I
read 100 books in 2022. 100 books, that’s a lot of books. In fairness, this ended
up being a pretty arbitrary exercise. I did not distinguish between poetry or
fiction. An 800-page postmodern classic counted as the same number of books as
a 17-page chapbook from a twitter mutual—which is to say, one book. This type
of reading challenge absolutely incentivized seeking out the shortest, easiest
books I could get my hands on while actively discouraging me from tackling
stuff I might otherwise be interested in. It also turns out that buying 100 new
books to read is expensive. Amazon is a supposed corporate monopoly edging out
the market because it doesn’t have to deal with the same taxes its competition
faces, yet somehow even books listed as a dollar used total $10 after shipping
and handling (I don’t have Amazon Prime because of sunk-cost fallacy; my local
gas station that I’ve bought pretty much a decade’s worth of gas from has a
rewards program I refuse to invest in for the same reason). Multiply this by
100 books. That’s a lot of books to buy. Still, I’m glad I did this. Before
2022, the most books I’d read in a year was ~50 back in 2017, and in the years
following I struggled to finish anything more than 20 books annually. Reading
100 books forced me to engage with material I’d otherwise ignore, while also encouraging
positive-seeming habits like scheduling daily reading time, not getting plastered
drunk so I could process words on a page, and staring at my phone less. These
are all the books I read in 2022.
1.
Preparation for the Next Life (Atticus Lish): Finished in January but
began over Christmas with my family, such that I primarily associate it with
the disillusionment of being a 28-year-old office worker ‘home for the
holidays’, sadly masturbating in my childhood bedroom. At the time I was making
$1800/month filing documents. My family seemed off-putting and tragic, dad
complaining about the price of shellfish. I’d been meaning to read the prodigal
son of Gordon Lish for a while but also delayed this due to doubts of nepotism.
My concerns were for nothing, this is a truly ‘literary’, capital L, book. Some
people might find it obnoxiously so, but there’s a clear level of meticulous craft
and detail here, of trying to mean something big, that I respect. Ultimately
this is a ‘George Bush-era’ political novel, in that the themes it
highlights—the ramifications of mindless American interventions in the Middle
East— are probably obsolete at this point, but still appealing to me in the way
of nostalgia, of the sound of a Nintendo Gamecube booting up.
2.
A Fan's Notes (Frederick Exley): Genuinely didn’t know anything about Exley as
a literary figure before reading, I was primarily attracted to this book
because of how much it reminded me of the era I spent unemployed watching
sports games on bar television screens 2018-2019. Wikipedia tells me that ‘The
title comes from Exley’s fear that he is doomed to be a spectator in life as
well as sports’. Seems a little dramatic to me. I liked this book because it
struck me as a primordial sitcom, it is beautifully insane and funny without ever
unnecessarily elevating its own tragedy.
3.
Left Hand (Paul Curran): Among the category of ‘online books’—which I define as
‘books that circumvent traditional publishing means and marketing by going
straight to independent publishing thanks to the internet’s word-of-mouth viral
capacities’—there is a specific subgenre I default to insufficiently defining
as ‘edgy lit’. What I’m talking about is a style that emphasizes split-fractal
narratives, gore, and foggy shock value. Basically, Dennis Cooper will blurb
these books. Left Hand fits this bill. I wasn’t overly interested in it but I
also can’t concretely say it’s bad. I saw a Reddit comment criticizing it as
‘schizoposting’ and immediately felt warm and defensive toward Paul Curran.
This book is a thoughtful experiment. I thoroughly disagree with Reddit at all
times.
4.
Ghettoside (Jill Levoy): One of the few nonfiction books I read this year. Through
the lens of a specific homicide case in early 2000s Los Angeles, it provides a
broader analysis of murder in urban America, where most cases go unsolved and
the majority of the victims are black men. I was intrigued by this premise as
it’s sort of an inverse twist on current policing debate: in this scenario it’s
not police over-aggression killing these men but indifference, as cops simply
don’t care enough to solve the myriad cases ripping poorer communities apart.
Most insane-seeming aspect of this book is it spends hundreds of pages building
its main detective into an eccentric, Hollywood-glazed genius, just for him to
‘solve’ the final case by bullying a teenager into confession without any
actual evidence. In my experience, even media that takes the most painstaking
approach to glorify policework ends up exposing the sewage inherent to it. I
was recently laid off, and whenever I’m out of a job I immediately fantasize
about Antarctic scientist, unionized railroad worker, or cop as my next career
option.
5.
When We Cease to Understand the World (Benjamin Labatut): Wrote about this in a
previous
blogpost. Very Reddit-seeming book. Obama recommends it and Obama is
by objective legal definition a war criminal.
6.
A Gate at the Stairs (Lorrie Moore): Wrote about this in a previous
blogpost but basically I think Moore is underwhelming as a novelist
compared to what she can do as a short story writer (probably an unfair
judgment since this is the only novel I’ve read by her). I did find this book
notable in that it accurately predicts modern Twitter discourse. Written in
2009, its plot revolves around a white family adopting a black baby, with numerous
scenes precociously evocative of 2022 Twitter threads where comedically
out-of-touch Caucasians deliberate over race, such as a passage where they brag
about who volunteers the most at soup kitchens before debating whether it’s
more socially progressive to say ‘biracial’ or ‘mixed’.
7.
Heathenish (Kelby Losack): There was a plot thread about selling marijuana that
seemed melodramatic to me, the narrator has to like, ‘go straight’ and find an
honest living instead of selling weed to escape his delinquency, etc. Reminded
me of the kids I went to college with who thought they were the Sopranos
because they sold weed. To be fair, there are other drugs in this book. There’s
meth and pills and stuff. I realize I’m coming at this with an incredibly
biased perspective, as marijuana is legal in my state and hasn’t been a
criminal offense in years. Interestingly, weed is legal at the state but not
federal level, so if you were to smoke it in a national park you could still be
federally prosecuted. The last time I was unemployed, I part-timed for this guy
who wanted me to help him grow weed, but I ended up just doing odd jobs for him
like repairing the steps to his house and putting up a fence. To this day I
have this on my resume as ‘construction’. I don’t know how to use a hammer or
screwdriver properly.
8.
Salad Days (Laura Theobald): Using italics to indicate that this is poetry. I
thought these poems were deceptively straightforward, there’s minimal
enjambment, advanced rhetorical techniques, or complicated imagery or whatever.
As an example, ‘ASS POEM’ opens with ‘You have the finest ass I have ever
touched / Great now I am full of despair / And I would like to be on fire / I
am exactly like a Buddhist’. Poetry recommendations can be very hit or miss for
me, but I found this collection worthwhile and good. Megan Boyle has a blurb
for this I liked, to quote an excerpt: ‘I started copying and pasting my
favorite lines into an email draft, which quickly turned into copying and
pasting entire poems, before I realized I’d soon have an email draft containing
an exact copy of the book.’
9.
The Sky Contains the Plans (Matthew Rohrer): Been a longtime Matthew
Rohrer fan, enjoying The Hummock in the Malookas and his pieces up on bear parade,
so I decided I should probably extend my knowledge of his work and see if it holds
the same charm. The premise behind this collection is cool, it’s a ‘hypnagogic
project’, which sounds pretentious but means Rohrer essentially wrote the
titles/opening lines for these pieces in the dreamlike state between falling asleep
and waking. Some lines generated by this technique: ‘ALL RIGHT, SMELL YOUR
FINGER’, ‘A TOY SPACESHIP CALLED ALMOND CHICKEN’, ‘BRIEF, ALMOST MICROSCOPIC
ATTEMPTS MADE ON MY LIFE’.
10.
Love Actually (Ann Beattie): Saw this at a used bookstore and bought because it
had a classic Vintage Contemporaries cover. I’ve read Chilly Scenes of Winter
by Ann Beattie and a short story collection, both of which I liked, but found
this one kind of meandering. Plot mostly focuses on the romantic drama of a
group of upper-class artists in Vermont who don’t work real jobs. At one point
there’s a tragic death which felt, to me, shoehorned in to make the plot
‘matter’, or something. There’s a ‘dumb cop’ scene too, where dumb rural cops
pull out of like a McDonald’s drive-thru to fumblingly stop a low-level crime,
spilling French fries, donuts. Found it wholly uninteresting, trite, without
literary value or meaning. Imagined saying this to Ann Beattie and receiving
the rebuttal ‘Your face has no literary value.’
11.
Woke Racism (John McWhorter): Seems funny that I only read 2ish nonfiction
books this year and one of those is cop propaganda and the other an ‘anti-woke’
tirade. Overall I think McWhorter’s main points are actually pretty tame. He
doesn’t deny systemic racism but thinks we need to take steps to clearly address
it outside of say, performative social media posts and corporate HR trainings. If
anything, it’s not his ‘takedown’ of wokeness that struck me as controversial
but his proposed solution to racial inequity: according to McWhorter, we need
to teach children to read by using phonics, i.e., having them sound out words
letter-by-letter versus the more standard practice of encouraging students to
recognize words as single chunks. As a linguist, McWhorter probably knows
extensively more about this subject to me, but it still seems jarring to argue
that the biggest, most sweeping fix for deep structural, racial, economic
inequities in America is changing school curriculum phonics. Going to start advocating
for phonics-based teaching at parties, I think, the next time that I am invited
to a party.
