also it seems to have been a very early example of the now pretty ubiquitous historical fiction genre, so there's that.

Were there swords: Yeah, there were swords, but you couldn't exactly call it riveting. Still two books with swords in a week! I'm on a roll!

The Misanthrope and Other Plays by Moliere – the titular play is pretty hysterical, and beyond that a rather cutting critique of human misbehavior. A lot of the others are just silly romps, neatly executed but not much more than that. Can someone who understands this subject better explain to me why the English plays of this period and even earlier are so much richer and more complex than this? Even the Misanthrope, which again is a lot of fun, really can't possibly be compared to say, Midsummer Night's Dream or what have you. Thoughts? Anyone? Bueller?

Were there swords: Yes, but used for comedic effect.

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya – Man, I really liked this one. Sort of a post-apocalyptic narrative but actually a really brutally mean comment on the pointlessness of literature. The prose is extraordinarily inventive, both in terms of the language itself and of the viewpoint provided by Benedikt, the idiot manchild and protagonist/anti-hero. Having read so many endless self-serving paeans to the power of literature to ennoble the human spirit, there's something really hysterically funny about the idea of a book the essential set up of which being how reading making a person more barbaric and horrible. I just loved this book, it made me laugh constantly. Between this and the also fantastically kid Ice Trilogy, I'm starting to wonder why the Russians have all the good scifi writers?

Were there swords: No.

Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck – yeah, this was a fun one. Reck was a German arch-conservative and constant, bitter opponent of the Nazis who would end his life tragically shortly before the end of the war. With extraordinary clarity and depth of insight, he identifies the apocalyptic course which German society had embarked on, a madness which he identifies as being the ultimate product of the French revolution and of modernity generally. This is the angriest book you'll ever read, 200-odd pages of burning, lucid hatred for the moral degradation of Rcck's beloved homeland, of the apalling brutality and stupidity of the Nazis and of a society which is willing to follow them blindly off a cliff, and to lead much of the rest of Europe there with them. Excellent, worth reading, terribly sad.

Were there swords: This whole were there swords conceit is not as funny as I thought it would be.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household – this was a ton of fun. Our unnamed protagonist, an English sports hunter of wealth, good manners, impeccable pedigree, superhuman strength, giant balls, etc, gets captured by the secret service of an unnamed country (context clues suggest Germany) who (mistakenly?) suspect him of trying to assassinate their leader (Hitler). One of those very first-rate thrillers (reminded me of Forstyhe in this) where everything makes really perfect sense, the author has seriously considered all of the events and the book would have served as a useful roadmap for escaping Germany or the London police or whatever. Better still is the very gradual reveal of the hero's motives. It whiled me through a very rainy Saturday, for which I'm thankful.

Were there swords: No, but there were rifles and ballistae and killing generally.

The Jewish War by Josephus – is it maybe kind of stupid to criticize a work of classical history as being dry? Well, I just did. Basically it's just Josephus's immensely self-serving explanation of why it was OK for him to turn traitor and join up with the Romans rather than getting himself killed like all the other Jews did. This was a pretty far way from Thucydides.

Were there swords: There were a shitload of swords. There were swords all over the damn place, seriously. If you're looking for swords, BOOM, here you go. Enjoy yourself.

Right Now I'm Reading: Nothing, but I got a Samuel Delaney book in the hopper.

Books I read 9/15/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I read:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin – Coming to Le Guin rather belatedly. She has a rare gift for portraying the complexities of alien civilization (alien in the sense of being unlike our own) without devolving into agit prop. I confess to feeling, however, it was more of an intellectual exercise in a certain sense then it was a real comment on the nature of humanity. At least with Left Hand of Darkness, the differences in basic human interaction were explained by the native peoples being dual-sex. By contrast in this one, certain core aspects of the behavior of the Libertarian planet did not ring true to me. It's hard to imagine any amount of education/indoctrination could breed out the basic selfishness and violence which is at the core of the human animal (I'm a Hobbesian – can you tell?) Very interesting all the same, I can understand why this book/her work is held in such high regard.

Were there swords: No, but there were aliens!

