A couple more 5 star books in this batch also.
Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan. I thought I was largely done with magic realism in the 90s after large doses of Marquez and Allende, but wow, give me more – what a crazy story this was. Easily the most imaginative, fun and readable book out of this lot, but also incredibly dark. It continued to surprise and the magical stuff didn’t really ramp up until the last bit thank goodness. I could have kept reading forever. 5 stars.
Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem. Looking back, to read this after the previous book was not ideal. The stories seem self-conscious and overworked, a couple of them are just terrible really, but there’s quite a bit of imagination on show too. Some of these feel like early attempts at short stories that didn’t quite work or fell short, but I’d still give it 3 stars for originality.
Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn. Written in 1967, this funny little piece seemed to be exactly my kind of thing – an expose into the worst excesses of a newspaper office heading towards irrelevance, but along the way I realised that it was a lot more farcical than I expected. Some of the scenes in the TV studio were excruciating and unlikely, and although you know the protagonist is a silly git, and all the men in it are hopeless, it just made me a little sad in the end. I don’t think I love comedy in a novel much. 3.5 stars.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. This must have been quite a shocking book for its time (1961) when divorce or family issues were scandalous things, not to be talked about. It’s beautifully written – the tension ratchets up relentlessly, and the crushing of dreams is heartbreakingly detailed. A very affecting book and I’m so pleased I finally got to it. 5 stars.
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. A series of essays talking about the rhythm of poetry (fairly handy really) linked by a man-loses-partner-frustrated-by-procrastination-and-tries-to win-her-back story. I didn’t love it, and I wouldn’t recommend it. 3 stars.
The MVP Machine by Lindbergh and Sawchik. The only non-fiction in this batch of books, this had been all over my Twitter feed for months until I succumbed. I know there’s still a lot of things I don’t know about baseball, and I’ll confess I did learn a bit about spin rates and how determined Trevor Bauer is, but it was overly long, repetitive and had a cheap, rough dust-jacket which I could barely stand to touch. 3 stars.
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle (Mountain Goats). There were some early disconcerting moments because the book is put together in reverse order, so it’s funny that he titled it Wolf in White Van, because that’s what’s heard when playing Larry Norman’s “666” song backwards (for the satanic voices). A really interesting premise about a mail order adventure game “Trace Italian” run by a handicapped teenager, which ends up having real world consequences for some of the players. This is the sort of book that makes me nostalgic for the pre-internet age, when our imaginations were free to be explored and which spawned Dungeons and Dragons and the like. Occasionally it was a little verbose, but otherwise it was an amazing and worthwhile journey. 4 stars.