Risking the fate of the centipede: 2023 reading notes

These are the books I read in 2023—

The Nature Book by Tom Comitta

I interviewed Tom for BOMB and was sad to scrap these supercut questions I found in interviews with authors in the tradition of citational fiction:

• Are you ready to risk the fate of the centipede, who, when asked exactly how he crawled, shot himself? (Thomas Frick to J.G. Ballard, The Paris Review)
• A humanist vision considers history to be a human product, which is to say, a product of the freedom of its individuals and the diverse groups that have enacted it and interpreted it. An anti-humanist vision asserts that, on the contrary, those individuals and groups are the result of history itself, and their freedom is an illusion. If you allow me to limit the choices artificially within this possible spectrum, where do you situate yourself in it? (Jorge Mafjud to Eduardo Galeano, MR Online)
• What do you believe in? (William Burroughs, High Times)
• Do you regularly abstain from any of the following: a.) Red meat b.) Sugar c.) Boiled vegetables d.) Pizza e.) Hard Liquor f.) Coffee g.) Herbal tea h.) Black bean sauce i.) Shellfish j.) Potatoes k.) Chef salad l.) Hot sauce (Mark Magill to Kathy Acker, BOMB Magazine)
• I’m ruining everything, aren’t I? (Ryan McIlvain to Jonathan Lethem, Los Angeles Review of Books)

Flagged and Removed by Darcie Wilder

This wasn’t as compelling or cohesive as Literally Show Me a Healthy Person, but I enjoyed the accumulation and feeling of freedom. It made me think I should be compiling my tweets, or withholding my better ideas, saving them in a doc instead of posting. The thought dwindled quickly, though, and I haven’t changed my behavior. It’s ok because they don’t really publish books like this anymore.

orz by Troy James Weaver

Troy’s a master. These varied little guys are so fun and good. I feel sorry for the 8-billion-minus-50 people in the world who will not get to own this book.

Forever Imperfect (Forever Magazine Pocket Bible 3)

I guess I just read some hip kids’ new years resolutions, maybe? Good luck partying less, I guess. I hope you make some meaningful human connections in the year to come.

Picture Window by Danny Caine

I heard Danny say on the Autofocus pod that my 🖐 poems on HAD prompted some joke-poem riffs that made their way into this book. Ego sufficiently stoked, I picked up a copy! Danny is the preeminent dad-poet. I also admire his clear-eyed principles. These domestic gems made me feel guilty for slacking on being more creative with my own diaristic impulses.

VIO-LETS by EJ Kneifel

These prose poems are just right. There’s noticing, there’s action, there’s nature, there’s tenderness. There’s a line from a Florist song. I feel curiously warm toward EJ.

A Heart So White by Javier Marías

Ok here’s the point at which I’m now looking back a year ago (on Feb ’23 from March ’24), italicizing this list of book titles, formatting them to have “header” styles, remembering almost nothing about several of the entries that follow. Not so for this book! I can’t remember how I came to this one. I’ve seen small pockets of enthusiasm for the book break out online, but there had to’ve been a distinct moment that spurred me into action. It can’t just have appeared on my Kindle, but that’s where I found it. In a short-lived group DM with Aaron Burch and Josh Hebburn about Evan Williams’ “Ted,” I brought up this book. Aaron said that he taught it in a class, and told his students “I have NO IDEA what the fuck this piece is about. What it “means,’ what it’s trying to do…” — at which point I think they were all relieved to hear me say that, maybe afraid that they hadn’t “got it” — “… but I never doubt the piece itself knows what it is, and every sentence surprises and excites me, and I just… idk, I just love it!” And Josh called it “the paradigmatic HAD story.” And I agreed. But then, by contrast, I said, “I’ve been really vibing with the loose, excessive, rambly kind of prose in novels, lately. It’s no less attentive to language, but it’s much harder to pick a sentence and say: “look! great!” I’ve been drawn to more throwaway stuff that still adds intangible texture Specifically, “A Heart So White” by Javier Marías! It’s blowing my mind. It tries my patience at times, but always rewardingly so.” This book is about translation and misunderstanding and tension and it’s one of the most memorable things I’ve read in years.

Do Every Thing Wrong!!: XXXTentacion Against the World by Jarett Kobek

Got really into XXX because I was watching every single dumb doc I could find streaming as a visuals-optional kind of background noise to lifting my little weights after putting my kid to bed, and “Look at Me” on Netflix was a standout. It’s unfair to compare the experience of reading the book to the movie, but I kinda can’t help it. The subject’s magnetism doesn’t quite come across the same way on the page. The text does capture more of the nuance of the internet’s role in the story, and it obviously has a very compellingly stylized voice of its own. I don’t know anything about Kobek, but feel like I should.