The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platanov: No one does despairing magical realism like the Soviet-era Russians. Foundation Pit was strange, horrifying, immensely depressing, like a lot of the Stalin-era books that were banned and have found posthumous release only in this century. Was it good? I guess it was. Did I enjoy it? Not at all. Did I understand it? To a certain extent – I admit that I didn't have the energy to sift through it to the degree that it probably deserved, but in fairness, I have at this point read many thousands of pages about the horrors of communism during this period. Was this a useful book review? No, it was not. Sorry, but there we are.

Were there swords: Absolutely no swords.

Dr. No by Ian Fleming: With the exception of Casino Royale, I never really enjoyed any of the Bond movies – dated as all hell. A toupeed Connery, half-baked puns, etc. Still, there have been innumerable bad movies made from good books, and prior to last week I had sort of vaguely assumed that original Iam Fleming books fell into this category.

Incorrect. False. Wrong altogether. Dr. No is an absolutely fetid pile of crap – it is a shit sandwich, it is falling face down into an open sewage tent. It is stupid from top to bottom, it is irredeemably horrible. I never give up on a book and I very nearly gave up on this one. Every bit of it is an inane adolescent fantasy – the writing is terrible, the pacing is execrable. There is nothing interesting about bond, there is nothing interesting about Dr. No, there is just nothing at all interesting in this anywhere at all.

Sidenote: I'm not the sort of person who criticizes works of a past generation for being racist – I assure you, you hold opinions your grandchildren will find horrifying – but Dr. No deserves particular opprobium not only for being casually racist but for being lazily racist. This is a book in which Bond, investigative genius that he is, realizes that a secretary working for the home office is in cahoots with the villain because, get this, she, like Dr. No, is also of Asian descent! Zing! A riddle wrapped in an enigma, my friends! I hated, hated, hated, hated this book.

Where there swords: No, but you'd need to hold one to my throat to get me to read another Ian Fleming book.

Anatomy of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Strange, sad, funny, the back of my book compares this to Borges and Beckett and that sounds about right. About half of the stories missed me, but about half of them – one about a priest given control over all of the world's cracks, one about a man who tries to bite his own elbow, and the societal rage this sets off – I absolutely adored. Definitely recommended.

Were There Swords: No.

The Centurions by Jean Larteguy: Held in immensely high esteem within the Special Forces community around the world, The Centurions tells the story of a group of French paratroopers who are captured after the debacle at Dien Bien Phu and survive the communist camps only to return home and discover themselves estranged from capitalist, bourgeois France. I've actually been looking for this one for years, as being a classic text on the mind state of today's all-volunteer army, and it did not disappoint. Although it did depress—Larteguy's portrait of a society utterly consumed by hedonistic excess and bereft of a moral code; and of the men sworn to defend that society, who defend but are secretly loathed by it; both hit home in uncomfortable ways. I told Myke Cole he should read it, and he told me he was reading the Builders already, and I said this was better than the Builders, and he told me that was the sort of thing I shouldn't write in public, and then I went ahead and ignored him. Anyway – this was really excellent, deserving of the regard it is held in by a small portion of the population, definitely worth trying to find.

Were there swords: No, but there was some well-written, unheroic, realistic-seeming action, as would be appropriate for a book of this sort.

Acme Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware: My first encounter with the man, and I can see why he's so highly regarded. A very good pulp sci fi story and a strong digression into the personal history of the man who wrote it, both making use of the format in ways which I was unfamiliar with and enjoyed.

Were there swords: No.

Terror Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T.) by Benjamin Marra: A one note joke which quickly falls sour. The art is nothing really to speak of, and the hyper-stylized, childlike masculinity warrants a chuckle but not more than that. Not good.

Were there swords: Actually, There's one right there on the cover! Much good may it do you, you fucking dick. Yeah, I'm talking to you -- who the hell reads this shit anyway? Bring it on! You don't scare me!

Right Now I Am Reading: The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin.

Books I read 9/8/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I read:

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane by Frederick Starr: Pretty much as the subtitle says – an intellectual history of Central Asia during that period when it was dominating the philosophical, mathematical, medical and scientific firmaemnt.. Always interesting to read about a part of the world of which I know only a little, of which Central Asia is at the top of the list. Really made me want to take off on my do-before-I-die trip through the 'stans. Somewhat dry, but that's to be expected given the nature of the work. It also gave a lot of pushback to the Mongols-as-civilization-builders meme which has gotten a lot of play in academic circles in recent years, though to be blunt I have absolutely no capacity to mediate in this particular dispute. Interesting if you have the time.