12.
His Name Was Death (Rafael Bernal): This is a science fiction book from
like, the 1950s, I think? ‘Old’ sci-fi seems insane to me as the theories and
explanations it provides for space, the universe, etc are often jarringly
different from our modern hindsight. For example, in this book mosquitoes are a
sentient alien race possessing supreme intelligence, who the protagonist learns
to communicate with to the degree that he is able to coordinate the domination
of the earth and human race with their insect help. It’s a quick read. I
finished on a rainy afternoon and then went to see the new Batman movie, which
was 3-hours long—far too long, it feels, for a Batman movie. This was late
spring, a murky, submarine-like period that always renders me nostalgic for the
wet dark days of my childhood when I would attend the funerals of grandparents.
13.
Liver Mush (Graham Irvin): Probably has the most unique cover of anything on
this list. If you haven’t seen it, Liver Mush is a truly beautiful-looking
book. It’s modeled after FDA food packaging standards, so in addition to the
blood smears smattered across its front, you’ll also find net weight,
nutritional info, even refrigeration instructions. You might worry this is too
‘on the nose’—a fear that you could rightfully extend to the rest of the book,
as this is, after all, a collection of poems titled ‘Liver Mush’. Liver mush as
a phrase inherently steals your attention, it is a meme at the cellularly
phonetic level, and so my worry was Graham would lean on this gimmick instead
of the actual quality of his writing to keep readers interested. I associate Back
Patio Press (the publisher of this book) with a sort of ‘anti-poetry’—even
though probably only two of their books I’ve read actually fit this description
I just invented—where they use more grounded poetry with simpler language,
themes, lines, breaks, etc as a ‘fuck you’ to the kind of mainstream poetry
that sags with the weight of its self-importance. Hence, this is a collection
of poems purely about liver mush, ‘a pork liver and cornmeal based food eaten
mostly in Western North Carolina’ (quoted from the product description of Liver
Mush). The joke is liver mush is unappetizing and we’re going to get a whole
book of unappetizing poems (I guess there are, too, stories in here, but I
still consider this poetry as a whole). But Graham tenderly balances the joke
with universal sadness and weighty truths—he earns the right to hand-wavingly
use liver mush as a metaphor for everything because he proves that all of
existence can be boiled down to processed pig product, in the same sense that
even processed pig can be served, insanely and impossibly, as a vegan
alternative. (The collection ends, poignantly, with a recipe for vegan liver
mush.)
14.
No Tiger (Mika): This book fits, I think, the narrow definition I established
for the third book I read this year, book 3—Left Hand by Paul Curran, except
that because it’s poetry, I offer it much more leniency. I think this format of
verbal fragmentation/evisceration is 1000x more effective when there’s no other
broader narrative expectation. Trying to talk about poetry sucks, in my
opinion, and I find I actually lean on poets using gimmicks like the previous
entry’s Liver Mush just so I can find common ground with an unfamiliar reader
to explain why they should check out a collection in the first place, so I’m
going to default to abstract, blurb-like language here: this book is the mobile
Gundam suit of an extracted heart’s wiring, it is an angel cut in two: this
book is the dead bullet of everything that is left of you.
15.
Battles in the Desert (Jose Emilio Pacheco): Can’t remember much about
this/don’t have any broader insights except that it’s about like a fifth grader
kissing his best friend’s mom? I think she just kisses him on the cheek. According
to Wikipedia, this book is significant to Mexican culture and literature, but
also ‘highly criticized’ (?). It reminded me of a Mishima or Kobo Abe novel,
which seems retrospectively racist, in that I associate any foreign novel that
deals with premature sexuality with Japan.
16.
Pushkin Hills (Sergei Dovlatov): A failed writer needs cash having recently lost
his wife and child to divorce, and so he takes a job as a tour guide. Set in
Russia, Russian author. Most eye-opening line to me is how the narrator
describes his alcoholism, something like: ‘It’s easy to get the engine going, I
have no problem with the engine, it’s the brakes I can’t control’, which reminds
me of a country music song I often hear playing at the local biker bar near me
named The Roost whose lyrics are something like ‘They say I got a drinking
problem / Well I ain’t got no problem drinking at all’. This is probably in my
top personal favorites of books I read this year, due to biases; it concludes
with our protagonist luridly drunk alone after his wife and daughter emigrate
without him to America as the secret police smash on his door, which reminds me
viscerally of the year I spent drunk and unemployed swigging rum in my bedroom
replaying old Pokemon games—this book is literally me.
17.
Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon): I’ve blogged about
this previously, but essentially I have mixed thoughts when it comes
to hefty, postmodern ‘literary’ (capital L) novels. These are big books for big
boys. They are not meant to be read in the infantile diaper of mental
inadequacy, no. Because I read this book, I’m sort of a genius. All ‘fine art’
has differing layers of pretentiousness, but it seems to me there’re few things
as exhaustingly exclusionary as a well-renowned book. Even an experimental,
3-hour long art movie can be endured by sheer force of will. But an 800+ paged,
excessively dense book? I’ll say this. Gravity’s Rainbow is simultaneously
rewarding and capricious. It does not take itself seriously, balancing every
potentially overburdened theme of nuclear extinction with the slapstick comedy
of banana peels (there are literally entire chapters of this book devoted to
the joke of characters slipping on bananas, to piss and poop, to how terrible
British candies are). It’s also densely obnoxious. Chapters have no title or
number marking, page counts vary by edition, so to even begin joking about ‘the
part where Slothrop falls in the toilet’ requires an almost mathematically
precise familiarity with the text. The issue isn’t its multiple narrators but
that its narrative perspective can shift, at a sentence-level quick notice,
through both space and time, a transition from one paragraph to the next that
tumbles you between tenses, perspectives, and entire decades of thought. Most
of the ‘challenge’ of the book is just keeping track of where you are in the
narrative because the author smugly won’t tell you. In this sense, though, Gravity’s
Rainbow is more than ‘just’ a book. It’s a piece of art you have to clash and
reckon with, to pin to the wrestling mat of your mind. I think the ultimate
measure of the worth of a ‘big book’ is if you could simply read a lesser work
by the author and more or less milk the same point. Previously I’d only read Crying
of Lot V by Pynchon, and yes, you can more or else get the signature gist of
paranoia and comedic conspiracy in a measure of pages hundreds less than Gravity’s
Rainbow. If you want to brag about reading Pynchon, you can save yourself a lot
of time with just Crying of Lot V, but I admit Gravity’s Rainbow justifies
itself by being such an annoyingly unique reading experience. It’s an
incredibly big book. I’m smarter than anyone I went to high school with because
I finished it.
18.
Dog Day Economy (Ted Rees): Primarily objected to this book’s emphasis on
process—there’s a note at the end of this collection on how the first half was
inspired by the author physically cutting and pasting excerpts from The
Economist together, while the second was ‘composed on large sheets of butcher
paper utilizing luggage markets, permanent markers, packing tape, scraps of
paper, and pens, in a rather physical process’. Give me a fucking break!! I
don’t care about your poems more or less because you ripped them from glossy
magazine pages vs spurted them out in a Microsoft Office word processor. Can’t
poems just be fucking poems? That being said, one factor I valued in my
previous review of the ninth book I read this year—#9. The Sky Contains the
Plans (Matthew Rohrer)—is how the author utilized an outside, hypnagogic
method to create his pieces. Methodology is, I guess, important, although
ultimately what matters to me is what I get out of a piece by the surface level
experience of skimming through. The coolest thing Rees does in this collection
isn’t write poems on construction paper but rather uniquely establish syntax
structures like ‘[tangible mundane concept] of the [abstract concept]’ – i.e.,
an excerpt like ‘hibachi of the conscience, / a stripmall in Dayton’; syntactical
structures I’ve liked enough to emulate in my own poetry, so I have to give him
credit.
19.
Bondings (Maggie Siebert): Falls into the same arbitrary category I’ve
previously established for Left Hand and No Tiger—edgy books, likely to be
published by Apocalypse Press and/or blurbed by Dennis Cooper. I liked it.
‘Edgy’ is a vague, slug-like term, used as pathetic shorthand. This is a book
that wants to make its readers uncomfortable by presenting them with a
relentless sequence of unique, morally challenging scenarios. In this sense,
even though I try to clumsily sledgehammer it into a ‘category’, it is
fundamentally different from the other titles I’ve mentioned, as it splices its
fractal gore cohesively, with thoughtful, plot-involved narratives. I liked
this amalgam-like approach, this synthesis of shattered language and stories
with clearly defined arcs and lessons: it seems like a sustainable approach for
balancing the frenetic energy of ‘outsider’ ‘alt-lit’ with more traditional horror
structures.
20.
Thank You, Steel China (Sean Kilpatrick): I want to explain this right…this
book establishes, basically, a ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ within its poems, in
that while each poem functions as its own piece, it also creates an overarching,
self-referential ‘lore’ about ‘Steel China’. Steel China is a city, it’s a
country, it’s a mood, it’s your worst hangover, it is the future and the
exposed rib cage of the past. Helpfully, this book isn’t pretentious in its
methods either, but at times even slapstick, doing a good job, in my opinion,
of balancing the bite of what might otherwise be a collection I deem too up its
own ass.
21.
