thoughts on some books I've read this year

As of this writing, it’s August, and I’ve read 54 books this year. 54 books, that’s a lot of books. That’s more than a book every week. Despite this, if you were to ask me what I’ve read in the past month, I’d be unable to tell you. If you wanted my opinion on these books, if you challenged me to name favorites, give summaries or critiques, I’d be paralyzed, my eyes would glaze over, I’d space out and think instead about the level design of the video game series Metroid. So, in an attempt to become more actively aware of books I’m reading, I wanted to write down various thoughts I have on them, to engage with the texts, or something. This is that. That is what I’m doing right now. These are my thoughts on some books I’ve read so far this year.

 

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I think Lorrie Moore might be one of the best short story writers in existence. I love her short fiction but have always been nervous about reading her longer stuff, probably because of this love, not wanting to risk disappointment, etc. As such, I’ve never actively sought out any of her novels. I decided to buy this one on a kneejerk impulse upon seeing it in a local used bookstore. The cover is comedically ugly, with a giant “SHORTLISTED” sticker taking up 28% of the visual space. Seems insane that you would want to market your book around not winning a prize. The book is otherwise basically fine. It was written in the 2000’s, and there are obligatory-seeming references to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Probably these themes were necessary to keep the book “relevant”, to ensure that it remains timeless and literary, although I found they seemed to date the book, feeling like an elbow constantly jabbing me in the ribs to remind me that the plot is important and I should pay attention because it’s grappling with the cultural fallout of a post-terrorism America. The short stories by Lorrie Moore I like most are the one where the narrator’s cat dies and she’s sad about it. Or the one where a character takes their cat to the vet—the cat is fine. Maybe I don’t like literature where things happen. I’m working-class. I make $30,000 a year and I spend 10 hours a day minimum on the computer.

 

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Read this mostly just to feel superior to guys I went to high school with who now make more money than me. It’s a big book. It’s a big book and I read it.

 

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut

This is a book that has won, apparently, a lot of awards. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it at first. There is no fixed narrative here but instead this sweeping, dreamlike sequence of scientific fictions. The best way to describe it is probably the first story “Prussian Blue”, which charts how the discovery of a specific pigment of blue led to the invention of the poison used in Holocaust gas chambers, a story containing only one fictional paragraph, but whose subject matter seems absurdly impossible—how could something as simple as a colored dye become an instrumental component in one of the greatest crimes against humanity, etc. The deeper you read, the more fictitious the book gets, although the subjects throughout remain scientific, inventions and formulas whose discoveries create a catastrophic domino effect, and the whole thing has this wheeling sensation like crashing your 2009 Honda Civic at a slow yet fatal speed on the highway during a blizzard. Like I said, I was hooked on this conceit, stories set up as fantastical histories where it’s hard to disentangle truth from fiction, giving the science discussed an aspect that is almost mythical. You read this book and it is as if we humans, mankind, are but puppets dangling on the strings of a God whose essence is not faith but the math of our everyday existence, the formulas comprising everything from mundane multiplication tables to apocalyptic nukes. I was thinking all this, and then I happened to glance at the back cover and see that this book was “included on Barack Obama’s summer 2021 reading list”. Oh, fuck. In that one instant, this book was immediately and thoroughly ruined for me. This is nothing against Barack Obama. This is not a statement on politics. From what I understand, Obama did some things that are bad, like drone bombing hospitals and weddings, but I also grasp, especially as I get older and less idealistic, the necessity of these evils. If anything, I’m probably more of an “Obama Guy” than ever. We need an increased amount of Obama in our politics to fix this country, probably: we need, perhaps, “Obama Two”. But regardless—or maybe, actually, specifically in this regard—Obama is a man who won his presidency by appealing to the mass median American voter. He and his tastes, then, are by definition a baseline average. You could not engineer a more generic person suited for mass appeal. So for a book to make it onto his reading list, it would have to be the “Harry Potter” of “hauntingly brilliant fiction”. It would be the “Game of Thrones” of “literature for people who like NPR”. With my new biased perspective, the remaining stories in this collection were but ashes to me, burnt cinders of a good idea. There is an almost fetishistic appeal to technocracy in this book—science is portrayed always as this deity-like danger, an altar of progress at which you must perform ritual sacrifice. In one story, thinking too hard about the physics of a black hole drives a professor to madness, he literally goes insane from the sheer knowledge that science has wrought upon him. In another, a genius can only complete his research by attempting to seduce one of his underaged tuberculosis patients—the lesson being, I guess, that great science is linked inextricably to the “forbidden” impulses of our darkest selves. What I’m saying is this book reads like a teenager’s Reddit post about how cool science is in an atheism subforum. My heart rate went up thinking about how much I hate this book. I’m staring wild-eyed at my computer screen, breathing too heavily.

 

The Novelist by Jordan Castro

Jordan Castro is maybe the “alt-lit” figure I’ve been least interested in, historically. Not through any identifiable fault of his own, there was just never a moment where his social media profile or writing specifically attracted my attention. I went into this book with a fair amount of hesitation, then. I felt skeptical of the “cute” premise—a novel about a novelist trying to write a novel!! suck my dick, Jordan!!!—and its initial reviews which seemed overly-focused on its scatological elements. “This is a book,” the reviews seemed to scream, “about shit and poop. Isn’t that crazy? You’ve never heard of a book like that before. Oh, and it’s meta.” I felt immediately relieved upon starting the book. Within 16 pages I felt awed by The Novelist. It’s good. It’s good in a relieving way, because I didn’t feel like I was sycophantically making myself to like this book—didn’t feel like I was “coping,” forcing my perception of something to match the popular response—it really is just plain and simple good. The Novelist is paced by the second, documenting every single instant that transpires within the morning its story is set within, from the browsing of Twitter to the brewing of succulent tea to the wiping of shit from the narrator’s ass (ha ha!! Jordan Castro wrote about shit!!!). According to the blurbs and write-ups and interviews, this is in the vein of Thomas Bernhard and Nicholson Baker, but the comparison seems as middling to me as saying something is “like Hemingway” because it uses sparse sentences. Castro is clearly doing his own thing here, inspirations aside. A quote in the book that I liked from a section where the narrator gets upset about how bad Twitter is: “I imagined myself as an ogre-ish monster, clumsily slamming the keyboard with thick, hairy hands. Doooo, I thought.” About halfway through, the book shifts from this endearingly defocused silliness to pure shit-talk, the narrator veering into a ceaseless stream of shit-talk for 50ish pages. I like how “goblin-seeming” this part is, cackling and maniacal, and I think the strength of the book is it cherishes our base human impulses, our tendencies toward distraction and shit-talk, without either glorifying or defusing them with irony. The effect is a kind of sincerity that I find new and refreshing in the modern lit scene.