The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - David Grann

This is the first new read I’ve picked up in a while. I’ve been working my way back through Stephen King’s short story collections and didn’t have much to write about them (they’re good). I put The Lost City of Z on hold a while ago and forgot about it, sp when it came in I only roughly remembered what it was about. Fortunately, my interests are more consistent than my memory, and I usually end up enjoying the things my past self requests for me. So it was here.

The Lost City of Z is a journalistic account of the life of Percy Fawcett, one of the last Great White Explorers, a group seen much less kindly these days, but that loomed large in the British—and by extension, the global—imagination around the turn of the 19th century. Whatever you think of the European inclination to explore uncharted lands—or, indeed, to consider lands where people had lived for ten thousand years “uncharted” in the first place—Fawcett was a remarkable man, possessed of a keen mind, an unparalleled drive, and an almost inhuman constitution (he seemed never to get sick, even when everyone else in his party was half-dead with rot and fever). After several tresk through the Amazon, he became obsessed with the notion of a lost civilization paved in gold, a place commonly called El Dorado, which he referred to as Z. In his quest for Z, Fawcett disappeared along with his son and his son’s friend, his whereabouts and even ultiamte fate unknown.

Parallell to the story of Fawcett’s life and disappearance, the author David Grann details his own efforts to pick up the mystery that had consumed hundreds of others before him. What he finds isn’t something I want to spoil, but the book has an exciting conclusion that suggests Fawcett wasn’t as far off the mark as his detractors claim.

The writing is engaging journalistic prose, unadorned but full of keen detail. I enjoyed reading it.

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I read this over a month ago and I think I’ve missed a book or two in between. In any case, The Age of Innocence is one of the many 100 Great 20th Century Novels about unhappy rich people, and I can’t say that is one of my favourite genres (another big one among those books I don’t much care for is Male Writer Suffers Ennui in New England). I got through this one and didn’t mind reading it, so I would consider it a strong book on that fact alone.

The story concerns Newland Archer, a wealthy New York socialite who practices law more as a hobby than a career. He is betrothed to the equally wealthy May Welland, but before the wedding date is set her cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe. Separated from her husband—a Count—and unfamiliar with the mores of 19th century New York, Ellen fascinated Newland, and next to her his fiancé seems hopelessly dull. He asks her to push forward the wedding, hoping that being finally married will put paid to his conflicted emotions, but she resists.

Most of the story concerns the shadow courtship between Newland and Ellen, both of whom struggle with attraction and guilt. The writing is coy in typical fashion for the era, and I’m not sure if they are ever intimate beyond holding hands (though maybe I missed something, being a typically unsubtle 21st century reader).

The writing is strong, and the characters are rich and well-drawn. Apparently the story draws on Wharton’s own childhood in terms of setting, and the details feel true to life. I doubt I’ll read it again, but that’s more a question of my interests than the book’s quality. Those into Jane Austen and the like will enjoy it.

Holly - Stephen King

It pains me to say this, but I didn’t really like this one. Holly is the first Stephen King book I struggled to finish.

The problem wasn’t the main story, which was an engaging mystery using the Columbo formula of giving away the villains and the outset and making the cat and mouse discovery the source of tension. King knows how to spin a yarn, and he does this well, teasing out revelations and using our knowledge to build dramatic irony.

The villains, likewise, were well-drawn and satisfyingly nasty (spoilers ahead, though you learn this within the first twenty pages). Emily and Rodney Harris are retired professors of English and Biology, respectively, who have descended into cannibalism under the belief that human flesh—livers and brains especially—hold restorative properties. They make for interesting villains with believable (if deplorable) motivations, though the focus on Emily’s racism and homophobia felt more like easy tags for her vileness rather than natural extension of her character. A person like her could certainly be prejudiced, but would she really be that preoccupied with her own prejudice?

The Harris’s insatiable hunger leads to a string of kidnappings, the latest of which Holly Gibney is hired to investigate. Through her sleuthing, she begins to connect the latest disappearance to previous ones. It’s clear King loves Holly, and she is indeed a good and interesting character. But I think one of the problems with this book is that he loves his characters too much. One of King’s great strengths as a writer has been his moral ambiguity. The line between good and evil is clear, but the good aren’t angelically so. They have flaws. They disappoint and hurt people. They are human. I don’t get that sense so much with Holly, and especially side characters Jerome and Barbara Robinson, who feel Mary Sue-ish in their fundamental goodness.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of sour grapes, as well, because not one but both Robinsons fart out lucrative literary careers without any effort whatsoever. Jerome receives $100,000 advance for a book about his grandpa, and Barbara is basically the Poetry Messiah, bequeathed by a character who is the greatest living poet of the 20th century and serves exclusively to beatify her. She also somehow makes $25,000, which is not something poets generally do. As someone who has written novels and sweated the requisite five pints of blood to get them published, the sheer ease of their success is galling, and makes King seem more than a little out of touch.

