Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead — one downside to being a Weatherheadhead is that I’d already read a healthy chunk of this! Nevertheless, it’s nice to have it bound up all purdy in hardback for posterity. Andrew’s easily one of my favorite poets. I first read POEM WHILE ON HOLD WITH NBA LEAGUE PASS CUSTOMER SUPPORT in Brad Listi/Joey Grantham’s now-defunct Nervous Breakdown, but now you can and should read it in Muumuu House. I also have a habit of buying any book I see Andrew post about, which is reflected below.
If I Close My Eyes by Ben Fama — Not what I’d expected from a person I considered, by reputation, to be a poet, in that it had a relatively straightforward LA actor/influencer addict plot about a guy who gets shot at a Kim Kardashian book signing. Enjoyable story, well-written. In texts to friends I called it “shiny,” “aspirationally conventional,” and said it “moves pretty quick.” I also told them that “it’s trying to be Broom of the System but straighter.” There’s bedside dialog from Kanye and it’s believable.
what a heaven could feel like by md wheatley — I like md a lot, his stuff has a real pleasant energy to it. Relaxed and alive. He sent me a pdf of this, I think maybe because he’d hoped I’d review it or something, so now I’m feeling guilty thinking back on this sweet chap I read two years ago. So let this be my review. At the time, I told him “I enjoyed recognizing in the book a kind of quiet, weary, melancholic contentedness that I felt in the early times of my own fatherhood.” I support md.
Septology by Jon Fosse — What even is there to say. I got completely lost in the Fosse sauce. I want to go back there.
Every Book Is About The Same Thing and I Love Information by Courtney Bush — I am now a proud lifetime subscriber to the work Courtney Bush. Two more in the mail on the way, including, excitingly, her forthcoming Joyland novella.
Witch Hunt & Black Cloud by Juliet Escoria — I was excited to buy and read this double feature, having read and liked Juliet the Maniac the year prior. Funny that Scott McClanahan (her husband, right?) wrote the intro. I’ll always have a heightened sensitivity to at-least-quasi-repentant addiction-adjacent stories, and this one got to me. In a good way. Not cheap or trite or cliché. And the poems hit, too!
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti — Actually read this in parallel with Septology, and they felt like opposites. This one is a lasagna. Thousands of stories happening at once. I loved it.
Be Holding by Ross Gay — Having become somewhat fanatical all of a sudden, I think I asked Twitter for basketball books and this was one of them. I remember what felt like him describing a photo of Dr. J doing a cool layup for like thirty of the hundred pages.
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton — lovely.
The Stranger by Albert Camus — I liked lines like “I nodded, as if to say ‘Yes.'” and “I remembered that it was Sunday, and that bothered me: I don’t like Sundays.”
Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms — took a few years to get through this one. Some genius, some duds! Plenty of pieces in here that people are still (possibly accidentally) continually copying.
All Fours by Miranda July — Here’s what I said about it to brother Lamb: “was giddy about the mundane domestic stuff in the beginning. felt massively let down by the open relationship turn. not sure how to critique it on the level of artistry though. it just started to feel like a new york times modern love podcast or something.”
03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat — Think I saw Brian Alan Carr recommend this alongside Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which is one of my favorite books, actually probably the book that made me want to and believe I could write. I think Brian actually even said that he taught them together? Anyway, 03 was vaguely offensive in a way I couldn’t quite get over. Like un-PC, or whatever. I can usually stomach some of that, but I must just have been feeling especially snowflakey at that moment. I guess having a kid can do that to you.
Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane by Parker Young — Somehow forgot that I’d bought and read (and loved) this and so later I bought another copy directly from Parker, this one “signed by Elvis” or something. I can’t find it. I can’t find either copy. This is maddening.
And the rest! As with last time, omission is not necessarily (thought might be) a reflection of their worthiness. Comment or DM if you want me to summon a thought on any of the following (your own book being fair game!): Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen, Stricture by Isabelle Nicou, NOON 2024, Outlive by Peter Attia, Maafa by Harmony Holiday, Who Killed Mabel Frost? by Miss Unity, Pregaming Grief by Danielle Chelosky, Cheap Seats by Kayla Jean, Leasing by D.T. Robbins, Every Word in the Dictionary Except Myself by Chelsea Martin, The Burden of Joy by Lexi Kent-Monning, Tennis Leg by Mike Andrelczyk, Committed by Suzanne Scanlon, The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, I Don’t Want to Talk About It by Terrence Real, My First Book by Honor Levy, Cult of Loretta by Kevin Maloney, The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman, Relief of My Symptoms by Kevin Chesser, Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, The Pink Trance Notebooks by Wayne Koestenbaum, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, Saint Lizard by Jon Berger, The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews, Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook, Endure by Alex Hutchinson, Love Hotel by Jane Unrue, Overstaying by Ariane Koch, Further Reports by Brian Evenson, Waiting for the Miracle by Jason DeYoung, What I Remember of My Love Affair with the Bird and Other Stories by Thomas Israel Hopkins, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Why So Serious by Mike Singer, Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors, Girl on Girl by Emily Costa, How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Posted by crowjonah 3 days ago | Filed under:Reading |
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)
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)
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.
