I set two goals for myself this year. The first was to generate gobs of business value by providing liquidity to the U.S. index options market and the second was to read more books. I made some great strides in my reading life in 2024, but I locked in too hard at work in 2025 and backslid. Determined to turn the franchise around, I brought a copy of *2666* with me to Japan in December. I was the sickest I've been in years on that trip, but all of my time on trains and buses plus the magic of Japanese cough medicine got me in the right headspace to focus on the most ambitious book I've read in years. By the time I finished "The Part About Archimboldi", I knew I was (so) back. I set an ambitious New Year's Resolution to read 50 pages a day which I couldn't maintain for more than a week outside of vacations. I've still managed to get a decent amount of reading done over past year, but I'm hoping that I can step it up by the end of 2026. I'm not explicitly scoring these books, because I found that I would spend way too much time trying to rate movies while watching them when I used Letterboxd during Covid, which took something away from my ability to enjoy and process art. I have some super loosy goosey categories for how much I enjoyed the books at the end of this page if my thoughts don't come through clearly enough in the individual reviews. My apologies if any of this reads poorly, or feels drawn out. My writing skills have completely atrophied outside of machine-gunning slack messages at work and yelling at the little golem in my terminal to do my job for me, so this is a very low-stakes way for me to churn out some sentences and attempt to get my mojo back. I assure you, this is artisanal, hand-crafted text. ## Contents - [[#December|December]] - [[#2666|2666]] - [[#January|January]] - [[#American Psycho|American Psycho]] - [[#The Sellout|The Sellout]] - [[#Human Acts|Human Acts]] - [[#February|February]] - [[#Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark|Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark]] - [[#Jesus' Son|Jesus' Son]] - [[#Amusing Ourselves to Death|Amusing Ourselves to Death]] - [[#Amulet|Amulet]] - [[#The King in Yellow|The King in Yellow]] - [[#Being There|Being There]] - [[#The Future of Truth|The Future of Truth]] - [[#March|March]] - [[#The Insufferable Gaucho|The Insufferable Gaucho]] - [[#Fathers and Sons|Fathers and Sons]] - [[#April|April]] - [[#“The Pedersen Kid”|“The Pedersen Kid”]] - [[#We Have Always Lived in the Castle|We Have Always Lived in the Castle]] - [[#Morning and Evening|Morning and Evening]] - [[#A Visit from the Goon Squad|A Visit from the Goon Squad]] - [[#May|May]] - [[#A Song for the Unraveling of the World|A Song for the Unraveling of the World]] - [[#The Vegetarian|The Vegetarian]] - [[#The White Book|The White Book]] - [[#Labyrinths|Labyrinths]] - [[#The Divinity Student|The Divinity Student]] - [[#Piranesi|Piranesi]] - [[#June|June]] - [[#Rejection|Rejection]] - [[#The Golem|The Golem]] - [[#July|July]] - [[#Worst Boyfriend Ever|Worst Boyfriend Ever]] - [[#Harassment Architecture|Harassment Architecture]] - [[#The Puttermesser Papers|The Puttermesser Papers]] - [[#The World of Odysseus|The World of Odysseus]] - [[#The Oresteia|The Oresteia]] - [[#The Death of Napoleon|The Death of Napoleon]] - [[#August|August]] - [[#My Work is Not Yet Done|My Work is Not Yet Done]] - [[#Submission|Submission]] - [[#I Deliver Parcels in Beijing|I Deliver Parcels in Beijing]] - [[#A Short Stay in Hell|A Short Stay in Hell]] - [[#The Story of Hong Gildong|The Story of Hong Gildong]] - [[#September|September]] - [[#Mythology|Mythology]] - [[#Recommendations, in Brief|Recommendations]] ## December ### 2666 Bolaño, Roberto. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. 898 pp. ![[2666.jpg|center|300]] > No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them. There's so much to talk about here, but I don't have the space or writing skills to express all of my thoughts on this book right now. If you haven't read any Roberto Bolaño before, he was a Chilean poet-in-exile that drifted through Mexico City and ended up settling down in a beach town near Barcelona, where he passed away of liver cancer in 2003 at the age of 50. He managed to mostly finish *2666* before he died, judging from the afterward in the epub I read; there might have been a small amount of edits, but for the most part, we can assume that the *2666* we got was basically the one we would have gotten had he lived for another 6-12 months. The novel takes the form of 5 interlinked sections that orbit around mass killings of women in the fictional Santa Teresa, which serves as a stand-in for Ciudad Juarez and the real life femicides that occurred there. The first section, "The Part About the Critics", concerns a group of European academics that share a common research interest in the reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. They become embroiled in love triangles and quadrilaterals and eventually hear a tip that Archimboldi was seen in Santa Teresa and attempt to find him. They come up empty-handed, but this section brings us closer to the killings. A professor at the University of Santa Teresa that helps orient the academics returns in "The Part About Amalfitano", where he begins to lose his mind as he's confronted with the bleak reality of Santa Teresa and wonders how he's going to keep his daughter Rosa safe when it seems like being a woman is cause enough to be murdered. He starts hearing voices, whether its a ghost or not is left unclear, and leaves a mysterious geometry textbook hanging on a clothesline outside of his home to see what exposure to Santa Teresa brings with it. The next one, "The Part About Fate", focuses on an American journalist that goes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match and comes face to face with the violence in the city, which leads us straight to the physical center of the novel, "The Part About the Crimes", a 300-page police procedural that takes place in between brutal descriptions of the bodies of the women killed in the city. If you've heard anything about *2666* before, it's probably about how brutal and drawn-out "The Part About the Crimes" is. It's over 300 pages of unrelenting descriptions of the bodies of 122 female murder victims in Santa Teresa and its outskirts, and Bolaño does not make any attempt to sanitize the violence. Bolaño writes like he's a mortician or a reporter, fastidiously focused on every detail while maintaining distance from the emotional subject he's covering. In between the murders, is an incredibly gripping police procedural, that like the rest of the book, is full of different intersecting characters, plot threads, and anecdotes that paint a fuller picture of Santa Teresa's reaction to the