Books I Read May 15th, 2022

It was my birthday this week and so rather than read a lot I went on some day trips and baked some amazing fucking bread.

Nuts, right? Anyhow, in between that I still managed to get through...

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier – The lovestruck misadventures of a melancholic Peter Pan as written by his chief lost boy in turn of the century rural France. An odd, elegant paean to friendship, melodrama, and lost youth. Good stuff.

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas – One afternoon some years ago I found myself at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. I was driving south from Victoria Falls and wearing a J Dilla Changed My Life shirt. From what I can recall from that byzantine immigration procedure you needed a stamp certifying that your car was up to snuff, and a stamp agreeing that you personally should be allowed to exit the country. The line for the first was three people; the line for the second stretched out the door and looped the large building. I had settled in for a long wait when a security guard called me over. A lot of my time in Zimbabwe had been spent being touched for bribes so I was expecting the worst, but instead the guy asked me 'How Did J Dilla Change My Life?' Thinking he wanted me to to explain the shirt, I went on a quick shpiel about Dilla – your favorite producer's favorite producer, birth of Neo Soul, yadda yadda. Nodding approvingly, the security guard told me to give him my passport, then walked me to the front of the line and had the official stamp it.

I also strongly suspect I am the only person to ever work Dilla into a major work of published fantasy—perhaps a dubious tribute, perhaps, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, Charnas does a good job of explaining how Dilla earned such veneration during his brief career while also exposing many of the myths which sprung up around him before and after his premature demise. What emerges is a complex, contradictory figure, brilliant and mercurial. I found the book immense fun, and suspect even less vigorous devotees will enjoy it.

Books I Read May 8th, 2022

Actually, I have good reasons for being a few weeks behind on these but they're private so quit asking.

Engine Summer by John Crowley – A wistful post-apocalypse doubling as a 60's elegiac. I first read this when I was like 11, at an age when the only books I read had people hitting other people with swords. I didn't get it but it stuck in my mind ever since. A re-read reveals a lot of strange beauty mixed with the interminable wank which seems to have struck Crowley somewhat in old age (see: Aegypt, or maybe don't.) Still, it's odd and unique and worth a read.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger – A depressing if not entirely accurate discussion of California's homelessness crisis. I'll have more to say about it in another forum.

The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams – Gnostic fantasy from a lesser known Inkling. No part of that sentence appeals to me, I'm not sure why I read this and not surprised I didn't like it.

Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei – The daughter of exiled rural gentry becomes embroiled in revolutionary activities in turn of the century China. An esoteric, almost fantastical depiction of the impossible necessity of revolution and the recurring failures of humankind. Very good.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor – Mrs. Palfrey brings her stiff upper lip and dated English reserve to old age, a shoddy hotel London hotel inhabited by other elders in her position. As always, Taylor's prose is quiet, mean, and masterful.

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman – The vast tableau of the misery that was Western Europe in the 14th century as revealed by one of the best popular historians of the 20th. Tuchman's prose is lucid and clever, and she moves effortlessly between broad trends and minor anecdotes. Lots of fun.

Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood by Danny Trejo and Donal Logue – I needed something light after the brick that was Distant Mirror, and who doesn't love Danny Trejo? Like Malcolm Braly but with more celebrity gossip.

High Spirits by Robertson Davies – Not actually ghost stories but rather very tepid academic/Canadian satire. No idea why I finished this.

Books I Read April 18th, 2022

Back in Baltimore for a thing, seeing old friends and eating too much food. If you're interested, I'm over at the LA Review of Books talking about bitching about homeless policy.

Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Ghost stories, fever dreams, pederasty – you kinda know what you're getting into.

The Blue Room by Simenon – A man pays for his infidelity. Simenon is always fun.

Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny – Picked this up from off my father's shelves for old times' sake. (Time's sake?) It moves quick and doesn't waste a ton of time with explanations.

Books I Read April 10th, 2022

I kind of half-assed it this week and I couldn't really tell you why. It was hot? Anyway...

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg – Schulberg's classic send-up/poison pen letter to his beloathed father tells the story of Sammy Glick, whose complete lack of morals and energetic self-promotion make him the perfect Hollywood functionary/archetype of capitalist ruin. It's the kind of book that's so influential it ends up seeming kind of obvious, but its effective and funny and sharp and worth its place in the canon.