Year of the Buffalo by Aaron Burch

*Vince McMahon meme GIF* Aaron Burch writing about a former wrestler whose likeness is being made into a videogame 😏 Aaron Burch writing about distant brothers on a road trip 😮 Aaron Burch writing an inexplicable and little-resolved indoor/outdoor pet buffalo side plot 🤩

The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai

I met Sam Bett, who translated this, when a friend coaxed me into attending a kinda hokey local writer event (just not my scene). He was just behind me at Bennington, I think. I’d seen his funny TikTok videos promoting the book, which centered around a character (him, I think) in a pink skin-tight suit brazenly doing silly things in public places in a way that felt both wholesome and suggestive. Anyway, this book is excellent. I think it’s some kind of a pre or sequel to one of the other big Dazai books that I’m pretty sure I’ve read, but didn’t remember, and missing that connection didn’t detract from my experience of reading it. Haplessness, paranoia, enabling friends, etc. How could you not love a lighthearted, humorous depiction of suicidality(?)

Echo Chamber by Claire Hopple

I’d read pieces of this here and there online, and it was very cool to see them stitched together. Claire’s great. I said on X that every sentence is a delight. It gave me that pleasantly disoriented feeling that I find myself chasing. Being able to pin down exactly what’s happening all the time is honestly overrated.

Supremacist by David Shapiro

It’d feel unseemly to be effusive about this book. But I loved it. Pitchfork Reviews Reviews were big for me. Great example of how writing can be unapologetically tied to a specific moment in time and still feel fresh despite quickly becoming dated. Your fears are unfounded!

The Firebird Poems by Gerald Locklin

Graham Irvin was saying he liked Locklin, I think, and this is the one I could find, which I don’t think is one he particularly liked or recommended. I enjoyed some parts. Others fell flat. Others felt humorously politically incorrect in a retrospectively more enlightened yet ultimately unforgiving way. I didn’t rate it on Goodreads because my reading attention didn’t feel rigorous enough to render a judgment.

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It’s now November 3rd, 2025, and this blog post draft has been sitting for a while. I forget having read a lot of these books. I’m going to leave extremely superficial notes on a few and then hit Post.

Florida by Christine Schutt

I remember this feeling dark, like murky. I like this feeling in books.

God’s Green Earth by Noelle Kocot

I think Duggan rec’d this? Thanks for the rec, Duggan. I remember posting the cover and maybe an interior page to my IG story, and I don’t do that often, although I was doing that more often a couple years ago when I read this, so maybe it isn’t too reliable an indicator of my enthusiasm.

The Hermit by Lucy Ives

This was good! I do remember it being good. I also remember it being extremely short. Too short, apparently, because that’s all I remember about it. You gotta let me sink into a thing like this.

Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson

I was in the Bennington Writing Seminar’s cafeteria during a grad school residency, and met Lee, who is peripherally involved, primarily as a musician, playing the commencement music, as well as in The Dog House Band whose revolving players(?) at the time included David Gates and James Wood, though he may have also attended the MFA program there, I’m not sure/can’t remember. His partner at the time was also there, and she’d lived in Providence around the same time as me, and so I was describing a memorable Microphones/Woelv/D+ or Karl Blau show where the crowd was arranged into a blob and began jumping in time such that it felt like the floor was going to cave in. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember Lee’s reaction to my anecdote being something along the lines of “I don’t really listen to popular music.” Anyway, I still remember this novel quite vividly, and just discovered that he has a new novel out that I’m gonna have to go buy!

Proxies by Brian Blanchfield

I rationed out the essays in this book because one, they’re dense and long, and two, they’re so thoughtful that they demand a period of thoughtful saturation. Don’t rail this one. Do read it, though. The concept, to write solely from retained memory and knowledge and without reference, is inspiring, and whenever I’ve tried to do it like this, it’s gone horribly wrong.

Deliver Me by Elle Nash

This was a good, freaky book. I’m glad to see it’s done well and reached readers. I’d spent a bunch of time thinking about and preparing notes for an interview with Elle about her prior book, Gag Reflex, whose PR cycle seemed to be swallowed by this one, and so without really being direct about it, we abandoned that interview. I feel a little bit bad about that falling through, and I debated trying to curry the accepted pitch for that into one that touched on this then-new book as well, but I didn’t feel as qualified or prepared to do it justice. Sorry, Elle. You still rule.

Death Egg by Nathaniel Duggan

Wow. Super negligent of me not to’ve written this one up properly in a timely manner. I mean, I did blurb it, though:

From within the false balm of a hard shell and with the grandiosity of a final boss battle, Duggan plumbs the endless devastation of domestic disappointment, the impossibility of intimacy, gleeful villainy, and suffocating righteousness. Death Egg good.