The late pandemic setting is an interesting touch, but this too proves distracting. I don’t think it’s by any means necessary to ignore COVID in fiction, but the constant references to it (though justifiable; it was all encompassing at that time) tended to take me out of the book, as did the repeated mentions of Trump. I know King’s politics, and while I share many of them, it still felt a bit cheap, as Trump supporter or COVID denier read like shorthands for “don’t like this person.”

To end on a positive note (and this really is a spoiler), I thought it was a clever choice to make the Harris’s cannibalism entirely a product of madness, and that the regenerative properties they feel are simply placebos. King doesn’t cheat with this, showing us impossible recovery that he then goes back on, but he does provide enough hints that, in the context of the Gibneyverse, where supernatural events have already occurred, such occult powers could conceivably exist.

Christine - Stephen King

I read Christine for the first time in high school and hadn’t picked it up since then. I’ve reread most of King’s books at least once since that time, and I’m not sure why Christine was one of the few I didn’t get around to. It’s a good book, classic King, full of quotidian details and bullies with switchblades and supernatural evil lurking at the fringes, operating at a level never fully explained but sufficiently realized to function within the universe of the story.

The book is constructed in an unusual way, opening and closing in first person with an extended stretch of third-person in the middle. Our narrator for the bookends is Dennis, friend of the bright, bespectacled, and perennially unpopular Arnie Cunningham, who is both the tragic hero and villain of the story. Arnie spots an aging Plymouth Fury up on blocks and is instantly smitten—or perhaps ensnared is a better word. He buys it from a crusty old coot named Roland LeBay, who dies shortly thereafter, and sets to fixing it up. As he works on the car—making impressive if desultory strides in the repair—his personality begins to change, aping the mannerisms of the late LeBay. Dennis is distrustful of the car and feels his relationship with Arnie start to slip.

Meanwhile, Arnie gets a girlfriend, who hates the car as much as Dennis does. The inevitable dirtbag bully crosses him and meets a violent end. A police officer grows suspicious and eventually dies as well. Dennis and Leigh both struggle to believe what is right in front of them, against the frantic struggle of their rational minds: Christine is alive, or possessed of LeBay’s malign spirit, or both (I was never entirely clear), and must be destroyed before it’s jealousy turns on them.

Christine is a good pulpy story elevated by King’s knack for dialogue and character, and his ability to nest outlandish tales in worlds made believable by small details. There is always room to breathe in a King story, and these moments of minutia, which a lesser writer might cut to torque up the action, have always been his greatest strength.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure - Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind neatly summarizes its thesis in its subtitle. The authors come from different backgrounds, Lukianoff as a lawyer and first amendment activist and Haidt as a social psychologist and academic, but are united over their concern with some of the trends appearing on modern liberal arts college campuses. They chronicle a shift in belief in a university’s core mandate from challenging students to protecting them, and argue that this change harms students by leaving them fragile and unprepared for life beyond school.

The subject matter is inherently inflammatory, but Lukianoff and Haidt take great pains to avoid turning their book into a polemic. The language is calm, circumspect, and reasoned, proffering explanations for this shift that include the political and social landscape these students came of age in and avoiding broad value judgments. There’s no bandying about terms like “snowflake.” The book’s focus on cognitive behavioral therapy struck me as bizarre at first, but the authors make a convincing case that speaker bans and trigger warnings feed into the negative thoughts CBT attempts to combat.

The structure of the book betrays their background in advocacy and academia, reading like a cross between a white paper and a textbook (albeit a pared down, accessible one). Chapters end with bullet point synopses, and the authors pause on a number of occasions to reiterate what they have discussed so far and tie it back to their original argument. Overall, I found it an interesting read, especially as someone who left university just a few years before these changes took hold.

Pet Sematary - Stephen King

The 1980s was a dark time for Stephen King. By accounts, his alcoholism was at its worst during this period, and he also struggled wit ha cocaine addiction. I always felt this bled through into his fiction, as Kings novels written during this period are among his darkest, most vicious works (and also, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, some of his best).

People associate horror fiction with bleak plots and unhappy endings, but King is, despite his reputation, an extremely optimistic writer. Throughout his fiction, one sees a recurring motif of a benevolent force, often unnamed or unspoken, tat seeks to counterbalance the darkness faced by his characters. He has referred to this “the coming of the White” (probably not a term he uses anymore, given contemporary context), and it takes many forms: the hand that strikes the cleansing A bomb in The Stand, Maturin the turtle in the Dark Tower series and It (I assume it’s the same turtle, though I don’t think he gets a name), Father Callahan’s glowing cross in Salem’s Lot. Even if the main character dies (as he sometimes does) or tragedy strikes (as it almost always does), most King books conclude with a sense, at some level, of balance restored. The White sometimes comes late, but it comes.