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.
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!
Six-Legged Spider by uhhhhh Coleman Bomar? Yeah, Coleman Bomar. That’s what it says on the cover.
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.
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
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’d actually written tiny tidbits on both of these but then backed them out, finding them too half-assed, wanting to say more but running out of steam, but now I’m compelled to say more! The Adcox book is the 2nd book on my shelf in my office as alphabetized by author last name (after Hitchhikers Guide, before Speedboat). I got it as a freebie/bonus from either Garrett Strickland or Steven Arcieri (can’t remember which) after buying some other used books off of em. I’ve felt some affinity for James for a long time as someone seemingly interested in experimentation and innovation but not just for its own alienating sake. Thanks to my ego, this regard took a slight hit when I got a rejection from Always Crashing, which I at least think he was editing at the time. But Human Knowledge is crazy fresh-feeling; reading it, you’d be shocked to realize it’s a decade old (at the time of reading; 13 years now). The table of contents/organizing conceit at first feels a little forced or artificial, but the connections between the essays and stories (each a couple of pages) really hum. It’s a CCM book, too, which is notable for the alt lit historians. I’d highly recommend tracking down a copy.
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!
Posted by crowjonah 3 months ago | Filed under:Reading |
These are the books I read in the month of December, 2022—
Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf by Daniel Bailey
This one took me a while to get through because I’d have to stop after nearly every poem to take a picture of the ~2 pages I’d just read and send them to someone. This one’s more sprawling than Drunk Sonnets, though not as sprawling as A Better Word for the World, which is not a qualitative statement. Daniel Bailey is excellent in either mode. Need to figure out how to be more like Daniel Bailey.
The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury
Hot dang. Just delightful. I marveled at how far outside my wheelhouse this novel is, how hard it must’ve been to write. A full small town of colorful characters. I oddly Stranger Thingsed them in my head, which was weird. The main character is a cop so I just pictured that warmly gruff handsome dude who also makes me think of Nick Offerman. And so the new wife looked like… oh gosh, what’s her name. Not Parker Posey. Not Helena Bonham Carter. Wynona Ryder? Rider? Ryder. The one who got in trouble for stealing stuff? Or doing drugs. Stealing stuff on drugs. Stealing drugs. I only watched one season of Stranger Things. I’d watch ~8 seasons of a TV show based on this book, or however many seasons there are of Stranger Things now. Oddly, I think it could actually be done. I wonder what the status is on this book’s IP. Somebody ring up Netflix. Thank you, Joshua, for sending this to me. I really liked it. (Just looked it up. Winona. Dangit.)
Characters by Derek Maine
I’ve really liked many of Derek’s pieces online. I’ve always compulsively winced whenever I see Derek doing Derek things on the timeline. I was ready to accept that I wasn’t going to get to this one given that life is short, time is precious, etc., but then I changed my mind. Not about life and time, but about getting to this one. I don’t regret it, but I also don’t think it was entirely successful. I think it failed in a compelling way. I admire Derek’s ambitiousness with the scope of this book and the way it’s woven together. It falls short for me in seemingly patting itself on the back for being clever or confessional or confrontational or risky, when it wasn’t really very much of any of those things. If you lose a friend for writing a thinly veiled story, by all means process that on the page. Fabricate around the edges for the sake of a narrative. Divulge some nasty secrets and make some up too so people can’t guess what’s real. That’s all great. Hmm. I keep going back and forth feeling like I’m being too negative or too positive, and I’m gradually talking myself into liking the book more. The individual pieces are good. They fit together pretty well. It needed some room to breathe or something.