Were there swords: There were not a lot of swords, no.

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima: Best known as this point in the West for the least successful coup attempt in the history of mankind (worth a Google, I promise), Mishima is still generally considered one of the great 20th century Japanese writers, and one can see why. This book is beautifully written, even in translation the prose sparkles. I admit that the story itself, which is sort of a lost-love story and sort of about Mishima's obsession with suicide/brevity/emotional purity/the transient nature of perfection, did not resonate in any particularly strong way with me. It reminded me a lot of the German romantics, so if Rilke etc. is your bag this might do it for you. Maybe if I'd read it 15 years ago the passion in the novel would have affected me more strongly, as it was I felt a little bit like, ugh, grow the fuck up kids. Anyway, just me.

Were there swords: No.

Doctor Frigo by Eric Ambler: Fucking Eric Ambler, man, fucking Eric Ambler. Best spy novelist ever, though the protagonists are never spies, just regular folk in over their heads. Very cleverly written, possessing a moral weight which more conventional novels in this genre can only dream of, never allwoing geopolitical concerns to outweigh the human element. Not his best (personally I would go with Judgment for Deltchev though there are lots of contenders) it's still pretty stellar, definitely worth a look.

Were there swords: Not really, but there's action of various sorts.

Right Now I Am Reading: As soon as I post this, I'm going to buy another beer and read Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which should be fun. Update: Bought beer early. 

Do I Write Dark Fiction?

I recommended a book to Mark Lawrence on twitter the other day, (Red Shift, in case you were wondering) commenting (in a positive sense) that it was quite bleak. A Facebook follower, alluding to the general darkness of Mark and my work, that if we think something as grim, it must truly be a nasty piece of business. I admit I was sort of taken aback – when I think of really bleak books, I'm thinking of Jim Thompson, or maybe the Gulag Archipelago, meditations on the nature of sin, which is to say the nature of man, not the sort of adventure novels for which I'm known. On the other hand, pretty much every review of my stuff that I've ever read, positive or negative, has commented on it being very dark, not-your-parents-sort-of-fantasy, that kind of thing.

So I got to thinking – just what kind of books do I write?

The Low Town stuff is, on the surface at least, quite grim. For those of you who haven't read it (and really, if you haven't, please do, the rent man has been banging loudly at my door these last days) the protagonist is a (nearly) amoral sociopath who makes his living selling drugs, conning the stupid, brutalizing the weak. He curses, he snarls, he snorts the secondary world equivalent of cocaine. He kills a lot of people with bladed weapons. What morals he holds are hidden so deep that even he seems barely aware of them. His past history, gradually revealed over the course of the trilogy, is filled with acts of betrayal, blasphemy and depredation. Compared to classic fantasy, with its paladins, white horses, shining swords and swooning maidens, it certainly has more of an edge to it. So far as I can tell, there's no sex to be found in Middle Earth, let alone people paying for it, and although the exact chemical composition of 'pipe weed' remains unclear, it presumably isn't what we would all hope it to be.

All that said, and for my money, Low Town isn't really dark, despite bad things happening to all of the characters pretty much all the time. The narrative is constructed in such a fashion that you can always be rooting for the Warden, even if it's just because his opponents are so much worse. And while he does terrible things, he's doing them for sympathetic reasons, and you sort of get the sense that he regrets it in some distant way. The Warden is, in short, something of a genre cliché, if, I hope, a well written one. This is not the Sheriff in The Killer Inside me – you are meant to root for the Warden, to hold out hope for his redemption.