Well, the White never shows up in Pet Sematary. I would consider it King’s darkest book, and appropriately so, for it deals with the horror that looms above all others in the heart of every parent: the death of a child. King is at his usual best setting up the town of Ludlow and building a friendship between Louis Creed, a doctor who moved his family to this sleepy town from Chicago, and Jud Crandall, one of King’s stalwart Maine lifers, who ayuhs his way into Louis’ heart. When the family cat dies while Louis’ wife and kids are away, Jud shows Louis a way to bring it back by burying it in an old Mi’kmaq burial ground. The cat comes back, just like the song says, but it comes back wrong. This proof of concept, however troubling, is enough to goad Louis into repeating the experiment with his own son, after the boy is killed by a truck.

The result is King’s most potent morality play, a profound metaphor on the destructive power of grief, and how if improperly channeled, it rips apart those it flows through.

Or at least, it should be.

If the book has a weakness, it is King’s repeated suggestions that the burial ground itself is manipulating things, and that the characters are only one step up from puppets in the malevolent land’s pantomime. I assume King did this to help explain some of the characters’ more irrational choices, but I think it is a mistake. The characters do indeed act irrationally, but grief is irrational. Knowing everything Louis knew at the time—that the ground had the power of resurrection, but the creatures that come from it don’t feel quite right, and secondhand accounts of human resurrections were disastrous—and faced with the death of one of my own children, would I make a different choice? I like to think I would, but any parent who says so with certainly is lying to themselves and to you.

I think Pet Sematary would be a stronger book with the references to the Sematary’s manipulations cut out. But even with them in, it’s a hell of a book. One of King’s best.

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era - Donovan X. Ramsey

I’d wanted someone to write this book for a long time.

I’m lucky enough to have grown up in a neighbourhood more or less untouched by the crack epidemic, but I was alive during its peak, too young to understand exactly what crack was or what it did, but old enough to catch the wave of fear and disdain that emanated from its use. Mostly this filtered through hyperbolic news coverage and sappy TV plotlines, but it entered general discourse too. Kids used crackhead as a slur for a poor or mentally unwell person, and I knew a “crack baby” was a child born broken in some fundamental way. But I never understood why crack emerged so abruptly, ravaged communities so thoroughly, and why it seemed to ebb away even as I became aware of it.

Donovan X. Ramsey does a great job answering these questions, and a lot more besides. When Crack Was King takes a broad lens to the crack epidemic, reaching back to the Great Migration and Nixon’s War on Drugs to explain how the impoverished, largely Black population of America’s inner cities became uniquely vulnerable to the drug, documents the rise in cocaine’s availability that dropped the price enough for regular people to afford it, and the chemical innovations that freed cocaine from its powdered form, first through the complex and dangerous method of free base, and later through the much simpler form of crack. Ramsey meticulously discusses the policy decisions of each administration, how each party’s desire to be “touch of crime” led to an ever-tightening spiral of restrictions and harsher sentences. He also gives a simple and compelling reason for why crack petered out the way it did: its addiction was so ravaging and destructive that the kids growing up around the first generation of addicts were scared off for fear of becoming the second.

As good as Ramsey is at the wide lens, When Crack Was King is at it’s core a book about four people whose lives were touched by the crack epidemic: Elgin Swift, the son of an addict who grew up in a Yonkers neighbourhood ravaged by crack; Lennie Woodley, an addict herself who overcame an appallingly abusive childhood and years as a sex worker to become an advocate for addicts in recovery; Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore, who fought the Tough on Crime tide in an effort to put compassion and treatment into the city’s response to the epidemic; and Shawn McCray, a basketball prodigy and ace student who sold crack and became part of an infamous Newark gang called the Zoo Crew. Ramsey’s portraits of the four are unfailingly sympathetic yet honest, not flinching from the failures and bad decisions they sometimes made—that we all make, and that those more fortunate among us can afford to make without serious consequences.

Ramsey’s prose is engaging and evocative without being flowery. He captures the mood of a troubled era in American history in an illuminating way. This book was excellent.

Up In Honey's Room - Elmore Leonard

This was a weird one. Most of the Elmore Leonard I’ve read has been contemporary crime fiction, so if it took place in the 70s it’s because it was written in the 70s. Up In Honey’s Room is set during World War II, and is a follow up to another historical crime thriller, the Hot Kid, which I haven’t read. The setting might not seem that different, but Elmore Leonard’s dialogue is so distinct that it felt weird coming out of the mouths of these characters. Maybe people talked like that in 1944, but I found it jarring.