killings. There's stuff here about a serial church defiler that pisses all over the altars while smashing statues, Epstein parties, snuff films, and in a particularly high point, a medium on public access television is possessed and cries out for the dead women and demands answers. Throughout all of it, Bolaño alludes to potential answers for the reasons for the killings, but masterfully evades blaming it on any single factor in particular. The maquiladoras, factories in Mexico that assemble parts made in China before shipping into America, create a class of itinerant workers with no support network in Santa Teresa to protect them, but not all of the victims worked at maquiladoras. Some of the killers are clearly not Mexican, but then the cops try to pin all of the killings on a single (extremely suspicious) German man. Misogyny is obviously a factor, but one of the killings happened when a woman who loved to box told her roommates that she wanted to fight for fun, and then the hit her head and died (I think we are meant to take the story at face value). It's all of these reasons and none of them. Finally, we return to starting position in "The Part About Archimboldi", where we meet the author we were hunting for at the beginning of the novel, and we learn about his childhood in Weimar Germany, his exploits during WWII, and how he ends up in Santa Teresa. Some episodes here that are stunning include: free diving, Archimboldi's time on the Eastern Front, a visit to Dracula's castle, the journal he finds in a fireplace about a Soviet sci-fi author, a crucifixion, a Polish civil administrator confessing his sins, a reunion with a lost love, a reunion with a lost object of lust, a confession from a Swiss man, a trip to an artists' home that ends up being an asylum, a reunion with a lost sister, and finally, the origin of a German ice cream. Somehow it all works, and this might very well be the best part of the book. I'm usually a seller on these fragmentary plots with tenuous connections between stories because too often an author will have Character A from story 1 show up in story 4 and expect you to point at the page, slack-jawed, and yell "omg i remember character A from story 1" like it's an Avengers movie. I'm no longer a big fat baby, and I resent it when people try to jingle keys in front of my face like I am one (Jennifer Egan, I'm coming for your ass). Bolaño avoids this by using repeated motifs instead of frequent character crossovers, and so many of these motifs further the book's core themes of violence and literature. An incomplete list of connections between parts that stuck out in my mind six months after the fact: - Men exploding into violence: taxi driver hate crime_I, weird freak that goes to gay bars to start fights_II, Fate's confrontation_III, Lalo Cura's first day on the job_IV, Haas showing the other prisoners what he really is_IV, Archimboldi's exploits during the war_V, Archimboldi's actions in the POW camp after the war_V - Insane asylums: painter who cut his hand off_I, poet that Amalfitano's wife was infatuated with_II, the madhouse the detective's love interest worked at_IV - Benito Juarez: La Santa understanding what Benito Juarez felt on those nights as a shepherd_IV, Archimboldi taking the name Benno_V - Global violence: Femicides in Santa Teresa_I-IV, Eastern Front of WWII_V, the Holocaust in Poland_V, human sacrifice in the Aztec Empire_V - Mirrors: The two mirrors forming an infinite labyrinth Liz Norton's hotel room in Santa Teresa_I, the congresswoman having a vision of said hotel room chronologically before Liz Norton stays in it_IV, Archimboldi hiding behind a mirror in Dracula's castle_V - Readers acting as investigators: the critics_I, Amalfitano_II, Fate_III, Lalo Cura_IV, Archimboldi_V - Speeches by older readers emphasizing the importance of a balanced diet: Barry Seaman_III, La Santa_IV So, what's it all about? Before he died, Bolaño wrote in a note that there > \[existed] in the work of a “hidden center,” concealed beneath what might be considered the novel’s “physical center.” The "physical center" is obviously Santa Teresa, but what is the "hidden center"? I think it's this locus of violence that ties everything together. Santa Teresa is this current site of hyperviolence, but before that there was Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and before that were the human sacrifices committed by the Aztecs in order to perpetuate the world. He offers no real solutions to this fundamental problem of violence in human nature, which from the Baudelaire epigraph, might be motivated in part by the desire to replace "a desert of boredom" with "an oasis of horror", but he does offer a balm. In each part, there are radical acts of love and connection that cut through the miasma of evil and offer escape to characters that are trapped by the pull of Santa Teresa. "The Part About the Crimes" ends with this paragraph which hit me incredibly hard when I finished it, and I think also serves as a reasonable ending for this review: >Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost. ## January ### American Psycho Ellis, Bret Easton. Vintage, 1991. 399 pp. ![[american_psycho.jpg|center|300]] Brilliant and hilarious. ### The Sellout Beatty, Paul. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. 305 pp. ![[the_sellout.jpg|center|300]] I hated this one. The Sellout is about a man, the titular Sellout, who devotes his energies towards getting his disincorporated hometown Dickens back on the map after his heterodox social scientist father is shot dead by cops. In the course of trying to restore his hometown to the good ol' days, he reinstitutes segregation and slavery, but only half-heartedly. The _in media res_ opening in the Supreme Court was great, and having Clarence Thomas be the one to excoriate the Sellout for bringing back slavery got a chuckle out of me, but the book quickly fell off for me. What started out as a funny, wacky story just got incredibly grating. Every paragraph needed to be packed with so many one liners, jokes, references, etc that I felt like there was no space for character development, or any real thematic exploration other than pointing at a thing and going "hmmm... makes one think". Beatty goes for some shock value by making The Sellout a slaveholder, but there are enough exigent circumstances that it’s almost reasonable in the context of the book. While on his worst behavior, he finds that adding “whites only seats” signs to buses improves behavior on public transit and faking the construction of a white magnet school causes reading scores to shoot up. It’s not really my place to weigh in on the merits of black cynicism, but gesturing towards the argument that black people need to live in the panopticon is nuts. It would be one thing if Beatty