The Dead Girls' Class Trip and Other Stories by Anna Seghers – A diverse collection of short fiction which, along with Transit and The Seventh Cross, firmly establish Seghers as a brilliant and original writer. The range here is really extraordinary – there are a few which are basically straight horror/fantasy that work beautifully, though the excellent eponymous and most of the rest are ruminations on the Holocaust/the collapse of civilization in Central Europe. Strong stuff.

A Thousand Deaths Plus One by Sergio Ramirez – Knowing nothing about Ramirez when I read Deaths of Our Fathers a few weeks back I was surprised to discover that he had been the VP of Nicaragua under the early Sandanistas. His work is complex, contradictory, unheroic and resolutely non-didactic. That his most recent book has been banned in Nicaragua, and Ramirez himself having fled his homeland, is more tragic though for more believable. Anyway, this, like Deaths of Our Fathers, is excellent if very different, a rumination on the nebulous boundaries of identity and the subtle repetitions which guide human existence. A peculiar, erudite, and lovely work.

Mr. Hire's Engagement by Simenon – It took me about 20 pages to realize I'd read this a couple of years back, but I kept going because its so mean and sad and fun. A harmless, pitiful, tragic fat man is destroyed by a world which reflexively if unfairly loathes him. Excellent.

Books I Read April 3rd, 2022

Selected Journalism, 1850-1870 by Charles Dickens – I have this rule about finishing books that I start. Mostly, I think this is a good rule, I often find that difficult books can get more enjoyable as you work through them and even in bad books there is usually some value in figuring out what's bad about them. Every so often it does end up becoming a miserable exercise in intellectual masochism.

The Crows of Deliverance by Nirmal Verma – A collection of ruminative shorts about melancholic exchange students and disobedient sons. I quite like Verma, these were very good.

The Waste Books by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – Aphorisms from everyone's favorite Enlightenment German.

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

Books I Read March 27th, 2022

I will tell you a secret: sometimes, I make myself read books even when I don't really want to.

Every Man a Murderer by Heimito von Doderer – A conventionally minded young German man finds a new sense of purpose in investigating his sister-in-law's death. About a 100 pages into this, and despite there being nothing directly anti-Semitic in the text, I got the (later confirmed) impression that Heimito was a Nazi. Apart from it being the only apolitical book I've read written in Central Europe between the wars, there's a lot of that strand of German self-obsession which runs through Nietzsche and back (at least) to Goethe, a style of writing/thinking in which enormous and elaborate attention is paid to one's moods, as if they were storm clouds seen from a leaky vessel. At its most extreme this becomes a form of introversion which mythologizes selfishness, and, imagining genuine morality to be conventional and common (when of course it is nothing of the kind), assigns unjustified weight to ethical transgressions. All that said there's some sharp and funny stuff in here, the book is structured in a really interesting way, with the first 2/3 being sort of a backwards bildungsroman turning abruptly into a murder mystery. So, yeah, some mixed feelings on this one but I couldn't honestly say I hated it.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy – A month-long dance marathon (apparently a real thing during the Depression) reveals the degradation of the human condition. The sort of noir which makes Andre Gide look like Mitch Albom.

Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness – TK

The Silentiary by Antonio di Benedotto – A highly strung middle manager is driven insane by urban noise/modernity. There are five different housing projects being erected within a two block radius of my house (no foolin'), so I was sympathetic to this one, and it certainly sets out what it means to do, if, you know, somewhat predictably.

Little Snow Landscape by Robert Walser – Collected short fictions by everyone's favorite eternal innocent. I like Walser in small doses but honestly after a couple of pages it feels like being force fed bonbons. Maybe that's me.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams – A competent if dated commercial thriller.

Books I Read March 20th, 2022

This week I read these books.

The N'Gustro Affair by Jean-Patrick Manchette – A morally reprehensible Frenchman plays a minor role in the morally reprehensible politics of a morally reprehensible world. Manchette applies his noir sensibilities to the spy novel with predictably excellent effect.

A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner – An engaging work of popular history.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler – Yeah he's pretty good.

Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess by Hannah Arendt – Arendt sets out to write the biography of a a prominent if largely forgotten figure of the German Romantic-era in the Romantic style, which is to say, with enormously self-indulgent melodrama. Its a fascinating exercise that elicits some interesting points about Judaism but also I really can't stand Rahel Varnhagen or the Romantics generally so I had to kind of drag myself through this.

The Netanyahu's by Joshua Cohen – A fictionalized retelling of the time Bibi Netanyahu's father met Harold Bloom while applying for a job at Cornell. Funny and sharp, though I suspect a lot of the humor would be lost on a goy.

Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk – A fantastical re-imagining of Poland's tumultuous 20th century/the grand and inescapable tragedy of human existence. The weird parts are weird, the scary parts are scary, the sexy parts are sexy, the sad parts are sad. I dug it.

Books I Read, March 13th 2022

I didn't read as much as usual this week but I baked a hot ton of bread, some of which came out OK.

See?

I also read the following...

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner – I was supposed to read this in high school but didn't, laziness masquerading as rebellion, I suppose. Anyway my memory is that my AP English teacher (who was a tedious, self-important Faulkner-obsessive) saw in Quentin some sort of sensitive, sympathetic surrogate, which gave me the wrong impression of the book going in, since he (like all the men in this) is a sackless (sometimes literally), simpering coward. But that's personal history and neither here nor there—I always enjoy Faulkner's riddles and linguistic mysteries, and this one's great for that, but I also found the parade of grotesqueries which is the hallmark of southern Gothic a bit...I dunno, shlocky? This is coming from someone who has read pretty much everything Faulkner wrote at this point, and regards him as one of the best English writers of the 20th century, so, you know, degrees of genius, but still I'd take Absalom, Absalom.

Love, Anger, Madness by Marie Viuex-Chuavet – A triptych of novellas obliquely describing the nightmare of living in Haiti under the rule of Papa Doc Duvalier. In Love, an embittered, sex-maddened spinster obsesses over her brother-in-law and the brutalities of the coming regime; in Anger, a girl sells her virtue to save her family. Disturbing, erotic, insightful, excellent. Worth a read.

The Open Road by Jean Giano – A melancholic vagabond befriends a self-destructive con artist in a bitter rural French winter. There is an element of menace to everything that Giano wrote, some intrinsic understanding of the nebulous membrane between beauty and death, love and hate. I enjoyed the hell out of this one.

The Ship of Fools by Cristina Peri Rossi – Fantastical vignettes loosely linked by the presence of a its central character, a wandering hero archetype re-imagined for a feminist age. Kind of like if the Night Town chapter of Ulysses went on for 200 pages. Which, thinking about it now, it nearly does. Anyway, I thought this was uneven.

Books I Read March 6th, 2022

I sell bread now, if you live in east LA get at me on instagram @insufferablebaker or email me to get on the list. That's an actual sentence I just actually wrote. Strange world. I read these books this week...

Country By Ways by Sarah Orne Jewett – Lovely, thoughtful nature writing and some slightly mawkish short stories of the sober New England variety. Someone could (has?) do a thesis on the connection between Jewett and Marilynne Robinson, which, if you don't know what I think of Marilynne Robinson, is a compliment.

The Friend of Madame Maigret by Simenon – How Maigret is this Maigret? I would give it three, maybe three and a half pipes, maybe four.

Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives by Benjamin F. Henwood, Deborah Padgett, and Sam Tsemberis – An overview of the current housing model by which California and most of the rest of the country/Western world operate. This isn't really the place for a longer discussion of the merits of this policy, though I will say in brief that it probably works really well in places that have places to put homeless people. Alas, LA is not one of those places.

Flight of Ashes by Monika Maron – A GDR journalist struggles with censorship, her obligations towards the communist state, etc. Maron's first work, it's not bad but I thought her later stuff worked this ground more effectively.

The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green – The back text of my Penguin edition suggests this as a precursor to Sherlock Holmes, but it's not really—it's a Gothic romance in the 'which beautiful sister with the dark secret will inherit the fortune' mold. I don't really love those, and I didn't really love this.