Leonard’s novels are never particularly plot heavy, and the principal plan or focus tends to shift midway through. I like that about them, as it feels more realistic, but it can also muddy the action. In this case ,the story is ostensibly about Carl “the Hot Kid” Webster chasing down a pair of escaped German POWs. His pursuit brings him to Detroit, where he encounters Honey Deal, a young woman previously married to a pro-Nazi German immigrant named Walter.

Carl suspects Walter might be involved in hiding the POWs, and enlists Honey to help interrogate him, under the reasoning that her presence will throw him off balance. There are some other characters, including a spy named Vera and an officer named Kevin, but their roles aren’t always that clear, and Walter’s plan to murder president Roosevelt is mentioned suddenly and comes to nothing when the man dies of natural causes. Walter’s lame attempts to make people think he was responsible were funny, but they leant to the overall sense of narrative drift.

I wouldn’t want Leonard to write tight, plotted novels like Frederick Forsythe, as the meandering stories and bumbling criminals are part of the charm, but for whatever reason this one didn’t feel like it came together as nicely as his previous work.

Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

I came across this book after reading about the Collyer brothers on Wikipedia and seeing it mentioned in the popular culture section. I’d read and enjoyed Ragtime and found the brothers fascinating subject matter, so checked it out from the library. The story is told in elegant prose form the perspective of Homer Collyer, a blind pianist who lives in a Harlem brownstone with his brother Langley, an obsessive hoarder. Through his eyes (or ears, rather) the reader passes through the early years of the 20th century into the 1980s, encountering bootlegging gangsters and roving hippies, observing two world wars, and generally chronicling the century as it matures, ragged and cynical, into its twilight years.

The book takes significant liberties with its facts and chronology—the actual Collyers died in 1947, and Langley was the musician, not Homer—but sticks close to key events (the gradual recession from society, the begrudging paying off of their mortgage in one fell swoop, their untimely end) proposing a thesis on the brothers recalcitrant hermitism, speculating on the impulse that made these bizarre introverted men effectively immure themselves in rubbish collected from the streets over decades.

The plot is episodic, structured only in the natural progression of the brothers’ lives from youth to old age. Having the narrator be a blind man was an interesting choice and one Doctorow handles effectively. His limited description of images was handled deftly, and I don’t recall spotting him describing something he couldn’t have known. The fact he’d had sight as a young man allowed him some context, at least; I expect it would be a greater challenge to write a novel with a narrator blind from birth.

Homer & Langley didn’t pack quite the punch that Ragtime did, but it was still worth reading, and encouraged me to grab another Doctorow book at some point.

Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut was one of my four go-to authors through high school, and by the time I left home for university I’d read all of the books of his my parents had, except for one: Deadeye Dick. The (fairly stupid) reason for this was that their copy was either poorly bound or mistreated (or both), and as a result most of the pages would come free as soon as you turned them. I was never comfortable takin it out of the house, and because I did most of my reading on the school bus, I kept giving it a miss.

I’ve picked up a few Vonnegut books since high school (mostly re-reads), but that dumb prejudice kept me from picking it up until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally decided to read the thing, and if it fell apart in my hands, who the hell cares?

It would be a neat irony if it turned out Deadeye Dick was far and away my favourite Vonnegut book, but reality isn’t so tidy. It’s a good book—I’ve never read a Vonnegut that wasn’t—and very much in his milieu, but I don’t think it is quite the equal of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, or Breakfast of Champions (which most people don’t consider one of his best, but remains a favourite of mine).

The story follows Vonnegut’s familiar obsession with bizarre characters caroming off each other in peculiar coincidences. The narrator, a pharmacist and self-professed “neuter” named Rudy Waltz, recounts his life and that of his helpless bohemian parents. At twelve years old, Rudy fired a gun off his roof at nothing in particular and accidentally murdered a pregnant woman. The resulting arrest and lawsuit ruins his family socially and financially, and he becomes their caregiver, a role he doesn’t seem to particularly resent.

Like most Vonnegut novels, Deadeye Dick bounces between points in time, talking one moment about his venture opening a hotel in Haiti, the next about his short-lived career as a published playwrite. Rudy’s defining trait is his apathy/ Nothing in life excites him, and he recounts everything with muted emotion.

This isn’t the book I’d give someone as an introduction to Vonnegut, but for a fan it’s certainly worth a read.