People from My Neighborhood (Hiromi Kawakami): Series of ‘fairy tale’-like,
interlinking vignettes about a small town. This had flavors of ‘magical
realism’ to me in that most of the stories are grimy, unsettling, and often mundane
in their use of the supernatural. Enjoyed this quote from a five-star Amazon
review: ‘The difference between a palm-of-the-hand story and flash fiction is
not clear to me. According to my extensive research (two minutes on the web)
flash fiction is a story of less than 1000 words that emphasizes plot. It not a
vignette or reflection but a story. So what’s a story?’ What indeed…
22.
Light-Up Swan (Tom Snarsky): Became aware of Tom by his
twitter, where he reliably posts excerpts
of poetry that resonate with me ~75% of the time. He has good taste and is also
a poet, so I figured his own work would be worth checking out. I wasn’t wrong.
He gets bonus points, in my opinion, for being a ‘serious’ poet—he has
established through his Twitter that he has genuinely good, ‘educated’ taste in
poetry—that’s also playful, he can do beautifully elaborate, linguistically
rich poems, but he can also do the old ‘two line short and sweet clever’ poem,
he can do video game poems.
23.
Small Moods (Shane Kowalski): DM’d Zac Smith comparing this book to his
recently published Everything Is Totally Fine and he got mad at me, I think. These
are similar books to me in terms of tone, humor, use of ellipsis, but also very
different conceptually—Kowalski favors, I feel, more abstract themes/ideas,
stories that verge on ‘prose poetry’. Regardless, I felt excited ‘discovering’
this book. My process for finding books for this 100 book list was mostly to read
1.) ‘big name classics’ I’d been meaning to get around to, 2.) any book Sebastian Castillo and Crow Jonah mention, and 3.) online authors
I’d read/heard of before and could reliably guess I’d enjoy further reading. I
would then put in Amazon orders based on this methodology and receive books a
month later, wholly forgetting why I’d purchased them in the first place. This
made bad books feel extra bad to read, as I had no idea why they’d ended up in
my hands to begin with, but it also made books like this more enjoyable, like
‘Christmas presents’ I got to open early and unexpectedly.
24.
Norwood (Charles Portis): I’d previously watched the Coen Brother’s adaptation
of True Grit, a movie I liked and specifically remember for the unique
dialogue, but had otherwise no prior experience with Charles Portis. Enjoyed,
book seems sufficiently flawless in a literary capacity such that I can’t think
of anything further to say, except that it’s ‘literary’ in a comedy sense, it’s
funny, doesn’t sniff its own ass, etc.
25.
First Love (Gwendoline Riley): Remember being bored by this, which seems bad as
it’s a horrific story of gritty relationship abuse. I did find the parts about
the awful boyfriend valuable in how over-the-top villainous his dialogue and
shittalking were, he was exaggerated in a way that made him more real than any
portrayal of a shitty partner I’ve ever read. I’d almost recommend checking out
this book just for that, as much as I otherwise felt uninterested and unengaged
by it.
26.
The Mezzanine (Nicholson Baker): When people talk about Jordan Castro’s novel The
Novelist (reviewed further down this list) they mention this book. They say
insane shit like, ‘Jordan Castro is where Nicholson Baker meets Thomas Bernhard
on the iPhone app’. The ‘gimmick’ of The Mezzanine is it charts a single day of
an office worker in microscopic detail, every stapler, paper clip, trip to the
bathroom, and lunchbreak is examined to a molecular degree. Found it overall
relentless and plodding, at times unbearable to sit down and read, but I guess
that’s the literal point—congratulations Nicholson Baker, you sure showed me,
you accomplished what you set out to do.
27.
Begat Who Begat Who Begat (Marcus Pactor): Heard of Marcus when he went on the
Selected Prose podcast, and I guess I found the interview compelling enough to
buy his book. Overall don’t have much to say, I don’t think this one resonated
with me, the biggest thing I associate with Pactor is in the podcast he talks
about how he values spending time with his children more than writing, he told
an anecdote about how like, if the decision is between teaching his daughter to
ride a bike and writing a story, he will always favor creating irreplaceable
memories with his daughter, which I found gentle and profound. I have neglected
pretty much every other aspect of my life by doing this reading challenge. I
have lost so much time with family and loved ones. This whole literature
thing—it’s all kind of shit, isn’t it? There’s no value, there is no point. The
only thing that’s real is the dirt you can grasp, the overflowing trash of the
world. Girlfriend is mad at me right now because I need to clean the toilet but
I’m not, I’m working on my blogpost about all 100 books I read this year, one
hundred books. That’s a lot of books.
28.
Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett): I italicized this, but it’s a play, not
poetry. I’d never read Beckett before, and obviously you have to read Beckett.
So I did. I read this play, I have read Samuel Beckett. Big takeaways are there
is a video game villain in the series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney named Godot who
I think is cool, one of his character traits is he insists on drinking coffee
‘black as a moonless night’.
29.
Tom Sawyer (Joseph Grantham): Grantham has always been an interesting online
‘alt-lit’ figure to me. Seems like he ‘cracked’ the classical online scene, securing
an editor position at The Nervous Breakdown while making inroads with famous
people like Megan Boyle and the guy who does the Otherppl literature podcast. Simultaneously,
I wonder if his celebrity has ‘stalled out’, in that he hovers around ~2000
twitter followers and has not, to my knowledge, cemented the book deals and
fame one is supposed to with 2010 alt-lit internet connections. In this frame
of reference, I appreciate his Twitter presence, in that he seems to use it
solely for corny, throwaway jokes—I genuinely mean this, I like the sheer
‘nothingness’, the lack of a goal or product, of this account that represents
the culmination of his online achievements. He does these commercial voiceovers that I like and laugh at and feel are underrecognized. So much of life and
society is excessive and unneeded, I think that I would be fine if Grantham
somehow secured a monetary deal where he just makes these commercial voiceovers
and never has to work again.
30.
Bad Behavior (Mary Gaitskill): Feel like I ‘missed’ something important, in
that Gaitskill is a renowned author yet I found this jarringly bad. Stories seemed
to end abruptly, inconclusively, lacking any real sense of moral purpose. You
could argue, I guess, the nihilism is the point, although I don’t feel like
that conclusion is earned by any of these stories. Enjoyed thinking the
portrayals of sex work in this book asinine, out-of-touch, and privileged only
to google Gaitskill and discover she’s a former prostitute. The one story in
this I did like was about a young woman who lives bleakly with her parents and
sister who decides to finally get a job, only for this to be a secretary
position at a law firm where her boss masturbates onto her. Summarizing it like
that makes it sound maybe cheap and rife with unnecessary shock value, but
Gaitskill crafts it in a way that I found heart-wrenching.
31.
Under the Sea (Mark Leidner): Had previously only read Leidner’s poetry, which
I enjoyed. I liked this collection and enjoyed the ‘playwright’-seeming
influence: all of these stories are plot-driven, locomotive, moving engines
with a tight focus on dialogue. Not sure exactly what I mean by this, except
that I feel most of the stories in this collection could’ve been stripped of
description/scenery and reduced to plays and they would still function, if not
thrive.
32.
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God (Etgar Keret): Started this with the soft
suspicion that it was a ‘NPR’ book. Feel vaguely that Etgar Keret is a
‘high-level’ writer that Ira Glass probably talks about. Upon reading, there’s
nothing specific I would object to or find bad except this continued nagging
imp on my shoulder that NPR would probably praise this book. I don’t know how
to formulate my hatred for NPR in a way that makes sense.
33.
sad sad boy (Michael O'Brien): This is another Back Patio Press classic,
meaning I classify it as ‘anti-poetry’ in the same vein as Liver Mush, where it
avoids the stale profundity so often associated with the medium but also
achieves enough of a balance of the whimsical and the emotional to avoid lapsing
into banal, ‘schoolboy pissing in the sink’ territory. The title is fitting as this
whole collection openly indulges in its own sad boy melodrama but is self-aware
of this sadness enough to come across as clever and moving.
34.
Nudes (Elle Nash): My cat was a kitten and teething while I read this and, for
some reason, tore this specific book to shit. These were involving stories
about sexual exploitation, drug abuse, eating disorders, all thematically
twined together with what I interpreted as a running critique of America. Anti-capitalist
writing runs the risk of corniness, in my opinion, of shooting easy targets,
but I appreciated how Nash used that lens to strengthen already punch-y ideas:
the story “Define Hungry” starts with the speaker listing all her bills in what
very closely triggered my most disliked trope of post-internet writing (complaining
about your college debt), only to climax with her getting caught by grocery
store security attempting to smuggle out an ice cream cake beneath her clothes as
a guise for pregnancy in a vivid climax of sticky, melting oozing.
35.
Underworld (Don DeLillo): This is the other ‘big boy book’ I read this year, in
addition to Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a kaleidoscopic romp, the ‘hook’ being that
it works backwards, the plot moving in reverse, which I respect as a narrative
gimmick in that DeLillo didn’t use it as a throwaway on a short story or
novella but instead an ~800 page behemoth. He truly committed to the bit, here.
However, holding to the values I established in my Gravity’s Rainbow review, I
do think that the worth of these big boy diaper books ultimately rests in what
you get out of them. After reading, I genuinely feel that you could pick up any
Don DeLillo much shorter than this one and get the same literary mileage out of
it—if you don’t want to spend a month of your life sifting through a page count
that rounds up to a thousand, you could probably read any of his briefer works
and save yourself the trouble.