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boine – A revisionist history of a riot in Rome presenting Alaric and his followers as responding to the religious and ethnic intolerance of the then Christian state. One ought always be cautious of work which purports to see in some vastly different context contemporary political trends satisfactory to one's own political sympathies. The paucity of documentation about Alaric allows the author a degree of latitude to interpret the behavior of the man in a way which seemed to me inappropriate. Most of it was fluff, an occasionally interesting but fundamentally pretty scattershot discussion of the culture of 4th century Rome, and what remains is unconvincing by virtue of the fact that we actually don't seem to know almost anything of relevance about the man in question.

Books I Read February 27th, 2022

I wandered through Kiev about 12 years ago when I was playing itinerant, and thought it was big and fascinatingly weird and unwelcomingly charming. No one needs to hear any of my thoughts about politics. I read these books this week...

The Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola – A razor sharp critique of capitalism and the burgeoning consumer culture then taking root in Paris, marred to the sort of mawkish romanticism common in literature of that era. A mixed bag, but worth the time.

Dead Boys by Robert Lange – Short stories in the 'meth-addicted Angeleno returns to his mother's house in Pasadena to obsess over his ex-wife' vein. Well-executed but predictable.

Ride on the Whirlwind by Sipho Sepamla – A fictionalized retelling of the 'Children's Revolution' in Apartheid-era Soweto. Fascinating if uneven.

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade – An exploration of America's economic and culturally abandoned. Most of the folks chronicled in this are a few steps up the ladder from the unhoused with whom I associate, but the essential injustice of the society which Arnade depicts, one which penalizes anyone incapable of or uninteresting in becoming a stockbroker, resonated. Good stuff.

Me, Detective by Leslie White – The inexplicably forgotten autobiographical adventures of a pre-war LA policeman is the ur-text for Chandler, Ross MacDonald, etc, creating almost full-form the image of the upright two-fisted detective, struggling to hold the line against a fundamentally corrupt society. Somehow this book hasn't been reprinted in 80 years, and to read it I had to go down to the LA central branch and collect it from the reserve stacks, but it was as project worth the effort and one I'd like to write more about soon.

The Axe by Ludvik Vaculik – In the days leading up to the Prague Spring, a dissident journalist returns to his village to ponder the life and career of his father, a sincere if imperfect communist. Excellent. A profound and sincere meditation on legacy, morality, family, all the important things. Vaculik was a great talent, and this is a gorgeous, complex, thoughtful book. Worth your time.

To Bury Our Fathers by Sergio Ramirez – A non-chronological, mythologized retelling of Nicaragua's bloody dictatorships. Fucking fabulous. Lurid, lyrical, bloody, fierce. Definitely a Bolano precursor, with lots of long monologues about tragic past misdeeds interrupted by really exact descriptions of a checker board or whatever. Anyway, excellent.

The OK End of Funny Town by Mark Polnzak – Short fiction.

Books I Read February 20th, 2022

I only came here for two reasons – to read books, and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of bubble gum.

Southern California: An Island on the Land by Cared McWilliams – An engaging and insightful cultural history of Southern California between like 1880-1930. Did you know there was a running joke in the first half of the century that everyone who lived in LA was from Iowa? Or that the city once had a professional rain maker on contract, but refused to pay him after he summoned a deluge which flooded downtown? It's a strange town I live in.

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh – As usual with Waugh, this is funny and cheap. He knew as much about LA as he did Abyssinia.

Woman in the Dark by Dashiell Hammett – A forgotten work by a great master, probably not really worth uncovering.

The Hot Spot by Charles Williams – It's tough to keep track of which Black Lizard's I've read, and I picked this up without realizing I read it years back. Which is just as well because this story of a rowdy who robs a bank is tight and mean as it comes. I'll have to read more Charles Williams.

Mildred Pierce by James M. Caine – In the midst of the depression, a housewife escapes poverty but not her shitty, ungrateful daughter. Mean, good. Caine applies his noir chops and eye for human weakness to the inhuman cruelty of the petit-bourgeoisie family.

Masters of the Dew by Jaquees Romain – A prodigal son tries to save his rural Haitian village from infighting, drought.

Hitchhiking: Twelve German Tales by Gabriele Eckart – A series of shorts from the waning days of the DDR, Eckart's depictions of builders, drunken janitors and embittered old woman are witty, sympathetic and thoughtful. I dug it.