stuck his neck out and said “this is what I believe”, but all the shitty jokes make it so the ideas are underbaked, and he gets to hide behind a cloak of irony. The conclusion of the book is a flashback to a black comedy night at the donut shop, where a black comedian berates a white couple for laughing too hard, because this is “our thing”, and they’re not in on it. He ends the book with a question: “what is our thing?” XXX actual quote. *Ugh*. The heavy rhetorical question is the domain of the coward, because when (weak) authors ask these questions, they have no intention of even having a discussion about them, let alone moving towards an answer. Anne DeMarcken’s *It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over* was overstuffed with this pablum and by the end I felt like the title described the experience of reading the damn book better than any review could. You cannot end your book with “geez, wouldn’t this be an interesting topic to discuss? FIN.” Not for me! ### Human Acts Kang, Han. Portobello Books, 2016. Trans. Deborah Smith. 224 pp. ![[human_acts.jpg|center|300]] ## February ### Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Schwartz, Alvin. J. B. Lippincott, 1981. 111 pp. ![[scary_stories_to_tell_in_the_dark.jpg|center|300]] *Goosebumps* **kneels** before *Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark*. I don't know what possessed me to read this again all of a sudden, but it definitely holds up. Stephen Gammell's illustrations are still haunting (the corpse with the empty eye sockets still gets me), but what I didn't remember was how folksy a lot of these stories are. For some reason I thought that more of these were straight horror stories, like the haunted scarecrow story from the second volume, "Harold", but there's a decent amount of variety in this collection. There are songs, comedic stories, romances, indigenous folklore, etc., etc. I'm looking forward to reading the other two volumes at some point this year. ### Jesus' Son Johnson, Denis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. 160 pp. ![[jesus_son.jpg|center|300]] Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. ### Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman, Neil. Viking Press, 1985. 184 pp. ![[amusing_ourselves_to_death.jpg|center|300]] Screeching into the void about how _Meet the Press_ and TVs in the classroom will destroy American minds. Sort of quaint given that Postman was at least two generations away from iPad babies bursting onto the scene, but I found his arguments about literacy to be compelling. The first half of the book is largely a history of American literacy. Postman argues that 17th and 18th century Americans were unusually well-read for their time, and engaged in asfasdf The Lincoln-Douglas debates get a lot of focus asdfasdf One point that seemed obvious when I read it, but keep coming back to months later is that (good) writing needs to have a thesis and argument, while media is exempt from this burden. Compare a persuasive essay with a McDonald's advertisement. asdfas One interesting later section discusses how politicians will respond to the decreased level of Discourse by attempting to mirror voters' tendencies back to them in order to win their votes. I think he was getting close to something here. My main criticism of this is that Postman thinks that politicians will essentially be aping the voters like this classic Dril tweet, but one of the most interesting things about Trump is that he's lumpen-bourgeois in an inimitable way. > turning a big dial taht \[sic] says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right > > @dril, March 15, 2017 Obviously, Trump's been lobotomized through a combination of 24/7 news, Twitter, and memes physically printed out for him by one of his female praetorians. I doubt that Postman would have accepted the idea that the "elites" of American society would allow themselves to be debased by television and other forms of mass media. ### Amulet Bolaño, Roberto. New Directions, 2006. Trans. Chris Andrews. 184 pp. ![[amulet.avif|center|300]] Another fantastic novella from Bolaño. Even if you only looked at his novellas and excluIed the rest of his oeuvre, I think he'd still be one of the greatest authors of the last 30 years. *Amulet* is another instance of Bolaño remixing a shorter section of another work and fleshing it out into a novella. *Nazi Literature in the Americas* is a fictional reference book that catalogues fascist LatAm poets and writers, and he took the final story about skywriting and expanded it out into *Distant Star*. *Amulet* is an expansion of one of the most memorable episodes in *The Savage Detectives*, where a woman, Auxilio Lacouture, hid in the bathroom of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for two weeks in 1968 while it was occupied by the Army. Another fantastic novella from Bolaño. Bit in 2666 about tightly written exercises vs messy masterpieces xxx warmth of auxilio xxx connection to savage detectives xxx repeat of amalfitano wife obsessed with poet xxx spectre of death: rent boy, orestia shut in, saved on the street xxx song ending xxx life centers around small number of major events? ### The King in Yellow Chambers, Robert W. Wordsworth Editions, 2010. 192 pp. ![[the_king_in_yellow.jpg|center]] This collection probably invented the Weird Fiction genre, but I think it's mostly interesting as a historical curio rather than a book you'd want to go out of the way to read. The first four stories in the collection are linked by a play, also named *The King in Yellow*, that inspires madness in whoever reads it and makes them swear fealty to supernatural The King in Yellow, who reigns over a distant land named Carcosa. The opening story, ["The Repairer of Reputations"](https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/RepaRepu.shtml) is a fun read, but mostly for its presentation of an alternate, fascist 1920's United States. The only "horrific" elements of the story concern the narrator's mental collapse, which is so obvious to the reader that the usual tension in these kinds of stories, _"Who should I believe?"