false 77 57 57 true 5731862 read 0 true 388414 currently-reading 0 true 388413 to-read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66102321 to: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (Hardcover) by Sid Jacobson
I am a fan of this kind of use of the graphic novel.

Spoiler alert: turns out Saddam did it. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66102205 to: After-Dinner Declarations (Paperback) by Nicanor Parra
probably not the best Parra to start with.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/... ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66101894 to: Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Paperback) by Claudia Rankine
A good distillation of the post-9/11 ennui. It took me back. This is the sort of book (associative essay) that looks like it would be extremely easy to write but then if you try it turns out you have no idea. I can't give it five stars because the prominent title made it too embarrassing to read in public places. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64611201 to: G.: A Novel (Paperback) by John Berger
This book ended up really getting on my nerves, so that I couldn't finish it. Which is too bad, because I was really getting to love Berger at his best (see my review of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos) and he basically laid it on so thick here that now I know I'll have a harder time stomaching his style even in cases when it's much more artfully applied. This book won the Booker Prize in '72, so I was especially disappointed. He comes off more or less as a twat with some grand theory about every little thing who has to stop the action every five seconds to say something like:

"In morality there are no mysteries. That is why there are no moral facts, only moral judgments. Moral judgments require continuity and predictability. A new, profoundly surprising fact cannot be accommodated by morality..."

That's in the middle of a scene when the protagonist and a married woman are driving off to have sex for the first time. And Berger wants to get all semantic about what morality is and isn't. There's really an interjection like this (and the one quoted above keeps going...) every couple of paragraphs. The fact that most of the book, and thus most of the theorizing, is pretty much about sex makes it even smarmier. (More smarmy?) A book about sex where 75% of the sentences are constructed around conjugations of the verb "to be." ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64612781 to: Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño
Recommended stories: "Sensini", title story, "Dentist"

I'm going to try once more and a little harder to get at why I think he's great, though I know it's not exactly a minority opinion these days.

Take Borges, the reason you probably love him, if you do-- that he continuously tries to speak to the reason you're reading a book, his book or any book, the searching for another part of the self through the labyrinth of culture. Borges gets at it most successfully through metafictional tricks and mythologies of the book, the artist, or the intellectual. In one essay Borges tries to create a lineage for Kafka, and thus for himself, through a handful of heterogeneous source materials going back to ancient Greece. In the end, he's most interested in the fact that none of the predecessors resemble each other at all and are in fact only related through Kafka. Bolano moves forward from Borges with a style that does not remind one of Borges at all. Only the overriding concern is the same, and their shared, highly-developed ability to step back from what seems like a vital struggle between oneself and culture (where to stop and look around for a minute would mean giving an all-important inch) and simply record those dynamics with pathos and present that as worthy art, the limits of our understanding of ourselves. Most interesting, I imagine, for most of the recent American Bolano fans (myself included) is his marriage of Borges's vanguardism with the sort of conventional personal narrative (often in the first person) that writing workshops are famous for. This book convinces us that the methods we've been honing--maybe with a commercial advantage in mind, maybe because it's what we know, maybe because we sense that it would be idiotic to imitate the inimitable-- are actually capable of treating all themes, that a story doesn't have to look "postmodern" to take on the most definitionally postmodern scenario: the attempt to mature as a person through reading and thinking about modern literature.

I keep thinking about the story "Dentist," a narrative of visiting an old college friend, a dentist in a small Mexican town, who has just had a woman die on him (dentists become dentists so that they won't have to be responsible for death!), and, possibly in reaction, becomes obsessed with an Indian boy, a (he insists, non-sexual) Rimbaud type who writes amazing stories in his father's shack on the outskirts of Iraputo. Maybe it was just the cumulative effect of the book, but Bolano didn't have to do more than that, they didn't have to make the kid a publishing success or reveal him as a fraud or apologize for being kind of racist in what they need from him, the whole thing is just sort of awful and extremely true and there's enough in it for them both to hold on to at particularly trying points in their lives and that's enough. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/63447970 Amanda's review of God Says No
by James Hannaham

The more I think about it, there are a lot of good reasons why the Carver should have this book, beyond just you getting to read it. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/63397083 to: God Says No (Hardcover) by James Hannaham
Readers, read it. Teachers, teach it. I know James, and this book surprised and deeply impressed me. At the heart of it is a trick-- er, I could call it a trick if it was less successful, let's call it a major accomplishment-- of personation, inhabiting the voice of a fat, closeted, deeply religious black man from South Carolina named Gary Gray. The two might not have all of those aspects in common, but think of Kenneth the Page as maybe not too far-off in terms of voice. Gary is freaking hilarious, and the book is fun all the way through. But in addition to laughing at Gary, James got me crying with him, too, which as far as I've been taught is not technically possible in fiction. This may say something about the books I tend to choose, but God Says No also feels like the most positive book I've read in a long time. Here's a book with a serious social theme (God and gays) that actually manages to earn its happy ending, just by doing the things that a novel does naturally, allowing its characters to grow. It's... nice. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/63396269 to: 2666 (Audio CD) by Roberto Bolaño
(I didn't listen to this on CD, but that's what the cover of the book I read looks like.) Yes, this book is wonderful. Bolano has a light touch that seems impossibly hard-earned. His eyes on the inside of the dust jacket measure the worth of books in general and his magnum opus in particular. It's rare for me, reading in English, to come across a new good writer with magic in his arsenal, let alone one with a proper scorn for using it. This felt like a major step forward to me. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/55432540 to: The Road (Hardcover) by Cormac McCarthy
An extremely plausible zombie scenario. I read this book approximately ten times faster than any other McCarthy book I've read, because I actually wanted to know what happened next. ]]>