The Syndicate

I finished 25 books in 2018, with Universal Harvester (see post above) being the best of them. Hoping to get those numbers up this year.

I finished Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, aka the guy from the Mountain Goats. I don’t want to praise it too much, but it’s probably the best book I’ve read all year. Considering that John writes his songs in such a novelistic way (with a great sense for character, story, workd-building details, etc.) I shouldn’t be surprised but I’m very impressed. It’s about a video rental store where strange things start appearing on the tapes, and it’s very spooky and sad. It’s a little twisty so I don’t want to say too much but it strikes a really nice balance between horror and verisimilitude and I’m pretty excited to read his other books now.

I also quickly got through Dante’s Vita Nova, which is supposed to be a collection of love poems but mostly just creeped me out. I know the world was different when Dante was alive but ... the Dante-Beatrice “relationship” (in quotes, because it doesn’t exist) is textbook neckbeard incel stalker stuff, and Dante’s histrionics and metaphysical rambling honestly make him sound insane. So it’s enjoyable, but definitely not in any way that was ever intended.

Finally finished the Divine Comedy — as I had somewhat predicted, the further you go, the less interesting it is. Paradiso is alright but it’s mostly Beatrice lecturing on astronomy or the perfect order of the universe, which doesn’t provoke the mind as much as the existentialism of the other 2 books. Plus the horror factor of Inferno captures the imagination better and makes it more fun in general. I realized my copy has La vita nuovo, Dante’s “little book,” at the end, so I’ll be getting to that eventually, as well as my old professor’s short textbook on Dante, but for now, I think I’m going with something released in the last year or so ...

It seems like you and I took a lot of similar courses! Mine was actually taught by a philosophy professor but it was similar to a lit course, just with frequent digressions into bigger picture issues and theories.

My reading has slowed to a crawl lately, but I am still chugging along. Senior year I took a seminar on Dante but we didn’t cover the third part of the Divine Comedy, Paradisio, so I’ve been rereading the whole work. Inferno is great and very heavy metal. I’m about halfway through Purgatorio now and it’s enjoyable too. You dig more into the meat of Dante’s moral philosophy in that one, I feel, and it’s interesting if nothing else. Get a good edition that has footnotes, though, because otherwise you’ll be lost.

I finished Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut a few days ago. Vonnegut is "the guy" for me, so I liked it a lot of course, but YMMV — it's a heavily autobiographical memoir-ish collage of different articles and speeches he wrote during the 1980s, stitched together with thematic bridges on topics like family, art, war, mental illness, and more. I could read Vonnegut's thoughts on anything at this point and I pretty much have.

I used to read John Swartzwelder (prolific author of many episodes of The Simpsons) and I want to get more Christie and Chandler. But I split my time in a lot of directions and read a lot slower these days so not really at the moment, but that said, I’d like to!

I finished The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger maybe a week or so ago. It's the second in a detective series by Bruce Holsinger, who is a medieval history professor and focuses his stories on the poet John Gower in long-ago London. I was seriously enthralled by the first one (A Burnable Book), but found its sequel pretty lacking for reasons I'm not totally sure about. Everything about it — the prose, the world-building, the direction of the plot, the crux of the plot, the side characters — felt ... lacking, and not nearly as captivating. I pretty much finished it just to finish it, which is never a good sign. I'd have to revisit the first one to know if it's really that much worse or if my tastes have just changed a bit since I read it three years or so ago, but I suspect it's a little of column A, a little of column B. Disappointing.

I’ve always been interested in that. I’ll have to check it out sometime.

Yeah, my favorite English professor taught it every few semesters and it was a blast. We did Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton (thought that one wasn’t that good), Michael Chabon’s old Holmes book, maybe a few other things. I didn’t read a lot of mysteries before that class but I love them now.

That’s awesome! I read With No One as Witness in a class on mystery fiction in college, which has some, uhh ... big plot developments ... but I’m going back from the very beginning now.

I finished Well-Schooled in Murder by Elizabeth George. It’s no. 3 in a detective series I started reading for coursework in college, about a posh Scotland Yard inspector named Lynley who comes from wealth and privilege and his partner, working-class Sgt. Barbara Havers. I really like George’s mysteries because she populates them with very full, fleshed-out characters, and she always has good twists. Makes it hard to predict who the killer is, but this time I had the suspect in my POE. This one’s about a murder at a prep school and it’s very dark — all of her mysteries go to some pretty disturbing places — but it hits the spot. There’s like 18 of these books and some plots that continue through all of them, but you can pick up any in the series and be fine.