But even if you didn't – if you found him to be irredeemable, or simply too unpleasant to want to spend an entire novel with (as some readers did) the book is all the same so clearly in the classic genre mode, that it seems sort of impossible to take it seriously. From the frequent scenes of physical violence, which are described in intimate detail, to the highly stylized dialogue, which is sharper then any normal conversation, it is clear that the narrative is taking place in a world which, beyond its obvious fictional characteristics, is not the same as our own. Too much happens too quickly, reality is made subject to the deadheads of a fast-moving plot. In short, even a largely unobservant reader will implicitly understand that they are consuming a story which has only a very loose connection to thei own lives. It is difficult for me to imagine there are many readers working their way through Low Town and grappling, with the moral struggles facing the Warden. The day to day concerns of modern existence – alienation, over-consumption, good old fashioned ennui – have little reflection in the Warden's own troubles. His misfortunes are entertaining, a happy distraction from our own, more complicated, less solvable, problems.

On another, deeper level, the fact that Low Town coheres to a traditional structure, however grim that might be, is in itself a source of comfort to the reader. Stories are attempts to force a narrative pattern on a world which steadfastly resists it. It is far easier to accept that we are the victim of tragedy, one of our own making or one decreed upon us by grim fate, than it is to admit that life essentially consists of random or seemingly random events, that boulders fall on us from the sky, that bullets catch heroes and cronies alike, that the only purpose or meaning is that which we create for ourselves, dependent and not external to us.

A book like Red Shift, by contrast, which is of genre but not within it, works deliberately to confuse and confound the reader. The perspective changes abruptly and with little warning, terrible violence is introduced without preamble or postscript, the dialogue is confusing and somewhat obtuse, and all of these work to unmoor the reader from their usual perspective. In its refusal to give clear answers, in its confusing and opaque structure, Red Shift mimics the nature of human existence in a more accurate and thus more discomfiting way then more conventional genre fiction.

In short, the the things I write are satisfying, even if they aren't happy. That's my feeling – what's yours?

Books I Read 4/28/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I Read:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor: Patrick Leigh Fermor, when he was eighteen, decided to walk from London to Constantinope, and this is the first third of that trip. I suppose this isn't quite Marco Polo but amongst travel writers in the 20th century it reigns pretty much untouched.. To have been able to explore this last fragment of pre-modern Europe – Germany before it was turned to ash, Central Europe before fifty years of a Soviet yoke! – is something that no serious traveler cannot look upon without undisguised jealousy. And there is a great deal here that any backpacker, even those of us in this dull and benighted and progress-throttled modern age, can appreciate. The sudden fortuitous kindness of strangers, the stunning, childlike jubilation one feels when one is utterly alone and untraceable in some strange place.

On to the downside. Fermor is tremendously erudite, which can be marvelously fun when you are dealing with intersecting interests (the 30 year war, the early migrations of peoples in Europe) bot at other times can grow quite ponderous, as for instance the phenomenally rococo descriptions of steeples and church naves. It has to be admitted even by a fundamentally positive reviewer that Fermor's linguistic excesses grow wearisome. Three times in the book Fermor has occasion to use the term Caracol, a cavalry maneuver which utilized the pistol and which saw brief use during the Wars of Religion but swiftly fell out of favor as reducing the shock value of the charge itself and generally being less valuable than just riding up and sabering people. It has a lovely sound to it but is unknown except amongst specialists and probably not the thing a good editor should let slip past. In any event, in none of the instances does Fermor appear to use it properly, but rather as a simple euphemism for ride, which is really just bad writing all around. I only harp on this because it was one of the innumerable obscured words in the book that by coincidence I happened to be familiar with, and because I can't help but think that many of these linguistic bric-a-brac, if investigated might reveal a similarly dubious provance.

Put another way – were I more clever, Fermor might appear less so.

Happily, I am not that clever, and anyway when Fermor returns to his narrative, winking (asexual?) trysts with German maidens beneath the claws of Nazi SS leches, making a living as a professional portrait artist in Vienna, being invited into the castles of the fading Dual-Monarchy nobility, it is impossible not to enjoy yourself. I would certainly have picked up the next two in the trilogy if I wasn't about to follow Fermor's example (if, it goes without saying, in a less admirable and courageous fashion) and going traveling for a while, and thus can only take giant books which will take me a long time to finish. It might also be the reason why next Tuesday you don't get a blog entry. Heartbreaking, I know.

Were there swords: No, there were no swords.

