READ IN THE LAST EIGHT MONTHS:
Robot Dreams – Sara Varon
When Things Fall Apart – Pema Chodron
Miss Lonelyhearts and the Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
The Savage Dectectives – Roberto Bolano
Post Office – Charles Bukowski
Ham On Rye – Charles Bukowski
Love is a Dog From Hell – Charles Bukowski
The I Ching
Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Written in 1940 when she was 23, this novel explores social revenues poetically. She was another of many infinitely depressed, sickly authors who took to alcohol and sexual experimentation. She also belongs to the heralded crew of Southern Gothic authors. Below is a review from the Boston Evening Transcript soon after the publishing of McCullers’ first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter:
“This book is literature. Because it is literature, when one puts it down it is not with a feeling of emptiness and despair (which an outline of the plot might suggest), but with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth. For one knows at the end, that it is these cheated people, these with burning intense needs and purposes, who must inherit the earth. They are the reason for the existence of a democracy which is still to be created. This is the way it is, one says to oneself – but not forever.” – May Sarton. “Pitiful Hunt for Security: Tragedy of Unfulfillment Theme of Story That Will Rank High in American Letters.” Boston Evening Transcript. June 8, 1940.
Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy
Absurdist, cartoony, noirish, playful. This set of three short crime-postmodern novels is a sly way of asking the big, unanswerable questions of the world. Auster plays the meta card so often one is left calculating it as pure absurdity, that which contours the guts of life, reality as a series of hoops that don’t always line up and leave one with scraped knees and hands from so many falls. Ghosts particularly shuffled my noggin with the role confusion of each player, and the question of solitude, of belonging, isolationism. Strangely, I have yet to find a review I see as adequate for these novels. Much can be said about a text so interwoven with philosophy and potently labyrinthine.
Anita Brookner – Hotel du Lac
Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Jane Bowles – Two Serious Ladies
Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
John Hersey – Hiroshima
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Of Love and Other Demons
Flannery O’Connor – A Good Man is Hard to Find
Denton Welch – A Voice Through a Cloud
