We're not quite halfway through the year, but I'm going to look back to December 2025 so I can include *2666* in my Half-Year in Review and inflate my pages read count. ## December ### _2666_ by Roberto Bolaño ![[2666_dithered.png]] ## January ### *American Psycho* by Brett Ellison ### _The Sellout_ by Paul Beatty I went into this one completely blind and the big reveal at the end of the prologue had me rolling out of my chair, but the novel started to grate on me pretty quickly. The premise of the story is that the narrator, last name Me, first name unknown, AKA The Sellout was raised by his father, a black psychologist and social scientist, as an experimental subject to investigate black childrearing techniques. After his father dies in a police shooting, The Sellout turns his energies towards getting his recently disincorporated hometown, Dickens, back on the map. Along the way he (sort of) reintroduces slavery, segregation, and satsumas to Dickens. Somehow, that fixes everything. XXX This sentence is bad: The first third of the book felt like an extended Boondocks episode and had me cackling at how much it was daring you to be offended, but then the rest of the book turned into a rejected McSweeney's piece. Humor is extremely subjective, and this subject did not care for the humor in this book. Beatty's writing started out funny and absurd, but as the book went on it began to grate on me to the point where I could barely make it through ten pages in a sitting. It just felt like every little plot point had to be surrounded with heaping descriptions of zany shit going on and cultural reference after cultural reference to the point where it felt like Beatty was afraid you'd actually end up finding the core of the book inside all the artifice. At one point he had Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice, and Barack Obama crash a neighborhood meeting of pseudo-intellectuals, only to have the local neighborhood philosopher-gangster teach them how to cripwalk and my only thought was _fuck off_. Not for me! ### *Human Acts* by Han Kang ## February ### *Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark* by XXX ### *Jesus' Son* by Denis Johnson ### *Amusing Ourselves to Death* by Neil Postman ### *Amulet* by Roberto Bolaño ### *The King in Yellow* by Robert W. Chambers ### *Being There* by Jerry Kosinski ### *The Future of Truth* by Werner Herzog ## March ### *The Insufferable Gaucho* by Roberto Bolaño ### *Fathers and Sons* by Ivan Turgenev ## April ### *We Have Always Lived in the Castle* by Shirley Jackson ### *Morning and Evening* by Jon Fosse ## May ### *A Visit from the Goon Squad* by Jennifer Egan ### *A Song for the Unraveling of the World* by Brian Evenson ### *The Vegetarian* by Han Kang ### *The White Book* by Han Kang ### *Labyrinths* by Jorge Luis Borges ### *The Divinity Student* by Michael Cisco ### *Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke ## June ### *Rejection* by Tony Tulathimutte ### *The Golem* by Michael Cisco