36.
The Years (Annie Ernaux): This was my first Ernaux, and I was shocked by how
simple and obvious her style is despite having never encountered anything like
it in any other format—it’s basically an ethereal ranting that transcends any
previously established standard point of view. This is not first-person,
third-person, or even second-person POV: it’s a weird ‘universal-person’
perspective in which the narrator is the royal ‘we’. I liked it, reminded me of
my more political days when I got kicked out of a bar for raving about
neoliberalism and Obama drone bombing babies.
37.
The Grief Performance (Emily Kendal Frey): Mostly tight, economic, ‘2-4
syllables per line’ kinds of poems, where the writer must pack a neutron star
of dense meaning into each piece for the reader to not feel ripped off for
paying $17 on Amazon. As always I struggle to articulate what makes poetry
collections good or bad, but this one was worth the $17 on Amazon, for me.
38.
Obscene Gestures for Women (Janet Kauffman): Felt like this lives up to the
reputation of its Vintage Contemporaries publisher label, in that it’s a
collection of refined short stories clearly written at the highest skill level
an author can achieve. I appreciate that despite her evident talent, Kauffman also
isn’t afraid to dip her stories into zany goofiness: she doesn’t depreciate her
own writing by taking it too seriously. Excerpt I liked was story where woman
with bad teeth argues that her oral health isn’t a personal but a political
problem, telling her dentist that her mouth can’t improve until the world does.
Also, as expected of a story collection called Obscene Gestures for Women, I
think Kauffman has some excellent titles here. A few that I liked: ‘In the
Discorruption of Flesh’, ‘How Sunlight Figures In’, ‘The Sky Is Still
Overhead’.
39.
Notes from a Wood-Paneled Basement (Alan Ten-Hoeve): Feel biased in that this
kind of poetry collection seems rare and infrequent to me, tackling themes far
removed from the usual indie lit scene of sex and drugs in order to focus on
the quiet moments of fatherhood. The book is also interlaced with flashbacks to
the narrator’s ‘fucked’ childhood, which I probably would have been less
interested in had they been the bulk of the collection, but the way Alan
mingles them throughout was refreshing and helped maintain my enthusiasm. Also
enjoyed that while I did just use ‘fucked’ as a descriptor, these are also
pretty mundane snapshots of the life of a divorced kid in America—Alan is
skillfully grounded and authentic as a writer, excited to see more ‘dad lit’
from him.
40.
Light While There Is Light: An American History (Keith Waldrop): Title for this
seems insanely misleading, feel like it’s prepping you for an NPR-acclaimed
‘masterpiece’ when in fact this is one of the funniest, most indescribably
bizarre books I read this year. This is nothing more or less than a
fictionalized autobiography (dare I say this is…autofiction?), yet easily one
of my favorites. Recommend reading.
41.
Castle Faggot (Derek McCormack): Scrolled through Goodreads and a 1-Star Review
says: ‘Well curiosity killed the cat. This was a complete waste of my time.
Recommended for people who like shit.’ By contrast, a 5-Star Review: ‘i cannot
imagine having a middle of the road opinion about this book. you will either
hate it or spend a lot of money buying copies for all your friends. best kept
in the bathroom, near or even in the toilet.’
42.
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Harry Crews): Insanely bleak portrayal
of early 20th century America. Like, I knew it was bad back then, what with the
farms, great depressions, and lack of refrigeration, didn’t realize it was this
bad. There is literally a segment where the narrator gets boiled alive as a
child, he is accidentally tossed into a cauldron of water so scalding it strips
the flesh from his muscles and leaves him bedridden for months. Seems comically
bad. When I was growing up, I was middle-class suburban. I had absolutely no
obstacles in life aside from deep anger issues that I would resolve by smashing
my head against driveways, bricks, concrete, etc whenever I got mad, usually
over things like video games, Pokemon cards, etc.
43. Everything
Was Fine Until Whatever (Chelsea Martin): Mix of prose and poetry that
seems to have been written with a ‘punch-line’ bent, I felt: the emphasis here
is less on figurative language, narrative techniques, whatever, but a kind of
‘standup routine’ of funny, shocking, relatable anecdotes. Because of the
potentially ‘meme-y’, ‘Reddit’ nature of this format, I enjoyed the variety of
rhetorical techniques Martin utilizes for each piece—this could’ve gotten stale
really quickly, but things are mixed up frequently enough that each segment is
unique. Prose is broken up by full pages of art, poems can be a quick two lines
or explosive bombs of caps locked oversized font; there’re even little footnotes
sprinkled like easter eggs throughout containing lines such as ‘I accidentally
shat on a person once. There, I said it.’ Even a meta-approach like this, where
the collection feels less like a traditional book and more like an art collage,
risks the Reddit, but despite Martin’s dispersal of technique I thought her
writing remained solid and skilled. Particularly liked her almost journalistic
emphasis of concrete details to render abstract, individual emotions more real:
in a story where the narrator starts fasting and breaks up with her boyfriend
out of the boredom that would be otherwise replaced by hunger, Martin
concludes: ‘I was alone and my body was a large part of who I was, that seemed
clear, but the sequence of things was all wrong and there was no food inside to
make me feel less confused about this.’
44.
Wittgenstein’s Nephew (Thomas Bernhard): There is a lot of Bernhard ‘love’ in
online alt-lit circles that I am frustratingly unable to relate to. I still
have not yet ‘gotten’ it. I do vaguely remember liking the sheer intensity of
shittalking in Woodcutters, but my brain was less developed then and I’d
probably need to reread.
45.
You Are Having a Good Time (Amie Barrodale): Completely serviceable, ‘The New
Yorker’-tier collection of short stories that hits all the right narrative/thematic
beats without being stuffy and sounding like it could be read in the voice of an
NPR host. There’s a Raymond Carver-esque ‘quietness’ to this collection, a
minimalism that feels, to me, like being alone and sober in a one-bedroom
apartment on a Friday night, the only light the television’s aquarium glow. The
story I recall liking the most was ‘The Imp’, which climaxes with the narrator
beating his wife for maybe texting her ex before locking himself in the
bathroom and hallucinating an imp: ‘She was dirty and slimy like something that
had been in the drain for decades. She was made of hair and slime. She had her
hands around my throat.’
46. Satellite (Matthew
Rohrer): The second Matthew Rohrer poetry book I read this year. Reading Rohrer
feels, to me, the way that other people describe cracking a beer, there’s this
refreshing carbonation, a mild but pronounced ‘ooooohhh yeahhh’. I find no
pleasure in beer. If I drink a beer, I need to drink 10, 15, 20. I need to
drink until I sweat and puke and piss myself.
47.
62: A Model Kit (Julio Cortazar): Obscure-seeming novel to me, my previous
exposure to Cortazar was in a high school AP English class where we read
‘Continuity of Parks’ because it was ‘real’ magical realism and not the watered
down, CIA-backed bullshit pushed on us by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Quick
Goodreads search of 62 brought me this comment: ‘always feels like you are on a
mild LSD trip.’
48.
Woman Running in the Mountains (Yuko Tsushima): My experience with Japanese
literature is almost solely limited to books about deranged, lonely men unable
to cope with their sexuality, so it’s funny to me that this is the almost formulaically
perfect opposite of that. A young woman gets pregnant from a married coworker;
rather than let herself be crushed by the social stigma of single-motherhood, she
uses it as an opportunity for self-actualization and independence. Was intrigued
by how Tsushima addresses her central moral question of infidelity through thematic
omission; the protagonist simply continues to have mindless, indifferent sex
with disappointing men in a portrayal that lacks direct condemnation or
valorization. This is just what real people do, Tsushima argues, I think: they
get lonely and horny. They have sex, they have babies. Regardless of it all,
human life is miraculous, and you should always try to build yourself into a
stronger person. An ultimately stronger message, I feel maybe, than Yuko Tsushima’s
fascist freak loneliness, which I have also always admired. Made me want to
have a baby, made me want to be a father—interestingly, so too did 2022’s
blockbuster release Avatar 2: The Way of Water.
49. Several
Gravities (Keith Waldrop): Read this after deeply enjoying Waldrop’s Light
While There Is Light. The introduction of that book said Waldrop was primarily
a poet, so I felt interested in comparing his work and so bought this
(expensive) book with minimal research, not realizing it was less poetry and
more a collage collection. Still appreciated it, although it definitely didn’t
resonate the way his other book did for me. I just don’t get collages…I like
when online people do them and they have like, pictures of William Dafoe
spliced with horses, but I feel way more artistically skeptical of them when
compiled into glossy hardcovers I have to pay $40 for.
50. Can
You Relax in My House (Michael Earl Craig): As I’ve established, I like
Matthew Rohrer a lot, and Rohrer helps run Fence Books who published this, so I
figured it might be worth checking out. Had a lukewarm time getting into this, Michael
Earl Craig frequently does this meta-thing where he forces you to acknowledge
that you are, indeed, reading poetry (there is literally a poem titled ‘in my
poetry’) that went over my head, but eventually his writing did click, enough
that I was willing to read another, better-seeming book by him for this list. Michael
Earl Craig’s bio says he’s a ferrier, which I literally took to mean he ferries
boats or something, but it actually means ‘a specialist in equine hoof care’,
according to Wikipedia.