I just finished The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson. It’s easily the best thing I’ve read all year and one of the best novels I’ve read. I wondered going into it how it would portray North Korea — the book is about a sort-of-soldier who has a few different vocations — and it doesn’t disappoint; at times it feels like fantasy but then you remember it’s all actually happening. The book is clever, funny, and heartbreaking; it straddles a few different genres but does them all well. I think it won the Pulitzer when it came out, and I’d say it was well-deserved. It’s going to be one that sticks with me.

That’s high praise for Mann — who’s the translator on your copy?

I wasn’t that impressed by Crime and Punishment when I read it either, but I was in high school and it may have been a little out of my depth. I don’t think I had a very celebrated translation either ... then again, I’ve been reading War and Peace off-and-on (mostly off) for 4 years now so maybe Russian lit isn’t my bag.

I finished Good Sex by Ray Belliotti. Dr. Belliotti was one of my favorite professors in school and his philosophy classes really left an impact on me, the last one being Sex and Love. This was the assigned text for the course, but he's a talented enough writer that I didn't mind buying it or finishing it later. It's a pretty thorough examination of sexual ethics from ancient Greece to contemporary feminism and also has some good diversions into selected problems. Belliotti proposes his own sexual ethic in the last half of the book after finding the other main schools of thought (Christian morality, sex with love, Marxism, several versions of libertarian contractualism and more of feminism) to be lacking, and it's hard (though not impossible) to disagree with his metric. I think it was pretty widely taught in the field for a while, so anybody interested in real-life philosophy applications might get good mileage out of it.

I finished The America Play and Other Works by Suzan Lori Parks. It’s a collection of Parks’ plays from the late 80s and 90s and they all focus on themes of black identity, history, and, uh, other stuff I couldn’t tell you about. Parks is a MacArthur genius grant recipient and I’m sure these plays are interesting when staged — I’d like to see one — but as far as reading the text goes, holy hell are they hard to follow. I really couldn’t get into any of them for extended periods as there are almost no typical plots, just characters talking (sometimes to each other, but rarely). They’re also written in a kind of vernacular that’s supposed to be representative of AAVE, I guess, but it comes off as that annoying elitist style (bad, white) authors tend to write Southern characters as speaking in .... “The America Play” in particular begins as a really interesting monologue of a man known as the Foundling Father, a Lincoln impersonator who re-enacts the assassination for money, but it ends up going the way of the rest of them and was more or less something I endured. Overall I don’t recommend reading them, but if you have a chance to check out the live performances they may be interesting.

dunya wrote: ↑Wed Jul 11, 2018 7:42 pm you rank norweigan wood as normal?

holy shit man, that book made me cry like a baby and depressed me for a month for reals.

wind-up bird chronicle is probably my fav by him too though so good choice.

Emotions aside, it’s probably his most realistic. I don’t remember any of the usual Murakami oddities appearing.

Today I finished After Dark by Haruki Murakami.

There isn't a lot of story to it; young people wander in the night and things happen, some very mysterious and some not. It's sort of like a Murakami take on Before Sunrise, and while it starts out feeling very quotidian by Murakami's standards, that's not the case at all by the end of it. There weren't very many passages that either spoke to me emotionally or really gave me pause because of the weirdness, but it was decent overall and there are some relatable themes in it.
I would rate it a 3/5 and place it in the middle for Murakami. Not mindblowing by any means, but it has some neat ideas and it's worth checking out if you're into him or magic realism (plus it's very quick).

For those of you who have never read Murakami, his work is usually described as dreamlike and nonsensical in a good way. He'll juxtapose a scene of someone making pasta in great detail with a cat looking up and speaking, or two moons appearing in the sky, or someone slipping into another world. In that sense he is definitely part of his own magic realist tradition, but if you're looking for something as clean as Gabriel Garcia Marquez think again — a lot of the time his work feels to me totally inscrutable and hard to discern a really clear thesis from. I walk away from Murakami books roused by certain feelings I had while reading it, but never with even a good understanding of what I just read. He's one of my favorite novelists, though, and worth checking out for sure.

As a bonus I'll rank the books by him I've read too (don't hate):
I have some old plays that an ex-girlfriend loaded off on me in college, so I think I'll read one of those next.

Nice thread. I’ll have to post about the Murakami I’m halfway through when I get done with it (hopefully this weekend but looking grim).