Books I Read 4/21/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I Read:

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge: So after last week's debacle, after I laid that goose egg, after the rare route in the lifelong battle against ignorance, I had hoped to return this week at double-speed. Alas. I only read the one book, and even then only barely. Part of this is because I'm under the gun with Those Below, and I'm moving out of my apartment, and I'm going traveling at the end of the month, and also for other reasons that don't need to be entered in on. But mostly because Unforgiving Years is not a page turner, not something to skim while defecating or half-read in a bar while eying a pretty girl. Simultaneously complex in language, structure, and thought, Unforgiving Years chronicles the terrible brutality of the years leading up to an immediately after WWII. It is loosely the story of Daria, a Soviet revolutionary struggling against the onslaught of Fascism while trying to survive Stalin's savage series of purges, although really this is to simplify the matter immensely.

It is a fantastic book. It is a minor masterpiece. It is very, very hard to read. The complexity of Serge's language and thought, the curious shifts in perspective—he has a habit of slipping seamlessly from one character to another so that you barely notice he has done so—are not easily comprehended, not even to a relatively capable reader. Moreover, the subject matter itself, which, though despairing, is not nihilistic, is similarly something of a challenge. The third portion of the novel in particular, which chronicles Daria's mission in war-ravaged Germany, is ferocious and disturbing, the imagery horrifying, the prose chaotic. Serge's perspective as true witness to war—he fought for the Red Army during the Russian revolution—offers an authentically tragic perspective on what is one of the darkest periods of human history, when the full potential of the industrial age has been turned towards the eradication of all that is decent and noble and innocent in humankind.

It took me a while, but it was worth it. And it got me thinking some about difficult literature, and of the things that books ask of us. Books can serve different purposes—to educate, to entertain, to enlighten, although the last I think it ultimately the most important. But revelation is not something which can be easily granted—it requires struggle, it requires sacrifice. The best books, in my opinion, are usually not the easy ones, not the downhill sprints (though they can be fun also). They're the rough ones, the ones that force us to stretch ourselves, the ones that stare back at us from our bedside tables contemptuously, challenging our attention. Unforgiving Years is one of these books, though a reader who makes the attempt will find not only a profound meditation on the nature of man, and on the foolish, formless optimism which is a requirement to avoid the weight of nihilism, but also a work of immense lyrical and aesthetic excellence. Highly recommended.

Were There Sword Fights: No, but there was some action. Although I mean, obviously, from the above you shouldn't expect a whiz-banger. Anyway.

Right Now I Am Reading: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and just loving it.

Books I read 4/14/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I Read:

Nothing, by no one. Not a damn thing. I read about 50 pages of one thing but 50 pages isn't a whole book. 50 pages isn't close to a book. Why? Laziness, essentially. Spring finally arrived in Brooklyn, green buds and smiling girls, and the sun returned also, you remember the sun, and also my brother and some friends came to visit, and I found I preferred to enjoy their collected company rather than keep my nose firmly into the terrifyingly grim if very well written Russian novel I'm am trying to read. So anyway, I didn't read anything. Were there sword fights: No, my life generally contains very few of these.

Right Now I Am Reading: I could tell you, but why would you trust me at this point?

Books I read 4/7/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I Read:

Last Call by Tim Powers – As a rule, I don't see the point in ever reviewing a book negatively. I'm not a professional reviewer, I don't have any obligation to anyone to try and present an impartial opinion, I'm obviously not playing any sort of role in a larger aesthetic and cultural discourse, and therefore saying anything bad about anyone else in a public forum just seems mean and cheap and nasty. Who cares? There are so many good books in the world, spend your time talking about them. At some point you start meeting these people and attaching the names on their books to hands you've shaken and smiling faces and people who seem altogether decent or who at least seem like people, trying to get through the day like all of us and why do you want to have done anything to even in some minor way add to their burdens? (I haven't ever met Tim Powers, I'm speaking abstractly at this point) But then again Tim Powers has sold about a million books and won every aware you can win, and will in all likelihood never see this review and so I don't feel quite as bad about it.