A Short History of Russia - Mark Galeotti

A Short History of Russia is aptly named, covering nearly 1,000 years of history across the world’s biggest country in a little over a hundred pages. The entire soviet period is summarized in less than a dozen pages. Despite the book’s brevity, Galeotti does a good job of distilling the keys points form the era, giving important context on who leaders were and how their personalities, obsessions, and flaws shaped the nation under their tenure. Each chapter ends with a paragraph of recommendations for further reading, which is helpful.

The overall thesis of Galeotti’s book is that Russia is a country without a clear, unifying thread. Sprawling across two continents and eleven time zones, it lacked for much of its history a common geography, ethnicity, culture, or language. This forced a certain obsession with national identity among the ruling class, and made Russians especially eager to define themselves as a people. I don’t know enough to speak to the accuracy of this assessment, but Galleoti argues it convincingly.

I don’t have much else to say about it, other than those looking for a quick primer on Russian history should check it out.

52 Pick-up - Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has long been a standby author of mine—someone whose work I would pick up at random whenever I wasn’t reading anything in particular. For whatever reason, I hadn’t read a book by him in several years, so when I found a copy of 52 Pick-Up in a Little Free Library I grabbed it eagerly.

52 Pick-Up is classic Elmore Leonard, full of skeezy characters, excellent naturalistic dialogue, and crisp, effortless prose. Leonard never feels like he’s trying to impress, and thus always impresses. As far as the plot goes, I wouldn’t rank this among his best, but it’s certainly engaging. Harry Mitchell, a former soldier and autoworker who studied engineering and opened a successful auto plant, is captured by masked assailants and shown a porn film starring him and his mistress. They demand he pay up or they’ll leak the footage. Stubborn Harry refuses, and the ante is steadily upped, resulting in murder, kidnapping, and other Leonardy mayhem.

The characters are archetypal but distinct, filled with life through Leonard’s keen eye for detail and even keener ear for capturing spoken language. He has mastered the art of dropping words form sentences in a way that mirrors speech, something I see surprisingly rarely in other books (perhaps because it sounds hackneyed if done wrong)

I wouldn’t call 52 Pick-Up my favourite of Leonard’s novels (that’s Freaky Deaky, incidentally), and the title is incredibly arbitrary (referring, I assume, to the $52,000 in bribe money the perps settle on, a number I’m guessing he chose after he thought of the title), but it’s solid and worth reading.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying was the first William Faulkner book I ever read. I was about 18, and while a lot of it went over my head (some of it still does, to be honest), there was something deeply intriguing and evocative about it. I was used to more popular literature, with clearly delineated stories and key plot points spelled out or at most lightly obscured. As I Lay Dying offers no such roadmap. The story, itself quite minimal, is buried under conflicting perspectives, stream of conscience narration, and a language both florid and deeply colloquial.

The central premise concerns Anse Bundren and his five children, who travel with the recently deceased Addie Bundren (Anse’s wife and the children’s mother) in order to fulfill her dying wish to be married in the town Jefferson. Sudden rainfall floods the river and washes out the bridges, making the journey a challenge, but the real conflict is between and within the family members themselves. Cas, the oldest, is stoic to the point of self-destruction, refusing to admit to any discomfort from his broken leg. Darl, the second child, is slowly going mad. Jewel, the middle child and product (we infer) of an affair, bucks at the contraints imposed by his headstrong father. Dewey Dell, the only daughter, is pregnant out of wedlock and desperately seeking an abortion. Vardaman, the youngest, struggles to process his mother’s death, likening her to a fish he caught shortly before she died.

Each chapter is in first person, told by a revolving cast of characters. Most often it’s the Bundrens themselves, but smaller characters are given narrator duty as well. The prose, as you might expect, is superb, and even where actions are unclear, the strength of the language pulls you along. Rereading this some near twenty years later, I’m still struck by its narrative force. It feels like a much bigger book than it is, not because it drags ,but because of the weight of psychological and literary detail Faulkner provides. An excellent book.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants - Bill Bryson (re-read)

This is my first time reading The Body since its initial release. Like all Bryson books, it’s an entertaining, funny read. Bryson’s books generally fall into two categories: travelogues, in which Bryson chronicles his journey through a particular part of the world, and researched books, in which he chooses a subject and explains it in layman’s terms. The Body, as the name suggests, is among the latter.

Bryson’s output has skewed towards research books in his later years, quite possibly because he’s less inclined to take long journeys. He is very good at both, and while the travelogues tend to be funnier (I would count his funniest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, among this group, even though the “travel” is through his own childhood), The Body still includes humour through bizarre anecdotes and clever turns of phrase. The overall content, however, is educational, as Bryson works his way through the human body section by section, branching off near the end into disease and medicine. The final chapter, fittingly enough, deals with death, and the process of dying. It ends a bit abruptly, but then again so does life in a lot of cases, so perhaps that’s fitting in its way.