Behind the Lines by Jaroslav Hasek – Comically fictionalized retelling of the author's experiences fighting for the Red Army during the Russian civil war. Uneven but I'll read more.

Books I Read February 13th, 2022

This week I've been iterating versions of a cinnamon-raisin swirl loaf and trying not to notice it's 90 degrees in February. Like everyone else here in LA I've suddenly remembered I'm a longtime Rams fan, since back when they were playing in South Bend, or even Poughkeepsie.

Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabo – After her husband dies, a peasant woman moves in with her upright, emotionally stunted daughter, is slowly strangled by a lack of empathy and understanding. Effective is slightly manipulative, but it does remind me I need to call my mother.

A Game for Eagles by Oakey Hall – A California stringer of dubious morality gets involved in a coup attempt against a small Caribbean nation on behalf of the sugar company he works for. Excellent 70's paranoid thriller, shades of Ambler. A fun digression, I'll pick up more by Hall soon.

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Lauren Dubois – A first rate popular history of the island nation of Haiti made for my second book about American imperialism in two days. We really fucked some shit up there, amiright? Anyway this was an excellent primer on a complex topic, nuanced, thoughtful and well-written.

Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America by Johnathan Kozol – What's disturbing about this classic account of homelessness in America – and many similar volumes I've been reading lately – is of course that they are written in the midst of crises that have only been compounded over the succeeding decades. This account, primarily of the experiences of unhoused families living in shitty hotels, presents a homelessness services system of horrifying decrepitude which is nonetheless far better than anything we work with here in LA in 2022. By coincidence I was reading this the same day I got to tell a woman I know who lives behind a chain-link fence next to the 5 that her housing opportunity had been revoked and the whole time I was thinking that things have only gotten worse. Also, I hope some devil somewhere is giving Ronald Reagan a high-colonic with a heated corkscrew.

My Merry Mornings by Ivan Klima – A series of semi-fantastical vignettes depicting Prague in the 80's, and the author's own peculiar position as a writer banned by the communist state. Fun, funny, sharp and strange, with the idiosyncratic black humor characteristic of Czech writing.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams – An aging actress takes refuge in a love affair with a Roman cad. Sharp, insightful, sad, an excellent short work.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner – I've read nearly everything that Faulkner ever wrote over the years but somehow skipped over this story of a family of white trash dragging their mother's corpse from their homestead into town. Obviously Faulkner's style is, well, Faulknerian, and although the narrative leaned a bit too much into the Southern Gothic shtick of having everything that can go wrong go ruinously (I'm looking at you, Flannery) it has an absolutely ferocious ending.

Books I Read February 6th, 2022

Good stuff happened to me this week but I'm not going to tell you about it. You're just some internet stranger, you're lucky I even tell you about all the books I read. To whit...

A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator by Ludvik Vaculik – Samizdat feuilletons from the a Charter 77 signatory during the late stage of the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic. Witty and human, like meeting your thoughtful, funny friend for an Urquell on a sunny day, except that he’s being tailed by the secret police.

Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo S. Ndebele – Short stories from the waning days of apartheid. The eponymous didn't do much for me but most of the rest of them, dealing with the youthful customs of township adolescents, were excellent.

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising by Miron Bialoszewski – A chronicle of the demolition of the Polish capital by the Nazis in a deliberately rambling, conversational fashion, intended to express the chaotic nature of the time and the impossibility of offering a coherent explanation for the events. I remember going to Warsaw many years ago and having a friend take me to the old city and explain that it was a Disney facade built over rubble, and I can still remember the Praga district which had remained standing, apartment blocks like fortresses shielding Catholic shrines, still extant despite the bombings and 50 odd years of Communist rule. Anyway, this was a difficult, interesting, tragic read.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich – Gonzo journalism meets poverty porn. Actually for a book about the writer's personal experiences it wasn't that self-indulgent, I'm just being nasty because I've read 3 more or less identical works in the last week or so (did you know Reagan ruined everything? He did! He really, really did. Rot in hell, Ronnie!)

Animal Triste by Monika Maron – An old woman recalls a doomed love affair over which she has long obsessed herself into madness. It's a loose plot but the execution is perfect, the language thoughtful and lyrical and funny and sad. Maron is a treasure.