This is kind of a big build up especially because actually I pretty much liked Last Call, I just didn't like it to the degree that I thought I would given some of the other things he's written. Tim Powers is such an enormously imaginative writer, his stuff is always weird and clever in a way which the vast majority of the rest of us in the genre only distantly aspire to. And there's a lot of that on evidence in Last Call. The beginning is very mean and fierce, and the entire idea of stealing bodies and whatnot, the fortune teller, lots of fun bits. But not all the subplots work as well, and like a lot of these sort of things the early build up is more fun than the pay off. I dunno, endings are tough. It's not really fair because I went in comparing it to Declare which is just stunningly fucking cool, if you haven't read that stop reading this review and pick it up ASAP. And then after you're done that go ahead and read Last Call, because it's really quite good despite this damn-with-faint-praise thing I've been doing for about four hundred words now. The truth is that even one of Tim Power's lesser works is probably better than 90% of the rest of the stuff in the genre.

Unrelated to this, it's really weird that when you type 'Last Call' into goodreads the entire first page are for bodice rippers. Were There Sword Fights: No, but there was pretty much everything else. People get shot and there are magic fights and etc. So I think I'm going to count this one.

The Great Sea by David Abulafia– Do you have--(you might, what do I know, you're reading this blog post)--some interest in writing a work of high fantasy? Then this is exactly the sort of book you need to be reading. A sweeping history of human activity in the Mediterranean, going back to pre-history and extending up to the modern day, thoughtful in its conclusions and evocative in its language. Here is Leonidas at Hot Gates, here the bastard Don Juan saves the West at Lepanto, here Napoleon's hopes for an Egyptian empire go down in a hail of shot and splinter. Here false-Converso Jews scuttle through the trading ports of the levant, here the Ragusans plot and scheme against the Doges of Venice, here is the interplay of nations and cultures and languages on a vast scale. This is just absolutely enthralling stuff, a magisterial history, the sort of thing which one might look at in the moment before dying, nod their head, and drift off happily. Kudos to David Abulafia—this is worth every moment of the time it will take you to finish it. The best work of non fiction I've read in a long time. Were There Sword Fights: Not described in vivid detail, I guess, but there's a lot of battles.

Right Now I'm Reading: Yeah, nothing actually. I gotta pick something up tomorrow. Rjurik Davidson and I both promised we would read the others book ( after having already reviewed it) but I kind of suspect in the end we'll both prove to be liars. I'm insanely busy all of a sudden with work and moving out of my apartment and going back to being a vagabond again, and also finishing up Those Below, and don't have quite as much energy to throw into my studies. Which is not an excuse. Maybe I'll read the Mahabharata. I dunno.

Books I read 3/31/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

Last Week I Read:

Stoner by John Williams: First of all, can we talk about the goddamned New York Review of Books Classics? Can we please talk about the goddamned New York Review of Books Classics? We can? Great. These things are just fantastic, whomever is in charge of putting this collection together has done an immense good service to the reading public. I've been basically just buying any one of these that crosses my path in the last six months or so and they've all been great, virtually across the board, lesser known writers who's lack of fame is in no way related to the excellence of their works. God bless those guys/gals. Good stuff.

Right, where were we? Our eponymous hero, Stoner, is the son of Missouri dirt farmers who becomes a professor of English and then dies. Spoiler Alert. It's not exactly action packed, but it's beautiful and erudite and terribly sad, sad because the world is often kind of a sad place, even for people for whom nothing very bad happens, the quiet weight of day to day existence is often a heavy one and the book is a rare celebration of the strength required of all of us to carry it. I thought it was really lovely and I'd recommend it broadly. Were there sword fights: No. Not a lot really happens, like I said. But maybe still don't let that discourage you.

The Duke of Wellington's Military Dispatches by Arthur Wellesley collected by Charles Esdaile: I really have no idea what possessed me to read this, it was just entirely beyond my ken. I also have no idea how to review it—this is indeed the collected dispatches of Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, detailing various aspects of his Penninsular campaigns and Waterloo. It is of essentially no interest to anyone not a narrow specialist in the field, like very narrow, like which division went where on what day, which I am not at all. So, it was kind of a slog, and also for some reason I refused to stop reading it, and so most of my week reading-wise was eaten up by this. That's not it's fault though, really. Anyhow. Were there sword fights: God, I would have killed for a sword fight just to break up the monotony. But no, there were not really any sword fights.

