BOOK REVIEWS
I invited reviews of books and birds and rocks and things from my friends, but none of you lameasses contributed anything. And I don't have the energy to write reviews after writing all the drivel above. So I'll just do my best and point your collective antennae to some interesting things you may or may not be interested in:
• Richard Yates, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates has just been published. The only thing I've read by him is Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and based on that, I have to say that he was a brilliant writer with an great ability to capture that part of us that thinks that other people's lives are foolish, when it is our own lives that often deserve that descriptor. You will not be dissapointed in his work.
• Nick Hornby, How to Be Good has just been put out. I haven't read this, but he's the same dude who wrote High Fidelity (which was brilliant, but made me turn my life around at precisely the wrong time -- there were repercussions of a comedic and tragic nature which I will spare you). This book is about a doctor and mother of two who is about to get divorced (via cell phone).
• R. K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets. Published in 1967, this is a sweet little book about (gasp) clashes between generations and cultures, but NOT in that nouveau chic way that modern South Asian writers trip over themselves to outdo. This is much more understated. It is, after all, a story about a sweet vendor. Lovely.
• J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World. Originally published in 1962, this is the first science fiction novel that depressed me. This is the anti-Childhood's End (which, as you should all know, is one of the most brilliant novels ever written by anybody). But whereas Childhood's End had a redemptive quality, there is nothing of that sort in here. Ballard hits the jugular about a future when (global warming?) has melted the icecaps, and we survive in a planet of water. It is bleak. But brilliant.
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces. I include this book here not because I recently read it, but because I am trying to get a friend of mine to read it. This is one of the most magnificient novels ever written. OK, OK, I have a weakness for hyperbole -- but bear with me. This is a story about thirty year old Ignatius J. Reilly, a self-proclaimed genius whose only goal is to reform civilization as we know it. Unfortunately, he's unemployed and lost in the city of New Orleans. That's just the beginning. This book is the best parts of Catch-22 merged with the misfits on the cover of Bob Dylan's The Basement Tapes. It is undeniably one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