The Periphereal by William Gibson – Corporate dictocrats from the far future interfere with the life of roughnecks from the near future, chaos ensuing. Gibson is a clever cultural critic and this is fun and moves fast, although it does that thing he does where since the protagonists are all pawns in a much larger scheme the narrative unfolds as a series of Deus Ex Machinas. Still, lots of fun.

Days of Longing by Nirmal Verma – An Indian student living in the Czech Republic has a doomed love affair with an Austrian single mother. Nostalgic and lovely. I spent a lot of time thinking longingly of Eastern Europe this week, actually.

Books I Read January 30th, 2022

Winter in LA is a slice of paradise. Everything is green and the light is clear and you can wear a sweater in the evening. After a long period of laziness I'm back on my reading grind, evidence of which is to follow...

Silent Close No. 6 by Monika Maron – In the last days of the DDR, a listless intellectual takes on a position as private secretary for an aging Communist bigwig. A sharply written, funny, not entirely unsympathetic of the generation of Germans who built East Germany and tried to force it on their children. Maron is very talented, I've got another by her on the shelf.

First Light by Peter Ackroyd – A collection of archaeologists, astronomers, and various others try and make sense of a pre-historical find in Dorset, the complexities of human existence. This was fine. I'm not quite sure what possessed me to read a bunch of Peter Ackroyd lately.

I Dreamt the Snow was Burning by Antonio Skarmeta – A jock from the provinces come to Santiago in the days before the assassination of Allende. A Faulknerian recreation of the golden moments before hell came to Chile. Funny and energetic in defiance of the subject matter.

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies by Reyner Banham – The classic work of LA boosterism. I always love reading enthusiastic discussions of my adopted homeland, and Banham brings a lot of insight into the world's premier postmodern city, even if his encomium to the freeway system falls a little flat.

The Gold Coast and the Slum by Harvey Warren Zorbaugh – A depiction of inner city Chicago in the mid 30's, and some thoughtful if overheated commentary on the destabilizing effects of city living. Also, surprisingly not that racist given its time.

The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett by Sarah Orne Jewett – Sympathetic if mawkish depictions of Irish immigrants to Jewett's native New England. Pleasant if slight.

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder – You probably saw the movie.

Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford – A chronicle of the occasionally passionate romance of two of the great thinkers of the French enlightenment. Nobody does caddy social history like Nancy Mitford, and this was a fun read.

Book I Read January 23rd, 2022

I wrote a lot and I read a lot and I ate a lot of tofu. Enjoying my days of exaggerated solitude.

False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons by Malcolm Braly – A fascinating and readable history of the first half of the author's life. This is fascinating simply as a (seemingly accurate) account of the life of a small time criminal, but Braly is also a perceptive and sympathetic critic of his society and his own circumstance, the injustices and personal failings which led him to waste 25 odd years in state correctional facilities.

The World Elsewhere by Nirmal Verma – Verma was (is? He might still be alive) of Indian descent but he spent much of his life in the communist Czech Republic, and there are shades of the Eastern European short story tradition in his listless narrators, oppressed by shadowy forces and the relentless turmoil of their own mind. Some hit harder than other but basically I thought these were strong.

Wings of Stone by Linda Ty-Casper – An expatriate Filipino returns to his homeland in the days before the ousting of the Marcos regime, attempts to reconcile the mysteries of his own heritage, homeland, purpose. I can't say it was my favorite thing I ever read in this vein, but I didn't hate it neither.

A Man's Head by Simenon – I'm going to stop trying to think up funny lines for these.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond – An exhaustively researched, tragically compelling examination of the ways in which our housing market and laws perpetrate inequality and injustice. I gather everyone read this about 10 years ago but it was worth your time then and if you haven't picked it up it's probably worth your time now. Engaging, fascinating, and horrible.

Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche – A series of lectures the author gave at the beginning of his career attacking the German university system. His essential thesis – that the expansion of education to less capable individuals, along with academia's increasing obsession with minutia, would ruin the ideal of classical education as creating truly thoughtful, cultured individuals, seems indisputable, and looking back some 130 years on one is, as always, impressed with Nietzsche's prophetic powers. Of course, as is always also the case with Nietzsche, once we get beyond diagnosis the entire thrust falls apart into a lot of vague, soaring, dull Teutonic pseudo-poetry. I remember telling my favorite professor that Nietzsche was the best philosopher to read on the can, because he was funny and you could get through him quick, and my mentor replied something to the effect of he was best kept there. Which is mean and not altogether true but it's a little true.