Call for the Dead by John le Carré: After the last two books I really needed to read a book in which something happens. Of course the joke with le Carré is that lots of things tend to happen but always in the grayest sort of ways. I really enjoy le Carré, although sometimes he gets a bit too 'it was a rainy day in London and the sky was gray and there was mud everywhere and people's clothes were very drab and the steak was burnt and the tea was weak...' But then again any distinct voice carries the capacity for self-parody. Anyhow this is really burying the lede, I quite liked it, Smiley's first appearance though in a slightly different form than he would appear in the better developed Karla series. It's John le Carré's first book and you can definitely tell that, the theme's haven't quite asserted itself, there is some physical combat (which there virtually never is in the later stuff although I admit I enjoyed it, especially after the last two books I'd read) and it's all not quite as tight as some of the later stuff, but it's also a fiercely-paced 150 pages and a ton of fun. Strong recommendation. Were there sword fights: No but there are shootings and bludgeonings and generally action and that was enough.

Right Now I Am Reading:

Last Call by Tim Powers: And it's great.

Books I read 3/24/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

Last Week I Read:

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, translation by Donald Rayfield: A classic work of world literature I no longer need to lie about having read! Dead Souls is the story of Chichikov, a double-dealing antihero who travels through the provinces in an effort to purchase ownership recently deceased serfs, a MacGuffin which allows Gogol ample opportunity to skewer the foibles, pretensions, and general awfulness of the backwater nobility, Russia, and humanity generally speaking. The language is nuanced and rich and tons of fun, and by the standards of canonical Russian literature it's really quite breezy (admittedly, damning with faint praise). Of course, only part one was ever completed (supposedly Gogol destroyed the rest of what he had written shortly before his death) and whatever grand point he might have been building towards never really gets made— But still, really very laugh out loud funny, and although an informed reader will understand, in a broad way at least, what the plot behind the purchasing of all of these 'dead souls', still you have to appreciate the quite modern-seeming brilliance of not telling the reader what the hell is going on for more than two-hundred pages. Were there sword fights: No, the only sparring is verbal.

East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick: A grand an entertaining history of Russia's conquest and colonization of Siberia, from Ivan the Great to Stalin (chronologically if not morally distant). I learned some things I didn't know, I got some ideas for a sort of magical western novel that I might someday write, after I write about five other books and assuming I don't get hit by a car crossing the street this afternoon. A worthwhile read, all around. Were there sword fights: I mean, there aren't any literal descriptions of anyone going at it, but there's a fair bit of violence in the conquest of Siberia, as you might imagine, and the book doesn't stint. Speaking strictly, though, no, there weren't any sword fights.

Right Now I Am Reading: Stoner by John Williams, because I'm a glutton for punishment.

Books I read 3/17/2015

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

Last Week I Read:

War and Gold: A 500-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng: a perfectly acceptable history of 20th century finance, breezily written, coherent to a reasonably attentive reader without much prior knowledge of economics. In and of itself an admirable, if not particularly ambitious work. Lamentably, this is not at all how the book is marketed or presents itself. The first four hundred years alluded to in the subtitle are dispensed with in about fifty pages, and it really could not be said to deal with war to any particular degree, nor finance as an aspect of war. Still, I learned some things I didn't know before hand. Were there sword fights? No, it was not that sort of book.

Conquered City by Victor Serge: holy shit, this was a book. Victor Serge was the child of Anarchist revolutionaries who fought with the Reds in the Russian Civil War before breaking with Stalin and dying penniless and basically forgotten in Mexico. This story of the attempt of the Red Army to fend off the White in St. Petersburg in 1919 is fabulously good. With blistering if difficult prose he describes the thought processes of a menagerie of different characters on both sides of the struggle, die-hard Soviet Partisans and White Army hold-outs, peasants and prostitutes and bandits, all well-realized and clearly drawn from the author's own experience in the conflict. Excellent, all around. Were there sword fights? No, but there was a brief knife fight which I thought was done well.