_, is completely absent. ["The Yellow Sign"](https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/YellSign.shtml) was also solid, but once you finish the horror stories, it's all sappy romances and I couldn't force myself to continue reading. I'm sure that these stories had a ton of punch in 1895, but they feel quotidian now. I've been reading a decent amount of weird fiction this year, so this is probably a good place to attempt to explain what it is. In my own words: Weird fiction is a genre of speculative fiction that takes cues from horror, fantasy, and sci-fi and aims to provoke a sense of discomfort or awe in the reader by attempting to describe the indescribable. Some common themes that Weird stories touch upon are: madness, the Outside, the boundaries of language and expression, the boundaries of the human subject, metamorphoses, cosmic horror, existential dread, egregores, consciousness, and holes. In general, think of these as stories that creep up on you, or if you're going to be juvenile, are "total mindfucks". I took a quick look at my bookshelf and here are some Weird fiction authors that I'd happily recommend to anyone that's trying to read something a little freaky: JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Cisco, Mark Z. Danielewski, Philip K. Dick, Brian Evenson, Franz Kafka, Nick Land, Thomas Ligotti, China Mieville, Reza Negarestani, and Jeff VanderMeer. ### Being There Kosiński, Jerzy. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. 142 pp. ![[being_there.jpg|center|300]] I picked this one up off of a stoop in Park Slope, and while I thought it was _fine_, it felt like the perfect stoop book. Not good enough to want to keep in your library, but not bad enough that you'd want to pulp it. This one concerns a man named Chance that grew up in total isolation in a wealthy man's estate and spends his days experiencing the world through the medium of television. Once the wealthy man (his father) dies, Chance is thrown out on his ass into the cruel, cruel world, but he manages to overcome adversity by behaving like the people he saw on TV. He adopts a posture of saying as little as possible, and when he has to do so, speaks about the only thing he knows how to do: gardening. Despite being a certified dum-dum, he wows everyone he speaks with who thinks he's this wise, reserved man, and he rockets through Washington High Society to the point where he might get tapped to run as Vice-President. There's an amusing subplot where the KGB and CIA are trying to figure out who the hell this guy is, but it doesn't overstay its welcome. I had just finished _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ when I picked this up, and the two serve as interesting foils for one another. Postman predicted that in the future, politicians would spend more time on TV trying to pretend to be just like their dunderheaded electorate. In essence, they'd need to play dumb to get their job. Chance is the perfect Postman subject, a man that has _only_ experienced the outside world through a screen, but he performs the inverse; he's an utter moron that punches up and convinces high society, not the Median Voter, that he's Just Like Them. It's an interesting contra, but neither book really predicts Trump's lumpenbourgeosie innovation. ### The Future of Truth Herzog, Werner. The Bodley Head, 2025. Trans. Michael Hofmann. 112 pp. ![[the_future_of_truth.jpg|center|300]] Werner rules, but I don’t think he made much of a coherent argument here about the future of truth. However, his riffing on historical and artistic topics is electric and the Nero episode is sublime. This was another free find, and it was also an uncorrected galley, so I could pretend that I was some overworked publishing agent when I read it. I honestly don't have much to say about this one; I didn't plan on writing book reviews for everything I read, and about five months have passed between reading this and attempting to discuss it. ## March ### The Insufferable Gaucho Bolaño, Roberto. New Directions, 2010. Trans. Chris Andrews. 200 pp. ![[the_insufferable_gaucho.jpg|center|300]] This is a collection of loosies (five stories and two essays) that didn’t make it into the two main Bolaño short story collections we got in America: *Last Evenings on Earth* and *The Return*. I loved *The Return* when I read it last year, and I think the highlights of this collection, “Police Rat” and “Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey”, are as good as anything in *The Return*. “Police Rat” feels like a condensed version of *2666’s* "The Part About The Crimes", where a rat detective investigates murders in the sewer system. The rat cop, Pepe, is met with indifference and outright hostility when he concludes that the killer he’s looking for is a rat, which is a case without precedent in his stinky little world. Pepe manages to find some resolution in his investigation, unlike the Santa Teresa police, but is left adrift in a disenchanted world that’s newly open to evil. A rat getting killed by a snake is just the way things go. A rat getting killed by another rat - it sends chills down my tail. Bolano is a master of suspense, and [“Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/26/alvaro-rousselots-journey) has him apply his talents towards comedy instead of horror. Alvaro Rousselot is a middling Argentine author who happens across an unauthorized adaptation of one of his novels. But curiously, the filmmaker didn’t plagiarize the book beat for beat: > Morini’s new film, “The Shape of the Day,” opened in Buenos Aires. It was exactly like “Life of a Newlywed” but better; that is, revised and considerably extended in much the same way that “Lost Voices” had been, compressing Rousselot’s plot into the central part of the film, while the beginning and the end served as commentaries on the main story (or ways into and out of it, or dead ends, or simply—and herein lay the charm of this method—delicately filmed scenes from the lives of the minor characters). This keeps going on until Rousselot resolves to confront Morini in France. In true Bolaño fashion, Alvaro becomes a total fuckup on his trip, blows through his cash, and has to ask the prostitute he’s seeing to float him. Finally, in the climax of the story, Rousselot tracks the director down and... I don't want to spoil it, but it got a belly laugh out of me even on a reread. The rest of the collection was fine, but I think that this is a collection for established Bolaño readers, not for newcomers. ### Fathers and Sons Turgenev, Ivan. Modern Library Classics, 2001. Trans. Constance Garnett; rev. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen. 226 pp. ![[fathers_and_sons.jpeg|center|300]] There were some interesting character studies, but I can’t get past the feeling that nothing much happened here. ## April ### “The Pedersen Kid” ![[william_gass_reader.jpg|center|300]] Killer short story (heh). This is the first Gass I've ever read, and it’s going to be difficult to top it. Killer short story xxx stream of consciousness xxx somewhat unclear if the intruder exists at all or if the son kills everyone xxx chomo farmhand xxx brutal to see that the dad wasn’t always this abusive xxx sequence at farmhouse is incredibly stressful ### We Have Always Lived in the Castle Jackson, Shirley. Viking Press, 1962. 160 pp. ![[we_have_always_lived_in_the_castle.jpeg|center|300]] ### Morning and Evening Fosse, Jon. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024. Trans. Damion Searls. 112 pp. ![[morning_and_evening.jpeg|center|300]] The big reveal, if you can call it that, is that Johannes is not dying, because he is already dead. This had me bawling on the Q train, but I wasn’t sure why it had such a strong effect on me, and I had no interest in ruining the moment by self-analyzing it in real time. The synopsis on the book jacket and the foreshadowing throughout the book makes it very clear that Johannes is not going to be alive by the end of the novel, so what does it matter if he died before I even cracked the cover open? The good thing about writing these reviews well after the fact is that my subconscious has done some processing in the background, and here's what it came up with: if Johannes is already dead, yet is still able to *experience*, he's undeniably in the afterlife, whereas if he was actively dying and having these visions, you could dismiss it as a final rush of neurotransmitters in a dying brain. XXX God is in silence, mundanity Nun sought transcendence in every moment I think God’s nature is contradictory, and we find him by going high and low ### A Visit from the Goon Squad Egan, Jennifer. Vintage, 2011. 368 pp. ![[a_visit_from_the_goon_squad.jpg|center|300]] It’s like if you made *Crash* (the one about racism, not the one about being horny) into a book. This one is a collection of interconnected short stories, but I found the connections to be superficial. Thematically the stories touch on aging and the compromises we have to make in our lives, but that's just it – they _touch_ on them. There's not much here about getting older that was new or insightful. It might just be that I'm Irish Catholic and think a _lot_ about dying, but I'm not that interesting in people wallowing in pity about being washed up. Just pull a James Murphy and embrace [losing your edge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xG4oFny2Pk). I think the main draw for this book is the whole interconnected short story conceit. I love structural experiments, but this is not pushing the novel forward as an art form. If the most interesting thing people are debating about your "experiment" is whether you wrote a short story collection or a novel, you didn't do anything particularly innovative. Like what I mentioned in my *2666* review, I'm an inveterate hater of "everything's connected" plots because I think it's emotional manipulation targeted at dim-to-mid wits, and most storytellers take a similar, boring tack when developing the theme. First, let me explain what I mean by the emotional manipulation bit. One of the classic techniques in stand-up comedy is the callback joke, which is a joke, usually at the end of the set, that harkens back to an earlier joke that got a big reaction. Its purpose is both to double dip on a successful joke, and to also reward the audience for paying attention. They get to think of themselves as savvy viewers that are able to connect the callback joke to what it's calling-back-to, and get to pat themselves on the back for the extremely mentally taxing work they just did, and they appreciate the comedian for giving them the opportunity to feel smart. The connections Egan makes between the stories rarely offer any additional depth or insight to a character other than Sasha, who's probably the single character that shows up the most in the book. Let me give an example of this from the last story of the book: "Pure Language". Without context, this is just going to sound like a pileup of random names and connections, but I assure you, it doesn't feel much more meaningful if you've read the book. "Pure Language" is supposed to be a speculative fiction from the near future at the time of publication (2011), where an audio tech named Alex has to promote a show for Bennie, a record producer that shows up in several stories. Bennie's assistant _used_ to be a woman named Sasha that Alex went on a single date with in the first story. His current assistant is Lulu, whose mom Dolly was once a big PR agent, but had to fix the image of a dictator in the eighth story. Lulu's husband is briefly mentioned to be the son of the safari guide in the fourth story. The show is the debut of one of Bennie's old teenage bandmates, Scotty, who gets back in touch with him and gives him a fish that he caught in the East River (gross) in the sixth story. After the show is a success, Alex and Bennie realize that they both knew Sasha, and go to her old East Village apartment and buzz it to try to see if she's there, but she's not there, which you'd know if you read the twelfth story, _duh!_ Does that sound exciting to you? That this book was building up to a story that's 80% pointing at characters and being excited because you recognize them for the two seconds they're on the page? It wasn't to me! It was like a TV series finale where, in the absence of a better idea for an ending, the writers room shoehorned in every character they could and hoped that fan service would placate the viewers. The difference though is that if you've watched a show for multiple seasons, you've seen each of these characters for hours or more, so there is something bittersweet about their last onscreen appearance, but we only get to see Lulu for like 15 pages. Why the fuck should I care about most of these people? Am I supposed to feel smart for recognizing these names? Should I thank Jennifer Egan for giving me the opportunity to play a round of "Remember These Guys"? What if Bennie's assistant was just some random person? What if Lulu's husband was just some guy? What if she was single? What changes at all in the story? I would say nothing at all, but my hunch is that Egan thinks that the connections themselves matter, so removing these tenuous connections would ruin the whole book. This exchange from "Out of Body" felt like Egan's clearest statement of intent in *Goon Squad*: >“Oh, we’ll know each other forever,” Bix says. “The days of losing touch are almost gone.” > "What does that mean?" Drew asks. > "We're going to meet again in a different place," Bix says. "Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us." > > "Where? How?" Drew asks. > > Bix hesitates, like he's held this secret so long he's afraid of what will happen when he releases it into the air. "I picture it like Judgment Day," he says finally, his eyes on the water. "We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.” Who cares about finding "everyone we've lost" when most of the connections we make in our life are weak ties by their very nature? Sure maybe we're all connected in _some capacity_, but the whole "everything's connected" thing is a thought-terminating cliche. Okay, everything's connected - what about it? It's a spiritual "insight" that could have come from a TED Talk and demands nothing from you. Tony briefly got hung up on the idea that "everything is everything" in season 6 of *The Sopranos*, but the point there was that Tony had one minor spiritual insight and immediately forgot it. *Serial Experiments Lain* takes the whole "everything's connected" idea and makes it a paranoid schizophrenic's nightmare, where everything dissolves in the Plane of Immanence. *Goon Squad* says that everything's connected and expects me to congratulate it for saying nothing at all. Damn... I didn't know that I had this much hate in my heart. Just watch *Serial Experiments Lain* instead. ![[lain_connected.jpg|center]] ## May ### A Song for the Unraveling of the World Evenson, Brian. Coffee House Press, 2019. 