Cathedral of the August Heat by Pierre Clitandre – A tale of the Haitian slums, told in part through myth and legend and in part through the earthy and despairing misadventures of its inhabitant. Vivid, lyrical, horrifying, good.

Not a Crime to be Poor by Peter Edelman – An exhaustive if not exactly narratively fascinating account of the many ways we screw poor people in this country. I knew about a lot of them, but not all!

Books I Read January 16th, 2022

I had a lovely week, thanks for asking. Got a lot done, baked some good bread. Feeling energetic. Purposeful. Positive. Read the following books.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston – A compelling and bleakly funny account of growing up an impoverished Chinese immigrant in post-war San Francisco. As a rule I'm not big on the 'my family was absolute batshit' form of literary nonfiction and occasionally this gets a bit overheated, but basically I thought it was strong and weird and I dug it.

The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman – I had basically completely forgotten the existence of Barbara Tuchman which is both weird cause I used to love her but kind of great cause I remembered how great she is. This is really first rate popular history, brisk and entertaining but also measured and thoughtful. Tuchman is an astute and atypical commentator even on events with which I was already pretty familiar, and she's genuinely funny, which is unfortunately a rare quality in historians. Fun stuff.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd – Entertaining if indistinct literary horror.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens – Last I dipped into Dickens I was 19 and found Great Expectations an absolutely ponderous melodrama but I don't put that much stock in the opinions I held at 19 (in retrospect American Beauty is a horrible movie) so I figured I'd give him another shot. Negs—the characterization is effective but one dimensional. This results in some engaging minor characters but the majors are pretty insufferable. It does that Victorian era thing (Jane Austen does this also) where a character is sketched in thumbnail as soon as they come onto the page ('Richard is so charming and kind-hearted but also inconstant, I hope terribly he doesn't find himself bogged down by this Jardyce inheritance') and then spending the rest of the book confirming this initial impression ('Poor Richard, so sweet and amiable, but alas his lack of direction has doomed him!'). Its mawkish—Esther is an absolutely insufferable Mary-Sue and her Guardian somehow even worse. Pros—Dickens is a masterful critic of his age, funny and savage with a core of genuine outrage. His ability to set a scene by turning a metaphor tighter and tighter over the course of a paragraph is fabulous. And he has a number of observations about dire poverty—and particularly about the street child Jo—which reminded me of my own experience working with the unhoused to an uncanny and frankly horrifying degree. It ain’t Dostoevsky, but I’d take it above Victor Hugo.

Books I Read January 9th 2022

Happy New Year. I spent my December too busy to read much or to write about reading. I got to talk a bit about homelessness in the LA Times. In brute truth, the back half of the year was not what it should have been reading wise, and after a decent start my total for 2021 puttered out at just north of 175 books. Not what I was hoping for but I enter 2022 committed to self-improvement in that, as in many other areas. In any event, these are the books I read the last month or so...

Maigret at the Coroners – Maigret's trip through Arizona offers Simenon opportunity to make some engaging but ultimately oddly off-base criticisms of America. Engaging stuff, even if it ain't quite Toqueville.

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian – Engaging historical fiction of the sort which is really accurate about how many guns a ship of the line has. I read it beside a fire, in a cabin in Big Bear while watching the snow fall. That benefits you very little, admittedly, but it's mainly what I remember about this book.

The Gourmet and Other Stories from Modern China by Lu Wenfu – Wenfu was one of post-war China's most talented writers, whose fame caused him to become a casualty of the cultural revolution, These series of stories, written shortly after Mao's death and the resuscitation of the his reputation, offer an oblique and measured criticism of a society experiencing rapid and unprecedented change. I dug it.

The World of 'Mestre' Tamoda by Uanhenga Xitu – Rabelesian fables about a fast-talking good-for-nothing and post-Colonial Angola. Despite being written while the author was imprisoned by the Portuguese regime, they possess an earthy joy at the daily realities of Angolan existence. Fun and strange.

