Thoughts on books and things.

1. The Disappointment Artist

If I wrote a book of essays, it would be worse than this. There are people who don’t believe that’s possible. I won’t rehash that argument, but it’s also true that a lot of those people are idiots. Not all of them, though.

2. Madame Bovary

I had a conversation in a bar over the weekend with a classmate about how this book didn’t resonate with him at all. I guess I don’t find that strange, but that turned out not to be true of me. I’m not usually much of one for “classics”, but I liked this one.

It did make me wonder about the mind of a person who writes a book like this. (I often have the same question when I finish a Franzen novel. Urp.) How does one spend so long with characters one so obviously hates? Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary c’est moi”, and yet he doesn’t seem to like her much. He doesn’t like anybody much. I don’t like anybody much, but still, I have to have a character who doesn’t make me want to barf if I’m going to write a story.

3. Collaborators

Subject matter: boring. Style: alienating. Structure: amazing; influential. Maybe someday I’ll write a collage novel.

4. Consider the Lobster

Eh, mixed feelings. Wallace is funny and humane, but also kind of an arrogant prick sometimes. Puts me in mind of something, though: DFW does a lot of lexical and graphical fucking about, and yet it seems to be in service of something. My objection to fraudulent experimental writing is that most of it appears to be about a gimmick, and often everything other than the gimmick is poorly executed. (I’m looking at you, Jenny Boully.) DFW doesn’t have that problem. Though sometimes I wish he would quit condescending to his readers in the footnotes.

5. The Cat’s Table

Not long ago, my father asked me, “How do you feel about the ocean?” The truth is that it frightens me. It’s too big, too deep, too mysterious. I can never decide if being buried at sea is my idea of existential horror or the afterlife.

6. Black Swan Green

Even when he’s being straightforward, David Mitchell can’t help but screw around a bit.

7. Great Jones Street

Awful claptrap. I guess I just don’t really care for or about the mythic rockstar thing. Also, not nearly as funny as it wants to be.

8. Chronicles, vol. 1

If one were to read reviews of Dylan’s memoir, one might think it were good. It isn’t. I don’t think it’s intended to be.

9. The Beauty of the Husband

A great book I shall never read again.

10. Just Kids

I kind of wish Bob Dylan had written Just Kids, and Patti Smith had written Chronicles. There’s another universe in which that happened.

11. The Art of Subtext

Charles Baxter has an unnerving ability to notice the very most important things about a story.