240 pp. ![[song_for_the_unraveling_of_the_world.jpg|center|300]] Evenson is one of the reigning kings of "weird fiction", which is a genre I've been reading a lot of recently. See my review of *The King in Yellow* for more about what weird fiction consists of, xxx ### The Vegetarian Kang, Han. Portobello Books, 2015. Trans. Deborah Smith. 183 pp. ![[the_vegetarian.jpg|center|300]] Similar story to *Human Acts*. I can’t tell if it’s Han Kang, or her translator, Deborah Smith, but there are some arresting images here that are held back by the quality of the prose. I remember there being a fair amount of Discourse about this one when it first came out, and for some reason I thought the story was about cannibalism. The story follows Yeong-hye, who decides to become a vegetarian after she is tormented by a recurring dream XXX Mongolian mark best part xxx tragedy that she thought the gooner BIL could fix her problem xxx he never truly “saw” her xxx tbh is it important to be “seen”? Xxx ever ethical to let someone starve to death ### The White Book Kang, Han. Portobello Books, 2017. Trans. Deborah Smith. 161 pp. ![[the_white_book.jpg|center|300]] I think I’m too stupid for poetry. Yet another Han Kang book where I can't tell if it's her, me, or the translator. The book is a series of prose poems about white objects – snow, rice cakes, etc – as a way of Han Kang exploring the grief she feels for her older sister who died shortly after being born. One asdfasdf ### Labyrinths Borges, Jorge Luis. New Directions, 1964. Trans. James E. Irby et al. 260 pp. ![[labyrinths.avif|center|300]] One of the GOATs of short fiction. Bolaño said that he could "live under a table reading Borges" Love seeing some ideas develop esp the inevitability of being certain ppl - see Don Quixote, the one where the guy hangs with Homer, the essay on time Loved the circular ruins, just superb Weaknesses are the detective shit Honestly not that into the garden of forking paths ### The Divinity Student Cisco, Michael. Buzzcity Press, 1999. 149 pp. ![[the_divinity_student.jpg|center|300]] Absolutely stellar. Prior to this, I had only read one other book by Cisco, *Antisocities*, which I enjoyed but didn't love, so I didn't expect how good this one was going to be. Cisco's prose and storytelling are extremely surreal, and I've never read an author that was this good at describing transcendent, uncanny events at that approach the boundary of what can be expressed in language. TDS follows the titular Divinity Student's search for the words underpinning all of creation. The story starts with his death by lightning strike, and his revival by stuffing his corpse full of words. He recovers and is sent to the Spanish desert city of San Veneficio to become a "word finder" and is told to wait for further instructions. The first half of the plot is a series of strange episodes as he pokes and prods at anything strange to attempt to discern what his ultimate task will be. Eventually, he is taught the secret of how to recover the memories of the dead through a ritual involving formaldehyde, and his mission becomes clear: a group of enterprising word finders created a copy of the Eclogue, the words that the gods speak amongst themselves in order to maintain the existence of the world. The back half of TDS is a genuinely gruesome tale of grave robbery and butchery as the Divinity Student digs up the word finders and ventures into their brains to rediscover the Eclogue. He constructs increasingly byzantine apparatuses to venture deeper into the minds of the dead and his lair is besieged by demons driving black cars. Things keep escalating until author and protagonist reach their apexes simultaneously. The Divinity Student completes the Eclogue, achieving some form of apotheosis, while Cisco's prose reaches its acme in his attempt to describe a truly transcendent event – how apt. There's a lot to dig into here, and I'm working on a longer post about this book and its sequel, *The Golem*, so I'm not going to try to jam everything in here. However, I would be remiss to not discuss some of the thematic elements that made me love this book so much. The book is extremely concerned with language and its uncanny position in between the realms of the living and the dead. The Divinity Student is stuffed full of words (though it does not matter which words). He's busy digging up corpses to eat or smoke their brains in order to pick up some new vocab words. The world would presumably decay or disappear if the sacred language wasn't spoken. My abridged summary of what I *think* Cisco is attempting to convey here is that while language is this animating force behind the world as we understand it, there are certain strata of language that are inaccessible to us or simply don't exist. We can attempt to mine the preserved thoughts and words of past writers, but the further we go back, the harder it is to divine any great meaning from them, and reading ravenously like this can weaken one's ties to the "normal" world. I'm also not sure how much this is intended to have a didactic _point_ or if _The Divinity Student_ should be read just as a riff on language and speech. However lacking my analysis might be, the point of this review is clear: run, don't walk to your nearest freakazoid bookseller to pick up a copy. ### Piranesi Clarke, Susanna. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. 272 pp. ![[piranesi.jpg|center|300]] My quantitative, Big T, recommended this one to me, and I should have been a little skeptical considering that he was pounding the table to try to get me to read *Goon Squad*. However, *House of Leaves* is one of my favorite books, so I was willing to give *Piranesi* a chance once I found out that it also centers around an investigation into an infinitely large eldritch house. The book is presented as the journal of Piranesi, who documents his explorations of The House and its infinite Rooms. There's a little bit of Victorian gentleman scientist to him, and he's got this unimpeachably positive attitude that makes reading about his studies an absolute joy. Unfortunately, Clarke clearly has not attended the J.J. Abrams Masterclass, because she opens the Mystery Box way too early and the promising early segments devolve into a pretty perfunctory thriller once you know what's going on. There's some gesturing towards Plato's Allegory of the Cave throughout the book, but it felt more like window dressing than a deep inquiry into the nature of Forms and Images. So much squandered potential. ## June ### Rejection Tulathimutte, Tony. William Morrow, 2024. 