51.
The Novelist (Jordan Castro): I’ve blogged about
this previously. I liked it. Biggest criticism is the marketing
around the book. Blurbs and interviews kept assigning a like, philosophical
importance to it, remember skimming interviews that made The Novelist seem like
an opaquely dense rebuttal to Kierkegaard or something, when it’s actually a
light, pleasant, genuinely funny read that I breezed through. Also, the
poop—good god, people wouldn’t shut up about the poop scenes. There’s like, one
section so brief I can barely even recall where the narrator takes a shit, yet
every critic acted like this is a 500-page magnum opus on shitting. If I have
to read another blurb about Castro’s ‘scatological irreverence’ or whatever I
will set my copy of The Novelist on fire.
52. Bad
Poet (Brian Alan Ellis): Felt like there was a ‘Rupi Kaur’-like effect happening
here where these didn’t necessarily need to be poems, they could’ve easily been
forgettable one-off tweets about depression, but Brian decided to instead employ
the poetic formatting of line breaks and enjambment to add a pretentious
breathiness to otherwise garden-variety thoughts. Genuinely not saying this as
a criticism. I think this is an interesting/intelligently deconstructive
approach to the medium as a whole, wrapped up neatly with the self-aware bow of
‘bad poet’. Ultimately did not care for this collection, and again I don’t
think that means it’s bad or that it failed to accomplish what it set out to
do. Feel interested in how particularly alienated I felt from this
trendy-seeming portrayal of ‘relatable’ depression, where the infinite sadness
of having to be alive is watered down to pop culture references. Crippling
sadness seems like it should be more unique and special than a throwaway joke
about not owning a box spring, and that kind of ends up being Brian’s point.
53.
The Divorce (Cesar Aira): Not confident that I can recall a single concrete
detail about this. I liked the book Ghosts by Aira better, which balanced its
more abstract, magical realist thrusts with graspable everyday events like
insane lines at the grocery store, drinking beer, and invisible ghosts with exaggeratedly
huge cocks.
54.
Dogwalker (Arthur Bradford): Liked this, I think. Seemed thematically
reminiscent of the experience of going to rural county fairs, feeling hot and
sweaty confined within rusting amusement rides. This collection has lots of
drunk driving, freak show circus performances, and people fucking dogs, but
portrayed through a tightly restrained prose that never feels like Bradford is
earning cheap hits through shock value alone.
55.
Half an Inch of Water (Percival Everett): Everett’s author photo seems insane,
he has the pretentious ‘aloof literary’ pose of a Distinguished Professor of
English at the University of South Carolina going on, but there’s also a pet
raven on his shoulder. This maybe summarizes my take on these stories. I felt
cynical, wondering if literary success can be guaranteed just by having a basic
knowledge of rugged things like horseback riding and getting chased by mountain
lions while hiking, but I also felt like these are all technically perfect stories.
Overall, I don’t think I’m capable of disliking a writer who poses his author
photos with his pet raven.
56.
The Topeka School (Ben Lerner): I’d previously read Lerner’s poetry and his
autofiction Leaving the Atocha Station, which I liked. In this context, Topeka
School feels like his ‘Infinite Jest’, in which Lerner puts way too much into
one novel in a weighty grab at literary significance. Most absurd-seeming parts
were subplot about how Donald Trump is bad (I don’t disagree with this
sentiment, it just feels out-of-touch and doomed to rely on low-hanging lobs at
Trump’s presidency as a central core for a novel) and a scene where one of the
narrators explains eating pussy through the academic conventions of linguistic
phonetics. At the same time, there’s a running theme of self-aware inadequacy—always
present in Ben’s books—that might serve to prematurely counter these critiques.
For instance, the main characters are psychologists with deeply-established
psychological issues, such that the reoccurring thematic joke is how over-analysis/awareness
of yourself isn’t a substitute for a solution: if anything, it can be a defense
mechanism preventing necessary behavioral change. The frequent acts of
performatism in this book are steeped in rage and inadequacy, such that Ben’s
constant white savorism seem meta and deconstructive of the too-easy liberal impulse
to swap your personality disorder with broadly performative and ultimately
meaningless action.
57.
Hotel Splendid (Marie Redonnet): One of three novels that are the first English
translated works of Redonnet, an established novelist in France, is what the
Amazon product description for this says. These books, while not narratively
connected, are presented as a kind of series, a palate-sampling of Redonnet, so
I decided to read all three. I don’t often read multiple works by the same
author in short time intervals; my stance is that there are maybe a few thousand
books I’ll realistically have time to read in the course of my life, so the
best method to get a sense of literature is to try nibbling fractals of works
to get through as much as possible, only honing into multiple titles if I truly
enjoy the writer. Hotel Splendid is about three aging sisters fighting to
maintain their hotel, which is actively being swallowed by the swamp it
borders. The book is intensely repetitive, maybe verging on being boringly
so—basically, the hotel is dilapidated, the sisters are old, the pipes break
and need to be repaired, then the toilets clog, then there’s a surge of guests,
then it’s winter and the pipes freeze, then the garden is swallowed in a spring
sludge, then the toilets clog. Despite its short length, reading this and then her
other two novels might be a bit much, as this repetitive, Sisyphean slog is
Redonnet’s trademark unifying theme between these companion pieces. In terms of
fictional places I’d want to live in, I think I’d choose either the swamp hotel
in this book or the haunted mansion from the first Resident Evil video game.
58.
Shoplifting from American Apparel. (Tao Lin): Reread this in an attempt to
further ‘reckon’ with Tao Lin, whose cultural oeuvre disrupted modern alt lit
and continues to be a source of controversy to this day. Tao Lin’s Bed is one
of my favorite books ever, a short story collection that I can confidently say
deserves sharing shelf space with the likes of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. Shoplifting
is a dramatic departure from Bed’s style, in that Tao alters nearly everything
I liked about his writing, yet it still, fundamentally, remains very ‘Tao Lin’.
His removed, desolate-seeming insight on human interaction is persistently moving
regardless of what context it’s in, novella, short story, metaphor-heavy or
stylistically minimalist, etc. I still don’t understand how or why this works,
I don’t think, but I feel confident that it does.
59.
Ruthless Little Things (Elizabeth V. Aldrich): The author, Eris, died this
year. In the tiny, frog pool-shallow murk that is ‘online lit’, I believe she
was/is genuinely influential and good for the community. I think she had/has a
tangible impact on the lives of actual humans, many of them. I don’t want to
suggest that this should be the metric for what a life is worth. Just want to
say that this sucks. This is a person I never actually knew, she is data I
interacted with on a website, and she’s still gone, she’s not there and never
will be again. Have ‘anime character’-like thoughts on this, stereotypical
taglines like ‘you punk—I’ll kill you for dying on me.’ Recommend these
three poems in dedication
to Eris by g.g. roland.
60.
La Serenissima (Wallace Barker): Felt a lot of initial resistance toward
this due to the inherent-seeming tension between being a book that wants an
emotional rise from its readers and being a book about taking a bunch of
vacations. A lot of these pieces are about being depressed because the speaker
has to like, send emails for his remote work job while on vacation. Wallace
Barker wants me to feel bad that he can afford multiple vacations to
Mexico—give me a fucking break. Once I got past this, though, I ended up really
liking the collection, finding these poems stylistically educational in how
they blend a kind of rapid, dream-like freeflow to elevate otherwise boring
concepts (going on vacation, drinking on vacation, feeling happy on vacation,
feeling bleak on vacation) into the profound and moving.
61. The
Oblivion Ha-Ha (James Tate): Back in ~2015, I accidentally stole a book of
collected James Tate poem from my college library by failing to return it for 7
years, mostly because I really like the poem ‘Consumed’ in it, being probably
the first poem that I actually ‘got’. So finally this year I decided to buy the
collection ‘Consumed’ was originally published in and return the stolen
collected works. This book reminded me that James Tate is good, he occupies for
me that Matthew Rohrer-like sphere of poetry that doesn’t take itself too
seriously, that uses the often impenetrable nature of the medium for humor and
absurdity rather than an obtuse denseness locking the reader out.
62.
Tlooth (Harry Matthews): The introduction to Light While There Is Light mentions
Tlooth, among a few others, as ‘perfect’ short novels in the same category as Light
While There Is Light. Feel interested by this category and intend to read every
book mentioned in that introduction, one of the few introductions for a novel I
have ever bothered to read. As its weird title might suggest, Tlooth is a
bizarre adventure that globe-trots from Siberian prisons to Afghanistan to
Venice. The conclusion threw me off by revealing the protagonist’s gender to be
opposite from what I’d assumed for the ~200 pages that make up this novel,
which I thought was probably a product of my preconceived sexism, but a brief search
on Wikipedia shows that it’s written in an intentionally obfuscating style.
Found this approach interesting and reminiscent of Pynchon and David Foster
Wallace in how it defies reader expectations and actively tries to make their
engagement with the text a pain in the ass.