Mothers and Shadows by Marta Traba – Faulknerian recollections of two women united in suffering caused by the wave of fascism then sweeping across South America. It reminded me of Bolano in the potency of its monologues and in its willingness to stare at the nastiest aspects of the human experience without looking away or degenerating into pornography. Strong stuff.

The Laughing Cry: An African Cock and Bull Story by Henri Lopes – The rise of a thuggish African dictator as chronicled by his man servant and cuckold. Slim but large in scope, a tragicomic commentary on the unrealized hopes of post-colonial Africa. Sexy, funny, sad, excellent.

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge – A bestiary of a magical modern China. Part of that strain of modern East Asian fiction which intertwines the banal and fantastic/horrific in compact prose. Generally that's not really my taste but this worked – there's a genuine weirdness here combined with enough narrative pay off that you don't end the thing infuriated.

Haiji Musa and the Hindu Fire-Walker by Ahmed Essop – Another fascinating series of shorts, this time by a member of South Africa's Indian diaspora. Essop depiction of his community is lively and self-critical, with an eye for comic detail. I really dug it, one of a lot of good books I read this month.

Books I Read December 6th, 2021

Another week, during which I read these.

The Life of Thomas Moore by Peter Ackroyd – This readable history of Catholicism's first English martyr really hammered home to me how glad I am not to have lived in the middle ages.

Mother Spring by Driss Chraibi – A peculiar, challenging story of the advance of Islam/civilization into pagan North Africa. Chraibi is strange and lyrical and confounding as ever, though I am getting the increasing sense that these are not well translated.

The Book on Ending Homelessness by Iain de Jong – Probably unfair to give a capsule review of a book of this sort. It did reinforce how utterly awful LA's homelessness situation is, even by the standards.

The Years by Annie Ernaux – A history of the author as an archtype for her generation. Whistful and clever if sometimes self-indulgent.

The Fetish and Other Stories by Albert Moravia – Post-war Italians suffer existential breakdowns. Spare, clever and engaging.

Books I Read November 28th, 2021

Happy Thanksgiving. Hope you felt bloated and well-loved. I read these books this week.

Renewal Time by Es'kia Mphahlele – A collection of shorts from the doyen of South African fiction. I enjoy everything I get from Mphahlele, sharply observed mid-century prose in unfamiliar settings. Miss Plum is really gorgeously nasty.

Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel by Robert Alter – Alter chronicles the changing perception of the modern city through a selection of novelists. Basically I just was so enjoying Alter's translation of the Old Testament that I didn't like the idea of being finished. I virtually never read this sort of literary criticism so I vaguely enjoyed the challenge of pushing myself through it. Apart from those two caveats there were a lot of thoughtful stuff in here, I appreciated someone explaining to me what I didn't get out of Bely and it actually made me want to give Dickens another shot. Take that as you'd like.

São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos – A self-made rural tyrant laments his brutal past.

Books I Read November 21st, 2021

I finally managed to sit my ass down and read a few books this week, so bully for me. They were;

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett – Actually I read this a month ago and somehow forgot to write anything about it, which is strange because I found this affectionate recreation of a fishing village in turn of the century Maine a genuinely charming idyll. A series of interconnected character studies offer an evocative and wistful view of a pre-modern world already fading from view, affectionate without being cloying. Lovely.

In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm – At a brisk 200 pages I found it impossible to avoid enjoying this engaging depiction of a scholarly feud between several Freud obsessives.

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman – This history of the modern state of Israel as depicted through its extra-judicial killings, often as told by the people executing them. A riveting depiction of spycraft at its most savage, and the inevitable moral decline resulting thereof.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie – A pair of teenage boys are exiled into rural China during the Cultural Revolution, find a cache of Western novels, have misadventures with the eponymous tailor. Lyrical and unexpected, elegiac and strange and meaner than I anticipated. Fun stuff.

Inspector Ali by Driss Chraibi – An returned-expatriate Moroccan writer of genre fiction grapples with his place in society and his role as an author. Sort of like if Saul Bellow was Moroccan and less pretentious and Herzog was 200 pages rather than 500. Madcap and meandering in the best sort of way, Chraibi deserves rediscovery.