Letters to Emma Bowlcut by Bill Callahan
Posted a pic of the cover to my IG story and got way more engagement than normal. A frequent contributor to NOON said “One of my all time favorites,” which made sense. The host of a literary podcast that I enjoy but don’t listen to very often said “Never seen one in the wild,” then “Is it good or is it wack,” then “I love Bill but I can see it going either way lol.” I responded “I really like it so far! It’s hard not to read in his voice, and is kinda charmingly overwrought like his lyrics, but the unselfconscious melodrama fits the epistolariness perfectly,” to which the pod host heart-reacted. Half of my favorite indie lit power couple asked “Wow, how is it?” I said roughly the same thing that I said to the pod host. I may have even copy+pasted part of my answer. I’m embarrassed by that. Another friend said “Cool.”
Literally Show Me a Healthy Person by Darcie Wilder
I guess I just really like reading tweets. Especially good tweets. I like how someone’s recurring preoccupations reveal themselves when you get a nice corpus like this to digest in one go. It’s a great document/snapshot of a life. More of you should tweet like this.
Considering how exaggerated music is by Leslie Scalapino
So many of my friends favor brevity and clarity, so it’s nice to be reminded that convolution has its joys. Sometimes I forget who I really am and have been. When I posted this cover to my IG story, someone who has tattooed me a few times responded admiringly about the cover. I replied with the image credit, which is “Twin Suns” from Makrokosmos II by George Crumb. Curious about the piece, I found that it accompanied (and maybe even depicts the actual musical notation of?) a piano composition. I looked it up on Spotify and listened to ~30s before turning it off.
Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman
I get that I’m not fully “getting it,” but I’m enjoying not getting it. It’s horizon-expanding to mix up ideas of writing and mark-making and mapping and space on the page with different concepts of scale and interior logic for overloaded terms as if familiar English words don’t mean what I am sure they actually mean.
Funeral by Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao
Building off some assumptions based on formatting decisions about who wrote which portion of this text, I really enjoyed this absurd volley of legend, celebrity, food, and something even more geometrically elaborate than just a love triangle. Interdimensional love fractals?? One section appears to have been the framework—just the headers—for what could have easily been 24+ more pages of heart-rooted antics that I would’ve happily read, but I also enjoy what happens to the flow of time and consequence in the omission. It felt like a canny and clever decision that may have just been “feeling done with this.” Vi and Daisuke are very exciting writers.
Accept / Reject by Erin Dorney
Nice, spare, well-spaced, and meditative. Not too bleak or effortfully profound. Solid erasure work, engaging on several levels. Cheerful book object. A pleasure to own. Also, an easy way to get in a hundredth book on the last day of the year.
Posted by crowjonah 3 years ago | Filed under:Reading |
Told myself I wasn’t gonna do this this time/anymore, but had some notes and figured I’d post em. These are the books I read in the month of November, 2022—
The Missing Girl by Shirley Jackson
Hadn’t read any Shirley Jackson (flagrant foul for someone who went to Bennington) and also didn’t have any firm idea of what to expect. These stories have that pervasive low-grade dread that I’m drawn to. Often, when late to reading someone super influential, their moves will have been copied and mutated so many times that it all feels familiar and almost too simple or obvious. That wasn’t the case here! They felt quite contemporary. I enjoyed that characters were named things like Piglet and Snark.
I Hope You Enjoy the Food by Zac Smith
This book is disarmingly “straight,” by which I guess I mean practical. There is advice, and it seems constructed in a way that is meant to be convincing and useful. Zac’s voice and humor is there, but it serves a concrete function. I’m tempted to actually put it on my cookbook shelf. This makes the third book of Zac’s that I’d consider giving to friends/family/non-readers as a gift. It helped me reflect on what I value and enjoy about cooking, and the role it has in my life. It gave me ideas for how to break out of a meal-planning rut. I’m torn between wishing I had a Zac-like person in my life (to feed me) and wishing I were more like Zac (creative, resourceful, subtly inventive about matters of sustenance).
Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro
I got hung up on the passive voices and dislocation in this book. I couldn’t figure out how to relate to it. The food parts made me hungry. There were little glimmers of excitement, but it often felt (oddly, for a Dorothy Project book, in my opinion) very #flashfiction—linguistically pretty, intriguingly prickly, and “sensuous,” but without much of anything tangible to grasp.
Blindness by José Saramago
This book was tedious and exhausting. I disliked it similarly to the way I disliked The Marriage Plot. It had a wrongheadedness laying bare a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition. A writer I admire recommended this, and I’m now wondering if she might secretly hate me.