63. Ten
Mornings and The Convergence of the Virgins (Stephen Sturgeon):
Lots of internet writers attempt to curate an ‘alternative’, ‘unconventional’
online brand, but I feel like Stephen is legitimately deeply unwell as a
person. I also think that of all the poets associated with ‘alt-lit’, he
probably has the best classical understanding of the medium, he is the most
‘authentic’ poet within the scene (using these terms loosely, I doubt Sturgeon
would identify with the ‘alt-lit’ label, which is already pretty nonsensical
and overused). These are two tiny chapbooks that I counted as one because fuck
you, I read 100 books this year including Gravity’s Rainbow and Underworld. I
think Sturgeon in general deserves greater success/recognition, he is one of
the few writers I feel should get paid money to write and do nothing else. (All
other writers should have manual labor construction jobs.)
64.
The Ice at the Bottom of the World (Mark Richard): Expected—based on intense title,
prestigious awards listed on cover, and blurbs describing Richard as ‘a
stylistic daredevil’—a boring slog, was relieved to instead discover an
electric, funny, and often insane collection. Enjoyed the relentless barrage of
‘Lorrie Moore’-seeming antics, like one story’s pair of brothers abandoned by
their parents and left to the supervision of an ‘Uncle Trash’ who burn down
their house, and another where hired hands on a farm accidentally witness their
boss’s horse shit itself to death and are forced, through a series of
increasing hijinks, to hide its corpse by way of secretly floating it down a
nearby channel. In addition to learning new narrative and stylistic
possibilities, thought that this was just plain fun to read.
65.
Man in the Holocene (Max Frisch): Alone in his mountainside lodging, an aging
man is cut off from the rest of his village and larger society as a whole
during a cataclysmic summer flood. According to Wikipedia, key themes are man’s
‘insignificance and meaninglessness’. This seems like an obvious and stale
topic, but Frisch’s hyper-tragic portrayal of dying old and alone ended up
truly disturbing me. Felt especially ‘bothered’ by scene where the protagonist
attempts to make a familiar day hike, only to become irrevocably lost and
almost die alone and pathetic in his own backwoods. Finished and immediately
sent my brothers incoherent messages panicking about what we are going to do
about our own parents once they ‘get old’, what any of us will do once we get
old.
66. Flagged
and Removed (Darcie Wilder): Not sure if this Craigslist-themed collection
is posts Darcie Wilder personally found on the site and curated or if they’re
fictional testimonies she wrote—don’t care enough to research. It might say on
the back or product description, whatever. I remain interested in how either
possibility is interesting in its own way. Thought this was fun and unique, some
of these entries made me authentically laugh, some of them made me authentically
sad.
67.
Did You Ever Have a Family (Bill Clegg): Seems like the highest success you can
achieve as a writer who publishes stuff on the internet is getting Bill Clegg
as your agent. Despite this, I don’t like Bill Clegg as a writer, there is nothing
in his work that is for me. I’ve had this book on my nightstand since ~2016 and
only found the motivation to push through due to this reading challenge. In a
technical sense it’s fine, if anything that’s my complaint—it feels inorganic
and lifeless, like a text algorithmically generated to hit all the New York
Times bestseller checks: small town in New England, split narratives, tragic
mystery unpacked through the confessional trauma of each speaker. Felt baffled
by the heavy use of figurative cliches, enough that I even tweeted
about the line ‘spilling the beans’. I don’t think this is a bad book, which is
maybe my problem: this is written to be a good book that critics like and book
clubs widely circulate, and it maybe loses something because of that. Also,
feels utterly insane that 4 characters central to the plot have names starting
with ‘L’, Luke, Lydia, Liz, and Lolly, feel this must break some sort of rule.
68.
Modern Massacres (Timothy Willis Sanders): For the longest time, thought
bafflingly that Timothy Willis Sanders and Willis Plummer were the same person,
a conception confused, probably, because Willis Plummer was the editor for Western
Beefs of North America which published a short story (from this book?) by
Timothy Willis Sanders. Enjoyed this book and its framework of a ‘modern
massacre’, the most accurate summation I have heard for the contemporary social
experience of being utterly, irrevocably humiliated by your own actions.
69.
I'm Not Hungry but I Could Eat (Christopher Gonzalez): Had an initial, visceral
‘eye roll’ toward this as it starts with heavy ‘straight white people suck, am
I right?’ tones reminiscent of condescending Twitter posts (I’m not white, I’m
Slavic, I’m a person of color as defined by the Coalition of Communities of
Color, and while I’ve only been sexually attracted to women my whole life, I
kissed a guy at a college party once, and people would often criticize me in
high school for my effeminate mannerisms, deeming them ‘too gay’). However, this
impression would turn out to be completely false, as Gonzalez’s commitment here
isn’t to potshots at poor, vulnerable white people like me but tackling deeper themes
of identity and self-doubt. When each story concludes, there is no narcissistic
escape of victimization, in which responsibility is thrust outward and
forgotten—instead, Gonzalez traps us with his character’s anxiety, giving this
collection a claustrophobic loneliness.
70.
Selected Stories (Troy James Weaver): Series of quick, punchy, effective short-short
stories. While a lot of flash fiction risks leaving me baffled and dangling,
these stories were all, for me, rounded and effective. The darker themes of sex
and drugs—which a lesser writer might have used as a shock value crutch in the
place of actually interesting prose—were satisfying balanced with Troy’s strong
understanding of language. Particularly liked story in this about trying heroin
for the first time ending with the narrator wondering what the spoon will look
like when he’s hungry enough to eat, this almost jarringly specific fixation on
the spoon instead of concrete food/appetite struck me as smart and emblematic
of what makes Troy clever/good.
71. A
Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts (Wang Yin): Compilation of Yin’s poems
from 1988-2021. Was interested in the general formatting of this collection,
where newer poems are placed first and each section moves us backwards through
the poet’s oeuvre. Regardless of the time period, I felt that all of Yin’s work
has an archaic-seeming sincerity to it, much different from glitzy, postmodern
poetry. Images are sharp and obvious, emotions are laid completely bare without
subterfuge or an indulgently clever ‘poetry voice’ winking at you. Enjoyed the
line from a poem titled ‘#5’: ‘In the midst of this a lonely planet my lonely
self / in great pain’. Literally me.
72.
Forever Valley (Marie Redonnet): The second book by Redonnet I read this year.
Like Hotel Splendid, the narrative core of this book is futile repetition: a
young girl lives in a mountain valley utterly isolated from society, its sole
source of income is a prostitute dancehall where she works, she works at the
prostitute dancehall, the men who patron the prostitute dancehall start to
dwindle due to economic forces, the owner goes insane, the young girl continues
working there, things continue to grow bleaker, the young girl also lives with
a priest who goes insane then dies. I do admire Redonnet’s masterful depictions
of these brutal little worlds where the reader can’t even imagine the
possibility of hope, I like the almost comedically bleak subject matter of
hotels sinking into swamps and raving insane priests.
73. What
Narcissism Means to Me (Tony Hoagland): Poems that had a ‘Beat-era’, Frank
O’Hara quality, to me—could be completely, laughably wrong in my classification
of this. The back cover lauds Tony for bringing ‘his inquisitive, ironical
perspectives not only to the personal life, but also the fields of American
culture’, but in general he came across as less clever and more of just an
asshole, to me. Lots of self-indulgent and weak language here, one line sticks
out to me where Hoagland compares America to a commercial. Maybe the narcissism
is the point.
74.
Donald Goines (Calvin Westra): Enjoyed Westra’s debut novel Family Annihilator
and was excited at how stylistically different this book seemed in comparison,
reminding me of the gap between Tao Lin’s early, middle, and late writing, how
an author can shift styles drastically but not detrimentally. Oddly also made
me think of A Clockwork Orange, a book I have not read in over a decade, in how
it establishes its own private linguistic system (majority of characters in
this book are named after exotic birds, various invented slang replaces real
world terms, etc). Was impressed by how the slapstick, exaggerated depiction of
drugs—many scenes of characters slicing their flesh apart in order to shove
drugs into the festering open wounds reminiscent of early D.A.R.E propaganda—ended
up as one of the most affecting and accurate portrayals of abuse I’ve read. Don’t
think I would typically notice/care about this kind of thing, but Donald Goines
also has a really elegant-seeming structure that bounces between multiple
perspectives/flashbacks without ever losing its narrative thrust, i.e., I never
got bored when the plot went on a tangent to establish high school backstories
or whatever. Westra has impressed and excited me as a writer thus far.
75.
House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories (Yasunari Kawabata): Felt that
this collection of three long ‘short’ stories tended to drag. Liked the line
from the first story (which seems to be a quote from a poem?) ‘the night offers
toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned’. Thought the last story, ‘Of
Birds and Beasts’, was the strongest, where a man who collects exotic animals
ruminates on a failed romance—enjoyed the grisly scenes of constant animal
death, which were shocking in their unimportance, a tiny bird is killed by the
temperature of its bath, a puppy is suffocated when its mother rolls over in
her sleep.
76.
Letters to Wendy's (Joe Wenderoth): Genuinely thought this would be a meme book—the
title implies a sort of Reddit comedy where a socially maladjusted man’s
Wendy’s obsession culminates in a cohesive, feel-good funny narrative that
perhaps disparages capitalism but ultimately elevates the consumer experience. In
a refreshing surprise to me, this book is the exact opposite of that. I’ve
raved enough about the strain of Dennis Cooper ‘edgy’ books pervasive to the
online lit community, how writers can lean on mindless gore and shocking sex perversions
as a substitute for engaging prose, but Wenderoth is earnestly disturbing here,
with a refined insanity that sublimates instead of cheaply shocks.
