Last Ten Books Read — ixxx

Last Ten Books Read: ixxx
(In order of completion)

1. Walt Curtis. “Mala Noche.” Recommended by a Latino fellow I met at the café. He described himself as a friend of Curtis and Curtis as the unofficial poet laureate of Portland. The book’s a memoir about Curtis’s work in a Skid Row bodega and lust for teenage Mexican seasonal farmworkers. I didn’t care much for the prose (or poetry) and worry what lists my ordering it may have put me on.

2. Jose Saramango. “Blindness.” Recommended by friend Fran. Chilling. Consistently horrific. World class imagination, though not for the faint of heart or those protective of sunny dispositions.

3. George W.S. Trow. “My Pilgrim’s Progress.” This concludes my Trow readings. (See previous “Last.”) He has an enviable consciousness and style I hoped to adapt to benefit my own but was unable to pull this off.

4. Liz Kelner Pozen. “A Scarred Samovar.” A collection of poetry by a cousin. She has many complaints about aging, which she renders with rueful humor. Not going gently into or raging against the night for her. (There is also more stuff about my own family in here than seems required. It felt like someone else was picking at my scabs.)

5. Dan Nadel. “Crumb.” Excellent.. In places I had, like, one sentence of knowledge, Nadel provided paragraphs. He greatly increased my appreciation of Crumb as an artist and a person. (I even found him better looking in the photos than I’d recalled.)

6. Rick Atkinson. “The British Are Coming.” I liked Atkinson’s WW II trilogy a lot. (He was excellent on personalities, as I recall.) This didn’t grab me as much, possibly because the war is further removed, but I will read the next two volumes also.

7. Jarett Kobeck. “i hate the internet.” Recommended by the editor of an article I hve been assigned. As a novel, not much, but replete with scabrous humor on 21st century America I am happy to quote even if not asked.

8. Arsene Schauwen. “O. Schauwen.” Chris Ware’s review of Schauwen’s follow-up “Sunday” in the NYRB made me want me to read it, but while I was waiting for Fantagrapics to replenish its stock, I ordered this. A good intro. I did not regret my decision for a moment.

9. Marlen Haushofer. “The Wall.” Wish I could remember where I read about this. An excellent novel. At first it seemed a tour de force (“How do you write a novel about the last person alive living within a confined space – without being Samuel Beckett?”), but it was deep and humane and memorable and expanded my way of thinking about living in the world.

10. Robert Kehlmann. “The Rabbi’s Suitcase.” A friend’s novel about his mother’s emigration to the US from Palestine in the early 20th century and her romance with a young man who would become a significant figure in the Zionist movement. Of interest, in ascending order, to those interested in the Jewish emigrant experience, then this young man, and, most of all, the author’s mother.