272 pp. ![[rejection.jpg|center|300]] I hate to give it to Jia Tolentino, but her cover blurb is right on the money. Rejection is a book for sickos, freaks, losers, neets, incels, femcels, gooners, and miserable sacks of shit. This is another interlinked short story collection, but Tulathimutte uses the trick judiciously, and the stories themselves are of a much higher quality than the ones in *Goon Squad*, so my screeching about how much I hate "we're all connected" stuff doesn't apply here. The stories all focus on exceedingly neurotic characters that blow their lives up in different ways while coping with some form of rejection. "The Feminist" features a narrow-shouldered male feminist incel that is too freakish about trying to dissect and consume the pain and suffering of others to make genuine intimate connections, and concludes that women have been subject to the patriarchy for so long that they don't know what's good for them. "Pics" is about a woman, who takes The Feminist's virginity, that hooks up with a friend of hers, gets swerved, and then sublimates her rage about her rejection and her boring life into buying a raven (she is also confused by this) and then hosting one of the worst dinner parties of all time. Brutal depictions of girls' groupchat drama abound. I won't attempt to describe much of the plot of the funniest story, "Ahegao", because it ends in an extended gross-out aristocrats-style breakdown that is so shocking that describing it in mixed company could turn me into a subject for a story in *Rejection II*. The second half of the collection gets increasingly strange. "Our Dope Future" is an r/relationship_advice post made by a smooth-brained techbro seeking advice for how to fix his worsening relationship with the woman from "Pics", but his San Francisco dialect is so absurd that he sounds like Michelangelo from *TMNT* more than a crypto bro. It feels underresearched when you compare it to the earlier stories, where Tulathimutte clearly did his homework on incels and gooners. My guess is that this story is supposed to serve as a palate cleanser in between that this story about a perfectly smooth brained man is in there to smooth brained narrator the succession of otherwise horrifically over-socialized neurotic messes that drive the rest of the stories. "Main Character" is probably the XXX *Rejection* is mean, lewd, cringeworthy, incisive, hilarious, and could be the most successful piece of Extremely Online art I’ve seen. It's such a banger that I'm thinking of rereading it in a book club – please let me know if you would be interested. ### The Golem Cisco, Michael. Prime Books, 2004. 248 pp. ![[san_venficio_canon.jpg|center|300]] Overly reductive summary: The Divinity Student goes to Hell to get a girlfriend. The sole example of a sequel in Michael Cisco's bibliography, _The Golem_ is a follow-up to _The Divinity Student_ where the semi-dead Divinity Student is dug up and has to quickly set some schemes into motion before he dies again. He constructs a golem in a process that resembles his own rebirth, and then sets it loose in San Veneficio. The Golem is forced to descend into the underworld to find his betrothed, the magician Christine Dalman, who was promised to the Divinity Student years ago. Similar to *The Divinity Student*, *The Golem’s* second half is a surreal phantasmagoria where Cisco’s prose shines brightest. The journey to the underworld (a katabasis, some might say), is mostly a magical chase sequence between the Golem and Christine. The Golem can clearly catch her at any moment, but there’s an element of foreplay to the chase; he has to catch her fair and square, and only then will she be able to love him. However, fair and square in the Golem’s mind is quite different from what you or I might consider equitable. He grows spider-like appendages, can trap Christine in warped pocket realities, and knows where she is at all times if she is not wearing a particular Egyptian mask. The chase escalates until the Golem, the Divinity Student, and Christine meet in a chapel and reality breaks down. My interpretation of _The Golem_ is that it's about grappling with a text to get at its truth, and how taking shortcuts to extract its meaning will leave you empty-handed, but I should reread the last section at the chapel to see if that can clear some things up. I preferred _The Divinity Student_ to this one, but I felt like it was a worthy followup to one of my favorite books I've read this year. ## July ### Worst Boyfriend Ever Worst Boyfriend Ever. Self-published, 2025. 202 pp. ![[worst_boyfriend_ever.jpg|center|300]] Diary of a Wimpy Kid for sensitive young men with yellow fever. ### Harassment Architecture Ma, Mike. Self-published, 2019. 146 pp. ![[harassment_architecture.jpg|center|300]] Now, *this* is some incel lit. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's good, because it isn't, but I enjoyed *Harassment Architecture*. I would describe it as a low-quality rip of *American Psycho* written by an alt right lolcow. The book is almost entirely unlinked vignettes and rants where the narrator, who is clearly Mike Ma, trie ### The Puttermesser Papers Ozick, Cynthia. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 235 pp. ![[puttermesser_papers.jpg|center|300]] An alternately playful and mean series of episodes from the life of Ruth Puttermesser. The clear highlights of this book were the stories about Puttermesser constructing a golem, and Puttermesser getting married. The golem ### The World of Odysseus Finley, M. I. NYRB Classics, 2002. 232 pp. ![[the_world_of_odysseus.webp|center|300]] ### The Oresteia Aeschylus. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Trans. Ted Hughes. 208 pp. ![[oresteia.avif|center|300]] *The Oresteia* is a trilogy of Greek tragedies asdfasdf ### The Death of Napoleon Leys, Simon. NYRB Classics, 2015. Trans. Patricia Clancy. 