Bryson peppers his chapters with anecdotes about figures in medicine and biology both famous and obscure, charting medical breakthroughs and quack remedy fads with equal relish. He has always had an ear for bizarre stories and seems to delight in bringing forgotten heroes a bit of posthumous fame.

There isn’t a Bill Bryson book I haven’t read at least once, and nearly all of them I’ve gone through multiple times. It saddens me to hear that he intends for The Body to be his last book, but he’s certainly earned his retirement. Nevertheless, I can’t say I’m not hoping that boredom gets the better of him and he finds his way into a new one at some point.

Note: in preparing the tags for this entry, I discovered I’ve already written about this book once before! Oh well, interesting to capture my views on it a second time.

Bag of Bones - Stephen King

Bag of Bones was the new King novel when I started reading him in earnest. I don’t think I got to it until high school, but I recall thinking of it as a milestone of sorts in his work, in which supernatural terrors took a backseat to more psychological fears. In truth, it’s not quite that tidy, as books like Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are clear antecedents, and Dreamcatcher, published just three years later, is classic King. Still, on rereading, I think there is a distinct maturity in Bag of Bones regarding how King went about writing novels, an increased reflection and willingness to let the narrative breathe.

Bag of Bones is billed as a ghost story, and it is, but the spirits take a back seat for much of the novel and, in truth, are the weakest part of the book. The story of Sara Tidwell is well-told and shockingly brutal in its depiction of racial violence, but the latter portion involving the storm felt like a tonal shift and a way to up the tension that had been building much more subtly before that. Really, Bag of Bones is a book about grief, and a grief of a particular sort, where a person loses the partner they meant to spend their life with and finds, with no small amount of despair, that they now have to find a way to spend it alone.

King, about 20 years married at the time of the book’s writing, writes marriage well, cutting past the saccharine hallmark pablum on one side and the hackneyed discord on the other to find a complex, beating core that is truer than most “literary fiction” I’ve read. It is this talent, I think, that separates King from his peers. The man can write a thriller with the best of them, but he populates those taut tales with real, richly evoked people. No one feels like a cog in a Stephen King novel, and you could easily imagine following a side character off the page and into their daily life.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

I came across this book after reading an article by Timothy Snyder on the history behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In his piece, Snyder discusses the long history of invasion experienced by Ukraine and other Eastern European nations existing in the dubious space between belligerent powers. This is an area he explored more broadly in Bloodlands, the title of which refers to a swath of land roughly contiguous with Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine. where the vast majority of civilian death in the European theatre occurred between 1933 and 1945.

Much of this death was part of the Holocaust, but Snyder demonstrates that the Nazis were not the only genocidal force operating in that particular time and place. He provides a detailed rundown of the atrocities that the Soviets committed in these lands as well, from the imposed famine in Ukraine to the Great Terror to the purging of Polish intellectuals. He emphasizes that many of these places were subject to not just one invasion, but two or three, as the Nazis and the Soviets moved from allies to belligerents, and the Nazis from invaders to a broken, retreating army.

Of course, the Holocaust is given much focus, as its deliberate and racist intentions arouse particular loathing, but Snyder makes it clear that the Ukrainians and Poles were at times targeted almost as deliberately by the Soviets, if not with the same absolutist intention to eliminate them.

Snyder’s prose is academic but approachable, engaging and clear without much ornamentation. He had a tendency to repeat certain points, which I suspect is an effective way to ensure the general thesis is clear, though it sometimes grated a bit to hear the same fact several times. Overall, an important study of a particularly brutal stain on human history, one which it is hard to look at but must never be forgotten.

The Dark Half - Stephen King

The Dark Half is the first Stephen King book I read from start to finish. I’d attempted two others previously, It and The Talisman, but was bested by my young age and their prodigious length (I’d chosen, unwisely, two of the chunkier entries into King’s notoriously chunky bibliography).

As a result, I’ve always held a certain affection for The Dark Half, even though I hadn’t reread it until now (nearly twenty-five years later, Jesus) and could clearly recall only two specific things about it beyond the general plot. The first was the improbable and gustatorily unsatisfactory position of a victim’s male member upon discovery of his body (Google it at your peril), and the second was a character (I couldn’t remember who) having a picture of Ronald Reagan on their dartboard. I can see why the first one stuck with me, as it was likely the most gruesome thing I’d ever read to date at that point, but why I hung onto the Reagan thing I have no idea. Especially since the book’s climax contains one of the more striking images in King’s canon: a living corpse borne aloft by a cloak of sparrows and carted screaming to hell. Seems like the sort of thing that would grab my attention, but I didn’t remember it at all.