Name and Noun by Stephanie Yue Duhem
Stephanie is smart and funny online. I thought it was interesting that when this was released, she disclaimed the “identity” aspects of it. Undergrad Crow would have loved the wordplay here. I don’t mean that as a dig; I’m much dumber now than I was then. Her twitter handle (@poetrygrifter) prompted the thought that buying and reading the book means that I am the poetry-grifted.
Feds on Vacation by Big Bruiser Dope Boy
I’d like to believe I’d have had the aesthetic integrity to dislike this book even if I hadn’t stumbled into Mr. Boy’s crosshairs, but I guess I’ll never know for sure. This reflection prompted some interesting thoughts about the subjectivity and arbitrariness of art’s “worth,” but teasing that out further here would be attributing more credit to this book than it deserves.
Posted by crowjonah 3 years ago | Filed under:Reading |
These are the books I read in the month of October, 2022—
A Horse at Night by Amina Cain
Amina Cain is one of my favorite writers, and Dorothy Project is one of my favorite presses. This is a very strange book (by which I mean it resists neat categorization), and despite my increasing aversion to “writing about writing” and my unfamiliarity with some of the books she mulls over most thoroughly, the ways she places unsuspecting texts in conversation and weaves shifting preoccupations, self-awareness, and interrogation make it totally propulsive. I got a little charge each night as I got into bed at the prospect of returning to these pages. Her “diary of fiction” is close to what I aspire to with my own logging of readerly impressions—an associative constellation (is that Adorno?) that honors chance and personal meaning-making such that a juxtaposition of references is converted into fresh, new thought. With creative and editorial permission and encouragement, Cain thrives while extending the effort of synthesis and thinking on the page.
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
This is one of the books Amina Cain treats with most recurrence and care in A Horse at Night, and maybe it’s symbolic of my markedly less intelligent synthesis that I let myself be continually distracted and amused by seeing the name “Lol” all over every page. LOL. I did appreciate the benefit of Cain’s connective leap from this to Ferrante’s novels, and the potency and volatility of female friendship. I loved The Lover, and am glad to finally be getting back to Duras. During the days I had this on my nightstand, Bonnie asked “are you reading an erotic novel?” and I said “no,” and described the plot, and she said, “sounds like an erotic novel.”
The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey
I’ve got decreasing (nonjudgmental) patience for drunkenness these days, but this book of heartsick poems totally won me over and reminded me of the occasional beauty of belligerence. It’s gleeful and sad and grandiose in the best way. Daniel saw me post a photo of the first edition cover, and, saint that he is, not wanting me to miss out on the added content in the second edition, sent me another copy! I’m doubly glad about the bonus book because the used copy I bought has extraordinarily inane annotations on every third poem (“weird wording,” “?,” “true,” “makes sense,” “sad,” and “he gave it his all.”) The nonsequitur and violent tendencies seem a product of the era (2012), but feel “earned” and so have aged better than I might have expected. Reading this, I felt very warmly toward Daniel, admiring of the longevity of his poetry-writing life (last year’s A Better Word for the World—mysteriously $5 on Amazon right now—is also stellar), and inspired (based on my perception of his social media presence) by the way he seems to balance his work, family, and creative lives with integrity and honesty. I repeatedly thought to myself, “Daniel Bailey is a gem.”
Animal Days by Joshua Beckman
Ok it’s probably obvious by now that I’m choosing poetry and other short books in my haste to make ground on my annual reading goal. I read Take It 13 years ago, saw him read, and had him sign it, and have since bought but not read several of his Wave books. The shapeyness of the lines in this book at first felt very deliberate and useful, giving it a runaway, playful kind of energy. It had a lot of momentum. Either the effect wore off a little, or the quality of my reading attention diminished. Overall, I enjoyed the pleasurable nature of word pairings and sequences, but had a hard time comprehending the organizing principle of the book. I’m not a great reader of poetry. If I were, I’d probably read this book several more times in order to truly soak it in, or something.
Genesis 0 by Isabelle Nicou
I really liked Paresis. I’m eager to read Stricture, in large part because it’s translated by Kaycie Hall. This one lay between! By no fault of its own, my enjoyment of this one suffered from my lack of reverence for theater actors / historical plays, though I admired the way early pregnancy and an abortion attempt are documented from the lens of physical embodiment. I will probably remember this one for the clarity of its scope and the finitude of its timeline, both of which are abstract ideals for my own writing. Beginnings and endings, what a thought!
Posted by crowjonah 3 years ago | Filed under:Reading |