The Caucasus: An Introduction by Thomas de Waal: as the title says. A good primer on a region of the world I am visiting in a month and half but didn't know much about. It seemed admirably even-handed given the complexity and diversity of the region, not that I'm really qualified to comment on that. On the other hand, often times you can read when a guy has an act to grind and if de Waal does I couldn't pick it up. Recommended. Were there sword fights: No, no sword fights.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett: so I guess probably you've heard of this guy. My first Pratchett, and I appreciate why people love him. Sort of a PG Wodehouse with dragons, which I mean entirely as a compliment. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Were there sword fights: Yeah, pretty much. I mean actually there weren't any sword fights that I can recall, but there were a lot of other swords of fights (bar brawls, dragon attacks, etc.) that I think we can put a check in the sword fight column.

Right Now I Am Reading:

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol: because it seems like the kind of thing a person should read before they die.

A Review of Those Above, by Rjurik Davidson

It had been said that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, though I hope to god this is not the case. The specifics of that long ago night in Brighton in which Rjurik Davidson and I decided that we not only were but, in some ineffable sense, always had been bitter arch-rivals need not be entered into, though it involved hard alcohol, straight-razors, and soft-boiled eggs. Having cruelly reviewed (though not actually read) Davidson's Unwrapped Sky over on his own blog, it seemed only fair to offer him a similar forum for a shrapnel-sharp, if utterly ill-informed, critique of my own work. It is as follows.

The thing is, I wanted to read Daniel Polansky’s novel, Those Above. I wanted to, in the same way that I wanted to eat the spicy chicken and rice from the roadside stall in Thailand. That memorable time in Bankok, the drifting aroma attracted me like a rat to refuse. I scurried forward, bought my little plastic tub of the stuff, and ate it in the gutter. The flavours! The aroma! The thrill of risk-taking! How little I understood, in those glory days when the world was young. No sooner had I finished than the stabbing pains began, deep in my stomach. There was a rusty jagged dagger, somewhere in my intestines. I broke into a sweat. Tsunamis of nausea washed over me. The world lost all center. Things fell apart. For close to a week I stumbled through life, sweating, weeping, despairing, declaring I would never face a Thai hospital. Never! You can see, then, that though I wanted to read Polansky’s new book, I stayed well away from its seductive and vicious attractions.

To begin with, take the title: Those Above. Obviously this isn’t a book about Gods now is it? I mean, that would be too predictable. No, it’s more likely to be about an alien species, who have come to enslave the human race, or perhaps enslaved it in the past and now we – or the lame, hobbled things passing for characters within – must rebel against them. Oh Lord, could there be anything more trite than some kind of neo-Marxist parable of class struggle? I mean, next thing I’ll discover that Those Above is some crude fantasy recasting of a late 19th Century revolution, influenced by the realists and existentialists, filled with ponderous philosophizing, its plot creaking like some lumbering pirate galley against the waters of his leaden political positions. Forgive me if I’m jumping to conclusions, having not, of course, read the book, but doesn’t it make you want to punch Polansky in the head?

You see, there was a time when I attended the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton. Across the room I spied what might have been mistaken for a tall, debonair New Yorker. Our eyes locked. In that baleful stare coming from across the room I immediately recognized my nemesis. He was the black to my white, up to my down, the evil to my good, the dunce to my genius. Oh Christ, I thought, who is this dastardly, bile-spitting, hate-filled fiend come straight from one of Lovecraft’s more adjective-filled tales? Oh yes, he can be charming and witty. Oh yes, he can write. But underneath, I understood, this was the type of man who read Evelyn Waugh. It was, of course Polanski – yes, Polanki with an ‘i’, because he likes to deny his relationship with his slightly less odious relative, Roman.

Why then should we be surprised that he should write a book like Those Above? A book filled with such a malevolent ideology that you should want to pluck out your eyes from the very first page, thus freeing you from the horrid labour of having to read it. But knowing Polansky, he would only send you an audio-book version of it, the better to send you towards the knitting needles, your eardrums quivering with fear. Yes, I’m sure the world building is fantastic, if you like that kind of thing. I’m sure the plot builds to ever more intense crescendos. I’m sure it’s moving and humorous and one of the best books of the year. But that doesn’t contradict the fact that it is a horrendous novel of dastardly proportions. That doesn’t redeem Polansky. What could?

Oh, how I’ve wanted to read Those Above, but I remember that stall in Thailand. I remember that delicious and villainous scent. I remember the days of agony following. Can you hear its call, like a Siren calling you onto her rocks?