144 pp. ![[the_death_of_napoleon.png|center|300]] > What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon's devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention... How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely? > >- Paul Valery Every man has to pick a war to obsess over once they turn 40, and I've already decided that I'm going to become a Napoleon weeb when my time comes. *The Death of Napoleon* is a fun little novella about Napoleon escaping Elba, but the plan falls apart and he ends up in Antwerp with no way to prove that he is the legendary Emperor. The novella is comprised of a few amusing episodes where Napoleon gets his groove back, but struggles to accept that he can't become a world historical force again - he's suffered a metaphorical death at this point. He ends up creating a nice little life for himself with a widow nicknamed the Ostrich, but never allows himself to fully settle into his new routine. For the most part, I thought that the _The Death of Napoleon_ was a fun, but frivolous little story, but I thought that the actual death of Napoleon was stunning. Napoleon is seized by a vision of being stuck outside of the gates of Heaven, and the only way he can get in is answering the question: "What is The Ostrich's name?". I was on a trip without A– when I read this, and this just destroyed me. What is the one thing I don't know about her that will keep me out of Heaven? What foolish things am I wasting my energies on? What is the real thing that matters? I'm not sure how to evaluate the book as a whole, but the ending will stick with me for a while. ## August ### My Work is Not Yet Done Ligotti, Thomas. Virgin Books, 2009. 192 pp. ![[my_work_is_not_yet_done.jpeg|center|300]] A sinister corporate comedy turned supernatural slasher story. The title novella of the collection, _My Work is Not Yet Done_, focuses on the obsessive-compulsive Frank Dominio who is beset on all sides by the "swine" conspiring against him at his workplace. asfdasdf _Something_ happens to Dominio at the end of the first section and he becomes imbued with supernatural powers that he immediately uses to enact his revenge. One of his enemies gets his hands ripped off and replaced with Mickey Mouse gloves, another gets sucked into a mirror dimension, and so on and so forth. Dominio's revenge tour felt quite juvenile to me, which he eventually realizes at the climax of the story when he confronts his boss after killing everyone else. > "They made me feel bad, so I killed them." Once he kills everyone but the big boss, asdfasdf ### Submission Houellebecq, Michel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Trans. Lorin Stein. 256 pp. ![[submission.avif|center|300]] A French pervert reverts to Islam to get a promotion and pick up chicks. I've never read any Houellebecq before, ### I Deliver Parcels in Beijing Hu, Anyan. Penguin, 2025. Trans. Jack Hargreaves. 336 pp. ![[i_deliver_parcels_in_beijing.jpg|center|300]] I picked this one up expecting to learn a ton about byzantine details of Chinese logistics networks, but it ended up having much more to do with maintaining your dignity in an increasingly alienating world. ### A Short Stay in Hell Peck, Steven L. Strange Violin Editions, 2012. 108 pp. ![[a_short_stay_in_hell.jpg|center|300]] A very effective existential horror story. _A Short Stay in Hell_ starts with the protagonist ending up in Hell's waiting room, where he finds out that, _sorry!_, Zoroastrianism was the One True Religion, so he can't go to Paradise just yet. However, the angel that's running his orientation program tells him that he can go to Heaven once he finds the book that contains the story of his life within a massive library explicitly modeled after Borges' "Library of Babel", featured in [[2026 Reading#Labyrinths|Labyrinths]]. The books are randomly generated strings of text of a fixed length, so the library is finite, but this is of little comfort once the searchers run the numbers and realize that the library is several light years across. Contemplating the amount of time the damned spend wandering the stacks is deeply upsetting, but what makes it even worse is that the narrator finds love in the library, but has it brutally taken from him. He spends years traveling with a woman until a ruthless doomsday cult within the library corner them, but she vaults over a railing and plummets to the floor of the library rather than take her chances. He tries to follow but is captured and it takes months before he's able to try to find her. What's awful is that he simultaneously knows that she's alive somewhere, and that he will almost certainly never be able to find her again. Even though this love story is vanishingly brief compared to his "short" stay in hell, it looms large over his otherwise mundane existence in the library. Another book that made me want to hold A– tight and never let go. ### The Story of Hong Gildong Anonymous. Penguin Classics, 2016. Trans. Minsoo Kang. 128 pp. ![[hong_gil_dong.jpg|center|300]] Korean Mary Stu pulp fiction. The authorship of _The Story of Hong Gildong_ has been disputed, but Minsoo Kang's translation notes give us some historical context that argues that the book was not a piece of protest literature about a Korean Robin Hood, but rather a piece of pulp fiction that got popular enough in the 1XXXs to get copied and reprinted throughout the Korean peninsula. I found the story itself to be quite dull because it's just a power fantasy where Hong Gildong steamrolls every obstacle he faces through the power of magic and filial piety. Hong Gildong sends an assassin to the shadow realm, becomes the leader of a gang of thieves, steals from corrupt officials, and eventually becomes the king of an island nation, but at no point is there ever a chance that he could lose. On top of this, Gildong is also a boring character. He's the perfect Confucian son and his only real complication is that he's the son of a concubine and lacks some of the privileges that mainline children had in the XXX Dynasty. I enjoyed the bits of Korean cultural history I picked up via the footnotes, but it wasn't enough for me to recommend this. ## September ### Mythology Hamilton, Edith. Little, Brown and Company, 1998. 497 pp. ![[mythology.jpg|center|300]] In progress... ## Recommendations, in Brief **I’m grabbing you by the lapels and demanding you read**: 2666, American Psycho, Jesus’ Son, The Divinity Student, Rejection **I’m recommending**: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Amulet, Morning and Evening, A Song for the Unraveling of the World, Labyrinths, The Golem, The Puttermesser Papers, The World of Odysseus, The Oresteia, My Work is Not Yet Done, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, A Short Stay in Hell **I enjoyed it, but I’m not going to stick my neck out to recommend**: Human Acts, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Death of Napoleon, Submission **I’m split on:** Being There, The Future of Truth, Fathers and Sons, The Vegetarian, The White Book, Piranesi, Harassment Architecture, Hong Gildong **I did not care for:** The Sellout, The King in Yellow, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Worst Boyfriend Ever