Duggan jokes about this not even being the best book of poetry published by Back Patio, which I think someone else actually said, but that’s a narrow and sad view of art, I think, to compare things that way. Which I concede is a large facet of Duggan’s whole Twitter shtick. Which I think has served him relatively well, as far as book sales and engaging readers. So no complaints here. But I meant what I said in the blurb. This book is fantastic. I’ve given it as a gift to many people. As many people as I’ve gifted books by the other renowned Back Patio poet. Who didn’t ask me for a blurb. So, you know, make of that what you will.

The Plotinus by Rikki Ducornet

Kinda mischievous and grim like Evenson. Loved it.

South by Babak Lakghomi

This book has it all. Nefarious administrative hurdles. Illicit union activities. Structural quirkiness. Paranoia. Faulty, altered memory. Riots. Love. Big big rec from me!

I enjoyed reading this book and then taking it down to my basement to take a silly picture to post on Twitter. Now I’m enjoying posting this alternate shot from that same trip downstairs on my blog.

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts by Claire Donato

I pitched a “mention” to “The Drift” and received a form rejection for it:

The Analyst is the fourth story in the collection and serves as a rhizomatic legend for Claire Donato’s densely cathected auto-meta-fictional project: A long-distance sadomasochist lover actually wants to just be friends. Claire turns “to psychoanalysis to mourn the last shards of faith I had in heterosexuality,” and tells her analyst that Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is the book the therapist will write, while the patient herself intends to author The Analyst, an homage to Lolita but “more repressed.” Their therapeutic alliance resembles collaboration, then friendship, then fusion. Hyperintelligence is foisted into material asceticism, eventually giving way in later sections to the numinousness of small joys: the intuitively indifferent companionship of a new cat named Woebegone; the tactile pleasure of the obsolete technology of film photography; volunteer shifts at the co-op; thoughtfully prepared meals, shared. Claire’s unconscious unfolds: in the wake of many devastations, it’s an ethical responsibility to move toward light.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Mutual friends over the years have spoken effusively to me about the intense generosity of Rita Bullwinkel’s presence and attention (we went to the same undergrad program around the same time, and her aura was legendary even then), and though her first book, Belly Up, is a story collection I’ve recommended more than almost any other, this was the occasion for our actually meeting. I interviewed Rita about this for LARB. I sent her an email with my first question, and a few days later she hit me back with “What are the chances you’d want to do this interview on the phone or via zoom?” which struck the fear of inarticulacy into my heart. But I said yes, because (at the time at least) I was seeking new challenges and opportunities for growth. Having a conversation about a book, I reasoned, should be easy. And it was! Reflecting on the interview itself, it may read more naturally, but does feel slightly less substantive than what I might’ve mustered if given endless hours to tinker with pointed correspondence. And that’s fine. Headshot is experimental yet delightfully approachable, both quirky and deep, “high-concept” fiction finessed into a heart-rate spiking sports novel. Thankful to Rita, and to Medaya and Paul at LARB for working with me on this. I got to recommend this in paperback when I was at a bookstore with my mom a couple of weeks ago, that felt cool.

The One on Earth by Mark Baumer

Oh, Mark. I love you. We need Mark right now.

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I read these, too. Omission of detail about them is not a reflection of their worthiness (though in some cases, it is). Comment or DM if you want me to muster some tidbit about any of the following (your own book being fair game!):

A Kind of In-Between by Aaron Burch, Americanitis by Doug Paul Case, Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria, Closer by Dennis Cooper, The Employees by Olga Ravn, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge by James Tadd Adcox, The Emissary by Yōko Tawada, How to Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine, !!! by Mike Andrelczyk. Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, The Guest by Emma Cline, Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad, The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks by Joshua Beckman, Frisk by Dennis Cooper, Show Me Your Face by Danielle Chelosky, Alice Knott by Blake Butler, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida, Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison, Ablutions by Patrick deWitt, Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter by Karl Ove Knausgård, Spring by Karl Ove Knausgård, Molly by Blake Butler, Richard Yates by Tao Lin, selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle, Trilogy by Jon Fosse, Summer by Karl Ove Knausgård, Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson, Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek, Spurious by Lars Iyer, Participation by Anna Moschovakis

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November 4, 2025 Update:

Hebburn, via X DM said,

Tidbit me on “The Employees by Olga Ravn” and “The Map of the System of Human Knowledge.”

I’m actually going a little bit crazy trying to find The Employees to jog my memory. It’s not in my office (primary library) or dining room next to the stereo (newer, mostly fiction) or in the living room (art books, fantasy, and anime—mostly my wife’s) or in the bedroom (currently in progress or abandoned or finished but not yet reshelved). I remember really liking this one, it’s extremely up my alley. “A workplace novel.” Hard to go wrong, tbh. I recall… transmissions… almost like logs, or reports. If I were able to find it, I would reread it. Or maybe I would even send it to you!