77.
You Will Never Be Forgotten (Mary South): Accidentally bought a copy of this
when my girlfriend already owned a copy. Now we have two copies, and I have $20
less. A pretty standard, promising, ‘The New Yorker’-tier collection. A lot of
the stories had a sci-fi/fantastical bent meant, I gathered, to emphasize the
greater themes about ‘society’, like the first story where mediocre men named
Keith are mass-produced in a factory. Only parts I truly struggled with were
when South tried to tie in like, social media and the internet for a broader
social commentary, felt like these were cudgeled attempts to force this
collection to be ‘relevant’ (marketable).
78.
Kick the Latch (Kathryn Scanlan): Kind of torn on this one. Vividly enjoyed
Scanlan’s book The Dominant Animal. This book, meanwhile, is based on phone and
personal interviews she did with a woman who’d spent her life on the horse
racetrack. Didn’t realize this going in, and so I started expecting Scanlan’s
usual linguistic whip, only to find a much different experience. Kick the Latch
lacks the Lydia Davis-like snappy, frenetic punch of Scanlan’s flash fiction,
but it’s also a slow-building, powerful narrative about how fucked it is to
work with horses. One time my buddy and I took the train to upstate New York to
visit his equestrian girlfriend and I recall being afraid of the horses,
remember the ones in heat sounded like ancient dinosaurs, their horny groans a
primal resonation across the farm. A horse could kick you in the fucking head
and you would die. I don’t like horses.
79.
A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes): Was earnestly surprised to discover
that this book was written in 1929, as its humor and insights all seem
staggeringly relevant and contemporary. Wealthy English children living in
colonized Jamaica are sent back home to their parents after a tropical hurricane,
only to be abducted by pirates. While that premise sounded to me cheekily
‘Peter Pan’ and uninteresting, I was struck by Hughes’ realism. The pirates are
tragic buffoons, the children pure evil, the British justice system arbitrary
and bureaucratic. Recommend for the sheer timelessness-seeming nature of the
narrative alone.
80. Name
and Noun (Stephanie Yue Duhem): I’m a natural sucker for the poetic
wordplay, neatly summarized by the title, that defines this collection—Duhem
transforms what could easily be annoying puns into an experiment of linguistic
unraveling, taking a stylistic risk I feel is rare in the current online lit
scene (Duhem is a cyberwriter). As I’ve expressed already, the mainstream internet writing
approach is a kind of ‘anti-poetry’, shying away from the compromised, uncool,
obtuse ‘purple prose’ of ‘The New Yorker’ literature, which is fine, I like
many writers of this genre, but it’s refreshing to see Duhem succeed at a
contrary approach here. She seems like a genuine ‘smart’ poet—dare I say one of
those MFA-wielding, CIA-backed, ‘real’ poets.
81.
Night Train - Very Short Stories (A.L. Snijders): Translated by Lydia Davis, a
writer I very much like, such that I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed.
Snijders gives us funny little snippets of Dutch life, what the back of the
book classifies as ‘mini-stories’. Nothing that did much for me, although admittedly
Snijder’s modesty, both tonal and in the scope of his mundane, ant-focused
narratives, didn’t make this a slog by any means either.
82.
Waste (Eugene Marten): Very Gordon Lish-seeming book. I would’ve thought that
regardless because Lish blurbs it, but the prose vividly reminded me of the
other Lish-ish book I read this year, Preparation for the Next Life, by
his son Atticus. Waste is about a janitor working in an office complex, and
potentially the best custodian-focused book I’ve ever read outside of Calvin
Westra’s Family Annihilator. Particularly liked the constant characterization
of the narrator’s workplace as ‘The Building’, an omnisciently callous presence
looming at all times over the stark prose, a hollow megacomplex of abandoned
cubicles and trash chutes stuffed with corpses. Marten has a touch for well-researched
hyper-realism, down to the jangle of paperclips as the janitor empties his last
trash bin of the night in the fluorescent glow of an empty office. This, then,
helps the more jarring segments of the book (there is corpse-fucking, there’s sex
with dead people, etc) avoid teenage edginess and land as genuinely chilling
sequences I still don’t like to think back on.
83. Phrasis (Wendy
Xu): Published by Fence Books, such that I assumed it could be easily sorted
into the same zany yet elegant category as Matthew Rohrer and Michael Earl
Craig that I am partial to. Liked the constant hammering of colloquialisms,
lots of casual ‘shits’ and ‘fucks’ throughout, juxtaposed by Xu’s clearly
refined, literary understanding of what poetry ‘is’ (there are ‘big boy’ themes
happening in this collection, as evidenced by blurbs praising Xu’s ‘uncanny
detail’, ‘fragment as the unit composition’, and ‘interior work’). Trying to
grapplingly summarize why I like Fence Books’ taste both here and in general: I
think that what all of these releases have is some form of ‘anti-poetry’, yet executed
in a way that nevertheless understands, respects, and even parasitically uses
the medium, such that it is ultimately able to, virus-like, decompose what we
think poetry ‘is’ from within until it blooms into something new.
84.
Goon Dog (Jon Berger): Feel like an unnecessary amount of online debates—both
political and personal—center jobs and the identity of work, where there’s a
sliding scale of value/importance to art and opinions based on how much ‘skin’
one has in ‘the game’. Minimum wage laborers, construction workers, people who
do things with their hands and develop lasting back problems take priority over
those with cushy software jobs where they earn disproportionate sums typing
emails. I think there’s some phenomenon of like, protestant insecurity at play
here where we read headlines about resounding poverty across the world and need
to repent for our 9-5 remote work desk jobs. In this sense, I think Jon might
be ‘the realest’ writer out there, in that he is not, traditionally I don’t
think, a ‘writer.’ I might be failing to separate the art/artist and reading
too much into the characters of Jon’s novel, who have all failed high school,
dropped into vocational degrees, and partied and drank themselves through the
corroded heart of rural America, but I get the sense that Jon did not ride a
cushy middle class upbringing into a creative writing BA he then milked into an
MFA and PhD—Jon, probably, flunked his English classes and went to remedial
summer school. Regardless, the perspective he offers in this collection is quite
unlike anything else in the current online alt-lit scene. These are charming,
sincere stories that happen in the alien landscape of the rural Midwest, in the
guts of rotting barns, in the festering wounds of stupid teenagers stabbing one
another out of sheer summer boredom. I especially appreciated the contrast
between Goon Dog’s idealism and its realism, how its characters fantasize about
the cartoonish escapism of shooting anime beam attacks from their palms while
their mothers wither away with Alzheimer’s. This could’ve easily been a much
‘grittier’ collection but favors a childlike sincerity I found unique and
worthwhile.
85. 99
poems to cure whatever's wrong with you or create the problems you need. (Sam
Pink): Pink seems so consequentially foundational as a writer in the ‘online
scene’ that I don’t know if I can contribute anything useful in the way of
opinion on his writing. I know by now that I will probably always like
something written by Pink. I know I am likely to enjoy writing inspired by him.
But there’s an oversaturating effect here, caused only by his talent, where I
often get burnt out on Pink-ish writing and writers and need to distance myself
from them, maybe similar to how if you read a few Raymond Carver short story
collections too quickly, you tend to distance yourself from minimalism for a
while. Alternatively, Pink is also a good palate cleanser, and if I’m ever
stuck on reading motivation, I default to him for a quick reminder of why
writing is good: because it can be anything it wants. At this point in my
reading challenge, it was late October and nothing mattered. Interest rates
were up. Every week at my office job someone else was laid off. I was not
drinking beer, such that there were no longer any Fridays in my life—Friday
means release, escape, it is a carbonated rushing out from yourself that cannot
exist without beer. I went trick-or-treating with my girlfriend and her 7-year
old daughter and felt exaggeratedly despondent watching the sky darken. When we
had walked too far and tired her out, 7-year old began wailing ‘No more candy,
no more candy’, begging to return home—seems like a Sam Pink poem.
86.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (Patty Yumi Cottrell): Feel like my complaint with
90% of literature is how seriously it takes itself, so this intrigued me by
posing the opposite problem. This is a book about a sister returning to her
smalltown home from NYC to reckon with the suicide of her adopted brother—a
tagline that seems spawned by computer algorithm to reach New York Times bestseller
status. Yet Cottrell is insistently irreverent throughout the novel. She
refuses us readers an emotional release, often even parodying the grief of the
situation by rendering its actors tragic clowns (funny detail I remember/liked:
the rich parents are also penny pinchers, and so replaced all the real
furniture in their mansion with wicker chairs). The issue for me is less the
humorous approach and more that most of the jokes didn’t personally land.
That’s OK—I don’t like Seinfeld much either.
87.
Nightwork (Christine Schutt): What I classify as a ‘Garielle Lutz’-esque
collection, in that it fits Lutz’s ideal of writing established in the super famous
lonely sentence essay. I don’t dislike this microscopic approach to
writing, where the writer’s attention is atomized to the syllabic level of each
word, but I don’t think I love it either, having gone through my own personal
phase of this where I thought otherwise unengaging, bare pieces I wrote were
genius simply through virtue of how many glottal sounds I used in a row. I
don’t want to reduce Schutt to her syntax, though, as these are all narratively
provocative pieces as well, with an emphasis on parents thrusting sexuality in
their kid’s faces, moms kissing sons. Felt lost by the majority of them, not in
a ‘I cannot resonate with this piece’ preachy manner, just empirically unable
to understand what was happening, attempting to read these after work drinking
17 beers.