The lead character is named Thad Beaumont, and he’s the archetype of a King protagonist if ever there was one. He’s a successful writer (check) from Maine (check) with a family (check) who stuck with him through bouts of alcoholism and anger issues (check) and who also teaches English at a local college (check). King writes well enough that this tendency never bothered me much, but I can’t deny that it’s there, especially in much of his 80s-90s work.

The twist (and perhaps the first early nod to the metatextuality that would consume much of the later Dark Tower books) is that Thad achieved most of his commercial success not as himself, but as his pen name, George Stark. A snooping fan outs That as Stark, and in order to get ahead of the story Thad admits everything and stages a “funeral” for the late George Stark. Only George decides he doesn’t like being dead, and opts instead to come to life, rising from his staged grave to wreak havoc on those who outed him, and to persuade Thad through less-than-subtle means to collaborate with him on a final book.

Pulpy stuff, but King does pulp to a high art, in large part through his characters, who I’d argue are richer than truer than many inhabitants of so-called literary fiction. The best one here is Alan Pangborn, a small town sheriff with big city instincts who proves the first bit of the mettle that will be more fully on display in his star turn a few years later, Needful Things.

I love King, and even his more forgotten works are always a pleasure to reread. This may not be his best, but it’s a solid turn.

Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) - Franz Kafka

Ich habe Die Verwandlung von Franz Kafka viele Male in Englisch Übersetzung gelesen. Dieses war das erstes Mal, der ich es in Deutsch zu lesen versucht habe. 

Die Verwandlung ist Kafkas berühmteste Arbeit und vielleicht auch sein Bestes. Es wurde im Jahr neunzehnhundertfunfzehn publiziert. Die Geschichte geht um Gregor Samsa, ein Handlungsreisender, der seine Familie durch seine Arbeit ernährt. Die Zeit und Ort der Geschichte wird nie in dem Text erklärt, aber es wird allgemein vermutet, dass es in Prag stattfindet, und zur gleichen Zeit, in der das Buch geschrieben wurde. Samsa verdient nicht viel Geld, aber er ist stolz auf seine Rolle als Ernährer, und träumt davon, seine Schwester eines Tages auf das Musikkonservatorium zu schicken, wo sie Geige lernen kann. 

Das Buch beginnt mit einem dramatischen und berühmten ersten Satz, der die Geschichte in Gang setzt: “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” Der ungeheuren Ungeziefer, obwohl nie so genannt, wird durch die Beschreibung im Text als ein riesiger Käfer verstanden.

Anfangs scheint Sansa seine Position zu akzeptieren. Er scheint zu glauben, dass sie nur vorübergehend ist, und macht sich meistens Sorgen, ob er spät für Arbeit wird. Als sein Chef kommt, um ihn zu sehen, versucht er eine Ausrede zu machen. Leider, obwohl sein Verstand unandert ist und er andere Leute verstehen kann, niemand kann ihn verstehen. Sein Chef flieht in Furcht, und seine Familie ist entsetzt. Sie sperren ihn in seinem Zimmer ein, wo er über seinen neuen Körper lernen muss. Wie er fühlt, wie er bewegt, welche Art Essen er essen kann, alles ist für ihn neu und seltsam.  

Gregors Familie wisst nicht, wie Gregors Verwandlung zu reagieren. Sein Vater greift ihn an, wenn er versucht, sein Zimmer zu verlassen. Seine Mutter weint immer aber sie kann es nicht ertragen, ihn zu sehen. Nur seine Schwester kümmert sich um ihn. Sie bringt ihm Essen und putzt sein Zimmer auf. Sie übernimmt seine Fürsorge und weigert sich, die anderen Familienmitglieder in sein Zimmer zu lassen. Letztlich beginnt sie, ihn zu verübeln, weil er eine Bürde wird. Gregor verübelt seine Familie auch, weil sie ihn nicht verstehen kann, und langsam wird er krank. Schließlich er stirbt, und seine Familie ist zu erleichtert, um ihn zu trauern.

Was bedeutet diese seltsame Geschichte? Einige Gelehrte glauben, es geht um seine Gefühle gegenüber seiner Familie, besonders sein Vater, der angeblich wütend und anmaßend war, so wie der Vater, der in der Geschichte steht. Für Andere ist Die Verwandlung eine Geschichte von Kafkas Depressionen und Selbsthass. Man kann auch Die Verwandlung als eine Prophezeiung darüber lesen, die Behandlung der europäischen Juden in den kommenden Jahrzehnten. Als ein Jude konnte Kafka vielleicht vorstellen, dass eine Tag seiner christlichen Landsleute plötzlich dazu geführt werden könnte, einen Mann wie ihn als Ungeziefer anzusehen.