88. Yes,
Master (Michael Earl Craig): Second poetry collection by Michael I read
this year. Liked immediately the ‘goblin’-like title, imagined myself as a
henchman, nodding my head in obsequious enjoyment while reading. Liked this
better than the first book I read by him, feel like there’s a less meta
approach here and more of a commitment to full, actualized poems that also do
not compromise their value by being too ‘poet-y’. These pieces were satisfying
in the way of a good punchline but never alienating like when my dad tries to
explain full episodes of South Park to me; they’re absurd, clever, funny, without
encroaching too much on your face like a wagging finger.
89.
No one belongs here more than you. (Miranda July): Endured an emotional
rollercoaster with this one. Grabbed it off girlfriend’s bookshelf to read
because the texture/formatting of the cover reminded me of Tao Lin’s Bed, and
also dimly recalled Miranda July blurbing that book (?). Then, several stories
in, flippantly checked the author bio and realized Miranda July is a famous
filmmaker person. This infuriated me to no end—an already famous director,
established in their own art scene, has encroached in the finite world of
transgressive lit. Intuited that this somehow directly, negatively impacted me,
as a self-proclaimed writer: probably I’m not getting published because too
many people without day jobs, too many vanity ‘artists’ with impressively long
Wikipedia pages and preestablished fame, are stealing my spot. I then finished
this book and liked it, overall. I felt the stories with more blatantly insane
premises hit harder, whereas the ones intended to be concrete, moving, and
‘serious’ lost my interest. I deeply liked ‘Something That Needs Nothing’ and
thought ‘How to Tell Stories to Children’ was boring, for example.
90. Shithead
Laureate (Homeless): Feel slightly biased toward these poems in terms of
how much they center rats, trash, garbage, etc. I’m a fucked little rodent and
a sucker for this kind of filth. I did object to recurring trend I noticed with
how Homeless handles figurative language. I’d define it, I guess, as a ‘mixed
metaphor’, although I’m not confident in the accuracy of that diagnosis. As an
example, one poem starts with ‘A heart filled with / a dead hamster emptiness /
cartwheels across / the grassy landscape of my youth / like a little girl doing
cartwheels’. I really, really like the image of a dead hamster emptiness, but
I’m confused here because I’m already imagining an abstract, figurative entity—an
isolated heart that is filled with a rodent lack—and then being told that this,
then, is like something else (a little girl doing cartwheels). It’s a dead
hamster heart that is rolling across the speaker’s youth that is also like a
little girl doing cartwheels? Probably being extremely pedantic here, I just
felt like there were some authentically powerful images that ended up sabotaged
by being drawn out/confused.
91.
Rose Mellie Rose (Marie Redonnet): The final Redonnet I read this year, and
also the most different from her other two books. Felt that there was less of
her trademark, relentlessly-building repetition, in that while things in this
world are constantly falling to pieces, they are at least doing so
unpredictably: rather than the clockwork mechanism of the Hotel Splendid’s pipes
breaking, we’re given a much more organic, character-driven story here. Finished
reading in late November, my 100-book deadline fast approaching, and thought
some variation of ‘oh no, god, oh no.’
92.
Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson): Insane book. Published in 1919, takes a
primordial lens to America within a small Ohio town. Was struck by how enduring
the themes are, and not the typical ones like love, romance, hope, whatever—there
has always been and always will be a town drunk, people everywhere will forever
be breaking into exaggerated brokenhearted weeping, this book showed me.
Enjoyed the story titled ‘Adventure’ that ends with a woman turning over in
bed, ‘trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people die
must live and die alone, even in Winesburg,’ and the story ‘Respectability’,
which introduces the character William Walsh as ‘a man of courage. A thing had
happened to him that made him hate life, and he hated it wholeheartedly, with
the abandon of a poet.’
93. Baby
Don't Care (Chelsey Minnis): Following my run of trying to read more
authors published by Fence Books, I bought this (published by Wave Books—I
think it should be illegal for book publishers to include ‘book’ in their
name). Felt disappointed, if only because the premise is a gimmick that never
clicked with me. These poems are written to resemble ‘old Hollywood movies,’
according to multiple reviews I skimmed, a classification that seems vague and
confusing, but I guess obvious once you read these poems, which use words like
‘darling’ a lot. I don’t think there’s any lack of talent on display here, just
that a gimmick is effectively a joke, and if I don’t get that joke, which in
this case is a feminist detangling of classic 1950s cinema stereotypes, then I
will be incapable of appreciating the larger work as a whole. I don’t like Seinfeld
either, I generally feel alien-like and murky because of how little I relate to
anything in this world. At corporate jobs I’ve worked in the past, we often had
to announce our ‘interests’ during meetings as a ‘group-building exercise’. One
time, I split into teams and partnered with the office reformed heroin addict
(every office has a reformed heroin addict), who glared at me when I when I
attempted to initiate our bonding activity and said ‘I’m not doing this shit’.
94. that
ex (Rachelle Toarmino): Was getting desperate to finish my 100-book
challenge and so began cultivating the shortest-seeming books I could grab off
my girlfriend’s bookshelf. My girlfriend is the same height as the famous
actor, Danny DeVito, and has huge tits, she’s less than five feet tall.
95.
Bliss Montage (Ling Ma): Felt, overall, pedantic and trivializing about this
collection. Frequently caught myself frowningly thinking tropes like ‘show
don’t tell’, mentally wagging my finger as I criticized the long-winded story
openings, the unengaging prose. Enjoyed the first story in this, in which the
speaker lives with her 100 ex-boyfriends: I thought Ma here perfectly toed the
magical realism line, allowing fantastical exaggeration to cement and solidify
the harsher truths of abuse and shittiness.
96.
Written Lives (Javier Marias): Literary equivalent of a shittalking blogpost—I
liked it a lot. Marias does quick summations here of both prestigious and
lesser-known writers, emphasizing personal history over literary analysis. Excerpts
that come to mind: Faulkner naming his 5-day old dead baby Alabama and Marias roasting
Yukio Mishima for failing to kill himself properly and efficiently.
97.
Ice Cream Man (Dax Flame): Seems like this can be read in two entirely
different ways, raising
interesting-seeming questions to me about literature, the author vs the
speaker, what’s real in fiction and how much it matters. Without context, this
is a cute, short book about a failed movie star turned disgruntled ice cream
worker, enhanced by its alien-like robot monotone narrator, whose objectivism
helps to highlight the absurdity of how we’re all little rats who need to have
jobs to exist in this world. However, this is also a book by a successful
youtuber who thrived in the early 2010s, only to see dwindling popularity
severe enough that he has to seek the day job that is the premise of this
book—ice cream man. On the one hand, I want to treat this book as an isolated,
fiction about a fallen actor working a drudging ice cream job that deploys
monotonous minimalism reminiscent of some of the best alt-lit authors. On the
other, after watching the guy’s youtube, I realize the prose and story aren’t a
narrative technique, but literally why he was a famous youtube star (he’s
awkward and unable to read social cues in an autistic-seeming way). Anyway,
enjoyed this and found it earnestly surprising that I haven’t seen it circulate
in any ‘alt-lit’ discussions—this book bizarrely mirrors almost every
successful ‘alt-lit’ convention I’ve seen despite being seemingly 100% detached
from the community at large.
98.
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine (Jessica Baer): Collection of frazzled,
alien-seeming anecdotes—liked the thematic focus on transmissions, whether they
be interstellar or just the ruined signals of your own failed brain. This is
another Apocalypse Party book and it shows, in the best of ways, I feel. Overall
structure/presentation of the book highlights the thematic link between beach
sand and stars, dust and grit, to me, fractals of light in otherwise washed
darkness—reminded me intensely of the video game Metal Gear Solid’s boss fight
against Sniper Wolf, a lonely snowstorm of intense back-and-forth sniper
mechanics lost within millions of pixels.
99.
I'll Tell You in Person (Chloe Caldwell): Essay collection that starts with a
meandering, baffling-seeming ‘introduction’ justifying its existence—i.e., explores ‘the point’ of writing selfish anecdotes of
being a New York-based, at times drug-addicted, otherwise socially successful
white woman with no broader philosophical meaning—by citing Caldwell's experiences at,
of all things, a Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s workshop. My pessimism persisted as
a lot of these essays just seemed bland, in fundamental structural terms they
often defused their own impact. I felt disappointed when Caldwell would
conclude what should’ve been a poignant point from her own perspective with
song lyrics or a quote from another essay, felt like she was leaning her
rhetorical weight on someone else’s shoulders. Still found myself delicately
surprised by how much the book grew on me. Feel like there is a ‘chicken soup
of the soul’ effect here or something where the overall intimacy and warmth of
the writing overcame the ‘live, laugh, love’ cheesiness, she has a fantastic
piece about heroin addiction that downplays the drug aspect and instead seems
entirely focused on the bad acne caused by opioid abuse, which I found surreal,
goofy, and affecting.
100.
I Hope You Enjoy the Food (Zac Smith): Chose this cookbook written by Zac Smith
for the final book I read this year because fuck you, I read 100 books this
year, that’s a lot of books.