Die Verwandlung ist kein leichtes Buch. Seine Sprache ist komplex und seine Themen sind subtil und düster. Jedoch ist es eine ausgezeichnete Geschichte, psychologisch komplex und gut geschrieben und verdient ihren Platz im literarischen Kanon.

Needful Things - Stephen King

I’ve been half-finishing a lot of books lately, which is why there’s such a large gap between entries. My choices weren’t bad books, but were a little too demanding for my frame of mind. I needed something I could sink into easily, and for that Stephen King is always a good choice.

I last read Needful Things in high school, so my memory of it was spotty. A few brief scenes remained clear to me—the fatal duel between Nettie and Wilma, the thing in Polly’s azka, and the encounter between Sherriff Pangborn and Leland Gaunt—but beyond that I could really only recall the general plot: a new store called Needful Things opens in Castle Rock, selling objects that entrance the townsfolk. I’d forgotten about the pranks, which Gaunt extracts from buyers as an additional payment in an effort to play the townspeople off of each other and stoke ill feeling.

It’s a classic King story, with a compelling villain, strong flawed heroes, and an undergirding magic that is never fully explained but feels earned by the premise of the story. It also includes a fair bit of what I think is King’s strongest trait: his ability to conjure a deep sense of community between his characters. His books never drag, even when they spend whole chapters on seemingly prosaic matters unrelated to the main story. His characters feel real, and it’s always a pleasure to spend time with them, even the unpleasant ones. There is something entrancingly human about them.

Picking up Needful Things got me in a mind to reread some of the other Castle Rock stories, as that particular intertextual universe of his hasn’t drawn me back as often as some others (the Dark Tower, for one). There’s something homey a Stephen King book (an odd thing, maybe, considering he’s known as a horror writer). It’s comforting to know I can always come back to them.

Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan

Last month, I was pleased to receive a copy of Faith, Hope and Carnage as a Christmas present, as I’d heard about the book but hadn’t gotten around to buying it. The book os co-authored with Sean O’Hagan, but their collaboration was not in the traditional sense of celebrity biographies (i.e., the celebrity lends his name and the partner does all the actual writing).

For one thing, the book wasn’t written in the traditional sense. Rather, it is the transcript of an extended interview with Cave, conducted through phone calls over a roughly year-long period. The start of the timeline is shortly after the first COVID lockdowns, which are to some extent an impetus (a book written by phone being an apt medium in the era of social distancing).

The pandemic is thus naturally a subject for discussion, but the biggest theme is certainly Cave’s experiences as a grieving father in the wake of his son’s death in 2015. I doubt the years lessen the pain in an absolute sense, but they do offer Cave some time in which to reflect and articulate the experience, which those without children can never understand, and those (like me) who have kids but have not lost one can sense only as a sort of vertigo. I make no claims that I can in any way truly understand the abyss the grieving parent plunges into, but since becoming a parent, I can, in contemplating such a thing, peer queasily over the edge.

Though the book deals in grief, O’Hagan’s questions never feel exploitative. He is a good interviewer, probing where he senses more could be said without driving the conversation, pushing back on some statements in a way that is not confrontational, but prompts Cave to delve a little deeper or offer a clearer sense of his meaning. This isn’t needed often, for Cave is, in my opinion, a great thinker. There is an unfortunate tendency to assume people in a creative field have an innate understanding of larger issues, but Cave has long struck me as someone who truly thinks deeply about things. He is the sort of religious person that I greatly admire. Not a zealot, because zealots are invariably shallow thinkers who don conviction as a kind of flashy armor, but one who doubts as much as they believe. One whose belief is fueled, almost paradoxically, by that doubt. As someone who struggled with belief and wound up on the other side of the equation, it is always fascinating to me to read from someone who wrestled with the same questions and reached the opposite conclusion.

Of course, Cave is known most of all as a musician, and while the book avoids the trappings of the standard music interview (when’s the new album out? What does this song mean? Who are your favourite artists?) some discussion of his work is inevitable—and much appreciated. It’s particularly intriguing to read his discussions with Sean while in the process of writing Carnage with Warren Ellis.

I loved this book, loved it’s intimacy, loved Cave’s passion that has mellowed with wisdom into a surprising optimism. I was sad when it ended. As a Cave fan, I’m certainly the target audience, but I’ve also never been huge on biographies or books about my favourite bands for their own sake. Too often, these feel more like collector’s items than works of literature. This one is different. I would recommend it to people who haven’t even heard of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. What Cave has to say cuts deeper than fandom.